To the Chaos Computer Club, and to the larger community that makes the Chaos Communication Congress happen.

Congress has been a place for politicized hackers from all around the world to meet, share and learn. Yet this year's #38C3 event has been lived by many of us as an awkward space of silencing and self-censoring with regards to the Palestinian genocide. We couldn't help but feel terrified at that, although not completely surprised.

It has been dreadful to once again hear discussions in which the only "argument" issued was "it's a complex situation" when trying to face the harsh reality of a 2 million people country being destroyed, blocked and bombed with barely any food or clean water, while one of the last running hospital was bombed three days before.

As an heterogeneous group of people that are part of communities that are interested, active or impacted by the struggle for liberation of the Palestinian people, we've felt necessary to start this discussion.

What follows is a series of experiences, questions and reflections that have been shared in the self-organized session "Let's talk about the not talking about Gaza" that was announced on the last day of the Congress (https://events.ccc.de/congress/2024/hub/en/event/lets-talk-about-the-not-talking-about-gaza/).

For starters, at CCC we have experienced:

Can strongly recommend the #38C3 talk "Feelings are Facts: Love, Privacy, and the Politics of Intellectual Shame"
by @Mer__edith

https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-feelings-are-facts-love-privacy-and-the-politics-of-intellectual-shame

“Being a woman in tech is insane. We do not work in the same moral system model as most of the people that we interact with daily and we can’t talk about it, because when we do, we are the ones portrayed as crazy or hysterical.”

This is such an excellent piece by @irene – you should spend a few minutes today reading it.

#womeninstem #womenintech #compsci

https://www.sigops.org/2024/the-moral-implications-of-being-a-moderately-successful-computer-scientist-and-a-woman/

Born on this day: #physicist J. R. Oppenheimer (1904-1967). While best remembered for his role in the Manhattan Project, he was a giant of 20th century theoretical physics, nominated for a Nobel 3 times. ⁠
⁠
In 1927 he & Max Born greatly simplified how we predict electrons behaviour within atoms. The Born-Oppenheimer or adiabatic approximation is based on the observation that electrons are 1000s times lighter than nuclei, 🧵1/n

#sciart #linocut #printmaking #histstm #quantum

Here's a fun AI story: a security researcher noticed that large companies' AI-authored source-code repeatedly referenced a nonexistent library (an AI "hallucination"), so he created a (defanged) malicious library with that name and uploaded it, and thousands of developers automatically downloaded and incorporated it as they compiled the code:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/

1/

“SARS-CoV-2 infection and the brain: direct evidence for brain changes in milder cases”

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41392-022-01072-1

#Covid
#ItsNotJustACold
#WearAMask