Chaos Construction 2010. My impressions

    Hello everybody!

    This weekend I visited the Chaos Construction 2010 festival, which is being held for the 13th time in St. Petersburg, for the first time and am ready to share my impressions and photos.

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    Waking up in the morning on August 28, I threw a camera, money, drink into my backpack and drove up to the Kirovsky Zavod metro station, Stachek ave., 47.

    It was pleasant cool St. Petersburg weather.


    I arrived at the place by 11, at the entrance some dudes were already crowding.


    They were not allowed into the hall, so I sat on the street and looked at the people who approached.


    At 12 o’clock they started to let me into the hall. At the entrance, they took 500 rubles, put on a bracelet with a bar code and passed into the hall. Also at the entrance stood police officers who stole backpacks and took food and drinks every time you passed them.


    Each time it was necessary to go in / out, it was necessary to pick a barcode. Those who were with the laptops received a sticker on the laptop and picked it at the entrance.

    In general, I ended up in a large hall.


    There were 2 halls - a large one, in which everything took place, except for seminars and an exhibition of pictures that took place in a small hall.




    Before the official opening of the festival, I walked around the hall and looked at the stands of sponsors and partners.

    MSI has delivered 6 gaming laptops on which it was possible to play kwaku and Starcraft II.




    There was a Headhunter who called to work at Oracle:


    At the Gigabyte stand, people dabbled in nitrogen


    and admired modding







    . At that time, demos worked on the screen:


    Finally, at 13 o’clock the organizers took to the stage and officially opened the Chaos Construction 2010.


    In general, the festival, in my opinion, is soooooooooooo unusual. Sometimes it seemed to me that I walk among aliens. However, the atmosphere was very friendly and even kind of family. Among visitors it was possible to meet the whole family with small children.

    Nothing bothered at all. There was a feeling that some people spent 2 days at the laptop or at the game console and it was wonderful for them. Everyone who came to the fest could find something to do - if not by participating in contests, so by participating in battles in the game zone or simply communicating with like-minded people.

    The audience of the festival is probably the most important feature of the festival. The organizers managed to gather a unique motley company of people - hackers, demos, electronic engineers, gamers, overclockers and many more interesting people.

    However, the main theme of the festival was still the demoscene. In truth, I first saw what it was, and indeed my main goal was to attend the seminars where I went immediately after the opening.

    The first workshop is an IT breakthrough. I was late for it - I came to the very end and found conversations about promising projects, about venture funds, about business incubators, about United Russia, that everything is bad in Russian IT, and bad because Russian IT people are assholes they can’t lift it, but in United Russia, meanwhile, there are normal people.

    The second workshop is Open Embedded. Nothing interesting. It feels as if you read the wikipedia article out loud.

    Then came the dude from the Moscow company TerraElectronica and talked about what they sell in their stores. Also nothing interesting.

    And then Alexander Chemeris spoke, who talked about Open Source Hardware. He told me interestingly, vividly - I liked it. Got a couple of links for myself, like this one .

    Then there were 2 reports about the safety of Dmitry Evteev and Nikita Tarakanov, the contents of which I did not remember.

    After that there was a report by Taras Ivashchenko about HTML5 security - very interesting. I would also like to give a present to him ...

    After that, I wanted to hear about something called “Object-Oriented OS”, but, forgive me, the speaker, after 10 minutes of trying not to fall asleep, I left.

    And at this time, people in the big hall were not sad.
    They listened to the history of the demo scene: They


    watched the demos






    and voted on Sun Ray.


    And I went to look at the exhibition.









































    After that, I went home, leaving the geeks for the night.


    The next day, I arrived only at 3 pm, because in principle I did not want to listen to advertising seminars from MSI and Gigabyte. I was told that the seminar from Gigabyte was very boring - the speaker talked about each super-duper technology of his company and zadolbal all.

    At 3 a.m., Alexei Sintsov , a researcher fromSecurity the Digital . He not only talked about Windows protection mechanisms (ASLR, DEP, SEH, etc.), but also showed how they work out. In general, a gorgeous report came out.

    After that there were good reports about SDRF from Vladimir Vorontsov and about ReactOS . By the way, ReactOS surprised with its stability - it can launch the latest Firefox, Photoshop and office.

    At the end there was a workshop on fuzzing, which I left, because they did not say anything interesting.

    Nikitozzz and step from Hacker, Alexander Matrosov and many more interesting people were noticed at the fest

    In general, security topics were very popular on CC10, as evidenced by the two-day HackQuest, which, in the end, no one could completely cope with. One of the organizers said that half of the tasks were not done, and that some organizers overdid it with the tasks.
    There were many different tasks in the quest - implementation of various XSS, SQL-injection, Path-traversal, weak passwords, crack cracking, etc.

    Realizing on the second day that the tasks were complicated, the organizers posted hints


    Yes, and in general they had fun as they could:


    In the evening, they held an art soldering contest:












    In general, not only men were interested in electronics:




    Meanwhile, the night was approaching smoothly, the sponsors turned their stands, and the organizers began delivery prizes:


    Well, meanwhile, I, saturated with the atmosphere of a unique event and happy, went home.

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