Hackers met in Leipzig to push tech’s boundaries in the name of creating a better society. Personal privacy, big data and sexual harassment were the hot topics.

(Source: dpa) Lit in Leipzig.

It’s been a year of reckoning for the tech industry. The Wannacry virus locked up 200,000 computers for bitcoin ransom at the start of the summer. Women in the tech industry are increasingly speaking up about harassment and the pay gap. Growing interest in the ethics of big data and artificial intelligence is spawning a new generation of tech criticism.

Our lives are increasingly centered around our data. Trafficking in personal data has become big business, both legal and illegal. As much as good things can come from quantified lives — improved health treatment, more efficient production — bad actors are also at the ready to eavesdrop, manipulate and repress.

The theme of the Chaos Computer Club’s 34th annual gathering is #TuWat, or “do something” in English. That theme extends to issues like protecting data, but also, as with so many other industries this year, to confronting sexual harassment. The largest hacker convention in Europe will draw about 15,000 attendees through Saturday to Leipzig, a city in eastern Germany, about a two-hour train ride south from Berlin. The technologists have taken over the city's main conference hall, creating a wonderland of crazy projects and collective actions.

Almost every year, the official and self-organized sessions of the convention reveal tech vulnerabilities that make news, many of which are available to watch on the Chaos Computer Club website. In 2015, it was details on how exactly Volkswagen cheated emissions tests.

One revelation at this year's hacker convention, also known by its acronymn 34c3, was the insecurity of online banking applications. Vincent Haupert, a doctoral candidate at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, demonstrated how he compromised 31 mobile banking services, including apps by Commerzbank and German savings banks, known as Sparkassen. The security hole was found in the services of Norwegian cybersecurity company Promon, which has since updated its software. No banks have reported any instances of misuse as of yet. Mr. Haupert's suggested solution is to use two separate devices when enabling two-factor authorization for sensitive apps.

(Source: dpa) Hack the planet.

Germans are perhaps less likely to give up their personal data in exchange for convenience. European privacy law is also much stricter than in the United States, which has led to increasing frustration with the overwhelmingly American tech giants, such as Google and Facebook. While protecting personal data sometimes feels like a Sisyphean task, internet privacy activists and cybersecurity experts at the congress don’t want people to give up the fight.

Hackers, who are by their nature a rule-defying people, are also looking inwards, scrutinizing the community's spirits of “fight the power” and “anything goes” with well-known female technologists taking a stand against the congress’ lack of a code of conduct. If a conference wants to be welcoming to people of color, women and gender nonconforming people, it is expected that they codify a zero-tolerance discrimination policy and hold people accountable for their actions. The CCC’s official policy “welcomes all lifeforms” and encourages them to “be excellent to each other,” which critics see as a cop-out. This year, a person asked 34c3 organizers to prohibit a man who assaulted them from attending the conference, even providing evidence of the pending charges and hospital records. The request was denied, and backlash on social media is ongoing.

(Source: dpa) From Moscow with love.

Nor does the congress shy away from political controversy. Like South by Southwest in the United States, the tech event draws attendees from industry and government as well. This year, exiled American whistleblower Edward Snowden, a controversial but popular figure in Germany, made an appearance at 34c3 via videocall from Russia.

“This year proved how important our skepticism is,” he told the audience. “Our work has never been more important.” When Mr. Snowden first brought the revelations about NSA spying capabilities to light in 2013, he was housed for a time in Hong Kong by a number of refugees, who are now seeking asylum themselves in Canada. Green Party politician Hans-Christian Ströbele, who was part of Germany’s own inquiry into the NSA, was also at 34c3 and expressed his support for Mr. Snowden.

Mr. Ströbele is hardly the only outspoken German politician advocating greater protections for data privacy. It is all but certain that the question of what the digital future looks like, and what governments and hackers alike can do about it, will carry on into 2018.

Video: Sönke Iwersen, the Handelsblatt reporter who spoke with the refugees who hid Edward Snowden, introduced the whistleblower and his protectors. He explained that since then, they have faced persecution so Mr. Snowden set up a fund to provide support. For more information: https://fortherefugees.com.

Grace Dobush is an editor with Handelsblatt Global in Berlin. Ina Karabasz writes about telecommunications, IT and security issues for Handelsblatt. To contact the authors: [email protected] and [email protected].</s>Energy, dynamism and rhythm radiate from the work of Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann.

I think of my work as landscape oriented or having to do with landscape painting,” says Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann of her complex, visually arresting paintings. The work is abstract, but Mann’s use of botanical imagery, glimpses of what looks like sky, orientation and the general ebb and flow of mass across the picture plane both reference and evoke the natural world. Being in nature and capturing it are vital to Mann’s practice, and she often paints en plein air near her home in Basye, in Shenandoah County.

“I’m not as interested in thinking about landscape in terms of perspectival space. I like thinking of landscape in terms of teeming masses of life and the systems that make them work together. In the Shenandoah Valley for example, I’m not just looking at the mountains in the distance, I am actually looking at what is immediately below my feet. Weeds and bugs and how those are combining and melding together.”

Mann, 35, who is half Taiwanese, spent her early childhood and the summers of her teenage years in Taiwan. During those latter visits, she studied the traditional Chinese shan shui (“mountain-water”) school of painting, which uses a brush and sumi ink to depict mountains, rivers and waterfalls. Although Mann is very much a product of both Eastern and Western traditions—she majored in studio art at Brown University and pursued an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art Hoffberger School of Painting, where she is currently an adjunct professor—this rigorous early training and approach formed the foundation of her practice and is evident in most of her work today.

Mann starts every work with what she refers to as a “pour.” After laying her paper—this can either be a plain sheet or collaged or woven paper—on the floor of her studio, she haphazardly pours buckets of watered-down acrylic or ink onto it. She likes the lack of control of the pour; not planning or knowing what she’ll end up with is both freeing and challenging. It takes several days, or sometimes even weeks for the water to evaporate leaving a bloom of pigment staining the paper. The stain, a product of what Mann refers to as a “chance operation” becomes the starting point for the work. It’s an interesting turn of phrase, almost oxymoronic, containing both accident and determination. It could refer to Mann’s approach as well as to the fusion of Western and Eastern painting traditions.

Mann’s works are large. Her intention is to create an immersive experience for the viewer where they don’t just see something, they also experience it, or at least get a whiff of its essence. In looking at Mann’s work, one is struck by how it is charged with energy. It radiates outward in explosive splinters or undulates across the surface in sensuous mounds, or swirls around like bits of confetti.

In “Fable” (2014), Mann combines painting, silkscreen, collage and etching to create a ravishing work of extraordinary complexity and visual power. An abstract tour de force of composition, juxtaposed texture and color, spatial dynamism and rhythm, the painting exudes confidence and nerve. From a formal standpoint, it’s visually dazzling. It’s also curious looking, and we can’t help wondering if what is there is an actual thing, and so our interest is piqued twice. It’s as if Mann is provoking us to think in two different directions at the same time.

“Double Bed” (2017) also thrums with energy, but of a quieter kind. The painting takes its compositional elements from murals in the ancient Roman villa of Livia. The diptych composition is suggestive of traditional space with a repeated shape that conveys arched portals, or perhaps these are the beds of the title. Earth and sky can be read into the left side, but Mann pulls us back into abstraction on the right with overlapping vertical bands of color and pattern. The pine tree at the center evokes nature as do the greenish, blue and yellow hues. These are punctuated by patches of gaudy multicolored pointillist daubs. The swirling ribbons and funny little squiggles add a lightness to the piece—the visual equivalents of a soft, spring breeze.

Mann’s work is a virtuosic balancing act between formal elements, technique, images and movement. There is a lot going on, but Mann never loses control. She flirts with chaos, allowing it into the work like a dash of piquant seasoning to add spice to the more placid areas, but it never takes over. “I like combining something that is inherently and easily, naturally beautiful, like a pour of paint with something that feels a little more ham-handed or clumsy.” This visual yin and yang enlivens and enriches the work and keeps the viewer on their toes.

This article originally appeared in our October 2018 issue.
The Chaos Computer Club holds their 35th Chaos Communication Congress, a hacker convention, in Leipzig, Germany.