037: New year, new villager joining!

We closed last year with a heartfelt goodbye to Christoph, who stepped down as a Village One co-owner and employee to focus more on his teaching and freelance gigs. But Christoph hasn’t left the village entirely, he’ll keep working with us as a freelance collaborator, and we decided to use this opportunity to add a new section to our website. It shows that our village is not just made up of the core team, but also a network of our friends and collaborators, bringing in their expertise and support so we can all work on more complex projects together.

Christoph was also our cooperative’s authorized representative (or “Bevollmächtigter” in German). With him leaving, I was elected as the new authorized representative during our last general assembly in October. This role gets more important as the cooperative grows—right now we are still small enough for everyone to participate directly in decision-making. Nevertheless, a representative can represent the cooperative legally, sign contracts, and also handle matters for a cooperative member if appointed.

Between Christmas and the New Year, Doro, Harry, and I went to the 38th Chaos Communication Congress (38C3) in Hamburg. Besides socializing, interacting with mesmerizing art installations, and (maybe or maybe not 😏) sitting in a ball pit, we attended a lot of inspiring, entertaining, informative, but also some anxiety-inducing talks, and decided to compile a list of recommendations (next to the well-known ones about the VW data leak and the ePA) to share with you:

Hacking yourself a satellite—recovering BEESAT-1 – Super entertaining talk about one programmer single-handedly reviving a university satellite that had been defunct for over 10 years.

Longtermismus—der "Geist" des digitalen Kapitalismus – Explains the role of the Longtermismus theory in form of a new ideology followed by Elon Musk, Peter Thiel or Sam Altman to justify digital capitalism and their suck up 🤷🏻‍♀️ to Trump.

Ten Years of Rowhammer: A Retrospect (and a Path to the Future) – Can you access the bits on a DRAM so fast and so often that it induces unintended bit flips in adjacent memory cells? Yes, you can! I learned about this (theoretical) exploitation ten years ago at 32C3, the researchers gave an update about it again this year.

Lightning Talk: Road Trip – Really fun and brilliantly executed lightning talk about how somebody decided to go on a road trip to visit streets in Europe that are named after a date, and do this for every date of a year. (It's the first talk in the video.)

And one last thing to wrap up this newsletter: due to their popularity, Harry took the time to open source our sticker designs and put them under a Creative Common license on GitHub for everyone to use. Read more about it here in our Digital Garden.

This is all from us for now. May all of your New Year’s resolutions hold up a bit better than last year! Bye and talk soon! 👋🏼