Pixel Bureaucracy At The Scale Of Chaos - or: Torturing 286 People By Pretending To Be The Government (gpn24)

Pixel Bureaucracy At The Scale Of Chaos - or: Torturing 286 People By Pretending To Be The Government (gpn24)

Author: CCC media team June 7, 2026 Duration: 59:01
This talk could be described as "pixelebbe Wrapped", except that it is at a different time of the year, has better jokes, provides more technical and moral insights and is not personalized. So erm it probably isn't a "pixelebbe Wrapped" at all, but hey, learn how we built and hosted pixelebbe, achieved better uptime than GitHub and spent only a reasonable amount of effort on this shitpost-turned-project (that's what we tell ourselves at night). In the history of human kind, there is a set of unfortunate innovations that have caused a lot of suffering and destroyed many lives. One might think of the nuclear bomb, or the internet. One could also think of pixelebbe. At least if one were to be untroubled by accusations of exaggeration and over-dramatising. Well what is pixelebbe? It's a pixel-setting experience designed to frustrate the player using everyones' favorite thing: ✨ excessive bureaucracy ✨. The idea is very simple: we provide a 40x30 canvas, everyone can then tell us to set a specific pixel to a specific colour from our limited colourset, which we then do and so a picture will be created. Just add on top of that large amounts of red tape, such as limited office hours, a dedicated queueing system, having to use an official government form, very strict formality control and stamps. In this talk, we want to lift the curtains and give a backoffice tour through pixelebbe. We'll talk about the technology abused to build and host pixelebbe, how we made professional software designed to look like it was put together in 2 hours. We'll even leak official secrets and risk going to pixeljail. There'll be time for a Q&A and a rare live-pixel-setting-session. Rumour has it, that even our agency lead might appear on stage, which had been notoriously always-absent during 39c3. Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ about this event: https://cfp.gulas.ch/gpn24/talk/VJDF8H/

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Author: Episodes: 100

Chaos Computer Club - recent events feed
Podcast Episodes
Infrastructure Review & Closing (gpn24) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:16:35
Große Zahlen und ganz viel WOW Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ about this event: https://cfp.gulas.ch/gpn24/talk/MTP7YB/
WAF: Wrong Approach Firewall (gpn24) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:01:42
Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) for filtering based on HTTP and payload are omnipresent. In this talk an argument will be made that, in many cases, the wrong approach for implementing WAFs is chosen: They are implemente…
Building video games with 20 year old tech (gpn24) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 19:10
The market is full of high-performance graphics APIs like Vulkan and fantastic engines like Unreal and Unity. So, why not use DirectX 9 and a self-built engine instead? ;) In this talk we'll take a quick stroll down memo…
Three Languages, Triple the Confusion (gpn24) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 20:21
This code runs without errors, but still confuses. In this talk, we explore some subtle quirks of C, Python, and Java (and others) that catch even experienced developers off guard. No bugs, no typos - just the language d…
MMO-CHIP: From Microscope to Verilog in an hour (gpn24) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 58:45
Reverse engineering old custom chips from microscope pictures is cool, but oh so painfully slow! Last time I did this (talk at 38C3), I spent two weeks waking up, annotating wires in Inkscape, going to bed, and then drea…
DI.Days as Anarchist Practice/Anarchist Practices for DI.Days (gpn24) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 44:54
Digital Independence Days are a response to the growing monopolization of technology and the recent loss of trust in US-based tech firms after the USA's shift towards authoritarianism. The (communicated) goal is to prote…
Bluetooth-Smart-Kommunikation von Gadgets analysieren (gpn24) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 53:08
Was muss ich tun, um dieses neue Gadget "mit App" von der kruden Hersteller-UI zu befreien? Mit einem (gerne gerooteten) Android-Gerät, Wireshark und jadx-gui auf Protokoll-Erkundungstour. Immer mehr Gadgets - ob Smart W…