title: 36c3 Leipzig: how to fight resources exhaustion
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pub_date: 2019-12-30
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author: ungleich
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twitter_handle: ungleich
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abstract:
36c3 Leipzig, 17,000 people gathered to discuss the today and tomorrow of technology.
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body:

Today we’re at Leipzig, Germany. Last day of [36c3](https://events.ccc.de/category/congress/36c3/), Chaos Communication Congress.
17,000 people gathered to discuss the future of technology and the world. Although it's been the biggest Congress ever held for CCC, we are still a small number of people if seen globally - but we have been leading some meaningful changes in technology. This time around 36c3 was special for us at team ungleich, because our [Data Center Light](https://datacenterlight.ch) was presented at 36c3 by one of the most impressive organisation in the world today: [Extinction Rebellion](https://rebellion.earth).

![](/u/image/xr-green.jpg)

## The earth is getting hotter

Back in Switzerland we’ve been having an exceptionally warm winter in our small mountain village in the Swiss Alps. 18°C (=64,4) in December is still cold enough for our servers but some of the local businesses are suffering from not having enough visitors to the region, since the visitors usually come to enjoy skiing and other winter sports at colder weather.

![](/u/image/december2019-weather.jpg)

While one strangely warm and snowless winter is not direct evidence of climate change, we can’t help but wonder what will happen if this continues every year: with such warm weather, what will happen to the mountain ecosystem and ultimately to us humans? What will happen when there is no snow left on top of the Alps?

## Resources Exhaustion will define our future

![](/u/image/world-4c-higher.jpg)

Not having snow on the Alps and having most parts of southern Europe turning into deserts is not a part of dystopian sci-fi scenario, but one of the possibilities environmental scientists are forecasting with gravitas: scientists such as [UK Met Office researchers warn that by 2060, the world could warm up by 4 °C](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19778-royal-society-paints-picture-of-a-world-4-c-warmer/) which will likely cause a serious food and water shortage for everyone, followed by civil wars.

## Extinction Rebellion at 36c3

With its catchphrase "Resources Exhaustion," climate change was indisputably one of the hottest topics at 36c3 and at the heart of it stood Extinction Rebellion(XR). [Julian](https://twitter.com/julian0liver) who administrates the infrastructure of XR gave a truly inspiring talk introducing their activism which uses effective civil disobedience, and shared the details of their decentralised, self-hosted set of communication infrastructure for its members.
We strongly recommend everybody to watch the whole talk on [CCC website](https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-11008-server_infrastructure_for_global_rebellion), as it shares much-needed insights for anybody who is looking for a solution that does not betray their core belief, as Julian puts in his talk: you get to see what "Mission Coherent infrastructure." looks like.

![](/u/image/dcl-36c3.png)

## How to support decentralised communication infrastructure

According to the talk the following are the criterion XR uses for building their infrastructure.

- Community-owned and operated platforms
- Free and Open Source Software
- Outside of Five Eyes (an anglophone intelligence alliance: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US.) and EU member states
- Direct-from-source renewables (no CO2 credits)
- Debian GNU/Linux
- Affordable
- Well routed

It makes perfect sense and we could have written the above criterion for ourselves, and that's probably why they are hosting infrastructure with us at Data Center Light. Not only Data Center Light is *extremely well routed,*(we directly quoted from the video, thank you...!) but the servers are running by the power generated by water, which melted from the snow of the Alps. That snow they are fighting to keep from melting completely away - it is indeed almost poetic.

## Slack VS. Mattermost

XR is using [Mattermost](www.mattermost.com), the same as [our chat](https://chat.ungleich.ch), for mobilising and organising 475 teams of national and local branches. Unlike XR, ungleich chat moved away from Slack earlier and first went to Rocketchat, before eventually settling down[TM] to Mattermost. Rocketchat also has a user-friendly interface and is Open Source, but we decided to move due to instability caused by MongoDB.
The following points were considered by XR when moving away from Slack to Mattermost.

- UI similarity to Slack: had to get thousands off Slack, fast
- Export paths from Slack
- Team chat
- reasonably unified ui/ux across endpoint platforms
- team invite links
- basic team admin controls
- extremely low entry barrier/support overheads
- scales linearly as regards system overheads
- extremely performant (Golang)

Our team has been also happy with Mattermost and it is the Open Source chat we recommend to anybody who is looking for a self-hosted chat solution. It scales linearly which makes it a smooth sale for maintenance, and its easy interface enables people with or without tech background to join the communication in a hassle-free way.

We do support chat-as-a-service (link) at Data Center Light which is a preconfigured Mattermost instance: it's an option you can consider if you've been seeing problems of using Slack and want to find an alternative. There are a number of reasons why one would want to move away from Slack, partially also well explained by Julian during the talk, but to discuss the details we will write a followup post on this topic soon.

## Google drive VS. Nextcloud

During the talk a list of XR infrastructure details was shared and another one we have in common is Nextcloud. Our team has been using Nextcloud for some time now and also have been offering it to our customers as a storage solution for keeping important data inside Switzerland. Customers we maintain Nextcloud for range from artists and musicians who need to store and access a big amount of data as a part of their daily work to anybody who wants to store data without compromising their privacy. We named this cloud service as [Glarnercloud](https://glarnercloud.ch), which indicates the data location: Glarus, Switzerland. Switzerland has one of the most strict privacy laws in the world and has a strategically advantageous position in the middle of Europe in terms of latency.

## Call for action

The talk ended with Julian asking everybody at the Congress to join their activism: this part we can not phrase better than he did, so we will quote him directly.
"...It’s time for techies to rebel: with no actions, there is no hope. And no actions can be done without infrastructure. We need massive deployments. People need places to get to organise, and to do so safely. You can dedicate an hour a week, to a cause that is the most important for all of us as a species. Sysops, Devops, coders front and back, UI/UX, infosec...join us at [rebellion.global](https://rebellion.global).

## We support your green activism

As discussed extensively at 36c3, resource depletion is not something we can close our eyes on anymore. Our journey for [building a really green data center](https://ungleich.ch/en-us/cms/blog/2019/06/28/how-run-really-green-datacenter/) started with the same realisation - that we need to act to revert the bad done to the environment, and we need to act fast - and we are more than happy to support green activists for their mission coherent infrastructure. If you are a green activist yourself, we heartily invite you to get in touch with us for discussing what kind of tech infrastructure you need for organising your activism. We are also closing this year by giving out [a 19% discount](https://datacenterlight.ch/en-us/cms/sale/) for people who needs our infrastructure for their green activism, and we're happy to do so.

Learn more about our [secure chat](url) and [Swiss cloud](https://glarnercloud.ch) solutions, you can also find us at [ungleich chat](https://chat.ungleich.ch) or [follow us on
Twitter](https://twitter.com/ungleich).
