Viele Gruesse Dr. Humer: I'm not quite sure which angle you are coming from when you speak of social engineering, but I am a bit familiar with the (non-malicious) hacker scene and would say that it is definitely one worth investigating. I would start here: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2007/09/berlin_hacker_spaces_1.html http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Hacker_Spaces A good friend of mine is the co-principal of The Hacktory ( http://www.thehacktory.org) here in Philadelphia and orchestrated an international Hackerspaces call-in in November. I believe Chaos ( http://www.ccc.de/) in Berlin was one of the participating hacker spaces. You can view the blog entry about the call-in here: http://industrialsomething.org/?p=219 One social engineering (a.k.a. geek–?) phenomena from the 1980s that is being revived by the hacker scenes in Philadelphia and in New York is the live performance of chiptunes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiptunes) by means of hacked/repurposed Nintendo Gameboys. Without fail, these shows are always accompanied by 8-bit VJing (http://www.waitforvblank.com/ & http://www.no-carrier.com/). Philly's 8static crew (8static.com) were major players in the recent Blip Festival in New York ( http://blipfestival.org/2008/). This may not be the kind of thing you were looking for, but most of these people do work as some type of engineer by day and play hacker by night/weekend. It is a fascinating (and friendly!) scene, and I'm sure the hacker scene in Berlin has just as much to offer. Feel free to email me off-list if you would like more information. Alles gute, Julia Pellicciaro Philadelpia, PA -- tweet :: twitter.com/juropel blog :: telluricaesthetic.net <http://blog.telluricaesthetic.net> /* Passion. Purpose. Integrity. */ Only the curious will learn, only the resolute overcome the obstacles to learning. The Quest Quotient has always excited me more than the Intelligence Quotient. —Eugene S. Wilson