Hackers Gather in Finland, Netherlands, and Vegas

tRSS points out this CNN article about the ongoing "What the Hack" gathering in the Netherlands which starts out "There are hundreds of tents on the hot and soggy campground, but this isn't your ordinary summertime outing, considering that it includes workshops with such titles as 'Politics of Psychedelic Research' or 'Fun and Mayhem with RFID.'" Read on for news from this weekend's other major hacker gatherings, namely (drumroll, please) The Gathering and DefCon.

From Las Vegas, giucmo writes "The Hacker Jeopardy crew are sending images and video live from DefCon to a moblog at textamerica.com Last night they captured the lights going out in a tent full of hackers. Tonight is the main event." And sysrec writes "I've been to an even number of defcon's greater than 3 and wanted to share some personal insights from the largest hacker con in the world." (Largest, I guess, is in the eye of the beholder.)

Jumping back to Europe, Late writes "The Assembly 2005 demoparty, possibly the largest in the world, is taking place in Helsinki, Finland. As I write this the best compos are still to come and you can view them and a lot more live via the AssemblyTV streams (we use VideoLAN.org's VLC media player). If you do miss the compos, the entries will be available for download from our mirrors and as video clips from the AssemblyTV media gallery."

Is this true ?

I have heard from people who visit this conferences that these conferences are also visited by many plainclothed FBI agents too.
One way to recognize them is by their polished shoes.

Re:Is this true ?

true, at least the dutch police is present at WTH.

The WTH guys actually fooled the press by publishing a faked information in their wiki that the police is giving a Lawfull Interception Workshop [whatthehack.org].

Re:Is this true ?

At DefCon, "spot the fed" is a fun game (so to speak) every year that you can participate in. I imagine it's similar at other security cons.

No, but at Defcon they have a spot the fed prize

Spot the Fed [defcon.org]

It's kind of fun to watch, but really screws up the talk schedule when someone announce they found a fed in the middle of a talk. This happened last year. They stop the talk, run to get a moderator and begin the interrogation.

Washed away

"There are hundreds of tents on the hot and soggy campground".

Well, it's not hot and soggy anymore. Just soggy. Here in Eindhoven (which is 20km from Liempde where What the Hack is located) it has rained all evening. So those tents are washed away by now.

Related links

Our earlier slashdot [slashdot.org] annoucement about whathehack.

Whatthehack wiki [whatthehack.org] has details about the various events.

If you read the FAQ from the main site [whatthehack.org]

The Netherlands

Is not in any US state. Neither is it the capital of Denmark: it is a small monarchy, roughly 200 x 300 kilometers at the longest and widest, 16 million inhabitants. Western industrialized country, high standard of living, expensive, lousy food anywhere but on our campsite, but you can drink the tap water. No major injections needed to travel there, no visa requirements for inhabitants of other western industrialized countries but immigration officials can be fairly nasty towards pretty much anyone else.

Showers and toilets

Please be assured there will be enough of both. Due to popular demand (and because the location allows for it this time) many toilets will be of the water-flushing kind.

w00t!

I'm currently at What the Hack, and just a few minutes, somebody screamed, "We're on Slashdot!" Overall cheering ensured. It's really, really great here. Get some pictures at Flickr [flickr.com] or read about it at What the Planet [psychlotron.de]. And please, don't /. our wiki. Pretty pretty please.

Beer?

Is there lots of beer at these things?

I mean LOTS. Every computer conference I have been to involved getting blind drunk every night.

OOPSLA conferences were the best.

Its all funny 'til the Penguin gets hung in effigy

Just scroll down (way down):

A really cute penguin is swinging from a rope.

http://www.eurobsd.org/2005-WhatTheHack/ [eurobsd.org]

From Assembly

I'm writing this from the assembly'05 demoparty and it's a hackers fest in it's purest sense.

Thousands of people (actually 5k+), all geeks, enjoing one of the purest and greatest form of technology-based art (ok, all forms of art use technology, but you all know what I mean).

And what really amuses me is that we are all ejoying and finding an aesthetic (sp?) point of view of coding. It's great.

Also the mood.. no wonder why it's called a party.

Ok, gotta go, the Demo compo starts in 2 minutes

--krahd

Hackers Always Gathered in Finland

Anyone remembers the good old days when you actually had to be a genius to code a demo like Second Reality? I ask because today any imbecilic script kiddie with ADD and AS can write a demo using high level languages like C and libraries like SDL but in those days one had to know what byte do you need to send on which I/O port and which bit to check to know whether the electron beam in your CRT does a vertical retrace to smoothly copy your buffers to address 0x0A000. Well my point is that in those years nearly every winner of Assembly was from Finland. It was the time we also heard that some guy from Finland started playing with the GNU system by adding a new kernel and calling it Freax. Remember? It was later renamed by Ari Lemmke as "Linux." It begs the question: what is it about Finland that there are 800 times more hackers per capita than in the US and 40 times more than in India, Tokyo and Europe combined? Better education? More access to hardware? Smarter population? More nerdy environment? Less entertainment? We should really find out because every country should take an example from our sisters and brothers from Finland. Kudos to them!

DefCon

I guess I'm fortunate enough to live in Vegas, so I can get to all three days without having to shell out for hotel and airfare...

I think it's been better than the last one I went to (DC 11, I think). The lockpicking contest was a bit of a wash as they had some hardassed Weiser locks for the first round and very few (less than 5) actually got them. About halfway through they decided to give people a second chance later that evening and try a different lock- I heard that few people showed up for that. Lockpicking seems to be the latest fad in the hacking crowd . The Irvine Underground table was pretty crowded all the time, especially around the demo tables.

The usual stuff is all there, including the Wall of Sheep. You can tell its Day 2... there's slightly less people in the morning and those who do show up don't have that bright and cheery look.

Party Mixup?

Got things a bit mixed up?
The first half of the article talks about The Gathering, which is held in Norway, and makes some bold claims about it being arranged this weekend.
Then in the second half it speaks about Finland-based Assembly, which seems to fit the article more correctly.

Attendee counts?

Not that it matters, but what are the usual attendance levels at the various "hacker" conventions throughout the world?

The Indypendent newspaper said there were "over 2000" people at the 5th HOPE, and nobody was claiming HOPE was the biggest. Is the Chaos Communications Camp the biggest? Perhaps someone with better Google skills than I could enlighten me?

Just curious.

Some news from the WTH campsite

Some news from the WTH campsite:

you can follow *everything* at in video by rehash [whatthehack.org]. There is some great talks you can follow there, all withouth wearing socks soaked from walking from tent to tent on the wet fields....

Yes there is a police presence This is especially interesting considering the events surounding the previous event, hacking at large. Back then media reports claimed that the dutch national itelligence service proclaimed that all the visiters were "staatsgevaarlijke anarchisten" (anarchists that are a danger to the state). Which is fun. Ofcourse what is less fun is that the dutch system for collecting internet traffic from ISP`s and sending it to law enforment agencies was just in place. One of the problems that still needed to be ironed out of this system was that the port of the amsterdam internet exchange used by the law enforment agencies was know. Internet providers peer with the police to get intercepted traffic to them as cheaply as possible while still being real-time. Not only was the port know, but the traffic graph for it was also public.... and it showed a *huge* spike during HAL. People who want to speculate on the police presence have all oppertunity to do so here [whatthehack.org]. Fact is that when entering the campsite you pass two huge police trailers, there is a photo of them at the "lawfull interception workshop" wiki entry [whatthehack.org]. since this wiki fooled associated press I feel fine about admitting it fooled me. You got to admit it would make a great oppertunity to ask for an explanation of that spike.("lawfull interception" is newspeak for goverment/law enforcement interception, not "legal under article 8 of the european human rights law".)

The reason the police might have a physical pressence now could be explained by the permit story [whatthehack.org] of this year. Once local politicians realised the permit they promised read: "what the hack hacker conference" they suddenly backed out citing "public order" concerns. During the the introdution talks it was mentiond that the field kept clear for trauma helicopters is also in the planning to group the riot police if that is needed. (We are in the middle of nowhere, forests, fields with cows an horses as far as the eye can see. What would we destroy even if we werent a bunch of nerds without a single bit of muscle mass?) Another quote from the police side of things: police officer to openBSD kernel hacker who just explained what he does: "But could you break into a computer?" cute ;-) Also the fact that the police wear the pink wrists bands is concidental, or so we are told.

Yes there was psychadelic research politics talk. It was great fun. It mostly talked about the US research into medicinal use of drugs that are considered recreational and the politics that suround it. Ofcourse associated press forgot to mention the talks about oild depletion and honest research into what the real energy options are. Or the many, many other great talks. [whatthehack.org]. Every dutch privacy, police powers and digital rights watchdog is here and has one or more talks. Meeting these people face to face is cool. There was also a talk on the working condiction of the people who produce our hardware....

The chaos computer club has brought some blinkenlights where you you play pong on using the dect phone network used for the event. There are dome tents that look cool, pinball machines from all over the country, lockpickers, a local campsite wide radio station....

Expect a *huge* contribution to tor network to come from the netherlands shortly.

Now I have to get back to my tent, I need to turn in in time to be awake for the "lobbying at national and european level" lecture tomorow morning... This politics

What the Hack Languages?

What I want to know is when they have a presentation or talk at What the Hack do they multicast in different languages? Or if you only know German you are out of luck for a Finnish speaker, etc.

I Know I've Been Doing A Good Job Because....

I've seen friends using imeem [imeem.com] from the Alexis Park network at defcon, since my job title at imeem is 'Security Architect' I know that someone is trusting my security-fu enough to give it a spin on what is very likely the antithesis to the phrase 'Trusted Network'.
I Always loved the Wall of Shame^H^H^H^H^HSheep showing all the individuals who were clueless enough to log into unencrypted services from the Defcon network.

It was a dark and stormy night ...

Suddenly, out in the middle of nowhere and far from anyone who could hear: a tree fell in the forest.

Late news...

It's great it is reported here but I would like to see events like these announced here early enough so I could have a real chance of going there. I was at the HEU in 1993, it was truly great and I'm kind of annoyed I didn't know about this one coming.

WTF? No software comes from Finland

Well, there was this one program. But nobody ever uses it. It's not even a real OS.

Dataretension: 450 Mln people loose privacy

I have been to the Netherlands to a seminair and you have to read this: http://www.dataretentionisnosolution.com/ [dataretent...lution.com]

Its about a new law (they will decide in October 2005) in which they want to decide that the government can store all internet traffic and phone traffic for a year at least!!!!

You can sign a petition, I hope as much people as possible do it!!!

BBQ

Poor form

I doubt he got permission of all the crowd to take pictures, which they made a really big deal about on Friday. Some guy took a picture of the crowd and was escorted out of the tent. Turns out that a convention of people doing borderline legal stuff doesn't care to have images floating the net. The non-feds probably don't either.

Assembly sponsored by Ministry of Education

This might explain why there are so many hackers etc. in Finland. It is a sponsored activity, and is seen as an important step in the process of growing up, and is seen as a step towards professional career in IT. NOT as criminal activity...

Jari

Re:Yeah, Assembly was there 2004 too

Assembly today is shit. Just another lan party for kids today, it was cool back in 99 and before when it was real demoscene event.
Now it's just overcommercial and focused on langames, some even complain why they make everyone turn off their monitors and stop playing because of the compos on main screen.

Re:Yeah, Assembly was there 2004 too

1999 wasn't anything specially different from today. Wish I was there actually this year, but anyway Assembly is still a premium choice date for north-european / central-european sceners to gather. It is possible to attend smaller more scene oriented events like breakpoint and still appreciate the opportunity big (even if more commercial) events give to meet even more people.

The kill all audio + light thing, the way assembly still tries to help out and sponsor other scene events (for example the scene.org awards) are still a big proof that the head of asm organizing is caring about its roots.

But yeah, I'm only bothering to answer so that people don't get the wrong idea that everybody's dissing assembly in the scene. My own take is that you make of any event what you yourself make of it, it's not the event's organisers that are gonna dictate the atmosphere there. (especially in the hills behind)

Re:Finland amazes me

I have traveled to Japan, and the people there REALLY embrace high tech. It's not that they want a cellphone, just everybody wants the latest and greatest all the time. The US doesn't have this demand. We are happy with mediocrity.

Our bestbuy, compusa, circuit city don't remotely compare to the Japanese counterparts. They sell stereos, phones and gadgets that I would dream of seeing in the US.

Re:Finland amazes me

1. Education system that provides tuition all the way to PhD if you have what it takes
2. Openness of the population to gadgets (not has much of a fetish as the Japanese have)
3. High standard of living in general so they have the money to buy these toys
4. 1-3 cause a market for services and the creators to them (this is yet to be fully realized, 3G has been a long time coming)
4. The Nordic Mobile Telephone system of old that eventually gave us Nokia
5. Good old-fashioned engineering traditions (mostly stemming from 1) that were used to build ships and machinery for the paper industry in the old days, and still to a degree today.

Check your facts, sir :)

Assembly is *not* the largest demoparty -- that honour belongs to Breakpoint. Assembly is mostly for gamers.

According to Breakpoint web site, they expected up to 1000 visitors this year, whereas Assembly usually has around 5000. What qualifies you into making a statement that less than 20% of people at Assembly are interested in demos?

You can argue whether assembly is a demoparty, but how do you define such an event? By amount of compos, size of prizes? Or the spirit of the people? Altough there IS a lot of gaming going on in Assembly, I'd count most of the visitors as computer enthusiasts instead of "mostly gamers", as you put it.

Of course if you mean demoparty as in "we are as hostile towards gamers as possible" -sense, I'll agree with you, Assembly is no longer a pure demoparty. But still, saying "Assembly is mostly for gamers" sounds a touch elitist.