Re: What the hack roundup

[Paul Wouters <paul () xelerance com>]

On Fri, 5 Aug 2005, Dave Aitel wrote:

> What the Hack rocked. It was by far more awesome than I thought it would be.

Thanks. I keep telling the north americans how different the european conferences
are compared to the 2600/defcon ones.

> experienced before. Second of all, it was remarkably well run. It had a 
> for-the-people-by-the-people atmosphere I've never seen before. At no other 
> conference are you going to get served drinks by some of the best hackers 
> you've ever met.

Suprisingly, beforehand there is always a lot of bickering and fights,
but in the end it does always work out. This time it was no different.
Four years ago, I was part of the following conversation:
Q: Who is that hippie over there at the switches
A: That's John Gilmore configuring the switches for field C
Q: Gilmore?
A: Yeah, you know. Co-Founder of EFF, DES cracker machine builder, Cygnus corp.
   Sun employee number 5. Millionaire.
Q: What? Why is a person like him configuring those switches?
A: He asked what needed to be done, and the switches needed to be configured.

And yes. What one person might find a boring job, another person finds
exciting. There are always people who love to crimp UTP cables in the
dark, which by the way is suprisingly hard.

> already. There was a huge booth of Apple computers busy doing live 
> transcoding during the conference, so the talks were available almost 
> immediately afterwards.

There was a very good reason for that. In 1997 the big Sun storage server
went back to Sun before copies of the storage had been made. In 2001 AV
tapes were made, but never encoded to digital media (I believe XS4ALL
has now outsourced this and they might show up in a few months). The
problem is, once the event is over, no one is motivated to do anything
for it anymore. It has to happen AT and DURING the event.

> Lemme just do a bullet point list of WTH, since there were very few Americans 
> there (Justine and I were almost the only ones):

There were a few 2600 people and a few Cypherpunks. But I guess most
westcoat people were actually at Blackhat/Defcon.

> o WTH had its own phone system. You could bring a phone (some standard kind)

The "some standard" is DECT.

> or buy one there, and you'd have phone service wherever you went. People 
> could call you on your phone from anywhere in the world and it would get

Using Asterisk servers from people around the globe (and I believe the
Free World Dialup network of Pulver)

> routed through the WTH pdx to you, sitting next to a camp-fire drinking beer 
> with THC people and watching the lights on the spaceship.

two years ago, that spaceship was surrounded by a few hundred lightning
balls (the ones you put your hand on).

> o There were lesbian computer art displays (you'll have to see it to 
> understand what I mean)

I thought it was "Genderbenders" :)

> o There was a 50 foot space ship with a light display. I originally thought 
> it was inflatable. It wasn't. I wouldn't have been surprised if it had 
> worked.

That is the CCC spaceship. You can see it on all the CCC logos and
previous events.  It is called the Heart of Gold I believe.

> o It was visibly stunning - walking into the place you went past a huge, lit 
> sign, that said "Hacking is not a crime." Everywhere you went were colored 
> light bars. The visual impact of the conference is hard to explain.

Those lights are done by a group losely associated by the CCC (and
C-Base?) people.  Lights at the Dutch events in the past have been pretty
non-impressing. I was very happy to see they picked up from the Germans
this year. The many coloured TL's work really nice, and the way those
people can light up a tree at night is especially impressive. Doubly so
when you take certain enhancing substances that some people apparently
take at these events.  (rumours only, I don't know them, my friends
don't do such things, I want to talk to my lawyer)

> o Food was reasonably good, and reasonably priced.

Food was IMHO pretty bad actually. The problem here was that four years
ago, the caterors got a contract which would guarantee them a certain
turnover. It wasn't met and it cost the HAL2001 organisation quite
some money. This year they didnt want any contracts with this clause,
but then the cateror only uses a contract where he can bail out at the
last minute. Rain was predicted, and the main cateror canceled. The
other caterors had to fill in for this. They needed to spread out their
ingredients more and buy more from local supermarkets instead of whole
sale. This is why the price went up by a few euros during WTH as compared
to the building days before WTH.

> o Toilets and other facilities were perfectly good. Power appeared to be 
> exceptionally good.

Indeed. I've only seen one power outage at the CCC corner, which happened 
during the worst rainstorm.

> o Very few mosquitos

Indeed. Even the predicted wasps and bees were not a problem at all.

> o EU Feds much better dressed than US feds.

And all wore a pink wristband.
The next day, the newspaper Volkskrant had a page big article about the event.
Two policemen said that they could have done with half the police force to maintain
order and security at the event if they had not been interested in the workshops
themselves. Note that they sent close to 200 people (excluding secret services). It's
pretty sad that our police force is allowed to steal 100 tickets......

> o There was a room full of sun computers to use (with full working network 
> connections) if you felt like browsing for a bit. None of these were defaced 
> or owned by amatures.

Wasn't this a  blade cluster? Or perhaps no one knows 32bit SPARC assembly anymore? :)

> o Everyone there quite smart and nice. No salesguys at WTH. WTH is not all 
> about the "networking". You could leave your wallet/laptop on the table, and 
> not worry about it walking too much.

Indeed. AFAIK, no laptop has ever been stolen at the Dutch summer events. (I believe
some laptops have gone missing from the annual CCC events though, but those are not
comping events but conferences in Berlin itself)

> o A military (NATO?) AWACs buzzed us for fun during lunch. As halvar said "I 
> guess a lot of wireless boxes got popped just now". Who has an AWACs in the 
> area?

Really? Intersting. I missed that. It must have been from a US base in Germany. The
Netherlands does not own AWACs AFAIK. Heck, we even rent our Apache helicopters.

> Basically, WTH was mind-blowingly awesome. In a couple years we plan to hit 
> up the CCC camp as well, since I assume it's similar. Next time we'll bring a 
> tent.

And statistically, CCC has seen much better weather too :)

Anyway. It was a pleasant surprise meeting you there Dave!

Paul
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