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The website for the new event is quite boring, yes. But just have a look at www.hal2001.org or hal2001.drno.de - they will give you a lot of information what was going on the last time - and it will be nearby the same this year. I am really looking forward to this event. fh.

Then we had a jam echelon day shortly after 9/11. Of course only few participated because everybody felt ashamed about it.

At HAL2001 lists with words that would trigger echelon were published and they included words like "steak-knife" (the codename of a double agent) or "sex". But I can't say that those were not published by TLA agents.

But mostly we were concerned with the european cybercrime convention act.

Ahh, those were the times...

This could be a perfect solution for conferences such as HAL 2001. I remember there was a need for sponsorship by a professional television broadcaster to provide licenses for realtime streaming of conference speakers back then.
A good alternative to Real and Media encoder that is free is definitely wanted in these areas.

Offtopic: I wonder why the DV's of this conference are still not encoded...

Of course the probability of a Security Expert to be a black hat increases somewhat, if you know that he has been jailed for cracking. But you even might be able to trust an rehabilitated ex-cracker more than a hacker, whose hat colour you cant know...

And of course it goes without saing that I would hire Kevin Mitnick anytime. Indeed, this would give me a strong warm and fuzzy feeling.

This was already discussed at HAL 2001...

I hope nobody was hurt.

Funny, I was in this building a few times during the buildup and cleanup of HAL2001. Feels strange now.

Maybe its too bad for their /. appreciation that its called the Big Green Gathering and not HAL or Chaos Communication Camp.. Nonetheless they have done a nice and valuable hack, and a green one too...

We already had a week of sun this year. That was the summer. Today the weather forecast is that it will rain less then yesterday.

HIP'97 had a week of good weather. Hal2001 had rain.

in 1997: HIP 97
in 2001: HAL 2001

The BOFs and after-hour discussions are perhaps deeper and more insightful in Holland, or at least, it seems that way...

This is old news. Job showed the very same bug at HAL2001, on his "SMS security" session on friday 10th 2001, 16:00.

Just goes to show that TheRegister apparently missed a great hacker conference ;)

The cool part: it was in a retired federal bank. Literally a fortress: fully bulletproof, tempest-shielded, multiple sub-basements, iron gates and fully enclosed by fences or walls, the works.

The ICBM silo gets me thinking about the same thing. They have on-site power generation and battery backup and an obviously pretty damn secure setup. So, why not open a secure hosting facility? It's not HavenCo/Sealand, but it's not bad.

The main problem is it's in the middle of nowhere (Mapquest link ), about 50 miles from Topeka. Paying the local loop charges for dedicated (and redundant) Internet access is probably going to cost a fortune.

• Greg

Perhaps someone who was at the HAL workshop can give the hacker's perspective?

Ferguson of course declined.

True. Last weekend I have been in a crowd of approx. 2500 (HAL 2001), most of which took their own computer so it should give an answer to who is using what OS, and why. This question remains unanswered. It didn't really matter, everybody had its own reason to use what he or she liked. A micro-cosmos of that could be seen in our tent (I was visiting the event together with folks from the Dutch Linux user group NLLGG). Of course, everybody took their own Linux box with them, installed with his or her favorite distro. There is some tendency to Mandrake for beginners and Debian for experienced users, but there are several exceptions to the rule.

At the end of the weekend, a 15-year old kid dropped in our tent who became interested in Linux. The kid had some clue (at least he was familiar with the "man" command :-)), was programming VB in Windows and knew how Internet protocols work. After some discussion, we sent him off with a URL of the nearest Red Hat mirror (he has a cable modem and CD burner at home), because that was the easiest way to go. Support in our user group is plentiful for any popular distro, however, Red Hat is easiest to get.

Brinkie

See my HAL 2001 Photo Gallery

He said that he had done some research on some topic (unfortunately I could not hear what it was about). He said he would go to the US next week for a conference and he feared being arrested if he would publish. Since he had mouths to feed and rent to pay, he said he could not afford to take the risk. So he decided to not publish his research. He urged everyone to protest against the DMCA which affects him as a non-US citizen. He did realise that at the HAL he was preaching to the choir...

While I feel incredibly sorry for Dmitry and his family, there's absolutely nothing about this incident which couldn't be fully predicted from the DMCA itself, and the general legal trend in the US for the past 50+ years. Corporations are in the business of maximizing profit and minimizing risk, and governments are in the business of maximizing order, increasing control, and growing their headcount, prestige, and budgets. This is the logical result of evolution through time.

Without strong protections, enshrined in contracts like the US Constitution, Bill of Rights, and in the everyday behavior and norms expected by a well-educated, informed, and active citizenry, things will naturally become more and more authoritarian. We've seen it in the US with DMCA, CALEA, and other new laws, as well as administrative actions taken by government agencies. We've seen it in the UK, with abominations like the RIP Act. We've seen it in the EU, which passes laws which ostensibly protect individual privacy but in fact create new bureaucracy. And Asia and Australia are even worse in a lot of ways.

Absent a major change in public perception (which I think is highly unlikely), the only path to individual liberty is technical. Perhaps it is now the case that security researchers, mathematicians, and pro-liberty activists must go underground, communicating using anonymous remailers, pseudonyms, and strong cryptography. Certainly groups have been forced underground in the past, but given certain conditions, it is impossible for them to be totally silenced. There are plenty of places in the world where people can live in freedom, due to a policy (intentional or unintentional) of tolerance -- Holland, Costa Rica, islands in the Caribbean, the Pacific -- for those who can't live underground in their own lands. Hopefully, HavenCo and Sealand can play some role in safeguarding liberty for those who live in other nations, by hosting servers for sensitive projects, remailers, and other infrastructure, as well as serving as an example of rational security policy for other nations. However, systems like Mojonation, Gnutella, Napster, ZKS Freedom, Mixmaster remailers, OpenPGP, and BitTorrent are perhaps more important for enabling this kind of research to be conducted, if not openly, at least securely.

If you're going to campaign for political change, don't just campaign for Dmitry to be released, or the DMCA to be overturned -- the core issue here is the continued erosion of individual liberty, at the hands of government, "well-intentioned do-gooders", and corporations.

I look forward to seeing people at HAL 2001, which thankfully is being held in a fairly free country.

Ryan Lackey
http://www.venona.com/rdl/
http://www.havenco.com/

The ETSI standards maturing now (see Opentap) in Europe provide LEA's with encrypted (and signed) information, so the LEA's are pretty sure about the authenticity of the material. The defense could in theory see when information was ommited, since the data sent to the LEA includes a serial number per packet, but the ISP's box has no digital signature of its own, so the LEA can just "create" any information it would want. The ISP isn't allowed to keep copies (or even buffer) the data sent to LEA's.

We'll just have to trust them.

Some more of my comments can be found on Cryptome. I'll be talking about the tapping laws at Hal2001, august 10-12, in the Netherlands.

see www.hal2001.org.

HAL is between 10 and 12 August 2001 at the campus of Twente University in the Netherlands. HAL is Hacking At Large, a gathering in the tradition of HEU and HIP. Camp outside, bring your PC and have a fast uplink to the Internet and a lot of nice people around (you can have both at the same time!). Website: http://www.hal2001.org/. Spread the word and spread the banners.

HAL is between 10 and 12 August 2001 at the campus of Twente University in the Netherlands. HAL is Hacking At Large, a gathering in the tradition of HEU and HIP. Camp outside, bring your PC and have a fast uplink to the Internet and a lot of nice people around (you can have both at the same time!). Website: http://www.hal2001.org/. Spread the word and spread the banners.

HAL is between 10 and 12 August 2001 at the campus of Twente University in the Netherlands. HAL is Hacking At Large, a gathering in the tradition of HEU and HIP. Camp outside, bring your PC and have a fast uplink to the Internet and a lot of nice people around (you can have both at the same time!). Website: http://www.hal2001.org/. Spread the word and spread the banners.

Greetings

See you all at HAL 2001 http://www.hal20001.org/