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A New HOPE on the Horizon
double-oh three writes "It's an even numbered year, and that means that 2600 is holding the party again this summer. The 5th HOPE conference has been announced and scheduled for July 9th to 11th(a Friday-Sunday weekend), again at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York. This year's 'theme' for the conference is Propaganda, and if this is anything like H2k2, it'll be by the phone companies. And for
those of you who are clueless, here's a roundup of the last HOPE con."
My favorite thing about 2600 was their use of bart system, put in bart ticket, meet in the station underground, go back home, and go out the same terminal you came in, pay no fare total because you "travelled no distance". I thought that was slick.
These sorts of things are illegal under the current anti-terrorism laws.
How long do you think it will take the Dept. of Home Land Insecurity to declare HOPE a gathering of terrorists?
1) 2-4 Hours
2) 24-48 Hours
3) 1 Week
4) Sometime before the USA lands on Mars
5) As soon as Dubya has his mourning coffee
6) Time is a man made concept you insensitive clod!
I was 99% sure this was going to be a Star Wars thread...
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
There is an abstract class called Terrorism(Object o). 2600 points out that with propaganda all marginals are passed into the Abstract. It is the job of the Hope conference to instill Honor in all the OOP spin doctors in the world: Beware of Reckless OOP. There goal of a good hacker is to overload Terrorism(Object o) with something a bit more easy rider, while still properly passing deadly free radicals, with something a little more easy rider like Freedom(Object o). Are you with me on this????
The Custom Mary
HOPE is little more than a get together for criminals. For those who don't know, HOPE stands for Hackers on Planet Earth. Thats right, folks, hackers.
I'm getting really tired of this "wink and a nod" attitude towards hackers. They are dangerous scofflaws.
Any how, I hope the feds will be in attendance and taking notes on who shows up at this "conference".
By far, the biggest draw of the HOPE conventions over the years is the Social Engineering panel.
Just watching illustrating what Mitnick wrote about in Art of Deception displayed before a live audience is well worth the price of admission.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
Public displays of "hacker" culture have been overwhelmed by script kiddies, wannabees, media morons (disclaimer: I worked in the biz myself for 20 years) and intelligence/law enforcement types. DEFCON has become a joke; 2600 is even worse, catering to the average alienated junior high school student who still thinks anarchy rocks. Nearly all real analysis and argument take place on line these days.
And for those of you who are over 14, it's time to start applying your meager skills towards doing something useful with your life instead of writing "manifestos" denouncing the phone companies for stifling your creativity and fawning over some relic who exploited a default root password in 1986.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I had the pleasure of seeing Jello at a performance talk he gave at UMass sometime around the late 80's. It was about the Iraq war V1.0 and the Challenger disaster (covered a lot of ground, eh?). Jello wasn't the debacle that night though, it was the mass of students who couldn't get in to see him due high demand for tickets (first come first served). They pushed so hard on the doors they broke the glass and fell through. The state police took a bunch away and covered the door, then they put speakers outside so the mob could hear Jello also. It was loads of anarchistic fun.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I was working for the New York Transit Authority back when a fellow by the name of Red Balaklava claimed he would reveal "secrets" about the MetroCard system. I got sent as an "undercover agent" along with a few people from the contractor that produced all the MetroCard equipment. It was a big waste of time. Nothing was revealed other than a talk about how doors were designed on token booths and how it's a safety issue. As a matter of fact, he advised people at the conference that trying to hack the system to save a $1.50 (the fare at the time), is a waste of time.
I had to sit through other equally useless presentations, like how html code needs to be designed so it's compatible in lynx in order for libraries and poor people who can only afford 386 computers can surf the Internet. (I shit you not!) What I learned from the HOPE conference is that most "hackers" (if we can agree these were hackers) are paranoid and generally misinformed about a great many things. The successful ones are those that had access to equipment and inside information. This Red Balaklava guy was a token booth clerk in disguise (our security people recognized him under his ridiculous mask). However, he had no real knowledge of how the system worked other than what he gleaned from the patent office's description and his own speculation...which was inaccurate to say the least.
I personally hope that many feds are there. At previous HOPE conferences I attended, it was a pleasure to be able to sit down with law enforcement agents from various three-letter-organizations and chat it up with them. They learned from me. I learned from them. And, overall, they're pretty cool guys. Besides, my file is filled with good stuff, so it doesn't really matter to me.
PepperHacks - Hacking the Pepper Pad
Hacker culture really does suck. A bunch of pasty-faced smelling fat t-shirt wearing beer stained straight edge libertarian or obnoxious green pedophiles come together to explore how many ways they can produce the same buffer overflow and call it brilliance.
Yeah, DefCon is just like that. A bunch of guys in a conference room.. gang-raping children, tossing beer all about, but not actually drinking it, for moral reasons.. and then having a big circle jerk when they discover new buffer overflows. They might all be dressed up like Adolf Hitler.. just for good measure.
Seriously.. what the hell are you talking about?
2600, the pedophile quarterly
I went to H2K2 and found it to be fairly dull. Some things to point out:
There were two things that I did enjoy while I was there. One was the lockpicking session: I've never seen someone so good at picking locks before. The other was this hysterical documentary about script kiddies called Owned, which I'd like to have a copy of but can't seem to find anywhere.
But just being in Manhattan alone is worth the trip. That's one hell of an amazing city.
I went to H2K figureing what the heck, I think its needless to say, but at 22 I was well past the median age at the time :) of attendees at least. And most of the criticism here is valid, a lot of the talks were by people who thought they knew far more than they did, and a lot of the guys are paranoid.
Around the same time I saw a 2600 panel at ICON (a sci-fi con on LI) and I forget the guys name but one of the little lackies that was on Off The Hook all the time was going on about how they track Metrocards, I got in an arguement with him because I said that it was possible they tracked them so they could get a better idea of traffic flow, not so they would know what a bunch of 16 year old script kiddies were up to (I put it nicer)
But H2K was around the time of the MPAA v 2600 trial and RMS showed up, and I have to say after watching him speak I haven't used a proprietary OS since (except when working with someone elses computer of course) I am even the only one in my office running GNU/Linux for all my work. I always believed in free software but I found his talk very enjoyable and it was enough to push me over the edge.
And of course there was the "Freedom Downtime" showing with long delays (nothings more fun than sitting in an over crouded room full of tennage 'hackers' while they can figure out how to project a movie) while the film was amatuerish and basically a large Michael Moore derivation it was none-the-less enjoyable.
I think the Mitnick by phone (couldn't get permission to leave the state of california at the time) social engineering panel was very good. Eric called Verizon or AT&T to enquire about a memo about hope, and they bought that he was an employee hook line and sinker (till the croud yelled.
Cult of the Dead cow was retarded, and enlighting because I learned how much I actually completely disagree with a lot of what they stand for when they arent acting like buffoons on stage.
Jello was entertaining, of course it was a typical left-wing political "they're are fucking us" speech.
I think the best part was the MPAA v 2600 Mock trial in which I manged to get a good portion of the crowd to boo and hiss at eric when he walked in (in hannabal lecter garb no less). - it was a delightful mix of real lawyer speak, and really fun jabs.
I was in attendance in 2002 at H2K2.
I didn't attend a ton of panels. I picked out some of the interesting ones, to me, and thought most of them were worth my time.
I wasn't terribly interested in all the politics, or Jello Biafra. I'd like to see more technical stuff, but I know that politics are part of what 2600 is all about.
The entertainment was okay. The show put on by Cult of the Dead Cow was very boring. I hope they never do it again. On the other hand, I really liked some of the DJ's who composed all of their own music. Some of it was excellent.
None-the-less, I plan to return to New York in July and hope this year's HOPE conference is even better than 2002's.
"armed military across the country would protect americans rights and keep the country safe from the jihad."
Someone actually modded this insightful? You've got to be joking. Many of the founding fathers saw a standing military, in and of itself, as a major threat to liberty. Standing armies have historically been used to oppress the population in both times of war and peace. This nation, in an attempt to protect the people from a corrupt regime using the military as a weapon against the people, enacted the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878. It restricts the military from engaging in any law enforcement, except where provided for by act of Congress or the US Constitution. This followed the Supreme Court decision of Ex Parte Milligan(1866), which stated that Martial rule (military law) cannot exist or be enforced within the borders of the United States except where it is necessitated by a situation (such as rebellion) in which the courts cease to function, and thus, civilian authority no longer exists. The Supreme Court, like just about everyone else who's ever taken 10 seconds to look at a history book, recognized military forces policing civilians as a grave and dire threat to the liberties guaranteed by our Constitution.
The threat posed by the military to the liberties of the American people has been recognized since this country was formed. To say that we should now reverse more than 200 years of historically-based common fucking sense is absolutely insane.
What part of this did someone find "insightful"?
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."