CodeCon, Placebos, Fear, Yoyo-hacking, Dune, etc.

doom writes "Annalee Newitz rambles about CodeCon, placebos, random numbers, fear, yoyo-hacking, Dune and more. This is what it means to be a geek: Techsploitation."

Comments

Anallee Newitz?

[mikeophile]

Ummm, put down the porn for two seconds to spell check, ok?

Re:What the hell was that?

[Zakabog]

What is CodeCon?

I think this gives a decent picture of what to expect at CodeCon: That's sort of the beauty of CodeCon: people come here to share their weird creations, even if all the bugs haven't quite gotten worked out yet. A place people come to share their weird creations. And if you read the entire article it seems like they're tech related creations, with a ton of geeks around. The yo-yos aren't important, they're mentioned because of the REACTION to the yo-yos, the people their were true crackers, trying to figure out how the yo-yos worked, taking them apart, making them better. That was why it was mentioned, not that there was anything special about them. Sure the article does swing between so many different topics (placebos, dune, codecon, geek habits) but it's a little interesting (although I also don't understand how it got posted, there really isn't much of a point to the story.)

linkage

[doom]

If you were wondering what this is all about... Annalee Newitz (with two N's) is the author of a regular print-media column called "Techsploitation", of which this story was an example. More on that: http://www.techsploitation.com/writing/ http://www.alternet.org/alsoby.html?Author=2188 More about CodeCon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CodeCon http://www.codecon.org/2004/ http://www.oblomovka.com/search.php3?q=%3Cspan%20c lass= http://www.financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/0 00050.html The Schmoo Hacker Group: "The Shmoo Group is a non-profit think-tank comprised of security professionals from around the world who donate their free time and energy to information security research and development." http://www.shmoo.com/ Wi-Fi Remains a Work in Progress A latte, a Wi-Fi link and a hacker Wireless network worries? Get a dog! "Need To Know" (a zine in fixed-width font, the way god intended the net): http://www.ntk.net/ Ken Schalk, yo-yo hacker, is the author of Vesta: "Vesta is an advanced system for source code control, versioning, configuration management, and building. It is an alternative to CVS+make." http://freshmeat.net/projects/vesta/ http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?relea se_id=156198 Sparky's http://www.milkycat.com/toiletree.htm Jonathan Moore evidentally did a bunch of wifi networking down in Santa Cruz, and is the author of the MobileMesh software http://wiki.haven.sh/index.php/WikiWikiWan Jonathan Moore's CodeCon presentation was about: "Hacking Social Networks part II (Don't search private data)" http://more.theory.org/archives/000110.html#more Science Magazine is put out by the AAAS, and does great in-depth coverage of general science (and insanely detailed minutia about biology): http://www.sciencemag.org/ Placebos http://placebo.nih.gov/ Oh, and about "GenToo 2004": http://www.gentoo.org/news/20031203-news.xml

Heh... note the email address Annalee Newitz is using here... she evidentally creates a new mail alias for every column: sugarpill@techsploitation.com

Ah, slash ids pushing a billion and whining about what a sewer it's become...

Re:linkage

[[Xorian]]

Ken Schalk, yo-yo hacker, is the author of Vesta

Maintainer, yes. Person who ported it to Linux and got it released as free software, yes. Author, no. (I am Ken Schalk, so I should know. :-)

Vesta was written by researchers at the Digital/Compaq Systems Research Center in Aplo Alto, CA. I've certainly tried to make a useful contribution, but I did not create it.

Great Article!

[burris]

I loved this article! Of course, I was at CodeCon, at the Google reception, and I stuffed my face at Sparky's. Would anyone like some origami paper (or foil?), I always have some with me...

In case anyone is wondering, CodeCon is what Bram Cohen (of BitTorrent fame) started after getting tired of conferences where you pay a ridiculous fee to hear some marketeer ramble on about some vaporware that won't ever see the light of day. CodeCon is a conference for hackers to show off their projects; the presentation must be made by a developer and you must demo some working code. It was also less than $100 for three days of presentations.

burris

yo-yo hack? no.

[ayeco]

The first thing you do to a new yo-yo is adjust the string. "mod", "hack", whatever - memes getting old, fast.

Re:What the hell was that?

[Catiline]

The yo-yos aren't important, they're mentioned because of the REACTION to the yo-yos, the people their were true crackers, trying to figure out how the yo-yos worked, taking them apart, making them better.

I think you mean true hackers; if the subjects were crackers the yo-yos would have been spat upon, stomped, kicked around, and probably thrown into the hotel pool. (Or, if they were the script kiddie kind, simply stared at slack-jawed with an "ooOOhh, teh 5h1nej!!!1!")

Re:$1 for a random number??? WTF?

[lars-o-matic]

[...] Random numbers don't exist period, even taking them from external sources is still pseudo-random generation

Time series data from radioactive decay will generate truly random numbers in a non-uniform distribution. (Prerequisite: belief in quantum physics.)

[...] one of them is not.

Use one good one (many bits long) to seed your PRNG.

[...] You should read up on chaos theory and probability before you call someone an idiot jaz.
[...] and by the way, using a Lehmer Congruential Generator

Demonstrably wrong statements, an abusive tone and gratuitous play of buzzwords does nothing to make you look less an idiot.