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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."
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."
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.
What does your Credit Report look like?
Whatthehack wiki has details about the various events.
If you read the FAQ from the main site
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.
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.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
Spot the Fed
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.
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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 or read about it at What the Planet. And please, don't /. our wiki. Pretty pretty please.
Karma
Finland amazes me constantly. Finland has a population of 5 million people - yet it is one of the most hi-tech countries in the world! How is this possible?
So true. Did you attend it? In that case, did you check the old school section?
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.
The Gathering was during the Easter long weekend, not this weekend.
Assembly is *not* the largest demoparty -- that honour belongs to Breakpoint. Assembly is mostly for gamers.
And you can't drink the water here in Las Vegas. Absolutely foul and disgusting!
Patent: from Latin patere, to be open
other major hacker gatherings, namely (drumroll, please) The Gathering, and DefCon.
What? 5000 nerds isn't major?
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)
. . . . . . .
may u!sh 2 sm!le at dz!z bad nn.!m!tat!ion
Who knew that asking "Are you a fed?" is an interrogation. The McDonalds drive through person must have beat me silly.
I fully agree - Assembly does a lot of good work for the Demo community, and some of the 64K intros, and the about to begin demo competition is excellent - very high standard.
Although I would say that - I'm the fat ginger Brit that presents a lot of ASMTV... =)
There. fixed it for you.
-97 was already mostly about gaming.
...Linux didn't like whatever video card I happened to have in that.
...And we used to put onions on our belts because that was the fashion at that time...)
I had the privilege to have a linux hacker sitting next to me. (well, at that time, anyone who could use Linux and GNU tools for anything was a hacker)
He had the coolest setup thou. I had a plain gray box PC and a 15" monitor with me. He had this long and thin 8" black&green display and and a sports bag full of components with him. Before my eyes, he just put together somekind of a computer out of that bag'o'crap and booted linux out of a cd.
Lemme tell you... Atleast for me, at that time, it was something special.
Oh yeah. I also bought a LAN card and VGA card from him for 10 marks. (1.3 euros or so) for my machine-on-the-spot and for my experimentation machine at home.
(...Who? Me? Rambling!? Never!
Bot Assisted Blogging
Keep saying boozembly on asm tv and you'll be fine ;)
. . . . . . .
may u!sh 2 sm!le at dz!z bad nn.!m!tat!ion
Just scroll down (way down):
A really cute penguin is swinging from a rope.
http://www.eurobsd.org/2005-WhatTheHack/
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
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
mod me up scottie!
is at defcon
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!
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
for hackers to meet in the states anymore after Dimitri and that Cisco guy caught so much hell? All the feds have to do now is lock the doors and...
What?
"We have found a Fed! May we burn him?"
Assembly today is shit
Aye, I can only agree. The demoscene as we old-schoolers know it and love it has unfortunately been dead for many years. The only way for the demo-parties to survive was to morph into kiddie-friendly LAN-parties, which IMHO sucks elephantballs. They're more boring than watching paint dry, and what with all the ATI and Nvidia-accelerated GPU's the ancient art of optimizing your code is pretty much gone, since every lamer has a 3+ Ghz with some fat videocard these days.
Where did all the cool hacks go? Whatever happened to code optimization? Hell, in my days the only gaming that took place was when you were stuck at some coding segment and needed to blow off steam.
(and yes, in those days we walked uphill both ways to get to school!)
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
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.
Pitty it is not online at phrack.org yet!
I had the privilege to have a linux hacker sitting next to me. (well, at that time, anyone who could use Linux and GNU tools for anything was a hacker)
Does that make me a hacker?
Back in '97 (september iirc), i got to borrow a set of redhat 4.2 discs.
Installed my own little linux desktop at home, complete with my own compile of apache and sendmail.
To tell you the truth, not all that much has chanced since then.
Sure, RPMHell isn't what it used to be (in fact, it's nicer to deal with these days).
A bunch of core-libs have been updated (glibc vs. libc etc).
Even so,
I'm still only using linux for servers, and it's far far away from my desktops.
p.s, i'm drunk atm, so if something of the above doesn't make sense, please ignore it and mod me +1 , Drunken Stupor.
In Finland Vodka makes you a hacker. In Sovied Russia hackers makes Vodka.
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.
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.
Excuse me, but Finland lost the continuation war, and lost parts of its territory to the USSR.
Some news from the WTH campsite:
you can follow *everything* at in video by rehash. 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. 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. 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 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.. 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 stuff is very importand for us anachist types.
Yeah well, even though programming challenge is gone, it still takes an artist to make a demo that looks cool. Maybe it wasn't like that before.
Why do you have to say that the scene is dead? Why can't you think that the scene [b]has changed[/b]? Leave your spinning cubes for a while and pay attention to things such as design.
Well, you'd probably call me a lamer since my first Assembly was '04, so I prolly have no right to talk about this.
I also can't see why gamers need to be seen as somekind of a problem. Most of the time they close their screens without problems. What really does annoy me, homewer, are these freakin'-funny-oldskool dudes shouting "KUAKE POIS" a couple hundred times at the start of every single competition. It's like these beowulf cluster "jokes" on Slashdot, extremely annoying and unoriginal.
If the extremes from both groups just changed their attitudes - old beards kept their mouths shut and the worst cs addicts closed their screens in time - everyone would have fun.
Most of the people have anyways, though; the clever people who understand that nobody's party needs to be ruined because of other people.
I, for example, come here to mainly just enjoy the atmosphere. I watch demos and find them interesting. I use IRC and play games too. I'd code if I wasn't too lazy to try and learn. If you want to simply watch and code demos, you can do that too. It's simply elitism that causes all these complaints. And nostalgia.
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.
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no, fed's are immune to fire magic, one needs to use a vorpal blade, or else a high level banishment/containment spell.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Finland has the most suicides in the world (escecially among young men) and the most hackers in the world (escecially among young men). A very plausible cause of both records might be the highest ISD factor in the world (escecially among young women). Any Finns to comment on that?
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
I've seen friends using imeem 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.
Informative? People who say things like that generally don't really know a thing about the scene or are just quite clueless. If Assembly is so shit, then it must be sheer luck that Assembly almost constantly has a high standard in the productions and lots of great prizes.
Oh, and Boozembly has been great this year too. (Boozembly is the 'event' that takes place in the hills behind the partyplace, and I guess the name says it all..)
the hottest music podcast on the block
Funny thing that back in 99 asm was on the edge of dying. Compos sucked immensely etc.
you go to get the free beer.
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Suddenly, out in the middle of nowhere and far from anyone who could hear: a tree fell in the forest.
Coding a demo.. You should really try though :)
or make some graphics.. or music?
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.
Well, there was this one program. But nobody ever uses it. It's not even a real OS.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
I have been to the Netherlands to a seminair and you have to read this: http://www.dataretentionisnosolution.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
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.
$ cat pah.c
.comment pah
#include <asm/unistd.h>
static int errno;
static inline _syscall1(int, exit, int, a);
static inline _syscall3(int, write, int, a, const char *, b, int, c);
void _start() {
write(1, "hello\n", 6);
exit(0);
}
$ gcc -w -s -nostdlib -Os pah.c -o pah && objcopy -R
$ wc -c pah
496 pah
Amen. I was in Assembly 1998 and was disappointed by it already. Too many stupid kids and unruly behaviour caused by this. The organizers need to carry a big stick to keep the immature brats in order, and this creates a bit of a police state feel to the whole thing...
I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian.
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.
http://codeandlife.com
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