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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."
true, at least the dutch police is present at WTH.
The WTH guys actually fooled the press by publishing a faked information in their wiki that the police is giving a Lawfull Interception Workshop.
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!
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.