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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.
Quality Hosting e3 Servers
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
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
I have traveled to Japan, and the people there REALLY embrace high tech. It's not that they want a cellphone, just everybody wants the latest and greatest all the time. The US doesn't have this demand. We are happy with mediocrity.
Our bestbuy, compusa, circuit city don't remotely compare to the Japanese counterparts. They sell stereos, phones and gadgets that I would dream of seeing in the US.
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!
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)