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Hackers Gather in Finland, Netherlands, and Vegas 123

Posted by timothy from the just-what-are-they-gathering-in-those-places dept.
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."
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Hackers Gather in Finland, Netherlands, and Vegas More

Hackers Gather in Finland, Netherlands, and Vegas

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  • Is this true ? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Jeet81 ( 613099 ) on Saturday July 30, 2005 @03:49PM (#13203864)
    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.

  • Washed away (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "There are hundreds of tents on the hot and soggy campground".
    Well, it's not hot and soggy anymore. Just soggy. Here in Eindhoven (which is 20km from Liempde where What the Hack is located) it has rained all evening. So those tents are washed away by now.
    • Washed away is a bit of an overstatement, a whole bunch of people had to sleep in Conference Tent 4, and move to a different area in the morning, but apart from that it's all good.
      BTW: I just have to say it's wierd being on a campground with an average of two computers per tent :)
      • It was so satisfying when it was raining yesterday... a sleeping bag pulled up to my neck, sitting in a 2 man tent reading random blogs. Sure, my tent leaked loads, but who cares? I covered all my electronics with towels.
        • I wasen't acctually there that night (went home for a warm shower and a real bed at my place in Rotterdam). But I left alot of my electonic gear in my tent and it was bone dry when I came back in the morning. I did pay a bit for a good tent tho.
          It really seems to be coming down right now (11:15 - I'm acctually noticeing little droplets getting through to the inside of my tent.
          I do agree that rain on the outside of a tent when you are cosy warm is a comforting sound :)

    • :)
      at Campzone [campzone.nl] its about the same.
      BBQing is NO fun in the rain!

      (Campzone: also netherlands, 1700+ ppl gaming on a camping, 11 days, ended today)

      Sure enough, the miss campzone 2005 elections profited from some well timed rain. :)

  • Related links (Score:3, Informative)

    by karvind ( 833059 ) <karvind@@@gmail...com> on Saturday July 30, 2005 @03:58PM (#13203921) Journal
    Our earlier slashdot [slashdot.org] annoucement about whathehack.

    Whatthehack wiki [whatthehack.org] has details about the various events.

    If you read the FAQ from the main site [whatthehack.org]

    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.

  • w00t! (Score:4, Funny)

    by benson hedges ( 595198 ) <reo AT gmx DOT at> on Saturday July 30, 2005 @04:05PM (#13203957) Homepage Journal
    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 [flickr.com] or read about it at What the Planet [psychlotron.de]. And please, don't /. our wiki. Pretty pretty please.

  • Beer? (Score:1)

    by elgee ( 308600 )
    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.
    • There are no age limits to Assembly, so there's no drinking or selling of drinks. That's what the nearby Boozembly is for.

  • Its all funny 'til the Penguin gets hung in effigy (Score:4, Funny)

    by putko ( 753330 ) on Saturday July 30, 2005 @04:58PM (#13204204) Homepage Journal
    Just scroll down (way down):

    A really cute penguin is swinging from a rope.

    http://www.eurobsd.org/2005-WhatTheHack/ [eurobsd.org]

  • From Assembly (Score:3, Interesting)

    by krahd ( 106540 ) on Saturday July 30, 2005 @05:00PM (#13204213) Homepage Journal
    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

  • Hackers Always Gathered in Finland (Score:4, Funny)

    by Mensa Babe ( 675349 ) on Saturday July 30, 2005 @05:12PM (#13204271) Homepage Journal
    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!
    • In Finland Vodka makes you a hacker. In Sovied Russia hackers makes Vodka.
    • High average IQ, and a long history of raising up the less fortunate. (they've had free education for a long time).
    • Finland:

      - Free University education
      - Top 1 government education system in the world
      - Top 1 coffee drinkers (twice as much as the second)
      - Top 1 suicide country (escecially young men)
      - And other interesting statistics..

      I think it's because our history. After the second warld war and our wictory from Soviet Union (yes, Finland vs. USSR and we won!) we have done so hard work to rebuild our country, and after we achieved that we just couldn't stop working :)

      Maby because our language is so hard, so that after le
      • 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 [wikipedia.org] factor in the world (escecially among young women). Any Finns to comment on that?
        • As a finnish american male... I can't speak for people born in the native country, but even growing up in a very loose nation (the states, highest teen pregnancy rate in the industrilized nations) I never could quite justify having sex with the kind of women i was around ;) And yeah among other factors (feelings of inadequacy, etc) it lead to suidical tendancies...

          I'm pretty sure that suicide is a genentic factor, remember the vikings? they were afraid of laplanders... anyone crazy enough to leap out of hi
        • Disclaimer: Not Finnish. But yeah, I've found that I only hack while single. While not single, I am too busy doing...other things.

          (...and yes, back to hacking at the moment, grumble...)
      • After the second warld war and our wictory from Soviet Union...
        I think you need to read your history books again... I know some finns like to call it a defensive victory, but even that is stretching the truth -- In reality Finland lost in almost every sense of the word.

        Turpaan tuli, ei mussuteta jälkikäteen.

    • Anyone remembers the good old days when you actually had to be a genius to code a demo like Second Reality?

      The funny thing is that it wasn't a very good prod even back then, technically. Full of slow code and no very special effects...

    • 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?

      Linus said, a few years ago I think, that it was because the winters here are so long and cold that people need to come up with something to do. He wasn't sure what the real reason was, but that was as good explanation as any.

      Personally, I have a better theory. Know what we have in common with Japan? That's right, a freakishly complex language that no othe

  • 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. Lockpi
  • 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.

  • Some news from the WTH campsite (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Some news from the WTH campsite:

    you can follow *everything* at in video by rehash [whatthehack.org]. 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 t

  • 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.
    • All the signs on the Flickr stream are in English.

    • All the main conference stuff has been in English. At the 'speedgeek', common-denominator languages were used in the (non-recorded) short presentations - I was with a German and a Dutch guy (I'm British), we all spoke English, so that's what was used in the presentations.

      All the officiating is done in English. A few people are wearing name badges with the country codes or flags of the languages they speak.

      If you want to get the videos, try here [whatthehack.org] or here [xs4all.nl] (the former might go offline when the conference pa

  • I've seen friends using imeem [imeem.com] 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.
  • Suddenly, out in the middle of nowhere and far from anyone who could hear: a tree fell in the forest.
  • 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.
  • I have been to the Netherlands to a seminair and you have to read this: http://www.dataretentionisnosolution.com/ [dataretent...lution.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.
  • 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

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