The Zereps

…Okay, so maybe not the kind of hope you were thinking of, but I digress. As you may have noticed if you’ve been following Candice’s posts lately is that we’ve been without (much) power at our place for a week now. Most electricity has been restored for us here, so we can at least run our refrigerator and AC now. Apparently there are also black-outs and record-breaking temperatures going on in California as well.

The type of HOPE I’m actually talking about was the Hackers On Planet Earth conference hosted by 2600. Basically I’ve been wanting to go since they first started in 1994, (when I was only 14 years old!) but never had the funds nor means of actually getting out here.

So living in New York City came in handy this time as it was just a hope, skip, and a jump on the subway to the Hotel Pennsylvania in Manhattan. Unfortunately, I had to work on Friday, so I missed most of that days meetings/speakers. I left work and headed straight over to the hotel that day.
Here’s a short summary of my exploits during the weekend (pun intended) and a list of workshops/talks that were held:
-Friday:

“Off The Hook” – The Indecent Version – Emmanual Goldstein and friends hosted a ‘live’ version of their weekely Off The Hook radio show. The rest of the time I spent on Friday was meandering around the conf grounds, talking to people, checking out the lockpicking demonstration, and looking what that various vendors had to offer. There were lockpicking kits, RFID-blocking wallets, TV-B-Gones, DIY electronics kits, wireless/warddriving antennas/cards/accessories, a 3-DVD BBS Documentary (which was the only thing I bought) and numerous other ‘warez.’
Between meetings, I had a nice little chat with the legendary Captain Crunch about the state of the phone industry and his thoughts on things like VoIP–that was pretty cool. The guy’s getting pretty old (and losing some teeth,) but he’s still pretty active in the telecommunications sector.
-Saturday:

I left the house around 10 and got to the hotel in time for the first meeting at 11, Wireless Security Flaws. After that I went to the Phone Phreaking 101 meeting, and then the Retrocomputing forum. After those, I was ‘meetinged’-out, so I just hung out around the mezzanine area for a while. It was pretty cool how they had it set up. The actual meetings were held in seperate areas on the 18th floor of the hotel, but on the mezzanine (2nd floor) level, they had projectors showing the different speakers in different areas, so you didn’t actually have to go upstairs to listen in. In the main area, past the vendors, they had a projector screen and in front of it about 30 hammocks where people were just hanging out, sleeping, chilling with their laptops, etc. That was a pretty nice little setup.

Kevin Mitnick was supposed to give 2 talks: Hackers in Prison and Kevin Mitnick Unplugged, but unfortunately he got sick and was in a hospital in London (or so I heard.) 🙁

-Sunday:

Sunday, I also left the house around 10 to make it to the 11am meeting: Urban Exploring. Two people shared their experiences exploring the areas around New York. They outlined the laws regarding tresspassing and what to do if you get caught. 😉 That was one of the more interesting talks I went to. After that I went to Basics of Forensic Recovery and Exploring your World with GIS, which were both kinda dry. The Social Engineering meeting was probably the most packed of any that I went to. Emmanual Goldstein and a few other notables led a talk on social engineering and talked of past exploits. The perfect situation played right into their hands for getting people to release information–the power outage in Queens, so they gave us a little demo. That was pretty interesting. After all those, I still managed to squeeze in 3 more meetings: Selfness-Copyfight: From Censorship to New Business Models, Comparison of WAN Routing Protocols (dry but I learned a lot,) and of course the closing ceremonies.

After 10 years of waiting, I was not disappointed. Hopefully sometime in the future I will be able to take a trip out here again for a weekend and make it to another HOPE Conference. I wish I had taken a camera with me, but alas, I forgot. You can probably find a good number of HOPE pictures here, though: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/hopenumbersix/. Enjoy!

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