07/15/02

Friday

I have spent this last weekend at H2K2, the hacking conference in New York City. While there I met most of the notable American hackers, with the exception of Kevin Mitnick whom I do not fault for being absent considering his current legal situation.

I've never really been star-struck before, but I have to admit that when the Cheshire Catalyst gave my associate Daniel and I our passes, I continued to comment on it for the next several hours. That's out of character for me, maybe this was just the first time I was actually impressed by a celebrity. I was very pleased that Cheshire was working admissions; I was very pleased in general and quite impressed to see that far from the way many celebrities "run" their events, the old-school hackers were in fact the organizers of the event and in fact taking the brunt of the labor.

The atmosphere at H2K2 was great the first day, Friday that is. Everybody was glad to be there, and all of the old-schoolers had shown up. I've been a hacker since I was about seven defeating the copy-protection (not to mention the age protection) on Leisure Suit Larry 1 on an old IBM 256 XT with 640k memory and a monochrome CGA monitor. In all that time, I've never really felt accepted, and in fact never really felt at home in society. In this place, this USA PATRIOT Act dubbed "subversive" conference, I felt as though their were other people in the world who thought like me and who were intelligent enough to note the merit of creativity in a society and most things that I feel are wrong with ours. This is a subversive web page by the way, technically, if evidence of this were found on your computer, it would be enough evidence to hold you indefinitely without your civil rights as an "Enemy Combatant" under the USA PATRIOT Act.

There was one room at the conference that was entirely devoted to computer hardware. Additionally, there was an entire area allocated to retro-computing alone. This area had such wonders of the world as Atari 800's, Atari Consoles, TRS 80's (both color desktop and Model 100 Portable series), Apple 2 e's c's and basically any other combination of letters and numbers you could come-up with, Macintosh SE's, an Apollo 3000 or two, and a host of other things that were amazingly even before my time (in reality, my time goes back about 5 years earlier than it should because as a child my mom never bought a computer component that she could pick from the garbage, and I salute her for that). Cheshire Catalyst was even walking around using a TRS 80 Model 100 which made me quite impressed and extremely envious at the same time, I'll definitely be picking one of those up off Ebay.

It was at this point that Daniel and I realized that we should have shown our Press Cards at the door in order to get press passes (as opposed to at the information desk), so we went back to registration and got our press passes. We had to sign the "late press list" since we hadn't pre-registered as press, we did so, directly under the reporter for Wired's name. You'll have to excuse me, I am quite new to the whole press business and I'm sure I'll get used to it soon, but for the moment it is definitely a novel experience.

Friday continued on with panels on various political issues and technical considerations, ending at 1:30 (well for the commuters at least) with the showing of the movie "Owned", a documentary about large portions of the hacking and also phreaking scene which as a bonus featured: Cheshire Catalyst.

Saturday

Though everyone was clearly quite tired the next morning, the level of enthusiasm in the conventioners remained high. There were many panels this day, featuring subjects such as the construction of a virus as taught by V1ru5. Basically, it was a hectic day, I learned a lot, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

Sunday

Though there were less people on the last day of the conference, and those who were there were running off three hours of sleep and an ungodly amount of caffeine, the energy level was still surprisingly high.

Cult of the Dead Cow performed and though their variety show did not whip the crowd to a fevered pitch so much as it had in years gone by, it was still viewed by the majority of conference-goers in a rock concert like atmosphere. As with most things, some parts were better than others, I look forward to their show two or three years from now.

One of the most highly anticipated panels of the conference is the one on lockpicking. Everyone from locksmith proffesionals, hobbyists, and the occasional real life incarnation of a Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition Rogue tends to show up to this one. It was very informative panel which at the same time provided an education for both beginners and the more advanced person alike.

There was a second showing of Freedom Downtime, the chronicle of the Kevin Mitnick case as reported by Emmanuel Goldstein and Bernie S. I and many others were glad for the second showing as the one the night before had not begun until after one in the morning.

Freedom Downtime is an incredible documentary, starring Emmanuel Goldstein, Bernie S., Kevin Mitnick, and others, complete with cameos by the stars of Dawson's Creek. The documentary is well presented with many very obvious attempts on the part of Emmanuel in particular but everyone in general to avoid the kind of bias that is found in other movies (*cough*piece of propagandist crap*cough*) such as Takedown (*cough*see previous coughing*cough*).

Finally, it was time for everyone to go home. For some that meant reporting to a commanding officer, for some it meant going back to a world where they can not speak about who they are, for some it meant going back to a place where they are both respected for what they do and hunted at the same time. For all it meant going out into our world, a little more aware of how easily we can have our liberties taken away at any moment. For me, it meant writing this article which I know will go into a law enforcement database somewhere along with my name and all other thing that can be used to identiy me, but also knowing that I am taking advantage of the freedom that I have and that all have right to.

If I had to sum up the conference, it would probably be lauded as one of the most innacurate and offensively stereotypical statements in the history of the world (I find that most generalizations are this way), so I will say this. Hacking isn't about hurting people, it isn't about control, it isn't about material gain. It's about curiosity, intellectualism, and the sort of fulfillment that should be a daily part of everyone's life. Hackers get fulfillment from hacking, criminals get all the other things.