I find the weirdest times to write these entries… Right now I am sitting at some random rest stop on I-84 which is serving as a temporary refuge from the traffic…. So far the ride had been smooth.
Saturday things really started to get rolling. Two keynote speakers, back to back conferences, sweaty geeks (myself included) clamoring to touch greatness, a gyro from around the corner and the list goes on. Actually, in all honesty Saturday kinda merges in to Sunday in my mind, but I’ll start from the beginning…
Having been up till 3AM (writing the previous entry I might add) on Friday night, we were in no mood to wake up and get going early, so we missed the first set of talks, and the second on account of breakfast.
How Piracy feeds a starving audience-Michael Perkins
This was a talk about how the music industry is screwing the average consumer into buying overpriced cookie cutter material. Well maybe it wasn’t so much a talk as a life style (manifesto, middle finger to the music industry, radical declaration of independence) for the gentleman that gave this talk. While I may not have agreed with everything he was saying I think he did make a few excellent points about the nature of the music industry and humanity as a whole, which I think was the point of the talk. Mr. Perkins also went as far as to support his talk by producing a musical albue for 12$, which I thought was an interesting approach. The problem with that approach is that I don’t think it’s scalable, it would never work for the record industry as a whole. I think this was an extremely radical talk and quite possibly unrealistic, but Hope is all about free expression in a way. A certain other colleague of mine, who happened to be sitting next to me didn’t agree one bit and proceeded to make his voice heard. Perhaps the middle ground was somewhere in between these two idealists.
Keynote Address -Steven Levy
Steven Levy literally wrote the book about Hackers. He started out as a journalist writing for Newsweek about mixed topics and even more notably the original Mac. I especially enjoyed this talk because of Mr. Levy’s perspective on a small of Macintosh history, which I find incredibly interesting. Mr. Levy pretty much outlined what it is to be a hacker. Hacker as the word is commonly used conjures up images of Acid Burn and Zero Cool from the movie Hackers. However, there are more than just those characters thought of in the movies, but now there are also, hardware hackers, phreakers, crackers etc. And if we take that a step further we can pretty much define a hacker as someone who doesn’t just see a system, but they see a system that can be altered, manipulate in to doing their wildest dreams. Mr. Levy put it far more succinctly during his talk, than I am remembering now. All in all an excellent talk.
Bagcam – How did the TSA and/or the airlines manage to do that to your luggage?-Algormor
Ever since Sept. 2001 the government has spent billions of dollars to provide the illusion of safety on our domestic aircraft, but at what cost. Now when you take a flight you have to take off your shoes, take out your laptops, no liquids, your bags may end up ripped up, things missing and just more inconveniences. Algormor said he was a victim of all of the above due to his extensive amount of air travel, and he decided to fight back. How you ask? by mounting a digital video camera and solid state recorder inside of his luggage. The result? an intimate look at how luggage gets from the counter to its destination. While I was expecting more damning evidence against the TSA it turned out that the worst they had done was stand around watching the bags go by. Can’t say I blame them for that, it wouldn’t be my idea of a good time. All the same I think it’s a good idea that citizens watch their government entities to make sure they behave. In the future there should be some fun videos on www.algormor.com
Featured Speaker – Steven Rambam
By far my most favorite (and longest) talk of the conference. Mr. Rambam titled this talk, “Privacy is dead, get over it”. An extremely sobering talk about the current state of keeping your personal information private in our ever increasing connected environment. The theory behind it is sound, there are thousands and thousands of databases out there, some with information about you in them. Once the data in the databases is connected it’s very easy to get an accurate picture of you are as a person. It’s kinda like connect the dots between different databases, or on gigantic join operation if we were in SQL world. The talk lasted for 3.5 and I was riveted almost every minute of it. I could go on for now but I will leave you with this one thought: “Privacy is dead, get over it”
Social Engineering Panel
Some of the more well known hackers/phreakers hosted a panel in which they discussed social engineering. The basic idea of social engineering is manipulating other people into giving you information that will help you exploit other systems. They had a few demonstrations of social engineering in action and plenty of humorous stories to shared with a packed crowd.
Featured Speaker – Kevin Mitnick
One of the more well known hackers whom the FBI actually arrested and sent to high security federal (“pound me in the ass”) prison because they thought he could start a nuclear war by whistling into a phone. Kevin regaled us with many stories of his older exploits and a few phone phreaking tricks to bypass caller ID. As I mentioned earlier I’m writing this post while traveling home on a bus. A short time ago, I received two text messages from his gmail address. upon receiving the first address I was a little freaked out because it didn’t make any sense, AND I hadn’t given him my phone number. Then I thought about it and realized that he is probably one of the best phreakers out there and I should have expected something like this. Good show Kevin!
After all these talks were over it was about 12 or 1 I’m not sure really, but either way we decided to walk up to times square which was lit up bright as day and almost as busy. We ended up at a bar called Mr. Biggs, feasting on nachos and sucking down refreshing beer. They also had karaoke going at the time and for the most part everyone who sang was pretty good. After the bar we went back to the hotel, by this time it was 3:00AM and decided to check out what was going on at the mezzanine, not a whole lot. But the lego table was empty and things were just demanding to be built, so we built.
I will write up day 3 very soon.
