What the Hack Day 4
It was basically pouring the whole morning and as Internet access and power supply were fading off due to our upstreams tearing down their tents to return to France early I visited a talk about Buckminster Fuller, an inventor from the US and seeminly a genius of whom I never had heard before. I was very interesting and "Bucky" must have been a very fascinating person, "Inventions can either make profit or sense", to quote him.
Afterwards John Gilmore gave an update on the current state of copyright/DRM affairs in the US and some cases the EFF is persuing, was didn't present much new information, but was interesting nonetheless.
At noon there seemed to occur a time frame of relative dryness, so we decided to take the chance and tear down our tents, right in time to see the next talk about "RFID: Fun and Mayhem", by some research assistant from Prof. Tanenbaum, which was well made, but didn't present much new information for me. She had extremely funny pictures from morons from a beach club in Amsterdam, who received RFID tag injections to get access to the VIP section of the club. Mankind's sanity is slowly vanishing...
Afterwards I listened to a talk about some guy who built passive radars, a technique which allows you to track airplanes without needing a full-blown radar screen/sender installation. I didn't understand all the tech, but the approach has a lot of hack value. One of the earlier days some French guy presented his "satellite sniffer", which he used to grab information from weather satellites and to construct live weather satellite feeds on his notebook.
The "Fnord news show" was entertaining, my favourite anecdote was the US congress man, who threatened to take out Mecca with bombers if islamistic terrorists should ever use nuclear devices for acts of terrorism...
In the closing session the lead organizer said the event might take place in Germany in four years, if beaureaucry wouldn't become better over the next years. Initially they requested the organizers to present evacuation and power supply plans for every tent larger than 5x5 metres. And I thought Germans would be the world champions of useless regulations...
They nearly managed to reach the break even, due to the bad weather they had less visitors than expected. They called for donations and I hope they have gotten enough.
All in all "What the Hack" was almost perfect, the weather could have been better, but everyone else was simply great; the talks, the atmosphere, the people and even the Dutch food was better than expected, e.g. the "Bapao" rolls were rather tasty. I really liked the 18.00 lunch hour ;-) Power and Ethernet network supply was excellent, although WiFi was only usable in the main tents. The international atmosphere was great, while CCC Congress events are visited mostly by Germans, at WTH my estimation would be that a quarter were Germans, 50% Dutch and the rest from other countries, even a few dozens from the US and some Australian folks! It's also very cool to see people like the EFF or 2600 folks in person.
Big kudos to everyone involved in organizing this marvelous event!
Afterwards John Gilmore gave an update on the current state of copyright/DRM affairs in the US and some cases the EFF is persuing, was didn't present much new information, but was interesting nonetheless.
At noon there seemed to occur a time frame of relative dryness, so we decided to take the chance and tear down our tents, right in time to see the next talk about "RFID: Fun and Mayhem", by some research assistant from Prof. Tanenbaum, which was well made, but didn't present much new information for me. She had extremely funny pictures from morons from a beach club in Amsterdam, who received RFID tag injections to get access to the VIP section of the club. Mankind's sanity is slowly vanishing...
Afterwards I listened to a talk about some guy who built passive radars, a technique which allows you to track airplanes without needing a full-blown radar screen/sender installation. I didn't understand all the tech, but the approach has a lot of hack value. One of the earlier days some French guy presented his "satellite sniffer", which he used to grab information from weather satellites and to construct live weather satellite feeds on his notebook.
The "Fnord news show" was entertaining, my favourite anecdote was the US congress man, who threatened to take out Mecca with bombers if islamistic terrorists should ever use nuclear devices for acts of terrorism...
In the closing session the lead organizer said the event might take place in Germany in four years, if beaureaucry wouldn't become better over the next years. Initially they requested the organizers to present evacuation and power supply plans for every tent larger than 5x5 metres. And I thought Germans would be the world champions of useless regulations...
They nearly managed to reach the break even, due to the bad weather they had less visitors than expected. They called for donations and I hope they have gotten enough.
All in all "What the Hack" was almost perfect, the weather could have been better, but everyone else was simply great; the talks, the atmosphere, the people and even the Dutch food was better than expected, e.g. the "Bapao" rolls were rather tasty. I really liked the 18.00 lunch hour ;-) Power and Ethernet network supply was excellent, although WiFi was only usable in the main tents. The international atmosphere was great, while CCC Congress events are visited mostly by Germans, at WTH my estimation would be that a quarter were Germans, 50% Dutch and the rest from other countries, even a few dozens from the US and some Australian folks! It's also very cool to see people like the EFF or 2600 folks in person.
Big kudos to everyone involved in organizing this marvelous event!
posted by Moritz Muehlenhoff at 12:03 PM
<< Home