Part II: Hacking at Random

The following is Part II of V. Click for the beginning.

Off again. After four months in Montreal it was time to up the ante. With a one way ticket to Amsterdam, full knowledge of a terrible exchange rate (1.7 CAD = 1 EUR), and as few possessions as possible I was about to embark on a grand unplanned European adventure of a life time. First stop: hacking camp.

Nerds are amazing. I don’t know how many of you were the jerks who picked on us in high school—but let me tell you, the older I get, the more “vogue” it becomes to be a nerd. Travis Eden, who hit his high school popularity peak at my expense is still living with mom and pursuing a thrilling career in the concrete pumping industry. WHO’S COOL NOW TRAVIS!? PS: I made-out with your ex-girlfriend, yeah the one who dumped you.

The beautiful girls seem to be intrigued by a man who’s passionate about something, and we nerds are good at that. A past girlfriend of mine considered the simple act of talking about nerdy things foreplay. String a few sentences about particle accelerators, oscilloscopes, fluid dynamics, and space travel (in no particular order) “I voltage regulated a mosfet and impedance matched an inertial black hole while I was touring the large hadron collider babe.”

…and she was taking off her clothes. Nerds are hip.

The Dutch put together a hacker camp every four years. The brilliant minds from the hacker community bring out their finest laptops in the middle of the Dutch forest for a high tech camp out. I had been asked to appear to make my own contribution: a technical talk on the Eyeborg Project.

Cell phone networks hobbled together under “experimental” licenses were set up, lock picking seminars made everyone feel uneasy about their home security, laser extravaganzas lit up the night sky. Glowing quadracopters whooshed overhead while guys with names like “data wolf” assembled radio controlled and web enabled battle-tanks. Servers in retro-fitted port-a-potties sniffed the network traffic and listened for unencrypted passwords. At the last event a billboard displayed the passwords of those who weren’t savvy enough to keep them secure. …Shame on you for transmitting in plain-text.

Gigabit wireless internet was streamed over the campsite for the 2,500 attendees. The pimpled faces of campers glowed into the evening as they sat on lawn chairs and typed away on their laptops. They brought sound gear, lights, fog machines, and had “pseudo techno dance parties” roaring at all hours. I say pseudo because there were probably three girls in the whole place, so nobody danced, but it was a noble effort.

There were presentations on everything from building your own particle accelerator to eavesdropping on quantum cryptography. Rob and I presented “Eyeborg Project: Hacking the Human” to a delightful audience on the first day of the event.

When I started designing my talk it was pretty ambitious—touching on my own take on the future of humanity (a new messiah comes, builds a tower to the moon, and world hunger ends thanks to an almost infinite supply of moon-cheese.) I wanted to talk about cybernetics and the future of the mechanical man… but it became painfully apparent that your grandma with her artificial hip, pace maker, and hearing aid were about the closest thing to the bionic human mankind was ever going to achieve. I told a story instead, watch the presentation here.

Rob and I shared a small room with bunk beds, campers we were not. A lone fat Asian hacker was quarantined in the other small room—his snoring shook the walls. The “hackers on a plane” team had the larger surrounding dorm rooms- they brought plenty of whiskey, food, and network peripherals.

The experts were keeping me highly entertained: there was the guy who built the intense blinkey/sound glasses. They could simultaneously put me into a mental coma and made me want to vomit. Sasha, the security aficionado, who was so drunk he could barely stand, managed to tell a great story about defending credit card networks from hacking pirates.

I would have stayed for the whole event before I found Alice and we determined how well we got along, but the Dutch television show “Echt Niet” called. (Translates to: “really not” but according to the on-set hairstylist it’s more like “hell no.”) Anyone know anything about Dutch TV? Me neither.

Continue to Part III.