Sorry it took me so long to post some commentary about PhreakNIC. After a convention, convergence, congress, or whatever term you wish to apply to a con, I feel its important to take some time to put the pieces together and reflect on what happened and what was learned before attempting to express any of it. The point of these things, in my minds eye, is to come together, engage in as much discourse as possible, and take away every bit each individual is capable of maintaining. The focus of my work surrounds building communities, enhancing media, and addressing security threats. It would be a great act of hypocrisy if I did not attempt to apply these crafts wherever possible. That means doing so, failing, and preparing to get it right the next time around.

It also doesn't help that I had no shortage of work to get done in the past few days. I literarily have not had a chance to stop working on things since the weekend. This upcoming weekend, I'm looking forward to some rest.. Anyway, here is my PhreakNIC review. You are forewarned, this is going to be a long post.

During the talks, I was attending to the speaker area on the 9th floor. This may have been the most rewarding place to be at the con. I was very surprised when I showed up to do my part of the AV to find that no one else was tasked with watching the room. It was a vacuum I was happy to fill. All the speakers were great about taking cues to finish up their talks, so the schedule went along as planned, mostly. I'd love to do it next year as well. Everything up there was going pretty smoothly, all things considered. All the talks were good. I was able to catch the bulk of them. There were a few I missed parts of, opting to monitor the situation from the back balcony, and only focus on the beginning, end, and helping with the switch over. I look forward to catching the video of what I missed. Being heavily addicted to smoking cigarettes, I needed some breaks for that. That back balcony made it very easy for me to do this. Not to mention, the view of the city from back there is excellent.

Speaking of the video, Wilpig has already posted the talk video online on his website. Major props. This isn't the first year he has come through on this. I encourage others to mirror his site once all the video us up, and I'm sure several people will. Several people already have, although the only one I know at this time is MaxieZ's mirror. Some BitTorrent files for each of the talks would be a good idea too.

I got up to the speaker area shortly after Dolemite's opening comments when Catonic's "Professional Wifi" talk was underway. This was Catonic's first time as a convention speaker, and he told me afterwards that he had been a little nervous beforehand. I'm sure next time around, that nervousness will be replaced with confidence, because he gave a great talk. I was pre-occupied getting my stuff setup during most of it, but I was paying partial attention to it. I'm not Wifi expert, so I definitely learned a few things. The stuff I knew already, he went over. If you are interested in the subject, I suggest watching his talk. There were about 70 people present.

The next up was dc0de with his "Outbound Content Compliance" talk. dc0de was presenting based on a product his company makes, so he had a fine line to walk. "Sales talks" don't go over well at conferences like PhreakNIC. People want to hear about ideas, and be taught something, not to be sold products. He walked this line very well. His talk was focused on the subject at hand, not pimping the product on hand. I think he addressed and explained all the issues directly, and in the process did do a good job of showing how the product is effective with dealing with those issues. From what I saw, I'd recommend people look into the product his company makes. If you have no idea what outbound content compliance actually consists of, I suggest watching his talk. dc0de had about 60 people at his talk.

MaxieZ, whom is going to be getting involved with Industrial Memetics shortly working on MemeStreams, delivered a talk entitled "Web Security 101". From what I saw, it as a very good primer for those who know nothing about web security. I missed a fair amount of the middle of the talk. I caught various parts of it, and it was all solid. He had some technical problems which didn't allow him to demo some common attacks as he had planned, but it didn't detract from the talk much, just made it short. Maxie knows what he is talking about, check out his talk if you don't know anything about web security. There were about 70 people present at his talk.

The next talk was given by Rodney Thayer and entitled "A Security Analysis of Skype". I missed much of this one. It's one of the talks that I plan to watch the video of myself. VOIP is something we will only be seeing grow, and Skype is no doubt one of the market leaders. I was surprised there were only around 50 people present for this talk.

Robert Knop gave a talk on "Blender", the open source 3d graphics creation program. I didn't pay too much attention to this, because I don't think I'll ever get too much into 3D creation myself. If you are interested in 3D modeling, watch this talk. His entire talk was based around actually using Blender, as opposed to just talking about it. So you will no doubt learn something. I'm sure the 50 people in the room did.

Then came Virgil's (stream) "Artificial Intelligence" talk, which might have been better titled as "Evolution by Machine". There was only one problem with this talk... It was a three hour talk, and it had to be given in an hour. I felt so bad about having to rush him at the end. This was one of the points where we had a schedule problem. I truly wish Virgil would have been able to give his entire talk at his own pace. It was an important talk. The stuff he is working on is extremely important. Remember this, as at some point we are going to see some truly amazing stuff come from Virgil. I have no doubt of this, as we already are. When I look at Virgil, I am damn sure I'm seeing one of the best computer scientists I will ever know in his youth. There were about 60 people at this talk. There should have been double that, and it should have gone on twice as long. I hope the video came out well for it. Due to the configuration of his equipment, I was able to switch between the camera view, and a direct feed coming from his presentation computer. Hopefully it all looks good. I have no idea if it did, because we didn't yet have a monitor present. Check out Virgil's page on Artificial Life Resources.

Rockstar hacker Acidus was up next with "Layer 7 Fun: Extending Web Apps in Interesting Ways". In short, Acidus ripped TinyURL a new asshole, and showed us all how to store stuff in it, literarily. Acidus has posted the tool he made, check it out. I am of the opinion that TinyURL is a disaster just waiting to happen. I've made this case before, and for the sake of full disclosure, I'm the one who urged Acidus to look into it. I had no idea what he was going to come up with. I just wanted him to come up with some examples how it could be used to facilitate XSS. What he wound up doing, is proof that he truly is a rockstar hacker. His talk had about 70 people present, and I heard several people say that it was the best talk they had seen at the con so far. Acidus presents with massive enthusiasm. He is someone who loves the art of the hack, and he carries it to the audience.

The talk scheduled after Acidus was "Writing Cyberpunk Novels", to be presented by Mary M. Buckner. She was a no-show. Which is a shame, because I wanted to see it. I've been intending to try to develop my fiction writing skills, I'm (obviously) a fan of cyberpunk, and I'm always interested in other people's approaches to things. The bright side was that by skipping this talk, we got fully back on schedule.

In the idle time, we aired the first two episodes of HackTV by the Binrev crew. They deserve some serious credit. Not only are they producing a very good podcast, but they have a magazine as well. Stankdawg has kicked off a little media empire over there. I expect it to only get better. Check them out.

At this point, I handed over control of the room to Jason Scott for the BBS Documentary drinking game. There was a little bit of tension around this time, because of the previous schedule issues, a no-show speaker, and of course a good batch of technical issues causing us to have to re-wire everything in order to make both the sound work, the video work, and still relay the video to the rest of the hotel. It got taken care of, and I finally got a chance to leave the room for a bit. The times when I ducked back in to make sure everything was going alright for Jason, it seemed like everyone in the room was really enjoying themselves. I didn't do an actual head count, but I'd guess around 50 people were there. Jason was selling copies of the BBS Documentary all weekend, and he said he sold a decent number of copies, which I was happy to hear. He also took the best picture of me from the con I've seen, which is very different from my appearance last year. I'd suggest listening to Black Wings by Tom Waits when looking at this year's "best rattle pic"... Check out his PhreakNIC picture gallery. I'll say more about him later . . .

After Jason's guided drinking session, the main event was the drunken DDR competition in the conference room on the 1st floor. I saw some of this over the TV channel. Much fun was clearly being had, and it looked funny as hell on TV. I have no idea who won.

In that pic from last year, the focus of the pic, Nanochick, was not at PhreakNIC this year. I consider that element to be the most disappointing thing about PhreakNIC this year. Nanochick was not there. :(

The rest of the night from that point on for me consisted of getting plastered, attending room parties, and trying to come up with neat ways to encourage discourse between con attendees. There was one point when I was running around with Palindrome's camcorder, so there may be footage of a drunken PhreakNIC tour guided by yours truly. I should have done that about an hour or so later, because at that point not only was there more activity around PhreakNIC, but I was significantly more plastered.

On to Saturday...

I completely missed Greg Zapf's talk on "Vehicular Computing". I was pulling myself out of bed at that point. From what I gathered, so was the rest of the convention. I appeared back in the conference room when Nathe was giving his talk entitled "Dr. Cablelove". Not only was Nathe doing the work of three and a half people at PhreakNIC, but he also gave a very good talk. Since I was setting up my end of things, again, I was only able to pay partial attention to this talk. I plan to watch the video and catch the rest. Nathe knows cable infrastructure. This man closes his eyes and sees Comcast's network flow through his head. He knows the details. He can tell you the frequency the mind control waves are sent over. As I'm writing this, I can't seem to find where I was keeping track of the head-count in the conference room. It was early in the day, so based on memory, I think there were somewhere between 40-50 people present for his talk.

The next talk was given by Kenneth Swain and entitled "Hacker to Professional". The focus of this talk was how hackers can convey the importance of security problems to their managers and their companies executive staff. I heard some negative criticism of this talk, which I feel was completely unfounded. It's often very hard for technically minded individuals to properly convey the importance of addressing problems to the average executive. This talk was trying to address that, and I think Kenneth was giving good advice. There were about 50 or 60 people there receiving it.

Next up was Critical Mass with a talk on "Identity Theft". The talk was focused on defense against it, and what you should do if it happens. I don't have too much to say about this talk. I missed large portions of it. The talk was well attended, and there were a number of faces at it that I did not see at other talks.

Dolemite gave a talk on "MythTV". His goal was clearly to show how easy it was to setup a MythTV box, and he achieved this by setting one up over the course of his talk. He installed Linux, installed MythTV, and did a basic configuration. If you want to build your own PVR, watching his talk is a perfect place to start. There were about 60 people who learned to build a MythTV box at PhreakNIC.

Then came the best talk of all. :)

Decius and I gave our talk which was entitled "Information Warfare for The People". There was some attrition in the audience due to an announcement about cars being broken into, causing a number of people to suddenly leave to take stuff out of their cars. Talk about bad timing... However, everyone who remained was definitely paying attention and interested. My portion of the talk was about all things Industrial Memetics and MemeStreams related. Decius's part of the talk was about Wikipedia, it's reliability issues, and what Industrial Memetics was working on to contribute to a solution. The talk went well, aside from the announcement in the middle. I encourage everyone to download and watch it.

I did realize after the talk that I never explained the main page, which is not the ideal way to read MemeStreams. To get the advantages of the system, you have to have an account and use the Reputation Agent. Its a small detail to leave out, but an important one...

I completely missed the talk after us, as I was involved in various discussions which were an extension of Q&A. It was Adam Meyers on "Smoke and Mirrors", which appears to have been a case against security by obscurity. I was back in the room for the very beginning and end of the Wifi panel, but I missed almost all of it as well. That's usually the way things go after you give a talk. This is the nice thing about video being available for everything.

I did catch a chunk of Strick's talk on "Croquet", another I plan on catching the full video of. Strick doesn't give talks often, which should change, because he is an extremely smart guy, who surrounds himself with other smart people as a matter of principle. Croquet is an interesting system that looks to have some good potential. I'm not much of a 3D guy, but I was playing around a bit with Second Life, and the VR space does interest me.

I found the next talk to be awesome, and it fit so well with the con. Dr. Amy gave a talk entitled "Still Big Brother" which was a review of literature on dystopian society. The themes of books such as We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, Anthem by Ann Rand, and of course 1984 were discussed. This was the last talk before the night's break, and it extended right into it. After the first hour, it turned into a discussion. It was highly enjoyable to take part in, and everyone there had something to say. It was the perfect way to end the string of speakers.

After Amy, Decius did his yearly rant. Trying to list the subjects covered would be nearly impossible, as there were many. The DNS situation was the bulk of it. It went into politics and the court as well. Decius's rants are always something interesting. Granted, there was some audience attrition towards the end because people didn't seem to be interested in hearing intellectual arguments and were waiting for the comedy show, or going to get booze.

At that point, noxfu's comedy show kicked off, which hosted several professional comics from NashvilleStandUp. I missed it, but several people told me it was very good. Another thing I plan to watch the video of. I felt that a comedy show was a good thing to add to PhreakNIC. It's something that you wouldn't think was a good fit for a hacker con, but really it. It's the point in the night where everyone wants to switch to partying, and its a great way to do it. Normally Decius's rant is the only part of that switch. Next year, I think they are going to switch the rant and the comedy show. Which would make more sense. As at some point, Decius literarily tires half the audience out and incites the other half to a near riot.

From this point in the night, there was a comedy of errors pertaining to the switchover of the video stuff to the showing of No Maps for these Territories. I really don't feel like going into it. And honestly, if I do, it's just going to anger people, myself included. I'm not going there.

I truly hope a number of people were able to see that documentary. Mark Neale, the fellow who made it, was really excited about it being shown. It's an excellent documentary, and anyone who is a William Gibson fan should see it. Even if you are not a William Gibson fan, you should see it. Gibson is known for being a little disjointed with what he has to say, but in this video his point of view really comes across. He is really quite insightful.

Speaking of documentaries, I was happy to finally have a chance to shoot the shit with Jason Scott. He is someone I've been meaning for awhile to get to know. I consider the preservation of history and the documentation of culture to be a critical thing. If you don't do it, its lost. Jason has made it his mission to do that for a chunk of geek/hacker culture which is near and dear to my heart. A very large chunk of my youth was spent journeying through the BBS scene. I was involved with the textfile/zine scene in the 90's. I ran a BBS system, a big one, and it's something that effected everything in my life there after. If you notice, I'm running an evolved BBS right now. He is someone I support, even if we don't agree on everything. From what I gathered, we are coming at a number of issues from different angles. That's a good thing. I have a feeling we will be engaging in discussions. I hope he appears on this system. Buy his documentary.

The whole rest of the night was filled with hitting room parties, having great discussions, and meeting new people. There was a point Saturday night when I was running around with a camcorder as well as Friday. Footage may surface. I stayed up the entire night. After a certain point, it just made more sense to keep going then to crash.

I snapped a few pictures of the last crew partying at the end of the night on the 8th floor. We were sitting around bullshitting for a fair amount of time. There was one really nice moment too... We decided to take a moment to memorialize Overcode, who recently passed away. We went around in a circle, each person shared something about him, then let out a mighty yelp. I didn't have much to say, because even though I'm pretty sure I met him, I didn't not remember anything about him. None the less, it was all very touching. I think it meant a lot to Psyode who knew him better than anyone else there.

Shortly after that point, I had a few cheap ass protein bars in my jacket pocket for if the late night sudden urge for substance hit. I tore up one of them and passed around the pieces to everyone. The other one, everyone opted to play games with, as you can see in the pictures. The one fellow who is very well positioned in all the pics was an Army soldier who had recently gotten back from a tour of duty in Afghanistan. We spent the rest of the night talking on the 9th floor balcony enjoying the view of downtown.

Around the time everyone woke up, we decided to head down stairs and survey the parking lot to see if any more cars got broken into. At some point after that, I lost track of him.. From that point on, it was all just cleanup. Checking out of rooms.. Getting equipment loaded into cars. Breaking down PA stuff on the 9th floor, et cetera..

I made a point of going around and thanking all the staff I could find, as everyone did a great job. That includes Dolemite, Nathe, Dementia, Lissa, Corydon, Skydog, and others... I'm sure I'm leaving people out, but hey, this has been a long post.. :) Plus, there are a number of people who's names I don't know..

There was an outing to TGIF after cleanup for food, and a portion of the folks went to the range for the PhreakNIC shoot. I would have liked to have grabbed my firearms and gone with them, but I was both tired and low on cash. Ammo is expensive as hell, and I couldn't really justify the expense at the time. I'm kind of upset about that. I need to restock in bulk so I don't get gouged at Walmart prices.. Grr..

Till next year . . .