HOPE Conference, Anyone
The HOPE conference is coming! For those who don't know, HOPE stands for Hackers On Planet Earth, and it's held by 2600 Magazine, every two years, at the Hotel Pennsylvania in Manhattan, New York, USA. It's a fairly inexpensive conference, and I've been attending for the last, I don't know, a bunch of years, anyway.
Today is the last day to buy tickets online, (optionally using bitcoin,) after today, you will only be able to buy them at the door. I don't know how many are reserved for purchase at the door, but the price is generally higher. That being said, you can pay cash and not have to give out any personal details for entry, so that's pretty cool.
The website covers in far better detail what's going on this year, but like other conferences there will be technical talks, political talks, a vendor area where you can buy fun stuff, free workshops, and open space for hacking on random projects.
This is far from a glowing endorsement, as I feel that each year they are becoming less and less technical and more and more political, but I still enjoy it quite a bit. Plus, it's a great excuse to go for Dim Sum in Chinatown.
So, anybody else going?
A note on my inactivity on steem: I'll probably be posting pretty scarcely until the end of August or so, but I will be around. By September I hope to be back in full force.
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:) I want to hear more about this Hacker Convention! Bring back stories!
I was going to post each morning about the previous day, but two things happened. One - I was too exhausted the next morning and in a hurry to get back to the conference or other activities. Two - By the end of the first day of actual conference stuff, I had more negative notes written down than positive. So I decided that I'd lump all of the content together into one final post where I could better highlight the good parts and maybe not feel as rushed. So, in a day or two I'll be posting that.
Excellent! I can't wait to hear about this mystery (to me) conference!
I bet utopian would be a big hit among that crowd, roughly how many as a percentage know a lot about cryptocurrency?
I wouldn't know as a percentage. I will say that many of those present knew of blockchain technologies, as there have been several talks on it in the past, but it didn't seem to be a very big topic of conversation this year.
In the past they covered ways to come up with keys for (BTC) wallets that were created via the brain wallet method and how to steal coins that way, but even though there have been huge issues lately with wallets making use of unsecured local loopback-only services that several in-the-wild attacks have exploited via DNS rebinding, there was surprisingly little coverage of blockchain technologies beyond one talk that I saw regarding what block chains are good for.
Sadly, instead of learning about what recent or big new technologies or major security issues were coming (IoT Botnets, Spectre, Meltdown, subverting the IME, escaping sandboxes, etc) a lot of time was spent on politics, surveillance, and less technical content. If you google for how the conference went, you'll find lots of people complaining about MAGA hats, and how the conference was unfairly being fair to everyone instead of marginalizing anyone with a dissenting opinion. I'm sure that other stuff is important, but I'd much rather have spent time hearing about cool stuff that people were doing, like the guy that gave his entire presentation from a custom NES cartridge. Or the dude that made his own Amiibo emulator. Or the cool SPAKE crypto stuff that I only just heard about. But there were only a few of these technical talks.
Don't get me wrong, there was cool stuff going on, just not as much as there used to be.
I get that! I try my darndest to pay attention to things that actually matter, to learn and grow, break and make and fix and discuss. Seems like that's what you would want at a hacker convention. The custom NES cartidge guy sounds like a winner.
There is a lot of complaining over unfair fairness going around, but of course we must just keep pushing (to github ;p)
Oh, and 'many' is totally a percentage, I'd interpret it at 65-95%