W!T!H! Day 3: A Deranged Walk through Hackerdom

From What The Wiki?!

Having steamed into the parking lot enjoying the wind streaming through my hair with the top down I was ready to face day three of an event that had lasted for a whole lot longer than three days, awareness of which fact was limited to a select group of people who were more than enthusiastic to inform me of this fact. Boxtel has become a hub for all kinds of people since monday, and a cultural aspect of this was to hit me almost as soon as I'd laid down my entrance fee: volunteerism. The man directing my car to its parking spot, the man handing me my wrist band, the man helping me through my self-help security check-in and, having slogged down through the mud towards the What The Bar?! the man who got me unloading beer kegs halfway through my wake up cuppa.

Of course, this isn't the kind of event you come to alone, so there to share my early morning activities were the kind friends who happily informed me of the plastic token economy (in three colourful variants) and helpfully pointed out the tents that seemed to have shared the Titanic's fate during the night. Looking about the place showed me a bedraggled but strangely upbeat and even more strangely awake cross section of the type of people you don't usually see collected together. And where indeed outside of some academic environment would you expect such a wide range of anarchic intelligence to gather? An odd lot, these hackers.

So off to the first discussion for the day. Walking around the tents, we came across one wherein the main speaker was discoursing on a theme that seems to have captured the imagination of many of the people here. Privacy and freedom in the form of biometric systems. Now the argument was presented that it would be better to have the necessary personal information stored on a card instead of a centralised government database - the Dutch government had the best personal registration system in 1945 and it sure helped the Nazi occupiers find out who was Jewish easily. Of course you /could/ argue that transferring ownership of the data from a central government to a personal card only transfers the point of failure in the case of identity theft to the owner of the card (how hard is it to steal someone's wallet?), but the argument against centralised ownership sure come in heavily. A discussion on the accuracy of biometric identification systems followed in which we learned that fingerprint id has a high chance of yielding false negatives, is easily forgeable (as, we were assured, we would find out later), facial identification had a ridiculously high chance of false negatives (so high in fact, that law enforcement abandoned the useage during the Superbowl due to the amount of innocents the system classified as terrorists) and our best chance was iris scanning. Of course, there were always going to be people who'd be screwed by the system because they'd either always fail in the system, or had a high chance of being able to pass off as multiple other people in the system. Which basically means that whatever level of automation you try to employ in biometric identification, you'll always need a human to help out when things get rough (on the same people again and again and again) and that you'll need an old fashion analog fall back. The question whether having 2 identification pathways would lead to twice the vulnerability got left unasked due to lack of time. Well delivered and on the whole a good start to my W!T!H! experience.

Having had the economy of plastic explained to me, and suffering from a chronic lack of caffeine, the finer points of the plastic economy were pointed out to me (you can get it *there*) a trip back to What the Bar?! (YES the bar!) was in order, where by this time the amount of laptopping people had reached into their tweens and I happily wandered over to the media information bar. Off by one, I was to find out later, after having being shanghied into writing about the bgp routing seminar I was proudly pointing out to Bine (hard working and charitable, quick to find a soul with a lack of volunteer activities) I knew nothing about, but needed to. Naturally this necessitated a stop by the T-shirt stand (fashion for hackers by hackers. Did I use the word fashion? I mean that in a very loose sense), the camping stand (yes, I'd brought my tent, but forgotten my sleeping bag) and via the plastic coin stand to my friends who were looking on the verge of giving up on my promise to get them the cafeine they so obviously needed. I was in luck, cuppa's were going for the incredible price of zero coins and so I bought tosti's instead. Good plan, getting the food in.

Off to the lock picking place. My friends had bought into the bump key system and not had any succes with them whatsoever and thus needed workshopping help on the way to bgp. Thence we found preparations for the world championship lock picking in full swing, and were told that the proud winner had the honour to give us n00bs a workshop after he'd won. OK, that meant going to the Sun terminals to find out if we'd gone insane with the lecture we had seen - it sure didn't look like it was about the Italian crackdown, and maybe our programmes had been cracked. Nope, the wiki duly informed us that things had changed. This left us to try out the force feedback crash into other cars game. It's a good thing my car was parked far away.

With bgp a little while away, it was time to pitch my tent. Having got into the spirit of volunteerism we tried to pressgang people into driving us down to the car and back so we could get the tent but to no avail. Setting up the tent is a surprisingly trivial task, yet we still manage to get into the bgp routering seminar late. Damn. Being led into the world of Juniper and bgp turns into an interesting wander into the world of communities, in-knowledge (you have to *know* who has the fast peering connection to New York and give them priorities), the importance of filtering is duly pressed upon us (yes, once you've propagated a whole routing table along a whole load of your peers, you know what the word 'upset' means in a less than esoteric manner), providing us with a refreshing look at a world without Cisco (or at least, with only a passing nod to the existence of Cisco). Delivered with humour, I've learned that I can run a virtual internet exchange via a special project page once I install Quagga, and get real IP ranges assigned to my virtual AS number. I'm going to have to be quick on the ball, as there are only a number of slots left in virt-ix.net. Three things are important to us all in the bgp game: filtering, filtering and filtering. Impressed, I've decided I'm going to set up my own ISP now.

Next up is the defeating of fingerprinting systems in 10 minutes. Now, I'd heard how to do this using gummi bears, and seeing as biometrics and privacy invasion are high on my agenda a concensus is quickly reached that this is a must see. The rest of W!T!H! seems to agree with us. Since the 1990s fingerprinting scanners have been defeated by mr van den Putte, within timespans starting at 3 days to around 15 minutes, costing about 20 Euro's (1 Euro per defeated fingerprint since you can create about 20 copies of the fingerprints using the materials you have to buy). Claims by the manufacturers are highly inflated (being able to detect conductivity can be spoofed by licking the fake finger, claims that it detects life are spoofed because that is a non-integrated sensor, which beams from the side... where the fake fingerprint is not to be detected, but the live finger is), and the clarity of the system used to spoof the system is twice that of the scanner (a printer with a picture of a dusted fingerprint will output at 1200 dps, where the scanner is 500 dps). UV etching the print and then using four to five acryllic paint layers to create the skin is an incredibly easy and effective manner to break fingerprint id scanners.

As we wonder along the tents for our lock picking workshop, I notice a sign from my past: 2600 from the days I was interested in phreaking. I always follow the advice of my lawyer. Wow, I have to step in for a look at that. To my amazement the names put through my ears are eerily reminiscent of household heroes from a time when there were heroes. Mr. Goldstein himself is there, sporting a digital video camera and the word goes out that he's travelling the world making movies. More information later.

At the lock picking tent we are towards the end of the championships. Watching the passive faces in silence worming at locks, we quickly realise we don't master the finer points of the art and instead start to look at the paraphenalia of the craft. Guns, pocket knife type things and sets of varying quality are displayed to our wonder, but after watching for quarter of an hour we realise two things - we can't appreciate the art as spectators and it's going to take the championships a whole lot longer to finish than advertised.

Back to 2600. The project is more fully explained - Emannuel is travelling the world and wants to film the reactions of the worlds' citizens as they tell him what they think of the state of affairs with it. This concept is intriguing and before we know it we're invited to become potential movie stars. Naturally this idea is intriguing as well, so we head off to the bar for beer in the sun. Walking back, our priorities are sorting out. One of us has no Hollywood fantasies, so he'll stay as I and another friend continue on our way to international fame and fortune and unfortunately forgo the illicit pleasures promised by the 'defeating biometric systems' seminar. By the time we return to the 2600 tent we find that inertia has been overcome and the crew has headed out to the rail track to start the filming. Sauntering over we meet up with Bernie, followed by Dave Aitel who my friend recognises after we comment on the electric conductivity of the boots of the beautiful woman he's keeping company with. Shortly we convince him to join us in movie stardom and he joins us on our way to the track, where we find that a group of around 10 people have collected, waiting to be interviewed. Bernie picks berries from the bushes, and provides refreshments as we are warned by an organiser that the train drivers will not take kindly to people standing next to the track. We need a change of scenery and our filming session takes a rambling nature as we go off in search of cows, mini horses, trees, anything that will make it look like we've been travelling through ye olde Netherlands. Gweeds primes the conversation adroitly and everyone has a story to tell the camera when it is their turn. Much discussion and interviewing later we are caught in the torrential downpour which soaks us to the bone upon our return trip. It's been a good trip this, spending enough time with my fellow anarchists to get some sense of actually knowing them, and glad that whilst our political outlooks do differ, we seem to share the same core values in a sense that has been transmitted through the hallowed halls of BBS's since I can remember being on them.

Once returned we stock up on beers and learn about the Open Streetmap initiative. An ambitious project to map the world doing very well against all odds, with more developers needed, it fills a gap left by Google and Microsoft by attempting to map the data that the eyeballs and footsteps see and make, in a wiki kind of way; self correcting and growing, with conspicuous successes through the GPS data they have managed to get from an unnamed courier service hooked up to GPS sending their data to them for the London area, rocketing them out of the age of 1945 government survey maps. Very promising indeed.

We then attend a foray through 2004 and 2005 with the Commodore 64, full of interesting anecdotes, highlights and events. Old hardware never dies, it gets the heck hacked out of it.

And now? Now we sit in the disco bar, I'm writing this on an apple laptop convinced more than ever that I will never convert to apple - sorry folks, it's slow, the UI has freaked me out twice allready by turning the screen off whilst I was typing and then by randomly deleting a huge chunk of text of its own volition (thank the greatest hacker of them all for the undo button) whilst listening to bad eighties music whilst men are making dubious moves on a floor lit disco platform. Looking around I see that I'm having a good time, and more importantly, everyone else is too. It's been a good day, I've learnt a lot and I've met some hella interesting people. See you in four years time, if they manage to collar me again at the press desk.

Robin Edgar