Circuit Writer Version 7.11

By Jim Scheef

The Next HOPE

I just spent two entire days at a hacker conference I have wanted to attend for years. The Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE) conference is held every other year at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York. [Note: the HOPE website was up and down as I write this; hopefully (sic) it will be available reliably again soon once they have moved it out of the hotel.] The HOPE conference is organized by the same Emmanuel Goldstein who edits and publishes 2600 Magazine, the hackers quarterly. [Note the extremely rare all-numeric domain name.]

This year’s conference may have been the largest ever; several times I heard volunteers cite attendance of “thousands”. I do know that even on Friday morning, the first sessions had more than enough people to make all three main rooms (named Tesla, Bell and Lovelace) seem full and on Saturday every session was standing room only.

You may be surprised when I tell you that HOPE is not about computers. Only about 20 of the 120 session time slots were about writing actual computer code and less than half of those were about breaking into anything – although lock picking is an ever-popular topic and pastime at every HOPE.

This year the HOPE badge was actually hackable. As delivered, the badge is a three inch round circuit board with a battery clip, two chips (one is a microcontroller), three LEDs, some minor components and places to mount more stuff. These make the badge a radio beacon that transmits the badge’s unique “ID” number several times a second. Sensors dispersed around the conference hotel floors recorded the passing of each badge with a time stamp to track movement during the show. Two sessions dealt with the technology in the badge and on Saturday a website was available that showed badge movement in near real time. All this is active RFID technology in that the badge transmits all the time rather than passively waiting for energy from an external reader.

A “hacking kit” includes a USB jack plus another chip. Unfortunately, these are both surface mount so the soldering is a little out of my league. The USB port allows interfacing the badge from both Linux and Windows (I believe) to reflash the firmware or read data directly. The board also has holes to mount four pin headers allowing access to more of the “guts”. The organizers published the full “badge API” and by Friday nite, several Android apps appeared that used the badge data stream. Hopefully (sic) this data will become available again at badge.hope.net, openamd.org and related websites. I’ll include more when this column appears on the DACS website.

So, if The Next HOPE wasn’t so much about computer hacking, what was it about? Many speakers talked about the social aspects of hacking, threats to our civil liberties, life as a hacker, and electronic privacy. There was one marathon 3-hour session entitled “Privacy is Dead – Get Over It”. In this session the speaker covered how your information is first captured and then exploited by everything from the obvious ones like Facebook to your insurance companies, your phone company, etc., etc. record and track your activities and never let the information go. Google and Facebook were covered extensively. As frightening as all this might be, the real worry is that the government does not need to collect this information itself, it merely issues a national security letter (NSL) and the relevant company is required to turn over whatever information it has.

What I feel was the most unusual session was presented by three women about “Towards Open Libraries and Schools”. One of the women was your typical pure-as-the-driven-snow educator, but the two librarians from rural Vermont were a little more “cutting edge”. One of them appeals to the hacker community to help the libraries in their communities to adopt open source software and improve their technologies. She emphasized that many hackers could make it easier for the library staff if they softened their approach and brushed their teeth before coming to the library.

On the lighter side, two of the guys from my other computer club (midatlanticretro.org) in New Jersey gave a talk on computer history in the local (NJ, PA) area. They started with John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert of the University of Pennsylvania, the designers of the ENIAC (considered to be the first electronic, general purpose digital computer) continued with the MOS 6502 (heart of the Commodore PET and Apple II) from MOS Technology in Norristown, PA, and many other companies. They even managed to mention Bell Labs and AT&T. They also had a booth in the “Hacker Village” on the second floor where several MARCH members exhibited some vintage computers and generally talked hacking with attendees.

Overall, The Next HOPE was a lot of fun. I’ll award a prize to the first person who correctly identifies the hacker references in the names of the three conference rooms – Bell, Tesla and Lovelace. No, the last is not the actress Linda Lovelace who died a year or so ago. You need more than just the person’s name to win.

Cool Stuff

Have you been avoiding taking the train between Boston, New York and Washington D.C. for fear of being disconnected from the Internet for so long?

Well, Trains Magazine notes that Amtrak passengers on the Acela Express trains now have continuous Wi-Fi Internet access on the entire Northeast Corridor. What will they think of next?

Droid owners can now use their phone as a 3G wireless “modem” to connect a computer to the Internet without paying an exorbitant fee to Verizon. The instructions on eHow.com use an app called PDAnet that does the heavy lifting. The process requires installing the USB driver for the Droid so you can connect it to your PC.

Later, you can use a Bluetooth link to the PC, but the initial connection requires the USB cable. The thing that caught my eye is that this app does not require root access. With the 2.2 version of Android due for the Droid in just a few days, I have been reluctant to root my phone. PDAnet costs $24 for continued use. The app is licensed to the phone so you can use the phone with as many PCs as you wish. The latest version adds support for Macintosh. If you don’t own a Droid, there are versions of PDAnet for PalmOS, Windows Mobile, Blackberry and the iPhone. How egalitarian!