Optiver Amsterdam

Located in a rural area in the middle of the Netherlands, this conference gathered about 2500 "hackers" from all walks of life, mostly from Europe and USA. The weather was hacked properly and all weekend was amazingly warm and bright. Only free blue-colored ice-cream and the "official" hacker drink of the event (stimulating concoction of mate and caffeine) could help staying focused not melting under the sun.

Lectures and workshops

Choosing between 4 venues where lectures and workshops were hosted from 11am till 10pm was quite a challenge. I started with Government 2.0 - a great story on how a small network of people interested in marrying civil servants and society using cutting edge web technologies grew from a small community into a respectful and influential organization now working on several government projects.

An ex-colleague I met right after the presentation walked me through notable areas of the festival: chill out tent, gaming room, several fields where visitors lived in tents giving improvised workshops. Great atmosphere.

Next talk was about analyzing embedded systems's side channels (such as power lines or EM field) in order to hack them. E.g. a password protection can be broken by taking power oscillograms at certain spots on a board - timing of oscillations depends on how many characters of an entered password matched! XBOX 360 was hacked in exactly that way.

Time for a lunch break, need to mention that everything at the event - food, drinks, books, etc can only be paid for with plastic tokens denominated in euros and obtained by exchanging in one of the tents. As for the prices:
burger - 3 euros, a glass of soft drink - 1, bier - 1.5. Decent dinner meal would cost you around 10.
More to come after the lunch break!

A new law was recently introduced which greatly simplifies the process of requesting public access to government documents. It's called Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA. Brenno de Winter described his experience (both positive and negative) in numerous cases where he was using the power of FOIA.

And then SMS public transport ticket hacking idea, which unfortunately ended up with the hacker being sued and banned to continue the "research" rather than improving security.

My impression so far?

What is good: Chill out tent, gaming room, several fields where visitors lived in tents giving improvised workshops. A number of great presenters. Wifi everywhere, reasonable food for good prices. Beautiful location, right number of participants, great atmosphere of an open-source conference".

What is bad: Minor technical details, e.g. presenters often didn't hear questions from audience if asked with a microphone because all speakers were targeted to the hall, none to presenters. Some of the presenters were badly prepared. Some didn't even showup.

After Hours

Saturday evening deserves a separate article. Wonderful professional illumination placed here and there kicks off as it gets dark. Together with music flowing from everywhere it creates a truly magic vibrant atmosphere. Some hackers are letting their long hair down in an open air dance area after a pleasant Saturday business. My attention grabbed a gathering in one of the tents on a field. Around 15 people, while cooking a huge bowl of sangria-like drink, were watching a life translation from one of the main areas (all presentations could be watched live online) beaming it cinema-style right onto a wall. It was a quiz, but of course a special HAR-quiz. After watching for about 10 minutes in the tent I decided to join this epic performance life.