Geek In The Big City
From July 19-21, I was at the biennial Hackers On Planet Earth, or HOPE, Conference at the historic Hotel Pennsylvania. The theme this year was "A Hacker's Dozen".
July 19 was actually my travel day, with me taking an Amtrak train from Harrisburg PA to New York City. I navigated the subway system and arrived at my AirBnB room.
Friday, July 20, got proceedings underway. My first talk was on the triumphs and difficulties of building the internet infrastructure for the Standing Rock occupation. The issues these activists faced were both technical and human. I couldn't help but see that many of these tactics may prove useful should President Trump ever try to impose martial law. The next three topics almost seemed to me to fit together; a panel discussion on Internet censorship, a report of the state of the TOR project, and a presentation on the SecureDrop platform. I was impressed to hear how efforts seem to be in the works to make TOR more user friendly, and could see SecureDrop being useful to smaller publications, if only there were a way to deal with the need for multiple computers. The presentation I attended after my lunch on an operating system called Qubes may have provided a solution.
Qubes is an operating system that basically puts each program in a separate virtual machine; your browsing, your e-mail, etc are all in individual compartments. The only issue I saw is that for the OS to work effectively, you would need to start from a blank hard drive. I can't help but think a cube-shaped, mini-tower may be something for me to look into.
One of the more popular panels of the conference is the panel on Social Engineering. The host of the "Off The Wall" program and company regaled the audience with tales of how they basically tricked people into giving them what they wanted.
A tale of malware and cyber-espionage, and what happens when a nation-state doesn't cover it's tracks fully was the next topic I explored. The case of Dark Caracal, a malware campaign directed at a dissident. This talk sounded like a novel or movie.
The 2016 election brought the use of bots and trolls into the spotlight. So a look at trolls and how they can be trolled made for an interesting topic. Any opportunity to hear the intelligence and maturity of Trump's supporters can be both hilarious and scary at the same time.
July 21 brought the I-star (I*) organizations into focus; the roles ICANN, IETF, IEEE and ITU play in human rights and privacy were discussed in a panel format. A discussion of the NotPetya "ransomware", which may not have been was the next talk I attended, and looked more at how this campaign was misunderstood, but still effective in causing $10 billion dollars of damage to several major supply chain companies.
The highlight of the conference was next. A live, onstage, interview with Chelsea Manning. At the beginning. she seemed a bit nervous, but as the interview progressed, she gathered confidence and spoke of her time in prison, her Senate campaign and her future plans. We may not have heard the last of Ms. Manning just yet.
The last talk I attended was on a topic that I see as being of use, starting a low-power FM radio station. This is not an easy task, and one must think that the current head of the FCC has little intent of making the task easier. But the idea of seeing if a local low-power station could use a smartphone app did re-enter my brain.
One other thing I learned about was a unique Google project called Outline. This tool is designed to allow journalists to communicate via virtual private networks, or VPNs. But I don't see why any activist group couldn't make user of it. Anti-fascist activists could use the system to communicate and coordinate their plans to counter a fascist rally.
I'm used to hacker conferences only lasting a day or two. I missed several interesting talks scheduled for July 22, as I had scheduled my train home. Hopefully those presentations make their way onto the 2600 YouTube channel soon, and I can view them and comment.