You can read my writeup of HOPE 2004 here.
Once Alexius and I began to unpack, we promised ourselves that we'd stay organised this year. Our resolution to not let the mess get too bad began with the wet bar. From left to right, Goldschlager, Wild Turkey, me'lange, a bottle of mead, Maker's Mark, Fedora Core 2 on CD-ROM, and Alexius' new laptop, Archimedes.
No, we really didn't drink all of that. Almost all of it is still left, and back at home with us.
Alexius kept everything neat, mostly because he packs light when he travels. I don't.
Genetik got there before we did, I think.
Robert Steele during the presentation Hacking National Intelligence: Power to the People on Friday afternoon. I also took a long view of the crowd at the presentation.
One of the HOPE 2004 banners that were strung up all over the place. The fabric is red, and the logo is the business side of a fist with "HOPE" written across the knuckles and the number "5" (meaning, the fifth HOPE conference) on the thumb.
Vlad_II in the track A room.
the.Silicon.Dragon taking a picture of me taking a picture of him. The recursion is a bit of a a tradition for us.
Silicon and Elwing taken by surprise.
Silicon, have you ever considered that wearing an earpiece at a hacker con might not be a good idea?
Alexius Pendragon and Archimedes in the public cluster on Saturday night. In the background is Jason Scott of textfiles.com.
This never ceases to give me a warm and fuzzy feeling: The family that hacks together stays together.
Multiple images from the lockpicking workshops: Working on a cylinder, a closeup of the same guy, demonstrating technique, a closeup of someone's pickset, a better view of the demo, and some solo practise.
The binrev.com crew in the dealer's room.
In a presentation strikingly reminiscent of one at Summercon 2003, Javaman drinking a 40 while giving a presentation on security through diversity. One of his assistants simultaneously did an interpretative dance.
Some shots of the crowd that turned out for Mitnick's speech: One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
Greg Newby introducing Mitnick.
Emmanuel introducing Mitnick.
Kevin Donald Mitnick, the Condor himself.
Establishing shots of the mezzanine floor at HOPE, where the public cluster and NOC were: One, two (with banners from HOPEs past), three (looking into the movie room), four.
One of the posters all over the walls at HOPE.
Talk about a face only a blind mother could love on payday...
Very InSoc. This was one of the paintings showing through the front windows of the Hotel Pennsylvania that multiple complaints forced the removal of.
Captain Crunch sleeping on an inflatable couch in the movie theatre.
When I was studying end user security awareness methodologies for the CISSP certification, I don't recall them being quite so blunt.
I don't know who this woman is, but she's been at every HOPE conference I have. I think she's part of the ops staff. In this series of shots, she's riding around on a Segway and looking like she's having a lot of fun doing so.
Elwing had a chance to ride it, too.
The official 2600 Magazine film crew taping the Segway action.
Some rather poor pictures of the Woz taken from the overflow room on the mezzanine: One, two, three (proving just how much you can get out of a digital image if you really try), four.
For years, rumours abound that Elwing wasn't really a human, but merely a highly sophisticated Perl script. This might prove once and for all that she's real... but she's also not going to flash you. Little did we know that her tank top had a built-in bra.
Hee hee hee...
We did discover, however, that two of the HOPE 2004 armbands make do a good bra.
The two guys from Canada that I was talking wearable computers with. Send me your handles, please!
There weren't many classic computers at HOPE this time around, though someone did set up their old TI 99/4a running TI BASIC.
Someone else brought a Compaq thinclient to put on the public net.
Sometimes you have to go to heroic lengths to find a box to illicitly patch yourself into. Other times it's just too easy. Here's a closer look at this box. Just abouve it was a pair of power jacks, something in short supply this year.
Vlad_II hanging out in the public cluster on Saturday night.
A few folks were playing PyDance down in the public cluster to relax. I even managed to grab a picture of what was behind the game while people were playing it - a laptop running Linux and the desktop environment XFCE.
A lot of people liked my war jacket at HOPE, so I got to take a few pictures with people who thought it was neat. Unfortunatley, I don't remember any handles. If you recognise yourself, please e-mail me and remind me! I ran into one guy who loved the patches so we goofed around a little. What can I say, I love /usr/bin/vi, and so does Trogdor. Jason Scott of textfiles.com liked it also, and we took a picture together. Alexius got a picture of Hairball taking a picture of me in the public cluster.
As if that wasn't enough shameless self-promotion, here I am just after Keebie finished my dreads. You can see them more clearly in this image.
Vlad got geared up for the Batcave, too. He, too did a little posing with Scud. His t-shirt reads, incidentally, "I was the teenage girl you jerked off with in the chatroom last night." the.Silicon.Dragon stopped by briefly to see how we were getting on. Keebie demonstrated that we were fully charged and ready to take the city by storm (or maybe it was all the mead we drank in the other room...) one of the problems with being everywhere, as we discovered, is that you can technically be on call all the time. Diplomacy, however, is often the best way to get them off the line.
After getting dressed we returned to the cluster to see who else we could get to go with us. Suddenly interested in going with us, 'lex jumped into the crowd for one more picture before returning to our room to change.
I'm no Carson Kressley, but I think I did a decent job. It didn't take him long to get into it.
We weren't the only ones to go out partying Saturday night - this guy passed out in the dealers' room. When he woke up he was selling a pile of RSA SecureID cards for $2us each. Guess what's getting dissected this weekend?
This guy has one of the most rare artefacts of the phone phreaking scene hanging out of his mouth: A Captain Crunch whistle. I tried to get a good shot of it but I don't think I can enhance the imprinted legend on the whistle's body any better than this.
Near the end of the con we ran into Renderman, dressed up for the evening to come. "How can you come to Manhanttan," he said, "if you're not going to swing dance?" He did it right, too, down to the white tie and suspenders.
Renderman and Greg Newby, dressed sharp as the proverbial scalpels.
Cheshire Catalyst, Porkchop, Emmanuel Goldstein, and Greg Newby during the closing ceremonies of HOPE 2004.
Because no one thought to come up with a method of choosing numbers for the prizes during the closing ceremony, some emergency shell hacking was required to do the job. You have to admit, it has more hack value than the ten sided dice they were using before...
If you follow the staircase at the Hotel Pennsylvania down to the level of the lobby, you'll find a single fire door leading out into the lobby through a nondescript side door. Some of the attendeed found immense humour value in this featureless steel door. Not to be outdone, the crew of hackers from Israel had their own take on what the door could be. Up close, the tags abouve the door read 'Ashcroft to Guantanamo' (a reference to the US military base in Cuba used to detain 'suspected terrorists') and 'Mossad Control'.
Here's a picture of that guy dancing while 'lex and I were waiting for the Staton Island Ferry after HOPE 2004 was a wrap.
And now, to torture you with a few images taken with the camera built into my cellphone. The quality's not great but sometimes you do get a good picture or two with it. This isn't the best shot of one of the security cameras in the elevators but it turned out pretty spooky looking. I think I'll keep it.
While we were wandering around on Saturday afternoon in Hell's Kitchen, we came across a fish market that had in the window one of the largest lobsters I've ever seen. If it hasn't been behind the front window of the store we would have put something like a dollar bill or a pencil next to it to give you a sense of scale.
On our way back to the hotel we saw this plaque on the side of a building. It reads: "Here died on January 7, 1945, at the age of 87, the great Yugoslav-American scientist-inventor Nikola Tesla, whose discoveries in the field of alternating electric current advanced the United States and the rest of the world into the modern era."
It appears that the local phone company knew we were coming, and took steps to lock up the payphone.
Not that this poses a problem...
This poster was surprisingly in-theme for HOPE 2004. We found it whilst wandering around Hell's Kitchen randomly, some time after visiting the flea market.
