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The Last HOPE, Part 4 of 4

July 20th, 2008 | 1 Comment | Posted in Features
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I finish the series of my experience on Friday at The Last HOPE.

At 7 PM I attended Exploration of Possibilities: Brain Hacking, presented by one “Dot.Ret”. In a lecture that was more like a tired series of observations, building to what I can’t say, and was long on vagueness and intuition and short on actual psychology, at least in my perception, Dot.Ret explained that the brain was the “most complex and powerful computer known” but due to its form–evolution has caused newer structures to be built over older structures–susceptible to attack. Social engineering was given as an example, as was hypnosis and other means to owering the ‘critical factor’ of believability. A brief explanation was given as to the meanings of speech, including gestures and expressions. Needless to say, this was only twenty minutes. As I wrote earlier in regards to the first talk, the Q&A sessions go on tangents and are not enjoyable to sit through. I rate the talk 2 / 5.

I then left Brain Hacking and sat through the remainder of Hacking the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer: Dispatches from the Field of Educational technology, presented by Gillian Andrews. I did miss a substantial part of the presentation, but what I did hear was thought-provoking. More »

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The Last HOPE, Part 3 of 4

July 20th, 2008 | 3 Comments | Posted in Features
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I continue the series of my experience on Friday at The Last HOPE.

At 3 PM, I attended Wikipedia: You Will Never Find a More Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy, a presentation by Virgil Griffith on his project WikiWatcher, an expanded WikiScanner, if you’ve been hiding under a rock, is the internet app that traces any IP or range, including corporate and government ranges, to the anonymous edits they made on Wikipedia. All he does is take all the anonymous edits from the latest dump of Wikipedia, buy a database of IPs and merge them together. Among other things, it’s been discovered that the CIA edits Wikipedia, that an official at the Arkansas governor’s office edited Mike Huckabee’s page during his candidacy, that a Dutch princess removed links to a drug baron, and that (not unexpectedly) politicians and corporations police their own pages. Other tools that Griffith recommends: Traffic statistics, coloring text by trust level and Vispedia, which allows the graphing of everything on Wikipedia.

WikiScanner did have a few problems, though: by having an account, or editing at home (outside of a corporate IP range) it could be circumvented. Thus he devised WikiWatcher, which features three tools: More »

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The Last HOPE, Part 2 of 4

July 20th, 2008 | No Comments | Posted in Features
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I continue the series of my experience on Friday at The Last HOPE.

At 12 PM I attended Packing and the Friendly Skies: Why transporting firearms may be the best way to safeguard your tech when you fly, presented by “Deviant Ollam”. The PowerPoint is available online. Essentially, when you pack a “firearm”–which, by TSA guidelines, can include a short or long gun, a flare gun, an airsoft gun (yes!), a replica or prop weapon, or weapon parts and hardware–there are all sorts of extra security processes that one must go through, which will ensure that your luggage remains safe.

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The Last HOPE, Part 1 of 4

July 19th, 2008 | No Comments | Posted in Features
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As anyone who’s been following the imapcsite twitter knows, yesterday I attended the first day of The Last HOPE, quite possibly the final biennial conference of the Hackers On Planet Earth in Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City. Due to various obligations, I am unable to make the conference today and tomorrow. Thus I only was able to witness a short sample of that momentous event that is the HOPE conference; the twitter feed is an even shorter sample–fed up with typing from my conventionally-keyboarded (read: slow and frustrating) phone, I gave up at 5pm. Here I will blog my notes and observations of Friday’s part of the conference in four parts; surely CNET or some other source can fill the inquisitive reader in on Saturday’s and Sunday’s conferences.

I arrived at the conference at 9:50 AM. After registration, where attendees are fitted with a tombstone-shaped badge, some of which have RFID tags, and a long, heavily packed elevator ride to the conference floor, I filed into one of the three conference rooms for one of the three concurrent 10 AM talks: Email: Descendant of the Telegram, presented by Richard Cheshire, the Cheshire Catalyst, a grizzled veteran of HAM radio, telex and who knows what other technology that seems archaic today. His lecture, rife with examples of old telegrams, briefly described international telegram convention–always indent your signature 5 spaces!–and their effects on modern email. While interesting, it was brief, and the entire lecture was but 15 minutes. When a talk is so short–I’ll come back to this later–the Q&A session tends to get bogged down in tangents and irrelevancies. I rate it 2 / 5.

At 11 I went to another room for Earth Intelligence Network: World Brain as EarthGame, presented by Richard Steele, one of the great legends of HOPE. A profane, permanently pissed-off “recovering CIA agent”, Steele pushed his Earth Intelligence Network, a plan long on rhetoric and technicalities and short on rhyme or reason to mobilize public intelligence “in the public interest”. More »

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