==Phrack Magazine== Volume Four, Issue Forty-Four, File 8 of 27 Conference News Part III **************************************************************************** A Hacker At The End Of The Universe by Erik Bloodaxe Eight hours on a plane isn't that bad. It isn't that fucking great either, but it isn't the end of the world. This is especially true under certain circumstances like if you were being inducted into the mile-high club by means of an obscure tantric ceremony, or you've just successfully hijacked a 747, or you are nestled in your seat on your way to Amsterdam. Unfortunately, I haven't hijacked much lately, and as far as the mile high club goes I'm pretty sure you need a partner to join; but as I was on my way to Hacktic's Hacking at the End of the Universe conference, I was stoked. When I finally arrived in Amsterdam and breezed through customs, I was greeted with the pleasant sight of a LOD Internet World Tour T-Shirt being held up above the throngs congregating at the customs exit. Its owner, Carl, was probably the only American that I knew that was going to be in this country so we had arranged previously to meet. The shirt was my beacon. EB's Handy Travelling Tip #1: Never have more bags than you have hands. I was to find out that we were in for a good deal of walking. Me being such a fucking plan ahead kind of guy, had packed enough clothes for 8 days and brought a camcorder as well as my laptop and assorted other crap. This was all find and dandy except for the fact that I had three bags and only two hands. I hoisted one bag up on a shoulder strap (which would begin its week-long gradual slicing into my collarbone) and drug the other two bags behind me. Carl had rented a room in Naarden at a Best Western or something. The con was in Lelystad somewhere. Neither of us had any idea of exactly where these two places were in relation to one another. We would soon find that they were no where close. EB's Handy Travelling Trip #2: Buy a Eurail Pass or the national equivalent thereof. Luckily, Carl had the foresight to suggest that we should buy a train pass for the week. It was only like 50 bucks and got us free rides on the trains, trams, buses, and train-taxis everywhere in the Netherlands. It MORE than paid for itself. We hopped a train and rode to the Amere stop, then took a taxi to the hotel, dropped off our crap then rode a bus back to the station and went into Amsterdam. Amsterdam is a really neat place. I think everyone should go there at least once. Carl and I wandered around for hours and hours just checking things out. During our travels I discovered some really neat places. EB's Handy Travelling Tip #3: Pornography Is Good. Foreign Pornography is GREAT! I have to respect a country that has smut proudly displayed everywhere. In every magazine rack, in every train station, convenience store and in large (clean, well-lit, heh) stores everywhere, smut. Not your average run of the mill nastiness either. We're talking monumental titles like "Teenage Sperm," "Seventeen," "Teeners From Holland," "Sex Bizarre," and "Color Climax." I went in every smut shop we saw. I think Carl wanted to die of embarrassment. I was like a kid in a candy store. It was really pathetic. You would not believe the shit they sell over there. Well, maybe you would. I pray that I can buy a vcr that transfers PAL to NTSC someday. One of the most hilarious items I saw was a HUGE dildo in the shape of an arm with a fist. And I mean life size. Like Arnold Schwartzenegger's arm life size. I wonder if that's a big seller? We finally got totally zonked out and headed back to the hotel to relieve our jetlag tomorrow was the con! EB's Handy Travelling Tip #4: Always take the Train Taxi In Holland, once you get off the train, for an extra 10 guilders, you can get a pass for a special taxi to take you anywhere you need to go. Carl and I didn't find this out until a few 20 dollar cab rides to the campground. HEU was held out in the Dutch countryside. A more appropriate title might have been "Hacking in the Middle of Fucking Nowhere." The taxi driver had been shuttling people out there all day. As we approached the campground signs for the conference began to show up. Signs of geekdom on the horizon. We got out at the gate, and walked over to the tent that said registration. In the tent were a couple of guys who took your picture and printed out a badge with your picture digitized on it. The area was layed out very well. There was a very big barn like structure where several dozen computers were all networked together. I sat down at one and saw that there was even a slip trying to work. With that many people trying to be on the net, it was almost 20 baud! Wow, technology at its finest. :) I also noticed that at least 2 people were running ethernet sniffers, so I decided that it would not be prudent to mess with the net there, even if the bandwidth dramatically increased. Also in the barn were a tv/vcr area, several couches, a merchandise area and a snack bar. The snack bar sold rolls for a buck, and had free sandwich makings (like pb & j, cheese & meat, etc..) chips, jolt, and beer. This was very important to me since I was wondering if I'd get to eat. There was to be some kind of food provided (a meal) for five bucks, but it was so foul that it could not be believed. And to top it all off it was vegetarian. Not just regular vegetarian, but totally off beat stuff that smelled like old socks. Nasty gruel unfit for even prisoners. Behind the barn was the camping area. There was a HUGE tent that was the main meeting area, and several mid-size tents. Additionally there was a large lookout tower, and a shitload of tents set up for sleeping. Running all over the campground were cables for the conference's LAN. It was impressive so say the least. One of the first people I ran into at the con was KCrow. He helped me try to find a safe place to stow some of my crap. (Again, me and my fucking bags. I'm such an asshole.) We tried to place them in the network control room, but Bill SF told me to "get the hell out of there," so I did. And this of course, has left me with a wonderful opinion about Bill SF. (Bill, I love ya!) Several people tried to make excuses in his behalf such as "he hadn't slept in days," or "Bill isn't ever so rude," and "He's got a lot on his mind." Yeah, right. (And I didn't even say ANYTHING about how shitty it would be to try to make millions counterfeiting something, then let one of your friends take the fall for you, while you left the country. Nope. I would never be so rude. There is a difference between a true hacker and an opportunistic technologically literate criminal. But I didn't say that.) I finally just stuck my stuff behind the merchandising area and prayed that there was still honor among thieves. I then ran into Damiano. He told me who was around. Several CCC people had arrived in a convoy of odd urban assault vehicles. The Germans (other than Damiano) kind of made me uneasy. They seemed to hang together and didn't talk to many non-germans. I suppose maybe some of them didn't speak English, or maybe I was just thinking odd Nazi fantasies. I dunno. Of all the people that were supposedly there, I kept missing Pengo. It was like some kind of weird trick. "Did you see him? He was just here." I never saw him. That afternoon I only made it to one "workshop." I was to find out later that all of the really technical workshops had a common thread. "Here's this cool technology, now go buy it from Hack-Tic for several hundred dollars." The first example I had of this was in the "It came out of the sky" workshop where Bill SF talked about a device they had made that received pager information. They presented a few scenarios in which police or other nasties might watch pagers, or always page certain numbers right before raids, etc... The concept was neat, but certainly nothing new. For a few bucks more than they were asking for the Hack-Tic model, you can buy a multimode decoder from Universal Radio (model M-400). It not only does POCSAG but also GOLAY (for pagers), ACARS, ASCII, Baudot, SITOR A & B, FEC-A, SWED-ARQ, FAX, CTSS, DCS & DTMF! Now that's a decoder. Additionally, a company called SWS security makes a similar device for law enforcement people at about $4,000 that does nothing but decode pager information. If it came right down to it, all you would have to do is open up your beeper, dump the rom, and tell it to display info for ALL cap-codes rather than just yours. Your cap-code is written on the back of your beeper, and is stored in non-volatile memory somewhere. Look for the call to it, and have it always branch to the display routine rather than do a comparison. I asked Bill about re-crystaling the device, since it there's would only be able to pick up one pager channel as is, and about whether or not anyone had played with any of the 8-bit paging types such as is used in America on services such as EMBARC. Bill looked at me as if I was on crack, and asked, "Are there any other questions?" Sigh. After that workshop, I took off with Andy of the Chaos Computer Club back to the German enclave. These guys were nuts. They had several winnebagoes totally decked out with all kinds of archaic electronic gear. They had all kinds of odd radio equipment; weird shit with Russian lettering was strewn about. The guys hanging about were jamming out really loud hard techno. I leeched a few programs from Andy and then took off back to the main area. Sometime later, a guy who said he knew me from way back named Mr. Miracle came up to say hello. I had no idea, but since I rarely remember my own name, I took him for his word. Mr. Miracle was at the con with his friends Wim and a Tasmanian Amiga Dude named XTC. We hung out the rest of the afternoon bullshitting and talking about all kinds of stupid things. As it grew dark, everyone moved into the Barn. Me, Carl, Mr. Miracle, XTC, Wim, and another Dutch Hacker named The Dude sat down to drink. We were joined for a bit by another Dutchman named The Key. He was totally into lock picking, and had a plethora of picks. (Car masters, traditional rakes, tube lock picks, and a weird looking pick for all new model fords.) The Key was a large, sinister looking guy who never took off his extremely dark sunglasses. I don't know if it was only for effect, but it certainly worked. I decided it was high time to introduce the Dutch to that quaint American custom, Quarters. We must have gone through some 200 glasses of beer, and were extremely loud, drunk and obnoxious. One woman (I think it was a woman) wandered over to us and said, shouldn't you all be on the computers or something. We cursed until she left. Mr. Miracle invited Carl and I to stay at his place for the rest of the con so we wouldn't have to go all the way back to our hotel. This was a godsend. We all piled into The Dude's car for a ride to the apartment that made Busch Garden's "Kumba" look like a merry-go-round. We were quite happy to make it home alive. Xtc was also staying at Mr. Miracle's. We all spilled onto the floor upstairs in his townhouse. While we were all getting ready to pass out, Xtc yakked all over a bathroom. Needless to say Mr. Miracle and his girlfriend were pissed. We all thought there was going to be a death, but somehow Xtc lucked out. The next morning we all took off over to check out of the Hotel Carl and I had rented. Carl had put some money in their safe. Of course, the safe broke, and it took them nearly an hour to destroy the safe completely so Carl could retrieve his 300 in traveller's checks. Mr. Miracle remarked, "Where's The Key when you need him." When we finally ended up back at the con, there was a large meeting going on about Phone Phreaking. Emmanuel Goldstein, Bill SF, Rop, KCrow (KCROW??) and others were babbling on the panel. Phiber Optik was on a speaker phone adding commentary. I toyed with the idea of getting on the phone and wishing him well and telling him how cool it was in Holland, but I decided that would be too mean. I sat outside the panel listening to everyone complain about the evils of the phone company. Many got up and argued that what they were doing was morally right, because the phone company charges too much. They also argued that since the lines were already there they should be able to use them for free. I got disgusted and began yelling about how there were chairs in the tent not being used and I wanted my hundred guilders back. Several people gathered around and I kept ranting. Mr. Miracle joined in on the spree and began challenging just how much Hack-Tic was making off of the conference. He estimated at minimum 500 people at 100 guilders a piece. 50000 guilders. That's a lot of money. The crowd gathering around us began questioning the whole situation too. It got ugly, but none of us had the balls to say anything about it. Later that day I sat down to hear Fidelio and RGB give a talk about Unix Security. I had asked them beforehand if they were going to talk about anything that I wouldn't know. (God, afterwards, I realized just how snotty that sounded. I'm a prick.) It went pretty good since most of the people in the crowd weren't gurus and this gave them a good overview. Afterwards, Bill SF was holding a workshop about Wireless LANs. I was thinking this would be a tutorial about wireless lan theory and how their security was handled, etc. WRONG! Hack-Tic is supposedly building a frequency hopping wireless ethernet adaptor. (Soon to be available at a store near you.) I asked Bill why they went with frequency hopping rather than direct sequence. There are basically two schools of thought about spread spectrum, and both have their plusses. Bill said their device would be hard to jam. I replied that if I pumped as little as 1 watt over a particular range, maybe like a 15 Mhz range, their device would be just as hosed as anyone else's. As an afterthought, I hope they build it in the 2.4GHz range, because that's the only frequency block that is legal everywhere for this type of application. Sometime later Bill SF was to give a phone phreaking tutorial. He trudged off in the woods to hold a secret workshop. Unfortunately, I wasn't among the privileged audience members, but I hear rumors that the Demon Dialer is available for sale. Sigh. I have no idea what I did for the next few hours. I think I was abducted by aliens. The final panel of the evening was a social engineering panel being led by The Dude. Let's just say that a European idea of what to use your bullshitting skills for is a little bit different than that of your American hacker. The Dude offered advice like "Say you are with the news or a tv star and maybe they will give you a guest account," or "Once I called up and said I was doing a story, and they told me information about their computers." WOW! Pretty radical stuff. I remember a certain boy holding up a 7-11 by phone. I remember someone turning my phone into a payphone by bullshitting an idiot at the switch. I remember people getting root passwords from system admins by social engineering. Where were Chasin, RNOC & Supernigger when you needed them? These are the true greats. I don't know what these people at HEU were all excited about, but they all loved it. Ahhh, ignorance IS bliss. After dark for some reason we were all drawn once again to the quarters table. It was brutal. They ran out of glasses. We made pyramids with the empties. We played chandeliers. We belched, we hollered, we were manly men doing manly things, and we mocked those playing computer games just a few yards away. We laughed at them with manly laughs. And I don't think anyone threw up that night. We got a ride home that night from The Key. He never took off his glasses. There are no lights along the highways in Holland. Luckily I was drunk, or I would have been scared shitless. The final day of the conference we arrived in time to see the "hacking and the law" panel. Emmanuel Goldstein, RGB, Rop, Ray Kaplan, Wietse Venema, Andy from the CCC, a Dutch CERT guy and a few others were on the panel. It started very well but went sour quickly. It was supposedly being moderated by this asshole of a journalist who apparently didn't understand what it meant to moderate. He would answer EVERY question addressed to the panel, whether or not he even knew what the question was about. This shithead gave journalists a bad name. Finally this guy got so annoying that I finally got up and left. We decided not to hang out for the party at the end of time. We figured that the party would be much more fun in Amsterdam, so we cut out. It was time to get into the city and cause problems. EB's Handy Travelling Tip #5: Don't buy drugs in other countries. Drugs are illegal in Holland, despite what everyone says. Despite this fact, they are plentiful and every swinging dick on the street has a few pills or joints to sell you. Now the way I looked at it, why in the world would you go a zillion miles away to see another country and spend your time wasted? It reminded me of walking in the Height after dark, or going down the Drag in Austin a few years back. Every three steps we took in Amsterdam, some joker would run up and say, "You want good smoke? Ecstasy? Cocaine? You want good coke? How about some good hashish?" I should have asked for DMT, but I just blew everyone off. On top of all this, there are like 5 or so bars in Amsterdam that actually sell hash in the bar. They are very easy to spot. They are the ones with the pot plants in the window and the tell tale dope smell permeating every pore of your body when you walk past. The big ones are the Bulldog and High Times. Save your money for better things, like t-shirts or smut. At the con, several people were selling "Space Cakes" which were essentially hash brownies. If you've never eaten dope, you might not like it. It comes on slower, lasts longer, and generally puts you to sleep. This was not what I'd want at a Hacker Con. We needed stimulants, damnit! I drank lots of jolt instead. EB's Handy Travelling Tip #6: Go to the Red Light District in Amsterdam. Even if you are too cheap (or too moral) to shell out the 25 bucks, you should go check out the Red Light District. Be forewarned, all those people who tell you that the women are all "so fine" are either fucked up or have bad taste. In the Red Light area the women hang out behind windows in their underwear and try to coerce you into sleeping with them by taunting you, flashing you, or making other sexual innuendoes. Unfortunately, the vast majority of these "women" look like out-takes from "The Crying Game." We are talking adam's apples and big hands here. Large boned Asian creatures that scared the shit out of me. These things were NASTY. Mr. Miracle, Wim and I must have walked around for an hour looking for decent women. Finally we came across two. TWO. Out of hundreds, there were two. One was a tall blonde in her twenties. One was a short, tan brunette who looked, uh, young. 17:10. I'll spare you the details. Let your imaginations run free. EB's Handy Travelling Tip #7: There's no place like home. I was very happy to hop on that plane back to the USA. As much as I hate to admit it, I really wouldn't know what to do with myself if I didn't live in America. Maybe an England or Australia trip would have been totally different. It really sucked not being able to speak the language. I also got real tired of trying to find food I could eat. [I gave up red meat almost a year ago, and Europeans LOVE THEIR MEAT. Trying to find chicken was a nightmare. The Dutch word for chicken is KIP. Remember that.] The TV sucked, there weren't really any good places for live music, the women weren't interested in a scummed-out, long-haired American tourist and I missed my cat. I met some really cool people and had a blast for the week I was there, but I was real happy to land in the USA. *Epilogue* EB's Handy Travelling Tip #8: If you think customs is going to search you they won't. Me, being stupid, left all my good smut in the Netherlands because I was afraid I'd get arrested for it. I envisioned the conversation. "What are you doing with all these nasty things, boy? You are one sick fucker! Lookie here Bob, this here hippy has pictures of gals a pissin' on one 'nuther." So what happens? They smile and wave me through. Fuck. ******************************************************************************* Hacking at the End of the Universe by Nimrod Kerrett, zzzen@math.tau.ac.il "A Techno-Anarchist Convention" -- August 3-6, Larserbos, HOLLAND. The announcement in Computer Underground Digest committed its viral act, erasing all the neatly ordered schedule entries for the first week of August from my old, grey memory cells, to be replaced by a neon light flashing "You deserve a vacation in Holland." Away we went... Most of us European/Third-World dwellers don't get to see much of the physical manifestations of Gibson's self-executing prophecies. OK. The Matrix is there, but to witness street-culture one must live in San Francisco or somesuch. HEU -- Hacking at the End of the Universe -- looked like the only chance to surface on the physical side of a phone plug and experience cyber-culture in form of faces, fashion and body-lang. How naive I was to presume this. Compared to most of the kids there, I looked dangerous (a timid, Swiss-bank sysadmin)... But don't get me wrong, I DID have fun -- failing to do so in Holland requires quite a unique body-chemistry -- but I had a nagging feeling that European hackers still live in the Seventies. First, A Few Positive Notes The most important lecture addressed electronic money. I won't go into sci.crypt-style details, but this was the most exciting thing I've ever heard since public-keys were first explained to me. The president of a Dutch firm called DigiCash described a crypto scheme where a bank can issue electronic credit-certificates which can't be forged, and yet are immune to traffic analysis. Their digital cash is just like physpace cash: it has no smell. You get a "virtual $100 bill" from the bank that you can't forge or spend more than once, and which the bank can't trace -- e.g. to the specific person who requested it. Ever since society devolved from cash to credit cards, people have become used to the idea that our shopping-histories are readily subject to electronic surveillance. At HEU I learned this was all hype: we CAN evolve economic systems to enjoy advantages of digital communication without sacrificing our privacy. Another interesting issue was a lecture by an ex-CIA executive who went private [ed. note: positively identified as a net.personality on the WELL] and now tries to preach for open-source approaches: instead of creating your own locks and picking the ones of your neighbor, the idea is to use information-gathering/analysis techniques -- one of those things in which "intelligence" bodies specialize -- to derive content from the info-swamp we seem to be sucked into... and then sell it. This guy made arguments similar to what Barlow said before the hush-hush community a few months ago, but seems to refocus everything on enterprise. Mighty exciting. BTW, I've noticed how the concept of profit makes bleeding-heart European anarchist types wince... The network built onsite also impressed me. In a campground setting, subject to occasional rainstorms, they erected three LANS connecting nearly 100 computers of all sizes and shapes, plus terminal servers for the Etherless. Computers were placed in our private tents, and the field bloomed with PC/XTs-turned-repeaters covered in wet plastic sheets. This monstrosity connected to the Internet over three shaky SLIP dial-up lines and it actually WORKED -- it cost some sleepless 36 hours, but still, WOW. Switch To Poison Ink Hacker (n) -- (1) One who derives pleasure from making systems do things they're not supposed to do. (2) A nerd who does word-processing in hexadecimal, is allergic to color or windows and hates being called a "user" in ANY context. Most of the hackers I met at HEU fell under the second definition. I was even scolded for using "Wintendo" and wasting the precious power of my 486 notebook. Let's start with the local network -- having all the tents connected was a wonderful idea, and symbolized constructive techno-anarchy. Unfortunately it lacked cultural content. To begin with, you had to login as a guest -- if you'd figured out the IP number of a server working at the moment. You had no identity handle, so there was no use in talking about site-specific newsgroup for follow-ups on topics. Even local email was impossible; to whom would you email? Since everyone got a badge on entrance, why didn't we also receive user-ids, perhaps written on the badges? Even administrative announcements (e.g. schedule changes) were only available on a PHYSICAL bulletin-board in the bar... ever tried to scan manually over 200 paper scraps? Another side effect was that to justify dragging your portable all the way to Holland, you just HAD to hog the SLIP lines and telnet outside, which made life hard for all of us, but much harder for the networking crew. In my humble opinion, excessive telneting is like saying "Nothing to do here, let's try somewhere else." I LIVE somewhere else; I took a plane in order to check out THIS place. Telneting was also a problem since the IP-resolving system didn't work and we had to apply hacking techniques to find the IP numbers back home. The most frustrating thing was the social/political discussions. In a discussion titled "Networking For The Masses" someone dared suggest user-friendliness as a key to resolving computer illiteracy. "No shit, Sherlock" -- I hear you mumble. Well, here's how another panel-member replied: "A revolution is not a user-friendly thing. Activists shouldn't count on the computer community to make stuff easier for them". Watch out, masses... prepare for computer military-training once the Revolution is over. Let's take another trendy political subject -- cryptography. One would assume that any techno-anarchist convention in '93 would feature a nice level of heated, political, crypto-discussion. Well, nada. The only crypto-related subject was the "electronic cash" mentioned above. Although it's quite exciting for the crypto-enlightened, 90% of the HEU audience lost contact after the first three cube-roots, returning to their tents to telnet elsewhere. I was left in a small group of highly-technical Cypherpunks who didn't give a fork whether New Delhi housewives would ever understand the switches of PGP; they seem to ENJOY their wizardly "elite" status. Even in discussions about hacker-paranoia, the audience disliked the idea of demystifiyng the almighty-hacker image to make your average, trigger-happy policeman relax a bit. Does Europe need an equivalent of USA's "Operation Sun-Devil" to knock sense into its collective skulls? FTP to ftp.eff.org:/pub/cud/papers/crime.puzzle to learn from the bitter experience of others (I don't know the IP number!). Epi-Travel-Log Before the convention, I naively believed that at least the HACKERS could Read the Writing on the Wall... Since I'm sober now, I'll spell it out for you: When the world finally adopts strong public-key cryptography (I hope it does, since I've seen too many wars and acts of human-rights infringement in my life), two things will become virtually impossible: 1) seeing what you're not supposed to see; and 2) changing what you're not supposed to change, unless you want to cause brute-force damage. These two anachronistic activities represent the basis for most hacker-culture I encountered at HEU -- so my advice is: switch to the first dictionary-definition of "Hacker". Try being less techno and more anarchist. There's a revolution going on... in case you've missed out on some Usenet recently. ---- Reprinted from Fringe Ware Review #2, ISSN 1069-5656. Published by FringeWare Inc., fringeware@illuminati.io.com Copyright (C)1993, Nimrod Kerrett. All rights reserved. ******************************************************************************* Hackers Play The Field July 26, 1993 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ (Newsweek) (Page 58) [A Newsweek reporter packs for, and dreams about, HEU in the Netherlands. As you can tell, it was written before the actual con] There's no guarantee of a large turn-out, but if thousands show up, it may help demonstrate how far hacking has moved out of the bedrooms of smelly adolescents. If so, there's likely to be less geeking and more dancing in the Dutch summer night. Programmers may one day be able to lean back from their terminals, pat their pocket protectors and say, "I was there." ******************************************************************************* A Woodstock For Hackers and Phreaks August 16, 1993 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ by Barbara Kantrowitz and Joshua Ramo It was billed as "Woodstock for the Nintendo Generation" The techno-freaks who gathered at the Hackers at the End of the Universe in the Netherlands last week had at lease one thing in common with their '60s counterparts: they believed rules were made to be broken. Some were there only electronically, communicating through networks around the world. The rest--the vast majority of them males in their late teens and early 20s--gathered in hundreds of multicolored tents clustered around power outlets and portable toilets in an area the size of six football fields. Many had computer terminals in their tents, with the monitors nestled between sleeping bags and guitars. No one was surprised by the white van bristling with antennas that trolled up and down the road leading to the campground. Everyone seemed to agree that it belonged to the Dutch Secret Service; everyone also assumed the meeting was being monitored by the CIA and Britain's MI6. But no one knew for sure; paranoia is popular among hackers. ******************************************************************************* Pump Con 94 "The Legacy Continues" by Erik Bloodaxe Travelling sucks most of the time. People like to glamorize it as if it's some kind of status unobtainable to the "Average Joe" but nine times out of ten its just a pain in the ass. My trip to Philadelphia for the second PumpCon fell well within the aforementioned nine of ten. I was sick as a dog, coughing up large blood-soaked clots of phlegm at a steady pace. This was either due to some undetected immune system failure or due to my previous weekend's fiasco which dealt with chemical overindulgence, alcohol abuse and some kind of strange creatures that tried to pass as female...but that's another story. (We will assume that my ill-health stemmed from the latter.) I showed up at the Comfort Inn to find a lobby full of what had to be conferees. (They had been saying to many people they were "Campus Crusaders for Christ.") After checking in I stumbled over to the group to see who was who. I introduced myself and asked if Dr. Who or Mark Tabas had showed up. They had not. (And as it turns out, they would never show up. Dr. Who I can forgive since he had no way in from Boston, but Tabas...obviously he had better things to do than drive a few miles across town to say hello. Remind me to reciprocate at HoHo Con.) I was immediately pulled away by GrayAreas and Ophie, who both bestowed upon me warnings of impending doom. Ophie relayed that The Wing had told her the previous night that he was going to come to the con and "get me." GrayAreas informed me that an unscrupulous character had been asking for me earlier. After she described him, it was obvious that Rogue Agent had made it to the con. (Unscrupulous...haha) Up in my room, I dove into my bag of medical goods and felt pity upon myself. Congested, contagious, feverish and now being stalked by some unknown person. Great. I never much paid any heed to the threats given by unknown typists over the net, as people's bravado multiplies exponentially in direct proportion to the distance they are separated behind a phone or computer screen. During the week prior to the con I had been threatened by at least 2 different people under a variety of nicks and addresses. One promised to crack me over the head with a bat. I figured with my luck, being sick, this would be the ONE time someone would make good on such a promise, as my timing and coordination would obviously be impaired. Swell. I went on back downstairs to jump in the conversations in the lobby. The group had grown a bit in my absence. I sat down and began talking to Shortwave & C-Curve about ham radio and archaic computer equipment. Shortwave offered to send me a Commodore PET to add to the Erik Bloodaxe Memorial Computer Archive. (The EBMCA is a non-profit organization devoted to maintaining the history of personal computing. Our museum will open soon. Hold your breath!) I then noticed that it appeared that damn near every IRC denizen from the Washington DC area was at this damn con. (sans KL & Strat, but they were to appear the following day.) A bunch of us took off wandering around later on to see what the hell was up at some of the other hotels. The area was laid out in such a manner that there were like five hotels immediately next door to one another with two cheesy restaurants between them. We took off to the Knights Inn and ended up hanging out in the parking lot staring at the moon, bullshitting about really lame stuff. While hanging out like retards in the near freezing winds, Dark Tangent came over and told us that Zar had been thrown off a bus for the 2nd time and was stuck in DC and needed someone to pick him up. No one wanted to road trip it to DC since we were all having SOOO much fun freezing our asses off, so Zar had to wait it out for the next bus. In one room in the Knights Inn a bunch of people were busily smoking their brains out. Their little gathering was dubbed "Hemp-Con." Finally, sanity rested upon me and I decided that the cold would not help nurse me back to health, so I took off back to my room. Ophie was in the room next door to mine with a bunch of people drinking. Well, I think Ophie was doing most of the drinking actually. :) I wandered in and gave her a hard time about being drunk. She responded by telling everyone in the room intimate details about her marriage and her sexual involvement with the entire DC hacker scene. Then she took off all her clothes and ran around throwing Miniature chocolate bars at everyone. I'm making this up, but she probably wouldn't remember. it anyway. Hehe. As I went to open my door I noticed that someone had written "DIE NARC" on it with a cigarette. On the floor was the cigarette, a Camel filterless. Well, it appeared that The Wing had arrived. [Oh frabjuous day. Calloo, Callay. I chortled in my joy.] Just as I was about to go to bed, people were banging on my door. When I opened it, it looked as if everyone from Ophie's room had staggered over for a visit. One guy in the back, kinda tall, kinda thin, wearing a purple shirt, was smoking a Camel stub. I smiled a him and said, "How's it going?" He seemed a bit put off but said, "Do you know who I am?" I replied, "Of course I do Alan, how's it going?" This seemed to piss him off for some reason. "You might be all happy tonight, but just wait until tomorrow," he said. "Oh?" I replied, "you got something in store for me? Cool. Could you play those Ken Shulman tapes for the con?" (For those of you who don't know, once upon a time, I had a little company called Comsec. One of my partners was Ken Shulman, a rather complex new money piece of @#!*. Well, things didn't work out with us and Ken for a number of reasons, so we fired him. Ken got mad at us. He tried to fuck over each of us in devious little ways. To get even, I gave his private number out to MOD via the MOD information conduit Renegade Hacker. One day, "little shulow" was called up by Wing and Corrupt. According to several people, this call was recorded by MOD. On this now legendary tape, allegedly a disgruntled Shulman proceeded to tell MOD the story of how we at Comsec were involved in crimes, drugs and were turning in everyone to the feds. This is the same Ken Shulman who lost his BMW to the Houston Police when it was found with 400 hits of X in the trunk, and went into seclusion. But I digress. I've been trying to get a copy of this tape for about two years to see if he said anything actionable about Comsec, and to it give to the FBI if he may have been interfering with an ongoing federal investigation. Yes, I do hate him.) This seemed to make Wing mad too. I guess I might have spoiled the surprise or something. "I'm not gonna play any tapes so you can sue Shulman." "Oh, that's too bad." I said. "Well, I just want you to know, that tomorrow when it happens, you'll know," he said. "Well, I guess we'll just wait till tomorrow then." "Yeah, we will." "Yup. I guess we will." "You think you're so cool, but YOU'RE A DICK!" he screamed. Oh great, this is where I get punched. "Well, it's nice you have your opinions." "YOU'RE A FUCKING DICK!" Maybe I was supposed to be the one getting mad and doing the punching but I wasn't getting anything but tired and was ready to take a shitload of aspirin and slam a bottle of night-time cold syrup and antibiotics. "Well, I'll see you tomorrow." By now, I guess everyone had figured out that there would be no bloodsport, so someone grabbed Wing and they left. Ophie yelled after him, "Some people are such assholes." "Well, wasn't that fun," I said to those still hanging around. "But, alas, time for me to get some sleep." I went down to bum some aspirin from Noelle and told her the sordid tale, then went back to my room and crashed out. AND THAT'S THE INFAMOUS ERIKB vs THE WING STORY. AREN'T YOU EXCITED? That night, VaxBuster and others tried to get in the electrical box, but were thwarted by a concerned citizen. "I'M GOING DOWN TO THE FRONT DESK RIGHT NOW!" Meanwhile, Sabre sat in the cold all night drinking himself into oblivion while keeping a sharp, albeit bloodshot, eye out for potential feds. The next day everyone congregated in a room at the Red Roof Inn that had been rented as the Conference Room. (How crafty, we'll have it in a hotel room, and SAY its a conference room.) Everyone piled into this room anxious for everything to begin. We waited. And waited. And waited. Several newcomers had arrived such as Strat and his woman, Dr. Freeze (who used to be the Wizard 703 of rolodex fame. Keep on Phreakin!), and Zar who had arranged to get kicked off of his 3rd bus right near the hotel by slamming a 40 and lighting up cigarettes right next to the bus driver. Finally, after about 7 hours, I figured that maybe I should just go say something. I hopped up and gave a quick and dirty overview of commercial packet radio technology. I talked briefly about RadioMail and CDPD, and also talked about EMBARC and demonstrated sucking messages out of a Newstream pager. Then I sent a message from my notebook from ARDIS to a Sprintnet gateway, thru an outdial to a dialup to a terminal server on the Internet, and from one account mailed myself at RadioMail which then sent it back to me on my HP95 over RAM. I dunno...I thought it was cool. After speaking, I was presented with an award: an empty porno video box. The buttheads didn't even have the decency to give me the tape! I put the bible in it instead and placed it back in a drawer. GreyAreas got up next and talked a bit about her magazine and then in a heartfelt plea, asked whoever was bothering her to stop. Many in the audience seemed indifferent to her cause, which upset her greatly. She had to leave immediately afterwards. I hope I wasn't the only person who felt kind of sorry for her. Now, I'm not one to rain on anyone's parade, but kids, fun and games on the net are one thing, but the minute you start fucking with people's businesses they will go to the FBI. Remember this. [Personally, I think there are about 4 or 5 specific people on the net who need to fucking grow up before they find themselves sharing a cell with Phiber, although that seems to be what they want.] To be fair, people who decide that they want to get on the net need to be reminded that THE NET IS NOT REAL! THE NET IS NOT REAL LIFE. IF THE NET SCARES YOU OR WORRIES YOU, TURN OFF THE FUCKING COMPUTER! GO HANG OUT ON ANOTHER CHANNEL! GO PLAY ON A MUD! GO READ NEWS! If that doesn't placate you, go to AOL. Next up was someone I didn't know, and unfortunately didn't meet. But his girlfriend was HOT! [If he's reading this, tell her I said "hi."] He gave everyone a rundown of the troubles from last year's Pumpcon. I noticed during his recap that the trouble last year didn't really start until they all read The Visionary's file. I suggested that we hold a midnight seance and read it aloud so we could all get busted too. Ixom finally made it to his own con and said a few syllables about the folks still waiting to be sentenced from last year. Up last was VaxBuster who talked about the wonderful world of Blue Boxing. Yes, Virginia, there is a way to box. People are so silly. Obviously I'm not the only one who has looked at CCITT manuals and knows signalling frequencies in other countries, or who knows about the "International Direct" numbers. Wow. After the conference several of us had pizza and got the worst service I have ever had in my entire life of dining out. Grand. We made up for it by amusing ourselves spotting "victims" with laser pointers, laughing like idiots as we placed the dots on their foreheads. Once we got back from chowing, everyone had already begun drinking. People were going off to congregate at the conference room for a central party location. As I was leaving to go over there, The Wing walked up to me, and said he needed to talk to me. We went into my room and he said he had heard what GrayAreas said earlier in the day, and he wanted to say that it wasn't him. I told him, he needed to tell her that, and not me. I went on to tell him that if he wasn't involved in all the crap going on all over the net, then I had no problems with him. I said he had some really poor choices in friends in the past, but hopefully he would exercise better judgement in the future. We all went back over to the conference room. Wing pulled GrayAreas outside to talk to her. While they were talking, I caught some talk about payphones. [no names from here on] It seems this guy had a lot of phones and several people too off to go buy a few. They ended up at the lamest party in Pennsylvania. Four people and a keg. The phones allegedly were sold for 75 bucks and were still in the box. Brand new. Back at the con, one of the hapless phone buyers decided to take his phone up to the conference room to show it off. Once there, everyone giggled and gawked over it, and then he took it back down to put it in a car. On the way there, a cop grabbed him and arrested him. The cop then searched the car he was about to put it in and found some pot and arrested the car's owner too and had the car impounded. [anonymous portion ends] Now the cops converged on the conference room and began hounding people in there. One wonderful cop discovered my Porno-Bible creation and screamed at the crowd, "You heathens! How could you do something like this? You people are sick!" Ixom, ready for a fight, began yelling at the chief of police over the phone. The police chief told him that maybe he would like for the nice officers to bring him downtown to go over his complaints. Ixom decided that would not be necessary. After the police interaction, people scattered from the conference room back to their individual rooms. No sooner than they got there, the police decided to investigate a "few noise complaints" at the Comfort Inn. Ophie's room, the Dope Room on the 1st floor and a few others got searched. While all of this mayhem was ensuing in the outside world, I was up in my little room being interviewed by GrayAreas for her magazine. This was probably the longest interview I've ever done. I hope I don't turn out looking like a bigger fuckhead in it than I already am. After the interview, I got the story of all the police interaction from the throngs of people who gathered outside my room. A few people remarked, "how come YOUR room didn't get searched?" I didn't have an answer for that, except maybe because it was paid on a corporate AmEx and might not have looked like a "hacker" was in there. (No, it was because I work for the government...just ask Agent Steal. Geez.) After this mess I went to bed. Yup. The following morning while waiting to get a table at Denny's, we noticed that the old dudes with the beer were going into the "conference room" and taking stuff out. A bunch of the crew ran over there to check it out and guess what? The old guys weren't just any bunch of drunken old dudes, they were the Pennsylvania State Police's Computer Crime Division. They had been staking out the conference from the room next door and had listened in to everything. Rad. Two years and running. Maybe next year the CIA and NSA will want to stake it out too. I can't wait. Then I went home. ******************************************************************************* - Top 10 things learned at PumpCon - - The Wink - 10) Hotel's don't like over 40 people in their lobby 9) Its not Ma'am, its Doris 8) "GrayArea has quite a few gray areas" 7) Greyhound hates Zar 6) Who needs speakers who show up? 5) SnatchBuster ! 4) "You heathens, how can you put the Holy Bible in a pornographic movie case !" 3) Geezer Narc ! 2) Don't put condor and erikb in the same space 1) Don't carry open payphones around the con ******************************************************************************* P U M P C O N ][ Informal Attendance List I cranked this thing out over the weekend, and some people I know were there, but I didn't get their names. Some people might be listed twice. It's up to you to figure it out. As we were waiting for people to arrive we came up with a lameness scale. If you got a "+l" that mean you got a lame point for saying someone's real name or info. Basically spouting off real stuff to people who shouldn't hear it. Sure it's easy when you all know each other, but if I was really trying I would have generated so much real data on people it would be scary. On the other hand if you were real slick and tricky, you got a "+e", or elite point. As more and more people showed up I stopped doing this 'cuz we all broke up and only the people I was around would have to suffer the wrath of the +l. Think of it as a security rating. The more +l the easier it was to get info out of people. The List is in the order of when I ran into people. Basically the first half is in chronological order, but after that I lost track and got names when I could. Grayarea Noe11e (Yes, she exists) Okinawa (+e) Reive (assigned to Fed-Man) Ophie (+l+l+l+l+l+l.. you get the idea) Lgas (+l) Loki (+l, but he was trying hard..) Jello Man Evak CarlCory SubEthan (+l) Bernie S. (+l, Elite handset dude) Jamie DRobinson iXom (5 hours late) Nick-O (+e, worked that stewardess) FreeJack MadCap (With the elite hat) Condor Jay Farnam ShortWave ErikB (+e, good speech) C-Curve (+e) Cuttle Fish Vax Buster (+e+e for protecting personal data, Good speech) Syntor LudiChrist (+l,+e for evading officers) Optic Nerve Scourge (+l) Great One (+l, +e for staying cool at police station) Dave (+l+l, Don't use your real name) Phil (+l+l, what's this, Real Name con?) Juanka (+l This guy was acting strange..) Rogue NtStriker (+e for being shot by the police) Wierdo DreamScriber Randy S. Hacker (+e for cool car and free beer) Count Zero Typhoid Mary (She locked onto TaquilaHeadPaint) Ragent The Wing Stranger (+l for believing NtStriker was shot) RedAlert Zar (+l for getting kicked off three busses) Dr. Freeze Strat Anonymous Caller KL (+e for staying at the Knights Inn) Mad Dog Odd Ball Hoog Decimator (+l, real name) Time Lord (+e, good speech) Albatross Saber Tristan Grimm Male Havoc MrG (+l+l for getting arrested, +e for not narking) The Dark Tangent (+l, for making this list)