One of the first things participants see upon arriving at HIP 97 - a gathering this weekend of 2,500 members of the international hacking community at a campground about 30 minutes from Amsterdam - is a gravestone engraved with Bill Gates' name and the epitaph "Where do you want to go today?"
"All the hackers just go crazy when they see that," event coordinator Maurice Wessling says of this goad to the fest's resolutely anti-authoritarian participants. The marker also serves, however - along with the event's willfully obscure location - to increase the sense of the site as underground and removed from the routine world. "We are trying to disconnect people from their daily whereabouts," Wessling says, "to force them to take a different approach to reality."
HIP - the name stands for Hacking in Progress, a follow-up of sorts to 1993's Hacking at the End of the Universe convocation - is a kind of politicized Burning Man for hackers, tent-cities and all-night parties included. Its technopaganism is skewed pretty far toward the techno side, though. HIP is a gathering, says an amused Wessling, where "you'll see these very small igloo-like tents with 17-inch monitors in them."
And unlike the pointed pointlessness of Burning Man, HIP hopes to address concrete issues that affect the lives of the participants, such as Internet censorship, spam, and, of course, cryptography. Spamming may seem off the subject for a group dedicated to abrogating the rules of the Internet, but Wessling explains that its proliferation threatens to make the Net unusable, while measures to prevent it may lead to censorship. "The essence of HIP is that the technical aspect and the political aspect are two sides of the same coin," he says.
This is not to say that elements of hacking's criminal background won't be evident at the gathering. There is a tent of German participants present to discuss the building of a brute-force DES cracking machine, and a presentation Saturday by another German group that recently made headlines for exploiting ActiveX security holes to intercept home-banking software. Still another demonstration will show how radiation from text on a computer screen can be picked up by an antenna and then displayed on another machine.
But HIP is mainly about how these techniques, and the laws and technologies used to address them, will affect the freedom and utility of the online world - about how the protocols developed and exposed by hackers now, says Wessling, "will be used against us later."
This direction isn't surprising, considering that HIP administrator Wessling is a former writer for a grassroots publisher of books on police and intelligence issues. It's also a reflection of the fact that the hacker class went from being a bane of the network system to becoming its architects. Wessling's salary, in fact, is paid by XS4All, a high-profile Dutch ISP itself founded by a group of former hackers.
Although many hackers have gone corporate, says Wessling, "We still feel the urge to do crazy things like this."
The event's geographical and psychological disconnection is in stark contrast to HIP's strikingly powerful electronic connections to the outside world, which consist of a microwave beam IP connection to the campground and a glass-fiber network connecting 600 participants' computers and growing.
Organizers have also secured extra transatlantic bandwidth for the event. Aside from allowing homebound hackers to be involved in the gathering through audio and video feeds to HIP's Web site, it also allows the fest to be closely coordinated with the simultaneous Beyond HOPE hackers' conference in New York. In fact, HIP was officially opened Friday morning via video link from the HOPE site by 2600 magazine editor Emmanuel Goldstein.
These being hackers, however, all that networking muscle is also being used for such things as a long-distance switch to turn a red light at each convention location on and off from across the ocean. On a slightly more useful front, 10 HIPsters are now working their PCs 24 hours a day building what was a small text site into the real-time multimedia hub. "If they do something wrong in the coding," says Wessling, "they instantly get three emails from all over the world. It's a completely new way of error-checking."
That the connections work at all is impressive. Richard Thieme, a writer and frequent speaker at hacker conventions, points out that at this year's version of the venerable DEFCon, organizers were unable to get their T1 connection to work. Though they stake their reputations on their ability to manipulate network technology, says Thieme, hackers are really playing catch-up with corporations, which conduct complex video conferences as a matter of routine. "These are not professional meeting-planners," he says.
Whether such get-togethers work with the groups' natural skills, though, Wessling believes they are worth the effort: "This is very important, because it is one of the rare opportunities for these people to really get together."
For participant Alfred Heitink, who's using his trip to HIP partly as an opportunity to establish an online adoptee network, "It is strange to talk at a camping site with people at 7 o'clock about PGP.... That's what makes this place so special."
