Last weekend I attended The Next Hope (Hackers on Planet Earth) conference, held at the Hotel Pennsylvania in NYC. It is held every 2 years and this is the 4th time I attended since 1998.

This is the badge-

this is the schematic for the badge designed by Travis Goodspeed-

“These badges are active RFID tags which beacon the position of each attendee a few times a second, so that the god damned devil army of lies–by which I mean the Next HOPE badge committee–can track each attendee around the Hotel Pennsylvania.”

There were alot of other cool things to check out such as this USB Typewriter setup and a working EASY button

Here are some topics to some of the talks I attended-

• Circuitbending
• Keeping Your Job While Being a Hacker
• Examining Costs, Benefits, and Economics in Malware and Carding Markets
• Arse Elektronika: Sex, Tech, and the Future of Screw-It-Yourself
• How Hacking is Both the Death and Future of Traditional and Interactive Publishing, Journalism, and the Media
• Reach Out And Touch Face: A Rant About Failing
• Sita Sings the Blues: A Free Culture Success Story

A keynote was scheduled to be given by Julian Assange of Wikileaks , he did not show for obvious reasons, but his partner Jacob Appelbaum and developer of TOR gave a great talk,cover past, present and future developments of the project and showed the much talked about a videotape showing a U.S. Army Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed a dozen people, including two Reuters news staff. for more information check out CollateralMurder.com

I got to ride a Segway (video on that later) and got put on to Etherape!-is a packet sniffer/network traffic monitoring tool, developed for Unix (thank you AngelXIII!)

I met threat analyst and journalist, known as a former grey hat hacker, Adrian Lamo  (we now follow each other on foursquare)

He also informed the authorities of the identity of a US Army Intelligence Specialist who is alleged to be the source of the July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrike video leak to Wikileaks.

Which shows guts and balls and I am in his corner no matter what his reputation may now be in the hacker community.

I also enjoyed 2 greats talk and got a pic with Johannes Grenzfurthner

(No-I do not work for @cafebustelo)

He is the founder of monochrom, an internationally acting art and theory group.

I shot an interview with a teacher from The Hacktory, a Philidelphia-based group that promotes the use of technolog in the arts.

(look for that video to be posted soon)

Overall, it was a good time of learning and unlearning.

Note: Most of the videos of the talks can be downloaded at Hattorents.com