This weekend I attended The Last HOPE conference in New York City. I had an astonishingly good time. (It's the first hacker conference I've been to since the 1989 USENIX in San Diego.) I was impressed and uplifted by the youth and energy!
Alas, I didn't get to see as many talks as I would have liked, mostly because I was holed up in my hotel room working away on my talks. :-) But two that I did catch that I thought were quite good were Jason Scott's funny and insightful rant on hacker history, and Stephen Cass's (of Discover Magazine) talk on how to deal with the mainstream media.
My two talks were "A Brief History of Phone Phreaking, 1960-1980" and "The Freedom of Information Act: A Hacker Perspective". Both seemed to be well attended and well received; the phreaking talk in particular was standing-room only! Many people said nice things to me after each of them, which was flattering. My belief is that the Last HOPE people will be offering DVDs of these talks for sale Real Soon Now, and I will be posting slides from the FOIA talk shortly as well. [12/1/2008 update: they are finally available!]
An unexpected treat was looking up after my FOIA talk and seeing my old friend David whom I met at Berkeley in 1987 or so and really haven't seen since then. We ended up going out to dinner later that weekend and had a great time catching up.
Thanks to Jason and Chesire Catalyst for introducing me to various people I needed to meet, and especially to Jason for shamelessly pimping my talk and then giving me a rousing impromptu introduction at my phone phreaking talk.
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