Check out the article Quinn Norton wrote about The Next Hope.

Less than three weeks after the end of The Next HOPE, we’re happy to announce that video and audio from the conference talks is now available. The audio is online for free at /talks-list/ while more than 100 DVDs of the talks can be found at http://store.2600.com/nexthopevideos.html for half the price than they went for at the last conference.

This year, the talks were especially interesting, provocative, engaging, and enlightening. This is a great way to comfort yourself if you didn’t make it to this historic conference and a means of seeing even more talks if you did happen to make it this time. Please help us spread the word so that more people have the HOPE experience!

Thanks to everyone who helped make The Next HOPE such a success! You’re the people who make it all possible.

We’re pleased to announce that audio & video from certain sessions from The Next HOPE are already being made available. The rest will follow shortly. For now we have four of the most popular talks available online as well as on dvd. The four talks include the Wikileaks keynote as well as the infamous informants panel featuring Adrian Lamo being grilled by members of the hacker community. In the next couple of weeks there will be over 100 hours of content from The Next HOPE posted.

- Keynote Address – Dan Kaminsky

- Keynote Address – Wikileaks

- Social Engineering

- Informants: Villains or Heroes?

Saturday night in the Video Temple at 11:30pm (EST) performances by Chromix, Neil Voss, Minusbaby, and Burnkit 2600. Live visuals by VBlank, No Carrier, and Enso.

The Beyond The Welding Hour concert will be carried live over the web on Radio Statler! (tune in at radio.hope.net).

There will also be another concert by Paradox Explorer at 2am.

Paradox Explorer is a multimedia and performance group based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. They experiment with mixing audio, video, animation and software into hybrid creations. The group consists of several core members. These members design and implement the initial works. They are often joined by talented musicians, DJs, VJs, dancers, and other performers. Paradox Explorer strives to make each performance an immersive environment using sound, image and various cutting edge technologies.

Beyond The Welding Hour and The Next Hope posters available for $25 at the 2600 store on the 18th floor.

New York City has a lot of hackerspaces.  Which one can command the most resources to help the Hackerspace Village?

Due to an shipping error, the HSV is running seriously low on power strips, wire cutters, old lamps and extension cords.

In light of this, we’ve decided to hold a little competition to see who can command the most of these available resources for The Next HOPE’s own hackerspace!   Drop by any power strips, wire cutters, old lamps and extension cords to the Next HOPE info desk, or at the registration desk if you don’t have a badge.  Be sure to label each item with the hackerspace you want to see credited with the doantion.

We’ll keep track of donated material and award a special prize to the hackerspace that donate the greatest quantity of these resources to the cause by Saturday at Noon.

Stay tuned to the Next HOPE for updated standings on which hackerspace is in the lead!

At the end of the competition, we’ll donate these tools and lamps evenly back to the hackerspace named in the donation, as well as sell any unwanted parts to help raise funds for the named hackerspace.

E-mail volunteer@hope.net for more information and thanks again!

After much tribulation (though not nearly as much misery as The Last HOPE), the Network is UP.   In fact, we’re blogging from it right now.

You can use the public wifi, or you can use the wpa2 network.

To get on WPA2, use the username ‘hope’ and the password ‘thelasthope’.

Since we’re doing WPA-EAP, every user, even using the same password, gets their own session key, protected by TLS.  It’s good!

Continue Reading…

Want to check out the concerts, hackerspace village, lockpick village, the hacker art installations, and dozens of other projects at The Next HOPE, but don’t want to blow $100 on a short visit?

Friday Night 10pm-dawn
Saturday Night 10pm-dawn
$10 Expo Floor Admission

PLUS, you can turn in your wristband the next morning for a $10 discount on full admission.

Note: Wristband visitors will only have access to the expo level, not the seminars and other activities on the 18th floor.

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Have something important to say at
The Next HOPE?

Can you say it in 5 minutes?

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A Lightning Talk is a short presentation given at a conference or similar forum. Unlike other presentations, lightning talks last only a few minutes and several will usually be delivered in a single period by different speakers.

This will be held in Tesla immediately following the keynote speeches.

If you want to present a lighting talk…

1. send an email to projects@hope.net with LIGHTNING in the subject line
2. in the body of the message, tell us (preferably in 6 sentences or less) exactly what you want to talk about
3. include your cell phone number so we can connect with you on-site at the conference if your topic is selected
4. let us know if you have a preference to present (or inability to attend) on either Friday or Saturday

If selected, you will be given 5 minutes to present and allowed 2 minutes for Q&A while the next presenter sets up.

Radio Statler! presents…

Beyond The Welding Hour

Parts I and II

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This two-night concerts series will bring together some of the most celebrated chiptune and circuitbending artists from the Philadelphia and New York metro areas.

On Friday, thrill to (what could very well be) GlaDOS singing your favorite Sega tunes (8bitbEtty), followed by jarringly groovy dance music (Cheap Dinosaurs), solid dance explosions (Animalstyle), ending with a grim-minded jungle state of affairs (Rhinostrich).

Saturday night brings more funky dance music (Chromix), heading into ambient N64 (Neil Voss), hybrid bass inoculations against non-moving-bootyitis (Minusbaby), and ending with circuits that scream and shout (Burnkit2600).

Fall into a trance with visuals from Enso, NO CARRIER, and VBlank.

Concerts start at 11:30pm in the Video Temple space on the Expo Floor.

Listen live on RADIO STATLER!

May we just add? Friday is GUS’S BIRTHDAY. All she wants for her birthday is to see YOU on the FLOOR getting LOOSE two nights in a ROW. Cut loose like Richard Stallman on Emacs juice. Lend me some sugar! I AM your neighbor!

With The Next HOPE less than a week away, it’s great to look back at The Last HOPE and the data that was collected during it. This article will explore what was released to the public and some of the cool data mining that is possible with this data.

Getting the data:

To start we can obtain this data from the Crawdad wireless dataset project. The Last HOPE data can be found at http://crawdad.org/meta.php?name=hope/amd

In browsing the dataset we will concentrate on different files as we need to relate users in different ways. As this data is heavily normalized, we will usually need two or three files to get at the relationships we are interested in.

Some of the more interesting csv files are:

• creation.csv – This file records when a user created an account, and which registration code they used.
• person.csv – This is the profile record. It contains the user’s handle, their stated age, gender, location, cell provider, etc. None of this data is verified or validated. This is data is useful for labeling and getting beyond user ids. Many of these handles are designed to be recognized. Mining forums for these handles could tell us more about the user.
• ping.csv – This file records everybody that pinged somebody else and when they did it. Think of this like Facebook’s “poke” feature.
• position_snapshot.csv – This file records what zone each user is twice a minute.
• talk_presense.csv – This file joins user locations with where talks were being held to infer which talks a user attended. This can be further used with talks.csv to link users with talk descriptions and interests associated with a talk.

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Check out http://sunnythinking.org/blog/mining_thelasthope.html for the rest of this analysis.