2600 Magazine presents The Next HOPE, the eighth conference in the 16 year history of the Hackers On Planet Earth series. It will happen at the Hotel Pennsylvania in the middle of New York City from July 16-18, 2010, and will be the largest creative technology conference on the U.S. East Coast.

Personal privacy will be the focus of a key project at The Next HOPE, when hackers unveil the next generation of a technology that could send privacy advocates into panic mode, and enforcer-types into nirvana.

[press release]

[click here to view or download this video in high definition]

Conference attendees will see first hand where human tracking by commercial and government interests may be headed when they are offered an active RFID conference badge.

Participation in RFID tracking is completely voluntary. If you wish, you can request an electronics-free “unpopulated” badge at registration, or simply remove the battery from your “populated” RFID badge at any time. There will be a limited number of the full-featured badges, so register early to be guaranteed to receive one.

RFID devices are increasingly being embedded into new clothing, handbags, footwear, mobile phones, credit cards, passports, and even tires. Some say this technology is only for “inventory control” and “security” –but The Next HOPE will give you an opportunity to decide for yourself, as you play with uses, abuses, and countermeasures in the OpenAMD system.

OpenAMD will also show the promise and the dark side of familiar social media sites and how they fit into theme of personal privacy when combined with other database and tracking technologies.

The entire project is Open Source, and developers worldwide are invited to create their own apps before and during the conference with the newly released Public API. The possibilities are endless, and all attendees will be part of the fun in this hacker version of massive scale installation art.

For more information, including API documentation, visit http://amd.hope.net or contact the OpenAMD team via amd@hope.net

UPDATE: The security team has been assembled. If you still want to volunteer as backup, see Roadie at the security desk during the conference. Continue Reading…

We’re happy to announce that Julian Assange of Wikileaks will be one of the keynote speakers at The Next HOPE, taking place in New York City July 16-18, 2010.

Over the years and particularly within the past couple of weeks, Julian has demonstrated some of the key values of those in the hacker and journalist community who strive to get real information out of the hands of bureaucracy and cover-ups and share it with the rest of the world, all the while protecting the sources.

Julian has been on the front page of newspapers worldwide with the revelation by Wikileaks of a videotape showing a U.S. Army Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed a dozen people in Baghdad, including two Reuters news staff. Previous attempts at uncovering the tape through the government had failed and its release clearly showed that there was no active firefight between U.S. forces and those killed, as had been maintained in official statements.

“WikiLeaks has probably produced more scoops in its short life than the Washington Post has in the past 30 years.” — The National, November 19, 2009

Recently, he has appeared on “Off The Hook” {listen to the episode} and “The Colbert Report” as well as in just about every newspaper in the world. In addition, Julian has been active in the recently announced project to help make Iceland a journalism haven.

For further updates, please follow @thenexthope on Twitter.

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* photo credit New Media Days / Peter Erichsen via Flickr here, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 License.

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see discussion on TALK.HOPE.NET forum

Admission to the conference is $75 for all three days if you register before May 15, 2010. It’s $85 online after that, and $100 if you pay at the door.

The Next HOPE is taking place at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City from July 16-18-2010.

Conference registration does not include lodging, but special room rates have been announced that are actually cheaper than in previous years. The conference hotel is right across the street from Penn Station, the country’s busiest train station, making travel incredibly easy.

2600 Magazine presents The Next HOPE, the eighth conference in the 16 year history of the Hackers On Planet Earth series. It will happen at the Hotel Pennsylvania in the middle of New York City from July 16-18, 2010, and will be the largest creative technology conference on the U.S. East Coast.

Organizers have arranged for a group rate discount on hotel rooms during the conference.

• $129 per night for one bed (single or double occupancy)
• $159 per night for two double beds (double, triple or quad occupancy)

To reserve a room at the conference rate, call the Hotel Pennsylvania at one of the most famous phone numbers in the world, PEnnsylvania 6-5000, or from one of those newfangled dial phones, +1 (212) 736-5000 or +1(800)223-8585, and ask for The HOPE Conference Rate.

This rate will be available only as long as the reserved block of rooms for The Next HOPE lasts, so it would be a good idea to reserve your room as early as possible.

Registering for a hotel room will not get you into the conference. To register for the conference itself, click here.

2600 Magazine presents The Next HOPE, the eighth conference in the 16 year history of the Hackers On Planet Earth series. It will happen at the Hotel Pennsylvania in the middle of New York City from July 16-18, 2010, and will be the largest creative technology conference on the U.S. East Coast.

Traditionally HOPE conferences have been more about the talks than the physical projects, but with the 2008 conference that started to change, and this time organizers are pushing for an even stronger showing of projects and tech art. This call for projects goes out to hackers, makers, technologists, artists, and free thinkers around the world. Come share your passions and ideas with 3,000+ of your soon-to-be closest friends.

If you want to pitch in and you don’t know what to do…

• Lounge/Hang-Out Spaces
  • HOPE usually has work spaces, seminar spaces, and crash spaces. Can you organize more chill zones for simple conversation?
• Games
  • You have 3,000+ people, three floors of a massive hotel, an RFID tracking system, and The City of New York. What can you do with that? Teach, play, explore.
• Art
  • What’s your vision of the future?  Show us using hardware, software, electricity and imagination.
• Night Life
  • The talks usually stop around midnight. What else could be going on between midnight and 9am? Plan it, make it interesting, make it happen.

The main visual theme of the conference is visions of the future from the past, so things that reference The World’s Fairs, The Jetsons, flying cars, DaVinci, Asimov, and so forth would be very appropriate. However, projects are not required to carry the central theme in any way. Some projects, such as OpenAMD, are already being planned to be simply visions of the future from the present, rather than referencing any futurist thoughts from antiquity.

Some projects already in the works include…

• The Attendee Meta-Data Project (“OpenAMD”)
  • An expansion of the RFID crowd tracking project from The Last Hope.
  • Needs programmers and hardware hackers, and is prime for spinoff projects.
  • Many possibilities exist for the development of games, data mining, and visualizations.
  • Ask about the OpenAMD API.
  • http://amd.hope.net/
  • contact: amd@hope.net
• Radio Statler!
  • Streaming 24 hours a day live from the expo floor.
  • Needs people to do shows, experienced engineers, reporters, and people with interesting audio gear.
  • Needs a large isolation booth.
  • http://radio.hope.net/
  • contact: radio@hope.net
• Art Space
  • The Next HOPE invites artists, local and beyond, who have a vision of the future expressed as installation art.
  • Installations must be technology-based. They can range from electrical experiments to computer-controlled machines, to data and information processing visualizations, they can be static or interactive, and they could be visual or musical, this is a very open field.
  • This is an unpaid exhibition, but the selected installation artists will be given free admission to the conference, and an online gallery with artist biographies will be set up for promotional purposes.
  • What are your space, power, time, and data connection requirements?
  • contact the curator: artspace@hope.net
• The Hackerspace and Hardware Hacking Village
  • A 24 hour gathering point for the hackerspace community, a hardware hacking workshop area, and a supply post for hardware hacking tools and expendables.
  • Are you involved with a hackerspace? Reserve a special area for your group to chill and show off projects!
  • Looking for hardware hackers and hackerspaces from all around the world to come together and share ideas.
  • contact: hackerspace@hope.net

If you need help with your project, you can find a lot of people on our forum before the conference starts, at talk.hope.net. The HOPE wiki is also available for your use, wiki.hope.net.

Contact the projects coordinator with a plan of action, along with your space, power, time, and data connection requirements: projects@hope.net.

Registration for The Next HOPE is now officially open! By registering for the conference now, you’ll not only save money on the admission cost but you’ll help us make the conference even better by increasing available funds to help us pay the many bills associated with putting on such an event.

2600 Magazine presents The Next HOPE, the eighth conference in the 16 year history of the Hackers On Planet Earth series. It will happen at the Hotel Pennsylvania in the middle of New York City from July 16-18, 2010, and will be the largest creative technology conference on the U.S. East Coast.

This call for speakers goes out to hackers, makers, technologists, artists, and free thinkers around the world. Come share your passions and ideas with 3,000+ of your soon-to-be closest friends.

This is a build-your-own sort of conference – the community makes it possible – so everyone is invited to contribute time, knowledge, and resources. There will be seminars on the top floor of the hotel, and a huge expo level will be open for people to share their art and technology projects.

If you would like to be a speaker, presentation ideas should be submitted with a synopsis of your topic and a short presenter bio, and will be chosen by relevance in a peer review. Seminars, panels, fireside chats, tutorials, debates, or other types of presentations are all welcome.  Most presentations will be allotted 55 minutes.

HOPE includes a very wide variety of topics, limited only by our collective imagination: cryptography, intellectual property, telecommunications, new technologies, hardware hacking, culture jamming, programming, law, education, and social engineering. We are also looking for innovative subjects and presentation formats. At a HOPE conference there isn’t just a right to explore, there is a mandate to color outside the lines. Come show us what you’ve got!

Submissions should be sent to speakers@hope.net and include names (or aliases) and email addresses, in addition to the bio and topic summary requested above.

Deadlines to be announced, but earlier is better.

Keep your eyes on www.hope.net for upcoming announcements about registration, volunteering, the call for projects, the hackerspace village, and other opportunities to participate.