Scheduling | Talks List (with audio downloads!) | Speakers List

Aestetix was last seen wandering the labyrinth searching for the Knights Templar.

Stephanie Alarcon is a tree-hugging, bike-riding, turntable-loving, science-fetishizing UNIX geek. By day she runs servers for the University of Pennsylvania where she is wrapping up a Master of environmental studies. In her free time, she serves on the board of Philadelphia hackerspace Hive76, works on a few urban farming projects, and engages in an unhealthy codependency with her never-quite-finished 100-year-old house, which she has populated with friendly nerds, a small herd of cats, and a whole kitchen dedicated to science.

Mitch Altman is the brains behind Cornfield Electronics, and one of the cofounders of the Noisebridge hackerspace in San Francisco. Mitch is best known as the inventor of TV-B-Gone, but his list of hacks and cool electronics includes a lot of other intriguing projects. When he is not at Noisebridge making and teaching, he is on the road from hackerspace to Hacker-Con and back again, sharing his love of electronics.

Chris Anderson is an assistant professor of media culture at the College of Staten Island and a fellow at Yale Law School and the New America Foundation. He was an organizer and editor with New York City Indymedia from 2001-2008 and helped found the inaugural New York City Grassroots Media Conference in 2004.

Gillian “Gus” Andrews recently received her doctorate in Internet confusion, having completed a dissertation on why people show up on unsuspecting blogs and think they are writing directly to Oprah or Bill Gates. She has written about similar confusions for ReadWriteWeb, and previously investigated the suffering of first-time Second Life users for Linden Lab. She is a periodic commentator on Off The Hook, and writes, edits, directs, and puppeteers for The Media Show, an award-winning YouTube show about digital and media literacy.

Jacob Appelbaum is a photographer and independent computer security researcher. He is currently employed by the Tor Project. He is ambassador for the art group monochrom and has researched cold boot attacks and MD5 collisions, among other projects. Jacob is a founder of the hackerspace Noisebridge, located in San Francisco.

James Arlen, sometimes known as Myrcurial, is a security consultant usually found in tall buildings wearing a suit, founder of the Think|Haus hackerspace, columnist at Liquidmatrix Security Digest, Infosec geek, hacker, social activist, author, speaker, and parent. He’s been at this security game for more than 15 years and loves blinky lights and shiny things.

Julian Assange of Wikileaks is one of our keynote speakers at The Next HOPE. Over the years, and particularly within the past few months, 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 coverups and share it with the rest of the world, all the while protecting the sources. He 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, 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.

More recently, he has appeared on “Off The Hook” 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.

Even more recently, Julian has been at the center of a huge controversy involving the alleged disclosure of this leaker’s identity, due to the actions of a certain hacker turned informant. This, along with the claim that 260,000 classified documents had been sent by the leaker to Wikileaks, has made it very hard for Julian to appear in the United States safely.

At press time, the fate of Julian’s keynote address at HOPE was still unknown. We’re used to controversy but this is pretty spectacular even for HOPE standards. In any event, we ask that attendees make contributions to http://www.wikileaks.org in the form of money and/or leaks. Both are essential for a bright future.

Konstantin Avdashchenko received his B.S. in electrical engineering from Union College while minoring in nanotechnology. He has always loved to build everything he could, since only then could he call it “his own.”

Maggie Avener is the technical and training organizer at the Prometheus Radio Project. She spends her days giving technical advice to community radio stations, teaching workshops to up-and-coming radio geeks, and brainstorming on how participatory media can take over the world.

Matt Blaze is an associate professor of computer and information sciences and director of the Trusted Network Eavesdropping and Countermeasures project at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include secure systems, cryptology and cryptographic protocols, and large-scale systems.

Sean Bonner is a founder of Crash Space and a member of HackerspaceSG

Tom Brennan cofounded a niche critical infrastructure services provider that offered protection of U.S. critical infrastructures with red-team services. He has led teams by example since serving with the United States Marines during the first Gulf War. Brennan has over a decade of hands-on experience in information security, as well as industry accreditations such as the Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), National Security Agency clearance, INFOSEC Assessment Methodology (NSA-IAM), Certified Ethical Hacker (C|EH), and ISACA Certified Information Security Manager (CISM). In 2007, Brennan was appointed by his peers to the global board of directors of the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Foundation (http://www.owasp.org) as a guide for over 21,000 individuals across 160 chapters worldwide. Additionally, he serves as president of the 1100-member OWASP New York/New Jersey chapter, which he founded in 2004 after his tenure with the FBI Infragard program.

Lyndsey Brown is an undergraduate student studying computer science. This is her first research experience, and she is amazed at what really happens to your computer when you install even “friendly” software. She is hooked now, and can’t wait to learn more.

Finn Brunton is a postdoctoral researcher in Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU. He works on the history and politics of digital media and is writing a book about spam.

Micha Cardenas / Azdel Slade (http://transreal.org) is an artist/theorist whose transreal work mixes physical and networked spaces in order to explore emerging forms of queer relationality, biopolitics and DIY horizontal knowledge production. She is a lecturer in the visual arts department at UCSD. She is an artist/researcher with UCSD Medical Education and the b.a.n.g. lab at Calit2. Her forthcoming publications include “Becoming Dragon: A Transversal Technology Study” in the book Code Drift from CTheory, “I am Transreal” in Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation from Seal Press and Trans Desire from Atropos Press. Her current collaboration with Elle Mehrmand, “Mixed Relations,” was the recipient of the UCIRA Emerging Fields Award for 2009.

Stephen Cass was born and raised in Dublin, but now hails from Boston. He cut his programming teeth on a TI 99-4/A and a totally pimped out BBC Model B+, back when 32 kB of memory was a big deal. Currently a senior editor for Technology Review, published by MIT, he has spent a decade covering space for IEEE Spectrum and Discover Magazine and currently edits Technology Review’s Delta-V blog on space technology.

The Cheshire Catalyst (Richard Cheshire) is the former publisher of the notorious TAP Newsletter of the radical 1970s and 80s. He has also attended (and volunteered at) every HOPE Conference we’ve ever held.

Bill Cheswick is an early innovator in Internet security. He is known for his work in firewalls, proxies, and Internet mapping at Bell Labs and Lumeta Corp. He is best known for the book he co-authored with Steve Bellovin and now Avi Rubin, Firewalls and Internet Security: Repelling the Wily Hacker. He is now a member of the technical staff at AT&T Labs Research in Florham Park, New Jersey, where he is working on security, visualization, user interfaces, and a variety of other things.

Joe Cicero is currently a network specialist instructor for Northeast Wisconsin Technical College and a columnist for the Shawano Leader. He specializes in teaching Linux, network security, and computer forensics courses. Joe has had positions covering every aspect of computers including help desk support, technician, programmer, network administrator, directory of technology, computer security and incident response team member, defense forensic examiner, and, of course, instructor.

Sandy Clark (Mouse) has been taking things apart since the age of two, and still hasn’t learned to put them back together. An active member of the hacker community, her professional work includes an Air Force Flight Control computer, a simulator for NASA, singing at Carnegie Hall, and a minor in history. She is currently fulfilling a childhood dream, pursuing a Ph.D. in C.S. at the University of Pennsylvania. A founding member of Toool-USA, she also enjoys puzzles, toys, Mao (the card game), and anything that involves night vision goggles. Her research explores human scale security and the unexpected ways that systems interact.

Gabriella Coleman is an assistant professor in NYU’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication. She specializes in the anthropology of computer hacking and digital activism and is completing a book manuscript “Coding Freedom: Hacker Pleasure and the Ethics of Free and Open Source Software.”

cpfr is a data scientist. His latest research interests include facial recognition and extracting emotions from text.

Dan Crowley is an independent information security researcher and lecturer with an appreciation for art and its integration with technology. Most of his time is spent playing around with web-based technologies or locks. Dan has previously won the US-TOOOL “Gringo Warrior” lockpicking competition.

Da Beave (Champ Clark III) is one of the founding members of the VoIP hobbyist group Telephreak. He also co-authored Asterisk Hacking, Threat Analysis 2008, and brought the OpenVMS Deathrow Cluster into existence. He is currently employed with Softwink, Inc., which specializes in security monitoring within the financial industry and has authored various security utilities including iWar, tscan/dscan (X.25), and many others. He calls the 904 NPA home.

Bill Degnan is vice president of MARCH (Mid-Atlantic Retro Computing Hobbyists) and teaches computer history at the University of Delaware.

Dragorn is the author of the open-source wireless sniffer and IDS Kismet, as well as several other wireless-related open source projects such as spectrum analysis tools and drivers, LORCON packet injection, and others.

Kyle Drosdick is an independent publisher, consultant, and photographer. He volunteers with organizations he is interested in, like The Telephone Pioneers of America, The Photographic Center, Lance Armstrong Foundation, HackerBot Labs, and, more recently, Sensible Washington. The Telephone Pioneers are an example of how that work impacts and supports his thriving adult learning process.

Echo is a visual artist in an ongoing effort to combine data analysis and pretty pretty visuals.

Elena is a cofounder of the Aftershock Action Alliance and a professional urban planner. She did relief work in New Orleans for Common Ground after Katrina.

Nick Farr is an accountant based in Washington, D.C. He’s been called the “Johnny Appleseed” of the hackerspaces movement in the United States.

Marco Figueroa is a senior security analyst consultant whose technical expertise includes reverse engineering of malware, incident handling, hacker attacks, tools, techniques, and defenses. He has performed numerous security assessments and responded to computer attacks for clients in various market verticals.

Rob T Firefly is an artist, writer, nerd-of-all-trades, and co-admin of NYC2600.net. You might know him from his work on Off The Hook, his misadventures with the Phone Losers of America, his artwork here at HOPE, or those prank calls he makes to your home at inconvenient hours. Rob lives at robvincent.net.

Jonathan Foote comes to the aesthetic sphere from a technical background. With a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and a scientific bent, he holds 34 U.S. patents and has over 60 scientific publications. His art work explores perception and interaction using a range of sophisticated electronics, from vintage vacuum tubes to the latest semiconductor devices. A San Francisco resident, he is a frequent hanger-on at the Noisebridge hackerspace there. He is a cofounder of the SWARM robotics collective, and his work has been shown at various Bay Area venues as well as internationally. More information on his work can be found at http://www.rotorbrain.com/jtfdesign.

Limor “Ladyada” Fried is founder of Adafruit Industries and recipient of the EFF Pioneer Award for her work in open source hardware.

Daniel Kahn Gillmor is a freelance technology advisor and free software developer. He participates in the Debian project with a focus on usable cryptographic infrastructure, rides bikes, cooks, and manages to stay out of trouble most of the time.

Emmanuel Goldstein came up with the idea for HOPE conferences in 1994 after growing tired of constantly having to visit his friends from around the world. By having all of them show up at the same time over a single weekend every couple of years under the guise of attending a trendy conference, he was able to find the time to watch every episode of Dr. Who in order, pursue a career as a public nuisance, and come up with the idea for Windows 7. (Lawsuits are scheduled for the fall.) When not trying to define his life in a paragraph, he publishes 2600 Magazine, hosts radio shows Off The Hook and Off The Wall, and spends a few hours a day trying to think of a clever name for the next HOPE conference (not this one), which won’t be necessary if they destroy the damn hotel.

Gonzo is an urban explorer, veteran hacker, and regular at the New York City 2600 meetings. His site is http://reprimandmag.com, and he lives in New Jersey.

Travis Goodspeed is a belt buckle engineer from southern Appalachia with a hobby of exploiting and reverse engineering embedded systems. Recently, he discovered a PRNG vulnerability of the key exchange protocol used by many ZigBee Smart Energy Profile devices. He is known to carry absurd quantities of GoodFET JTAG debugger boards, giving them out to any and all neighbors.

Peter Greko is a Miami security researcher, board member of HackMiami, and an application analyst specializing in web security for a Fortune 20 company. Pete gives presentations to programming classes on web security practices and has presented for both HackMiami and the south Florida ISSA chapter meetings.

Johannes Grenzfurthner is an artist, writer, curator, and director. He is the founder of monochrom, an internationally acting art and theory group. He holds a professorship for art theory and art practice at the University of Applied Sciences in Graz, Austria. He is head of the “Arse Elektronika” festival in San Francisco, host of “Roboexotica” (Festival for Cocktail-Robotics, Vienna and San Francisco), and curates the Paraflows Conference inVienna. Recurring topics in Johannes’ artistic and textual work are contemporary art, activism, performance, humor, philosophy, postmodernism, media theory, cultural studies, sex tech, popular culture studies, science fiction, and the debate about copyright.

Grey Frequency is an artist, co-admin of NYC2600.net and addicted to pretty things that have blinking lights. You might know her from her artwork here or as the girl that married a Canadian she met at HOPE.

Gweeds is a food hacker who programs food in his spare time. He also enjoys scraping and analyzing the world’s culinary data and cooking with freaks in hacker kitchens across the world.

Markus “fin” Hametner is less serious than Nick Farr, except when he’s fixing problems at the Metalab in Vienna or being the sysadmin for hackerspaces.org.

Michael S. Hart invented eBooks in 1971, and has spent nearly 40 years fostering the digitization and free distribution of eBooks and other digital content. He was a HOPE keynote speaker in 2006.

Adam Harvey is a designer and technologist who researches and develops new uses for, or against, new technology. He is a recent graduate of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU and has been featured on Reuters, CBC, The Register, Wired, and in the 2009 edition of Advances in Wearable Computing.

Hat Trick has built and maintained a dedicated website dealing with obtaining information from terrorist networks. He has worked with information gathering of terrorist networks with http://www.liveleak.com, National Geographic in providing footage for Reign of Terror – Suicide Web, and for government agencies. He now serves as web application security consultant for a Fortune 20 financial institution.

Alexander Heid is an information security researcher from Miami. He is a founding member of HackMiami, a hackerspace in south Florida, and is also a board member for the south Florida OWASP organization. Alexander was quoted by Technology Review Magazine in February 2010 regarding research on the Zeus trojan and antivirus evasion techniques. He is currently employed as a vulnerability analyst for a Fortune 20 financial firm.

Dr. Thomas J. Holt is an assistant professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University. His research focuses on computer hacking, malware, and the role that technology and the Internet play in facilitating all manner of crime and deviance. Dr. Holt has published in various academic journals including Crime and Delinquency, Deviant Behavior, and the Journal of Criminal Justice, is a coauthor of Digital Crime and Digital Terror, and serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Cyber Criminology.

Adrian Hong currently serves as director of the Pegasus Project, an initiative that uses cutting edge technology to penetrate closed societies and empower people in those nations to communicate amongst themselves, and with the outside world. In December of 2006, he was arrested in the People’s Republic of China and imprisoned before being released and deported for sheltering and moving North Korean refugees sought by the Chinese and North Korean governments. He was a visiting lecturer in 2008, teaching “America, Human Rights, and Foreign Policy” at Korea’s Ewha University, and he is a TED Senior Fellow.

John Huntington is a professor of entertainment technology at New York City College of Technology (Citytech/CUNY), and a visiting professor at the Yale School of Drama. Huntington’s book, Control Systems for Live Entertainment, now in its third edition on Focal Press, was the first on the topic of entertainment control and show control, and continues to be the leading book in the field. Huntington freelances as an entertainment and show control systems consultant, author, and sound designer/engineer, and maintains a blog on entertainment technology (and severe weather) at http://www.controlgeek.net. He lives in Brooklyn.

Ben Jackson is just another geek from Massachusetts. He spends his days doing InfoSec stuff, generally breaking things, and being relentlessly yet constructively paranoid for a large public sector organization in southern New England. In his spare time, he enjoys being a husband and dad, messing around with computers, VoIP, analog telephones, amateur radio, doing research as part of Mayhemic Labs, and generally pressing anything with a button on it. Ben was the lead author for Asterisk Hacking from Syngress Publishing, former host of Binary Revolution Radio, has spoken at Defcon, HOPE, Source Boston, QuahogCon, and various other conferences and strongly dislikes writing about himself in the third person.

Babak Javadi is one of the founding board members of The Open Organisation Of Lockpickers (TOOOL) in North America. Having entered the lockpicking world over a decade ago, he now shares his passion for locks with members of the community and has been putting significant effort into bridging the Old World security mentality of locksmiths and modern security philosophies. He has been invited to speak at a multitude of hacker conferences worldwide, has trained at numerous professional conferences, operates a security firm, and has helped run the HOPE Lockpick Village for the past several conferences.

JFalcon has been involved in the scene for almost two decades. He also has the claim to fame of being the first federally convicted computer hacker in the state of Alaska during Operation Sundevil (1991-1995). Since his release in 1996, he has professionally consulted businesses and business executives in their own security needs along with being a senior system administrator to Fortune 500 companies and U.S. government agencies. Currently, he maintains his passion for finding unique solutions to today’s problems by studying the past, from running his own hybrid BBS system to see how it could compete with social network websites, to designing his own robotic antenna controls for his radio gear, to studying people’s experiments into hydrogen fuels. He currently calls Seattle his home.

Matt Joyce was once banned from HOPE, and twice spoken at HOPE. He’s part of NYCResistor, founded MakeNYC, and built several electronics projects featured in Make and BoingBoing.

Dan Kaminsky is one of our keynote speakers at The Next HOPE. He has a widely respected history in the computer security world, probably best known for discovering the 2008 DNS cache poisoning vulnerability, a flaw which could allow attackers to easily perform cache poisoning attacks on any name server. He also was key in the Sony BMG CD copy protection scandal, where Sony was found to be complicit in installing rootkits on consumer computers, making them vulnerable to all sorts of malware. Dan estimated that Sony’s rootkit had been installed on computers spanning more than 500,000 networks.

It’s particularly thrilling for us to have Dan in attendance (it’s also his first HOPE appearance) because he’s able to present this material in an entertaining and accessible manner, unlike so many security experts who have trouble reaching an audience outside their field of expertise. This, after all, is our goal with all of our conferences – to reach as many people with varying levels of interest and ability as possible.

Colin Keigher is a systems administrator living in the metro Vancouver area and an active member of the Vancouver Hack Space (hackspace.ca). A lot of what he does with his spare time is documented on his blog at keyboardcowboy.ca. You’ll also find him as “afreak” on irc.2600.net.

Michael Kemp (clappymonkey) is an experienced U.K. based security consultant, with a specialization in the penetration testing of web applications and the testing of compiled code bases and DB environments to destruction. As well as the day job, Michael has been published in a range of journals and magazines, including heise, Network Security, Inform IT, and Security Focus. To date, Michael has worked for NGS Software, CSC (Computer Sciences Corporation), British Telecom, and a host of freelance clients throughout the globe. Presently, Mike is working in a day job for Xiphos Research Labs. When not breaking things, Michael enjoys loud music, bad movies, weird books, and writing about himself in the third person.

Joe Klein has been teaching, researching, and hacking IPv6 for over eight year.

Evan Koblentz is curator of the InfoAge Science Center’s Vintage Computer Museum in Wall, New Jersey, founder and president of MARCH (Mid-Atlantic Retro Computing Hobbyists), and is a frequent speaker and author on computer history subjects.

Phil Lapsley has spent the last several years documenting the history of phone phreaking, through hundreds of interviews and Freedom of Information Act requests. He has been interviewed by National Public Radio and the BBC and quoted in multiple newspapers, including The New York Times, on the topic. He has also presented on phone phreaking history at the 10th Annual Vintage Computer Festival and The Last HOPE. When not researching phreaking, Phil has tried to act like an upstanding member of society. He cofounded two high technology companies in the San Francisco Bay Area and worked for McKinsey and Company, a management consulting company that advises Fortune 100 companies on business strategy. He holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering and computer sciences from U.C. Berkeley and an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management. He codeveloped Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP, RFC 977) used in the USENET news system. He is also the author of one textbook, 17 patents, and numerous technical articles.

Lazlow is a writer/director/producer who has worked in radio, TV, and video games. His first HOPE conference was Beyond HOPE in 1997. As a syndicated tech journalist, he was heard on over 100 radio stations worldwide on The Technofile, which was inducted into the Museum of Television and Radio. As a print journalist, he was a contributing writer to several publications including Playboy. Currently he works for Rockstar Games on multiple titles, including the Grand Theft Auto series as well as this year’s Red Dead Redemption. Between game deadlines, he hosts The Lazlow Show, which began on K-Rock New York, moved to XM Satellite Radio, and can now be heard at http://www.lazlow.com.

Nick Leghorn (Foghorn to his friends) graduated from Pennsylvania State University with a degree in security and risk analysis, and is currently employed as a risk analyst for a contractor working for the Department of Homeland Security. Nick is also an EMT, a general class amateur radio operator, started the State College 2600 meeting, and runs a competition shooting team in his spare time. More information can be found via his website: http://NickLeghorn.com.

Cass Lewart is an electrical engineer and a longtime hobbyist/hacker. He is also the author of many books and articles on database programming, hobby electronic projects, and data communication. Cass and his wife Ruth were joint recipients of the Hobbyist of the Year award from the Amateur Computer Group of New Jersey, the oldest U.S. computer club.

Scott Livingston currently studies flight, target-tracking, and call adaptation in the echolocating bat Eptesicus fuscus at the University of Maryland. He has begun researching theoretical and computational models of the (primate) vision system in a lab at Caltech.

Christine Love is writer of all sorts of fiction, especially science fiction and romances, and an occasional professional programmer. She has studied ’80s hacking and computer culture only well after the fact, and perhaps romanticizes the era a little too much. When not writing novels or computer game narratives, she is a full time student of English literature and history, located just outside of Toronto.

Joey Mariano is an American guitar virtuoso, chip musician, visual artist, and educator hailing from Philadelphia. Better known as Animal Style, his music is a blend of demoscene sensibilities, catchy melodies, organic guitar riffs, and improvisation that will explode your ear canal and leave you begging for more. Mariano stands at the forefront of the emerging chip scene in Philadelphia and is a frequent coconspirator with 8bitpeoples, the New York chip scene, and http://iimusic.net.

Joshua Marpet has served as an adjunct professor of computer science at St. John’s University’s Tobin College of Business. Prior to WhiteHat Security (his present employer), he worked as an information security consultant focused on penetration testing, auditing, and forensics. Early in his career, he worked in law enforcement. He was later able to combine those skills with his interest in technology to create security systems for the airline, prison, and gaming industries.

Carlyn Maw is the dominant force behind the function of the Crashspace hackerspace in Los Angeles.

Daniel McCarney is a bizarre combination of stereotypes, backgrounds, and interests ranging from counter culture to artificial intelligence. Interested in a career of lifelong learning, Daniel considers knowledge a weapon and aims to arm you and himself.

Far McKon is the cofounder of Hive76, a Philadelphia hackerspace, and instigator of weird and interesting projects, and a ginger.

John McNabb, an IT Pro from the Boston area, worked for ten years for Clean Water Action, where he spearheaded efforts to pass electronic take back laws in Massachusetts and supported national efforts to pass such laws. He also worked for six years as a legislative liaison for the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection.

Elle Mehrmand is a performance/new media artist and musician who uses the body, electronics, video, sound, and installation within her work. She is the singer and trombone player of Assembly of Mazes, a music collective who create dark, electronic, Middle Eastern, rhythmic jazz rock. Elle is currently an MFA candidate at UCSD, and received her BFA in art photography with a minor in music at CSULB. Elle has received grants from UCIRA, the Russell Foundation, and Fine Arts Affiliates. She is a researcher at CRCA and the b.a.n.g. lab at UCSD. Her performances have been shown in Long Beach, Los Angeles, Tijuana, Montreal, Dublin, San Diego and Bogota. Her work has been discussed in Art21, the Los Angeles Times, Furtherfield.org, Reno News and Review and the OC Weekly.

Ellen Meier is co-director of the Center for Technology and School Change at Teachers College, and associate professor of practice, computing, and education. She also co-chairs the Regents-appointed Council for Technology Policy and Practice for New York. Her research examines the role of technology in creating more engaging learning environments and in catalyzing school change. She has worked extensively with metropolitan schools to study the integration of digital tools in ways that improve educational practice.

Don Miller performs live visuals in real time under the alias NO CARRIER. He works with nearly obsolete repurposed electronics to create high energy low resolution abstract video. Part of the 8bitpeoples artist collective, he performs, exhibits, and lectures worldwide. Miller is based in Philadelphia, where he organizes and curates 8static, a monthly showcase of low-bit music and visuals.

Chris Mooney is a software engineer who works in the high performance and high availability problem space. He has a B.S. in computer science and a minor in mathematics at the University of Southern Maine. He is the current executive director of Project DoD Inc., a 501(c)(3) charitable technology nonprofit with a focus on censorship resistant services. He has always been interested in computer security, and has focused a good deal of time on cryptology and computer security research. His web page is at: https://chris.dod.net/.

Mudsplatter has served four years in the U.S. Air Force as a computer, network, crytography, and telephone switching tech. He has also served a year with the NSHC in South Korea, performing research and development as the senior master security engineer and lead security consultant and is currently the acting military liaison for NeoCatena Systems.

Alex Muentz is a geek and a lawyer. When he’s not trying to keep his clients out of trouble, he teaches about the collision of law and technology and tries to be useful to his fellow geeks.

Matt Neely is the profiling team manager at SecureState, a Cleveland based security consulting company. His research interests include the convergence of physical and logical security, lock and lockpicking, cryptography, and all things wireless. Matt is also a host on the Security Justice podcast.

Nicolle (“Rogueclown”) Neulist is a founding member of Pumping Station: One, the hackerspace in Chicago. She first encountered the hacker community in the spring of 2008, and her first hacker conference was The Last HOPE. She’s dedicating her talk to all of the fascinating, brilliant, and welcoming people that she has met since then who have helped her realize that the hacker community is home, and who have taught her everything she has learned in the last two years.

Greg Newby is a high-end computing technologist and information engineer. He has been with Project Gutenberg since 1991. His overarching goal is to make information and information systems more useable and accessible to all persons. He has been involved with HOPE conferences since 2000.

Deb Nicholson has been working at the Free Software Foundation for four years. Before that, she spent 13 years working for equality and social justice by pushing legislation and supporting progressive candidates. As our society becomes more dependent on digital methods for access to power and information, she is glad to be part of the struggle towards freedom for computer users.

Ryan O’Horo is a security consultant with a large professional services company and has designed several car PCs and runs the DIY group Make:NYC.

Deviant Ollam pays his bills by being a security auditor and penetration testing consultant with The CORE Group, but is also on the board of directors at the U.S. division of TOOOL, The Open Organisation Of Lockpickers. Every year at DEFCON and ShmooCon, Deviant runs the Lockpicking Village, and he has conducted physical security training sessions at Black Hat, DeepSec, ToorCon, HackCon, ShakaCon, HackInTheBox, CanSecWest, ekoparty, and the United States Military Academy at West Point. His favorite amendments to the U.S. Constitution are, in no particular order, the 1st, 2nd, 9th, and 10th.

Jennifer Ortiz is a pharmacy student at Creighton University, PharmD class of 2012. She graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a B.S. in electronic media arts and communication and a minor in computer science. She worked for five years in web development and is now working at a hospital as a pharmacy intern.

Davi Ottenheimer has over 16 years of experience managing global security operations and assessments, including a decade of leading incident response and digital forensics.

Nina Paley is based in New York. She is a culture hacker and “free culture” advocate. Nina made the film Sita Sings the Blues, possibly the first commercially viable feature film released under CopyLeft (CC-by-sa) at http://www.sitasingstheblues.com/. She often give talks about how she make money with a “free” film. She is also artist-in-residence at QuestionCopyright.org, with whom she makes Minute Memes, short animations about intellectual freedom.

Pan is the founder of Sensory Research, an organization of engineers, designers, and artists dedicated to providing useful tools, services, and ideas to augment human interaction. Most recently, his work has focused on developing interactive software for Android and iPhone, as well as for the P5 virtual reality glove. Sensory Research is also host to the various projects of the Snuggles Collective and the audio archive for the Church of the Subgenius Hour of Slack. Pan is the creator and host of the long running technology radio show Interactive Technologies. Under the moniker Paradox Explorer, Pan (and associates) organize live performances that incorporate music, video, and interactive technology. He has been participating in technology and culture jamming in various forms since the 1980s.

Christina “fabulous” Pei is a Wall Street analyst turned math teacher turned math pirate. After working in New York City public schools for three years teaching grades 6-12, she now works for Paul Sally, the University of Chicago “math pirate” who has been hacking math education for decades. She helps promote hacker and maker spaces everywhere, and has appeared in panels with noteworthy educators, including the controversial William Ayers.

Alessio “mayhem” Pennasilico lives and works in Verona (Italy) as a security evangelist for Alba S.T. s.r.l. His personal and working interests are information technology, security issues, open source and digital rights. He is usually a speaker at most of the Italian national events such as SMAU, Infosecurity, E-privacy, Linux Day, OpenCon, OpenEXP, ESC and the Italian HackMeeting. He also holds workshops in secondary schools and Italian universities, with the aim of spreading the culture for an awareness of today’s technology.

Ed Piskor is a cartoonist from Pittsburgh working on many projects such as American Splendor with writer Harvey Pekar. Aside from wrapping up the Wizzywig comic, Ed is also helping design a soon to be released animation project.

Jeff Potter has done the cubicle thing, the startup thing, and the entrepreneur thing, and through it all maintained his sanity by cooking for friends. He studied computer science and visual art at Brown University.

Psytek is an inventor and engineer currently building a flying saucer at Alpha One Labs in Brooklyn.

Tiffany Rad is the president of ELCnetworks, LLC., a technology, law, and business development firm with offices in Portland, Maine and Washington, D.C. Her consulting projects have included business and tech analysis for startups and security consulting for U.S. government agencies. She is also a part-time adjunct professor in the computer science department at the University of Southern Maine, teaching computer law and ethics and information security. Tiffany also researches car computers, is president of the reverse engineering and development company Q Labs, is the director/founder of Reverse Space, a hackerspace in northern Virginia, and is pro bono legal counsel for Project DoD, a nonprofit hosting company with censorship resistant services. Her website is http://www.tiffanyrad.com.

Steven Rambam is the founder and CEO of Pallorium, Inc. (http://www.pallorium.com), a licensed investigative agency with offices and affiliates worldwide. Recently described by a New York newspaper as “legendary,” during the past 25 years he has closed more than 10,000 investigations including 500 homicide and “death claim” cases. Steven is perhaps best known for his pro bono activities, which have included the investigation of nearly 200 Nazi war criminals in the USA, Canada, Europe, and Australia. He has also coordinated efforts to expose terrorist groups’ fundraising activities in the United States and has coordinated investigations which resulted in the tightening of airport security in eight U.S. cities prior to 9/11. Many of his investigations involve coordination with national authorities, and he has received commendations and awards in a number of foreign locations and mention on the floors of the Canadian and Israeli Parliaments. Steven has appeared at every HOPE conference, and his “Privacy Is Dead – Get Over It” presentation has received international acclaim.

Michael Ravnitzky has worked as an investigative reporter, private investigator, trade association technical director, aeronautical engineer, and now serves as an attorney in the communications field. As a journalist, he broke new ground by using the Freedom of Information Act in innovative ways (having personally filed some 10,000 FOIA requests since 1992), and he continues to encourage reporters to apply these techniques to spur greater government transparency, openness, and utility. He has written a number of technical articles, the most recent being a proposal to mount mobile sensors on the national postal vehicle fleet to collect data and map parameters such as weather, pollutants, potholes, areas of weak radio signals, and perhaps even to raise alerts about chemical or biological agents. He received a B.A. in Physics from Cornell University and a law degree from William Mitchell College of Law.

Paul F. Renda started his career working on the IBM 360 and the PDP 11. He was an early advocate of using hacking software to check corporate data systems and has presented talks at the Computer Security Institute. Paul’s articles have appeared in Info Security Magazine. In 1995, Paul developed a defense against war dialers. He is currently a computer security analyst and futurist.

RenderMan is a Canadian born and raised hacker who spends way too much time figuring out ways of inserting electronics into treasured childhood toys. A frequent speaker at hacker and security cons around the world, he has also been an author on three books: RFID Security, Kismet Hacking, and Seven Deadliest Wireless Technology Attacks, all from Syngress. Consultant by trade, hacker by birth, black hat by fashion, co-refounder of the Church of Wifi, and recent member of the NMRC, he spends his time adding to his expansive collection of con badges and thinking of new ways to subvert wireless networks and childhood memories.

Jimmie Rodgers is a circuit bender and electronic instrument creator.

Jameson Rollins is a physicist looking for the elusive gravitational wave. In his spare time, he likes to work on free software, ride his bike, and drink beer.

Fabian Rothschild is a Miami college student leading malware research for HackMiami and has presented his research on ZeuS for South Florida OWASP. He is a consultant for small and medium businesses providing best security practices for application development. He enjoys programming in Python and running Linux.

Eleanor Saitta is a designer, artist, hacker, and researcher working at the intersections between mediums ranging from interaction design and architecture to fashion, with an emphasis on the seamless integration of technology into lived experience and the humanity of objects and the built environment. She has previously worked at the NASA Ames Research Center and the IBM Almaden Research Center, and lives mostly in New York.

Chester Santos is the 2008 United States National Memory Champion. He is one of the nation’s foremost experts on memory improvement and has appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post, USA Today, CNN, and various other television, radio, and printed media all over the world. Chester holds an undergraduate degree in psychology from the University of California at Berkeley, and a master’s degree in software engineering from Golden Gate University. He draws on his degree in psychology, his vast experience competing at the highest levels of competitive memory, and the latest developments in brain research in order to help people from all over the world to realize the extraordinary power of their minds.

Michael “theprez98″ Schearer is a government contractor who spent nearly nine years in the United States Navy as an EA-6B Prowler Electronic Countermeasures Officer. His military experience includes aerial combat missions over both Afghanistan and Iraq and nine months on the ground doing counter-IED work with the U.S. Army. He is a graduate of Georgetown University’s National Security Studies Program, a licensed amateur radio operator, and an active member of the Church of WiFi.

Seth Schoen is a senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He has worked at EFF for eight years, helping other technologists to understand the civil liberties implications of their work, the EFF staff to better understand the underlying technology related to EFF’s legal work, and the public to understand what the technology products they use really do. He helped create the LNX-BBC live CD and has researched phenomena including laser printer forensic tracking codes, ISP packet spoofing, and key recovery from computer RAM after a computer has been turned off. He is secretary of the Noisebridge hackerspace.

Jason Scott is a computer historian known for either his website textfiles.com, his documentaries BBS and Get Lamp, his Twittering cat Sockington, his presentations and speeches at many different conventions, or his insistence on never shutting up. He lives a little north of here.

Jimmy Shah is a mobile anti-virus researcher for McAfee, specializing in analysis of mobile threats on existing platforms (J2ME, SymbOS, Windows Mobile, iPhone OS, Android) and potential mobile malware and spyware. He works with a team of researchers that regularly provides analysis and research on mobile threats to McAfee clients.

Shalom Silbermintz (Spam) is your average, everyday I.T. ninja. If he’s not breaking computers, he is probably watching far too much television for his own good. He is also probably the only person in history to ever pick up a soldering iron by the wrong end (in case you were wondering, that did not end well).

Smokey, cofounder of the Aftershock Action Alliance, organized the first Emergence Broadcast System and was recently arrested and had his home raided by the Joint Terrorism Task Force for working with the Tin Can Communications Collective during the G-20 protests in Pittsburgh. He also presented at HOPE a few years back with the People’s Law Collective about PATRIOT Act and Emerging Technologies.

Robert Steele is the first public intelligence officer of the 21st Century. A recovering spy who signed the letter against torture and has generally condemned the current and past administrators of the various national intelligence elements in the USA, he has helped 90 countries get a grip on Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), and is today a pioneer of multinational, multifunctional information-sharing and sense-making. He has written a number of books, all of which will be on sale at half price on Saturday only, and is the host of three websites, http://www.oss.net (original), http://www.earth-intelligence.net (non-profit), and http://www.phibetaiota.net (front end for both and the main site for anyone interested in public intelligence of, by, and for the public.

Peter Swimm has edited the daily chip music news blog True Chip Till Death (http://www.truechip.org) since 2008. He also records and performs his own low-bit music, helped found the monthly Pulsewave Chip Music concert series (now entering its fourth year), and has helped blog for Blip Festival since 2008.

Adam Tannir is an autodidact with a corporate day job. With more than passing interests in various sciences, computation, art and education, he likes to share his insights and realizations with whomever he can, combining concepts so the world makes more sense. He is currently learning about the Android platform, microcontrollers and electronics, and how to improve his cooking skills. Plutarch reminds us: “The mind is a fire to be kindled, not a vessel to be filled.”

Don Tobin is currently an assistant professor of computer science and a retired Air Force officer. His research interests are in general computer security, rootkits and detection, social computing, and static and dynamic analysis. He has been breaking rules since the first Pong game came home.

Phillip Torrone is senior editor of MAKE Magazine, contributing editor to Popular Science and founder of Hack-a-Day.

Vincent Toubiana is a postdoctoral researcher at New York University (NYU) working on web search privacy and obfuscation. Before joining NYU, he worked at Alcatel-Lucent as research engineer. He obtained his Ph.D. in computer science at Telecom ParisTech (French National School of Telecommunications) in 2008.

TProphet, also known as “The Telecom Informer,” is a longtime columnist for 2600 Magazine. Beginning his phreaking career at the age of 11, TProphet has taken payphone pictures on six of seven continents.

TradeMark G. is a musician and artist, perhaps best known as founder of the band The Evolution Control Committee in 1986. He is also a culture jammer, equipment designer, software designer, and organizer. The Evolution Control Committee is best known for its copyright-challenging stance, using found sounds to create new musical works at the risk of copyright violation. This made the ECC the target of a cease and desist order from CBS for sampling newscaster Dan Rather, but also earned them credit for creating the “mash-up” genre of music (also called bastard pop). TradeMark can take credit for those and all other ECC projects, including the development and construction of the Thimbletron, a live sampling performance instrument that utilizes hand gestures.

Pete Tridish is a cofounder of the Prometheus Radio Project. His focus for Prometheus is radio engineering and policy advocacy. He has been a carpenter, an environmental educator, a solar energy system installer, a squatter, a homeless shelter volunteer, and an activist in many social movements since the age of 16.

Paul V is a grad student in Toronto trying to figure out why people geo-tag tweets, what they get out of it, and what the risks are.

James Vasile is an attorney at the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) and a longtime advocate of free software and free culture. He has advised major free software projects like GNOME, Apache, Drupal, and Joomla. Alongside his work at the SFLC, James writes software for the Book Liberator project and produced the last two New York Software Freedom Day celebrations. He serves on the board of several freedom-oriented non-profits and writes about freedom, technology, and community at his blog, Hackervisions.org.

Nathan “JimShoe” Warner (Makers Local 256, Huntsville, AL, USA) is the former chairman and charter member of Makers Local 256.

Jessamyn West is a community technology instructor, writer, and public librarian in Randolph, Vermont. She is a community moderator at MetaFilter, runs librarian.net, and has been blogging since 1997. Over the years, she has campaigned for smarter library technology policies, having been an at-large councilor for the American Library Association and a co-editor on the book Revolting Librarians Redux.

Dennison Williams is a member of the Hackbloc and March Hare collectives, lead developer of the Tapatio project, and thinks skunks are way cuter then raccoons.

Dr. Aleksandr Yampolskiy is a head of security and compliance at a well-known e-commerce company. Prior to this position, he has been a lead technologist for authentication/authorization and IDM products in several Fortune 100 companies. He’s been cited in The New York Times, Yale Scientific, and published half a dozen articles in top security conferences. He’s been hacking programs for as long as he can remember. He has a B.A. in mathematics from NYU, and a Ph.D. in cryptography from Yale.