WHYcast transcript episode 10

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Transcript 10

Ad: Hi, and welcome to the WHYcast episode 10. Episode 10? Episode 10?

Nancy: We're already at number 10. Hi, Ad.

Ad: And we are the hosts of the only podcast about a hacker camp in the universe. This volunteer run event will take place next year in the Netherlands, approximately 42 kilometers above Amsterdam from August 8th to 12th, 2025. So, Ad, what are we talking about today?

Nancy: Well, obviously, we have to talk about this being number 10 and this event, WHY-2025, being the 10th in a row. So, that's a pattern here. And it's a milestone. Making this podcast takes a bit more time than I realized when I said, oh, sure, we can do this. But we managed to get to number 10 and we'll take the next 10 and then we'll see. And then we'll celebrate again and then we'll celebrate at 42 and then we'll celebrate at, well, whatever we want. We'll see.

Ad: But for now, we made it to the 10th episode and I think that's a cool achievement.

Nancy: We made it till episode 10 because technically the 10th episode was the last one as we started counting from zero.

Ad: Of course we did.

Nancy: Because you always start at zero unless you program in Lua.

Ad: But never mind that.

Nancy: In this episode, we have some news as each week or each episode. We have where to hack. We have a nice conversation with Walter about what the heck. And we have an interview with Jos from Team Content.

Ad: Very cool. And of course, efficacy of the week and other stuff.

Nancy: Yes.

Ad: So, news from the trenches.

Ad: I'm so psyched about this one. Ticket sale is about to start. Soon. And if you follow us on the socials, you will know when exactly because we probably have some countdown stuff going on. And I'm personally very happy to share that the early tickets, we named them early nerds, which I found particularly funny. And they will go up for sale coming Wednesday, the 4th of December. During the Orga Meet online. Woo!

Nancy: Nice. Yes. Yes.

Ad: Yes.

Nancy: The word is out. The word is out. It's no longer a secret.

Ad: December 4th. Yay.

Ad: So, you can get your very nerdy Christmas presents right next week, actually.

Nancy: The first batch of tickets is 512 early nerd tickets. Yes. For a special price. Special. Special price for you, my friend. Yeah.

Ad: Very special price. And after that, we will have nerd tickets. We won't have regular nerd tickets because we don't know of any regular nerds. Regular nerds don't exist. They don't exist. Do you have regular tickets?

Nancy: Yeah.

Ad: If you are very late to the party, you will be either a late nerd or a procrastinate nerd. But for now, coming 4th of December, early nerd tickets will be available. They will be available for anyone who wants them.

Walter: Exciting.

Ad: Yes. Very happy. And thanks to all the hard work of all the volunteers to make sure that the ticket shop is in order. So, a big shout out to all the teams and the volunteers who worked on that. From Team Merge to Team SysAdmin to also Team Info, I guess, for some of the visuals and all the things. So, a lot of people have worked on this to make this happen.

Nancy: Yes, definitely.

Ad: All the love to you.

Nancy: And you can share all the love at the Orga meet next Wednesday at 8 on the Etsy. Information is on the wiki. If you go to wiki.WHY2025.org/meetings, capital M, you'll find an overview of all the meetings, including the in-person meeting at the 14th at BitLair in Amersfoort.

Ad: Amersfoort. There we have it again. Yes. So, that's all cool stuff. And what's also cool is that probably you can have a sneak peek. We'll share a link in the show notes to the generator. And the generator is the one where you can put in text and it will show you a WHY logo with custom text, for instance. And so, you can play around with the logo, the colors, the things that the great team Housestyle made. I will share a nice Nancy Beers WHY logo. And you can see the logo here in post. It looks very cool. And you can fiddle around with it. Official release will be anytime soon as well—first half of December. But you can have a quick sneak peek already.

Nancy: Well, cool.

Ad: Yeah.

Nancy: Yeah.

Nancy: And if you can't wait to the 14th to go to a hackerspace, there's actually some other stuff we'll be mentioning. And where to hack.

Ad: Each week, we will share where you can find wise-minded people. Where to hack.

Nancy: Because tonight at the Pixel Bar in Rotterdam, there is Sint Pannekoek, which is a tradition originally from Rotterdam, where Pixel Bar is located. And this is celebrated every year on November 29th—so, today, the day the podcast comes out. So, if you're listening to this after the 29th of November, unfortunately, you're too late. I mean, it's still a good excuse to eat pancakes. Sure. But if you want to eat pancakes at Pixel Bar, head over to the Discord and join in for the fun.

Nancy: Also, tonight—so, again, if you're listening to this, you're too late, maybe.

Ad: It's an extra excuse to subscribe.

Nancy: Oh, like, share, and subscribe. Yeah, all the social things. Whiskey Leaks in Utrecht. And if you want to know exactly where, you have to find Pinnikas and slide into her DMs because it's on a secret location.

Ad: It's been mysterious. I do see a lot of people already signed up. But I'm not disclosing where, because you have to slide into the DMs. Yes. Of Pinnikas.

Nancy: Yeah. And if you bought your ticket on the 4th of December, then the day after, on the 5th, you can join. You can join Printerklaas at BitLair. It's the same BitLair in Amersfoort. Printerklaas, if you're not celebrating Sinterklaas in the Netherlands, you can join in for some pizza and 3D printing fun.

Ad: I'm a sucker for word jokes. I love this.

Nancy: It's brilliant. It's brilliant. If you bring yourself as being a nerd, then they will make sure there's chocolate milk and Dutch pepernoten. So, also, check out their Discord—and you'll find all the information.

Ad: Very cool. Enough places to have some WHY-minded people fun. So, very good.

Nancy: Definitely. Yes.

Nancy: And with that, let's jump into a history story, a history lesson with Walter about what the heck. Each episode, we'll be diving into a piece of history, something special from the predecessors of WHY2025. So, that could be from the Galactic Hacker Podcast, Party from 1989; Hackers at the End of the Universe from ’93; Hacking in Progress, ’97; Hackers at Large, 2001; What the Hack, 2005; Hacking at Random, 2009; Observe Hack Make, 2013; Still Hacking Anyways, 2017; May Contain Hackers from 2021—no, Mac-Ovid happened, so that became May Contain Hackers 2022. And this week, we will be taking a look at… Moi, Bob.

Ad: So, Walter is back with us again with stories from an ’80s hacker. So, please, Walter—tell us some more about another camp.

Walter: Let's tell you something about What the Hack, 2005, which took place in Lint. I even found my original… Look at that. Yeah. Cool. So, we had plastic badges. And of course, it was the first time when we had… merch. Well, this was for the podcast. So, you could also see who and what team people were in—what team? Network team. But this event I did—I did the network stuff, but I also helped with the build-up. I really enjoyed the previous events as well to do build-up. It's just really great to be among like-minded people and just do simple work, like putting up tents. And what was nice is I dyed my hair blue because at the event before that, Aldert Hasenberg, he had blue hair during the camp—and he did the network—and this year at What the Hack, I did the network stuff, at least at the event. Before that, it was another person. So, I dyed my hair blue to honor Aldert Hasenberg. But it was… yeah, I didn't take enough time for that. So, and to get blue hair, you need to blonde your hair first and then make it blue, but it wasn't done good enough. So, I only had blue hair for a couple of days and it went blonde. Anyway.

Walter: For the network, we had a sponsor that had fiber running to somewhere near the field in Linde, which is in the province of Brabant—close to where I lived—and we had a party where we needed to lay the last few miles of fiber cable through the field. The organization had asked all the farmers, “Can we put our fiber through your field?” and they said yes, and they also got instructions not to mess around with the fiber cable. But there was one party that wouldn't give their okay—that was the Dutch railway—and we needed to cross the railway to get to the terrain. So, what I've been told—I haven't seen this but I was told that somebody had a small dog that they took with them and there are these pipes underneath the railway, and they sent the dog—a real live dog—through the pipe to the other side with a little piece of string, to get a string under the railway. And with that string they could pull the fiber cable through. So, we had the fiber there, everything was working—which is a challenge in itself because normally to lay fiber you have to have really expensive equipment because if you pull too hard it breaks, but we were just doing this with volunteers…and dogs. The day before the event we had it working. Oh, yeah. It was also fun—if you have a high-vis jacket and you walk past the railway station or the railway, the train drivers will just honk and wave. If you walk without the high-vis jacket, it's a different story. But it all went well—fiber was up and running. And then one day before the event, suddenly the whole network collapsed—nothing. Oops, we don't have anything on the fiber. But our fiber cable—we had multiple cables so we could switch to another cable, a backup cable—but that also didn't work. Okay, so that means we have some issues. So we had a party to go and walk along the fiber to see if they were cut somewhere, and I was with a party—we saw in one of the farmers’ fields that the farmer had taken the fiber out of the ditch and made a knot to attach it to the pole. We thought, “Well, fiber cannot handle somebody pulling a knot into it,” so we were contemplating what to do. And then we got a phone call that it was another search party at the railway track, and they found that somebody had mowed through the cable—they were cutting the grass. Yeah, there's a picture now, and I have a picture—the fiber wasn’t working. It was completely shut. So we had to quickly get somebody with the right equipment to splice the fiber cable together—and yeah, splicing—and that worked. So thankfully on the day itself it worked.

Walter: Another story I remember is that we were sharing the terrain with another event that was, I think, just after ours—which was from the Evangelical Broadcasting Corporation in the Netherlands—they have some kind of youth day every year; this is the place for Christian people to find their partner for life, for instance. Anyway, they were after us on the same terrain and we were in discussion with them to see if there was something in which we could cooperate logistically. We said, “Well, we are putting a one-gigabit fiber connection—I don't know exactly what the speed was—but we have fiber on the terrain, is that something you can use?” “No, we don't need the fiber, you can take it away.” Then they said, “But we will have fencing around the whole terrain, so maybe you will also want to use the fencing?” “Fencing? We don't need any fencing. Why would we need fences? People don't touch each other's stuff normally.” They couldn't believe that we didn't want fences because they apparently really needed them. As far as I know, maybe one laptop was missing afterwards—but that was all there was. Nothing really went wrong at What the Hack or any of the other camps, actually—and that's what is really nice about these camps: it's all very nice people who have good intentions, and that works really well. You don't have to have much policing or security or anything.

Walter: There was a thing that was not so nice for me: I was on the field where all the organizers were, and that field appeared to have no drainage—the water was not going away. On the other fields it was not so much of a problem. It rained so much that the next morning I woke up and I put my hand next to me—I was electrocuted because I had all this power stuff going on in my tent and all my computers. Then I thought, “Well, this is not very good.” So I slept a few days in my own bed at home because I lived very close to Linde, so it was easy to go back and forth. Luckily nobody was injured.

Walter: There was also the first event where the darton glow was used, inspired by the German camps—I am not really sure, but I guess it was at What the Hack. I have a picture of a tent where they had retro gaming—but mechanical retro gaming with pinball machines. I had a pinball machine in my house at the time, so that was also collected to be put there. It was rainy this event, so we had some nice days but also quite a bit of rain and thunderstorms leading to soaked fields. Here is a picture of a field with a lot of water in it—that was the volunteers’ field. Is that a normal or is that a darton glow? I think that is probably a darton glow—so, on the picture, yes, that is a darton glow. So, yeah: it's a very wet field with tents on it and a darton glow, which will keep the equipment dry—so that's a good thing. More of that later.

Walter: An important lesson I learned at What the Hack was that at the entrance they had, for fun, a detector. Everybody that entered the event needed to go through the registration tent and there was a metal detector which you had to go through. It didn't really matter what the metal detector said, but it was a nice way to play around with it. That was the first time I realized that the metal detector detects changes in magnetic fields. If you have metal on you but you stand stationary in the metal detector, it doesn't detect it—it’s about the change in the field. Which also means that if you have metal on you and you walk slowly through the metal detector, the signal is lower. Then I suddenly realized that at airports the people next to the metal detector always say, “Go through quickly, go through quickly,” and now I know why—to make it detect better. And that's why they wave the handheld detectors over your body instead of just holding it in one spot—it needs to be moving. Same goes for metal detecting on beaches to find old coins. It's logical, but I hadn't realized until I got to play with another detector at What the Hack, which is a very cool thing to do.

Ad: What the Hack was actually the first camp where my then-husband and my current husband went—so that's funny. They met each other there. He also mentioned the fact that it was a do-it-yourself security check and that that was really funny to him as well: “Okay, so you want to be secure? Do it yourself, just go there.” That is a volunteer-driven camp.

Nancy: What else can we say? Thank you very much for this cool story again and I hope to see you in the next one.

Walter: Me too, because there’s a couple of camps more until 2025 and we are gathering stories from ’80s hackers—and more on that next week.

Ad: Yet another cool story from Walter, who actually wrote a book about lock picking and lock sport. He did it together with Jos.

Nancy: By the way, Jos is one of the members of Team Content—and at Wiccon I spoke with Jos outside in the sun with a very cool old building as a backdrop. I recorded that interview and let's jump in to that now. We're here at Wiccon and we also have one-minded people over here and one of them is from Team Content. Welcome, Jos.

Jos: Hello.

Nancy: We’re doing it in English.

Jos: Hello, hello again. So, who are you and what do you do within your team?

Jos: Okay, I'm Jos Wires. I'm a member of Team Content. I've been in Team Content for three or four events in the past: MCH, SHA, HOME—yes, that would be three.

Nancy: So, what is happening with Team Content today?

Jos: Well, what we normally do is we keep on scouting for good speakers. Of course, the good speakers are also scouting us via the CFP. As it normally goes, people send in CFPs that you vet and figure out, “Would this be a good match and where should it be in the agenda?” But you also reach out to speakers. In that regard, I want to share a story from SHA 2017. A couple months before SHA, a pianist named Kimiko found that if you hear Bach on the radio, you have to pay rights, even though Bach has been dead for quite some years. If you look at the sheet music, that is open source—but the recording itself is newer. So she started a Kickstarter to “open source Bach”: she’d raise money, hire a studio, pay off all rights—so now you can actually listen to Bach for free, which was fun. I pledged to the Kickstarter because I wanted a lot of things, and then I thought she should talk about that open source thing on one of our stages. I reached out to her, she said cool, so I put her on the schedule. Then she said, “If I'm there, I should play it.” We in Team Content were like, “Does MCH provide pianos?” No. So we had to rent a grand piano, tuned five times because it was outside in a tent—sun comes out and it goes off tune. We had to get subwoofers, proper mics, stage reinforcement—and of course we did it, because it was stupid and awesome. It's that hacker mentality: weird stuff happens—it can happen and sometimes it's not even planned.

Nancy: Is there something going on for WHY? Some things in the making?

Jos: I can't spoil anything—mostly because it's not done yet. But CFP is still open, so if you have some wild ideas, send something in. CFP.WHY2025.org will work—or go to wiki.WHY2025.org and look under Team Content.

Nancy: Do you still need people on your team?

Jos: At the moment, no. We need ideas and CFPs. If a ton of people send CFPs, then we have to grade them—and that grading is done by the team. After that, we need more people to vote anonymously for the talks. So, we may call in more reviewers around February or March ’25.

Nancy: Anything more to add?

Jos: I'm looking forward to WHY and now we're having fun at Wiccon. Also, we're going back inside. Thank you very much.

Ad: So we heard you also about the need of some more volunteers for the reviewing process. Since the closing is 25th of May, it's not all day for now—sometimes it's not that urgent. What is urgent, though, is the Vacancy of the Week: Team Lead Sponsoring, because a lot of companies are reaching out that they would love to be a sponsor. We need someone to manage the incoming sponsorship inquiries—administrative things and making sure the team has everything they need. Good news: the first official sponsor contract was signed last week. Yay! We still have more money to raise, and we have a strict sponsoring policy—it’s not supposed to be a commercial fest, but you could put down your company logo somewhere and a few stickers inside your own little area. Team Sponsoring really needs help, and business owners often want to talk to someone in charge—sometimes that's how it works. We encourage you to sign up via the link in the show notes.

Nancy: And with that, I think we're down to our last item of this show: messages from listeners and viewers. We actually had someone on socials ask, “Are you gonna do more info on the badge?” Yes, we will—but not today. First I want to have some more history on how the badges evolved in past events. Further down the road we'll look at the badge for this event. Also, we had a message from Millie Ways from their organization—they were very enthusiastic about the shout-out in episode five earlier, and they will be at WHY in a big way. We're going to have an interview with Obsidian very soon-ish—stay tuned for that.

Nancy: If you have something you’d like to add to the show—feedback or comments—put them down below in the doobly-doo if you’re on YouTube, or email us at whycast@why2025.org. We also had someone reach out that she would love to make some shorts for the socials from epic talks at former events—nice soundbites, cool stuff. If you have a favorite talk from CHA or one of the predecessors, please let us know so we can make more cool content to get even more people excited about WHY2025.

Ad: Definitely. And with that, I think we’re at the end of the episode. Like I said, you can always shoot us a line and check the website. Check the ticket site tickets.WHY2025.org—keep refreshing it until it works. There will be more regular news updates on the website as well, so check that out. Follow us on all the socials. Thanks for listening to us and we hope to see you next Friday.