WHYcast transcript episode 14

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Transcript 14

Nancy: Hi, and welcome to the WHYcast episode 14. I’m Nancy. Hi, 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 8 to 12, 2025. So, Ad, the last episode of this year—what are we talking about today?

Ad: Well, we obviously will look at some news from Project Lead, some new things that are happening around the camp. We have a Where to Hack, as every week. We have a history lesson—a cool story with Walter on MCH. We have an interview with some people that we recorded at the last in-person Orga meet in BitLair. And we have the vacancy of the week with some nice news and messages from our listeners. And yes, this is the last episode of this year. So, we have to change the intro text for the next time to “will take place this year” instead of “take place next year.” I think we’re going to fumble that up a couple of times because we’re so used to saying next year.

Nancy: I’m psyched and a little bit scared at the same time, actually.

Ad: Yep, exactly. Exactly, because as of from tomorrow it’s only 222 days to WHY.

Nancy: We like nice numbers, yeah. Talking of nice numbers…

Ad: That brings us to the ticket sales because those are nice numbers. The numbers are looking awesome. If you’re listening to this WHYcast episode on the 22nd I’m actually at CCC Camp making recordings for later episodes, and hopefully we can also announce there that we’ve reached 1,500 tickets sold. We are getting there—you’re hearing it first—we are nearing 1,300 sold tickets right now. So, I guess that’s crazy cool. I would like to ask everybody, if you are on a social media platform—whether that be LinkedIn, or Blue Sky, or Twitter, or other cool stuff—please give WHY2025 a shout. Oh, I have to bleep that out because otherwise we’re going to get… (bleep). So, but we would love to get to the 1,500 before fireworks—and that can be the Dutch fireworks, not the Australian, because that might be too early—before the Dutch fireworks, that would be awesome. And something else is going on on the 27th as well, so—today, hopefully.

Nancy: You know all about that.

Ad: Well, I have seen a sneak peek of the upcoming merch for WHY2025 and it is looking so shiny.

Nancy: Tell us more.

Ad: We have a hoodie. We have a shirt. We have a separate kids’ shirt, which is really cool. There’s bags, there’s hats—the hat actually is two hats in one because you can flip it inside out and reverse it and you have a whole new hat. It’s a little safari hat so it does keep your ears out of the sun, which is really, really awesome. It’s the same style as with the previous caps, at least with Ohm—I still have that one upstairs somewhere. And if everything is going according to plan, by the time you can listen to this you can also go to tickets.WHY2025.org and order your merch.

Nancy: And of course we all love Douglas Adams, so there is a possibility that we can quote him by saying, “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” Yeah. Because we are volunteers on events—things happen, life happens, Christmas happens—anything could have happened. But if it’s not today, it’s in the coming days. You can find the merch online.

Ad: Exactly. And with that we have some more great news, because the first sponsor contracts have been signed.

Nancy: Special shout-out to Stegen Electronics and the S-Unit for signing up and sponsoring our event. Very cool—thank you so much. We hope you will make some noise for the WHY event as well on your platforms. That would be great.

Nancy: Also, another tiny project I’m working on, because it might fill an information gap, is I am fiddling around with this whole video-editing stuff—I’m trying to make short explainer videos for newbies. For now I have a short explainer that explains how you can sign up for the mailing list, because that’s one of the questions we get asked a lot at info: “How do I sign up for the mailing list?” But there are other things that are handy for a new and faster generation that wants short snippets. So I would love to make more explainer videos for new people and I would love to hear from our listeners: what topics should I cover? Signing up for the wiki, signing up for the mailing list, becoming a volunteer, signing up for the Angel System—I don’t know. Please fill me in. You can reach out to us at WHYcast@WHY2025.org to let us know what kind of explainer videos you’d like to see in the future. Yes, thanks.

Ad: And there are no stupid questions, only silly answers.

Nancy: And with that, you already mentioned that today when this is going live you’ll be at CCC at the 38C3.

Ad: Not only you—there’s a whole bunch of WHY-minded people over there.

Nancy: Absolutely. At least I know Boekenwuurm, Marieke, NetSmurf, plus a lot of other volunteers. There’s an assembly from Hackerspaces Netherlands where a lot of people will join us. The WHY-light from Henry will be there, the banners will be there, the tiaras will be there, the stickers will be there. A lot of people involved in the WHY organization will be there. So if you want to find us, talk to us—I will be there with our lovely little mics and recording equipment. If you want to be in the WHYcast with a cool subject or a question or anything, please come and find me or reach out to me if you can’t find me and let’s make it happen and create some more cool interviews for the promotion of WHY 2025.

Ad: I think it would be really cool to show people who are curious but maybe haven’t decided to actually go, to show them what Congress is all about—how that works, stories from that camp, from other camps in the past as well—just telling what people could expect. Why would you go to WHY?

Nancy: One of the quests I’m on is I want to seek out the lovely people of Chaos Post, find them, hopefully get an interview with them and write a card to the Adfluencer at Hacker Hotel and see what happens. So stay tuned for that in future episodes.

Ad: Cool, cool, cool—that’s a really cool idea. And so, speaking of the future…yeah, let’s go to the past. Each episode will be diving into a piece of history, something special from the predecessors of WHY 2025—Galactic Hacker Party 1989, Hackers at the End of the Universe 1993, Hacking in Progress 1997, 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, MacCovid happened so May Contain Hackers 2022. And this week we will be taking a look at MCH 2022.

Ad: All right, so we’re getting closer to WHY 2025. And what is also closer to WHY 2025 than to the first party, the Intergalactic Hacker Party, was MCH 2022—because there was apparently a thing worldwide that people shouldn’t be together, so MCH 2021 turned into 2022, and I think we were all there. And there’s obviously cool stories, but we’ll start with the stories from our special guest, Walter.

Walter: Yeah, so that was in the Zeewolde MCH. I’m very proud of MCH because that’s the event that I named. There was a competition for its name and I had some proposals sent in that I really thought through. Then at the end I thought “May Contain Hackers” might also be fun, so at the last minute I submitted that one and that was eventually the name of the event. I was again in the press team, but I also did a few talks at the event. I think it was really a continuation of the event five years before that. It had a similar vibe. And again we had these huge villages with all the big stuff that they brought. Organization-wise, everything worked pretty well from a press standpoint. What the press team does during the event is mainly get people over there from press and walk them around. After you’ve walked around a few times yourself, you know where the interesting things are for press people to look at. But of course there were also some lectures that got their own press attention, like the IVD that had a new hack they explained to the press. It was a bit different from, I think, an OM where we also had people coming and suddenly there was a guy who was actually storming from home—there was a guy who walked up to the tent and said, “Yeah, I’m making pictures for a local thing and I want to be shown around.” In the end I think he was just a hacker who hacked his way into the event.

Walter: The press people do get walked around; they don’t walk around typically by themselves. There was a bit of a problem at MCH: we had people from VPRO television who wanted to make an item for a youth program. They did the data show, they were walking around the family village for several days, made a lot of footage—but they were also accompanied continuously by people from the press team. In the end, it turned out they didn’t use the footage at all, so the whole thing was sort of scrapped. That was too bad. I also remember the nice lighting again and the interesting things on the terrain making it look interesting. I have a picture of a bit of the lighting at night—it was really nice atmosphere again. We had fireworks and—I don’t know if you’re going to interview the guy who was responsible for that.

Nancy: Yes, we did, and we will in the near future, because for WHY 2025 he’s building a physical firewall.

Walter: Oh, yeah—cool. Another thing that’s interesting: we discussed earlier the event where the Fox I.T. was at the camp and there was a lot of controversy with them being there. At home we had a big tent from NFI, which you might think could also be controversial, but this time it was very different. That was a very good dialogue. A lot of people went in and did all kinds of interesting workshops with physical hacking and reverse engineering, and they were all very positive about it.

Nancy: Oh, that’s the Dutch National Forensics Institute. Thanks.

Walter: Yes, and they do interesting stuff with soldering, iris decapping chips, looking inside—for the really technical hackers that’s really interesting stuff. So it was a really good vibe, I have to say. And just as with the one before, Shah, you’re really able to see that it’s becoming so professional—not super strict, but professional in the sense that people take responsibility, know what they need to do, and if not, they find somebody else to do it. There are really no major hiccups going on; everything runs smoothly, which is quite an achievement in itself.

Ad: I think what I noticed was that the commercial aspect was less. I mean, there are sponsors at these events, and if you want to know more about that on the wiki there’s Team:Sponsors. But instead of having a big village screaming “We are this company and we’re awesome,” there were just subtle banners here and there, and it was actually not really allowed together. I know for one company they had a flag opposite of their own company—they had a big flag “false”—and I think that’s a really cool way of being part of a group of people who use stuff in ways it wasn’t necessarily intended to be used, bending the rules out of curiosity, just wanting to try stuff. I think that’s one of the values of these camps: I want to learn stuff, I want to try stuff, I want to experience stuff, and together we can make that happen.

Walter: Yeah. We’ve also learned that we need to have certain rules for our sponsors, like what Nancy mentioned—that they cannot have these huge banners. It depends a bit on how you reach the company: if you talk to marketing people, maybe they want to do their usual event marketing. But if you have the right people within the company who understand that they’re hackers themselves, those people are in every company, then you can set up a presence at the camp that really makes sense—for example, NFI was there doing workshops and sharing knowledge. That works much better for marketing to technical people than just having a huge banner and giving away goodies.

Ad: And then it’s like our team sponsor says as well: we would love to have sponsors that really understand the DNA of this event and want to contribute to that rather than just get something out of it. There are a lot of companies that understand that very well.

Walter: And to get back to Fox I.T.—they were in the middle of the controversy. Later, Kuhn started to work for them—he was a key person in the organization of earlier events, so I hold him in high regard. It shows it’s not just a company; it’s certain people you deal with within a company. If you get the right people with the right mindset, it doesn’t really matter which company it is. If they’re there with the right intentions and to share knowledge, that’s great.

Nancy: So one final question that I’m very curious about: what are your plans for WHY 2025? I know you’re in Team:Press, but are there more things you already know?

Walter: No, I might or might not be involved in the build-up phase—putting up tents and stuff with a smaller group of people. I really enjoy that; it’s physical work, not brain work. If I have time for that I might do it. I’d like to participate in press, walk around on the terrain, maybe do a lecture again. I have this lecture at the Hacker Hotel about hacking your dreams—I think that might be an interesting topic for MCH.

Nancy: And we will also see you at—or have seen you at—NLLUG with the talk about the old hacker stories.

Ad: Depending on when this gets edited in.

Walter: I haven’t talked about hacking in the old days in public. It was all legal then because there were no computer crime laws, but it’s not something I’d want to present for a big audience and have it recorded for the Internet. We’ll see. “Hacking your dreams” is a beautiful topic—I would go to that. I really like it when people hack technical stuff; I enjoy those sessions. But cross-pollination between hackers and art—or medical psychology in this case—is an interesting place. I remember past events had wonderful talks about DNA; that was fantastic.

Ad: I was there. Very cool.

Ad: Already looking forward to WHY, and thank you again for all the great stories. If you come up with more, please let us know. If you’re listening and think you have a cool story about a camp, get in touch—send us an email at WHYcast@WHY2025.org and maybe you’ll be on air with us, or we’ll just tell your story.

Nancy: And if you work for a press outlet and you want to be on the camp and talk to Walter, you can find his contacts on the wiki and we would most gladly show you all the crazy cool stuff we’re doing at WHY.

Walter: Yeah, and press—don’t hesitate to contact us when the event starts, because we’d very much like to have people involved before the event to explain what we’re doing and spread the word.

Ad: Awesome. Thank you very much and see you next time.

Walter: Thank you.

Nancy: So although a lot of our visitors are very fond of their privacy, we also have to welcome the press. It’s very cool to have some press coverage as well, right? Something amazing is happening and it’s always a bit of a balance between how we reach new, interesting, cool, authentic thinkers and hackers without jeopardizing the privacy of our visitors. I think it’s good to have someone like Walter in the press team who knows how our community feels in these cases. Very cool.

Nancy: Shall we talk logistics?

Ad: The official name of the team is On-site Transportation, but yeah—it used to be just Logistics. Manduca is someone who has been doing this for quite a while, and he has a few cool stories. But first he’ll dive into what on-site logistics does, how it works, and what happens there. Let’s listen to that.

Nancy: So we’re here with Manduca today. Can you tell us a little bit about what you are going to do for WHY 2025?

Manduca: Well, surprisingly for a lot of people, I’m doing logistics—on-site logistics mainly. So we move everything except people.

Nancy: Except people—because we have Team:Shuttle for that.

Manduca: Yeah, this is also kind of his platform. In preparation, the good thing is you’re not dependent on any other team except Terrain a little bit, but everybody is dependent on us. That makes preparations basically easy. I always have a good plan, but the plan is that I don’t have a plan. I just organize that I have all the stuff I need—forklifts, tail lifts, some big telehandlers because we really need them, cherry pickers, that kind of stuff. I make sure I have the right equipment and a small dedicated crew, and then we can fix everything.

Nancy: How many people are in the crew?

Manduca: On on-site logistics now about five, six people.

Nancy: And are you in need of any more help?

Manduca: No—everybody wants to drive forklifts, understandably. I have enough. If you want to join me, you have to please me somehow—maybe next time.

Nancy: Sometimes people drop in at these Orga meets.

Manduca: That’s okay. Other teams probably will need a lot of volunteers, so please volunteer—we need everybody, but not for on-site logistics.

Nancy: And why do you volunteer each and every time? You’ve been there as long as I can remember.

Manduca: My first event was HIP in 1997—I had a day ticket and then I kind of fell in love. I’m not a hacker in the sense that I use Linux on my laptop and hack my way around; that’s not my thing. But I like the atmosphere—the friendliness, inclusiveness, the weirdness—everybody can be themselves, and I really love that. And I like to organize things, help people fix things they didn’t organize, because amazingly at the first event I was in the organization, which was HAL in 2001 at the campus of Enschede—there wasn’t any logistics, things just happened somehow. So at the next event, What the Hack in Linde, we decided “Why is there no logistics? We need a team for that.” I ended up knee-deep in garbage because people didn’t organize their trash—so now we have Team:Waste. We had growing pains: at first we were emptying trash cans into a big container, which wasn’t handy, so we rented a trash compactor for the next event. During teardown we ran to the compactor, pressed the button—and nothing happened because there was no power. Next time we’ll put power on it, and now we have two compactors. We learned to put one behind the kitchen because that makes the most mess. It’s all part of organizing. I did shuttles at Hacking at Random so I optimized that. I try to move things around logistically and make it really fun.

Nancy: Well, thanks for shedding a light on that. I’m probably going to ask you more stories in future episodes.

Manduca: Always welcome—I have enough stories about leakage in the bar and stuff.

Nancy: Sometimes people say, “I have something cool to share in the WHYcast.” I think you recorded an interview with Dave, right?

Ad: Yeah—it was kind of like “OK, we have about five minutes left, I’ll turn on the camera and see what happens.” So it’s a bit messy, but very spontaneous—that’s the charm.

Nancy: “Authentic,” if I were a real estate salesperson.

Ad: Absolutely. So here we go.

Ad: We’re still here in Amersfoort at BitLair for the in-person Orga meet on 14 December 2024 in preparation for WHY, and I’m here with Dave.

Dave: Yes. People may know me from Hackfest where we did a few interviews. Now we’re at the organization for the next event—you may know I’m active in the demo scene. The demo scene is a bit more about abstract art and live coding. I also did it at MCH 2022 at ByCharm and everyone liked it, so my intention is to do that again. We have a demo village page (it’s a little empty right now, but by the time this goes out there will be more). If you’re interested in the demo scene or active right now, I invite you to come to WHY and connect to the demo village and maybe participate in ByCharm.

Ad: Well, very cool.

Dave: Also HSNL village with 3D printers like last time—but that’s community-organized: I kick it off and then leave it going. I’m from Techalab, representing the hackerspaces.

Ad: Very cool—well, we’ll see you at WHY.

Dave: Yeah, thank you, and see you all at WHY.

Ad: It’s always fun with Dave—he’s a cool guy. For the hackerspaces, HSNL village organizes itself. He does ByCharm on stage; I recommend you check it out. I’ve linked the MCH ByCharm recording in the show notes so you can see what it looks like.

Nancy: And let’s not underestimate all the love and effort Dave is putting in in the Permits team as well—he didn’t want to talk about that during the interview, but yep, valued member.

Ad: We could also always use more volunteers. Tell me, what’s the vacancy of the week this week?

Ad: This week we have Team Food Court still looking for some people—and we all want to eat, right? Please look at their wiki page for contact information and get in touch if you want to feed the people.

Nancy: Good food.

Ad: Last week we mentioned Team Party Area and I know talks have been going well and we might have someone for that position—so that is awesome. New volunteers are coming in. And listeners are sending in questions, which is pretty cool. One asked: can we do a campfire? Well, open fires are not allowed. Based on MCH’s rules (which I doubt will differ for WHY, but it’s not finalized yet), no open fire or coal/wood barbecues. Cooking is allowed with small camping cookers and gas bottles up to 250 grams. If you have a bigger village and want to feed a lot of people with a large gas-powered cooking apparatus or barbecue, get in touch with Team Fire so it can be inspected. Electric cookware is fine too—but in accordance with Team Power’s guidelines, because if we all turn on induction cooktops at once we’ll probably blow the generators. So no open fires, no coal or wood barbecues—other things can be arranged in communication with Team Fire (they may even provide a dedicated fire pit somewhere). That’s another listener question out of the way.

Ad: If you have more questions or feedback, leave a comment below if you’re watching on YouTube, or send us an email at WHYcast@WHY2025.org. Like, share, and subscribe to this podcast or video—however you’re getting this into your earholes. We can always use more friends on social media. Thank you for listening, and see you not just next Friday, but see you next year.

Nancy: See you next year—and next Friday, because that’s another WHYday. Hey.