WHYcast transcript episode 2
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Transcript episode 2
Nancy: Hi and welcome to the WHYcast episode 2. I am Nancy.
Ad: And I’m Ad, and we are the hosts of the only podcast about a hacker camp in the world. This volunteer-run event will take place next year in the Netherlands, 42 kilometers above Amsterdam, from August 8th to 12th, 2025. So, Ad, what are we talking about today?
Ad: Well, there’s a couple of items we have to cross off the list. We start off with the project lead meetup from earlier this week—last Sunday, technically this week, I think. We have an interview with someone from Team:Terrain. Not just someone—Stitch. Right. And where to hack, obviously, yes, every week. We’re also going to be talking about the WHYcast vacancies for volunteers, and there’s a history lesson like every week with the Adinfluencer. Very cool. But first off, the project lead meetup—project leiding, as we call it in Dutch.
Nancy: Yes, project leiding in proper Dutch. We are with six people. I will share a photo, and you can also find us on the wiki because everything is on the wiki. That’s a very scary thing to say because we try to have everything on the wiki. So if you miss information, please let us know, or put it there. One of the things we wanted—or have to—work on is budget so we can determine a ticket price. Everybody’s favorite: budgets.
Ad: Right, yes. So we discussed it. It is interesting because it’s so relevant. Some things that are stupid but relevant enough are less stupid—or less annoying—because we need it. And we really, really try to keep the ticket price as low as possible while covering the cost of the event. It’s so easy to find a ticket on the island, so it’s worth the effort if you have to make a plan and want to keep the ticket price low. You can apply for a ticket from any device, but it’s really important. Again, we don’t want to drag this out—we really want to get on with the rest of the organizing, but yeah, it’s hard work, so bear with us a little bit more.
Nancy: But what we also did—and that is really cool, because I was looking forward to Fall Fest in September—are more physical meetups with the volunteers. You were there at Fall Fest, and I think we can agree that that was awesome. Pretty cool.
Ad: Yeah, it was awesome. I think that many people there had the same ideas and the same goal in mind, and everybody was just trying to be productive and constructive toward that goal. It’s a great, great feeling.
Nancy: We have online meetings for everybody who wants to be involved every month for now. The frequency will probably get higher as we get closer to the event. But online meetings are more like a serial thing: everybody talks about their teams and what’s going on. What you see at physical days is way more interaction between different teams—also a lot of people having fun, good food, friends meeting each other—so it’s more fun and more effective to have physical meetups. The first one is still this year, the 14th of December, and after that one every two months: February, April (the 5th, which will be a field day on the terrain), June 21st, and September. As always, you can find all the meetings—online and offline—on the wiki. There’s a “meetings” button in the menu. Mark your calendars: all meetups are on Saturdays, so you don’t have to take a day off work—unless your job requires Saturday work.
Ad: All the online meetings are on Wednesdays, and the physical meetups are on Saturdays. It’s international as well—people came in from Germany and the UK. It’s a lovely and effective way to make this awesome event happen. We need locations, preferably hackerspaces. We’ve already been to Bitlair in Amersfoort and Hack a Lot in Eindhoven. Bookworm has sent out an email to the mailing list—find it on the wiki—asking who wants to host which meeting. If you have a space for around 100 people to meet and work together on the event, please send an email to project leiding so we can make it happen at your location.
Nancy: Awesome. You already mentioned Team:Terrain and Stitch. Shall we hop into the interview right away? Let’s go to the interview with Stitch.
Stitch: Welcome to the WHYcast. Thank you—we have a WHYcast! Actually, hello, hello, WHYcasters. This is the first episode—we don’t know if it’s episode three or five, or weekly. It’s weekly, so you have like 50 episodes to go: one hour, half an hour, two hours, half an hour—42 minutes. Maybe 42 minutes.
Stitch: We’re talking with team members from all different types of teams to figure out what’s going on in your team—do you need help?—and share cool stuff about what’s happening in the preparations of WHY. Right, and should I break the fourth wall and say you have to help? You can always do that—fourth wall, fourth wall. Hello. What I’ve done now is work with Team:Terrain.
Stitch: Let me introduce myself—who are you? Hello, I’m Stitch. I have helped organize the past two camps. Now the burden has shifted to you and Crystal and lots of other people. This time I have no responsibility at all, which makes it even easier to organize things. I’ve worked on the Terrain team a little bit just to get that going. We’ve done site visits, made drawings—first drawings were absolutely horrible in hindsight, but at least there was something to talk about. Everybody said, “This sucks,” and, “Why does it suck, and what do you need?” Then we switched things over.
Stitch: We visited the terrain after the Liquicity drum-and-bass festival, which was five days prior to what we are organizing, so we saw how damaged the field was. We did some statistical analysis: it probably won’t be that bad next time, but in the worst case it will be as terrible as it is now. That makes part of the terrain “the Bad Lands,” which cannot be used. We figured out where to place stages, the food court, how to deal with waste streams or wastewater, and where to plan villages. That’s been on our minds for five, like seven or eight weeks now. The team is six people—nice. Red Lizard is the chair of that team.
Stitch: We just met here—some people took three hours to get here by train from Eindhoven to Fall Fest. Today is the 7th of September—really early in the process—but I think it’s starting to take shape. There haven’t been many complaints, so either we don’t communicate or we’re really good at our jobs. We’re requesting feedback now—we just presented it on stage. We need feedback from other teams, and if people want to help join Team:Terrain, volunteers are welcome. Other teams may be more in need of help, though. The next step is writing permit stuff—we’re pretty fine on that—and planning build-up, tear-down, and vendor arrangements for big companies that put up tents. That’s a while away, so we’ll slow down and then accelerate a few months before the event. The Terrain team is stronger now than it’s ever been—great. It comes in handy that we have someone who’s done it before. How are you doing with all this stuff so far?
Nancy: It’s still crazy fun. Probably a lot of fun because I don’t know what I don’t know yet—ignorance is bliss. This is fine. We’ll get to see how it feels in the last rush—how you look, how I feel. It’s good that there are at least two of us and six in project leiding and the whole team. Things happen, but I’m confident and still having a good time. There might be a sleepless night or two, but many on the team have been there already and know what to do. I felt okay.
Stitch: There’s always something. No breaking—no. That’s good. That’s what I’d like to hear. A small story: last time we made a super cool budget, but it was tight because things were really expensive with the COVID stuff. We made a tight budget and then the ticket price. When we summed up all the costs in the spreadsheet—cost this, cost that—we forgot one sale in the spreadsheet: 100,000 euros of the most expensive team. We were at the point of making a loss and thought we were going bankrupt—another 100,000 in the hole. That was the least fun part. The only thing I’d recommend is have more people checking the spreadsheet—five people checked, maybe have six—diligently. It will save you a lot of money. It caused panic—it was the lowest point, like “How much do they have? It’s gone!” That project was gone. That was really painful. You can laugh about it now.
Nancy: I will make new mistakes, right?
Stitch: I hope so. I learned from them.
Ad: Hopefully, yeah. So, well, I think we’re all set. In the coming few months we’ll talk to you somewhere again about other cool stuff you’re secretly working on. If you want to tell us more about cool stuff, come and bring it to us.
Nancy: Awesome. Very cool. Thanks. This terrain is going to look so awesome—so looking forward to it. Stitch is also probably the one who makes the drone images. If you look at the after-movie from MCH 2022 on our YouTube channel, he’s in our WHYcast there as well. It’s very cool that he’s still so involved and at the place where we are going to talk about hacker stuff.
Ad: Each week we will share where you can find WHY-minded people—where to hack.
Nancy: So, where to hack this time?
Ad: Next week, the 1st and 2nd of October, there’s the One Conference in The Hague in the Netherlands. It’s organized by the National Cyber Security Center—so it’s got cyber in it. I am speaking, and Stitch is speaking. This is a Stitch-loving episode, right? It all comes together. I will give a talk about why you won’t think at day one in the main room right before lunch. It’s called something along the lines of “The History of Dutch Hacker Camps.” The regular presentation is an hour, but I have to shorten it to 25 minutes, leaving out the future and importance—just history. Hopefully by the release of this episode it’s finished.
Ad: On day two go to Stitch’s presentation about how the Dutch raised the security baseline: what mandates are planning, transparency, and lots of cool presentations. I think tickets are in flight, which sucks because we want as many people there as possible. On Tuesday night there are parties all over The Hague with all WHY-minded people—keep an eye and ear on what’s going on, you will find them. Talk to WHY-minded people—they’ll know where to go. We can have some hacker parties in The Hague, so even if you’re not at the event, there are enough cool people to have an amazing time. I’ll share the link in the show notes: oneconference.nl. You can find WHY-linked people there and, of course, stickers.
Nancy: All right, let’s talk about vacancies—plural, because we need more people. We started out with the idea of one vacancy per episode, but we need more help. You are part of Team:Info, and there’s a specific role there we want to highlight: we need a social spammer. We need someone to monitor and post on social media—schedule messages, grab info from other teams that might be interesting, inform the world about what’s happening behind the scenes, and create bits of content. We have a lot to share, but it takes time to create and send it out. Social spammer can be plural—spread the load of content to get more friends and nice people at the event.
Ad: Also, Team:Permits needs someone to help with getting permits. If you hop in now, you can join the startup and kickoff. For now we don’t have many people in Team:Permits. No permits, no event. It’s such a grateful job because it’s so important to have the permits done, but it is a lot of work—harvesting all the information from the separate teams: first aid, security, fire, traffic—really a load. We only have two to three people now, so we need more to gather all the information and make sure we have everything. If that sounds interesting, reach out to Team:Permits or mail Nancy. On the wiki for Team:Permits you will see “mail Nancy.”
Ad: Then let’s hop into the history lesson. Do you have a cool history lesson for us?
Ad: It’s not just a history lesson; it’s also a little computer science explanation. Each episode we dive into a piece of history from the predecessors of WHY2025: 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 Anyway 2017, May Contain Hackers 2021, Mac-Ovid became May Contain Hackers 2022. This week we look at pegs—specifically, the wooden clampy things you use to hang clothes. But a very specific use: pegs as a DHCP server—or more precisely, a DHCP offer message.
Ad: First, what is DHCP? Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol tells a computer what IP address to use on a network, what subnet mask, and some other info. It was designed in 1993—RFC 1531 for those playing along at home. But it wasn’t commonly in use in ’97 when Hacking in Progress was the camp to be at. For the 1,600 computers at the event, something else was needed to work as a DHCP server.
Ad: They took a tent in the middle of the field and a huge bucket of pegs. They wrote the last numbers of the IP addresses on the pegs—all unique, because that’s what the DHCP server does: it gives out unique addresses. They also had paper with the subnet mask and other info to configure your computer. Then you could use the 100-megabit backbone on camp and the six-megabit internet upload—which was huge back then.
Ad: They had 40 kilometers of cable on the terrain—intense. But Hacking in Progress in 1997 had the first use of peg DHCP. You’d go to the tent, get a peg with a unique number, get the leaflet, clamp the peg on your network cable—wireless wasn’t a thing back then—configure your computer according to the number, and you were part of the network. Nowadays it’s done automatically in every consumer router. Your computer asks, “Is someone there who can tell me an IP address?” Your router says, “Yeah, take this one.” But in ’97 it was done with a peg.
Ad: On April 1st, 1998, RFC 2324 describing peg DHCP was released—April 1st might be significant. From reliable sources, that RFC not only got laughs but at least one relationship was formed because of it.
Ad: Back to today, back to now, back to the future, back to WHY2025. Thank you all for listening, and thanks, Stitch, for the interview. If you have feedback, comments, or cool ideas, leave them in the comments or email us at WHYcast@why2025.org. Tip us on cool hacker events or historical Dutch hacker camp stories. Visit the wiki for all information about the event and volunteering—for vacancies and everything you want to know. If it isn’t there, send us an email. Thank you all for listening, and see you next Friday. Bye day.
Nancy: Bye day.