WHYcast transcript episode 8
| WHYcast episode | |
|---|---|
| Episode Nr. | 8 |
Disclaimer
This is the full transcript generated using AI tools and some human oversight. It may contain errors. Please review and correct obvious mistakes before publishing.
Transcript 8
Nancy: Hi, and welcome to the WHYcast episode 8. I’m Nancy.
Ad: I’m Ad. And we are the hosts of the only podcast in the world about a hacker camp. This volunteer-run event will take place next year in the Netherlands, approximately 42 kilometers above Amsterdam, from August 8 to 12, 2025.
Nancy: So, Ad, where are we today?
Ad: Today, we are at the NLLUG, which is the Dutch Unix and Linux user community. They have a couple of events per year and a lot of nerds—why-minded people—so that’s why we’re here. We thought, let’s do a sort of live recording on location. Yeah, at least the two of us, live. What are we talking about today?
Nancy: Sure.
Ad: Well, there’s some news. From Project Lead, as usual, we have a very cool interview. And we do have a Where to Hack segment, where we go into a little bit more about this event, but also where we were last week. There’s the vacancy of the week. And there’s a little history lesson, which ties in with Walter’s story from last week.
Nancy: Walter is actually also a speaker here about hacking in the 80s—which is not recorded, for real.
Ad: But I think we’ll start off with the news.
Nancy: Sure. So, the first news is that on the 14th of December, we have the first physical meet. That meet will be at Bitlair in Amersfoort.
Ad: There we have it again.
Nancy: And so, that’s big news. We think that the ticket sales of WHY2025 will start on the 14th of December, around the Dutch Sinterklaas feest—so approximately the beginning of December. That’s exciting news. Some people here asked me what the ticket price will be. It’s approximately €342, of course.
Ad: So we have been promoting a couple of events in the Where to Hack section of our WHYcast. We’ve both been to WICCON. Can you tell me a little bit about your experience?
Nancy: It was awesome again. It was now two days instead of one, like last year. There were more than 30 talks, if I’m correct.
Ad: A lot.
Nancy: A lot.
Ad: Yeah. And actually, after day two, I could go to an after party, but I was too tired because it was just so much—all cool people, very relaxed atmosphere. Absolutely, very, very cool to be there. And now we’re at the Enloof, which is not on a Friday. So we’re now breaking the fourth wall and letting you know: it’s recorded. It’s a Tuesday.
Nancy: Here we have Lars.
Ad: Lars is also here and he’s a volunteer, but more on that later. Very good cameo. Also, we have a new hackerspace in the Netherlands.
Nancy: We do. We have another hackerspace—the second one in Drenthe, in Emmen.
Ad: It just opened, and I’ve heard from Boekenwuurm—yes, Elboro, also a volunteer at WHY—that it was pretty cool, the opening. The municipality even was there, so they’re taking it very seriously over there in Drenthe.
Nancy: Cute thing.
Ad: So, if you have the chance, go visit.
Nancy: Absolutely. And those were the places where we could have hacked.
Ad: Well, Emmen—you can still hack in Emmen, of course, just like all the other hackerspaces. But there’s also… if you are listening on the day that this podcast comes out, you will have the time to go to another event tomorrow.
Nancy: The BSD Day.
Ad: BSD Day, the Dutch full-day event. It is in Utrecht, at the Maximus Brewery. If you go to bsdnl.nl, you will find all the information there.
Nancy: Yep. And if you listen to this podcast on Sunday…
Ad: You’re too late. You’re out of luck. You can go there next year, I guess.
Nancy: Yep. Cool?
Ad: All right. So, we talked about a lot of things, including WICCON. We did loads of interviews at WICCON, and today we are going to listen to my co-chair, partner in crime, Christel Boekenwuurm. She will tell us a little bit more about the volunteering things that she’s doing for WHY. So, let’s listen to the interview.
Christel: Yes. I’ve had some LED filament, and I thought I want to have a mini neon sign for my dress. It’s so cool. I really love it. So, I’m here at WICCON dressed as a neon sign for WHY.
Nancy: Very good, because we need more WHY promotion, of course. And we’re here together with a lot of other WHY-minded people to do so. So, Christel, what I want to ask you is: we have our next in-person WHY Orga meet in December. Can you tell a little bit about that and where it is?
Christel: So, it’s the next meeting where we can come all together to talk about what our teams are doing. We’re going to do that at Bitlair in Amersfoort. They have a new space, and it’s big enough for a lot of us, so we can come there, talk about how it goes. We will start at 3 o’clock—doors open at 2:15—so you can enter that early. That’s the perfect place to meet each other, talk about our teams, get a taste of all the teams. If you want to start, that’s also the place to start.
Nancy: And if you want to, you can bring your ugliest Christmas sweater as well.
Christel: If you don’t want to, that’s also fine.
Nancy: I also think it’s cool to mention that it’s the new location of Bitlair, because they just moved. It’s on top of another place.
Christel: Their door is visible if you know where it is.
Nancy: All the data will be on the wiki. It’s also a little bit of hackerspace warming as well.
Christel: And our opening party will be a bit later this year, but we can get a sneak peek.
Nancy: That’s cool.
Christel: We’re recording this at WICCON, the second day, and yesterday I did a talk about the history of the Dutch hacker events and what they did for the rest of the summer. It’s an awesome talk, because we tried this interesting concept: we do half of the conference to you, half to I, and some of them overlap, and then we do it together. It’s going well. It’s a nice little history lesson. I get to do what I love most: telling small stories and taking people with me. We go to all the events that are there and do a small highlight of one or two things that were noticeable. Then we talk about what WHY will be, what’s possible, what’s there, highlights of the vacancies. I think it’s a very nice addition to a tech conference like this, to have a small tech history lesson.
Nancy: Absolutely. It’s very cool. We did it at separate places, and we will be at the end of December at CCC Congress, hopefully giving this presentation—the CFP has been sent in, so let’s hope…
Christel: The content team has to decide, but we are available.
Nancy: Absolutely. We really want to. Open application here in the WHYcast.
Christel: One of the things I also admire about you is we have a WHY stand here at WICCON as well. Of course a lot of people have never heard of the concept of a hacker camp and have no idea. They just entered the cybersecurity scene and have never heard of it before. You can give a great explanation to someone who has never been to a camp like this before on how you can join in and help out on the fund. So, let’s say I’m new to this. I come to the WHY stand with our lovely banner and LED lighting. How can I get involved and why should I want that?
Christel: A big part of it is that it’s an amazing place to be. Hacker camps are really cool. There are villages with amazing things you can’t imagine. It’s a sense of community. It is a really awesome place to be. There are so many things happening: talks, workshops, just cool people to talk to. If you don’t have a starting point, you can always volunteer on the field. Volunteering is awesome. You do a two-, three-, four-hour shift and you get a meal in return. That means you get one of the best foods on the field for just doing a volunteer shift. It’s an awesome place to work if you don’t know where to start or don’t have any point of attachment. If you don’t know anybody else, that is a great place to meet people.
If you think yes, that’s great, but I want to do more upfront—that’s awesome; we love those people. You’re more than welcome to volunteer at WHY by emailing bookworm@WHY2025.org or volunteers@WHY2025.org. Then you can do a small task or join a team. Joining a team is an awesome place to find another community to prolong your fun upfront. You can be one of the people who makes from this empty field—where we’re going to build up—we can make something that a lot of people get so much fun, enjoyment, and learning opportunities from. It’s amazing to do that. There are so many things you can do, things you are good at, but also things you’ve never done before. You get chances to do things you’ve never done before: driving a golf cart, organizing banners, printing more stickers than you can count—all those things, whatever drives your fancy or whatever is needed. I cannot recommend it enough. It’s an awesome thing to do; it really enriches your life. I am so incredibly happy that I took the chance when I got it, and I want everybody to have that opportunity. If you’re doubting, get in contact and try to do something. It is amazing.
Nancy: This is why I asked you to tell the story. I love it. Thank you so much. I’m so happy that you’re my partner in crime with the other amazing IFCAT board members Robert and Henry, of course, and the rest of the pre-act lining, which we will talk about in the future. And the WHYcast as well, of course. We’ll have all the interviews in the future.
Christel: Thank you a lot. I’m very grateful we can do it together and with all the other people and volunteers. I look so much forward to seeing that field in 2025.
Nancy: Damn. Oh my God. We make such an amazing team. I just love to work. Christel is the brains of our operation; I just make a lot of noise. That’s what I do, which is cool.
Ad: Let’s talk about the vacancy of the week.
Nancy: Off-site transportation. And what is that?
Ad: They’re looking for someone as a team lead for off-site transportation. While there’s not much to do right now, soon there will be, because off-site transportation has to do with all the logistics from and to the terrain. There is a bunch of that, so we do need people. If you have a knack for logistics and like puzzles—fitting everything together—look at the wiki and you can find the information there to help out with off-site transportation.
Nancy: Yes.
Ad: Let’s go for the next episode of the history lesson. This is a bit of a weird one; we’ll do some introduction work.
Ad: Last week, Walter talked about HIP and showed the badge he got for HIP very shortly. A few episodes back, when talking about badges, Big Red sent me a photograph of his HIP badge in high detail, and that took me down a bit of a rabbit hole. So it’s not all that much about the camp—I wasn’t there, so I don’t know—how the badge was made and what hurdles you had to take back in 1997 to make a badge like that on the spot in the middle of a field. That is what this history lesson is all about. So let’s geek out.
Ad: Each episode, we’ll dive into a piece of history, something special 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 Anyways 2017; May Contain Hackers 2021—then COVID happened, so that became May Contain Hackers 2022. This week, we’ll take a look at printed badges because, as already shown by Walter very briefly in the previous episode—thanks to Big Red for sending that one in—HIP97 badges were printed on the spot in awesome black and white. You get your picture taken at the entrance, wait for the printer to go “brr,” and then have your personal badge for the event. It is not very surprising today, but back then digital photography wasn’t all that common. Browsing some old ads, I saw that the top of the line was a Pentium II machine with a four-gigabyte hard drive and a video card with four megabytes of video memory. Today we have specs a thousand times greater. Laser printers were something you had at the office; inkjet was what people had at home. Digital photography was just starting to become affordable; I saw cameras for sale for $300 in 1997, offering resolutions of 320×240 or maybe even 640×480 if you paid up—that’s 0.3 megapixels compared to the 50-megapixel camera in my phone today. Having in a field, in the middle of nowhere, a digital camera that takes a picture and immediately prints your name and picture on a badge would have blown my mind if I were there. I wasn’t, unfortunately, but I wish I was.
Ad: Looking at ads for a Casio camera, for example, it had two megabytes of built-in storage, which meant if you took high-quality pictures at 640×480, you had to offload them to a computer somewhere via a slow interface, then clear the pictures and start over again. There was a more professional camera—the Canon PowerShot 600N—which boasted a half-megapixel sensor and cost $1,000 back then (double that now, like an iPhone 16 Pro Max today). It would hold four images on the highest setting before filling its full megabyte of memory. Getting your picture taken on a digital camera in 1997 was not as trivial as today. That led me to a rabbit hole: did DSLR cameras exist then? Yes—in 1991, Kodak released a 1.3-megapixel camera, costing $30,000 back then (equivalent to $60,000 now). Nikon also had a one-megapixel camera in 1991, taken up with the Space Shuttle Discovery—not a regular consumer camera. The first real consumer DSLR was the Nikon D1, which came out in 1999, two years after Hacking in Progress. It cost $5,000 then (almost double now), offered 2.7 megapixels (similar to full HD video dimensions), and revolutionized price points. I’m not entirely sure which camera they used at HIP97, but I suspect something around 640×480. If you know, please let me know—put a comment on YouTube or send an email to WHYcast@WHY2025.org and maybe we’ll do a follow-up. Otherwise, we’ll look at some digital badges in a future episode.
Nancy: I did actually talk to people at this event and at WICCON—we have listeners, it’s amazing—and most of them like it as well. They are not mailing us yet, so you can always mail Nancy or the WHYcast. For now, I just checked: we don’t have any incoming emails or other things, but we would like to! If you have a very cool story from your previous camps you want to share, send us an email, or send in your video—that’s also fine—or reach out to us so we can do an interview online.
Nancy: Well, we’re at the end of this episode. See you next week on Friday.