This is my post of what we did in New York this past week. We went on Wednesday, but the conference didn’t start until Friday so we got a few days to visit around town.
Wednesday
We arrived at La Guardia on Wednesday morning at like 11:00′ish cause the pilot totally sped. We got a cab to the hotel, Hotel Pennsylvania and checked in and everything. We then took the subway downtown and went to Ground Zero. There’s really not much there to see except some mesh stuff and some construction. As a result, I didn’t take any pictures there because they wouldn’t be very interesting. After we saw that we went downtown further to Battery Park to see about going over to Liberty Island and Ellis Island. It was a little late in the day, so there would only be time to go to one island so we decided to just come back the next day. We then walked down Wall Street and then got on the subway to go uptown towards Rockefeller Center. We got tickets to tour NBC Studios the next day at 12 and then we walked down to Times Square. We went to eat supper at a Hawaiian themed Mexican restaurant, Maui Tacos and then headed to the Empire State Building. We took some pictures at the Empire State Building and then took the subway back to the hotel.
Thursday
On Thursday morning we went over to go on the NBC Studio tour. The tour guide guy agreed with me on why Last Call with Carson Daly is stupid,
which was cool. After we saw some girl from Chicago named Molly try and do the weather forecast we went to the little HDTV “demo” that they have
after the tour. It’s supposed to be this demo of HDTV and it’s got this three projector, 130 degree screen thing that they think is awesome.
It’s stupid because most of the images they show aren’t HD and you could see where the three images from the three projects were pieced together. Anywho, after that we went to see the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. You have to practically get cavity searched to get on the ferry to the islands…it’s retarded. So, I don’t know if you know this or not, but the Statue of Liberty is the only monument that still hasn’t been reopened since 9-11. You can go to the islands…just not inside any part of the statue. They even moved the gift shop to a tent outside. I’ve been inside the statue on the way to the top twice before and haven’t been able to go all the way up. And this time I got the shaft again…only this time is was by the Federal Government and not some crappy tour guide lady. This all basically means that there’s nothing to do at Liberty Island except walk around the statue and get on the boat again. Anyway, so Ellis Island is where people got new Americanized names a long time ago….’nuff said there. We then went over to China Town and Little Italy for supper. We ate at this really good Italian (obviously) place in Little Italy. It’s funny cause the people over there try to solicit business from you as you walk by. You normally don’t get that from restaurants.
Friday – Day 1 of H.O.P.E. – Click For Schedule
Friday was the start of the 5th Hackers On Planet Earth conference ran by 2600. I went to When Corporations Attack and then the keynote for Friday was Kevin Mitnick. He basically gave his life story and told some of his exploits and stuff. Very entertaining. We also heard
a thing on Hacking Nanotechnology which was with a crazy guy who
cuts holes in microwave ovens. Then we heard a talk on Terrorism and Hackers.
Saturday – Day 2 of H.O.P.E. – Click For Schedule
On Saturday there was a panel with Captain Crunch (the acutal guy!) and The Cheshire Catalyst talking about Phreaking In The Early Days. I caught the end of this talk. The Lockpicking panel was next, which was one of the ones I wanted to see the most. It was very awesome. I went to the lockpicking workshop after the lecture and learned how to pick locks. So I’m learning that skill now. I find it very intriguing and I think I’ve found a fun new hobby. I got a set of limited edition H.O.P.E. picks that were made for the conference and I decided to mail them back to myself since I didn’t want to take any chances and have to get a body cavity search at the airport. But I learned a lot more about lockpicking and I definitely plan to learn more about it. After lockpicking was Saturday’s keynote by Steve Wozniak. He also basically told his life story and he was a good speechifyer as well. It’s cool cause he’s a huge CEO guy that started these big revolutions, but he’s really a hacker at heart and not all CEO’y (if that makes sense).
After Woz’s talk, a guy that’s a PI talked about how you no longer have any privacy and told us all about these lists that are compiled on all kinds of ridiculous things. He did a demo at the end of just how much stuff is available on any one person by getting a volunteer “victim.” A guy volunteered and gave him his social security number and the guy put it in and looked up stuff about him like the last 30 places he’d lived and what not. He then said, “…and you also go by Jose Rodriguez?” The guy was like, “no…I don’t…” The PI guy said someone was probably messing with his social security number and that he needed to get that checked out. Pretty creepy if you ask me. So after that the
Cult of the Dead Cow was supposed to give a panel on Hacktivism, but it turned out to be some lady ranting about problems with computers and stuff in China. It was disappointing cause normally the cDc is really entertaining. This time…not so much. But I did meet some of the people from cDc and they were totally cool. We went to a little talk about Dumpster Diving too. It was pretty interesting. It was basically just stuff to keep in mind while dumpster diving. Last that day was a 4 hour marathon talk by a guy who used to be a spy for the government and his talk was entitled “Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Spying, 9-11, And Why We Continue To Screw Up”. This pretty much sums up what it was about. But it was four hours long and I heard about 3 and a half hours of those four and I’m not going to sum it all up here, but his main thing was
Open Source Intelligence.
Sunday – Day 3 of H.O.P.E. – Click For Schedule
Sunday was the last day of The Fifth H.O.P.E. The first thing I heard all of was about Urban Exploring – Hacking the Physical World. It was pretty interesting. The people showed a couple short videos from an abandoned asylum that they explored and it looked like it was straight out of The Blair Witch Project. They run
Long Island Oddities if you want to see more info about it. I’m sure they have stuff up there that will describe what Urban Exploring is. But it’s basically just going places that normally people don’t go. After that was Sunday’s keynote address by Jello Biafra. He was the lead singer of the Dead Kennedys. He’s pretty extreme and is pretty much just about awareness and doesn’t provide any solutions to problems. He was pretty entertaining though and is a good speaker overall I think. After Jello, came the Social Engineering panel. It was really good. Emmanuel convinced a guy at Taco Bell to not touch his cash registers at all for five minutes from 9:00 to 9:05 that night for “system upgrades” that corporate was going to do. He also tried to get the direct dial number of an American Express customer service center in India. He did it, but it took him like 30 minutes and 11 transfers around the world. They also demonstrated how to fake Caller ID which was kind of neat. At a very basic level, you just get a third party (computer) to make a three way call and tell it the forwarding information. After the Social Engineering panel, the last thing we went to was the Closing Ceremonies where everyone thanked everyone else and they gave away some stuff. The theme of the conference was “Watch the Watchers” in addition to a 1984 Big Brother thing. A guy is making a comic from 1984 and he drew the art for the banners. You can check out his stuff
here.
That was basically a summary of what we did for 5 days. I’ll put up the pictures I took soon and link them from the home page.
Big Brother Is Watching You
