Andrew Orlowski on CodeCon, the cutting-edge technology conference produced by Bay Area Cypherpunks Bram Cohen and Len Sassaman.
Andrew seems to like the heavy emphasis on working code (even without working demos!) and the lack of comp'd journalists. <quote> Probably what made this grassroots conference so enthralling was the absence of people who talk about stuff, and an abundance of people who do stuff . This is in marked contrast to the O'Reilly P2P conference exactly a year ago, which no self-respecting blog giant (hi Dave!) or media pundit could afford to miss. Such folk were conspicuous by their absence at CodeCon. On the other hand, we did get to hang out with Captain Crunch, which was a treat beyond compare. Instead, there were precisely three hacks in consistent attendance. Annalee Newitz, who writes the terrific Techsploitation column for the Bay Guardian and the San Jose Metro; Danny O'Brien, whose natty precis of the event tops this week's NTK , and your own humble scribe. So if you were one of the creme de la creme of cryptographers present, you had no fear of Declan creeping up behind you to take your picture. Phew! [...] Although the organizers promised only working-demos, most of the demos didn't um, actually work. Most nearly worked, and in some cases were compiling before our very eyes - an authenticity trip that's hard to beat - but that didn't make them any less engaging. [...] The bit where Eric Hughes confesses to posting the RC4 code anonymously onto the cypherpunks list back in 1995 takes place nine hours in. The most "rock and roll" event, the details of Peek-A-Booty, takes place an hour later. Neglected but no less intriguing, is the Invisible IRC Project by 0x90. He's got a stream of the session itself, a 5MB download here . IIP has a three-tier approach, and looks and smells like an IRC network but has a fundamentally different approach: it rotates the keys constantly. 0x90 reckons it "can be used to do anything." [...] The other show-stopper is Jonathan Moore's ad-hoc 802.11 network project, Wiki Wiki Wan . Now the benefits of such spontaneous wireless networks are obvious, but hacking one together isn't easy, as it runs counter to how networks are put together. Did you say "packet collision"? [...] The bones of Mojo live on, in Zooko's MNET project, an hour into the stream, and the BitTorrent project. Of course BitTorrent shouldn't exist: we should all be using multicast IP by now, right? But we aren't, and BitTorrent is a neat hack to distribute one to many file shares over today's IP. </quote> [...] http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/24183.html
