CodeCon 2002 (blog entry) is now over. After three days of presentations from friends and fellow hackers, I now know what most of them sound like and what some of them look like. Plus there are a bunch of cool goodies…

After getting slashdotted, jwz has pulled the audio archive… maybe someone will offer to help host using BitTorrent, one of the P2P file swarming tools presented at the conference.

Meanwhile, when the CodeCon folks decided to host the Freedom Server 2.x source code and got slashdotted themselves, Ryan of Sealand/HavenCo pulled their access to his server (where CodeCon.org is hosted) and refused to give up the domain name. The site was moved to codecon.deor.org in the middle of the conference. Ryan plans to use the CodeCon name for a set of conferences run the way he wants them to be run.

The interesting parts of the conference were the unscheduled bits. The Freedom source code release, Eric Hughes revealing that the he posted the RC4 source code to sci.crypt from a diskette he received in the mail and Tinfoilhat Linux (a Linux distro for really paranoid people).

The panels were also interesting, and revealed the hacker value system on display. The first night was “Money: Do we need it?” where hackers explained they just wanted a way to hack on their code with a nice machine and fast Internet connection and not starve. The second night was “Legality: Could we be in trouble?” where hackers explained how they dodged the less-liked parts of the law.

Overall, CodeCon was an insightful look into the hackers who are developing today’s interesting software. Now we just need to find a way to keep them developing it.

posted February 19, 2002 10:08 AM (Technology) #

Nearby

My Flamboyant Grandson
CodeCon!
EarthWeb by Marc Stiegler
Students, Teachers and Dragons
CSS: Client-side rendering rules
CodeCon Wrapup
The Copyright Tax
Goodbye, Brent.
Aaron’s Photo Albums
Aaron joins Creative Commons as RDF Advisor
Learning on the Road

Aaron Swartz (me@aaronsw.com)