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Reuters, one of the biggest news agencies of the world, was in What The Hack.
Their images went worldwide on their World News Service friday, 29th, with the following story for worldwide broadcasters and agencies.
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STORY: World's hackers are gathering for "WHAT THE HACK", their own version of Woodstock, on a campsite near Boxtel, in the south of the Netherlands.
A few thousand people have arrived on Day One of the festival, and according to the organisers have hired more than two thousand mobile phones.
Events like "What The Hack" take place every four years, and originate from a group of people originally centred around a small hacker magazine called Hack-Tic. The magazine's last issue was published in 1993, but the events continue to be organized. 1989 Featured the "Galactic Hacker Party" then in 1993 "Hacking at the End of the Universe", followed in 1997 by "Hacking In Progress" and the 2001 "Hackers At Large".
Recently the traditional "hacker issues" such as computer insecurity, freedom of speech and government transparency have become interesting topics for a wider population of a world facing terrorist attacks.
"The government doesn't want to make things secure. The government just wants to make sure that population has a perception of security. Real security is about weighting different measures, it's about understanding where security lies and where the flaws are, and that's discouraged. People are not supposed to understand where the flaws are. They are supposed to believe that mandatory ID helps against terrorism. Why? Because 19 people with perfect ID blew themselves in aeroplanes," Rop Gonggrijp, organiser of the event Reuters on Thursday (July 28). He added that Hackers are the people that help show the world these measures don't work.
Hackers argue that holding and owning information is wrong and believe it should be shared. They differentiate clearly between those who hack in order to make protected information available for sharing and free of use, and others, who damage and destroy for fun or for selfish purposes. According to the festival participants the 'baddies' are called Crackers, and have nothing to do with Hackers.
"There is a culture of sharing and of sharing information. So there is quite clear idea that information wants to be free and that no one really can hold and own information. Being a hacker who wants to hack on closed systems to make them open, to share knowledge, to share ideas, to be enthusiastic and curious about the technology, just became (a) really negative term," Marcell Mars, a passionate Croatian hacker and an activist from Egoboo.bits said.
According to many in a diverse hacker community, laws and regulations have been changed since the innocent times of the seventies, particularly to suit corporations in their quest to own information and to sell it, making it a profitable commodity.
In a friendly atmosphere of sharing, Arun Mehta, chief technology officer at Net Radiophony India, came to share his knowledge of writing (free) software for disabled people. Mehta is a creator of a famous one-click-software designed personally for prof. Stephen Hawking, a disabled genius scientist. Since then, Arun Mehta has been creating software for spastics, quadriplegics and blind people, based on the one-button-approach.
"There are people who are extremely motor-disabled. People like prof. Stephen Hawking, for example, who can only press one button. People who have...quadriplegics, who have spinal injuries, even people who are spastic sometimes have very severe motor disabilities, so they can only really press one button. So, one button can be pressed in so many different ways. You can do it with your eyebrow, with your tongue, you can have eye ball tracking devices, you can even have devices that can send electrical activity in the skull, so you can even by thought, provide a limited number of inputs to the computer," Mehta explained.
"What we are now trying to do is to train people who are themselves disabled to write software. It's very difficult for me to put myself in the shoes of a person who can only press one button or who is blind. So it is easier for me to teach person to write software than it is to write software for that person," he added.
On the campsite, pirate flags and stickers seem to dominate this community's visual image, together with more practical things, like beer and especially coffee. As most of the hackers hack all night long, coffee is a prerequisite for any action, and therefore has to be available fresh and strong. :-)
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Salomão Nuno