July 14-16, 2000, H2K was hosted in New York City. I first arrived at the con just before 1pm. I was scheduled to speak with Weld Pond at 1:00pm about the MTV Hacker documentary. I first had to get my badge for the con itself. So I went to the 18th floor and after waiting for a minute or two I finally was told speaker registration was being held on the 6th floor. Waiting with tons of people for the elevator and it stopping on every other floor on the way down I finally got to the 6th floor registration and had no problems. I met Weld Pond on the 18th floor and we sat in on the last couple of minutes of the panel before ours. The crowd was pretty good and we did have a bunch of great questions from the attendees.

After the panel, I went outside to have a smoke and connect names with faces. I cruised around the network room, looking for something to drink I find a water cooler. The water was warm. I then looked for a network connection and the t-1 seemed to be down. I was a little upset at the first day not seeming to be an interesting time. I decided to go home for a bit. I then returned in time to go to the 'Freedom Downtime' premier. This is where things started to get ugly. The only way to get into the movie was to have a ticket. The tickets were free but it seemed like that gave out too many tickets. The Red Shirt people which were supposed to be helpful, as the handouts said, were nothing but confused and rude to people who spent $40 to see a convention. I did see them usher certain high profile people in but for the regular attendees that weren't already inside, there was no luck. Then one of the Red Shirts yells out "We cannot let any more people in and we have no other plans of showing this film this week" The crowd just had a real bad vibe so I left again.

Saturday morning, I look at the schedule and I see that Jello is supposed be giving his keynote at noon. I arrive there at noon just to hear about more confusion. I don't know if it was true at all but there was a rumor that Emmanuel and Jello over slept. The whole schedule throughout the day was pushed back 1-2 hours. I caught a little of the Hackers and the Media panel but it again turned into a lot of the same questions from the panel that I was on. I walked to the Network room again and talked with the guys in charge of the network. They were very helpful and told me that the t-1 line was up. One of the guys made a patch cable for me and after testing a couple of connections I was up. There really was no challenges on the network, most people were running windows, boring. There was alot of IRC traffic but there was a bit of clear text traffic on the LAN, hope those people changed those passwords. I later bought my beer, played on the network some more. AbbyNrml and GhstWrtr were supposed to spin at 11pm but a bootleg of X-Men surfaced. I didn't go watch it but when reports came back, the story was that it was so unwatchable that they stopped showing it. GhstWrtr and AbbyNrml finally went on to spin at 2am. I left hoping for a better day tomorrow.

Sunday, final day, I arrive at the con to see the Social Engineering panel making sure that I am early so I get admitted. Well when I get there, I hear that it too has been pushed back. I go into the main stage room early to make sure I have a seat for the SE panel. The speaker ends and a helpful Red Shirt fellow asks the crowd what are they there for, the audience shouts back "Social Engineering!". "Well" he says, "That's right, but they are holding it in the other room and we are going to broadcast it into here". Some of the people got up and ran into the other room while most stayed to see what was going to happen. Well first the audio came up and then they set up a screen and projector. It worked for about five minutes and then the picture went out. Meanwhile Emmanuel, Cheshire Catalyst and V1RU5 were calling an AT&T operator and then AT&T corporate security. From what was being said, I really didn't get the point of what they were doing. Then they had connected with Kevin Mitnick, and it turned into a Question and Answer panel with Kevin Mitnick, some old school stuff about Motorola and ATT. Then, that was it. I was like come on, there has to be more phone calls, but there weren't. Three years ago, Beyond Hope had a great panel which was really funny but this years just couldn't compare.

There was alot to complain about. The fact that people had to travel from the 6th floor to the 18th floor for panels was silly. It really didn't have that carnival-like atmosphere that the other cons have. I really can't wait for DefCon and if there is another HOPE, I would think that this was a lesson to be learned.                                    -tommEE

Shortly after writing this I started receiving emailed reviews of the event...



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On Mon, 17 Jul 2000, Shaughn Shea wrote:
There were definate lessons from h2k.

I personally think Emmanuel was an ass for choosing a hotel
that didn't fit the first HOPE for a third and larger con.

The T-1 didn't work at BH either, yet this time around noone
seemed to attack the culprit, BellAtlantic, like they did at
BH.

The problem with red shirts, it's a volunteer staff. A handfull of
them got off on assumed power, and were assholes.

The guy whom you quoted was told to stay of the floor after that, not
because I had any power to tell him that, but because I had the right.

I personally went down to the 6th floor,and elsewhere, even into the
running panel, to find people who got turned away and bring them to
seats. Those important people you mentioned were brought there upon
Emmanuel's request. His vip list, his section. We in red didn't decide that.

It was nuts though, and the first day was a bore.

You can't seperate a con like that, and you didn't mention that the
hotel threatened to fine us 5000$ if we didn't obey the fired code on
the 6th floor. Those rooms only held 75 persons, which is ridiculous for
a con with ~2300 people in attendance.

Oh, and Emmanuel didn't oversleep, but Jello did oversleep viciously, and
noone on security (and security had to deal with the crowd
told anyone he was still sleeping five minutes before show time.

Eric telling us Jello was coming up in the elevator was a load of bull.

This only added to the fun of moving 500 in the main stage from the last panel
past the 725 who had jello tickets and the 200 more who didn't. The tickets were
to try to stay within the firecode seating limit, which the hotel was up our ass about.


I apologise if the reds you dealt with were assholes. Volunteer staff,
very shorthanded, and we can't always get around that.

Space was a crucial thing. You just can't split the con, it kills the
atmosphere, which is was hurt it the most. The only enjoyment I got out
of the con was the people, and I enjoyed that a lot. That doesn't make it the
great success that 2600 is calling it though. We can certaintly do better.

The redshirts were attendees who paid 40$ who got the right to be hated,
called 'nazis' or worse called 'feds', who saw few panels at all. Yet I don't
mind because I still had an experience to meet many people in person I'd
only know online, and that was good. It broke the weaker red shirts though,
and so they became the assholes.

The SE panel was pathetic, and I don't know why. Apparently 2600 would
like its syncophants to worship Mitnick as a S.engineer now too. I
wonder if he realised the true injustice in his case is being masked to
make him 2600's media whore.

You called the redshirts confused, and that is exactly right. When the
guy with the gun was roaming around the con, Emmanuel told one of us to
piss off. Security basically had to run the con blind. Noone told us about the
fire code beforehand, noone told us we were the liason to the hotel, noone told us
that the network team couldn't handle getting the T1 up and running, and
noone told us the AV guys didn't have enough people, and would bail on
us like they did before the CDC show. Security was told to run fiber, we ran
fiber from 18 to 6, set up fiber<->cat5 hubs, and they were never used. It was supposed
to stream both floors into one place, but AV and/or networking never did any of
that.

I don't aim to make excuses of point fingers, but it wasn't all asshole
cowboys. Keep in mind that a redshirt could have been any staff member
what-so-ever, and none of them had a complete picture. 2600 for the most
part left the volunteers wholly unguided.

The little experience I had with the moloch crew, was only chit-chatting
in the elevator, or elsewhere, never in any official fashion, except for
watching the mixer for Delchi, while Ron was spinning, and that I had to
leave when reports of the explosion came over the radio (I actually
never heard it over the music).

And the explosion, Would such idiocy have happened if people weren't bored at night?
There was no carnival, just alcohol, movies and egos.

The savior of the con was the people. It was a location, little more. And for that is was good.
To say more however, is an exercise in denial.

To end this overly long letter with the reason I wrote it,
I apologise for ignorance I could not curb.

Shaughn Shea


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Why DEF CON beats H2K
By Drew Ulricksen, ZDNet News
July 17, 2000 6:27 PM PT
 
 
NEW YORK -- If you're a hacker or a fed with a limited budget (yeah, right) and are bummed that you couldn't afford to go to H2K as well as DEF CON, rest assured -- you haven't missed anything yet. 2600 magazine's H2K, or Hacking on Planet Earth 2000, is over but DEF CON 8.0 is coming up in less than two weeks.

While there were a few redeeming qualities to H2K this year, it sure wasn't worth a plane ticket to New York and the cost of staying in the scummy Hotel Pennsylvania. In my humble opinion, DEF CON is far more informative and entertaining.

At the start of H2K, people were starting to wonder whether it would take the crown away from DEF CON as the premiere hacking conference. Most of that speculation was due to the appearance of such hacking greats as the Cult of the Dead Cow -- a much hotter commodity now, post-Back Orifice, than who were during the last 2600 con in 1997 -- and the backing of 2600.

But cDc's performance at H2K didn't seem to compare with their rock concert of a show at DEF CON 7.0 to unveil BO2K. cDc's H2K show was quite bizarre and most of it seemed to have been thought up a few minutes before. As for the unveiling of a new cDc application by Sir Dystic, he said to wait two weeks, until DEF CON 8.0, which left me wondering why I bothered coming.

full story here


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the H2K website is here

Also you can check out these past HOPE conventions:

 

HOPE
Beyond HOPE