Giant Ginkgo

I woke up pretty late and wandered over to the Network area after breakfast (which was hideously expensive!). A huge number of old computers had been assembled for people's use and exploration. Rows of old terminals, wintel boxes, and Mac classics were joined by an amazingly diverse assortment of old machines and gaming consoles. I pulled out my Powerbook, and discovered that there were several wireless access points available for my usage. I did my normal morning round of news sites, there wasn't anything particularly newsworthy going on Friday morning.

I went up to the main conference area, on the 18th floor of the Hotel Pennsylvania and checked out the view from the wrap around windows in the main room. It was pretty cool, with an odd painting visible from one side of the room and the Empire State Building looming a few blocks away on the other.

The first session that I attended was on the Cryptome/Cartome web site, an information clearing house on the internet. They started off talking about the history of the Hotel Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania Station next door and its links to the underground and 'hacking' going back many decades. The original station was truly beautiful and was unfortunately torn down in 1966 and replaced with an ugly modern piece of trash. Among the wide variety of materials posted on the site are some pictures taken at Ground Zero of the WTC. The photographer who had taken the pictures was caught on the grounds, and the police thoughtfully erased the shots that he had taken. Fortunately they were retrieved off of the smartcard later by knowledgable people on one of their mailing lists. Perhaps the amazing thing about the Cryptome web site is the fact that it is still available and accessible even though they are regularly watched by the government and other interested parties; the owners of it are not web people, but architects.

After the first session that I attended I figured that it would be a good time to go out and see the Met. I took the 'C' Subway to 81st and discovered that it let me off right at the entrance to the Rose Planetarium. I had been wanting to visit it ever since I had first read about it several years ago during its opening... So I walked over and got in line for a ticket. The building that it is housed in is spectacular. I had no idea that it would be so beautiful and well thought out. The show itself was quite impressive as well. There were times when the planets and nebula looked like they were hanging in space directly overhead instead of just being a projection. I can't imagine how much cpu went into creating the feature.

After that I wandered through Central Park and visited my old friend, the Met. It was as amazing as the last time that I saw it. I visited the Asian section and admired their large collection of Hokusai prints, which includes the view of Mt. Fuji and the Great Wave. Unforunately, the perfect head of Buddha had gone missing since the last time that I saw it (which was one of the main reasons why I had retread old ground there.) But I did get to see the lovely zen rock/fountain sculpture.

Back at the conference I attended the 802.11 B session. It was quite entertaining. They went over the different cards and attenaes that are available and showed different sniffing and wardriver tools. Everybody brought their wireless laptops with them and set up ad-hoc networks with silly names/commentary during the speech which could be read on the large projection behind the speakers. By the end of the talk, their software had recorded over 500 networks in the room.

The next session was pretty boring, "Tracking Criminals on the Internet." While the speaker had done some impressive sluething historically there wasn't too much meat to his presentation. It doesn't help when he starts pointing out obvious tracking methods repeatedly.

After that speech I went down to the network area, and had a blast hanging out with a whole bunch of different people. I learned a lot about just how open the internet is to being monitored. Unfortunately the script kiddies were out in force, they managed to basically halt the network traffic because of the flood of packets they were sending out to take it down.