I’m back home now. Yesterday was the last official day of What The Hack. The whole day was rainy again but luckily nothing of our stuff got wet.
At 12 a.m. Joerg Platzer held a talk about intellectual selfdefense. Joerg was actually one of the guys that were traveling with me. The talk was about PR agencies, media, and politics and about how they cooperate since 1920 in order to leave the decision making to the elite. Like Henry Kissinger said: “Democracy is too important to leave in the hands of the public.” Regular training like in physical selfdefense is needed in order to develop you own opinion and not adopting the inflicted point of view.
Then I went to an introduction to mesh routing and the Optimized Link State routing protocol in specific by Thomas Lopatic who organizes a mesh network in Berlin and is a developer of www.olsr.org. Wikipedia explains quite good what a mesh network is:
Mesh networking is a way to route data, voice and instructions between nodes. It allows for continuous connections and reconfiguration around blocked paths by “hopping” from node to node until a connection can be established. Mesh networks are self healing: the network can still operate even when a node breaks down or a connection goes bad. As a result, a very reliable network is formed.
Again, very interesting and as there is a mesh network in Berlin I will definitely have a closer look on OLSR and mesh networking.
What The Hack ended for me with the closing session by Rop Gonggrijp. Rop thanked a lot of people for their work and talked about the problems with the local authorities. They had many problems with the police and had to follow many regulations. There was a mobile HQ police vehicle near the registration center and a helicopter landing zone had to be reserved for the police. Officially there were nearly 20 police officers on the camp while I heard rumors that unofficially there were nearly one hundred. A local security guy told me that the police !! tried to sniff all the traffic but then realized that it was just too much. The is a site on the wiki called spot the cop were people made pictures of suspected police officers.
Rop also said that the authorities stated that next time the camp had to pay the police deployment but could not determine how much police force they want. If this had been applied to this year’s camp, the costs would have been twice as high. Because of these problems the next camp might not be in the Netherlands, maybe in Germany.
Concluding, I spent some nice days in the Netherlands, fine talks, interesting stuff, and nice people. Oh, and rain…
