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Paris Hosts the Second Hacker Space Festival 55

Posted by kdawson from the cette-annee-a-paris dept.
zoobab writes "Hackers from all over Europe will meet at the end of the month (27-30 June) at the second Hacker Space Festival in Paris. The four-day schedule includes conferences and workshops on: Metasploit, HostileWRT, FPGA for beginners, ICT disaster recovery, software patents in Europe, Hadopi, and many other topics. The future of Hacker Spaces will also be debated. The event will be hosted by the first French hackerspace, /tmp/lab, located in an industrial zone on the outskirts of Paris."
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Paris Hosts the Second Hacker Space Festival More

Paris Hosts the Second Hacker Space Festival

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  • HACKING (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AndGodSed ( 968378 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @02:54AM (#28262307) Homepage Journal

    Is a dying art - and I am not referring to malicious hacking. That is a term spawned by the over-hyped media.

    Being able to hack a system to get it to work is sadly something that less and less techs are able to do. Format-reinstall is the mantra of techsupport lately.

    And these tools that the summary mentions might not refer to that kind of hack, but they still have some real-world positive applications that seem to be eschewed by the new generation of IT staffers, and when something does go bork in the night they stare wide-eyed at the screen and look for the re-install disks without thinking of running a diagnostic such as NMAP or metasploit (yes it can and should be used as a diagnostic tool) to find out where the problem actually lies.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by siloko ( 1133863 )

      running a diagnostic such as NMAP or metasploit

      . . . if only all system borks were network related. For me these are amongst the easiest to track down and fix, it's the weird hardware faults, software incompatabilities, driver issues, badly written shell scripts firing twice a day etc., etc., which take the time. Obviously it would take a drive failure combined with an untested backup routine which really causes face slapping incredulity but that's rare around here . . .

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by rdnetto ( 955205 )
      Don't worry, we'll get off you lawn. :) In all seriousness though, this is just a reflection of modern society; it's become cheaper to replace something (or reinstall from scratch/backup) than to actually fix the damaged product. I once knew a guy who reinstalled Windows because the sound from his mic was being played back through his speaker (turned out he'd fiddled around with the volume control). It took 5 sec to fix that, yet he chose to spend over an hour reinstalling. It really just comes down to w
      • Every time I hear "It's faster to reinstall (OS)", I think, "This guy doesn't do very many things with his computer".

        • Re:HACKING (Score:4, Interesting)

          by EdIII ( 1114411 ) * on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @05:34AM (#28263113)

          Every time I hear "It's faster to reinstall (OS)", I think, "This guy doesn't do very many things with his computer".

          Sometimes it is faster. Time is money, too.

          I could spend the time to figure out what the problem is, but at some point you realize that not only is it going to be faster to reinstall the OS, but it is going to be a BETTER solution.

          The better question is, WHY are we reinstalling the OS?

          If it's malware, spyware, weird persistent popups, then reinstalling the OS is the only SANE solution. You will never be absolutely certain you got rid of it, and if it is still doing something to your system. Reinstallation provides peace of mind in many cases as well, and is pretty much required in a corporate setting.

          If it's just a problem relating to one specific program, then either update the program, or do a reinstall of that program. There are some cases where it is literally so fucked up, that you need to start with a fresh OS install just to get that program to work again. I personally have spent 8-10 hours trying to figure out why a program did what it was doing, before finally realizing that my time was going to be better spent elsewhere. Was that software developer going to give me anything for it? Unlikely. Could I have made money doing something else? Probably. The best example I can come up with off the top of my head is fucking Vongo. That was a nightmare crapware additive on HP laptops a few years back that had no solution (a working one) anywhere. Not from Vongo or HP. Their suggestion? Pay us more money.

          Driver issues? Sometimes a reinstall is going to be required as well. You can only do so much, and when reinstalling the drivers and the tcp/ip stack does not work..... well you are screwed. You can get mad and spend hour after hour trying to fix the driver depending on your level of skill from dumbass to god-like kung fu, but your time would have still been better spent just reinstalling the OS and moving on.

          What about imaging? If you perform a clean install, updates, and an installation of a basic software package that includes most of your tools and development platforms, and then set all your configurations correct and then create an image, how is using that image to fall back a "bad thing" as you seem to suggest?

          I recommend to most people to keep their data on separate partitions and drives for a reason. That way you CAN reinstall the OS or go back to an image within 15 minutes and not be forced to use your time to get down deep into the OS and actually figure out what is going on.

          Not everybody has that kind of time, dude. That is what some techs forget. Yeah, you can treat it as a challenge and a problem that must be solved. However, somebody is paying for your time one way or the other. If you can solve the problem quicker for your client and get them back up and running, well then you really should do that. Figure shit out on your own time. I don't know about you, but if I decide to go the 5 hour route to figure out the why, instead of the 20 minute route that I KNOW will fix the problem, it will cost my clients hundred of dollars.

          My overall point being that you are being a little bit simplistic and condescending to hastily condemn somebody as ignorant and unsophisticated simply because they chose a path of least resistance instead of deliberately choosing the "challenge".

          • Could I have made money doing something else? Probably. The best example I can come up with off the top of my head is fucking Vongo.

            That just sounds wrong on its own.

          • You know... I have my Gentoo server since 2001 now. I changed the whole hardware. Twice. Had numerous problems. And solved them. Something that I never had been able to do with previous systems. Even Linux ones. The point was, that the installation forced me to finally understand the OS. To me this even was a fun process. (And the forum people and wikis helped me more than words can say.)

            So it basically ran nice for more than 8 years. And to re-configure it all would take at least a month. That's how custom

            • Ooh another Gentoo server geek! At our company all our large servers and client servers (save our Windows Webserver [you gotta have at least one meh]) are gentoo boxen.

              A 1U server just showed up - ready for install. Not my job to do the install though, but I will be going with a guy on Friday night to install it in the cabinet at the DC.

              Woot!

          • The decision whether to repair or to wipe a computer is not always easy. I've been fixing computers for a long time, to the point where many of my clients are other IT professionals in need of support, and my hourly rates are significant.

            A common scenario involves multiple malware infections on a computer with numerous applications installed. Wiping and properly reinstalling the machine will give guaranteed results, but will take hours due to the large number of updates and patches required. With luck it's

    • Re:HACKING (Score:5, Informative)

      by AceJohnny ( 253840 ) <<jlargentaye> <at> <gmail.com>> on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @03:44AM (#28262563) Journal

      Actually, I think we're seeing a bit of a comeback. Hackerspaces are mushrooming [wired.com] around the world. (I like to believe the talk at the 24th Chaos Computer Congress in December 2007, Building a Hacker Space [events.ccc.de], helped provide impetus to this movement.) I also believe DIY culture is on the rise again, as spearheaded by Make [makezine.com].

      So I'd say it's not so much that hacking is dying off rather than being handed over to the new generation, which has its own interests.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Brietech ( 668850 )
        Don't forget groups like NYCResistor (www.nycresistor.com), HacDC (http://hacdc.org/), Noisebridge (https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Noisebridge), etc. Hackers are still around =)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rmccann ( 792082 )
        Yeah, we're making a Hackerspace in Dublin, Ireland

      • The hacker foundation hijacked the term as if they invented all these places, American arogance.

  • What an eclectic group of topics (Score:5, Insightful)

    by e2d2 ( 115622 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @03:17AM (#28262415)

    After I saw FPGA and Verilog right along side making your own bio-diesel I knew, this was a really eclectic group of topics being talked about. I envy you insensitive euro-bastards. Where is my hacker space festival (in the US?) All we get is lame gatherings of steam-punkers doing the cosplay thing in the desert while modding their cases/cars/bodies to look like they were built by Jules Verne .. or commercial gatherings where it's free pencils and a few days at the poker tables in the area.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by lekernel ( 1279600 )
      www.notacon.org is pretty good.
    • Create one! HSF can be done anywhere, by anyone... Need is the mother of Hacking :) Do you have it? It just requires energy and positive mind :) Do you have them?

    • How about making one happen? I would come... if I weren't in Germany. ^^

      Ask the people of this festival, if you could start a franchise festival at your place, and if you could work together to get you going.
      Protip: Contact some event managers. And let your visitors pay for their work. It will be worth it.

  • Plenty of 20 minutes slots for Lightning Talks (Score:5, Informative)

    by zoobab ( 201383 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @03:41AM (#28262549) Homepage

    There are still plenty of 20 minutes slots for Lightning Talks to present your project:

    http://www.hackerspace.net/lightning-talks

  • Some interesting videos of last year:

    http://www.justin.tv/hackerspace/all

  • The HostileWRT presentation appears to have been cancelled, which is too bad, it's the only thing in the summary that looks particularly interesting.

  • When I first read the headline, I thought Paris Hilton would be hosting the event! Perhaps she's just been a hacker in disguise all of this time!

    Oh well.

  • Not having my coffee yet, my mind entered a warp zone like when your eyes can't focus on the wall.
  • Just check the official Schedule ( http://www.hackerspace.net/schedule [hackerspace.net] ) and you'll see it's still there.

  • Paris Hosts the Second Hacker Space Festival

    No matter what you think of her lifestyle or social antics, ya gotta give her kudos for taking on a whole festival...

    Does that make it a hole festival?

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