This was based on 2 events: the "Chaos Communication Camp"
http://www.ccc.de/camp
http://www.ccc.de/camp/pressreview.html
and the solar eclipse, which I saw from near Augsburg while some
other campers went to Hungary.
http://Sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/TSE1999/TSE1999.html
http://iphcip1.physik.uni-mainz.de/Astro/eclipse99/h.html
http://www.solipse.com
The CCC was Fri-Sun 06-08 August and was in Atlandsberg, just East of Berlin.
I hired cars from Hertz (they have a deal "Le Swap" where you change cars in Calais for one that drives on the other side of the road. This seemed like a good idea for safety.) In the UK I had a Toyota Avensis at each end of the trip and in Europe I had an Opel Vectra. This was a French-registered car and had the added advantage that all the Belgian, Dutch and German drivers I annoyed probably thought I was French.
I crossed the channel in the tunnel on the Thursday intending to spend the bulk of the day driving to Berlin and arrive in the evening. In fact I got lost in some rural part of Belgium for about an hour and lost further time in Holland using small roads with 70 kph speed limits. I got some funny looks from overtaking motorists so it's possible I was obeying speed limits that did not apply to me or perhaps it's customary to ignore them. To my surprise the German Autobahns had speed limits on (in many places at least). They also had widespread roadworks marked and lanes closed although it was not always clear that any roadworks were happening. It did appear that some sections were being widened. I got further lost somewhere around Potsdam and in the end I stopped for some sleep at about 1:30 at a car park on the "Berliner Ring" A10 road. On rising at 5am the GPS showed me on the same screen as the camp site (previously marked with Lat and Long from the ccc web site). After that it was straightforward to Atlandsberg and there were a number of camp signs showing the HOG spaceship to help me along. Camp admission involved getting a wriststap to wear permanently as a ticket (prepaid in my case). Then I put up my tent in the crypto village area as marked on the camp booklet and went looking for people I knew. They were already on site but not up yet so I eventually identified the cypherpunks group activity tent to put my computer in.
While waiting for this I took a few photos and almost had my film confiscated by an eager member of the CCC. The photo in question was the inside of the "hackcentre" tent where many of the computers were set up on tables. This shot included many (distant) people and showed a something of the scale of the thing but without any detail of anybody's work. After going away to consult someone he allowed me to keep my film but said only details and not wide shots could be photographed at camp. (Better advance guidance for future events please !) This was the tent where I obtained my IP address for the camp, written on a wooden clothes peg.
Knowing that the cypherpunks tent would be equipped with European and US power supply (but not UK) I had brought with my computer some Europlug daisychain power cables, hoping to get power from the back of somebody else's equipment. This turned out not to be possible, largely due to the prevalence of laptops. So I made a shopping trip to a VOBIS shop in a shopping centre not too far away. They had exactly the cables I needed so my computer was set up soon afterward and named "formicro.camp.ccc.de". In future I think a European-UK adapter and a UK extension adapter would be good equipment for this sort of thing. I took a bunch of mixed fuses but they weren't needed.
Then I downloaded and installed pgp and ssh because carrying them out of the UK on a hard disk appears to require an export licence. These programs were deleted before leaving the camp site. This computer ran a slim version of Red Hat 6.0 with three network services. These were SMTP, finger and http. The finger and http servers were simple code of my own, with a low perfomance and high logging and not very close standards compliance, but did make sensible responses to likely requests and did appear invulnerable to the cracking attempts I expected them to meet. After recording some log entries early in the camp these 2 servers frequently died - if you know why please let me know. Operators of these hosts seemed most active in connecting to the services.
194.24.129.158 (sonar.camp.ccc.de)
unknown host 194.24.135.74
unknown host 194.24.134.160
194.24.133.123 (fuchs.camp.ccc.de)
194.24.128.201 (proxy.camp.ccc.de)
There were some denial-of-service attacks on the network. One of these seems to have been a smurf attack from someone who didn't know what he was doing. This proved particularly disruptive when the switches defaulted under pressure to hub behaviour (according to the description I got from Kurt Siefried). This culprit was found and made to clean the toilets.
The cypherpunks had bought a fridge and a sizable pile of food and drink for consumption by paid-up camp punks. They also had some inflatable chairs which were quite good for relaxing in. Lucky, Sameer, DDT, Adam Shostack, Hugh Daniel, Ian Goldberg, Alex de Joode and Judith, Alex Le Heux and Brian were all there. (Brian is a calf brain in a jar that can be seen in photos of HIP97 at www.sabotage.org.) As before, Lucky was the main organiser and obtained the tents and stuff.
John Gilmore I met for the first time and Kurt Siefried, Peter Honeyman and Ian Sparkes. Ulf Moeller turned up during the Friday, this time with short hair to confuse the SAR helicopter that had been inspecting the site early on. Bill Stewart, John Young, Zooko, Joichi and Tim May did not make it which was a pity as I'd have liked the chance to meet them.
On reading the timetable I found my talk was to be at 10pm on the Friday and it clashed with a talk on diversity of hacking activities given across the field by some other cypherpunks. This talk was on the angel software I have been developing and is available (unfinished) at www.notatla.org.uk. It took just about 1 hour (surprise) and covered all the important stuff. I realised afterward I had omitted a description of the time rationing but that was not really crucial to the talk and would have cluttered my diagram.
Other cpunk talks covered career planning, the "Freedom" product at www.zks.net
and the aims for collaboration between technically-skilled computer and crypto
users and human-rights activists in difficult areas such as Kosovo. Dave
Del Torto says these people are rarely available for meetings but he is hoping
to arrange a conference to help them some time in 2000.
ddt cryptorights.org
During one of the sessions John Gilmore predicted that in 15 years every common lightbulb will have an IPv6 address.
Camp food arrangements I thought were not as well done as at HIP, and it was awkward that the showers were closed for some time - seemingly due to the tanks having filled up. Food was there though, and if you wanted hunks of melon and cake and bowls of noodle stew and Arabic sausage in pancakes you'd be OK.
The weather was hot, as expected, with some rain. On Sunday night I went with Tobias (a German from the North who spoke good English) to an Indian takeaway for 18 meals which got eaten in the cypherpunks tent just after midnight. Monday was for packing up and leaving and I gave lifts to a few people before heading South toward the eclipse.
I had no hotel reservations so it was a case of driving round till I saw one and asking whether they had a room. I was rather unimpressed by 2 hotels which had conspicuous signs of "Hotel" or "Gasthaus" and then after parking I found small handwritten notes in the window about being closed for holidays. Anyway I found it possible to reach a hotel every night for the rest of the holiday, some nights it just took a little more work. On the Tuesday the traffic on an autobahn suddenly stopped and didn't move for 45 minutes. When it did move it was only slowly for about the next hour. People got out of their cars and stood around on the road. I never got to tell whether there was a crash at the front of that - it may have been cleared up before I got there.
From the South of Nurnberg on Wednesday morning I drove down to a rural area just North of Augsberg and set up a screen with a pinhole for viewing the eclipse. The weather was cloudy and rainy and there was initially nothing much to see except a deeper than usual darkness. Looking on a piece of card at the image that had come through the pinhole I could tell that the sun was about half covered but there was still nothing spectacular, only a sort of Winter evening darkness. According to the car radio there were 50,000 people gathered in Stuttgart to watch the eclipse. Around 12:30 I heard them cheering as they saw totality arrive and soon after that it was on me. The visible effects began with stripy shadows moving across the ground and proceeded with darkness falling in a few seconds at 12:36. This lasted about 2 minutes and was back to previous conditions.
At this point I packed up my stuff and tried to head for the Austrian border to visit Schloss Linderhof - a place Ian Sparkes says is in the same series of castles as Neuschwanstein but better. In fact the very heavy traffic and rain seemed to prevent anybody getting very far that afternoon and I abandoned the attempt and headed North again. While driving around some of the smaller towns I saw an overturned car being attended by a yellow helicopter and an ambulance. That night I stayed in Bayreuth where there are some hotels to be seen, but the traffic system keeps you away from them. I circled round quite a bit before settling somewhere. Further travels got me back home with little to report (unless you want to know about the Halle-Magdeburg roadsign that points down a section of road that is closed).