          ___                ___
         /   | Sovereigns   |   \     As the shovel speaks unto the ground,
        /    |      of      |    \
       /     |      Bell    |  |  \     Hands that cannot build must steal.
      /  /|  |   __________ |  |   \
     /  / |  |  /          \|      |_        With love to Ma Bell.
    /  /  |__| /      |     \        \
   /   ---------\     |      \  |\    \
  /__________    \    |       \ | \    \
 /                \   |        ||__\    \      Issue #11 By Dr. No
/                  \           |         \          HoHoCon '94 Review
\__________________/_________ /__________/

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

	I woke up at 7:02, ate breakfast, did a bunch of stuff in the 
bathroom, threw on my uXu t-shirt (thanks GNN) and then hopped in the
car for the trip up North. There were three of us in the car, Dr. No (me),
Flatline, and Walrus. It was about two hours north of San Antonio, and
we made good time doing 85 MPH. To amuse ourselves, we read copies of
Guitar World, 2600, and PC Computing magazine. After we tired of that,
we listened to various musical groups on a tape that Flatline made.
These included Bad Religion, Green Day, The Vandals, Weezer, and of
course, the Beatles (including Paul McCartney's "Why don't we do it
in the Road". A classic.).

        We arrived in the lobby of the Ramada Inn South at about 9:15.
I canceled my night's reservation, because we couldn't all stay the
night. We proceded to seek out the nearest guys with long hair. We found
them. They had all sorts of stuff with them, including imitation compact
video cameras and stun guns. We faked like we were taping all the Fed-like
looking people who walked through the door, and had fun watching thier
reactions. Photon then came downstairs to smoke a few cigs and to chat
with the newcomers. (he was a co-organizer) He told us about the net room
which was where all the people who had brought computers and had some
sort of UNIX system on it took them, and they were networked all together
and put them on the internet as hohocon.org. He also told us about his own
personal internet site that he keeps up during the year that we could
play with. So far, no one has been able to hack it. He told us how he
made it hard to log in because he had put a password in at the connect.
It didn't even show any prompt, which lead most people to believe that
his system had hung. You had ten seconds to type in a password or else
it'll disconnect. After you type in the password you finally get a login:
prompt. You still have to guess passwords. There are no unix defaults,
except root. He has promised to share root access with anyone good enough
to get through. We also spotted some lady walking by with a huge tote-bag
and a tape recorder. I immediatly piped up "Press!" and Photon went over
to talk to her. She was from Texas Monthly, and was there to do a story on
the con. Bonus. Someone also mentioned that there was a blurb in the paper
about the con that day. Fuck we're 31337.

	At 10:00, we went to the first floor where the con was about to 
start and had to wait outside the doors while they set everything up.
There was a blind guy there who talked pretty loud and had a real strange
sense of humor, and all the magazines wanted to interview him. While we
waited for the doors to open, we got into a conversation about our internet
access. The three of us were afraid to tell anyone about our account (which
is probably the lowest priced on the planet, even though it has Nazi system
admins) for fear that we would get our asses kicked out of jealousy.
There were probably about 200-300 total at the con, and about three
quarters of those were waiting outside of the doors for them to open. It
was getting quite crowded. As I looked around I noticed that they almost
should have called it a PressCon, because almost the entire group of
people that were by the door were Press and ended up scribling like mad
throughout the entire conferance. I can't wait to see some of the reviews
we get. Finally the door opened. We paid our $10, got our k-spiff red
checkered wrist bands, and we were in.

        First we went to check out the tables.  Fringeware was selling
some k-spiff t-shirts of Dr. Doobs, 2600, LOD, and miscellaneous
Hacker clothing, stickers, etc.  Cable Busters was selling their
descramblers, some guy who looked like a hippie straight out of the 70's
was selling an ATARI and all 6 quadzillion games ever written for it, and
someone else was selling clocks made out of old computer scrap. Later
drunkfux was selling I Love Cops, I Love Feds, I Love Warez, and Taco
Bell/OJ simpson shirts.  I have never seen Flatline with so much money,
and so much enthusiasm to spend it.

        We then met drunkfux, the red haired, nose ringed, organizer. He was
hooking up a SNES to PC converter. People were playing Mortal Kombat II for
about an hour into the con. There were three speakers before the lunch
break. The first speaker was Jon Lebkowsky of FringeWare, Inc. He talked
about the commericialization of cyberspace and the ongoing effects of
the World Wide Web. He really didn't have a point to his discussion, and
most of his time was actually people asking questions and bitching about
how much commercialization of the internet was preventing people from
using its full resources because it cost so fucking much. About halfway
through his speech everyone started laughing and we turned around to
check out the spectical that had just walked through the door. Two guys
dressed in blue suits, red ties, mirrored glasses and ear pieces had
just walked in. Straight out of In the Line of Fire. It was fucking
hilarious. The guy that was sitting close to us with the fake camera was
dared to get up and act like he was filming them, but he pleasantly
declined the offer. Another guy named Thorn aka Juan Folgers, (who kept
bitching about a 30 something hour bus ride from Washington state) said
he would go get their autograph, and when he asked them, they declined,
saying "Not rigt now son, I'm busy." Then Flatline and Thorn started
drawing pictures of the feds and putting quotes in thier mouths. When
someone asked to see the pictures, they eventually got passed around the
entire con until they ended up in the fed's hands. It was fucking great.
The next speaker was a guy named Internet Master who talked about internet
security and what was happening was the internet engineering task force.
He got up there, spoke, and sat down in like 5 minutes. It seemed like
he almost didn't want to be there. In the intermission between speakers
some fat guy stood up and said "I own a local bar, and I'm going to be
passing around free passes. The "Crazy Lady" will have no cover tonight
for all of you with this pass." I grabbed four. Anyway, the next speakers
were Doug Barnes, Jim McCoy, and Jeremy Porter. They talked mostly about
cryptology and how it is effecting the current internet system as it
gets larger and more commercialized. Douglas Barnes gave a brief
background of cryptography, Jerry Porter gave an overview of current
electronic payment systems and how they were developing, and Jim McCoy
presented notes from an upcoming Primer on Underground Internetworking,
which is the concepts of setting up an "underground internet" sorta
speaking. It was kinda like having a PD board with a k-c00l 31337
Wh4r3ZZZZZZ s3ct10n hidden behind some high-ascii command.

        We then had lunch. We went across the highway to dunkin donuts
where we ate three donuts each. Flatline had picked up a "I love Cops"
shirt and hat, and I was afraid some pig might saunter up and strike up
a conversation on why we loved cops so much. We exited quickly, and went
back across the highway to the hotel, and into room 518, the net room.
They had five 486 machines, a 386, a bunch of dumb terminals, and a big
pile of phone crap laying on the floor. It all amounted to two different
internet sites: hohocon.org and hohocon.usis.com. Impressive. Apparently
about 3,000,000 losers tried to hack the site, including ones from sweden,
who were hitting all the POP mail ports and everything else imaginable,
looking for a hole. Can you imagine the eliteness of hacking root on
hohocon.org? heh. The entire net was mainly run by the before mentioned
Photon and his roomate _fool. No one got in. While they were talking,
Photon lit up yet another cigarette, and we watched the smoke in the
sunbeam. It was fucking bad ass, and was like a fractal gone 3d or
something. God I wanted to trip right there and watch that all night.
There was also a sheet on the wall on which everyone signed up to get an
account on hohocon.org so that while you were at the con you could do
whatever you wanted on the internet.

        Yet again, we went back to the con. The speaker from before lunch
harped on a little longer about digicash, and then he got off. He basically
put everyone to sleep. Someone teach that dude how to speak. fuck. Anyway,
the next guy who got up was Luke Barrymore aka Deth Vegetable, who was the
guy who wrote the OLD anarchy files Anarchy For Fun And Profit, which
described how to make a pipe bomb, among other things. What had happened
was some little shit in canada thought it would be cool to make a pipe bomb,
and proceded to blow himself up and send himself to the hospital. The sysop
of the board that this kid got the file from was later arrested and
charged with "Inciting Injury to Persons or Property", a felony, and
"Risk of Injury to a Minor". From what Luke said, this guy was on the
police's hit list anyway, and they were just looking for a way to bust
him. Well, Luke, knowing all this information was completely legal and
protected by the First Amendment, raised hell, and submitted a statement
to the court. This earned him a call from every fucking journalist in
the nation, including dateline and CBS. Luke agreed to go onto dateline
with a pre-agreed set of questions, and to his horror, was not asked any
of them by Connie Chung. Instead he was asked "Don't you feel responsible?
Don't you have any remorse?" which is one of those two sided questions
where if you say no, then you're a heartless bastard, and if you say yes,
then she asks "Well, why did you write them then?". Fuck You Connie Chung.
You should die bitch. Anyway, between the jokes he was cracking and his
interesting story, he cought everyone's attention again, and woke all
those who were asleep.

        All during the con things were being passed through the
audience. From disks, to flyers, to ads for a satanic orginazation (Mock
Him) it was there. We of course picked up everything, not knowing what
would be handy. Then the raffle came. They had neat-o prizes such as a
210MB hard drive, a 14.4k modem, a 600 baud South Western Bell modem, all
the issues of 2600, Mr. T stickers, autographed posters from Vanilla
Ice (yo, ho, ho!), Traci Lords pornos, South Western Bell Telephone
booths, acoustic couplers, the TAP collection, HOPE shirts, 2600 shirts,
and other assorted stuff. Some asshole had bought like 30 tickets and
won the Traci Lords, all the 2600's, and a few other things. We were
going to jump him, but we decided that the hotel security wouldn't
appreciate it. We didn't win anything. Fuck.

        The next speaker was Damien Thorn, the founder and president of
Phoenix Rising Communications and a writer for Nuts & Volts magazine. He
spoke on Cellular Hacking : An Introduction for the Technical Investigator,
and An Extensive Overview of Cellular Modification & Cellular Security. He
showed us several ways at collecting ESN's, what happens when and why you
can modify a cell phone, and showed us a preview of a video he is doing on
cell hacking. He also had a scanner going, and the people in the front row
who could see were writing down the numbers like crazy.

        We had to take off at the end of the conferance, because of
personal stuff (fucking KEGS waiting at home!) The stop at Burger King
was interesting, as it seemed there was one of every minorty working
there. Hmm. In Conclusion, overall the con was fucking great. The
schedule worked out well, the only thing on the schedule that changed
was that because the dynamic trio took a little longer than expected,
their speech carried over a few minutes after the lunch break. Other than
that, there were no major downbringings or harbringers during the con. I
don't think anyone was busted this year either, which is also a plus.

        Great Quotes from the Con :
           - "So what's good in this damn raffle?" - Someone
             "Your Mom." - Dfx
           - "Have the federal agents left? Okay, we have a Tracy
              Lords video...." - Dfx
           - "How many tickets did that fucker who won the Tracy
              Lords video and the 2600's and... buy?" - Crowd
           - "And remember, the public thinks that all hackers
              worship Satan.. and rape small animals, and ..." - Deth Vegtable
           - "And they sit around with their 40 ouncers of Hot
              Chocolate and say 'Get me some Marshmellows BEEATCH'" - Beavis

        If you want more info on the con, just want to chat, or are just
looking for a good H/P board, give the Truth Sayer's Domain a call at
210-493-9975. Shout outs go to Flatline, Walrus, Juan Folgers, Jack The
Ripper, and all the users on the Atmosphere and the TSD.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
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to lmb@tenet.edu. Thank you for your interest in         úÅÄÄÙ   ÄÄÅú
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