Without a Traceroute

I guess the last time I wrote was over a week ago now. As you may have noticed, the site was down for a few days, too. Between that, and the fact that I haven’t been any place with reliable internet, it’s been hard. I’m going to try to get caught up, but I think I’ll do it as several posts because that seems to make more sense.

So, first, the Italian Hackmeeting. My biggest impression on first arrival was just how cool the location was. I think I mentioned this earlier, but the story I heard was that the place was built as a party mansion for a guy with mafia ties. It was pretty huge, with at least two main levels, plus the roof and the basement. There was also a good-sized coutyard with gardens and mosaic tiled fountains that I’m sure were quite impressive at one time. The place now is appropriately graffitoed (Italian word!) and grungy, with some pretty cool artwork and berpunk junk lying around. All in all, an excellent venue for a hackmeeting.

My other major early observation was that Italians eat like crazy. The first night, not everyone had arrived yet (I got in on Wednesday and the hackmeeting didn’t officially start until Friday), so there were only about 20 people to go out to dinner. A sizable number, but enough that we could all sit at one big table at a restaurant. First, we went to a sandwich place called Mr. Pannini. I’m not a big fan of the Italian almost-raw prosciutto, so I ordered the quattri formage…which also came with prosciutto, whoops. This was sort of a stand up/take it and go sandwich place and it took a long time for everyone to get their sandwich. So as we’re leaving the sandwich place, somebody goes, “Hey, you wanna go for pizza?” and most people were enthusiastic about a second dinner. We went to “Times Square Pizzaria” across the street from Mr. Pannini. They served individual 7-inch (18 cm?) pizzas. I got the “Empire State” which was basically a vegetable supreme. The pizza was very good, but it was in no way New York style pizza.

So then, as we’re leaving the pizzaria, another person is like, “Let’s get gellato and coffee!” So we had to go get that, too. In summary, I have no idea why Italians don’t all weigh 300 pounds.

The meetings were pretty cool. I frequently found myself wishing I spoke Italian. Among the presentations I watched, there was one on asymmetric encryption that was pretty interesting and seemed to do a good job of covering some of the history of crypto. I also saw one about some new P2P technology based on bittorrent, but apparently better in ways that were unclear to people who didn’t speak Italian. There was some stuff with ham radio that was pretty cool too, but again difficult to follow.

I had expected the meeting to be a little bit more international in character. There were a couple of Brazilians (from Indymedia, they had also been at the Budapest meeting), one German, and one other American there. The American guy spoke Italian, though. He was a pretty cool guy, but he was also prone to saying things like, “All currency is false currency,” which sounds sort of profound and radical, until you realize that it doesn’t mean anything unless you have rigorous definitions of “currency” and “false”. Now, I’m sure this guy did have those. But they’re so open to arguement that it pretty much defeats the point of having a pithy opening statement.

On Saturday night, they had a band play at the squat, and later I went into town with a guy named Gioseppi, who wore a denim jacket and was really into early-90s grunge and Kerouac. He told me he wanted to visit Seattle because, “That’s where grunge is from,” and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the grunge scene in Seattle has been dead since almost before Kurt Cobain’s body was cold.

Almost everyone was quite friendly and welcoming, and willing to try to talk to me in English, but not everyone spoke English well. It was quite isolating, and in some ways stressful to be surrounded 24 hours a day by people speaking a language you can barely understand. My stress was compounded by my laptop’s complete and utter failure on Friday. Some of the hackers were actually really cool about helping me look at my dead machine. I had initially felt bad about asking them about it. End user support is generally considered irritating and not worth the time by most people who actually know something. Plus, it makes me look like a “why can’t you fix your own computer?” moron.

I managed to get several people interested in it as a fun, curious challenge. Especially cracking the mysteriously-created BIOS password. One guy eventually guessed the password: all 0’s. Whether that comes about as the result of failing memory zeroing out values, or is some sort of default built into the BIOS, I don’t know.

Nobody could actually fix it, but they at least confirmed for me that it’s a pretty serious hardware failure that demands OEM servicing.

Also in the lame and irritating category, I slept on a couch of uncertain providence and awoke the next morning to find my hands and forearms covered with small itchy insect bites. I’m assuming bedbugs (couchbugs?). They’ve stopped itching now and have mostly healed, but it’s a week later and they’re still slightly visible. Lame.

There were a lot of cool things at the conference, however.

As part of a tradition at these hackmeetings, the DHCP was disabled, and anyone who wanted to use the network had to go up to a table where the “DHCP Umano” sat, provide him with your hostname, and he would tell you your IP address. I found this charmingly archaic.

They also had delicious pasta meals made twice a day by a group of volunteers. Anyone who wanted to eat kicked in €3 and was served. In the spirit of the free software movement, every day the pasta recipes were posted outside the kitchen, so that anyone who cared to could inspect the source code and make the food themselves if they liked a particular one.

All in all it was a really good time. It would’ve been better if I spoke Italian, but I met some cool people, including one guy who invited me to stay with him in Rome when I pass through that city.