I went on a caving trip yesterday, along with my friend Rachel from Pomona, who’s also here in Budapest. I thought it was a pretty cool trip. We went into the raw, undeveloped part of some of the many kilometers of limestone caves which lie underneath Budapest. We had to do a fair deal of scrambling over rocks and squeezing through small spaces. One particularly tricky one was called the “vinklie” (spelling?), which according to our guide means “90 degrees” (right angle?). Basically, the passageway was shaped roughly like an isosceles triangle (with the narrow angle facing downwards), and about large enough for your shoulders and hips. To quote our guide, “You have to lift your hips up, or you will get stuck…not forever, but maybe you leave a shoe behind.” So you wiggle along lying on your left side, using your left arm and one leg to try keep your hips and shoulders elevated in the wider part of the passageway. Then, about 2 or 3 meters along the passage, it turns abruptly to the right (hence the name) and you have to sort of worm your way around the corner.

Our guide was pretty amusing in his own right. He was apparently a very avid caver, and spent a lot of time bragging about the really cool caves he had explored. At the same time, he was critical of boastful show-offs in the caving/mountaineering community who walk around the street wearing carabiners and talk about their adventures constantly. In his defense, we were in a very cave-oriented situation, so it made some sense for him to regale us with stories of his travels.

He also wins the award for the most inadvertently profound-sounding statement of the trip. When we turned off all our headlamps in one of the rooms, our guide was heard to remark, “Without the light, the people can see nothing.”

The directives seem to be written with the mistaken idea that the ISP market looks like the mobile phone market, with only a few, large providers. Of course, if small ISPs are driven out by the costs of trying to comply with the directive, then that’s what the ISP market will look like.

Anyway, because I’m lazy about writing right now, here’s some photos of the Széchenyi Baths I went to yesterday. It was a pretty neat experience, kind of like a cross between a public pool and a water park. One thing that isn’t very obvious from the photos was the fact that it was actually really cold out, but the water is extremely warm (25-40°C depending on which pool).

This might be the best photo I've taken

The main outdoor pool

Playing chess in the pool

Golden hour

If nothing else, these experiences have put the fear of God in me with regard to data backups and I’ve been burning CDs, uploading to servers and saving to flash drives like crazy during the good periods. The all-or-nothing nature of the issue leads me to suspect the problem might be as simple as a loose cable connecting the drive. I don’t have the necessary tools (a very small screwdriver, basically) with me to open up the computer and take a look, but I’m going to try to borrow one.

In the meantime, I did manage to download and burn a copy of the Ubuntu LiveCD, so at least I’ll be able to have a functional system, even without a hard drive. The worst/most annoying part about this is just not having any confidence in the hardware. It’s not fun playing roulette to see if your computer will work when you need it to. This goes for other pieces of tempremental, but vital equipment, too: cars that only start half the time, bikes that frequently get flat tires. In some ways, it would almost be better if they didn’t work at all. That way, you’d know where you stand.

Anyway, I’ve got a bunch of notes (mostly on paper) from the Budapest conference and the last couple of days, so I’ll try to get up to date when I get a chance. I’m flying to Palermo, Italy in a few hours for another hacker conference, but I’ve got a 10-hour layover in a small regional airport outside of Milan. I’m debating whether it’s worth going into town for lunch. Right now, I have to go pack.

Last Saturday in Budapest, there were at least three significant political demonstrations. The first was organized by the Hungarian Democratic Charter (HDC), theoretically a non-partisan group, but one that was founded by the Prime Minister, Ferenc Gyurcsany, head of the Hungarian Socialist Party. It was a large, peaceful demonstration against extremism and fascism, and several thousand people showed up (one source I read said 4,500, which seems plausible after being there).

There were nice old people wearing red hats

Hey! It's the prime minister! (somebody pointed him out to me)

Another rally was held by the Roma (or “gypsies” as they prefer not to be called), this demonstration later joined with the larger HDC for a march to the square in front of the Parliament building.

Roma Marchers

The cardboard sign says 'everyone deserves respect' and the blue-and-green flag with the sunburst is a Roma flag.

The final demonstration was a counter-rally staged by several far-right nationalist/fascist groups, including the Sixty-four Counties Youth Movement (the name–which must be catchier in Hungarian–comes from the territory held by Hungary prior to WWI), and the Jobbik party. I never got close enough to get a good look at them, but news reports seem to put their numbers between 500 and 1,000. By all accounts, the right-wing protesters were radical, angry, and violent.

The Hungarians at the data retention conference told me that these right-wing groups usually stage violent riots several times a year, and that September 20 is a particular holiday for them because of the birthday of one of their historical heroes (which is why the anti-fascist demonstrations had been scheduled for that day). The Hungarians I talked with were generally very dismissive of the political aims of the rightists (“They’re just like football hooligans, they like to get drunk and fight”), but they also reported that the right-wingers have been growing in number and becoming better organized every year.

The other force present in central Budapest that day was the police, and they were out massive numbers. It seemed like every cop in Hungary was there, and they were all decked out in riot gear. I snapped some photos, but they don’t really do justice to quite how omipresent the riot police were. I would say at a bare minimum, there had to be around a thousand cops there. Every major intersection had cops guarding it with metal gates, which they opened and closed at different times in response to the movement of the crowd and the rioters. There were even more cops who I saw either piling into or pouring out of these APC-esque vehicles which moved them around the center.

Riot Cops

The cops' APC/tank thing

More riot police

It was clear that the authorities knew the right-wing demonstration was likely to turn violent and were taking no chances. They were well-equipped, there were enormous numbers of them, and they clearly knew what they were doing: opening and closing intersections to funnel the rioters the way they wanted them to go. As a demonstration of the efficient and overwhelming power of the state, it was frighteningly impressive.

As an American, the entire experience was somewhat strange for me. For one thing, I’m not at all used to fascists being a real and dangerous political force that must be opposed with large rallies. In the States, “fascism” has long since evolved into an empty and meaningless synonym for “whatever political position I strongly disagree with.”

For another thing, I’m not used to sympathizing with the riot police. Despite their imposing uniforms, plexiglas shields and truncheons, the Hungarian riot cops I encountered were generally polite, and even friendly. I saw tourists taking photos with their arms around two cops. At one point, I was going to lunch with some other people from the conference (none of whom spoke Hungarian) and the restaurant (a vegetarian place run by the Hare Krishnas) we wanted to go to was down a street obstructed by riot police. After some confusing inter-lingual back and forth, somebody gestured toward the restaurant, “Can we just go to the vegetarian restaurant?”, and the demeanor of the riot cops instantly changed, “Ahh…vegetarians!” and they opened the gates to let us pass. Apparently violent rightists do not frequent vegetarian restaurants. Afterwards, we joked that “vegetarian” was the secret password for getting past Hungarian riot police.

The only “bad” encounters I had with the Hungarian police were when they searched our bags before letting us enter the HDC rally. I don’t know whether this was a legal search under Hungarian law, but I thought it was justified since the Prime Minister was at the rally, and the other side was throwing Molotov cocktails. Also, a riot cop shouted at me for jaywalking and crossing against the light. I thought this was pretty ridiculous since there were absolutely no cars on the roads due to the demonstrations and the police roadblocks, but you better believe I moved out of the street double-time.

The riot cops seemed effective at keeping the rioters boxed in and away from the peaceful demonstrations. They also did a good job of keeping “normal” people away from the violence. This was a little disappointing because I would’ve liked to get close enough to take some photos, but on the whole they were doing their job well, and I’m glad I didn’t get the crap kicked out of me by violent fascists. The news reports say the rightists were tear-gassed, and some of the Hungarians told me that “They use the same strategy every time. They fence them in and beat the hell out of them, and leave them only one narrow way to leave when it’s over.” I can’t speak to how the police treated the rioters, but they were well-behaved in everything I saw.

This woman and her little daughter found themselves on the wrong side of the police barricade. They let her through right away.

Zagreb was cool, much livelier than Pula. The group at MaMa was really awesome. They are very much less ideological than the people in Pula, but that allows them to be more inclusive and they have a great community. They have a thing called “Skill Sharing” every Saturday, where people come and hang out and show each other how to do cool stuff. There’s a pretty diverse (in terms of age and gender) group of 20-50 or so people who come frequently. They even have a few people in their 50s and 60s who AREN’T old-school hackers, but rather people who learned computers/free software later in their lives. I think that’s really cool.

Saturday Skill Sharing

Oh, and after the meetings, everyone goes out for pizza together. Everyone at MaMa was really friendly and welcoming. They were even willing to switch a whole table of conversation from Croatian to English just for my  benefit. Probably the funniest comment was Marcell talking about people who know just enough about computers to seem like they really know a lot about computers, they’ll drop a phrase like “I had to recompile the kernel,” or “flash the BIOS,” and if you never actually ask them more questions or have a real discussion with them, you’d assume they were totally 1337. He said it reminded him of a guy who’d been teaching him yoga and meditation: At first, Marcell thought the guy was the smartest person in the world. He hardly ever spoke, and when he did, he’d dispense really wise aphorisms. Then after a while, he realized the guy was actually really dumb, and just spoke in nothing but wise aphorisms.

One guy told me he thought it was harder to become a good hacker these days, because lots of the small, but tricky problems have already been solved. These are the kinds of problems that one person just starting out might work on.

I also went to a couple museums in Zagreb. The technical museum was pretty cool. They had a lot of really good exhibits on different subjects. My favorites were probably the section with very early computers, a whole room full of very intricate and informative models of heat engines (everything from a refrigerator to a Saturn V rocket) by Ivo Kolin, and also a big exhibit on Nikola Tesla, including live demonstrations of some of his inventions.

1.21 gigawatts!

I also saw the naïve art museum, which I really liked. I’d gotten kind of burnt out on art museums in Italy, but this one had some really cool stuff, and it was very different from anything I’d seen elsewhere. I especially liked the pieces by Ivan Rabuzin.

Ivan Rabuzin: On the Hills - Primeval Forest, Image Courtesy Wikimedia Foundation, licensed under GNU Free Documentation License (I saw this in person, but Wikipedia had a better photo)

After Zagreb, I flew to Warsaw, Poland. I had a 20 hour layover in Budapest. I went to see the Memento Park, where the Hungarians dumped all the communist statues after the fall of communism there. It was the main thing that I’d missed in Budapest the last time I was there. The park is pretty far outside of the city, and getting there takes about an hour. Once you get there, it’s also kind of expensive by Hungarian standards. The irony of communist iconography being turned into a money-making tourist trap was not lost on me. What better way to remember a morally bankrupt, repressive government than with your very own McLenin’s t-shirt?

McLenin's or East Park t-shirt

So yeah, the Momento Park was a good way to kill time, and it would’ve been pretty cool if it were 70% closer and 50% cheaper.

The rearguard of the revolution?

I went out for drinks with a couple people I met the last time I was in Hungary (the bar had swings instead of seats!) and then went out and slept in the airport (which was much warmer than the one in Milan). My flight left for Warsaw at 7 am. In Poland I emailed some developers and white-hat security hacker types. I’ll probably meet with them when I get back there. Yesterday (!) I caught a train from Warsaw to Vienna, Austria for the Roboexotica festival.