Hackmeet 2011 took place October 15th - 16th in San Francisco at Noisebridge and a grip of the HB crew made it out to take part in the event. Hackmeet started a few years back in response to the closed and oppressive environment of the Adobe conference that was happening in San Diego. This was the third year of the conference which focused on creating space for discussions amongst radical tech folk. Below are some of my takes on the talks that were given along with a few notes from the two presentations I participated in that I said I would post.

Agitkid of kill radio and indymedia (since the WTO days) presented on consensus decision making. One of the main things that I took from this was the idea that for a group to be able to use consensus decision making process it is critical that there is defined points of unity, giving Indymedia's Principles of Unity as an example. The lack of principle's of unity in the various occupations across the states may point to why consensus decision making has been so difficult. Other useful suggestions where:

• having regular meetings with a time limit
• members should take turn facilitating meetings, taking notes, and keeping track of the non-verbal communication of the group (making sure certain individuals are not dominating conversation, calling breaks
• having subcommittees work though topics that are presenting a lot of difficulty to larger group outside of the meeting and bringing back findings to the larger group
• Restricting blocking on topics to concerns that directly come in conflict with the points of unity

Our very own Flatline facilitated a discussion of technology and privilege. This discussion focused on ways that some folk are marginalized in tech circles and in regards to access to tech. Some of the issues that were brought up were in regards to making hacker spaces accessible to more then just straight white men, making sure that your websites are designed to be accessible to visually impaired folk, as well as some feedback on how a "apprenticeship" program can work towards having diverse participation in a tech collective. This last bit resulted in a personal discussion with the success that tao.ca had with a mentor-ship program where no white men got root to their systems without taking on a new non-white man to show how to accomplish different sysadmin tasks where eventually the folk they were teaching were able to admin the system on their own. Another point was brought up by an older SDS member who talked about how implicit privilege came implicit responsibility. He talked about how privileged folks had the opportunity and privilege to take actions for change that weren't accessible to less privileged folk. The basics of all this is that if we oppose oppressive institutions but are still replicating the power dynamics of those institutions aren't we missing the point. I would argue that we are and that if your group is predominantly straight white men it is a good time to start asking why. Here is another review and better synopsis of this talk.

Silverfox gave a quick overview of concepts and tools for offensive and defensive security that could have been fleshed out into a 4 year course.

Liz of geekfeminism.org led a interesting discussion on what offensive security campaigns with a feminist perspective might look like. Discussions of what the targets would be and what tactics would be used. Geekfeminism is a rad site that consistently has a radical analysis of patriarchy in tech circles. Watching Liz disarm some bro try and splain what he thought feminism was after coming into the discussion was pretty spectacular. Check more about what Liz thought about all this here.

The next day Evoltech led a brief overview of the work that has been and is currently being done by the March-Hare Communications Collective. The Operator Distribution is still not ready for a beta release but should be in the upcoming months. When the group was posed with the question, "How can communications / offensive security teams assist street action" the responses where:

• Communication between working groups
• training people to use a specific tool
• concerns people have about security as a boundary
• sharing information
• decentralizing communication infrastructure
• more mobile device secure communication tools
• secure channels between people in the street
• a way to verify that communication is secure
• encrypted handhold radios
• Voice to text
• Building our own networks
• Operators monitoring police communication / scanners
• trainings on how to be a part of a comms team / trainings
• create a wiki to help people design IRL games as trainings
• working with homes not jails or other non-violent groups to setup infrastructure
• instead of focusing on supporting all mobile devices focus on supporting at least one device so that teams can be assured that if they have that device the application will work

Someone who has game authoring experience stepped up to help design a role play game that will help teach folk to run comms and work the bugs out upcoming March-Hare releases. Expect to see this getting worked out in a wiki on march-hare.org in the upcoming months.

Flatline and Silverfox talked about the progress and future plans of Openwatch - the cross platform cop watching app which provides a way to record and in real-time upload video to an off-site server for safe keeping. Folk from the Copwatch mobile team steped in to share the work they have been doing to support a similar effort but for feature phones that rely on a mms back-end.

Evoltech really bombed the DDOS presentation for beginners presentation after not being able to get the projector up and running in a different room. Meanwhile Silverfox discussed the new Hailstorm node.js tool for load testing websites. Evoltech eventually bailed on the hands on presentation and ended the presentation with a presentation of a phone DOS attack as released by b14ck based on pycall. The attack works by leveraging python with asterisk by creating automated call files for asterisk to process. Feed a simple app a file with a list of phone numbers and it will continually simultaneously dial each one leaving the phone in an unusable state. This attack can be used to consume all of the available trunks of a company's voice service or all of the out of band cell phones of police during a mobilization forcing communication back onto monitor-able police radio. It was pointed out that in a mass mobilization situation if this attack was performed to call all phones serviced by a single station that you would be dosing not just the phones you were targeting but all of the other callers that needed to make calls using that station. The additional benefit of using this tool is that it only uses sip headers to initiate the call which requires a low amount of bandwidth as compared to the high bandwidth demands of RTP once the call is answered, but as soon as the call is answered the call is terminated. As a result a large number of lines can be tied up without buying a lot of minutes from a sip/iax termination service. All that is needed is the ability to anonymously purchase service from a sip terminator. This tool will be weaponized in an upcoming Operator Distribution release. For those that were looking forward to the presentation and at least wanted access to the tools evoltech sends sincere apologies but offers the following download of notes and scripts that were going to be presented on in the talk.

There were a number of other awesome presentations including a very slick presentation
on windows cracking and general techniques for perverting the .NET framework which I will be reviewing in the upcoming weeks.