WHY 2025 - Day 1
Please note the disclaimer from Day 0 still applies.
At day 1 I woke up in a warm tent to ABBAs “Gimme Gimme”, making further sleep impossible. The weather service now predicted hotter weather than originally planned for, so I had to ration my cooler clothing for the hottest days, which had yet to come.
I got a pancake in the food court and continued writing. After saturation settled in, the next level in the pyramid of needs was social connections, so I walked around a bit.
Angry Nerds
After a while I came across a village by the “Angry Nerds” podcast, which is sadly in Dutch so I was not familiar with it. One of the creators of it was there and we talked for a while about differences between the German and Dutch hacker events. WHY20205 feels less political than the events by CCC. This may seem weird given that there is a big support for Ukraine tent, but at Congress there is a bunch of talks and assemblies about civil rights and climate action, by e.g. Netzpolitik.org or Bits&Bäume.
He also pointed out the preparations of the firewall (marked by big flames on the map) and showed me a sneak peek. Without being told, I could not have guessed what those grey boxes do.
As we can time travel here, you can also see the firewall at night already:
After a while, I did not want to bother my captive audience anymore so I continued exploring.
Anderstorps
I walked past a bar at one of the villages playing very loud music to something you could describe as art. I had just found Anderstorps, right next to BornHack.
// FIXME: add picture of intact art piece
As it seems like I do not have a picture of the art piece intact, here is a short description. There was a pavillion with a white table in the middle. On the table there was a black iron cage containing an accordeon. In front of the table there was a huge “accordeons forbidden” sign.
When asked about it, the inhabitants told me to come back later as they were too hung over from the night of Day 0, when different music will be playing. As I wanted to sit down and write some more, I used the provided shade here. Not much later, I noticed they were literally playing the same music, as in looping a single track.
🎵 Faxe Kondi by Klumben & Raske Penge
On Day 3 or so, the cage including the instrument were gone, which may or may not have been planned beforehands. They did not provide any further context apart from “have you heard what they sound like?”.
First talk
Next up was a talk that made me realize more stuff that was different from CCCamp. It expected a talk about either cloud security in general, or one about finding vulnerabilities in a deployment. Instead, this talk was about securing proprietary Microsoft Azure services (a company still rightiously considered evil in many parts of the chaos) using other proprietary Microsoft Azure services. Whenever there was a security issue, the solution was to use more Azure services. There was barely enough context to figure out how to generalize what was said for other products, so it was not really helpfull for me. The following questions were also about specific products and services. I am pretty sure this would not have been on the Fahrplan in Germany, and as stated by others this would also have raised eyebrows in the Dutch hacker community one or two decades ago.
Power issues
I wanted to get a new mate, but had to walk to a different bar because of issues with the payment system again. As Heaven announced, the power outage was not on site and affected all of North Holland. This meant that everything that was attached to the regional power grid, which was meant to be more stable than the on-site generators, did not work. Because of this, all talks for the rest of the day were cancelled and mostly rescheduled in the following days. At least bar payments were possible again shortly thereafter.
When the sun started to settle, the soundcheck of a Metallica tribute band fittingly called Sad but Tribute started. From then on, the evening was filled with surprisingly close covers. The castle-shaped stage (“party area”) and the flamethrowers attached to the towers were visible from all over the camping grounds.
What the fog
In the nights, it got really foggy, and I mean really foggy. This made all the lights everywhere stand out even more.
Combine this with a bunch of very strong fog machines and you could maybe see two meters into the distance.
Someone described their shift as customers popping into existance in front of the bar, ordering, and returning into nothingness after receiving their drinks.
After turning of the fog machines at milliways, it cleared up quicky around us. It looked unreal even in person.
The rest of the night I played PolyGen, which will be described in a future blog post.