H2K

Our third hacker conference from 2000 has been remastered from the original videos into a DVD format. We also have an audio disc of every talk in 128 kbps high fidelity audio. H2K was the first of our conferences to have more than one track and to run three full days. Originally, we had planned on using the 18th floor for the main stage and a much smaller room downstairs on the 6th floor for the second track. Within a day, this idea proved to be infeasible, as the second track was becoming far too crowded. On Saturday, we moved the second track up to the 18th floor, which also allowed us to record some of it with the equipment we had there. (For the really big talks like Jello Biafra and social engineering, the second track stage became the origination for a simulcast to both rooms.) A third unscheduled and unrecorded track continued on the 6th floor, which also attracted some great speakers like Richard Stallman. While we don't have every talk that was given in the two scheduled tracks, this collection does include a much bigger selection than had ever been gathered before at a single conference. H2K was also held at a very contentious time in history. Not only was there a bitter presidential campaign underway (keynote speaker Jello Biafra had even been a former candidate who had been running on the Green Party platform earlier that year), but 2600 Magazine had just been sued by the Motion Picture Association of America for posting the DeCSS code on our website. The trial was even scheduled for the very day after H2K! DeCSS author Jon Johansen was in attendance at both the conference and trial, along with members of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and civil libertarians of all sorts. Kevin Mitnick even made his first appearance at a hacker convention - however, federal authorities made sure it was confined to the telephone. H2K was held at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City July 14-16, 2000.