I was at May Contain Hackers MCH2022 / 2022-07-27

After I visited earlier Dutch hacker events HEU, HIP97, HAL2001, WTH2005 I missed HAR2009, OHM2013 and SHA2017. I can only say 'life happened' because my son was born in the interim and my interests changed.

In the beginning of this year I heard about the new planning for May Contain Hackers as the original plan was for 2021 and it was postponed due to covid-19. I started thinking about attending and when the opportunity to get a free ticket arose due to my links with Surf I got serious.

Life is still happening so I coordinated with the rest of the family whether I could be missed at home and for how long. The result was that I would go Friday evening until Tuesday afternoon and I would go there by recumbent bicycle with the luggage trailer so the rest of the family could use the car.

The people from Surf set up our own village Village:SMRF next to Village:OS3. I slept in my own tent because I really want my rest at night and I want that rest at a somewhat normal schedule (not really a hacker schedule). I brought a 1-person tent, a sleeping bag, clothes, gear to make breakfast with tea and coffee, a smartphone with charger and a handheld radio with charger. Having to move all my luggage myself on the recumbent bicycle made me very selective in what to bring.

I went to several talks spoke a number of well-known people, got to know new ones, saw people there I didn't expect and had a good time.

What I really enjoyed was the friendly atmosphere. One aspect of that caught my attention: besides people with non-traditional clothing and hairstyles I saw several people who looked like they were somewhere in a gender transitioning process. They felt free at MCH to be themselves. One person responded to me when I shared this observation: "I saw more LGTB flags here than at Pride in Amsterdam".

Also MCH was really non-commercial. Mentions of the sponsors were minimal and never in-your-face.

The weather cooperated a lot! It might have been quite different with bad weather. There was some rain before Friday so I saw mentions of "Mud Contains Hackers" on twitter. Saturday and Sunday were hot, Monday was cooler. Tuesday started with rain and some more showers, so my tent wasn't completely dry when I packed.

Cycling the 45 kilometers was fine. I used google maps for navigation (but with the smartphone not visible, just the instructions on my earbuds). I had to stop several times to check the screen to check the instructions and sometimes google came up with weird things. I had it set up for cycle navigation but it still said to take three-quarters of a roundabout to go left while the roundabout allowed me to go from one cycling path on the left of the road to the other. It took me about 2 hours 45 minutes including stops for navigating and stops for drinking, eating and adding some water to nearby trees.

All in all I had a great time. I had my moment of "I am getting too old for this" but that faded and I really enjoyed myself.

List of talks I attended, with links to the place to view it online:

• Everything is an input device (fun with barcodes)
• Honey, let's hack the kitchen: attacks on critical and not-so-critical cyber physical systems
• Radio Amateurism via commercial satelite (no video available), workshop with a demo of the QO-100 broadband transponder
• A Brief History of Automotive Insecurities
• Hacking COVID: Hackers helping the government
• Finding 0days in Enterprise Web Applications
• Audio networks and their security implications
• drand: publicly verifiable randomness explained
• The War in Ukraine: Cyberfront
• Cyber crises and what you can do to face the challenge
• Around the world in 80 networks, Hacking Universities Worldwide. ( ...lessons learned at age 15. ) - Rob Coleman (no video available)
• Payment terminals as general purpose (game-)computers
• A Smart Light Hacking Journey
• Sensor.Community - Global Open Environmental Data Platform
• How do GPS/Galileo really work & how the galmon.eu monitors all navigation satellites