HOPE Number Six

HOPE Network To Be Biggest Ever — How You Can Help

We’re happy to announce that the connectivity at this year’s HOPE conference will be the fastest we’ve ever had - and likely the fastest of any hacker conference ever in the States. Our network team has been hard at work making all of this possible. Your help at this stage can help to seal the deal.

We’ve already gotten one hell of a bandwidth donation but we still need to cover some other equipment and installation expenses to make it actually happen. If we can raise $5000 in the next two weeks, we will be assured of connectivity equivalent to an OC3 connection for the entire weekend. That’s more than 30 times what we had for The Fifth HOPE! This will make all sorts of projects possible as well as make it much simpler for HOPE attendees to stay connected.

Those interested in contributing to the cause will find a donation button on our main page which works through PayPal. Anyone who helps make this possible will be listed in the HOPE Conference Program. Donations of $1000 or more will get you listed as a benefactor, $200 or more as a contributor, $50 or more as a supporter.

This is something above and beyond what we were anticipating for this year’s conference which is why it wasn’t factored in to our original budget. This is a way for those of you who can afford it to pitch in and ensure that we have something truly spectacular and memorable this year.

Anyone who wishes to make a donation via a method other than PayPal, please contact us.

5 comments June 15th, 2006

The Network

We’ve got some interesting things happening in the Networking area. One of the topics of big discussion, the uplink, might be fixed firehose-style, but I don’t want to go talking any more about it until we have that all worked out. Longtime supporter NAC is offering to push as many bits as we can hand them; the issue is the actual layer-1 connection.

Wireless this year of course is handled by Dragorn, known best for his work on Kismet. Last year, with the help of almost a dozen people, we built the APs out of micro atx boards, 1U power supplies, pcmcia bridges, duct tape, and bailing wire. This year, they’re real enterprise access points from Aruba, which dragorn is writing the software for.

Other network folk are talking about and working on voip, video streaming, and of course the public terminal cluster. We’ll be needing volunteers to help staff the NOC and PTC. In fact, we still need volunteers for a lot of places. AV/Stage Management comes to mind, that’s actually one of the best places to directly impact the quality of the conference. Those guys get a lot of credit. Anyone wanting to help out for any department should drop a line to volunteers@2600.com.

1 comment April 21st, 2006