Peek-A-Booty to debut at grassroots P2P show

Reclaiming the meme

By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco, 29th January 2002

Regcast training : Hyper-V 3.0, VM high availability and disaster recovery

Peer-to-peer was 2000's most overused buzzword, and perhaps the only way to reclaim it is through grassroots organization.

That's what Bram Cohen thinks, anyway. Cohen worked on MojoNation before quitting last April to concentrate on his BitTorrent project, and he's convening hackers in downtown San Francisco next month for a P2P/cypherpunk conference a world away from the usual corporate trappings.

"Conferences cost a ridiculous amount of money, and hackers are treated like dirt," says Cohen.

By contrast admission to CodeCon will cost $50, with ten bucks off if you register before Friday. The rules should ensure that it's free of sociological discussions of collaborative writing, and theoretical discussions of grids, swarms or hives:-

"Everything has to have a working demo, presented by one of the implementers," Cohen tells us. "That should raise the signal to noise ration quite a bit."

The banned list encompasses "SET and other white elephant, unimplemented standards," "Mathematical cryptography lacking practical implementation" and evil DRM systems.

So there ought to be lots of detail from presenters representing the best-known P2P projects such as Gnutella, down to some "random hackers" and will be the stage for the public debut of the Cult of the Dead Cow's anonymity app Peek-A-Booty. That got a private unveiling at DefCon09 last year, which we covered here Other presentations include the Invisible IRC Project, Mnet and CryptoMail.

It's held at Jamie Zawinski's DNA Lounge nightclub - and as a bonus (well, for me, anyway) it's thoughtfully timed to coincide with my birthday. For the hackers who can't attend either of these landmark events, a webcast will be provided throughout. (Of the conference, not my birthday.) ®