WHY2025 and DNA talks

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I just got back from the most awesome WHY2025, the tenth installment of the four-yearly Dutch hacker festival series. I’ve been attending these things since 1993, so it is a big deal for me.

By being among the hacker community for nearly a week, you start seeing the world differently. I usually spend (too much) time on policy and writing stuff, and this was a much needed reset.


My badge for HEU 1993, the first Dutch hacker camp

I was particularly struck by Willem Westerhof’s presentation on the (cloud) security of the hundreds of gigawatts of solar panel inverters. Switching these on or off in bulk can take down Europe’s energy grid. And worse, by cleverly altering settings, the inverters could turn our grid into a nightmare with even limited effort. The summary of the presentation, not only is the security a total joke, the industry is such a joke that they aren’t even interested in hearing about the problems. There are (again) attempts being made to enlist the Chinese embassy in The Netherlands to get into contact with the afflicted vendors (!!).

Various people (including Willem and me) have been trying to get governments to care about this problem, but for now authorities are mostly inventing excuses why they can’t do anything, or saying that the problem isn’t real or (and I love this bit), that “while real, these problems are unlikely to harm us”.

For me this talk solidified thoughts I had earlier. We want to keep our infrastructure secure, something that is very important today, but governments these days are entirely unable to do that. We should get on this ourselves.

And surrounded by the 3750 hackers who attended WHY2025, I became somewhat hopeful. We definitely have the knowledge and skills to do it. Now only to find out how.


Drinking coffee while the hackers are mostly still asleep

My talks

Last time round I presented on GPS/GNSS/Galileo and DNA, this year I stuck to DNA.

In this first 25 minute talk, I gave a brief & highly concentrated overview of just four very cool DNA things. My goal was, for once, not to overwhelm the audience with too much content. I did not quite achieve that goal, but this talk is very accessible and I suspect fun for lots of computer people.

In the second talk, which partially overlapped with the first one, we apply computer reverse engineering skills to DNA. How big is it, what does that tell us? Does it compress? Are there patterns in there? Strings that happen a lot, or conversely, never? Is there structure we can discern? In this presentation, I showed known and explained patterns in DNA, but also highlight weird regularities that have no known explanation. And I exhort the computer people to get on with it and see if they can find out what is going on!


me, in front of the entire DNA of the Hepatitis-B virus

Finally, experience from 2017 showed that the enthusiasm for DNA over at hacker events is so great that there are infinite questions. This year, as in 2017, the organization kindly gave me another slot for the “DNA Afterparty”, and we had a full tent where we did 50 minutes of Q&A on DNA, and there was not a single dull moment.

When the scheduled DNA Afterparty was over, we spent yet another hour outside the tent discussing DNA with experts and newly enthused hackers, and it was a marvelously stimulating experience!

To round this off, many many thanks to all the angels (volunteers) and the organization of WHY2025. These events are a jewel in the crown of the Dutch and European technology scene, and we should all be very grateful that we get to experience this every four years!

All talks (except one) are now online, and can be viewed on the most wonderful CCC Video Operation Center website.

Panel

We also had a panel (in Dutch), on the Great Cyber Debate, with (aspiring) politicians. This was somewhat chaotic as the moderator had to drop out at the last minute (for good reasons). This being a great camp however meant that sufficient talent was on hand to find a replacement, and Saar Slegers agreed to step in.

Interestingly, for once, the policy people were augmented with subject matter experts, who were equipped with a “Bullshit” sign which we could raise when needed. And of course it was needed from time to time:

Specifically, one of the aspiring politicians (not in the photo) opined that the advent of quantum computers meant that encryption would lose its value. But as resident experts knew, we already have post-quantum encryption, and this is employed already, for example by Signal. Many traditional forms of encryption are also not vulnerable to quantum computers in the first place. So encryption remains important. And hence the sign!

It was a somewhat uncomfortable debate, and I don’t think anyone in politics is looking forward to repeating this format. Far easier to discuss these things without experts present!

(the recording of this panel is not yet online)

Some media

While there, I had the opportunity to spread the hacker camp gospel to a number of journalists, here (in Dutch) what has been published so far:

Some additional photos

I really had a great time, so please forgive me for spamming you with some more photos:


This was for a TV item on a serious subject, and by an amazing coincidence I actually had packed non-hacker clothes somehow

Many more photos can be viewed on the WHY2025 Orga Pictures Site.