#EMF2014 (Electromagnetic Field hacker festival 2014)

Last week Andrea and me (on twitter @jhaand and @awc_haandrikman) went to the hacker festival Electromagnetic Field in Milton Keynes, UK. Once again it formed an awesome experience. I will write a small synopsis of this event and post the pictures. We went to the UK on 2014-08-26 and arrived back on 2014-09-01. Because EMF only opened the camping field on Friday 0900h, we needed to stay somewhere else the day before. We used this opportunity to visit Saint Albans and raid some book stores in London.

I only had the camera of my Fairphone smartphone on me, so sorry for the quality. I also took some pictures from my twitter feed and included the source where possible. Enjoy.

The EMF website is at http://emfcamp.org
The program was as follows: https://frab.emfcamp.org/en/EMF2014/public/schedule/0
Several news outlets did a piece on EMF: Vice, BBC and the Guardian.

Here is a short top 3 overview of the talks:

  • Day 1 (Friday, 2014-08-29)
    • Not Safe For Work: Industrial Control System Security / Corresponds completely with my work on High Tech Systems
    • Lightning Talks – Sign up at the Info Tesk! / The ‘spontaneous’ talk about AI immune systems for computersĀ  was really interesting.
    • Showing keys in public / Just don’t or you’re pwned.
    • Gasman’s ZX Spectrum Chiptune Extravaganza / Here have some Dr. Who or src here.
  • Day 2 (Saturday, 2014-08-30)
    • Emojli: How we accidentally built an app and why we never want to build one again. / You start hacking and suddenly you’re harassed as a start-up. With VC and tech support and all. (Vice article here)
    • The 55th Flotilla (Live) With custom-built MIDI controllers & circuit bent lovelyness
    • Introduction to Information Security and Privacy / Good overview and you cannot be paranoid enough. Otherwise you lead a boring life.
  • Day 3 (Sunday, 2014-08-31)
    • Hexayurts, Distributed Infrastructure, and Maximizing Global Minimalism / Vinay Gupta onĀ  roll: Kill the mortgage, Spotify’ize the building codes regulations and start building a nerd reich. (view here)
    • Why are computers so @#!*, and what can we do about it? / Unfortunately Technology won’t solve everything. Create a tool to offer an overview and the devs will stretch it to the limits. C should die for anything except bit-banging.
    • My Container Ship Holiday Slideshow / Welcome to the dystopian industrial world of container shipping in East China. Lot’s of stuff to see in nice navy grey with a Maersk logo.
    • Trials and tribulations of a badge project / Hardware is hard. Especially if you’re in the valley of death for 1500 SKU’s and need to organise a hacker festival parallel next to it.

For the rest there was a lot other cool stuff in no particular order:

  • Retro Game arcade by Awesome Retro
  • Nuclear Poker. The game for everybody older than 7.
  • Wifi and electricity on the camping site
  • The Festiyurt / mini quad dome hexayurt
  • Milliways: the restaurant at the end of the universe, offering Chili con carne at 0200h for free
  • Lots of interesting and creative people
  • Buy drinks with Bitcoin at the bar from a POS system that has Bitcoin integrated.
  • Enough space to place all your tents ‘n stuff
  • Awesome chip tune music
  • Blacksmithing workshops
  • Laser cutters
  • Lightning Talks
  • Being still able to take in information and find the correct word-thingies, while being sleep deprivated.
  • Able to stand the portaloo’s.
  • And many more stuff which would make this article too long.

Finally I want to thank the following people for their total awesomeness: Andrea Haandrikman, Vinay Gupta, @ian_willy + kids, @Herx, @Frabcus, @spongefile, @artied and @jonty.

update 2014-09-07: Added some external links and mentions from news sources.

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