Hackers at Large

HAL 2001 monolith at the camp site

Bicycle powered game of Pong

HAL2001 was a Dutch hacker con held at the University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands in August 2001. This site, which hosts one of Europe's major network operations centers, was unique in allowing the conference to have, at the time, the largest Internet uplink speeds of any conference: a fiber-optic connection in excess of 1 gigabit per second. The conference never fully utilized the bandwidth; maximum bandwidth use was approximately 200 Mbit/s.

The main political topic of the conference was the fight against the DMCA and similar anti-hacker legislation under way in Europe.^[2]

The name HAL was primarily derived from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which HAL is the name of the ship's artificial intelligence. This name was backronymed Hackers At Large.

The conference was held primarily outdoors. Logistically speaking, the network structure was quite a feat, with approximately 15 km of category 5 cable for the ethernet backbones, as well as supplying power feeds for the tents' computers.

There was a technology-free zone, The Solaris Sl@ckers S@lon, named for the 1972 film by Andrei Tarkovsky, which is often thought to be the Russian answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey. The only technology permitted in the place was a television, a DVD player running the movie, and a Turkish (electric) samovar for brewing tea. A fishtank was set aside for drowning mobile phones which rang in the tent (it remained empty).

This conference was run by Stichting HAL2001, a not-for-profit organization.

See also

• Previous conference: Hacking in Progress (1997)
• Next conferences: What the Hack (2005)
• Hacking at Random (2009)

External links

• Official website

References