Hackers on Planet Earth or HOPE is a conference series sponsored by the hacker magazine 2600 The Hacker Quarterly. There have been five conferences to date.

Conferences

• H.O.P.E Hackers On Planet Earth (New York City, August 13, 1994-August 14, 1994). This conference marked 2600 The Hacker Quarterly's 10 year anniversary. Well over 1000 people were in attendance, including speakers from around the world. Admission included a 28.8 kbit/s local network.

• Beyond H.O.P.E. (Puck Building in New York City August 8, 1997-August 10, 1997). There were 2000 attendees. Garth Brooks opened the conference and Bell Technology Group helped to support the hackers. A TAPP reunion and a live brodcast of Off The Hook took place (hear it here). After the conference, Emmanuel Goldstein slept for 14 hours. Admission included a 10 Mbit/s local network.

• H2K (Hotel Pennsylvania , July 14, 2000-July 16, 2000). More than 2300 attended this conference, the first H.O.P.E. to run 24 hours a day for the three dates it was on. Jello Biafra gave a keynote speech. In this historic cultural exchange between the punk rock icon/free speech activist and the hacker community, Jello managed to draw powerful connections, despite not having any actual computer experience, and the EFF raised thousands of dollars. The conference admission included a working ethernet and a T1 link to the internet.

• H2K2 (Hotel Pennsylvania , July 12, 2002-July 14, 2002). This conference also ran 24/3 with a theme of the United States of America homeland security Advisory System, the con included two tracks of scheduled speakers, a third track reserved for last minute and self scheduled speakers, a movie room, Retrocomputing, musical performances, a State of the World Address by Jello Biafra, keynotes by Aaron McGruder and Siva Vaidhyanathan and discussions on the DMCA and DeCSS. Freedom Downtime premiered on Friday evening (July 14). The conference admission included wireless 802.11b coverage and places to link in with wired ethernet, an open computer area for access to a 24-hour direct uplink to the Internet at "T-1ish" speeds, a public cluster (pictures here) made available by The DataHaven Project, as well as an active internal network.

• The Fifth Hope (Hotel Pennsylvania , July 9, 2004-July 11, 2004) had a theme of propaganda and commemorated the anniversaries of both the H.O.P.E. cons and Off the hook (with a live broadcast of the show from the con like at Beyond H.O.P.E.). Keynotes speakers were Kevin Mitnick, Steve Wozniak and Jello Biafra. There was also a media presentation by some of the "members" of the Phone Losers of America who celebrated their tenth-year anniversary. The conference admission included access to a four layer public network with two T1 lines + backup links to the internet via a Public Terminal Cluster, various wired means, a WiFi network on three floors and a video network.

External links

• A wiki covering the conferences
• Pictures from the 4 days of HOPE5