Greetings! This is the initial announcement and invitation to PHREAKNIC, a convention for hackers, phone phreaks, cypherpunks, programmers, civil libertarians, ham/scanner enthusiasts and culture jammers. Not one of the above? No prob. Network engineers, ISP owners, sysops, security consultants, the generally curious and (especially) those who want to learn about some of the more "underground" elements of our technological culture are all encouraged to attend. We even expect a fed or two. A media circus is being engineered as well.
The con starts 1:00pm Thursday and runs nonstop until 5:00pm Sunday; there may be a few additional events afterwards, so check phreaknic.info once it goes live for daily updates. There will be live music, films, a series of lectures, panel discussions and workshops, and numerous informal tech talks and demos.
Why are we doing this?
A very wise man once said "Don't get mad at the media, BECOME the media!"
We see this as a chance to dispel many of the misconceptions and outright lies spread by certain greedy corporations (especially those in the telecommunications industry) about our subculture, expose the bad laws their lobbyists sponsor and our politicians pass (usually over the protests of experts), and chastise the mainstream media for frequently poor and biased reporting (and for perverting the term "hacker", which was a complement up until the 80's). Assuming anyone wants to listen, that is...
It's also an excuse for a big party Halloween weekend. See ya there!
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That, with a few content tweaks, was the PhreakNIC v1.0 announcement, blasted into teh intarwebz tubes on October 9th of 1997, just before midnight. What a long deranged trip it's been...