#CPSLV1: The Complete Campus Party Experience (English Version)

Author's Note: Some of the links are now broken due to content removal of stale content and has been removed from this article.

The ultimate tech conference festival that you don’t want to miss out.

Campus Party is annual-week long tech conference festival where thousands of hackers, developers, gamers, geeks and so forth unite to bring the edge of tomorrow. It is held in 15 countries in 15 cities.

As a result of high popularity, ALL of the tickets to the event were SOLD OUT within 5 week period.

Day One — November 27, 2014

It was first day of the event. It was incredibly exciting for me to work with my team and have some fun out of our inner selves while helping others to get into the venue with credentials and lanyards. Everyone was desperately waiting outside to get their credentials and get in.

Organizers, Sponsors and Volunteers were the first ones to get in (I was lucky to be one of them as a volunteer) and feel comfortable right at the CIFCO. I met so many people on the first sight. I arrived in CIFCO Wednesday 15 minutes to 1:00pm waiting patiently to open behind its closed doors. This is my first time going to this place. My parents told me so many facts about it and I never been there before. I met a few of my CRM team members and exchanged information and so forth. The technical staff team were setting up workstations and readying the databases at disposal of the volunteer.

As the time flew by, the very first person came into the venue and checking into the event, everyone and I cheered and applauded for the person who was very lucky to have a such opportunity like that. There were a LOT of press buzzing in on the story and interviewed the first attendee of the event when he arrived.

I was completely wrong from the beginning. It was life changing event that I never took advantage of… Volunteers have FULL access to the entire campus and camping out (even the VIP rooms where the celebrities lounged at, they let you in if you are out of your volunteering hours).

It was 2:00 pm, I was done working with my hours and I had free time to spend something new and useful. So I went out and took some beautiful pictures while I was inside of the main building.

I went to the How to Make Money with Free Open Source Software talk with @maddoghall (Linux International President) at 7 pm. On his talk, he highlights some do’s and don’ts when you are doing it

• Companies love proprietary software

This is can be totally wrong in some ways. Companies tend that closed sourced software drive the future but it’s not. Some startups/companies are in favor of open source software. Although, for example, Windows is really great operating system built for numerous of uses but it has one major issue: closed source. No one has access to the source code at all when they are need to fix bugs, security loopholes, etc. This quote got me questioning my entire career either flip over to open-source software or not:

It is in their best interest — Jon “Maddog” Hall

It just depends how everyone is going to source the project either closed or open and so forth.

Linux is one of the most popular operating system to date. I even used it. It’s fantastic and really easy to use. Useful when doing lightweight browsing and stuff.

Brazil: Rio de Janiero has it’s own train transportation system but there were some issues back in the past:

• Cost
• Flexibility
• Routing
• Not many people were going to the train stations
• Dirty stations
• Windows

But when they switched to Linux servers, everything changed for them. City of Rio de Janiero saved a ton of money just by doing it. They had three things that has changed:

• Microsoft Office → OpenOffice
• Hired Subway cleaners
• The # of subway riders went up

You can see the rest of the talk and watch it with the link above.

~ End of Day 1 ~

Day 2 — November 28, 2014

It was 6 am in the morning, I woke up really excited and getting ready for work at 8 am. I was listening to music to get me hyped up before another round of conferences come around. I worked for at least 8 hours doing check-ins, printing cards for the attendee and so forth. My teammates were carrying on their conversations and (obviously) joking around. So, I was in the middle of working and one of my teammates stopped what I was doing and stares at me for 2 silent minutes. After that, I basically won the game. Then, we moved on.

It was 1:00 pm. Everyone was seated in the main stage and waiting for Patrick Osborne (Known for working with Sony on “I Am Legend”, “Chronicles of Narnia” and director of Disney’s new short animation: Feast) talk to begin. 10 minutes later, he begins to talk. He begins briefly the talk about his hometown in Ohio where most of the land is cornfield and there were not much opportunities for him to show his abilities. So, after he finished high school, he went to Ringling School of Arts and Design to pursue art major. One day, he got a job offer from Walt Disney Animation Studios because they found him useful and share the common goals with him. Osborne joined the studios and moved to California. Then, he realized that all 700 Disney team members are able to pitch anything into a movie. Osborne pitched a idea where he imagined that we would get our favorite food everyday. Then, the director was amazed by the pitch, got green lit later. He worked on the pitch for 6 months and filming the movie for another 6 months.

After Osborne’s talk, I thanked him for the animation short talk.

Soon afterwards, I went to Yasu Suzuka’s Pinhole Camera Workshop and took pictures with him in the beginning. The instructions are simple and easy to follow. (I don’t have a picture that comes along inside of the workshop.)

Materials:

• Camera (either everyday point and shoot or SLR)
• Soda can
• Scissors
• Glue gun

Before I left the building and headed home, I went to drop by in the VIP room and talk to Jon “Maddog” Hall and exchanged some info and I asked him one simple question.

~ End of Day 2 ~

Day 3 — November 29, 2014

Same time in the same place but this time they were less people to work on issues. Canceled IDs (major issue about it is I had to go find the issue by going to the info lookup and resolving it from there), Generated cards, and upgrading the cards. I went the other side of the building and oh my gosh, there were like a billion things standing in front of me. Open Hardware stood the crowd showcasing the latest boards that has everyone talking. From Intel Edison to the Banana Pi. I played some of the coolest hardware projects built from the ground up.

This one caught my attention: (I don’t really know the name of the product nor its game name.) The goal is really simple: reach to the square and it accumulates time by how much time you made in 1 square point. I played around with it for a few minutes and the results are amazing. It claims that it is a endless game until you reset the board entirely.

When I was done messing around on the other side, I was really surprised that the baby 'campusero' arrived yesterday and I decided to take pictures. (I couldn't resist the cuteness) David is just 1 year old. I recently discovered that David was born on-site of Campus Party México last year. I found this story absolutely amazing and glorious.

Later, I went to a talk that discussed about the aspects of black-hat hacking. Hector López (the speaker) briefly discussed about the advancements of Windows on User Account Control (UAC) and other security mechanism to prevent hackers from gaining access on the computer’s files. He points out several security improvements in Windows 8:

• Better system kernel
• System Fraud Prevention
• Requires administrative control to access certain areas of the machine (i.e system32, registries, etc.)
• Unified Windows Security mechanism
• and many more

He gives the audience an example of how they’re not safe from hackers and spoof users with other vulnerable areas they could target their next move. Possible uses are:

1. Backdoor (Once gained access admin privileges) with an automated script
2. TCP spoofing
3. PowerShell attacks (injection scripts)

Later, he runs Windows 8 with the latest and greatest updates available. López converts from a .bat file to .exe file in just matter of seconds and adds details (in this scenario, popular in El Salvador, Whatsapp for PC). Once the victim executes the .exe file, the hacker gains total control of the entire PC. He can do anything to the computer. Really anything. For example, can create users in Windows while running Linux or create system registries…

~ End of Day 3 ~

This was it. This was the moment. It was the closing ceremony and they were handing out the awards for those who accepted the challenges. From the most intensive League of Legends gaming moments to hackathon hacking their ideas. There are no limits for me nor anyone. Although, I am going to say this was one of the most intensive, fun and time-consuming event. If you are a internet geek, gamer, scientist or engineer, then this for you. I would suggest you go to it and purchases the tickets.

That’s it for now.

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