Notacon (pronounced "not-a-con") was an art and technology conference which took place annually in Cleveland, Ohio from 2003 to 2014. Notacon ceased operations in 2014. [1] The name Notacon became a bacronym for Northern Ohio Technological Advancement Conference; however, use of this was mostly dropped after the first year. Notacon preceded the Ingenuity Festival [2] by over a year in its vision for a cohesive blend of art and technology. [3]
The conference was founded in 2003 by "FTS Conventures", a small group of friends who wanted to strengthen and expand their community. The conference was also founded in part to fill the vacuum caused by the sudden ending of the Detroit, Michigan Rubi-Con event, though it has now achieved its own personality and prominence.
While many hacker conventions focus on the mechanics or political issues that surround such activities, Notacon's focus was more on the underlying beauty or artistry of the technique of hacking, as well as other ways to apply a "hacker mentality" to the areas of art and music. Hence, in addition to topics of technology and computer security, many aspects of both the art and music world were represented. The concept of "community through technology" was one of the main focuses of Notacon, with the participants being dedicated to the advancement of computer technology.
Notacon 3, took place April 7–9, 2006, [4] with talks such as "Make Your Own Linux", "Blended Threat Management", "How to Survive a Federal Investigation", "The Great Failure of Wikipedia", "Kryptos and the Da Vinci Code", "HajjiNets: Running an ISP in a War Zone" and "Your Moment of Audio Zen: A History of Podcasts". A few of the talks were in direct association with the computer club Infonomicon, as several of their more high profile members spoke at the con, including droops, kn1ghtl0rd, p0trill023, irongeek, and ponyboy. Other notable speakers in 2006 included Jason Scott, Elonka Dunin, Drew Curtis, and Eric Meyer [5]
Notacon 4, April 27–29, 2007, worked as an incubator for Blockparty, the largest running North American demoparty. This collaborative effort allowed the fledgling party to utilize the existing support structure of an established conference. 2007 also featured the first known presentation from a deceased community member, a multimedia update to a talk given at Rubi-con 5 called "Secrets of the Phone Guy". This remixed presentation was titled "Secrets of the Dead Phone Guy" and was presented by "The Friends of DanKaye". [6] Also featured were presentations such as: "DIY Green Energy", "Why Building Hacker Spaces is Necessary and How to Do It", "Online Communities and the Politics of DDoS", "Notageek: Technology and Everyone Else", "8 Dirty Secrets of the Security Industry", and "Open Source Economic Development"
In 2005, 2006, and 2007, Notacon also included the Notacon Radio project, hosted by Jason Scott. Essentially an event-long Icecast (using Oddcast and Icecast2), Scott provided running audio commentary of the event, its attendees, and the world at large. The broadcast was also opened up to other contributors, including local tech-talkers Dial-a-Dork, who did a four-hour live show. [7]
Bruce Perens is an American computer programmer and advocate in the free software movement. He created The Open Source Definition and published the first formal announcement and manifesto of open source. He co-founded the Open Source Initiative (OSI) with Eric S. Raymond.
Slashdot is a social news website that originally billed itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters". It features news stories on science, technology, and politics that are submitted and evaluated by site users and editors. Each story has a comments section where users can add online comments.
CodeCon was an annual conference for software hackers and technology enthusiasts, held every year between 2002 and 2009. CodeCon was not intended to be a computer security conference, but a conference with a focus on software developers doing presentations of technologies, as computer programs, rather than products.
LinuxTag was an annual Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) conference and exposition with an emphasis on Linux but also BSD descendants located in Germany. The name is a compound with the German Tag meaning "Day", as it was initially a single day conference, but soon extended to multiple days, then always including a weekend. LinuxTag was the world's largest FLOSS conference and exhibition for years and aimed to provide a comprehensive overview of the Linux and Free Software market as well to promote contacts between users and developers. With this broad approach LinuxTag was one of the most important events of this kind.
The Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference series is a hacker convention sponsored by the security hacker magazine 2600: The Hacker Quarterly that until 2020 was typically held at Hotel Pennsylvania, in Manhattan, New York City.
PhreakNIC is an annual hacker and technology convention held in Nashville, Tennessee. It is organized by the Nashville 2600 Organization and draws upon resources from SouthEastern 2600 (se2600). The Nashville Linux User Group was closely tied with PhreakNIC for the first 10 years, but is no longer an active participant in the planning. First held in 1997, PhreakNIC continues to be a long-time favorite among hackers, security experts and technology enthusiasts. PhreakNIC currently holds claim as the oldest regional hacker con and is one of the few hacker cons run by a 501(c)(3) tax-free charity. The conference attracts about 350 attendees.
Jason Scott Sadofsky, more commonly known as Jason Scott, is an American archivist, historian of technology, filmmaker, performer, and actor. Scott has been known by the online pseudonyms Sketch, SketchCow, Sketch The Cow, The Slipped Disk, and textfiles. He has been called "the figurehead of the digital archiving world".
Jon "maddog" Hall is the board chair for the Linux Professional Institute.
TED Conferences, LLC is an American-Canadian non-profit media organization that posts international talks online for free distribution under the slogan "ideas worth spreading". It was founded by Richard Saul Wurman and Harry Marks in February 1984 as a technology conference, in which Mickey Schulhof gave a demo of the compact disc that was invented in October 1982. Its main conference has been held annually since 1990. It covers almost all topics—from science to business to global issues—in more than 100 languages.
David Blake, also known as StankDawg, is the founder of the hacking group Digital DawgPound (DDP) and a long-time member of the hacking community. He is known for being a regular presenter at multiple hacking conferences, but is best known as the creator of the "Binary Revolution" initiative, including being the founding host and producer of Binary Revolution Radio, a long-running weekly Internet radio show which ran 200 episodes from 2003 to 2007.
Benjamin Mako Hill is a free software activist, hacker, author, and professor. He is a contributor and free software developer as part of the Debian and Ubuntu projects as well as the co-author of three technical manuals on the subject, Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 Bible, The Official Ubuntu Server Book, and The Official Ubuntu Book.
Adequacy.org was a satirical web site. It featured articles on politics, religion, technology, history, and sociology, as well as the "Linux Zealot" cartoon series. The site shut down on September 11, 2002, but has since made its archives available.
LugRadio was a British podcast on the topic of Linux and events in the free and open source software communities, as well as coverage of technology, digital rights and politics.
LinuxFest Northwest is an annual technology conference and expo held in Bellingham, Washington. It is a Saturday and Sunday weekend event held in late April or early May. The event is dedicated to discussion and development of the Linux operating system and other free and open-source software projects.
Brian Aker, born August 4, 1972, in Lexington, Kentucky, US, is an open-source hacker who has worked on various Apache modules, the Slash system, and numerous storage engines for the MySQL database. Aker was Director of Architecture at MySQL AB until it was acquired by Sun Microsystems. He led Sun's web scaling research group, where he worked on the Drizzle database project. He later became a Distinguished Engineer for Sun Microsystems. After leaving Sun when Oracle acquired it, he became the CTO of Data Differential and provided support to open source projects such as libmemcached, Gearman and the Drizzle database project. Aker is currently a Fellow and VP at Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
A computer security conference is a convention for individuals involved in computer security. They generally serve as meeting places for system and network administrators, hackers, and computer security experts. Common activities at hacker conventions may include:
Frank Karlitschek is a German open source software developer living in Stuttgart, Germany.
SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) is an annual Linux and open source software conference held in the Southeast United States. It is a Friday through Sunday weekend event held in the second or third weekend of June. The event is dedicated to education, discussion, and networking related to Linux, free software, and open source.
Droidcon is the franchise name for a series of community conferences in Europe, focused on software development for Google's Android smartphone framework. The droidcon conferences are the largest Android developer conferences held outside the USA.
Christopher James Hadnagy is an American author and information technology security consultant. He is recognized for his contributions to the field of social engineering in information security.