Beyond the Scare Mongering

by StMerry

I am lucky enough to have traveled to Russia for the fifth time in the past few years, and just came back recently after having spent a couple of weeks there.  However, it was the first time that I attended ZeroNights in Moscow, and really got to get involved with the local hacker community.  I can confidently say that I regret not having done this sooner and it made me incredibly excited and hopeful for the future of our community.

ZeroNights is one of the two larger international conferences present in Russia, along with "Positive Hack Days" which usually happens in spring, and included high-caliber presenters for two days of technical talks and workshops.  It also included multiple areas where one could get their hands dirty with car hacking, lock picking, soldering, reverse engineering, arcade gaming, and much more.  And, as it should be in my opinion with these sort of gatherings, organizers emphasized the need to stay vendor-neutral and rely mainly on the community to run the event.

I was already excited about simply attending and learning from others.  However, what really stood out for me was that warm feeling of being so welcomed by the community.  It only took minutes before I got to know some of the other attendees, and by the end of the two days I had made lifelong friends and saw parts of Moscow from a totally different angle than the one I was ever used to.

In my daily life, I am constantly fed a negative view of Russia, especially on the so-called "cybercrime" scene.  And I wanted to take the opportunity to write this article to remind ourselves how the hacker community goes beyond the politics and media accusations.  No matter the language barriers, borders, and other obstacles, we keep working with each other, we keep being interested in each other, and we keep being curious together and improving technologies together as well as various social aspects of our lives.  To me, the world would be a much darker place were there not a hacker culture, and going to events like this one keeps restoring some of my faith in humanity, a much-needed feeling these days.  Stay awesome.