Sunday was the third and last day of EMFcamp. These camps are always too short 
.
Next time, I should come dressed either as pacman or as a ghost, and run around the place like crazy.
On Sunday I didn’t take my laptop with me, but instead I did bring my camera. After having to cycle through a charity running event going the other direction around Willen Lake, I arrived on the camp side to meet my friend Adrien who was there for the day. We listened to the end of a talk on Hypermedia RPC by Tef (the same one that talked about how programming is terrible the day before – and a very good public speaker). As I arrived late into the talk I’m not completely sure what exactly it was about. Something to do with using http properly, caching, and scaling. I should probably look into it and find out exactly what it’s all about. We then proceeded to have a beer and eat lunch, until it was time for Adrien’s talk on Datamining a cloud that wasn’t meant to be public. Interesting as always, Adrien found an, err, “undocumented feature” in a cloud storage service that allows anyone to look at the files shared by users, and that many of them probably think are kept more or less private. The trick is that the tiny URLs that the service provides are not generated randomly as one may think, but are actually a counter. It then becomes trivial to watch for new files being uploaded. By simply looking at the files’ metadata, Adrien was able to compute statistics about file sizes, types, and other similar things. Ooops.
A hacker camp wouldn’t really be a hacker camp without beer. And Club Mate.
We then desperately looked for the workshop on Fundamentals of web application security & security testing by Tom Doran, but there didn’t seem to be anything happening in the workshop tent, so I think we went for a beer instead (what else?). After hanging around the camp for a while it was already time for the camp’s feedback session, where the organisers discussed what went ok and what went wrong, and how they plan on making the next edition better. They also gave the audience the opportunity to provide feedback, which is great to find out what needs to be improved and what was good and interesting. Apparently there will be a one-day event next year, and the following camp will take place in 2014, but not in Milton Keynes. It turns out that there were quite a few problems with the camp site, for example the fact that it is often flooded by the nearby river (we were lucky it didn’t happen), or the fire hazards that were left on camp when they arrived even though it was supposed to have been cleaned by the parks trust beforehand.
Meet the bouncer at the bar, who was making sure that everyone was safe and had a great time.
The closing talk was then the occasion to thank everyone that came and everyone that got involved in the organisation. The organisation team has made a fantastic job, and so have the volunteers. Thanks a lot to all of them.
Many people have been taking pictures throughout the camp, and some of them are already available. My pictures are already online, and a dedicated page has been added to the EMFcamp wiki for people to post a link to their pictures galleries. If you were there and took pictures, don’t forget to edit the page.
I had a great time at EMFcamp, and I’m sure everyone else did, too. I hope we will all see each other again at EMF2014, and before that, at OHM2013.
Goodbye EMFcamp, see you next time!