BornHack 2025 - a summary

(All images are CC-BY-4.0 samuels.bitar.se)

I figured I will write this in English since there are most Danish, Dutch and German people (I think) that attend BornHack.

So what is BornHack? BornHack is an outdoor hacker festival or hacker camp. It started on the Danish island of Bornholm but has since moved to the island Fyn. So I could take the train there from Sweden. (Would have been a lot easier if Sweden wouldn’t have privatized the railroad and trains in the extreme and caused a lot of shitty delays.)

BornHack is located on a field owned by the scouts. There are also some small buildings with toilets, showers and bunk bed rooms in the very end of the area. Otherwise, BornHack is a tent camp. So a lot of tents. For sleeping of course but also party tents or makeshift tents for lectures, workshops and the bar. There are also a lot of LED lights!

📷 The bar

📷 Hammocks

The code of conduct is really nice, making the camp inclusive and safe (I hope):

Everyone who visits BornHack is required to abide by this code of conduct, both at the event and on any online channels. We will not tolerate harassment of participants or discriminatory behaviour of any form. Specifically:

• Do not engage in homophobic, racist, transphobic, ableist, sexist, or otherwise prejudiced behaviour.
• Do not harass people. Stalking, unconsented physical contact, or unwanted sexual attention is harassment. Dressing or acting in a certain way is not consent.
• BornHack is a shared space, but every participant’s personal space is their own. If you are asked to leave someone alone, or to leave a village, you must respect this.
• Some attendees may not want to be filmed or photographed. Respect their wishes.
• Aggression and elitism are not welcome — nobody should be afraid to ask questions.

There is a lot of emphasize on privacy which is great! However, it means taking pictures is a bit trickier. The photo policy is very strict. And a lot of the pictures I take are a bit boring since there is normally not a lot of people in them (maybe myself) since I have to ask everybody which appear in the picture. You have to images the ~400 hackers.

Day 1 - Thursday

📷 Ready for a lot of hours on train and several days of hacking

Well, the first day for me. The second for BornHack.

After a long day of travelling through Sweden and Denmark, I finally got to the camp.

The info desk was closed which I expected. Tried to get a Club Mate (the standard caffeine drink here) in the bar but I had no HAX. HAX is the currency used here. Anyway, I got a Club Mate from a person on loan. Nice!

📷 The hacker drink now adays - Club Mate

📷 My nice little tent setup behind the main tent / speakers tent

The hacker jepoardy had started so I listened a bit to that. Also met with some friends from BornHack 2023.

I took a stroll around the general camp and met up with nice people from sdrmap who had a nice village with a van and quite a lot tents. We tried setting up my raspberry pi zero wh so that I could access it from my laptop (so I don’t have to carry around a separate screen and a keyboard). Trickier than expected.

📷 Trying to setup the raspberry pi zero

Day 2 - Friday

Sitting in the sofa place with my Club Mate - Granat taste this time - and trying to set up my raspberry pi zero wh with the help of some tutorials while the International is playing in Danish and we were humming along. Nice with the music. But setting up the RPI as a headless machine is difficult. I want to continue with my writerdeck/cyberdeck project - setting up my RPI with an e-ink screen.

📷 Hacking in the sofa outside is a lovely feeling

I met a nice person at the sofa hangout place by the bar. She and I will organize a small meetup with creative writing. So I might write a really short story or perhaps some haikus.

When having my lunch I met a member of Pyjamas which I got in contact with with the gamejam in 2023. I created a simple gps game. (Code here.) Apparently they are hosting a gamejam this year as well! Thinking about if I should try Godot or if I should use p5.js again.

It turned out I did use p5.js in the end again :) The theme was “revolution”. The gamejam started at 15:00 and will end at 16:00 next day. I think I had great progress the first day. Though I didn’t get the accelerometer to work as I wanted. My idea was that the player had to “tap” the phone and thus moving things in the game. Next time maybe.

📷 A simple game in the end

Oh, and I did some own sprites using LibreSprite. They have an online editor as well.

The CTF contest has started now. I want to hop on to that after I finish up with the gamejam.

Day 3 - Saturday

Started with breakfast. Actually I brought a lot of food so I don’t have to buy any. It’s kind of the same food as when I go camping in the woods. A lot of pasta, powdered vegan bolognese (which you can buy in basically all the supermarkets in Sweden) and Tartex (vegan spread) and peanut butter. Also some ravioli in a metal jar and some lentil soup. I brought a thermos which I fill up in the morning (though it only contain two full cups).

📷 Simple food

📷 Pasta and beans

📷 Pasta and vegan bolognese

📷 Fill it up!

Continued with the small web based game for the gamejam. I did some fun tune with BeepBox and tried finding some nice assets on Kenney.nl. Think I found somewthing with pico-8 city. Also, I needed a tile editor. So I found Online Tile Map Editor and TilemapEditor (online here).

At around 17:00, everybody was done submitting their game and we played each others games and rated them. Super fun! And I was also super tired afterwards. I was happy in the end with my game Propaganda Revolution. I also really enjoyed rEVILution where you are supposed to shoot a part of a circle at the right time. Jamp! was a nice game written in the retro fantasy computer TIC-80. One was supposed to jump over revolving lines in a circle. The game Aster*ROIDED* was also very nice, a physics fun asteroid game. But the best gameplay might be Crush the revolution. It’s a multiplayer game played on your phone. You are a tank and should shoot other tanks by tilting your phone in different ways.

I then took a swing by the speakers tent where Amelia Andersdotter was giving the talk Green WiFi: Regulatory pressure sort of works. There was a talk after that about gears. Why not? I stayed. Not really my thing but it was interesting and inspiring to listen to somebody who has dived deeped in to something.

Then hacker jepoardy round 2. Nice!

At last I joined the CTF! I was hacking by the bar and met some nice guy who was in the lead. He recommended some nice challenges. I also found another member (a part from myself) to my team Mustard Squad. So we hacked together for a bit.

📷 One of the CTF challenges I solved

In the night there was also Hacker Millionaire by the bar. Ask a shitty llm, ask a friend (by dect phone), take a drink or ask the audience were ways to reduce the alternatives to the questions. Also very entertaining!

Day 4 - Sunday

I did my part helping out a bit in the kitchen after I had made my coffe. There was a lot of dried dishes in the stalls and dirty dishes left. I fixed maybe half.

Later I went back to the sofa hangout place next to the bar. I met one of the gamejam participants and he showed me how to to websocket communication in a multiplayer game. We also did some CTF hacking together.

I heard one could sing some karaoke and get free food. Nice! So I did that of course. Met a nice guy who sang a lot of songs as well.

Also, some people showed up at the creative writing session. It was nice. One participant wrote some ideas for a play and another one started with a short story. I also started writing a short story about a guy waking up in a tent with no sight.

I took a stroll by the pyjamas village and they played a nice multiplayer game they were coding in the same time. Planets, physics and shooting rocketat eachother. Really fun!

📷 Gameplay at pyjamas

In the evening I did some further hacking on a multiplayer GPS web app. Calling it a game is maybe streching it a bit.

Day 5 - Monday

The first day with rain. I woke up at 04:00 because of the sound of the rain against the tent. People were still partying at the bar :) Could fall back into sleep though.

I met up with a privacy activist I met in Bornhack 2023. We talked about Chat Control and the Danish EU presidency. He maintains the website https://chatcontrol.dk. He told me about the privacy event Freedom not Fear that takes place in Brussels 26-29 September. He also told me that the German Child Protection Association (Der Kinderschutzbund Bundesverband e.V.) has released a statement about Chat Control in which they are critical about the proposal. They are positive about initiatives to protect children online, which they say. But they are also against mass surveillance:

However, we do not agree with one key component of the Commission’s proposal, which is the so-called “discovery order”, commonly referred to as “chat control”. According to this, it is possible to scan the communications of all customers of a provider for weeks and months at the end of an official and legal procedure. This applies to companies that fail to meet their obligations to minimize risk and where a “significant risk” pertains. This groundless monitoring of communications is a deep intrusion into the fundamental right of freedom of communication, an essential component of freedom of expression, and an important right of children. We fear repercussions on the behavior of children and young people simply by having this option. A “chat control” contradicts the effort to balance fundamental rights and to weigh the interests. Investigators and AI experts also view this component critically.

This is really important because other child protection organizations have earlier supported the mass surevillance that Chat Control will mean. One might say that the German associations understands the technical implications of the Chat Control proposal. And they also understand that other activities are needed to protect children online which does not include mass surveillance.

If you want to know about the mass surveillance proposal Chat Control, checkout chatcontrol.se (Swedish), www.patrick-breyer.de (English/German), Kluvna tungor (report in Swedish by Kamratdataföreningen Konstellationen).

After our nice chat I went to the speakers tent and listened to a talk about self hosting your own mail server. Very inspiring!

Later in the afternoon, this years badge was sold. It was a badge with LoRa, WiFi and Bluetooth support. So one could connect it to Meshstastic, a network running over LoRa which means you don’t need any internet connection. You just need to be withing distance from other LoRa devices. Since LoRa is long range, a small device might reach maybe 1 km away. Perfect for a hacker camp!

📷 Badge front

📷 Badge back

I also tried out the fantasy console TIC-80. Perfect if one wants to create retro games with retro music. I really like bit pop / sid tunes / retro games music so I have wanted to learn tracking software. However, the trackers I have tried and the tutorials I have followed have always been a bit to difficult and I have given up quite soon. But with TIC-80 it’s much easier.

📷 TIC-80 music editor

Day 6 - Tuesday

My train from Gelsted station was at 08:31 so I had to get up quite early for breakfast, packing and taking down the tent. A bit wet in all the rain. The nice folks at BornHack offers a free shuttle service from the camp to Gelsted station so I took that.

All in all, my stay at BornHack was really nice! I went down by myself this time as well. In 2023 I made some new friends which was nice now when I got back. But still, it probably would have been more fun if I set up a village with some friends from maybe Kamratdataföreningen Konstellationen. But that takes more planning and organizing. Also, one needs at least a party tent for the village. It’s possible to rent tents, table and chairs from BornHack, though they are in limited amount.

I attented the gamejam again which I was very happy with! I also got to try out more of the CTF, perhaps not as much as I wanted to. But I solved 3-4 challenges which was fun.

The hacker jepoardy sessions are definetely one of the best things about BornHack. It’s when “everybody” gets together and have fun. The game team that prepares the categories and questions are doing a great job! The questions are all very interesting, hackerish and funny.

So thanks everybody who organized BornHack and everybody who attended! I had a great time!