It's HIP to Hack, Euros Say (08/12/97; 1:40 p.m. EDT) By James Governor , TechWire AMSTERDAM -- A crowd of hackers buried Bill Gates under a black tombstone in a field here last weekend. Fueled by beer, hundreds of European hackers chanted insults as they laid an effigy of the computer mogul to rest, with a stake through his heart for good measure. "Bill is dead!" shouted the hackers as they gathered around a grave decorated with barbed wire, smashed Windows CD-ROMs and empty cans. Welcome to Hacking In Progress (HIP) 97, one of the largest open-air hackers' conferences in the world -- a cross between Woodstock, a political rally and a prison camp for nerds. Hackers, artists and political activists from all over Europe gathered at the campsite near Amsterdam over a blazing hot weekend to learn about the latest hacking techniques, discuss past triumphs, talk Internet politics, and look at emerging technologies. More than 2,500 people attended the festival, creating the largest nonmilitary outdoor Ethernet ever. By Saturday afternoon, so many people had turned up that the organizers had to open an extra field to accommodate the growing camp, dubbed the "Intertent." Tents were stuffed with computers, hard drives and coaxial cables. It wasn't all hacking, of course. Talking filled most of the days -- along with beer and Jolt Cola -- and swapping experiences and tall tales. The whole affair was fairly laid back. It was two days before phreakers -- the people who hack telephone systems -- even bothered to make the public phone boxes free for international calls. Jorma Rus, a database-to-Internet connectivity specialist, said he hadn't learned much technical information from the festival, but still enjoyed himself. "The people are great," he said. "I have had some good discussions about the politics of the Net -- particularly around issues of privacy and anonymity." However, not everyone came away feeling great about HIP 97. Several sessions on Saturday were ruined when a bad connection using PictureTel technology failed to provide a videoconference link to a New York hackers' conference called Beyond Hope. "It's ironic," a Dutch hacker known as Menzango said. "PictureTel is a proprietary videoconferencing system. HIP 97 should have used Internet technologies and protocols." Lars Eigssen, an artist and technology enthusiast, said he was disappointed with the event. He persuaded a friend to join him because the conference's 1993 predecessor -- Hacking at the End of the Universe -- was so good, Eigssen said. But HIP 97 had not really lived up to expectations, he added. At the last conference, the attendees were caught up in the frenzy that they had special knowledge that would help them become enormously important, Eigssen said. "And in a way we did -- we all made money out of it. But the spirit has changed since the Internet exploded," he said. Hackers have maintained that they perform a useful purpose by exposing the flaws in computer security and allowing users to protect themselves against the evil-doers on the Net. They reject the media stereotypes of malicious pranksters or greedy thieves. But HIP 97 showed that tension and self-doubt exist among their ranks. "This time around, many people are trying to protect the image of a hacker as a criminal," Eigssen said. "They like being seen [as master criminals], even though they are not," he said. Another source of tension within the hacker community is the debate over privacy. "Hackers want anonymity and architectures to enable that, but they want to be able to trace [people who send junk mail]," Rus said. "It's a clear contradiction, and we need to talk about these things."