Episode: 516
Title: HPR0516: Interview with Astera
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0516/hpr0516.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 22:19:06

---

.
.
.
The interview you're about to hear was originally recorded for the Trackseq podcast. You can find
out more about the Trackseq podcast at www.trackseq.com. This interview is with a steerer who has
done evangelism for hacker spaces throughout Europe.
Now today we're really lucky. We have an interview for everyone in podcastland. We've managed
to get a steerer who has given a couple of talks in the past and has involved in hacker spaces
and so on for a steerer either.
Yes I am. Hello everyone.
Hiya steerer. Good to introduce yourself.
Thanks for inviting me.
As we know already, my name is Sarah. I'm also very much looking forward to the show today.
I'm working as a resettlement in Adults at a company called Mathes. I really really love my job. However,
every other steerer minute, I kind of spend on a couple of projects, most of which are in some way.
I have to do with hacker spaces with orgs or the hacker spaces movement in general. As you pointed
out, I've given a couple of talks in the East because hackers spaces are one very big love of mine
and they give me a lot of motivation and inspiration for whatever else I do, which is the color of that.
As there are for people who might not have heard of the term before, what is a hacker space?
It's both simple and difficult to explain actually. If you look at words like haggar and space, so apparently
it is the physical space and execution in which hackers get together to hack on things.
Now what's a little more difficult about this is what actually do we consider to be a hacker, right?
Is that one of these black-haired persons that you try to keep off your network and we say on and on again as we do this work?
Or do we rather say, well a hacker is actually a person that can also go into hardware or anything and takes things apart?
So in my very personal definition, I would say a hacker is a person who reads things, who wants to look behind the facade
of what is simply presented to us, who wants to come up with his own conclusions, wants to use whatever he gets his hands on
in probably a new way, in probably a more practical way, and probably just a very innovative way, and he doesn't necessarily do this for money.
So the hackers we get at hackers' places are mostly hardware hackers, or they are software engineers, or anything from a, let's say, you know, design and who does web design by artists that do in some way computer-related art to hardware hackers that feels robots or, you know,
get their hand on shiny things that come out of our live account or something in that way.
So we don't really say, well, you're going to have to, you can join.
You touched on a few things there, like hardware hacking and software development and artists.
I mean, are these sort of normal things you see in hackers' space, or is there, you know, what kind of things do you normally see happening inside a hackers' space?
Well, there's actually no novel with hackers' places, since anything has to be questioned, guys.
There's some hackers' places that mainly focus on this hardware part, those others that don't really have a hardware shop or don't have the space for this, so they mainly focus on programming.
Now, with MATLABs, I'm living in the end at the moment, and we have a hackers' place here called the MATLAB, and it's quite a huge hackers' place, actually, compared to other spaces.
We do have a hardware lab where, next to make a box, to rep rep a CNC, we also just recently acquired a laser cutter, which is awesome.
These epilogue are super huge, best sized laser cutters.
We have incredibly, an incredible amount of tools, so you could basically, you know, just do anything, I think.
We also have a little photography lab, right now we don't use it, because nobody does really look into photography, but basically people did within the last three years.
We have an audio lab, we have a library where people just bring their books that they have read, and they would like other people to share with.
Or where small groups of people with me to discuss their projects, there's a launch just for people to hang out, and there's the main room in which we do not only just sit there and hack or talk with other people.
Work on projects or whatever, but what we also hold lectures, presentations, from time to time we have parties there, but we do use it as some bigger workshop area, basically, which is not hardware related.
We have a huge kitchen of all bathrooms and all kinds of, it's pretty big, actually.
So with my lab especially, you could just do whatever you can think of, the only limitation really is, I guess, your idea.
Anything you can think of, basically.
If you've been involved in setting up hackerspacers before, were you involved in setting up the mad lab or...
No, unfortunately not.
I've only met a lab now for the more than two years.
My lab itself exists since a little more than three years now.
No, I haven't finished.
The reason I was asking was I was just wondering how hard it would be for someone to try and say they wanted a hacker space in their local area, how hard it would be to get the space up and running, and I was wondering if you had an AXB.
Yeah, I actually was around with a lot of other hackerspacers started, so it really, really depends on the location.
It also really depends on the motivation of the people involved, but it's mostly the location.
So the experience I've made was that, you know, people would probably announce this.
As of, you know, today you have people like Twitter or Facebook or whatever, social networking sites you use.
So you know, spread the idea a little bit.
You start mailing to mailing lists and ask if anyone was interested.
And then you get together, let's say, one through week, meet at a cafe or, you know, at a private space, whatever.
And I think what most, what's the biggest challenge in the beginning definitely is getting those people together that are really, really interested in, you know, joining the space and financially contributing to the space.
And then finding the actual location.
So with cities that are very big, it's hard to find a place that everyone alike wants to join.
If you need, if it takes you an hour or more to get to the space, maybe you're not as inclined to pick the space and then he out.
And it's also that rent very, very much arrived from city to city.
And this is basically the initial burden that you carry with you.
As soon as you have a physical space running, everything looks familiar.
A lot of people, I guess, do not start spaces because they have this inherent fear of, oh my God, but what if X happens, right?
The point of that, it's not there yet.
So in your mind, you should be aware of the fact that if something happens, you will be over the bend for right for now, you just do it.
I mean, you sort of touched on this and I kind of wanted to hop back to it.
About money is involved with it, you know, renting spaces and so on and so forth.
I mean, how does a hackerspace kind of fund itself?
It depends, but mostly what you see is that when a hackerspace starts, you don't really find somebody funding your space.
You don't really have, you know, stakeholders.
So it comes down to the managers then.
More or less.
You get companies participating, let's say, by donating hardware or less.
This very frequently is also the companies that the people that would join a hackerspace for, because they see how this will, you know, help having employees that are better educated or that have more motivation.
To explore new things in the field and the field of technology.
Well, is it a case of saying that the hackerspace has almost like a positive impact on the local community that's basically servicing.
That you almost touched on that yourself, that better employees that are going there and practicing and playing and being creative in a space that they're allowed to do that rather than actually.
If you look at how programmers, for example, how coders get employed these days, you still don't really have that many people working on strictly open source projects.
So if you would employ a person, you would rather take somebody else's suggestion as towards, you know, he's a good coder and he has experience in this in that field.
Rather than, you know, having 150 programmers show up that are all seeking a job and you would have to pick one and then see whether he's, you know, able to build up your project or not.
So a lot of these companies would turn to the hackerspace and to their mailing list and ask, well, do we have a programmer here that is able to, you know, that's leading coding in Python and has been working on these sort of projects last time.
We get these posts a lot on the mailing list, actually.
So this is another plus for companies that would, that would in some of the other way contribute to the hackerspace.
So it's also about kind of building up contacts and being able to kind of build a web of contacts, which is always a good thing in industry where, you know, you don't necessarily know everything, but you do know someone who can help you with that.
That's right. This is another thing internally in the hackerspace, right?
I mentioned the fact that we have all the tools there that you could possibly think of, if we don't have it, well, maybe we can get it together.
So the other very, very, very main focus on the other hackerspace is, I mean, even if you have the money and have laser cutter at home, you wouldn't be able to work together with other people.
You sit in a space with 10 other people around, maybe there's 30 other people around, and you have a question.
You just ask, and you can be absolutely assured that somebody will have an answer.
It's like, it's like a think tank of technology experts. If they're not there, yes, they're on the way of getting there.
Everyone kind of has a little, everyone's focus is a little bit different, right? But that again makes the shared knowledge thing so popular with hackerspace.
So there are, do you think local businesses are supportive of hackerspace as then, or do you think that maybe I'm just wondering if there's ever any stigma attached to all this going to be a bunch of hackers moving into an empty space next door to us?
Or do you find that out to the communities?
This question has more facets than one. So I think we're moving into a building. People that are renting this building two years, or the apartment, or the shop, or whatever it is, would probably have some concerns.
It also leads to the fact that you can't really rent a space, even if you really like it and really snuggly, and everyone's very kind.
You just have to think of the fact that machines are very heavy. First off, you would rather space, like ground level. And then also you do create a lot of noise.
At the Mad Lab, for instance, we have questions that we put into the windows. So there's more people around if we have like a big project there or something.
We would use these questions so much to generate more attention than we already have from outside of the space.
So this is the one thing. Now with other local businesses that are not sharing the space with you, I don't think that there is much stigma attached other than to the word hacker.
As I pointed out before, there are so many ways of deportation of this term. And still, hundreds, hundreds of articles and books, discussions about what is a hacker and what does it turn mean. It has a very negative connotation.
So most hackers basically say we know they don't really call themselves hackerspace, but you know, Mad Lab or some sort of lab or some sort of space, hand space, whatever.
Even if you say like our name, our hackerspace's name is, let's say, Mad Lab. If we tried to participate in an official something, if we write an official letter,
we wouldn't call ourselves a hacker space for rather a center for innovation and technology. You know, you can be just anything that you like. You don't really have to use the term hacker.
So it's all about wording. It's all about instead of using the word hacker, you just have to describe it better.
If you're thinking of a stigma that's attached, the only thing I've heard of is this term hacker.
How big do you think the global hacking space community is then? Is it a worldwide spread phenomenon or is it localized to some areas in Europe?
Let's look at questions. If you, I don't know if you're familiar with the list of hackerspaces and hackerspaces.org, we put a little map on top of this list.
And you can see all the hackerspaces that we are aware of that we know that we live under the Google map.
And you see a very high concentration of hackerspaces in Europe, in North America, and then, you know, spread out of the rest of the world.
You have like here and there and little dots of a little hacker space, but it's by far not as populated as Europe and North America.
Now, what we do not know is, you could call it maybe the dark number of hackerspaces, because probably, you know, hackerspaces.org is just a page.
Not everyone is into wiki, not everyone has ever heard about it. Most likely, people of Asia are not as likely to have heard about it than the people in Europe, maybe.
So, right at the moment, I think we have over 360 hackerspaces, or we know, out of which, about 200 have the status of being active, as they have the space up and running.
And the rest pretty much is planned or building right at the moment.
And then, it's very, very hard to say how many spaces there are that would not like to be listed in such a list.
Now, I've mentioned the fact that a hacker space is a physical location, right? Now, some people go out and rent a building. Some people just squat a place.
And this has a very long tradition, for instance, in Italy or in Spain, you know, more southern countries, at least in Europe.
So, there's a lot of squats there, and most of them would not want to be listed on this list of hackerspaces, just simply because of the legal situation of the space.
Do you think that there's a lot of hackerspaces then that are set up?
Oh, how do we say this on the gray side of legitimacy?
I don't think that it's a lot, like a whole lot. I just think it's some. And as a number of, you know, if I only have data of 360 spaces, most of which are from the same region being Europe and North America, I can't really tell how many places there are.
There might be in Asia. I had no clue about squatting in Asia. Did you?
Like, there's so many countries that you don't really know how tradition would kind of mix into this concept of ethical.
So, probably they just don't want to call themselves like this, and then again, maybe they just have never rid of ethical spaces.
So, it's really hard to tell. What we're trying to deal with, you know, given talks on hackerspaces, on the hackerspaces movement all over the world, is mainly to lay the limits of this, to wear it, and to have people contact each other.
Because probably somebody has an idea, like the one who's sitting at the hackerspaces, and hasn't really worded it yet in his own hands, and saying he's pretty much alone.
We've had those actually when, I think this first talk I ever gave in hackerspaces was at the last hope in New York. And shortly after that, some people from South Africa contacted me,
and we're like, there were some sources about this talk, right? They only got a good video, like the DVD.
And one of the founders of the South African hackerspaces actually wrote a blog post just a while before that, saying, well, she's thinking that she's having this idea of a space where, you know, like many people could get together, chat about technology,
chat about security, chat about programming, whatever. And, you know, moving this away from your own home, and from your workplace, into something that we call the third room,
and a place that is not considered to be works, and what you actually do there is work. When you spend your spare time, you free time apart from home, to devote your time to a specific project.
And so he was having this idea completely individually, and then he saw the talk, and I was like, oh my god, like this is whole movement.
I don't know how many thousands of people that came up with the same idea already, and apparently it's work.
And so he just went into it, had a terrible face, basically.
And it was really inspiring to hear this of a person that is so far away from anything that has ever thought of calling himself a hacker face even.
So I think that a lot of people that see such a talk, or that hear about it, read about it in the news, will think, oh well, actually this is something that I thought about previously, and I just couldn't give it a name.
And then there's those that haven't heard about it, would find the idea interesting.
I have two more hacker space questions for you. I have to declare a public interest, and I'm really interested in hacker spaces.
We're really looking up, trying to get one up, so it's great for me to be able to speak to you.
I have two questions for you to think about hacker spaces anyway.
The first one is, I'm a fair in saying that they seem to be getting more popular than this movement starting to get more and more bigger in the lack of a better word there.
But are you seeing a growth in hacker spaces, or is this just deadly the same amount of hacker spaces that come in as they were years before?
There has been a pretty fast growth just like, I think, starting about, let's say, three years ago, especially in the United States.
If you remember, I'm not sure what a listener's are aware of the case communication camp that takes place every four years, or every two years, if you come from the Netherlands one in.
There was a case communication camp in Germany, and a lot of hackers from the United States would get together on the plane as a group of people and come over to Europe just to see those camps.
The plane projects was called hackers on the plane, and they actually did it again for the Netherlands camp just this summer.
They came over and they figured they might as well favor a couple more days, right?
So after they camp, they went on a trip through hackerspaces in Germany and visited these and were so fascinated that some of them decided that we have to start a hackerspaces in the States as well.
And then there was a lot of talk about these. So the hackerspaces that came out of this kind of area where the New York City resistor, for instance, or noise bridge in San Francisco, which is an often space.
And they just got their second space because the first one was really too small, or HECC in Washington, they say.
Nick Farr is a person that you would frequently hear being talked about in this conversation just because he very much spread the word.
So most of the spaces that you see popping up right now in the United States came out of this group of maybe 20 hackers that came over to the camp,
and they moved back and had this inspiration all. We have to create a hackerspaces as well. And then other people see this and we'll look here about it and other people read about it.
And it's like, you know, it's like a huge wave to get started.
I think as before that, that was the tradition in hackerspaces, of course, in Germany, mainly started by the CCC.
Where everyone was very aware of what a hackerspaces are.
They already existed in Europe for maybe 20 years back.
And there's some that existed for quite a while in Italy as well, as I was mentioning, these photos places.
In the Netherlands, they've been asking for years in Europe.
Of course, there's also been small spaces in the United States, but it's more like, you know, the Hack-A-Hoffway House in New York or Deloft, which is some sort of a hack-a-space, especially the last one.
But it doesn't really think of itself as part of the community that is, well, a hack-a-space movement or whatever you call it.
But definitely, definitely, spreading news much, much more created a huge wave of hackerspaces that are being, you know, that we've been popping up.
And every so often somebody gives an inspiring talk at a conference or, and we get slashed out of it or whatever, you see how there's maybe 10, maybe 15 more spaces on the list that have the status plan.
I mean, this is that kind of leads nicely onto my last question for you about hack-a-space.
I mean, it sounds then really, you know, is it fair to say that advice for people wishing wanting to either get involved in a space or setting one up?
Basically, they need to start getting the message out there and talking to other people maybe through social networking and all of that sort of stuff.
What sort of advice would you give to someone who, like I say, wants to get involved?
Exactly that, actually. As I pointed out, it says, you know, there's various, various mailing lists you could send, you could shift into.
Let's say, I guess most of the logics of these nowadays are the Linux music groups nowadays, actually. Yes, it's the nowadays.
As a music group or, you know, a unique music group. These are people that frequently like the idea, you know, hack-a-space and would want to get involved.
You have technical universities, science universities, computer science universities where you could, you know, mail your get-together request, whatever it is to.
You can blog about it, you can Twitter about it, you can announce it at other hack-a-space lists because probably a person that's interested in hack-a-space would be reading the list of a city that's closed by, although they are not living there just because they don't have their own space yet in their city.
And then, you know, just try to get as many people as possible together and one location in the man, talk about it and suggest your ideas.
Anything that leads from there is something for which you'd have to know how many people are interested or ready.
And you can't really start a hack-a-space on yourself. If you go about a hack-a-space design pattern, for instance, the perfect number of people would be four, at least at a minimum, for further stay.
But I guess anything that's more than two is awesome already and probably enough. You need to keep the motivation up. You need to keep people motivated to come again, even if you don't have a fit for location yet.
Those friends with a problem with noise breached, who were looking for space for months, for a very, very long time.
And then we visited them and somebody made a suggestion that, you know, by next week, you could see that people weren't motivated anymore to invest more time in this.
And they would fall off the roof and couldn't come to the rear kind of needing one's league anymore.
And so somebody made a suggestion that, until the very next week, everyone should get together and groups of two and go out and walk through the city and look out for places for a program.
And everyone should just, you know, visit one of them and have a look at them and see whether they were suitable or not.
And then by the very next week, they had a space. They were signing the contracts and excels. It was incredibly successful there.
Yeah, I didn't want to keep it too long because I know you're a busy person and you've already spent today working.
Moving away from the hack-a-space. You love your work.
Moving away from the hack-a-space stuff, what I really wanted to talk quickly about was your talk at the upcoming CCC in December.
26th of July.
26th of July.
The discourse on a robotic war.
Yeah, 26th of July.
Right.
What is it about?
I mean, this is kind of a move away from what you've been talking about previously and seems very interesting.
Not really, actually.
I've talked about robotics before.
I have to admit that the first time I was given a talk on the subject, I was like, well, you know, this is going to be a fun talk.
Like, once in my lifetime, I want to do a really fun talk and talk about, you know, if it's not zombies, it's robots.
And I'm very much into robotics.
So, I did, you know, work in a couple of robots myself for the ones.
And I was very fascinating.
I was very fascinated with the book that I read by PW Singer, who's been researching robotics for years and years and that.
I was called by the world.
The talk itself, even the first time I held it, did not turn out to be funny at all.
Actually, if we look at the development that's done in the direction right now, in robotics in general, but also in warfare robotics,
as in robots that are used in war scenarios, in the army, is rather frightening than anything else.
We've seen a couple of, what they would call bugs or little security robots, maybe, that haven't really made it into news, obviously, because of the source they came from.
But I think the main problem is that everyone is trying to save money on warfare, especially now with the war in Iraq.
And so, deploying robots is a much more hostile, effective way of filling more war.
And then you're not losing people, right? You've developed this one machine and you can just reproduce it.
You don't have to teach anyone anything.
You just have an army that really follows.
You don't really have anyone really thinking whatever your order was.
And it's basically way more cheaper than fighting more with real people.
Now, what the leads to though is that the ethics of warfare do change at an incredible pace.
And then, like, never before, we could just decide whether we go to war or not by saying, well, tell me if we're this, because then we just do it.
We're not going to lose people on this.
We're not going to, you know, nation will not care as much for it.
There is no moral, you know, connections to what you're doing in a far away country anymore, if you're not living your own people.
And I think it's mainly those ethics of warfare that have changed so much, that are about to change so much, that I care about a lot.
But, yeah, in this talk, with the learning and the relation talks, I will also focus a lot on the technology that's being used.
I mean, that's one of the things that I really appreciate about events like the Chaos Computer Congress is that they tend to cross over quite a lot between the technology and the political side of things, whereas most other conferences are purely focused on technology and completely forget about the cultural effects of things like that.
But then again, you know, it's a hacker conference, not a security conference.
So, again, you have like a hacker conference for people who really think, basically anything.
Yeah, I'm very much looking forward to come.
Yeah, there's a fine line, I guess, between, you know, quite a lot of people, I know they consider a hacker conference and a security conference has the same thing.
But there is obviously a fine line between the two.
There is. There is.
See, some of these talks being accepted for Black Cat.
I mean, if you tried to do this talk at Black Cat, people wouldn't get it, because they're interested in the technology and how they can use it.
And that's not something that this is.
Well, you know, there's also sides on this talk, which actually deal with the security that's adhering to these technologies.
But this is just very, you know, it's just a small part of the whole picture of.
Are we actually being afraid of robots for a good reason or not?
Should we start thinking about the minor details of the whole technology there?
Yeah, it does sound like an interesting talk.
And hopefully I'll be there for it.
If my plane arrives on time, then I should be there for it.
Oh wow.
What about the price of warfare?
Do you actually, you know, have you actually looked into how much it costs to kind of create these kind of robots that you're going to go talk to?
Yeah, and I will also talk.
I have a couple of flags on me.
Okay, but I don't want to ruin the conflict at all.
Yeah, I'm afraid I have a lot of things on my mind right now.
I don't, I have a very bad memory.
I don't really have some numbers on the top of my head.
I'll mention them though.
Just another question as well.
Just going back off the robot.
How often do you spend at the hack-a-space personally?
How much time do you spend at the hack-a-space?
I have to admit, it's been much, much, much more time.
A couple of months back.
Now I've been traveling quite a lot.
I have to say that I do missing my lap whenever I'm on my own travels.
But basically every second I wake up on the day.
I might not be the right person to spend as much.
But I would say, if I would say how much, what, what big a percentage of my spare time,
or like, you know, not at the right time, would I spend at the hack-a-space?
Am I in Vienna?
I'd say it's robber boy around maybe 25 percent.
But as I said, like, back in the day, it was much, much more than that.
I just, right now at my home, I have my little test lab and everything.
It's in building looks right now, at home, rather than a test lab.
But yeah, so at some point, it's been about 50 to 70 percent.
In the interest of covering up there, it's not the end of you.
Firstly, thank you very much for all your time and stare.
It's been absolutely fantastic.
You're more than welcome.
If people want to find out more about hack-a-space, is it, am I right?
Is the web address of hack-a-space.org?
It is hack-a-space.org, right?
Spaces.org.
There's a blog on there as a wiki page.
A couple of mail-in lists.
I'd probably just pop them up for mail-in lists.
Not much traffic on them.
Do you have a Java server?
All right.
Do you Twitter at all?
Can people find you on Twitter?
Yes, I'm a Sarah.
And hack-a-space.org has its own little bot that has been rewritten
by a fellow hack-a-space number from.
Templar and Paris are called Helikin.
So that one's running as hack-a-space is bot on Twitter.
Quite a long name, actually.
Also, I was thinking whether I should numb something or not.
But basically, I don't think so.
Something.
Okay.
Thank you so much.
Apparently, out here in 2063, but so will be a lot of other hack-a-space people.
So if people are here to talk us, they might also be involved in that time.
We'll be having a best of theorists, I think, at the PCC,
where they can drop by at any time, enough questions on it.
You know, we're thinking of organists and a little workshop
to see whether hack-a-space is the org thing is going for the next time.
And we've devoted a lot of our time to, you know,
getting new spaces running and helping with that.
It's not that there is over 360 of them.
Probably, we should also look a little bit more into education,
which is one of my main, you know, spotlights at the moment.
But, yeah, we'll do some sort of workshop as well for the movement of self-kind of
as for people that want to build a hack-a-space maybe.
I want to, you know, gather a little bit of more background knowledge on what to look out for.
And we'll have a little, little challenge as we did last year.
Just this year, it's not programming, it's all the rings this year, it's a little.
And what else?
Actually, this last week, I spent a lot of time on planning and organizing
and getting people together and everything, again, for the upcoming year's PlomoCon.
So, I'm not sure if you're familiar with DeepSec at all,
which is security conference in Vienna.
That's always in November, has been the third time this year.
And so, last summer, I decided to put together a little hack-a-conference
and, you know, opposed to the security conference, a hack-a-hack-conference that,
just, you know, that in a very snugly placed and a fun place to be,
where people could hack a little bit of a lot of hardware hacking on their phone-free game.
It was a lot of fun, actually, and failed, but also fun.
So, since people asked, we're doing this again next year from the second to the fourth of July.
And we just started planning all of that.
They're coming up as well.
But yeah, that was good, too.
Awesome, Estera.
Thank you, like you say, before.
Thank you very much for jumping on the call with us and everything like that.
It's been fantastic.
As I say, for all those listeners who are wanting to find out more,
talk along to hockeyspaces.org.
And as you can see, you can find Estera on Twitter as well.
Thank you for listening to Hack-A-Covered Radio.
HPR is sponsored by Carol.net, so head on over to C-A-R-O dot-N-T for all of us here.
Thank you very much.
