Organizer: 'Hackathon' Will Go On

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,58602,00.html

By Joanna Glasner
April 24, 2003

A Canadian programmer says he will go ahead with plans to hold a
"hackathon" for participants in an open-source project, despite a
decision by the U.S. military's civilian research arm to yank funding
for the event.

Theo de Raadt, project leader for OpenBSD, an effort to develop a Unix
operating system with a security emphasis, said he intends to seek
donations or pay himself, to rent space for the gathering, in which
coders detect and create fixes for security holes.

"The hackathon will go on," de Raadt said. "There's no way I'll be
taking 60 people's personal flights and wasting them."

The event, expected to draw close to 60 programmers from several
countries, was scheduled to begin May 8 in Calgary, Alberta, where de
Raadt lives.

But plans for the gathering were put on hold last week after de
Raadt's research colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania received
a notice from the agency funding the project to stop work.

"No reason was given to Penn for this action," said Phyllis Holtzman,
a university spokeswoman. After receiving the notice, Holtzman said,
the university researchers in charge of the project told colleagues to
stop working on it.

The university had been carrying out research on OpenBSD as part of a
$2.1 million grant it received in 2001 from the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency, a brand of the Department of Defense. De
Raadt had been hired by the university as a contractor on the project.

According to Holtzman, the university first received notice from the
Air Force Research Laboratory, the organization sponsoring the grant
through DARPA, broadly stating that work on the project should stop.

On Monday, Holtzman said, researchers received another notice from
DARPA itself, saying that the stop work notification would only apply
to the hackathon, which it referred to as a "security fest." The chief
University of Pennsylvania researchers involved in the project could
not be reached for comment regarding the notices.

De Raadt, an organizer of the hackathon, suspects there was a
political motive behind the abrupt suspension of funding. Earlier this
month, in an interview with The Globe and Mail, a Toronto newspaper,
De Raadt said he was "uncomfortable" with having the Department of
Defense fund his work in the OpenBSD project.

"I try to convince myself that our grant means a half of a cruise
missile doesn't get built," de Raadt told the newspaper. A few days
after doing the interview, de Raadt said he spoke with Jonathan Smith,
lead researcher on the project at the University of Pennsylvania, who
he said expressed concern about the statements made in the newspaper.

A DARPA spokeswoman did not respond to questions regarding a possible
political motive behind the cancellation of funding.

In previous statements, including one published in The Daily
Pennsylvanian, the University of Pennsylvania newspaper, a DARPA
spokeswoman said the funding cancellation was "due to world events and
the evolving threat posed by increasingly capable nation-states," and
was not a response to the thoughts of an individual.

De Raadt said he believes his statements did play a role in the
decision to stop funding.

"So many people are not answering questions. The best we know is this
fits into a pattern of behavior," he said, adding that the agency has
not objected to providing funding for previous hackathons.

Since mid-2001, de Raadt said, the DARPA grant has paid for three
prior hackathons, at a cost of about $20,000 each.




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