This talk introduces participants to the Bosch BMI270 (inertial sensor) and BME690 (environmental sensor) on the WHY2025 Hackathon Badge. After a brief overview of MEMS technology and how these tiny sensors are made and used, we’ll dive into a hands-on session showing how to read sensor data using MicroPython — so you can start experimenting right away.

MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems) sensors are miniature, highly precise components that detect motion, position, and environmental conditions. They are widely used in smartphones, cars, wearables, and smart home devices and are manufactured in specialized cleanrooms using advanced semiconductor processes.

This talk starts with a short introduction covering:

What are MEMS?

How are they made?

What can the Bosch BMI270 (6-axis IMU) and BME690 (gas, humidity, temperature, and pressure sensor) do?

After this overview, we’ll switch to a practical session: you’ll learn how to get started with MicroPython to access real-time sensor data on the WHY2025 Badge. By the end, you’ll be ready to experiment with your own ideas and prototypes based on the badge’s powerful sensing capabilities.

Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

about this event: https://program.why2025.org/why2025/talk/9HUFEX/

Modern software development and operations heavily relies on third-party applications, libraries, containers etc.

This presentation will showcase how dev, ops, but also security management can be transparent about dependency versioning and known vulnerabilities, while also staying on track with updates.

It will show demos of Open Source Standards like SBOM and Frameworks like Dependency-Check, Dependency-Track and Renovate that can help automate the sadness of today's supply chain issues.

Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

about this event: https://program.why2025.org/why2025/talk/7C8XYS/

The Light and Music entertainment platform Lightupyourbanjo began in 2010 when “Cash-a-billy with a Bluegrass bite” band Ed and the Fretmen wanted to have better lights on their banjo. They developed banjo lights with addressable LEDs for in and outside mounting showing interactive animations, written in C++ supporting the songs, and wrote songs to support the lights. In 2025 the Lightupyourbanjo bands will be fighting the darkness with the new O4 model build into their 3 banjos.

In the WHY Lightupyourbanjo talk, we will look at the world of banjo lights, present the new O4 model and features, apply the 5xWHY analysis on this all to explore the greater meaning, and finally we hope to bring some Light and Music to WHY 2025.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_j19nTYNWv4

Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

about this event: https://program.why2025.org/why2025/talk/9NQTEL/

You've maybee seen the raking robot that got a CEH (Certified Estetisch Harker) certificate, the Telex linked to Twitter/Telegram or the ASCII foto booth. They are all made by me. If this talk gets accepted I will do a deep dive on these three contraptions and what I learned building them.

Beside Schuberg Philis, DIVD, attending the farm and keeping my bees I als build machines.

It is an interesting process and I want to share it with you.

Machiens I will be talking about:

* The (worlds?) 1st 3d color printer from TNO

* The raking robot

* AI/Twitter/Telegram/Slack connected Telex

* ASCII photo booth

Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

about this event: https://program.why2025.org/why2025/talk/FYPY7C/

This talk will enable you to lead architecture conversations and discuss their security options through an informal diagramming technique. I will use examples such as key/encryption architectures, DevOps, and even your home music system.

Presentation at https://digitalinfrastructures.nl/why2025/

You have seen many diagrams of computer and information systems in your career. They have been around since the early days of computing. They can be useful, but there are a few typical problems with them:

• They are drawn with obscure symbols that are only understood by architects

• They are drawn in an inconsistent way

• They are not used to their fullest potential.

In my practice I have run into these problems often, and I have found ways to turn a certain type of diagram, a simplified version of deployment diagrams, into the cornerstone of explanation of what goes on in cloud and cybersecurity.

In the talk I will lead you through the basic principles, and a few examples. This will enable you to lead architecture conversations and discuss their security options. I will use examples such as key/encryption architectures, DevOps, and even your home music system.

Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

about this event: https://program.why2025.org/why2025/talk/PRV9UP/

This talk will present the design philosophy behind Offworld Voyage, a decentralized science initiative that develops ecologically sustainable training habitats for use in simulated Mars surface exploration missions - while also solving for adaptation to extreme climate change on Earth.

The Offworld Voyage M.A.R.S. Tesseract Space Analog Simulation Habitats were designed with a zero waste ethos for minimal environmental impact by inventor Scott Beibin and visual wizard Michael Flood. The modular and portable structures of the habitats include: a bio-dome for cultivating organic vegan plant-based and fungi-based nutrition sources, autonomous power production, advanced waste reclamation, a science laboratory for experimentation and research, a space medicine bay, a fabrication lab for prototyping and repair, facilities for fitness and creativity as well as a kitchen and living quarters.

Mission immersions incorporate a vision of the future when space has become accessible to all through the use of emerging ecologically sustainable appropriate technologies enabled by new types of egalitarian economic structures and coordination methods.

Crew activities include EVA explorations in pressurized space suits outfitted with bio-sensors, 3D printed construction using regolith, utilization of open source communications tools, cooperative governance exercises and the practice of mutual aid and consensus decision making in mission planning, problem-solving and self-sufficiency challenges in the face of extreme resource scarcity, simulated time-delayed communications and experiments to analyze the effects of isolation on astronauts during offworld missions.

The inaugural mission for the M.A.R.S. Tesseract habitats will occur in a remote desert location in the near future. It will include the founders of the project, Scott Beibin and Elizabeth Jane Cole, who are both alumni of the Mars Desert Research Station (Mission 286) and core committee members of the Journal for Space Analog Research.

Future plans for the project include the development of pressurized facilities and closed loop systems, as well as development of public goods including hardware and software for Space Analog Research and S.T.E.A.M based educational programs.

Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

about this event: https://program.why2025.org/why2025/talk/ZDE7NN/

It's hard for a platform to have meaningful, useful ratings/reviews without both

substantially Knowing Your Customer, engineering to detect manipulated reviews,

and responding in a nuanced way -- to increase a fraudster's costs,

and not just train them to hide better. Lots of examples of diverse

platforms not doing a very good job of this. (I'll also talk about how this

knowledge sometimes leads platforms try to manipulate their own

customers to maximize their sales).

Ratings and reviews, although almost universally relied on by consumers, are, like

much other online info, often manipulated to increase sales, pump up merchant reputation

but are sometimes used malicious to slam a competitor).

Even sites that only allow reviews from purchasers can be manipulated, particularly on platforms

when low cost products are sold. Ebay harbors fraudulent sellers by combining buyer and

seller reputation, and not weighting by sale price. (So a 5 star rating for a trivial purchase accrues equal reputation as a large value sale.)

Many manipulations should be easily detectable by looking for some clear behavioral signatures, and then not training the adversaries by using adversary engineering rather than simply deactivating accounts. (I'll show you how to spot a lot of the red flags.)

Examples ranging from pumped up restaurant listings (up to #1 in London), Amazon

and Ebay's problems, a puppy sales site that had a rating system so bad by design

that they were sued by an animal rights org for facilitating fraud by puppy mills.

(There are a lot of sick puppies out there...)

Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

about this event: https://program.why2025.org/why2025/talk/CJQD7U/

Learn how to build end-to-end encrypted social apps including the newly released Bitchat using Nostr and MLS (Messaging Layer Security). We'll go from Nostr basics through to encrypted groups, explore the open source libraries and apps already in production, and show how to build your own. Includes live coding demonstrating how to create secure, private social tools that actually scale. You'll leave knowing how to build real e2e apps using tested, working tools.

Building truly private social applications isn't just about adding encryption - it's about rethinking how we build social spaces. By combining Nostr's decentralized protocol with MLS's efficient group encryption, we can create social apps that are both private and practical.

The talk walks through:

Technical Foundation:

- How Nostr works: events, relays, and NIPs

- Understanding MLS tree-based group key management

- Implementing encrypted groups that actually scale

- Real-world performance and security considerations

Practical Building:

- Tour of working libraries

- Open source apps you can use today

- Common implementation challenges and solutions

- Live coding of a basic encrypted group chat

Beyond the Code:

- Why traditional platform encryption fails

- How forking solves community governance

- Building tools that empower rather than control

- Real examples from nos.social and communities.nos.social

You'll leave understanding not just the protocols, but how to build real applications that respect privacy and community autonomy. We'll look at actual code running in production, discuss practical challenges we've solved, and show how you can start building your own encrypted social tools today.

This isn't just theory - everything shown is running in production now. Whether you're interested in cryptography, social protocols, or just want to build better tools for human communication, you'll get concrete knowledge you can use.

Prerequisites: Basic familiarity with public key cryptography helpful but not required. Examples will use JavaScript/TypeScript but concepts apply to any language.

Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

about this event: https://program.why2025.org/why2025/talk/3QQLRN/

During this talk we look at hardware and firmware reverse engineering, but also at corporate intimidation tactics and how to respond ethically as a security researcher.

Leveraging the hard-coded AES keys, outdated software, and lots and lots of custom code we found, we were able to install "custom code" on some phones and access global customer configuration data by exploiting Yealink's global cloud provisioning service (RPS).

Communication is the cornerstone of human collaboration and vital to functional governments, flourishing businesses, and our personal lives. We take for granted that sensitive information we send through our digital communication infrastructure is only received by the intended recipient.

This puts immense responsibility on communication equipment manufacturers and service providers to keep our communications safe from prying eyes. Surely we can trust a global, leading manufacturer of video conferencing, voice communication and collaboration solutions to keep our data safe, right? ...right?

They may have shiny devices and their marketing slides might be impressive, but we care about what's on the inside.

In this talk, we take a look at Yealink VoIP business phones and their cloud infrastructure.

Come with us on a technical deep dive involving hardware hacking and firmware reverse engineering, but also listen to a story about corporate intimidation tactics and lessons on how not to treat security researchers.

What we find is a security researcher's dream: hard-coded AES keys, outdated software, and lots and lots of custom C code (including cryptography!).

We were not only able to run custom code on some phones, but were also able to access configuration data of their global cloud provisioning service while casually answering the age-old question: "Does it run DOOM?".

This project concluded in a wide-ranging coordinated vulnerability disclosure involving the manufacturer, telecom providers, national cybersecurity agencies, and major customers, which we will also outline in this talk.

Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

about this event: https://program.why2025.org/why2025/talk/CXVW7V/

In 2017 a large corporation announced that they wanted to build a € 50 million theme park in a small forest that I had known from my childhood, thus replacing the future of our children with simple entertainment. An overwhelming feeling of injustice came over us. We created a plan, and we stuck to it. We drew a line in the sand.

Fatalism can be your greatest enemy, but it doesn’t have to be. Welcome to the rebellion.

In 2017 a large corporation announced that they wanted to build a water theme park in a small forest that I had known from my childhood. Immediately an overwhelming feeling of injustice came over me. Why would you sacrifice the future of our children for a theme park? It turned out a number of neighbours had the same feeling. We decided to draw a line in the sand.

For seven years we fought a battle with the corporation and the government, and the whole time everybody was telling us this was a fight we could not win.

In 2024 we won that fight. It turned out it wasn’t just luck. We created a plan, and we stuck to it. Since then we have been sharing our experiences with other organisations. Fatalism can be your greatest enemy, but it doesn’t have to be. Welcome to the rebellion.

Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

about this event: https://program.why2025.org/why2025/talk/7EMW3A/