Starting a hacker con is hardly what anyone would describe as easy — but arguably, the truly difficult part is keeping the momentum going into the second year and beyond. For the first year, you can get away with a few missed opportunities and glitches, but by the time you’ve got one event under your belt, you’ll have set the bar for what comes next. There’s pressure to grow, to make each year bigger and better than before. All the while, making sure you don’t go broke in the process. Putting on a single hacker con is an achievement in and of itself, but establishing a long-running hacker con is a feat that relatively few groups have managed to pull off.

With this in mind, the incredible success of the second annual JawnCon is all the more impressive. The Philadelphia-area event not only met the expectations of a sophomore effort, but exceeded them in pretty much every quantifiable way. From doubling attendance to providing a unique and immersive experience with their electronic badge, the team seized every opportunity to build upon the already strong foundation laid last year. If this was the make-or-break moment for the Northeast’s newest hacker con, the future looks very bright indeed.

But before setting our sights on next year, let’s take a look at some of the highlights from JawnCon 0x1. While you can watch all of this year’s talks on YouTube, the aspect of a hacker on that can’t easily be recorded is the quality time spent with like-minded individuals. Unfortunately, there’s no way to encompass everything that happened during a two-day con into a single article. Instead, this following will cover a few of the things that stood out to me personally.

If you’d like to experience the rest of JawnCon, you’ll just have to make the trip out to Philly for 2025.

Creating New Traditions

For returning attendees, certainly the most striking thing about this year’s event was simply how many people showed up. In the closing ceremonies, we learned that attendance had more than doubled since last year, and you could absolutely feel it. The rooms never felt cramped, but they certainly felt full. 

But the growth of this year’s event wasn’t limited to the ticket holders. The local chapter of The Open Organisation Of Lockpickers (TOOOL) was there, equipped with picks and transparent padlocks for anyone interested in an impromptu lesson in lockpicking. You could also try to get yourself out of a pair of handcuffs and other forms of restraints.

This year also featured a “Free Table” where attendees could leave interesting items for others. We’ve all got some piece of hardware that’s been gathering dust for just a bit too long. Maybe it was for some project that you’re no longer interested in, or you just don’t have the time to mess around with it. Instead of tossing it in the trash, a table like this is a great way to re-home some of those technical treasures.

The table was constantly being refreshed as more attendees showed up and added their contributions to the pile. There was only one rule: if your stuff was still there at the end of the con, you had to take it home. But as things started wrapping up on Saturday evening, there were just a few oddball antenna cables and a couple mystery PCBs left. It was especially gratifying to see how many reference books were picked up.

Another highlight this year was a informal competition inspired by the old IT adage that digital subscriber line (DSL)  broadband service could be run over a piece of wet string. With all the hardware necessary to establish a DSL connection on-site, attendees were invited to bring up various objects that would fill in for the telephone line. The medium that provided the fastest confirmed Internet connection would be crowned the winner.

Two pieces of spaghetti ended up taking the top spot, with a link speed of 10 Mbit. A section of carbon fiber tube — dubbed “hard-line coax” for the purposes of the competition — managed second place with around 6 Mbit. As you might expect, the failures in this competition were perhaps just as interesting as the successes. A line of “energy gel” was apparently not conductive enough, though some flickering of the indicator LEDs on the modem seemed to indicate it was close. While it came as no surprise that a line of hackers holding hands wasn’t a suitable link for the experiment, the audience did appreciate the irony that the hardware indicated it couldn’t progress past the handshaking stage of the connection.

Living History for Hackers

Attendees had already gotten a sneak peek at the JawnCon 0x1 badge a few weeks before the event, so the fact that they’d all be getting tiny modems to plug into their computers (and indeed, wear around their necks) wasn’t a complete surprise. But still, I don’t think anyone was fully prepared for what a unique experience it was really going to be.

For the younger players, there was an obvious learning curve. But the veterans in attendance were all too happy to explain the relevant AT commands and get them dialing away. Once you’d figured out how to connect up to the network and start exploring, it added a whole new dimension to the event.

Not only were there various puzzles and Capture the Flag (CTF) challenges that could be accessed through the modem, but it also acted as a gateway to games, chats, and other features that functioned within the con’s infrastructure.

For example, running a command within the modem’s onboard menu system would print the current talk taking place on the stage downstairs, and tell you who was up next.

It was actually a bit surreal. Walking around you’d come across a table of 20-somethings, all with look-alike Hayes modems plugged into their shiny new MacBooks or high-end gaming laptops. It’s hard to say how many of them came away from the event with a new respect for the old ways, but there’s no question they had learned a hell of a lot more about the early Internet than they would have from just watching a YouTube video about it.

While the badge was certainly the star of the show, there were also vintage serial terminals dotted around the chill-out area that you could interact with. By default they showed the talk schedule in a glorious shade of either amber or green, but hit a key and you’d be dumped into the terminal. Nominally, jumping on the terminals and executing various tasks was part of the CTF, but it was also a lot of fun to turn back the clock and sit down at a real serial terminal and interact with some *nix box hidden away elsewhere in the building.

Long Live the Jawn

Any event that manages to double its attendance from the previous year is clearly doing something right. But if you don’t know how to handle the growth, it can become a problem. Luckily, the JawnCon staff are on the case. It sounds like next year they may opt to use a larger space within the same building at Arcadia University. The University is a great fit for the event, so the fact that there’s room to grow is great news for everyone involved.

Of course, it takes more than simply securing a larger room every couple years to make sure an event like this stays on the right track. You also need intelligent and responsible folks at the wheel. Here again, JawnCon is well equipped for the future. The staff and volunteers that worked tirelessly behind the scenes to bring this con to life are some of the most passionate and welcoming individuals I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting. They represent the very best qualities of hacker culture, and armed with a genuine desire to bring that sense of exploration and inclusion to the next generation, they’re the catalyst that will keep JawnCon growing and evolving over the coming years.