TALKS - HOPE

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TALKS

Here are some of the HOPE 26 talks that have been finalized. We will be updating this section every day from now until HOPE so keep checking!

The Adversary in Your Bed: Stalkerware, Domestic Violence, and the Hacker Defense

Efrat Sternberg , Sarah E. Ross-Benjamin

Domestic violence breaks every assumption in your threat model. The adversary has physical access, knows the passcode, owns the cloud account, pays the bill, and shares the bed. No consumer device is designed for that adversary. This panel looks at what happens when intimate-partner abuse goes digital: covert stalkerware (mSpy, FlexiSPY, pcTattletale, Cocospy), the weaponization of legitimate consumer tech (Find My, Life360, Ring, shared iCloud, AirTags, vehicle telematics), and the surveillance-by-default architecture of modern households. Every major consumer spyware vendor on that list has been breached and dumped. The customer bases were overwhelmingly abusers. Hackers, not regulators, made that visible. This panel will cover detection in the field: MVT, TinyCheck, the Coalition Against Stalkerware’s indicator list, and triage on a phone the survivor cannot safely hand over for imaging. They will cover what prosecutors actually do with that evidence at charging and trial. And they will name the institutions carrying this load: the EFF, Citizen Lab, Operation Safe Escape, NNEDV’s Safety Net Project. Most of them are not government.

The point of putting this panel on a HOPE stage is direct. Prosecutors and DV advocates need hackers. Hackers often see this work as inaccessible or institutionally hostile. This panel maintains that it isn’t. This is an invitation.

Against the Edgelord International

Johannes Grenzfurthner (monochrom)

Hackers are trained to think in systems: attack surfaces, payloads, privilege escalation, persistence, obfuscation, cleanup. But contemporary politics and media culture increasingly operate in disturbingly similar ways. Narratives are injected, amplified, laundered, distorted, and made persistent across platforms, communities, and institutions. A meme can behave like a payload. A fake historical analogy can function like privilege escalation. A conspiracy theory can become a persistence mechanism. And in the age of generative AI, cultural exploits can be produced, varied, and deployed at industrial scale.

This talk proposes a hacker-oriented model of narrative warfare and cultural manipulation: the narrative exploit chain. Drawing from context hacking, media pranks, art activism, hacker history, propaganda studies, and Johannes’ own work in film, performance, and political subversion, it asks how stories become attack vectors, how irony becomes armor, how taboo-breaking becomes a recruitment funnel, and how communities can defend themselves without becoming humorless cops of consensus reality.

Against Tech Oligarchy

Clarissa Redwine

As tech bosses fall in line with the right, tech workers have begun fighting back. Resistance has included organizing against military contracts, walkouts to protest sexism, agitation about tech’s role in the climate crisis, and even a wave of union drives. Hellbent on stamping out any and all dissent, tech executives embraced Trumpism, fired organizers, and began lashing out against the “woke” ideology they blamed for turning their once loyal employees against them. This is the rousing inside story of the tech worker movement – and the way it spawned an anti-worker backlash now reshaping the industry.

Agshittification: Big Meat, Misinformation, and the Fight for the Future of Food

P.K. Newby

There is overwhelming evidence and scientific consensus that conventional agriculture and animal food production are threatening the things we hold dear: our health, our communities, our planet, and perhaps even our humanity. So why does diet advice from the American government emphasize meat, milk, and eggs? And who decides what food is “real,” or what makes something “ultra-processed?” On the same HOPE stage where she first heard “enshittification,” author and founder of Food Matters Media Dr. P.K. Newby introduces “agshittification,” a phrase coined in her newest book after learning the filthy truth about megafactory animal farming, the NIMBY Big Meat doesn’t want you to know about. With framing from Food and Nutrition: What Everyone Needs to Know, Newby illustrates how industry influence and misinformation are part of a larger nexus of agshittificatory practices, policies, and propaganda designed to keep you in the dark about “all natural” meat. This mind-bending story spans vertical pig farms and literal shitstorms as Newby stands on the shoulders of HOPE superheroes and tech gurus, Cory Doctorow and Greg Newby, sharing an ecotechno vision of what a healthy, sustainable food future looks like.

Newby’s talk is designed for all...