Back from Defcon 17
Finally back into Montréal; Las Vegas was exhausting, thats the least that I can say. Presentations at Defcon were very interesting but I was particularly impressed by what was available as side activities.
First, there was the hardware hacking village where people were working on the badge hacking contest. It's true, the Defcon 17 badge is hackable; it features a Freescale microprocessor, an RGB LED, a microphone, and a bunch of IO ports. To help the contestants, the full schematic of the board and the source code of the flashable chip was included in the conference kit. There was also the lockpicking village where people could learn about this fine skill and practice with a very wide variety of locks. I have to say that with proper coaching and with good tools, picking locks is seriously not that hard and that I am now be a bit scared to leave anything of value protected by a padlock that a novice like me can pick in 30 seconds. There was a Capture the Flag competition where opposing teams would hack into each other's servers, there was a hacker oriented Jeopardy, there were DJs, many contests, many smaller villages, and there was beer. A lot of beer.
Defcon is in Sin City and in Sin City, you can drink pretty muck where ever you want. People walk down the streets past police officers with beer cans in their hans, you get offered free booze at the casinos, you can buy drinks at the many watering holes that are scattered on the hotel floors, and if that's not enough, you can buy bigger cans at the several liquor stores. You just happen to have a drink in your hand when you're in Vegas; there is no wrong time or wrong place to enjoy a drink, here and now is good for many and so you see hackers sipping their huge cans while lining up for the 10 AM talk.
There's a lot more to mention but that will be it for now since after being a sinner for so many days in a row, my body is calling for a well deserved rest.