HIR Issue 10: Defcon 7.0 In a Nutshell
By Asmodian X
Defcon is a convention held yearly in las Vegas usually in July. It is promoted by Dark Tangent and his Defcon Goons. For more information about Defcon consult:
In concept, Defcon is a gathering of computer enthusiasts, paranoid people, and people who just want to be in the lime light. Ironically the majority of these people call themselves "Hackers." Weather any of these people can create furniture with an axe I do not know.
(See Dictionary definition)
The Ride to Las Vegas
My commerads and I boarded the airplane around 11 or 12pm and plopped down in our seats. Axon and Frogman plopped out their new(er) laptops, and proceeded to poke around with articles and other projects. Meanwhilst I was playing around with Twiggy (a Cassiopia E-10 Palm-PC). Twiggy was a new acquisition of mine, and I was playing solitaire and setting up a profile for myself in the case some one wanted to exchange electronic business cards. Frogman had a similar device which was made by Everex. Needless to say, the ride was un eventful.
Arrival
We arrived at Las Vegas and walked to the luggage area. After picking out our luggage pieces, we walked over to the Taxi area and picked up a Taxi over to Alexis Park. Where we were surprised to find that we had to pay a 400$ deposit. After scrimping up enough cash we waddled over to our room. It was a two bed room with a quasi kitchen. It had an empty refrigerator and cabinet with a convenient empty 6 pack of bottles.
We all hoped into one of the Whirl-pools, and relaxed for a bit before heading back to the room. I crashed on one of the beds, and axon and frog man poked around on laptops until about 7ish in the morning when we picked our selves up and walked over to the convention center. Alexis Park was really nice, it had rained a few inches a day or so back, so of course everything flooded out. The fountains looked rather polluted, and some of the pools were shut down. After getting some over priced breakfast we waited in line until 10am when they actually opened the doors.
During that time, it began to rain, which was a serious problem to those who chose to haul their laptop with them. Las Vegas was rather muddy from the floods which had pre-ceded the Defcon crowd. The ran had made the fountains polluted. The hotel staff scurried around dumping a cleaning compound into the murky fountains. By night fall the fountains were clean again.
The kick off was pretty cool, everybody got metal tags and lanyards, which beat the hell out of the lame plastic tags during DC6. Hordes of Tshirt sales tables were there. If I had any cash left I would have gotten the Shell oil spoof shirt (e.g. Shell -> /bin/sh) We probably would have gotten more stuff if it were not for the hotel rapeing us for the deposit. 400$ is not worth the P.O.S rooms we got, but we were happy enough to be there not to complain.
The Speakers
This time it was a bit more compartimentalised than it was a year or so back. It had three tracks, newbie, intermediate and advanced. My only regret was that we could not compete in the Capture the flag contest, primarily because everybody wanted to see the speakers. Not surprisingly the ghetto hackers won, purely because of numbers. (No disrespect of course.) Now a few words on the widely disliked Caraloyn Minel, which I can attest that Mrs. Minel is in fact, the closest thing to a true bitch that I've ever met. I could theorize possible causes for MBD (Massive Bitchness Disorder), but you probably all know about that. In-case you don't, I suggest you consult "http://www.attrition.org". (BTW. Carolyn got thrown out of defcon due to refusal to provide any services on her CTF box, she was under the impression a brick on a rope was an acceptable CTF target boxen.)
I found the Identity theft speaker the most interesting. His speech made me glad my credit rating sucks. Professor Feedlebom, made his speech about pirate radio amidst a hangover. It was un-interesting, and would have been better sans booze. The how to use nmap similar was boring as hell, it didn't get interesting until fydor showed up and answered some questions. The Oracle stuff was power pointed, and thus boring as hell. I noticed a trend. "Professionals" used lame power point presentations, the developers and grey hats were the MOST interesting because they could answer anything about the software you wanted to know. The newbies generally were hard to follow, due to lack of planning and shuddering.
As a note to future speakers who read this, be considerate of your audience, I don't use Microsoft products, thus ppt presentations are pointless, it would be more convenient to me to have something like a text, or some Unix friendlier document.
Food and stuff
Because of the hotel raping us, we could not afford to eat out. So we made do with some instant Mac&cheese, and some PB&J we bought from a grocery store. Of course the hotel practically required a down payment for the food. We ended up living at a convenience store down the street.
Transit Hell
30 hours + bus + psycho-driver = hell. nuff said.
Epoch
It was an enlightening experience, I want to go again, next time I am bringing more cash, better laptop, and more people. And food that requires less preparation. Aegis, my laptop, made it, but it was dwarfed. With luck,By the time DC8 is going on, I will have my new(er) laptop, (deacon) and/or something newer. Axon talked about bringing an IBM rs/6000 work station to the con for some extra muscle for crunching passwords. The frogman, will be bringing on his new(er) laptop an IBM thinkpad to join in to the fray. I'm expecting another friend of mine to come along and check out some of the speakers.
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