Some DEFCON 15 Thoughts

Best badge ever, obviously. And going for $200 on eBay at the moment (with 8 days still left in the auction). The woman who traded her badge for a 6-pack of beer and a latecomer cardboard badge is going to be pissed. Although I’m guessing the prices will fall as more people get home and try to make some money. Plus there’s one post in the DEFCON forums from someone interested in getting people to chip in for another run of them. Since the actual cost of the badge was $10 and change, it shouldn’t be a whole lot more for a small scale run. Or a large scale run, there were a ton of people at DEFCON who showed up too late and only got a cheap cardboard badge. I’d like to start hacking away at it and try writing some code for it, but I don’t want to wind up messing it up and leaving it unusable.

It sounds like Spot the Undercover Reporter may become an official ongoing contest. What talk did she get kicked out during? I’m annoyed that I missed that one, I’ll just have to keep watching the Youtube video over and over. Did anyone at Dateline NBC even think this through? Who thought that a hot blonde woman was the best way to blend in undercover at DEFCON? I guess Michelle Madigan isn’t going to be doing a whole lot more undercover reporting now that she’s so well known. I was most impressed that DEFCON knew about it right away and told everyone to keep an eye out for her before the first talk of the first day, complete with her picture. Classic.

Speaking of contests, what happened to Spot the Fed? I didn’t see anyone get spotted this year at all.

The L@st Mystery Box challenge might need to be Lost versus the entire rest of DEFCON next year. Pure evil genius.

The Dark Tangent gave a talk for the first time at DEFCON, to give some of the behind the scenes details of the whole Ciscogate excitement from Blackhat 2005. The full story has the expected amounts of corporate stupidity that you’d expect (from both ISS and Cisco).

One of these days Johnny Long is going to get arrested for videotaping the combinations to pilot areas in airports.

I can’t believe nobody got anything in the Own the Box, Own the Box contest. Sure, lots of network problems the first day, but come on…

I’m impressed that the dunk tank people turned Banshee’s nudity last year into more of a money-making opportunity this year by charging admission just to see her at the dunk tank. It sounds like it worked, the EFF got a big chunk of money from that (although, in the big picture, a small bit of the $25,000 they got from DEFCON overall.)

Worst Hacker Jeopardy contestants ever, although some impressive drinking went down. I’m not sure about the proposed rule of drinks possibly subtracting points from your score for next year, that seems to ruin half of the point of the game. Just get those Internet qualifications going.

One of these days I’ll have a better idea what the CTF teams are doing all day.

What happened to the “Clued” contest that was listed in the brochure? It sounded like some kind of mysterious “figure out the puzzle” from really vague clues contest, and I’m sure the binary numbers at the bottom of each page of the brochure were part of that, but I never heard anybody talk about it during all of DEFCON, and it wasn’t mentioned at all in the closing ceremonies. Anyone know?

Anyway, fun time as always. I’m going to squeeze in some more poker before flying back tomorrow. See you all next year…