DefCon Convention

This is a convention that I would love to attend but would so clearly be out-geeked at. If you aren’t familiar with it, it is a convention for serious hackers.

One amusing thing that happened was that they busted some Dateline producer who tried to attend without a press pass so that she could get some hidden footage of hackers talking with federal agents. It is a well known fact that feds attend the conference to learn tricks of the trade. DefCon apparently holds a “spot the Fed” contest, which is supposedly a good natured thing.

But this Dateline producer was not treated like a good natured thing. She was basically booted and filmed and they tried to turn the tables and make her answer questions the way Dateline would. Kind of amusing.

First of all, this is what she looks like:

Oh yeah, she looks a lot like a hacker. Please. One YouTube commentator joked:

“She was probably really easy to spot, since she was probably the only girl there.”

If you want to see the video, it’s here.

But what I found most amusing was the description of the DefCon network during the convention:

“It would be fair to describe the network as “hostile”. It has been described as ‘the worlds most hostile network,’ but such descriptions are just attempts at flattery. It is recommended that if you want to connect to the DEFCON network pretend that you are sharing out your entire hard drive to 5000 hackers. You may want to bring a ‘clean’ computer that you don’t mind being infected/hacked/etc. It is considered very poor form to attempt to DoS the network; while the DEFCON staff may not do anything about such attempts it is reasonable to assume that ‘peer justice’ may be meted out. If you’re unhappy about the possible risks associated with connecting to DEFCON networks there are a couple of options: refrain from computer use for a few days or connect using another network elsewhere in Vegas (another hotel or something)”.

lol.