Hacking at Random 2009 dates announced

Hacking at Random, an international technology and security conference, has just announced the dates for their 2009 event. The four day outdoor technology camp will be held August 13-16 near Vierhouten, Netherlands. HAR2009 is brought to you by the same people who held What the Hack, which we covered in 2005. They’ve done this every four years for … Read the rest

ShmooCon registration opens

November 1st means that registration for ShmooCon 2009 has opened. The DC hacker convention is entering the fifth year. They’re releasing the tickets in blocks; after today’s are gone the next won’t be available till December 1st. Today is also the closing of first round consideration for their call for papers, but you still have another month before the final … Read the rest

Maker Faire Austin is this weekend

Maker Faire Austin is happening this weekend, October 18 & 19, 2008 at the Travis County Expo Center in Austin, TX. Maker Faire is a showcase of all things DIY. You’ll see robots, sculptures, live performances, and other wonders including many of the projects we cover here every day. We enjoyed our time in San Mateo earlier this year and … Read the rest

SIGGRAPH 2008: The quest for more pixels


Long before we started reporting on [Dan Kaminsky]‘s DNS chicanery, he contributed a guest post about one of our favorite sources of new technology: SIGGRAPH. The stars have aligned again and we’re happy to bring you his analysis of this year’s convention. [photo: Phong Nguyen]

So, last week, I had the pleasure of being stabbed, … Read the rest

Black Hat 2008: FasTrak toll system completely broken


FasTrak is the electronic toll collection system used by the state of California. Motorists can purchase a toll transponder for ~$26 and link the serial number with a debit account to have their tolls deducted automatically. Today at Black Hat in Las Vegas, security researcher [Nate Lawson] presented not just the privacy problems with FasTrak, but why absolutely … Read the rest

More Defcon 16 events announced


Defcon keeps announcing more and more interesting events for next week’s conference. A free workshop is planned for the soon to be released DAVIX live CD. DAVIX is a collection of tools for data analysis and visualization. They’ll be running through a few example packet dumps to demonstrate how the tools can help you make sense of it all. … Read the rest

HOPE 2008: YouTomb, A free culture hack


YouTomb is a research project designed by the MIT Free Culture group to track video take downs on YouTube. To succeed, the team needed to track every single video on YouTube… which is close to impossible. Instead, they built several “explorer” scripts to track what videos were interesting. One explorer tracks all of YouTube’s lists: recommended, featured, most active, and … Read the rest