If you were waiting to finalize you travel plans, now’s the time; Defcon has published the final speaking schedule. The conference starts Friday August 8th in Las Vegas, NV and continues through Sunday with four separate speaking tracks. There’s quite a few talks we’re looking forward to: Silicon guru [Christopher Tarnovsky] from Flylogic will be hosting a breakout session on smartcard security. [Gadi Evron] will talk about the security implications of biological implants in the future. [Thomas Wilhelm] is going to cover building a mobile hacker space and the vehicle related hacks it requires.

Almost every security conference we’ve attended in the last year has uploaded videos from their speaker tracks. Explore the archives below, and you’re bound to find an interesting talk.

• Defcon 15, Las Vegas, NV
• ToorCon 9, San Diego, CA
• 24C3, Berlin, Germany
• ShmooCon 2008, Washington D.C.
  
• Notacon 5, Cleveland, OH
  
• LayerOne 2008, Pasadena, CA
  

[thanks, Dan]
[photo: ario_j]

Lots of con news is coming in these days so lets do a quick roundup of upcoming events:

REcon
June 13-15, 2008
Montreal, Canada

REcon has started posting information about their training sessions such as the Advanced Reverse Engineering session with Nicolas Brulez.

The Last HOPE
July 18-20, 2008
New York City

The Last HOPE just announced its speaker list. It includes the infamous Kevin Mitnick, Mythbusters co-host Adam Savage, and author Steven Levy to name a few.

DEFCON 16
August 8-10, 2008
Las Vegas

The DEFCON team also released the first batch of speakers for this year’s convention. Qualification starts tonight at 10PM EST for the capture the flag (CTF) contest so be sure to get registered. Check the txt for more information. We recently talked about the beverage cooling contraption contest, but you can find many other contests on the forums.

The second ToorCon Seattle got off to a quick start last Friday with a round of Lightning Talks at the Public Nerd Area. Each talk was limited to 5 minutes and covered a broad range of topics. Some talks were just supplying a chunk of information while others were a call to action for personal projects. Here are a few of the talks that we found interesting.

Read the rest of this entry »

We’re headed to Cleveland at the end of the week (we’ve heard rumors it rocks) and thought it would be good to list the events we’re planning on hitting in the next five months.

• Notacon / Blockparty April 4-6 Cleveland, OH – This will be a first for us, but we’re definitely excited, especially for the demoscene madness at Blockparty (like Trixter’s MONOTONE PC speaker tracker).
• ToorCon Seattle April 18-20 Seattle, WA – In its second year, this small gathering is sure to be a blast just like last year.
• The Last HOPE July 18-20 New York, NY – Our first HOPE and the last one ever.. since the hotel is being torn down.
• Black Hat US August 2-7 Las Vegas, NV – If anything gets released this year, it’ll be here.
• DefCon August 8-10 Las Vegas, NV – The first con we ever went to. It’s not the best con, but it’s always interesting.
• SIGGRAPH August 11-15 Los Angeles, CA – SIGGRAPH is where you need to be if you want to see cutting edge graphics and interaction projects. It’s a favorite of ours and a nice break from computer security.

Anything we’re missing?

UPDATE: Maker Faire May 3-4 San Mateo, CA – Can’t believe we forgot it. Thanks [pt]!