Preregistration for ToorCon San Diego ends today. The current price is $100 and it will be $140. This is the 10th year for the San Diego hacker convention which will happen September 26th – 28th. The schedule for ToorCon X has already been posted. We highly recommend this convention. We’ve attended the last four years and it’s always been a favorite.

The three-day conference will feature three tracks of scheduled talks, plus one track for unscheduled talks by registered attendees. You can view the full schedule interactively, in wiki format, or in conventional format. It takes place between July 18th and July 20th; hurry up and snag your tickets now. We’re interested in all the talks, but [Chris Seidel]‘s talk on biohacking, NYC Resistor’s presentation about collaborative hardware hacking, and [Ray]‘s demonstration on escaping high security handcuffs have us waiting in rapt anticipation. So who’s going? What are you looking forward to? Let us know in the comments.

[I)ruid] opened with an explanation of his handle, since he catches a lot of flak for it being l33tsp34k (that’s supposed to be a capital ‘I’). The name has actually proven to be quite fun since it has broken a few systems that aren’t sanitizing input properly. Registering at Black Hat 2006 caused a database error. At the ShmooCon hacker arcade, he entered his player name and was dropped directly to a root shell. It’s also rather hellish on many webapps. His point was: why not choose a l33t name and have the fun of fuzzing all the time and breaking stuff even when you aren’t trying?

[nous] gave a quick plug for Ninja Network’s phreaking contest. Last year at Defcon was the first event they held. The first task was to use a butt set on a 25 pair block to find usable line. Once the random line was found they were dropped into a voice mail system to explore. The backend for the contest is Asterisk plus some custom Perl scripts. You can catch a preview version of this contest next month at LayerOne.

[jrandom] talked about how scratch-off cards can be gamed. Using a bright light or a resurfacing pen can help you with games that require a certain scratch order. Other cards can be identified by telltale signs they pick up during their production. Winners and losers are usually produced in two separate batches. Cards from each group will have the same cut quality, alignment flaws, printing color, and even the font could change. Sometimes the cards even have coding on them to indicate the winners (could be a simple as a W and L). All this is great, but the manufacturer might be doing this intentionally just to get attention.

[Travis Goodspeed] gave a brief introduction to reversing the Econolite ASC/3 traffic light controller for compatibility. It’s a PowerPC box running VxWorks 5.x and has snmp and FTP support. The FTP provides simple anonymous access. All of the control values are stored in the ASC3.DB binary file that’s checksummed. [Travis] built a way to describe a binary file structure as XML and generate libraries for reading the binaries natively in multiple languages.

We also thought [Dean Pierce]‘s network pentesting visualization framework was interesting. [Joel Voss] was attempting to write a softphone for the IAX2 protocol and ended up DOSing Asterisk. 30kB from the attacker could cause a massive amount of packets from Asterisk. He now has a framework for testing all aspects of the protocol.