There were two possible categories: cooling a sealed beer and cooling a poured beer. Fastest time to get to 38 degreesF wins, if you kept it under $100. The beer of choice was Tecate at a toasty 90 degreesF surface temp. To kill time while the trials were being conducted the audience answered beer trivia questions and won prizes (thanks for the cherry bomb guys!). Unfortunately I didn’t get to see this competition to it’s completion, but here’s a photo of the Cincinnati Drinking Team’s entry.
The Zeus room at Defcon contains tons of cool merch and items. Everything from custom segways, to wardriving cantennas to your t-shirt swag. Some of the cool things you’ll find there though are the more cheaper items. For example, lockpicking kits are being sold and you can lockpick a doorknob and bike lock to try it out. It’s pretty hard. They also have a stand with all kinds of used hardware. I mean tons of cool stuff. Like above, there’s used “as-is” laptops for sale on the cheap. This is perfect for the sub-$100 laptop contest we had! There’s tons of used Sun servers, Cisco routers, and other great techno-crap.
There’s also a plethora of t-shirts, stickers, and other dumb fun crap. A book stand contains books on all topics from ethereal to shell scripting to identity theft. It’s great. You can win some great prizes too like t-shirts and iPods.
And yes. We know we got “hacked” or whatever you want to call it. Twas expected of course. No biggie. We appreciate other hackers not being malicious. That’s what makes a hacker good and not bad. Don’t forget that. We also appreciate you guys stopping by today and grabbing swag and saying hi. It’s been a great time so far. Tomorrow we’ll have t-shirts for sale! So get ready to get yours!
Continue reading “Defcon Day 1 – Stuff, Stuff, And More Stuff”
Vegas has been great. Look above, how neat.
I got in from hanging with Phil Torrone and Jason Striegel last night. We woke Eliot up. Then he woke me up.
The conference starts in an hour. My pass broke already. We’ve got about 5 pins left and a ton of stickers. If you want a pin, you have to give us something in return! We’d love to see a hack.
So come meet us at The Alexis Park/Resort/Dump and chat with us.
We’ll be hollerin back. Later!
Steganography is the art of hiding things in plain sight. When done correctly an observer shouldn’t be able to tell that there is a hidden message as opposed to cryptography where it is obvious that something is hidden. To do this using text you usually need a large piece of source material; say all of the works of Shakespeare. Since these works are known to most people steg can usually be broken using statistical analysis.
Christian’s solution is to use machine translated (MT) texts as the source material. It is hard to make a computer generate consistant semantically and rhetorically correct texts that mimic the original is very difficult. The technique presented here uses MT texts because translation errors are expected and common.
Continue reading “Defcon Day 1 – Lost In Translation – Christian Grothoff”
CISO was taking Q&A at Defcon. A lot of the questions were directed torward corporate security issues and how testing is done. A lot of jib jab about hackers and the patriot act ensued. Cool questions, but a bit long if you ask me.
Well, it’s my turn to roll into town. I got to my friend’s apartment at midnight and I am ready for dead bed. Vince is out with former editor Jason Striegel right now and isn’t sure when the night will end. Well I’ll see you guys tomorrow and I am sure we’ll post a pic to make finding us a little easier.
this is us. come say hi and get free stuff.
me (vince)
him (eliot)
