We’ve printed [John Keppel]’s winning t-shirt design. They’ll be available for purchase in the vendor area at Defcon. If you’re at the con, pick one up because we don’t have any plans yet to distribute them online. We will have a small number of women’s tank tops as well. See you there!
Defcon, the world’s largest hacker convention, is this coming weekend in Las Vegas. While the convention generally focuses on breaking new technology, digital archivist [Jason Scott] has an interesting surprise for attendees this year. With some help from VintageTech, he’ll be assembling a massive den of retro computing machinery. They’ll have fully functional systems like the PDP-11/70 for people to play with. It sure to be one of the more unique things to see at the con.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pSsLnNJIa4]
The Pwnie Awards are an annual event at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. They award the Golden Pwnie in a variety of categories: mass 0wnage, most innovative research, most overhyped bug, most epic FAIL, and our favorite: Best Song. Embedded above is [Paco Hope]’s 50 Ways to Inject Your SQL. While a strong entry, it doesn’t touch last year’s winner Kaspersky & Me: “Packin’ The K!”.
Last month, in preparation for Defcon 17, the qualifiers were held for capture the flag, one of Defcon’s most well known events. One participant, [mongii], did a writeup on how to solve problem B300. The challenge was to find the decryption key used by a program that had several twists that hindered debugging. After grappling with self-modifying code and junk instructions, the team was finally able to find the answer. This win helped Sapheads place in the top 10. Over at xchng.info, they are collecting solutions to the other problems. Sadly, they’re not all in comic form.
[John Park] has managed to snag a couple interesting business cards at Maker Faire. The first is Adafruit’s laser cut Spirograph card. The other is a ATtiny2313 prototyping board from Evil Mad Science; it looks to be the same style as their well-known AVR target board. We’ve also heard rumors that [Jérôme Demers] has bunch of resistor bending cards.
For more business card nonsense, check out: [Goodspeed]’s smart card emulator, [Mayer]’s embedded gears, and our web server business card.
Maker Faire returns to the San Francisco Bay Area this weekend. It’s “the World’s Largest DIY Festival”. We’ve been attending off and on since 2006 and you’re sure to catch many of the projects we’ve covered in the past. Be sure to stop by our favorite hackers that will be in attendance: mightyOhm, macetech, SparkFun, Liquidware, Jeri Ellsworth, Bleep Labs, Noisebridge, Ani Niow, EMSL, and Adafruit. If you’re attending, upload your photos to the Hack a Day Flickr pool and let us know what you see.
[photo: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid]
Annual hacker conference LayerOne will be held May 23-24th in Anaheim, CA. They’ve completed the speaker lineup and have quite a few interesting talks. [David Bryan] Will be focusing on practical hacking with the GNU Radio. It’s a software defined radio that we’ve covered in the past for GSM cracking. [Datagram] will present lockpicking forensics. While lockingpicking isn’t as obvious as brute force entry, it still leaves behind evidence. He’s launched lockpickingforensics.com as a companion to this talk. LayerOne is definitely worth checking out if you’re in the Los Angeles area.
