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 the last 20. We’ll be sure to attend. We loved CCCamp in Germany last year and plan on attending ToorCamp in Seattle this year too.
[photo: mark]
[Steffen Wernéry] has published a video of the impressioning contest at LockCon. We learned about key impressioning at this year’s HOPE conference. You start the process by inserting a key blank into the lock. By turning the lock until it stops and then moving the key up and down you create marks on the blank’s face. Take a file to those marks to remove the extra material and then repeat the process. Once the pins are set properly, they’ll stop leaving marks on the blank. It takes a lot of skill to do this right, but you end up with a perfectly functional key. [Barry Wels] managed to win the competition in 5:30 with second place coming in at 6 minutes.
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 deadline.
We’ve always enjoyed our time at ShmooCon. In 2008 we saw talks on cracking GSM encryption and recovering data from SSDs.
Maker Faire Austin has come to a close, which means it’s the perfect time to start checking out photos from the event. Pictured above is SparkFun’s Picture Frame Tetris. You can see this and many other pictures on Flickr. Let us know what you thought of the event in the comments.
[photo: pt]
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 the show keeps getting better and better. You can see photos from previous events on Flickr. If you’ve got a chance to go, take it.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Fr65PFqfk]
[Cal Henderson] delivered a keynote titled Why I Hate Django at the first annual DjangoCon. Django is an open source BSD licensed web framework written in Python. Google has posted the keynote in its entirety to YouTube, which you can find embedded above. While the talk is humorous (and takes many jabs at Rails developers) it does provide insight into what makes a good web framework. [Cal] is Director of Engineering at Flickr and is an authority on how to make websites scale. He points out that most frameworks are designed to get projects off the ground quickly, but are lacking when it comes to building an even larger service. He talks about several things in Django that need work and improvements that could be made. It’s really an interesting look at what it takes to go big. Continue reading “Why I Hate Django”
The Open Organisation Of Lockpickers (TOOOL) is planning a new annual gathering for lockpickers. October 9-12th they will hold the first ever LockCon in Sneek, Netherlands. The event was spawned from the Dutch Open lockpicking championships, but they’ve decided to expand beyond just competition into a full conference. This year the conference is limited to just 100 lockpickers, technicians, manufacturers, hackers, and law enforcement members. They’ll compete in picking competitions, safe manipulation, and key impressioning.
On a related note: Organizer [Barry Wels] just became the first non-German to win an SSDeV competition with his key impressioning skills. We covered key impressioning when we saw his talk about high security keys at The Last Hope. He says it’s only been about two years worth of study and 500 keys to become a master. He managed to open the lock in 5:13 filing two whole keys during that time.
[photo: Rija 2.0]
