Hackaday At 32C3 And Shmoocon

December 24, 2015 by Mike Szczys 4 Comments

We are just a few days away from the 2015 Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg Germany and we’re happy to say that a couple of the Hackaday crew will be on hand.
The annual event is one of the premier hacker conferences in the entire world. Both [Voja Antonic] and [Nava Whiteford] will be attending this year’s 32C3, which runs from Sunday the 27th through Wednesday the 30th.

[Voja] will be pretty busy working a booth that will show off two of his projects. One is his Single-Chip Gaming System and the other is his DIY Book Scanner. If you do want to track him down, he dusted off his Twitter account, @Voja_Antonic, just for the event.

[Nava] will be less tied town, and looking for the best there is to see at the conference. If you want to connect with him, give his Twitter account a jingle: @new299.

2016 Shmoocon

Shmoocon is in the middle of January and boasts “Less Moose than Ever”. It’s notoriously hard to get a ticket for the annual hacker convention held in Washington, DC. We asked for three press passes and they were kind enough to provide one. We tried and failed to get tickets during the second public release, which sold out 900 passes in 7.58 seconds.

We’re Looking for One More Ticket!

We were able to purchase a single ticket second-hand, so along with the press pass we now have two. [Mike] and [Brian] are both planning to attend, but we’d like it if [Sophi] could be there as well. If you know of an extra ticket which we can buy at face value, please email mike at Hackaday with the details.

Will you be at Shmoocon? Want to meet up with [Brian], [Mike], and hopefully [Sophi], or know of an activity there we just shouldn’t miss? Ping us on Twitter (@szczys, @bbenchoff, @sophikravitz).

Also, how are our choices on con attendance so far? Leave a comment below and let us know what hacking events you think we just shouldn’t miss in the coming year.

Watch All Of The Freshly Published Talks From 28c3

January 2, 2012 by Mike Szczys 4 Comments

The 28th Annual Chaos Communications Congress just wrapped things up on December 31st and they’ve already published recordings of all the talks at the event. These talks were live-streamed, but if you didn’t find time in your schedule to see all that you wanted, you’ll be happy to find your way to the YouTube collection of the event.

The topics span a surprising range. We were surprised to see a panel discussion on depression and suicide among geeks (hosted by [Mitch Altman]) which joins another panel called Queer Geeks, to address some social issues rather than just hardcore security tech. But there’s plenty of that as well with topics on cryptography, security within web applications, and also a segment on electronic currencies like Bitcoins.

There really is something for everyone and they’ve been thoughtful enough to include playlists for all talks, just the lightning talks, and lightning talks categorized by the day they occurred. Get those links from their YouTube channel description, or find them after the break.

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2011 CCC R0ket Badge

July 19, 2011 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

[Geekabit] wrote in asking if we’d seen the 2011 CCC badges yet. The answer is NO, we haven’t seen them because the image above is the only sneek peek we can find on their broken-certificate website. But we are glad that he shared the link with us, because it does tell the tale of what hardware and firmware features will be on this year’s badge.

Right off the bat we need to applaud them for several things. Most notably, the 3.7 volt 600 mAh LiPo battery which can be recharged via the USB port. It boasts an ARM Cortex M3 processor which is running what they call and ‘unbrickable’ bootloader that is programmed via the USB port. You can see there is an LCD screen which we’d guess is about 128×128 pixels (correct us if you know otherwise). You’ll be able to interact using a 5-way button, via the RF transceiver, and possibly using an optical interface but we’re not sure that feature made it into the final design. They’ve also rolled in a shield system for extra harware so that you can design your own add-ons before you get there.

As always, if you get your hands on one of these, we want to hear all about your project as well as get an overview of the stock badge and its features so don’t forget to drop us a line.

Update: [Never_gonna] left a comment with a link to a series of posts about r0cket development including a video which we’ve embedded after the break. Thanks!

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25C3 International Capture The Flag

December 23, 2008 by Eliot 5 Comments

Capture the Flag (CTF) is a long running tradition at hacker conventions. It pits teams of security researchers against each other on the same network. Every team gets an identical virtual machine image. The VM has a set of custom written services that are known to be vulnerable. The teams work to secure their image while simultaneously exploiting services on the machines of other teams. A scoring server monitors the match as it progresses and awards points to teams for keeping their services up and also for stealing data from their competitors.

The Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin December 27-30, 2008 will host a CTF competition. Most CTF matches are done head to head in the same room. While 25C3 will have local teams, it will also be wide open for international teams to compete remotely. Remote teams will host their own images on a VPN with the other competitors. Now is a good time to register and familiarize yourself with the scoring system. It will certainly be interesting to see how this competition plays out now that teams that can’t make the trip can still compete.