Last weekend I went to Las Vegas to attend the seventeenth iteration of Defcon. What an amazing time.
I made a bunch of awesome friends, and saw some old acquaintances I hadn’t seen HOPE6 three years ago. I also met some people I had talked to online for the first time: Irongeek, verbal, JFalcon, rbcp, Wes, and Da Beave. In the weird coincidences factor, I met someone that had come to a few Ottawa 2600 while waiting in registration line. Neither of us knew that the other was attending.
Defcon is an annual event held in Las Vegas. I got to see a bunch of talks, including a very interesting presentation by Moxie Marlinspike on a very serious exploitable bug with SSL certificate handling.
During the day I would attend Defcon, while in the evenings I would visit Las Vegas with Nick & Ben, who were staying in the room right across from me in the Circus Circus Hotel. They exposed me to the real Las Vegas, and I got to try an In-and-Out for the first time. I also had a very nice dinner one night with Jason Scott and Irongeek.
Walking around was interesting. Planet Hollywood had strippers at 3AM in the middle of the casino area. Families would be out, with their little children, at 4AM. This truly is the city that never sleeps. I found the hotels very inexpensive ($35/night @ Circus Circus), but everything else – especially the food – was very pricey in the strip.
Attendees to the conference were handed badges as proof that they had paid. Unlike your typical conference badge, however, these ones contained reprogrammable microcontrollers, a microphone, and a LED. The program that ran on them made the light blink with increasing frequency depending on the ambient noise level. Reprogramming the badge to perform neat tricks was encouraged through the use of a contest. One team managed to make the device wirelessly control a miniature blimp through sound. Really neat stuff. The organizers had put together a number of such cool contests.
That bit of awesomeness really encapsulates the spirit Defcon. What I liked best about the conference, however, was the sense of community that was always present. I could just strike up a conversation with anyone, whether we were in lines, or while sitting down at a table. We could talk about where we were from, what we were doing, what we thought of the conference – and it would just work. There wasn’t this layer of paranoia, which is something I have encountered in local 2600 meetings.
Defcon was a great, and I’ll definitively be going back.