I went off to DEF CON 9 for the weekend
with five other people in a van. I
had a great time, and ran into many people I know.
I thought the best talks were the SafeWeb
and War
Driving (see also) talks -- of those I went to, which were just a few of the many
talks presented there. The microcontroller talk was interesting but a bit
over my head in places; I also enjoyed the ingenuity of
Dan Kaminsky's
ssh talk, although I
"had issues with it". I did learn some nice tricks there. And Ian's
rendezvous talk was good, but I hadn't realize that I had already heard
those ideas before.
I got my first-ever hug for being a free software project developer. See,
don't let anybody tell you free software development doesn't have rewards.
I went to dinner with some strangers, one of whom was a New York
Times reporter I'd just met. I have to watch for her article on
Thursday about one of the DEF CON speakers.
I passed out a bunch of EFF brochures. People seemed pretty interested in
what EFF was doing; it probably would have been good to have an EFF booth
there. Maybe that can happen next year. Another thing that would have
been nice was giving away, or selling, Bootable Business Cards.
Las Vegas is pretty interesting. I have a bunch of other stories besides
what I'm documenting here.
We haven't had that finger here since 1989.
(Seth, on the fallout from the Morris Internet worm)
Suddenly your TCP three-way handshake is not fun anymore!
(Ian Goldberg, on disaffection with Internet protocols)
If computer technology presents such unexpected risks to the public,
what about life in general?
(Seth, on comp.risks versus life)
Some are born atheists, some are made atheists, and some become atheists
for the kingdom of heaven's sake.
(Seth, upon hearing someone's life story)
You can actually use clock noise to feed your entropy buffer -- if you,
you know, are into that sort of thing.
(Phillip King, on microcontroller hackers' strange perversions)
Alice and Bob have a little secret office relationship going on they want
to hide from everyone.
(Tek, on the real reason why that pair keeps appearing in cryptographic
protocols)
The geekiest thing of the year, not just of the conference, was that one
woman had a tattoo of the denial of the Continuum Hypothesis on her
arm! (After a bit of on-line research, I actually think that the tattoo
was a misstatement, because it claimed, in symbols, that the cardinality of
the real numbers is in between the cardinality of the natural numbers and two
to the power of the cardinality of the natural numbers. It is apparently
long since proven by Cantor that the cardinality of the reals is equal to two
to the power of the cardinality of the integers, and the Continuum Hypothesis
concerns whether that quantity is to be called aleph-1 or not.)
But seriously, getting a tattoo that expresses your view on the truth of
the Continuum Hypothesis is pretty geeky.
