Today I waited in line for over an hour and a half to get into Defcon 20… Totally worth it! This is my first time at Defcon, and already I’m loving it. The people are great, the opportunities are endless, and the talks are very interesting and entertaining. Today was mostly welcome stuff for new people, but even that was funny. One of the talks had a completely drunk speaker who didn’t really make any sense, but you could tell he was having a good time anyway.
I think I’m way outside my skill set here, the badge itself is a hacking challenge, and sadly I don’t even know where to begin. I wanted to hook the thing up to my PC and see what type of data I could gather. I’m dumb though and don’t have any cables or anything with me so I guess I’ll have to wait until I get home to tinker with it.
There are several crypto related things around the conference area that people are already starting to note down and try to figure out. Here is one that I thought looked fairly simple, but I haven’t yet started to decode it. There is a huge sticker on the floor, and the following numbers around the outside of it.
26 2 22 13 26 14 22 2 22 9 11 26 7 19 12 13 24 22 2 12 6 9 22 14 12 5 22 14 6 9 23 22 9 12 6 8 24 18 11 19 22 9 2 12 6 19 26 5 22 21 12 6 13 23 7 19 22 11 9 12 17 22 24 7
Tomorrow the real conference starts and I’m looking forward to spending some time learning about lock picking and finding some interesting people to chat with. So many people everywhere I’m sure I’ll learn a bunch of new things.
I think the best part of the day was when during one of the presentations there was a woman asking a question to the speaker and he started making jokes about chloroform and his prom. She yells out “cool it with the rape jokes or the women in here are going to rise up and kill you!” at that point the crowd started yelling out “NEXT” until she stopped talking. 🙂
YakHack 