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As someone who went to the 'Con last year (it was my first year) I can highly recommend it. It's nothing like you've ever seen before, and you'll learn more about the inner-workings of security in 3 days than you could in a year at an 'institution of higher learning'. See the Defcon site for more information.

defcon info

defcon is becoming more 'mainstream' every year and is a good conference on the cheap. for $75 you get many tracks from newbie to uberhax0r. its also a good excuse to get out of the office and spend a weekend in vegas.

So is anybody organizing tunnel hacking at DefCon ?

Nah...if it can handle DefCon for 10 years, Vegas can handle a couple of terrorists in the sewers.

Maybe for starters do a joint event with someone else who knows what they are doing.

Like DEFCON or Burning Man (we could create the tower of Katz and watch it burn!)

I think the most 37334 h3ck3r will be the one that gets the plans changed to include an Alexis Park/Hard Rock Cafe stop. Maybe that will be part of Capture the Flag this year? :)

This reminds me, looks like the speeches from Defcon 9 will be going up online soon.

From DEFCON.org

DEF CON 10 will be August 2nd-4th, 2002 in Las Vegas. More details soon.

...many thousands of hacker types are on their way to DEFCON 9 right now. (My plane leaves tonight). That might explain the lack of activity you're seeing.

... for defcon 9!

"Even Palm Pilots are too cramped for "real" use (both screen and input)"

I beg to differ. My Palm IIIx is used daily for text input (notes, appointments, et al) and for reading. I download news into it and have several books in it. Makes the subway ride go faster.

And while flying to Las Vegas last year for Defcon last year, I spent most of the flight writing on the Palm.

As for the Linux watch, it is a concept device, just like the 'Cars of the Future" that Detroit would showcase every year. They'll never go into production (for the most part) but are intended to show off new technologies and techniques.

The Linux watch is the same thing.

Myself, I'm more interested in the OLED display than the OS.

This amazing piece of technology, which I tested while huddled against the elements at a train station in New Jersey, is made largely of paper.

As a result, it's incredibly cheap. You'll be able to buy one for maybe 10 bucks, and it will come with 60 minutes of air time. When that time runs out, you can throw it away, or just punch a button to add another 60 minutes of time.

Basically, this is a calling card with a telephone built in. And the technological advances it's based on--22 patents have been awarded to its developers--are going to have a dramatic impact on many things we take for granted.

The phone, conceived by Randice-Lisa Altschul, relies on a technique that allows a standard electronic circuit to be literally printed on material using magnetic ink.

she's already got worldwide orders for 100 million of the devices and three factories standing by as soon as she receives approval for the device from the Federal Communications Commission. It's a fairly routine assessment guaranteeing things such as the device won't unduly interfere with other technology.

For instance, these phones are pretty much untraceable, like a call from a pay phone. That's great if you're concerned about privacy but bad if you're worried that bad guys will use stuff such as this to make it harder for law enforcement to catch them.

www.westernunion.com is running Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98

D'oh! Seriously, you'd think these big banks and money sending whatever it is western union does people would use a B1 Trusted OS or something.

May I suggest BullDog or possibly TrustedBSD? I haven't tried TrustedBSD, but I was quite impressed with BullDog's stats at this past DefCon. They put a server running thir OS (a modified Solaris) on the CTF (Capture The Flag) network running all sorts of insane services. A day into the competition they still hadn't been cracked so they posted the shadow password file. They never did get cracked.

• Which raises the question: Has anyone tried playing Q2 or something similar using one of the conference room style projectors, such as the ones made by In-Focus? I realize image quality would not be "outstanding", but would it be "acceptable"?

IIRC, she abused the press pass (read: didn't get a valid one yet attended press meetings and such at DC7), was warned twice and bodily removed on the third. There are many pictures linked from Defcon.org.

I must say I was rather amused to find that the Def Con 7 page was hacked by a group who couldn't make it to defcon this year. Well I don't think any legal action will come of it ;->

I also wanted to answer a few of the subjects that came up on this Slashdot topic, just so everyone sees my answers.

First of all, not all of the textfiles are up yet. In fact, while there are 9,000 textfiles up, I have something in the range of 20,000-40,000 waiting to be sorted through! I just wanted to choose a good "break" in my work to invite the world to come see, so that I wasn't toiling in silence and darkness without sharing what I've found so far. So, expect that the site will grow even more in the months to come. A few people expressed unhappiness that I didn't have X file or Y file; in fact, I might very well have it, just not put up on the site yet. At worst, if people feel my site needs a certain file, they should send it to me at the above address.

A VERY large group of people have expressed that I should have some sort of search engine on textfiles.com, and while I agree with them, I don't know any way to do that and still have the system move with any sort of speed. If there's a really good indexing program out there, I'd like to see it, but the site is already into the hundreds of megabytes and I'm concerned that there's no easy way to do it. I have a sort of backup plan, however, and I may have the hotbot site do the work for me because you can search by domain. If this is the case, I will utilize it. Otherwise, I don't know if I can help with that.

There were some minor aesthetic differences that people have with some of my choices on the site. Where I can non-intrusively implement the suggestions, I will, but otherwise, I kind of like things as they are. It makes me feel very cozy and nostalgic, and a lot of users have agreed with me.

At some point I might sell CDs for people who want the ease of getting a piece of plastic instead of spending hours downloading files, and I will possibly look into T-shirts if there's an interest. This is mostly because I like T-shirts.

It might interest some people to know I am speaking at DEFCON, the annual technologist/hacker convention held in Las Vegas. I hope some of you decide to make the trip. I'd love to meet you and talk about the old days and the wonder of the new days.

Finally, textfiles.com is running on a Dell 486/33 box running Red Hat and apache, and it handled over 15,000 users today without any major problems. What a wonderful operating system, and what a great web server.

Yours,
Jason Scott
TEXTFILES.COM