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Steve Rambam, a private investigator, gives talks at the 2600 HOPE conferences. In 2006, he gave a talk called, "Privacy is Dead, Get Over It." He makes a convincing case that in the age of the Internet, 20 bucks will get you access to everything you ever wanted to know about someone. Not just pseudo-personal information like address, date of birth, SSN, phone numbers, and so on, but their complete financial history including credit records, bank accounts, loans, and major purchases; magazine subscriptions; utility bills; memberships in various organizations, clubs, and charities; travel itineraries, you name it. Private companies have been compiling information from public, commercial, and government sources over the last decade and have gotten astonishingly good at assembling a complete profile of practically every person in western society. And there's no way to opt out or tell them to stop it because it's all perfectly legal. (The CIA and FBI are their biggest customers.) He also notes that sites like Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace are a private investigator's wet dream because people (even criminals) literally put all of their interests, activities, photos, relationships, and thoughts right up there on the Internet for everyone to see. (Or subpoena.)

At the 2008 conference, he told the story about he and a journalist friend played a game of hide and seek. The journalist (I don't recall his name) said that he could disappear from Steve's radar and Steve said, "bring it on." I wish I could remember all of the details, but the gist is that the journalist, despite his very best efforts, he couldn't stay hidden. He used aliases and even opened up bank accounts in foreign countries. It's a terrific speech and you can hear it here.

In case you missed it, recordings have been released from The Last HOPE conference, including Myrcurial's InfoSec talk "From a Black Hat to a Black Suit - How to Climb the Corporate Security Ladder Without Losing Your Soul" [direct link to large 64kbps MP3 file].

In case you missed it, recordings have been released from The Last HOPE conference, including Myrcurial's InfoSec talk "From a Black Hat to a Black Suit - How to Climb the Corporate Security Ladder Without Losing Your Soul" [direct link to large 64kbps MP3 file].

This is a really bad loss for the hacker (in the real sense of the word) community. I've never actually made it out to one before but I've made sure to listen to the majority of the recordings from the past conferences. There's some great content by some really intelligent speakers and I know that I'm really looking forward to some of the talks this year. Check out the list to see if you find anything you're interested in (you probably will): The Last HOPE.

Sorry. I'm not seeing "The Final Hope" anywhere. But I am seeing "The Last HOPE" on the 2600 news page *and* on "The Last HOPE's" official site.

There's even a picture of a tombstone on their official site that reads "Hope: 1994 - 2008."

Sorry. I'm not seeing "The Final Hope" anywhere. But I am seeing "The Last HOPE" on the 2600 news page *and* on "The Last HOPE's" official site.

There's even a picture of a tombstone on their official site that reads "Hope: 1994 - 2008."

Aside from the radio station, there will be other projects, such as the NOC NOC (none of our concern network operations center, a coat check for servers), and the Attendee Metadata project, which seeks to use 2.4GHz OpenBeacon tags to track all the attendees. http://www.thelasthope.org/projects.php#rfid They need some volunteers for this project, actually, so if you have some microcontroller skills, drop them a line at projects at hope.net

This looks like it will be a great conference, I'm looking forward to attending.