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Defcon 12 Running Man Contest
LiveSecurity writes "Contests involving Wireless Access Points have been a staple of Defcon for a few years now. This year at Defcon 12, three reporters from WatchGuard Technologies followed contestants in the Running Man mini-contest. Five teams had one hour to find a roving, low-power AP serving up a picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Add hundreds of hackers, 104-degree F. desert heat, and stir. The report on WatchGuard's Web site is officially sanctioned by the contest's designer, Frank Thornton, who mirrors the story. Long but good geeky fun!"
Pictures of Arnold? Would've been done quicker if they were looking for pictures of Natalie Portman.
Did the losers have their heads blown off?
Are there any other similar DF events like this with wifi? I did amateur radio DF some years back and it is certainly entertaining.
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I like the Watchguard story which, true to the book, counts the chapters down to. Of course the actual find in this case was hidden very well. Nice contest.
I can do the running man for an hour no problem. Try doing the Macarena for that long though! Your head will explode. Oh wait...
Everybody dies frustrated and sad and that is beautiful
Contest designer Frank Thornton of Blackthorn Systems has added a technological wrinkle or two to this year's contest. The Running Man Web page has a secret message on it, which will require cryptographic and puzzle-solving skills to decode. Competitors can't run around the hotel simply asking everyone, "Are you the Running Man?" Instead, they have to decode the message and say it to the Running Man. The first team to do so wins.
Mathematics is not a crime.
This is the defcon form of entertainment? I'll pass
Five teams had one hour to find a roving, low-power AP serving up a picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The "AP" in question is not the Assocated press, but an Apache Web Server.
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For a second there I saw Running and Defcon in the same sentence and thought "Here's an idea that's doomed to success".
Then I read the description and realized the paramedics might not be so busy after all....
- Relativistic? That's barely Newtonian!
Isn't the point of hacking into a computer to get logical access to the data stored in it ?
Why would any brother to care where it resides ?
And isn't the whole point of networking that you don't need any physical contact to the computer ?
What's next ? Brasilian script kiddies take a fight to Europe to lay hands on Dutch servers with a PHP-based blog software security hole ?
Sorry but this all seems to be pretty stupid ?
People have been doing radio direction finding as a sport for decades. I learned a lot from weekend transmitter hunts - we'd have one team hide somewhere in the general vicinity of the city (had to be heard from the starting point), transmit a signal on the 2 meter band, and the rest of the teams would hunt them down.
Sometimes it would be a tiny unattended transmitter. One of our favorite tricks was to bury the whole thing and use a 1/4 wave brass rod as an antenna, and insert it into a dry weed in a vacant lot. Still, a good team starting 10 miles away could often find it in 30 minutes.
We got a lot of weird looks driving around town with big home-built quad or yagi antennas hanging out the window, but there's no better way to learn practical RDF stills. And I'm still using those skills - Sunday evening I was out DFing an ELT signal from a crashed plane. Most search and rescue folks do this infrequently, and have a textbook education in how to triangulate the source of a signal, but there's no substitute for practice. I can hunt down a transmitter using a handheld scanner and omnidirectional antenna faster than most of them can do it with an expensive DF unit.
Did they have to take off their coke bottle glasses first? Did they force them to remove their shirts so there was more glare from the sun?
doo bee do...
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Competitors can't run around the hotel simply asking everyone, "Are you the Running Man?"
Yeah, they first have to translate it to Klingon in order for the nerds to compete with each other.
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AP != Apache ...
AP == Access point
Who will be the first to threaten a gratuitous infringement/trademark lawsuit? Stephen King (aka Richard Bachman) for the story title, "The Running Man," or Arnold Schwarzenegger who played the main character of the screen adaptation?
By the way, read the print version of the story. The last page of the book is a very interesting parallel to the September 11 attacks of New York. You know, the attack that "nobody could have foreseen."
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Fat, ugly women.
This reminded me of Triumph talking to the "super nerd"... "Pretend you've just run 10 feet" There must have been a whole lotta heavy breathing. ;)
Was this just random, or what?
What if the entire Universe were a chrooted environment with everything symlinked from the host?
not a8ymore. It's
Lets see who is the first slashdotter who can google up a dc12 pic of the hot red-head who played the running man
What do you suggest is better? Geeks looking for Arnold's photo, or geeks running away from the goatse guy?
awesome. just freaking awesome.
as in AP ammo?
First I thought Fscking degrees. Then Freakin'. Then I remembered that I can set my timezone to this ./ thingie but still it does not convert these strange units to ones used in most parts of the world. Oh well, have to resort to the google calculator...
- 4r0g
who saw the headline and thought they were running a contest to write manpages?
Pics of Arnold? "Long but good geeky fun."
... that while all of the geeks ran off, that a few other attendees didn't lurk around Dara, seeing as how there was now a whole lot less competition.
"Hey, forget this game. Let's go for the chicks!"
I just gotta say, this is the lamest thing I've ever heard of. Is this what happens to people when they don't have sex for extremely long periods of time?
Come on Slashdotters, we should be ashamed that this event is being billed as the kind of dumb-ass shit that most geeks would enjoy doing.
How the hell do they know a potato chip bag reduced the signal by 7 or 8 dbm? Did they measure it with a spectrum analyzer? A calibrated FIM? I doubt it.
More computer nerds talking out of their ass like they really understand RF.
Apparently the mods have never seen "The Running Man". At least the prison scene at the beginning.
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