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!"

Comments

Wrong motivation

[Anonymous Coward]

Pictures of Arnold? Would've been done quicker if they were looking for pictures of Natalie Portman.

Pshaw!

[b!arg]

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...

So there's a room full of ubergeeks, then..

[Anonymous Coward]

DJ in the corner starts spinning electronica, adding to the chaos. Near the Scavenger Hunt table, a brown-haired, bearded guy bellows, "I need six people to dogpile on me right now!" He lays on the carpet on his back, limbs spread

This is the defcon form of entertainment? I'll pass

Re:So there's a room full of ubergeeks, then..

[Rorschach1]

"This is the defcon form of entertainment? I'll pass"

Dude, have you seen the dance floor at DefCon? That's got to be the most pathetic sight I've ever seen. Imagine about 200 nerds just standing against the walls, and three of the six females in attendance dancing with a handful of guys that are either hotel staff or horrendously drunk.

That's nothing...

[Rorschach1]

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.

Easy

[xsupergr0verx]

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.

Re:DF for wifi

[carbolic]

Yes! There's several, of what I call, AP Games using wireless access points. NZWireless in New Zealand performed a treasure hunt in their home town. My pals and I designed a capture the flag game where you drive around the city trying to find an access point. And the traditional foxhunt (or RunningMan) where you seek to find a single AP moving around in an erratic fashion. I prefer using a car since I live in L.A. and don't walk.

In Chapter 11 of my book, Wi-Fi Toys, I describe some of these DF-based AP games in great detail. I love it how these guys are breaking the rules with traditional wireless.

Instead of using access points for boring Internet access, these guys are going extreme and creating a giant video game.

--
carbolic
Wi-Fi Toys