Defcon — The Equalizer
A few weeks have passed since Defcon 24, and everyone’s been writing about robotic hands and automated hacking computers. Which, don’t get me wrong, is totally awesome, but not a lot of folks have mentioned what its like walking the floor in Vegas at this conference.
Through my years of going, I’ve had extremely varying experiences. I’ve gone as the noob, unknown to everyone. I made friends, stayed up till 2am playing Cards Against Humanity and working on a hacking challenge, and helped someone recover their compromised, wrecked laptop too.
Sometimes I’ve gone with coworkers, where I had a pack of people who I knew, and who knew me, and was able to roam around and bounce between different groups of brilliant folks.
Other times I’ve worn the coveted blue speaker badge, met the big names of the industry, and partied with them. I got to meet the goons and see behind the curtain of all the chaos that keeps everything running.
This year, I roamed; met with friends that I only seem to meet at these conferences, caused some trouble, and used the time to recharge my creative, devious soul. I even taught some kids how to choose the right picks to use when attacking a lock.
With all that, I finally realized what keeps bringing me back:
Defcon, at its core, is not about technology. Its not about crime or deception… its about people being as creative as they possibly can be.
Defcon is about teaching, learning, making mistakes and meeting people. Pretty much everyone goes by first names or pseudonyms, and that is important, because when you strip the titles and the accolades from everyone and shove them in a room together… amazing things happen.
Want to learn a skill like soldering or forensics? Defcon is a great place to get started. You might get lucky and learn soldering from someone who built a hand out of a coffee maker. Perhaps you’ll learn how to wardrive from the guy who invented it. You might also meet a stranger that, it turns out, was one of the two people who almost disarmed the ‘bomb’ at the Tamper-Evident Village. If you’re open to it, the possibilities are endless!
When you’re done with that, grab someone and have lunch with them — even if you’ve never met before. Grab a bunch of folks and have a hacker family dinner. Everyone there is in one of three categories:
- done something cool
- doing something cool
- going to do something cool
You might find a new hobby at lunch, and figure out major risks to your startup idea over a few beers by the pool in the evening. You can attend a talk, and think “Hmm… well, what if…” You can meet someone with a cool idea — Such as @munin who is working on DNS Greylisting, and has source code that needs more love and tinkering. You might then get the idea of “Hey, what if I run this in AWS?” Go in, write up how to implement it on Amazon; maybe package it in a Docker container or an AMI. Just keep building.
Congratulations! You’re now doing something cool. Come to Defcon 25 and talk about what you made, what you found out, and what attacks you discovered and were able to handle.
Did you hear about the Cyber Grand Challenge? Its computers hacking computers and patching themselves in a contest this year. The third place team, Mechaphish, even managed to find and fix a bug the rest missed. Curious? The project is open source; go have fun and learn how it works, then break it a bit. Ping the creators on Twitter with questions — every hacker I’ve ever met is more than willing to help if you’re not just trying to get them to do things for you.
When you go around the conference, there are a lot of amazing people to meet; so go meet them. Simply start a conversation with “Hey, mind if I join you?” or “What is that thing?”. Then exchange handles (“Jeff” is as much of a handle as “DarkTangent”), hang out / grab a beer, and trade contact information; done and done. By chance you meet someone with blue hair and discover you don’t actually know anything about IPv6 in practice. Introduce yourself to the short woman riding a folding bike — that's probably Mouse, and she’s 100% cool in my book.
If you want to find someone interesting at Defcon, carry a few beers in your bag, find someone who’s not doing something at the moment, and offer them the beer. There’s an 80% chance they’ve got something interesting to talk about, and now they have incentive to sit down and share with you.
TL;DR Go to Defcon, meet cool people, HACK THE PLANET!
