Here and behind the cut are the notes I took at DefCon 23. They are necessarily incomplete because they're notes, and I refer you to the speakers' presentations and eventually video recordings for the whole story.

Applied Intelligence: Using Information That's Not There - Michael Schrenk

• Knowing your operations and resources
• More effective and efficient
• Competitive intelligence
• What's happening outside of your business
• Know your competitors and markets
• Collect, analyze, and apply external data
• There is a professional association of people who do competitive intelligence
• Applied intelligence is actionable and changes what you do
• Most is useless unless you develop it …

Well, I'm back from DefCon in sunny and hot Las Vegas, Nevada and more or less reinserted back into my everyday life. I'm just about caught up on everything that happened at work and finally finished the notes that are going to comprise this article. I'll type up the notes I took during the talks at DefCon in a couple of days; they've voluminous and I want to get the experience out of my head and into external storage before the memories fade much more. Unfortunately, I didn't make it to any of the villages so I don't have anything …

The field of artificial intelligence has taken many twists and turns on the journey toward its as-yet unrealized goal of building a human-equivalent machine intelligence. We're not there yet, but we've found lots of interesting things along the way. One of the things that has been discovered is that, if you understand it well enough (and there are degrees of approximation, to be sure) it's possible to use what you know to build logic circuits that work the same way - neuromorphic processing. The company AeroVironment recently test-flew a miniature drone which had as its spatial navigation system a prototype neuromorphic …

Behind the cut are the notes I took during DefCon 22, organized by name of presentation. Where appropriate I've linked to the precis of the talk. I make no guarantee that they make sense to anybody but me.

One Man Shop: Building an Effective Security Program All By Yourself - Medic

• Integrate with environment
• Continuous monitoring
• People and Process -> Secure Network Architecture -> Secure Systems Design -> Continuous Monitoring -> External Validation -> Compliance
• Compliance, per usual, means dick in the final analysis
• Roughly five year plan w/ deliverables
• Needs organizational supprt. Still answers to the Business.
• Supports, !replaces Business
• Security will not mature past …

Video footage of the first fully viable cyborg insects has been posted to the Net by cyberneticists at Cambridge University. They've managed to tap into the visual processing neural networks of dragonflies and horseflies to use them as drones.