If you were part of the hacker scene in the 1980's or 90's (or you played a certain tradition in Mage: The Ascension around that time) you undoubtedly have come across the weird, wonderful, bewildering, and occasionally insightful antics of The Cult of the Dead Cow, a crew of hackers originally based out of Texas who were well known for their periodic text file releases. What isn't well known until very recently is that many cDc alumni have gone on to do great things, from starting one of the first security companies to ascending to C-level status at some well …
If you've never been to Makerfaire, it's a rite of passage for geeks of all kinds. In fact, I'd recommend that everyone attend their nearest Mini-Makerfaire at least once because you'll see all manner of weird, wonderful, and inspiring things on display. I ran a table at the one in Silver Spring, Maryland back in 2013 with HacDC and had a ball. Anyway.
I had a chance to attend the original Makerfaire in the Bay Area a few weekends ago and, though it was a significant journey on BART and on a shuttle bus it was well worth it. There …
The reason I've been quiet so much lately and letting my constructs handle posting things for me is because I was getting ready to attend DefCon 22, one of the largest hacker cons in the world. It's been quite a few years since I last attended DefCon (the last one was DefCon 9, back in 2001.ev) due to the fact that Vegas is, in point of fact, stupidly expensive and when you get right down to it I need to pay bills more than I need to fly to Las Vegas for most of a week. I'm also in …
Back from DefCon 22. Exhausted from the flight home. Lots of stuff to write, need to type up my notes. No pictures of the con due to the "no photography" policy. Unlocked achievement pink mohawked cyberpunk.
Greetings to everyone I met at DefCon this year. Love to old friends, you know who you are. If you're waiting for e-mail from me, please be patient because my inboxes are backed up by thousands of e-mails and I'm patching together some new bots to help me sort through it all. It might be a week.
I finally got around to uploading the pictures I took at HOPE 9 - you can look through them here. As has been the trend in the last five years or so, I didn't take very many pictures because more and more people in the hacker community are simply not comfortable being photographed anymore. We don't have a whole lot left in the way of privacy and being snapped by one of your own just feels... wrong.
I asked everyone in the pictures if I could photograph them and they gave their permission. People who did not were not photographed.
UPDATE: 20191230 - Uploaded much better video footage to my Peertube account, linked appropriately.
My preparations leading up to HOPE 9 were something of a last minute scramble; at HacDC the night before we left for New York my trusty cellphone of four years decided to give up the ghost. This meant that I had to get to a Sprint store early on Thursday morning, pick out a new phone (a Samsung Galaxy S-2, which appears to be a later model of Lyssa's phone) and set about migrating all of my data in the little time there was before I had …
I'm snowed in at work because I have to catch up on everything that happened while attending HOPE 9. If we just met and you're trying to get in touch with me, please be patient. I'm not ignoring or trying to dodge you, I'm up to my neck and don't have time to get back to you yet. E-mails will be answered as time permits, I'm trying to catch up on Twitter, and your business cards are neatly stacked and await sorting. If you need my PGP public key here it is; when sending encrypted e-mail me please attach your …
HOPE Number Nine was a success. Due to a massive Boltbus failure on Sunday night, I didn't get home until 0530 this morning. I'm weary, exhausted, hurting rather a lot, and in need of yet another shower. I'll write about it when I've got more spoons.
"This is our SUV, the Nebuchadnezzar. From it, we hack into the Matrix and broadcast our pirate signal."
That pretty much sums up our trip to CarolinaCon 8, held last weekend at the Hilton Hotel in Raleigh, North Carolina.
CarolinaCon, now in its eighth year, is a small, intimate hacker con founded by people who believe that sharing information with one another is the best way to both learn and advance the state of the art. It's the sort of con where you will see a talk by someone who may have learned about public speaking from watching Jerry Seinfeld's …