2. August 2010 by admin.

Lots of fun and interesting stuff happened this year. Got to hang out with the ever-lovely Rain for the majority of the con. Thursday was mostly a relax and get used to being back in the Riv/LAS. Wasn’t able to get to the Summit, unfortunately, and that started a theme of missing Dual Core play every where that they were this year (read as: sad panda).

Friday was more or less a neuronumerous day.  Rain’s talk (Build a Lie Detector/Beat a Lie Detector) was very interesting and a joy to listen to. Unfortunately, she got cut off with 20 minutes worth of speech left unread because they ended up starting late due to technical difficulties. I will have to make sure to read the rest of her slides from the CD. Speaking of which, this year I have resolved to actually read the contents of the DEF CON cd as well as make it through all of the speeches that are posted online to date. After her speech, I wandered over to the vending area and picked up a copy of Jayson Street’s book and got it signed. My speech was at 1600. I was knocked off balance because the room that I was speaking in was changed at the last minute and I experienced some technical difficulties as well. Luckily, we ended up only eating a minute of speech time dealing with the issue and was able to get it working. I went through the speech rather quickly, but was able to a little Q&A done at the end (even though there is a Q&A room for that, I much prefer it this way). Managed to get trolled on camera by a fellow speaker, but dealt with it. She’ll get hers in the end [evil laugh]. Fast forward to later in the evening for Nikita and Heidi’s baby shower, where we played some games, gave well-wishes to the mamas-to-be, and ate cake pops in the forms of Hello Kitty (vanilla flavored) and Shmooballs (carrot cake flavored). Then on to when Rain, DeadAddict, Hypatia, 3ric, and myself met up and headed to Bill’s for the No Startch Press hang out. Fast forward to me ptfo’ing and then onwards to Saturday.

Saturday I spent all morning tooling around with Rain. We visited with LoSt (who gave us a spiffy mystery challenge shirt), got cough drops for poor -80 (who was rapping his voice hoarse), and got to meet Space Rogue of HNN (*fangirl squee*). Saw Jayson Street’s talk and watched him do a hacker striptease (not nearly as scarring as it sounds) and will be watching the video again when it’s posted, since I was exhausted by the time his speech started. Rounded the talks off with Jason Scott’s talk on 30 years of software pirating, who unfortunately also ran out of time while speaking.

Went to Hacker Pyramid. Became a contestant. Was going to originally partner up with Jayson Street, as per earlier coniving on both of our parts. But our plan was thwarted. It was for the best. I ended up being partnered up with Nikita (BFF) to which myrcurial responded “This should be interesting…”. The first round we didn’t do so hot (even though we had a category on her, which I did well on except guessing my handle. Major fail on my part.), but redeemed ourselves in the second round where we took the lead. Made it to the third round and got beat by Dan Kaminsky and his partner by one point. One. Freaking. Point. But, again, it worked out for the best. The consolation prize was a ninja badge (*insert another fangirl squee*). Went to the ninja party with my shiny new (bricked) badge, had a blast meeting up with people, headed back to the hotel and then ptfo’d so I could catch my ass-early flight home.

I will have (the few) pictures that I took up online soon as well as pictures from prior cons. I have a few announcements that I will be making later on as the day progresses, so keep an eye out.

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14. July 2010 by admin.

So, the past month or two has been crazy. Just wanted to hop on over here while I still had a minute or two of free time while drinking some coffee to let you know what is going on.We’ll start off with the projects. The daily projects have still been going on (some of them are even starting earlier than others so that they’ll be ready by the completion date that I set for them). Due to some technical difficulties (my desktop and laptop both needed to be reformatted) as well as time constraints from work, I have been unable to find the time to sit down and edit/upload all the pictures of the projects. I have been working on getting them done and the blog posts for each week should be up before (if not shortly after) DEFCON.

Speaking of DEFCON, I leave for DEFCON 18 in about fifteen days. For those of you who haven’t heard, my talk on “VirGraf101: Introduction to Virtual Graffiti” got accepted this year and I’ll be speaking on Friday at 1600. I’ll post a second blog with my best-guess itinerary for the show this year. Chances are that I won’t follow my own schedule, but I will try my best and you can always follow me on Twitter (@tottenkoph). I will have the slides that I’m using during the presentation up on tottenkoph.com Thursday night/Friday morning so that those of you unable to attend can see them and those who are attending can see them beforehand and prepare to throw your best questions at me (well, your second-best questions. Don’t be an over-achiever).

Another reason why the blog hasn’t been updated recently is that Rain and I just became the owners of neuronumerous.com It is completely empty right now, but we are working on making a place for neurohackers that not only has a collection of neurohacking presentations, but also a list of links and various other bits for the budding neurophyte (think of something similar to BoingBoing or Mind Hacks).

That’s all for now, kids. I need to go get more coffee and stare at the screen for another 6.5 hours.

Posted in update, DEFCON, neurohacking | Print | 1 Comment »