 |
|
DefconXI. It varied from awful to horribly awful. I'll start with the scene whore issue. Amber warned me pre-defcon about the scene whore factor. Being that I've attended and spoken at several conventions I assumed I would be prepared for any sort of whorish behavior. I've learned that 75% of attendees at any sort of convention are so desperate to score that the mere congregation of so many people in that same situation presents interesting and often fluid-exchanging conditions. I'm in the other 25% cause I score daily - at least. Heh. I assumed a scene whore to be a girl with lower than average self esteem for whatever reason. Maybe she thinks nerds will give her more attention because they're sex-starved, etc. Not to mention the male:female ratio is overwhelmingly in the female's favor. So, by basic numbers alone, chicks win. The quantity is favorable, but so many of these girls seem to overlook the quality factor. Intelligence is always attractive, but for most people I always assumed funny and confident outweighed intelligent. It doesn't for me, but it seems like it would for most people. So the attraction I imagined for these girls was ease of use and numbers that just can't lose. My scene whore expectations were that there would be lots of them. They would be dressed badly and probably stupid. I'm incredibly forgiving. I figured that they would be somehow into tech stuff. Maybe like irc girls or even camwhores or something. It wasn't like that at all. There were really none of those from what I could tell. There were however... "The Hax0r Grrls." Dear lord. They are girls from Phoenix, AZ who were convinced to make a porn DVD featuring them sitting at an imac, supposedly 'rooting' computers. At one point one of them reads some sort of man page. I had a rare opportunity to spend some quality time with both the producer of the DVD and the girls featured. First let me clarify that these people are not actual porn peddlers in a traditional sense. We're not talking Jenna Jameson and Pam Anderson here. They are random people in their early 20s [if that] who wanted to cash in and have very low morals [if that]. The 'producer' of this fine piece of classic cinema has a funny haircut and facial hair and wears those costume contacts to make his eyes look white. These things immediately spell out 'dumbass' to me. He also wears a headband with kitty ears. All the time. Yeah. Let me recount a conversation for you that occurred as I just met him and he handed me his card. There were two of his male associates in the room. The porn girls had been given instructions to go get 'slutted up' so as to be showcased while walking around the defcon pool area. Sherrod: So what are they doing on the DVD exactly? A bit later one of the porn girls comes in the room. There are 4 of them total. They are incredibly unremarkable. There are plastic hot topic shopping bags littered throughout their hotel room. This should give you an indication as to how alterna-generic these girls are. Head to toe hot topic. Bad bleach jobs. Bad skin. Bad, bad, bad skin. Two are too skinny. Two are a bit chunky. Sherrod: Hi, I'm Sherrod After saying this she beamed with the proud smile that only a 4th grader could manage after spelling 'encyclopedia' correctly for a teacher. Asking her 'do you know what 0day means?' seemed almost cruel by this point. I really did initially think that perhaps these girls were actually somehow interested in computers. After those two conversations my naive hopes and belief that maybe women would be respected in tech within my lifetime were dashed to all hell. Their producer guy with the utterly ridiculous kitty ears on his head made sure to get them back early so they could wake up and go sell their DVD in the vendor room as soon as it opened. He would be offering an incredible deal - A DVD and a the opportunity to have your picture taken with all the girls topless, only $100! The porn girls seemed excited and enthusiastic about this. I don't begrudge anyone the legal right to sell their body for any price, in any way they see fit. I'm a hardcore, terrifyingly right in line Libertarian, after all. Legally, what they're doing is not wrong and should never be illegal. Philosophically, I want to strangle them. Being a girl in the geek good ole boy's club is hard. I'm not going to detail this right now, but understand that its probably the last truly male-dominated industry and it really doesn't want to give up control. It fears female influence and contains more misogyny than I imagine can be found in any other single professional category. Proving yourself and working twice as hard as men becomes a way of life. I don't get involved in those 'my dick is bigger than your's' bullshit pissing contests with people... because, well - I don't have a dick. I encountered the 'Hax0r Grrls' a few other times in passing during the rest of the convention. They looked just terrible. All cheap hot topic clothes and bad skin and greasy hair. Say what you will about how horrid I look, but I know better than to take my clothes off on film and try to sell copies of it to underage sex-crazed nerds. Friday night I was really looking forward to Hacker Jeopardy as I'm a trivia freak and it seemed like a fun event. I got there and got a front row seat with some kids I had met earlier. Kelly, Shane and his attorney were super awesome and I really liked them a lot. Unfortunately the 'Hax0r Grrls' were there to sling beer to the players - who played miserably despite the fact that the questions were elementary. I really enjoyed everytime they went into the audience to give prizes and things. There was an extremely vocal group of guys who would just shout 'sluts!' at them at piercing levels. Satuday night I saw my little friend Clayton. You should remember him from PN6 as the saran wrap boy. He had a computer in a brief case that he had made. He's 16 and going to be a great little nerdy genius, he has tons of potential. He and Dan had a story to tell me. Now, I'm sure you can imagine what would happen to a hacker porn girl DVD at defcon. As soon as the first one is sold, it really would be an abomination for it NOT to be up on every P2P trading system and personal file server available. I mean, you'd be an idiot not to expect that within minutes of the initial sale. So my beloved Clayton and Dan walked straight up to one of the girls at their vending table, handed her a blank DVD-R and said 'hey, can you sign my copy of your DVD?' Well, we've already established that these girls aren't the brightest. It took her a minute to figure out that if he had a copy, then lots of other people had copies too, and they weren't making their money. She promptly took the DVD and broke it in half. Clayton started saying how its perfectly legal for him to make a copy of something he's bought under fair use. God, I love him. Unfortunately then one of the girls punched him twice in the face. Sigh. He took it well and didn't cause any trouble after that. Apparently the sluts were so upset about this that they sort of all piled in on him and started fighting with him. Security was called, you know the drill. After they told me this story Dan went on a really hardcore rant about how those whores are exploiting hacker culture and its disgusting and wrong. He seemed genuinely offended and enraged. Just about everyone I talked to seemed really put off and disgusted by it. That made me happy to know that there are so many guys who can differentiate between some porn whore and a girl who actually knows something. I'm glad the nerds are getting wise to women using their sexuality in that way and not buying into it. I got to meet neonfreon, DigiEbola and OverDose. All guys I know from #hackphreak. They were all awesome except neonfreon punched me in the face. That hurt. He was super drunk and went to put his hand on my shoulder to say hello, but he missed and his hand was in sort of a loose fist and came smashing into my cheek. Kelly, Shane the Pirate, his attorney, Ian, theMontell, and LizBorden were all total highlights. My pictures stop abruptly in the middle of hacker jeopardy and don't resume at all. That's precisely when Seth arrived and I forgot that I even had a camera with me. The talks were great. My favourite was the Embedded Systems talk by some crazy german. Imagine "ja, I like dee java scause its soooo fast, you know?" in a german accent. Then imagine me, Seth and 3 guys in the back row being the only ones laughing at the joke. His info on Cisco stuff and Siemens phones was really interesting. I enjoyed it a lot. I also really loved the talk on OS fingerprinting as it relates to Xprobe2. They seem to have the most advanced system available for doing that. Far more impressive and detailed than nmap. The guy doing the demo was Israeli and hates the french so he went through and showed all these websites like the sorbonne, the prime minister's site and the tour de france and how they all were using american technology, ie windows and solaris. I was with a group of people discussing various idiots we know. It turns out DigiEbola hacked one of my former clients. This devastated and upset me deeply. I built an openbsd firewall/gateway for them as well as a postfix mail server on open. They have a T-1 at their location and are running several servers. My pf rules were like exactly perfect and I set that stuff up meticulously. I couldn't believe that something I had done would get screwed like that. Then I reasoned that it probably hadn't been patched or cvsup'd since the initial install and that was the problem. Then he started talking about windows and DSL. It turns out he hacked an employee's home machine, not the actual client's location. Ugh. Amber and Thoren got matching geiger counters and Mark helped me keep track of my victims with precision and co-ordination rivaling that of the SS circa 1944. All the se2600 kids were awesome to see again too. Dolemite, skydog, Patrick, Clayton, Dan and of course my Vice President and the world famous author of Programming Linux Games - John R. Hall. I'm still undecided about returning to defcon next year.
Amber is terribly excited about building a robot for the robot wars,
I'd like to see that and I'd like to play hacker jeopardy and win. Also,
if I return next year I will be MUCH more organized. The things putting
me off of returning are probably obvious. The porn girls, the general
lack of actual tech stuff going on other than the talks, which have
limited space available, and you're never guaranteed to get in are all
factors making me think no. I don't like the drunken fraternity boy
atmosphere either. We'll see what happens. I think I would make a really
good goon. EDIT: |
||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|