my blogKiwicon
So just got back from Kiwicon, New Zealand's own hacker con "by hackers for hackers". It was a ton of fun, much beer was had, much pizza consumed and much knowledge was impressed into my feeble brain. It was pretty amazing seeing some of the live demos - seeing how to hide processes from root, how to completely pwn a kiosk, home-brewed distributed WPA crackers, hell, even how to go urban exploring! It wasn't all about teh hax0rs either - we learned about unsolvable problems and how to work around them, the law regarding search and surveillance, RFID tags (are they the best thing since sliced bread or the devils own children?), even the morals behind setting someone else up to take the fall for your nefarious deeds.
In between these talks (and many more besides - it went on over two days) we consumed beer, participated in hacking contests, tried to gain control of a radio-controlled robot and many other activities besides. To be honest I was too scared to connect to the wireless access point there - it's been described as a somewhat hostile environment and who knows who was wielding a 0day OS X exploit...
I'll definitely be back again next year and I've convinced a bunch of network security guys from work to come along - I think there's a bit of an image that only long haired pierced up cyberpunks go along to these events but the real people that should be there learning all they can are the suited up corporate security guys, after all they are the ones trying to protect against some of the guys giving the presentations...