One bourbon, one scotch, and one mav

Earlier today, our illustrious Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, called out critics of the action in Iraq as suffering from “moral or intellectual confusion.” I would love to have time to respond to this personally, but it’s just not in the cards. Thankfully, it seems that a wiser man - or, at the minimum, a far more eloquent one - has had a few free minutes to let his inner moral confusion flow forth.

Read or watch this, please. Take a moment. It’s worth it.

Olbermann’s blog - Downloadable video on Crooks and Liars - Watch it on YouTube

Having watched that, I have a couple of things to say.

Mr. Olbermann,

I can’t say that I’m a great student of journalism, or of history. This is my own shortcoming. I paid little attention to history when I had the chance, and now that I have the desire I don’t have the ability to do so. What I know of Murrow I learned from the Internet and from Good Night, and Good Luck. Based on that knowledge, I can only say this:

Murrow seemed, at least to me, to be like so many other great men have been, simply in the right place, at the right time, with the right vocabulary. The ideas he expressed were the same hopes and fears that many average Americans wanted to express, but they did not have the time, knowledge or vocabulary to do so eloquently. Murrow galvanized a nation by giving everyone a voice with which to associate - a point of light in the darkness.

You say that you have no claim to the legacy of Edward R. Murrow, but your words give you away.

Thank you.

This piece by Bruce Schneier called “What The Terrorists Want” pretty much sums up my feelings of the last few months quite succinctly. In short: Terrorists want fear. We’re so afraid now we’re automatically assuming everyone foreign doing anything strange is trying to kill us. This sort of attitude is not useful or progressive, is very emotionally damaging and, oh yeah, it’s EXACTLY WHAT THE EVIL PEOPLE WANT. Stop it. Right the hell now. Or I’m pulling this world over and we’re going right back home, and you’ll never get to ride the roller coaster.

Just got back from seeing Snakes on a Plane. It’s bad-fucking-ass. It would have been a lot better had I managed to drag myself out of my hellhole to go yesterday, during the premiere; today only five people made it to the 9pm show. It’ll be gone by next week, at this rate.

It couldn’t have been too much more over the top without totally tipping over into complete hopelessness. As is, it was pretty damned intense. I won’t spoil any surprises for anyone but it will definitely keep you grinning. It’s got enough completely gratuitous over-the-top snake attacks (and similarly weird snake deaths) to keep you laughing and of course there’s Sam Jackson yelling MOTHERFUCKER a lot, which is always badass.

I felt bad for the copilot though. He went through way too much goddamn shit in that movie. Poor fuck.

Anyway… Tomorrow I leave for my first plane ride ever. And I’m not staying up all night, like I had planned, on the advice of somebody who’s flown a lot more than I have. Of course that’s almost anyone. But anyway…

Only thing I’m scared of at this point is the TSA. I’ve got two laptops and way too many goddamn accessories to go along with said two laptops. Power adapters for both, connections for my phone and headset, iPod, portable mouse, Plantronics headset, blah, blah, blah… good god, I have way too much bullshit. It probably won’t be that big of a deal, I’m just nervous as fuck about it. Like normal.

It isn’t working anymore. This week has been a parade of stupidity; forgetting to log in, forgetting the phonetic alphabet, and other randomness that I would consider unusual. The key caper, though, takes the cake.

Last night I was out late working on a network. I got home around 10pm with the ever-nutritious McDonalds Asian Salad. I ate, I watched some BSG, I went to sleep. No biggie. Well, this morning I got up just like any other normal morning, except I couldn’t seem to get moving. I was late out the door, not very organized in general; I grabbed the pair of jeans I wore last night and a t-shirt and headed out. But one thing stopped me: my keys were missing.

Checked all the usual places, and they were still missing. Moved some furniture, checked behind shit, no go, keys still missing. But wait! I wore these jeans last night, and I had to have my keys last night or I couldn’t have gotten into the house. Checked pockets, no go. Still missing. Fuck it, I’m late. Grabbed the emergency keys and ran out the door.

Came home at lunch, unpacked my new booq Python XM bianco (review pending, don’t know whether I like it or not yet) and spent about another 40 minutes looking for those same goddamned keys. No fucking luck. Now I’m getting freaked out. I’m looking inside everything I interacted with last night - the medicine cabinet, under the sink near the TP, in the fridge, everything I can think of that I touched. Nothing. It’s like they simply vanished from existence.

Back to work and a long time to ponder. Don’t know where they are.

Finally get home late tonight and call up my mom. “Hey mom,” I ask, knowing I’ll have to explain a lot, “do you have any idea where my keys might be?”

She answers “Yeah, tardface, where you put them.” Not really. But that’s more exciting.

I explain. And while I’m explaining, I’m looking. I’m checking my desk again, I’m checking the DVD shelf, by the xbox, and searching my pockets again….

… wherein I find my goddamned keys, in my back pants pocket where I keep my wallet.

I don’t know how the fuck they got there. And more to the point, why I didn’t feel them at any point during the day while I was sitting on them. Also, I’m glad I don’t have a wireless remote for my car. And my Drive Savers light still works. But fuck beans, why the dickass didn’t I feel them? AND HOW THE FUCK DID MY KEYS MIGRATE FROM MY RIGHT FRONT POCKET TO MY LEFT BACK POCKET?

Do keys jump?

• Walking through Fred Meyer looking at people’s t-shirts thinking they’ll say something clever about computers (hint: they don’t)
• Reflex of wanting to run over to the schwag room to see if Unix Surplus put out anything new and cool
• Assuming anyone doing something ridiculous is raising money for the EFF
• Ending sentences with “X is like a series of tubes”
• In a similar vein, using “maybe X really is like a big truck”
• The urge to yell “WHY DO YOU HATE FREEDOM?” every time someone asks if there are any questions.

I went to bed thinking that I had a sore throat from all the yelling at the shows earlier in the week & the cigars and beer from Saturday night. Wroooooooooooong. I got sick at Defcon! Yay!

We went over to In-N-Out Burger for lunch. In-N-Out is the best fast food I’ve ever had - better than Whataburger, and the closest I’ve ever come to a Depot Burger-quality fast food burger.

We went over to Gameworks/M&M store/Coke store. Me standing in the Coke Store is kinda like Jon Stewart standing in the middle of the Republican National Convention - possible, understandable, but still seems wrong. Both of the stores are packed with loads of shit that I couldn’t care less about. One cool part, though, was the mix-and-match M&M color bay. They had 30+ colors of M&M’s. Gameworks was rather anticlimactic, also. Guess I just don’t care about arcades.

Teams split up and Furb & I went to check out the Las Vegas Fry’s. It’s just like the Fry’s I saw in DFW, except cleaner and neater. It was pretty nifty, I picked up the Blue Man Group’s Complex DVD.

We came back to the hotel as I was feeling like shit, and I hit the Sudafed really hard. Chilled here until it was time to go to P&T.

The P&T show was absolutely fucking awesome. Like Blue Man I won’t try to describe it, you need to see it for yourself. Think of it as a magic show without the flash, and with a bit of social commentary thrown in. It was quite nice. Got a picture of myself looking like a complete dufus with Penn Jillette. Came back to the hotel, doped myself back up on antihistamines and went to sleep for about 5 minutes.

It is presently 6:03 AM MST and I will be heading home as soon as I possibly can. I am very much ready to go home and sleep in my own bed.

Observations, closing remarks and to-dos:
Item #1 is still open for improvement. It was nice going around town and doing things this year but I’m not doing it again. With the exception of P&T, I’d rather just spend the money at the con.
Next year I’m going to the parties. Possibly in costume.
Spend more time in the skyboxes/penthouse/outdoor events area and less time watching talks. Be more selective about the talks I go to and interact more during other times.
Look for contests I can enter. CTF is way over my head at present, but isn’t insurmountable. LPCON is probably my best bet, although the wireless contests are also an open possibility.

Got up this morning right on cue, even though this is three mornings in a row I’ve screwed up setting an alarm on my phone. Today’s mistake was forgetting to change profiles so my phone was on silent. I’m smart.

Watched a bunch of varied stuff - Corporate Network Spying was like “Sniffing 101,” which is what it really comes down to anyway. Found it a bit boring but hopefully Furb got something out of it. Went to a couple of other things but the highlight of all the talks was another talk by Vixie et. al. about the need for a common repository for malware. The problem in a nutshell is that it is real easy for malware authors to mess with existing sensors, and as there is little to no communication between antivirus authors, we spend a lot of time spinning our wheels instead of sharing base tech. This has the effect of making AV software less effective and makes user’s lives more difficult. The solution proposed was to create some sort of centralized repository that major authors could have access to, in order to share info about malware, and alsos to provide some sort of automated processing against most executables (interestingly enough, the packing process itself appears to be the only thing different between many variants of the same piece of malware, so if we could effictvely automate the unpacking process properly it would result in substantially higher detection numbers using existing definitions and heuristics.)

Blah blah blah.

But anyway. Then came closing ceremonies. Many interesting things were discussed there.

• Over 7000 badges were sold. All badge stock was sold out, including the emergency “admit one” badges.
• Vegas PD and hotel security were both very happy with Defcon in general.
• The hotel wants us back again for next year and will be giving us nearly the whole center this time. Ideas for new uses for the space are welcomed. “Taking over” a tower and Defcon TV options are still under debate.
• Priest congratulated everyone for making this year’s Defcon the most pleasant con ever.

The vibe this year really was amazing. With the exception of some pretty short tempers on Friday morning, for obvious reasons, everybody was just immensely cool to everyone else. The talks were great, and the thing that totally sold me on this new place is the fact that I was never once kicked out or asked to leave during or after a talk. There were a few I had to stand through, but none I was turned away from - this by itself is such a huge improvement that it may have been the origin of the goodwill that seemed to permeate this year’s event.

Needless to say I will be attending DC15 unless I am dead. My dashboard already has the 360-or-so days until DC15 widget on it.

After all this craaaaaaazy shit we went to Quark’s, got some excellent steak, a few Borg Spheres and rode the rides. Borg Invasion is still lame as fucking ever. Klingon Encounter is aging but isn’t down yet - it’s still a fucking blast to ride.

Headed over to NYNY and caught the Zumanity show. This was OK but not nearly as good as I had in mind. There were some amazing parts but overall it was more hype than anything. Somewhat disappointed. Also, I was very severely underdressed for the crowd in question - I think this one is a bit more “upscale” than I was anticipating. Would probably have been a lot hotter had I been going with my SO.

Oh, wait.

Observations:
This year, as far as the con goes, was fucking phenomenal. The things that can be done better are more procedural than anything. Overall, there were no weak areas. Fan-fucking-tastic.

Finally got to sleep after a bit of effort. Next year I’d like to have two hotel rooms, a quiet room and a non-quiet room. In the AP we sorta had this option, in the Riv I can just pretty much plan on getting no sleep. This would be fine if I was a young party animal but I am an old cranky bastard. I’m gonna get that on a hat.

Got up this morning & hit up a few talks, wanted to go to one particular talk given by a goon but it was back to back with Kaminsky, and frankly, he’s one of the reasons why I am here. He delivered as per usual, a very animated discussion about various things - not quite as solid as last year but his material had less “cool factor.” Still, there was beer, and beer is always good.

Hit up many other things throughout the afteroon. One was a giant clusterfuck when they guy presenting about Linksys access points lost his presentation (!) It wasn’t in early enough to put on the DC14 CD and apparently he didn’t bother to back it up. Normally I’d have pity, but if I was presenting at Defcon, I’d have my presentation in at least three different places and mediums.

One of the highlights of the day was a talk by Dr. Linton (Lin) Wells, who is the Deputy Director of some damn thing or another - suffice it to say that he is a fed, and was on the Ask the Fed panel. His present task is information tech analysis and he spent the hour talking about creating a DoD network in which UNclassified data is properly distributed to government and non-government officials. For example, let’s say that during a disaster a local police agency wants to get federal satellite graphs of a local area. Right now there’s a bunch of bureaucratic bullshit process that one would have to go through to get that data, but he wants to make it so that anybody who needs it can get it, and is looking for lots of suggestions about implementing interaction with individual citizens, which is why he’s here. He was a very good speaker and brought up several interesting subjects.

Killed the night away watching DNS lectures which ended up being not so intresting. I should have gone to the lock picking lectures even if I already knew/know how to do what they were reviewing. Still, the only thing I really got out of the DNS lecutres was one idea for an interesting DDOS-style attack and a lasting understanding that Paul Vixie really, really fucking sounds like Kermit the Frog.

Picked up a couple of lighters from the schwag booth, one for collectin’ and another for usin’. Also met the guy who runs Unamerican, who has a fucking schwag booth set up. Bought several stickers and buttons on it. My bag now has pieces of flair. Rock.

Hacker Jeopardy was ABSOLUTELY FUCKING MINDBLOWINGLY AWESOME. I answered a lot of the questions before the guests did. I keep thinking it would be interesting to have a team even if we get our ass kicked, I just need some comrades that know a lot about proper software.

Observations:
Paul Vixie sounds curiously like Kermit the Frog. He’s very smart though.

Started off the day tripping over drunken comrades to leave the room at 9. But actually ended up leaving about 9:20. Figured I couldn’t get proper breakfast before the con started, so I picked up some junk food and headed for track 3. Got there and hung out for a few minutes, until a goon told us to get the fuck out. Apparently something happened and the fire marshal never cleared the con event rooms. So we waited in the hall for an hour, at which point Priest told us we were gonna have to wait for at least another hour. Wandered about seeking sustenance and hydration until the con finally started, 2 hours late. This would end up being bad later, but for entirely odd reasons.

Started off the day with a dude named Atlas who wanted to talk on and on about how he went from random brainy guy to l33t h4×0r in five days. He talked a lot about binary exploits and had a lot of interesting things to say, even though he got cut short a lot due to the weird scheduling problems.

Caught various talks throughout the day. The highlight of the afternoon was definitely Major Malfunction’s talk, but what can I say, the guy’s James fucking Bond. Top that. He had a lot of crazy awesome shit to talk about with regard to fucking with magstripes, including reading stripes with a cassette head and how to store them as a wav file. (Hint: Credit cards sound pretty fucked up when you play them through speakers.)

Rest of compadres blew me off for Margaritaville. I’d love to go, but there’s this con thing.

Evening was topped off by the EFF QA session, which was really awesome. Makes me feel way better about giving them my hard-earned dough, as they are honestly concerned with what goes on in the community. Or they’re really good fakers. Then I saw two RFID talks in a row, the first one about a device that could emulate or selectively cancel out or duplicate tags, the second about how to read RFID tags and emulate one specific type of tag, the type on the US passport. Lots of really cool shit here, including how to make the reader think the memory area on the tag is effectively infinite (it just reads until it hits a proper EOF marker! Who designs this shit?!?)

But the highlight of the night was definitely the Movie with Dark Tangent. On a whim I decided to blow off Hacker Jeopardy to see this, and it was a good goddamn idea. The movie of the night was a strange all-CG movie called Megadon, a very short (less than an hour) tribute to 60’s Godzilla-type monster movies of Japan. It was done by a small crew, 11, working over a period of three years. The production value is really amazing - it even has realistic artificial film grain and dirt/damage on film. Looks like fucking film. It’s the first movie I’ve ever seen where the CG scenes could legitimately be confused with live action. Granted, it’s only for a few seconds, and only for a few select scenes, but considering that nothing has ever come close so far, that’s really saying something. DT is a fucking nice guy, very down to earth and a big movie buff.

Oh, and that highlight part? Guess who saved the day when the laptop DT was gonna use to play the movie went on the fritz? Me. We subbed in Snow Crash and played the whole goddamn thing on my laptop. I know I’m overplaying this, and I don’t care - loaning a system to the guy who runs the largest hacker con in the world made my fucking night. (Nobody may ever get the reference to the title but hey, that’s their own fault.)

I’ll never wash Snow Crash’s keyboard ever again.

Observations:
Movie Night with DT is definitely on the menu every year, sans exceptions.

Got up this morning, lounged around and finally went and got breakfast. Unless something weird happens this will be the last day I get to sleep in. The con starts at 10 and by fucking God I am gonna be there. We went and ate at the “Coffee Shop” - the Riv’s generic diner. Upside: It’s poolside, which provides for an outstanding view. Downside: The staff was rather dismissive, as opposed to the AP where everybody was amazingly nice. Oh well.

At this point it was noon so we headed over to prereg. The badges this year are fucking wicked awesome, they are color coated PCB’s that have a built-in PIC and a pair of LED’s that flash in various patterns. In addition to that, there is a conveniently provided set of programming pads and a note inside the program that hacking your badge isn’t just suggested, it’s expected. The guy who designed them actually has a talk tomorrow morning at 10, which is unfortunately back to back with another one I want to see. I actually saw my first modded version earlier today, a group of guys who took one of the blue LED’s out and swapped them for red.

Dropped by the schwag booth and picked myself up a cap and a set of pint glasses. No shirts in ultramegamegafatass size. I may want to swing by tomorrow to get a bottle opener too, for kicks. Don’t know why.

We wanted to go to the Gun Store and to Costco, so we all piled in the Mitsubishi Monstrosity and headed for Costco. They sell a lot of booze at Costco here, and it’s really super cheap. Then we went over to the Gun Store. The guys there are really fucking awesome, friendly and very well-educated about their guns. I got to shoot a full-auto AK47 (fucking awesome), a SAW (easier than you’d think) and a P90 (semi-auto only, which after shooting the SAW feels like a fucking capgun.) I spent WAY more money than I should have spent. Way more.

We drove back to the hotel, packed all the booze & shit in, and then after wandering around the Riv looking like fucking retards trying to figure out where the taxi stand is (hint: underground) we caught a cab to Excalibur so that we could do the dinner show.

(Side note: When we were here the first time, we had a pretty good suite of taxi drivers. This year, so far, out of three cab rides we’ve had two crazy drivers; one guy who was flat out reckless and stupid and rude to boot, and the second guy today on the ride home from the Excalibur talked a big line about knowing a lot of crap about Vegas “gentlemen’s clubs” but couldn’t find the Riv from the Excalibur without assistance. Scary.)

The dinner show at Excalibur was pretty cool - not Blue Man cool, but it was half the price. It was done kinda theatre-in-the-round (or half-round, if you will) style. It was all about a challenge to the kings of various countries and an evil wizard trying to take over King Arthur’s kingdom. Very family-friendly.

Grabbed a cab & back to the Riv. (See aforementioned rant about lost taxi driver.) Sleep. Get up tomorrow and go to con.

Observations:
It’s really hard to sleep when the snoring is shaking the walls.
I already let down promise #1 from last year. Working on it.