nerd parties
Oct. 10th, 2017 05:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
queenluai don't think i ever blogged about the coolest thing at DefCon!
...oh, thumbing back through my posts, apparently i neglected to talk about DefCon at all, what the hell
okay, DefCon in general was awesome, and actually significantly more awesome than i was expecting; much more of a chill fuck-yeah-we're-all-hackers-here culture than one-uppy-competitive or anything and i loved it.
BUT
the part that perhaps amused me most:
you do not simply get invited to parties at DefCon. instead, you'll be handed a business card with a bunch of seemingly-random die rolls on it. or you'll get a link to a website with a trivially obvious SQL injection vulnerability. or you'll be handed some base64 encrypted string.
to get to the party, you have to solve the puzzle.
this turned out to be a ridiculously fun way to meet people, at least for me—if you're at some awkward happy hour, and you want to say hi but don't know how, just flag down the nearest lonely-looking person and say, "hey, i'm stuck on stage 3 of this challenge, want to try solving it together?"
then you learn that dude has a lot of background in government ops stuff, and also he suggests processing the codes as hex colors, and so on and so forth until you both solved the stage and got directions to the kickass party that night.
this also made parties much easier to find than conferences i've been to in the past—partially because there were just a ton of them, and this is Vegas, i'm sure, but also there's something very democratic about "whoever solves the puzzle can come," as opposed to the usual "make smalltalk with the right person whose company has deep pockets and rented the penthouse suite." you'd see people in the hallways all over with scratch paper and furiously intense expressions, and they'd always welcome some help.
it was awesome. i kind of want all parties to require some hacker challenges for entry, now
...oh, thumbing back through my posts, apparently i neglected to talk about DefCon at all, what the hell
okay, DefCon in general was awesome, and actually significantly more awesome than i was expecting; much more of a chill fuck-yeah-we're-all-hackers-here culture than one-uppy-competitive or anything and i loved it.
BUT
the part that perhaps amused me most:
you do not simply get invited to parties at DefCon. instead, you'll be handed a business card with a bunch of seemingly-random die rolls on it. or you'll get a link to a website with a trivially obvious SQL injection vulnerability. or you'll be handed some base64 encrypted string.
to get to the party, you have to solve the puzzle.
this turned out to be a ridiculously fun way to meet people, at least for me—if you're at some awkward happy hour, and you want to say hi but don't know how, just flag down the nearest lonely-looking person and say, "hey, i'm stuck on stage 3 of this challenge, want to try solving it together?"
then you learn that dude has a lot of background in government ops stuff, and also he suggests processing the codes as hex colors, and so on and so forth until you both solved the stage and got directions to the kickass party that night.
this also made parties much easier to find than conferences i've been to in the past—partially because there were just a ton of them, and this is Vegas, i'm sure, but also there's something very democratic about "whoever solves the puzzle can come," as opposed to the usual "make smalltalk with the right person whose company has deep pockets and rented the penthouse suite." you'd see people in the hallways all over with scratch paper and furiously intense expressions, and they'd always welcome some help.
it was awesome. i kind of want all parties to require some hacker challenges for entry, now
no subject
Date: 2017-10-11 01:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-11 02:11 am (UTC)