does anyoen else find it ironic they have the whole event on video, and then put it up on youtube? something isn't computing here...
well, that is hardly the whole event. I have no way of confiming this, but I suspect that the person filming knew they were about to out a hidden reporter, so thats why they were taping. and also, you really cant get a look at the attendees since the camera work is so abysmal. The speakers are already on record as attending, so no harm there, it is the people in the crowd who may not want their attendance documented.
I like all the nerds trying to talk trash as she's leaving. "Say hello to your editor!" "Have you ever been on 60 Minutes?" Uh... come on, guys. Surely you can do better than that...
I know it sounds like a bunch of nerds who hide behind their computers and throw threats in forums. I wonder how it would have gone had the reporter been a 6'11" wrestler dude.
ya gotta remember.....these guys dont get alot of practice in dealing with real people....in person like... you dont get REAL good at their field without spending hours and hours behind the keyboard. hell, Im not near as good as most of those people, and my inter-personal skills blow chunks.
Next on Dateline: WHEN GEEKS ATTACK! "Normaly docile, when geeks are threatened and feel safe in large numbers, they can become incredibly agressive"
heh in the interest of fairness, those kind of people normally throw insults in IRC chatrooms...forums are too open, and for the most part the ones involved in illegal stuff dont want a (virtual) paper trail. of course....since IRC is easily logged, that isnt a good solution either. WMJ depends on if you mean hacker sin the sense that the media talks about them? (otherwise known as script kiddies) or the kind of people who know how to "hack" (know how to bypass security systems and modify pieces of hardware to accomplish unsupported uses) there *is* a difference.
Bwahahaha... that was funny. I liked how they start screaming about Lindsay Lohan and "To Catch a Predator". At the very end she tries to exit the parking lot but goes the wrong way and has to throw it in reverse. Nice. For the person asking in the nerd asking in the video, that was an Infiniti M35, foo.
Nothing ironic about it. At defcon, you get a press pass if you're a media member. Many of the major networks do not get the press pass because all they do is try to glorify hacking as something evil and purely for ratings. Many of the speakers at Defcon are openly listed and known, so it's not something overly secretive - in many cases we're talking about people who are heads of security for universities, corporations, feds (being able to spot and expose a fed is actually one of the games there), etc. Anyone can really attend the thing if you've got $100. They have a disdain for big media, though. If you're a legitimate security-related magazine/outlet, they just ask you get a press pass and you can get in. She violated the rule of having a press pass if you're part of the media. I'm guessing she either tried and couldn't or knew she couldn't get a press pass, snuck in, and proceeded to video tape the whole thing. It's not some "dark, covert, convention" or anything. Yeah, there are good guys and bad guys there, but in the end it's a game... security analysts and hackers congregate in one area to understand security. On-site, it's all good... once they leave the convention they're at each other's throats. In the end, they learn from one another. The funniest part about Defcon is possibly the free network they offer if you want to use it. If you want to possibly expose yourself to the largest concentration of people attempting to break into every damn known security on a network, go ahead and use the network. lol.
The funnier part is the large projector on the wall that logs and displays, in real time, all of the username and passwords (in plain text) that are being obtained via war-driving. But yeah... several people have said it before and it bears retelling. The people who go to Defcon and especially the people who go to Black Hat (similar, pricier, and more corporate) are, for the most part highly sophisticated individuals. But these are not your MegaDeth t-shirt 13 year olds. They are MegaDeth t-shirt wearing 25-40 year olds. And FBI agents. I would say that most of these people are, at some level or another, involved in some kind of "harmless" snooping, but more than anything it's a means to demonstrate how hopelessly insecure most of the world is technologically. It's the punk 13 year old kids (script kiddies) who think it's cool to actually do damage to harmless bystanders, and those kids don't know what they're doing anyway. There's really a big market for security, and there's not a lot of good education out there on the subject. The fact is that most corporations really don't have a good handle on what it means to be secure. "Our IT guy says we have a firewall" doesn't cut it. In fact, one of the things they were showing at Defcon was a photograph used in an ad for a major IT (I will not name it) organization. It was basically a picture of one of their server rooms. And right there, on the end of each server rack, was a sticker displaying the IP address for the server. Seriously. But yeah, there is and will continue to be a big market for understanding security because it's never going to go away, and it going to continue to get worse.
I have to say you are WAY OFF on this. In ALL aspects of life, morons ALWAYS outnumber people who are good at what they do. Unless you were talking about the people actually at the convention.
I think he was talking about the people who attend that convention. Script kiddies are definitely in the minority there.
