I had a great weekend in Las Vegas at [DEF CON 15](http://www.defcon.org/). Met lots of cool people, saw lots of interesting presentations, ate lots of good food, and spent way too much money doing it all.

Perhaps my favorite moment of the conference was when DEF CON organizer [Jeff Moss](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Moss_%28hacker%29) lured Michelle Madigan, the undercover NBC Dateline reporter, to a room full of thousands of DEF CON attendees, and well… watch for yourself…

Some of the more interesting talks I saw:

### Day 1 ###

– The Church of WiFi’s “Wireless Extravaganza”, an overview of their current WiFi and Bluetooth projects.
– Steve Dunker on police procedure.
– H.D. Moore’s “Tactical Exploitation” (also the talk in which the Dateline reported was outed).
– Jeff Moss on “CiscoGate”, the story of the Michael Lynn / Cisco / ISS / Black Hat debacle in 2006.
– David Hulton’s “Faster PwninG Assured”, using FPGA’s to crack Bluetooth PINs and WinZip / Apple DMG encryption.
– Johnnie Long on “No-Tech Hacking”.

### Day 2 ###

– Dan Kaminsky’s “Black Ops 2007”, various web vulnerabilities.
– Zac Francken’s talk hacking access control readers like HID Prox cards.
– Brett Neilson on modern radio scanning (which is inspiring me to get back into scanning).
– David Gustin overview of “hardware hacking for software geeks”.

[Joe Grand](http://www.grandideastudio.com/) one-upped himself with the DEF CON badges this year. Last year the badge was a PCB with two blinking LEDs. This year it has 95 LEDs that can display scrolling text or a P.O.V., and can be reprogrammed by the user using the two capacitive touch sensing buttons.

The PCB also has pads and traces for accelerometer and ZigBee wireless transceiver chips. It would have been awesome if everyone’s badge already had them… imagine 6,000 DEF CON attendees’ badges wirelessly transmitting their accelerometer data. With a bunch of receivers placed around the conference hall, you could make some pretty neat maps. Oh well, there’s always next year!