Today started off slowly. After a rough night sleep I wandered through the casino floor as I headed towards Las Vegas Blvd. The sun was an unwelcome sight as I fumbled for my shades. My body was rebelling from caffiene withrawal and I wished I had loaded up on advil. As I made my way towards the Riviera I was getting more ill tempered. The time was winding away. Almost 10 am, augh, Joe Grand’s talk on hardware was the first one up that I wanted to see and I was convinced I was going to miss it. Well, as it turns out, I was early.
The Clark County Fire Department had descended on Defcon for an “inspection”. Once they were done making life miserable for all, things got rolling at noon. All of the speakers had been pushed back as a result. The first couple of presentations were rather uneventful. There were some good talks but, nothing that was particularly earth moving. That changed when Bruce Potter gave his presentation on Trusted Computing. I wish all conference speakers could be as charasmatic as Potter and Johnny Long. I was struck by somthing that Potter said during his presentation. He voiced his frustration with writers that advocate having enterprise encryption (for which I’m guilty). He said that it is an unrealistic expection to have encryption for 10,000 users in an enterprise. Now, while I won’t argue that this is a difficult undertaking I would question him as to what he would propose as a solution. That being said, an excellent presentation. If you ever get a chance to see him or Long speak it’s worth the time.
The best part of Defcon, well for me anyway, is the Wall of Sheep. This is where the poor bastages that have no concept of security have their misdeeds posted. Various characters were logging into their Myspace profiles, others were using ftp while others still were POPing their email, all of which was IN THE CLEAR. So, for their troubles they end up on the Wall of Sheep. Two notables were one character from Geek Squad and another from Dave the Computer Guy. Sigh, two sheep that should have known better.
Good times.
[tags]Bruce Potter, Johnny Long, Wall of Sheep, Defcon, Laptop Encryption[/tags]