Maëlys McArdle

Category: Life

Every other post.

  • Las Vegas & Defcon 17

    Last weekend I went to Las Vegas to attend the seventeenth iteration of Defcon. What an amazing time.

    I made a bunch of awesome friends, and saw some old acquaintances I hadn’t seen HOPE6 three years ago. I also met some people I had talked to online for the first time: Irongeek, verbal, JFalcon, rbcp, Wes, and Da Beave. In the weird coincidences factor, I met someone that had come to a few Ottawa 2600 while waiting in registration line. Neither of us knew that the other was attending.

    Defcon is an annual event held in Las Vegas. I got to see a bunch of talks, including a very interesting presentation by Moxie Marlinspike on a very serious exploitable bug with SSL certificate handling.

    During the day I would attend Defcon, while in the evenings I would visit Las Vegas with Nick & Ben, who were staying in the room right across from me in the Circus Circus Hotel. They exposed me to the real Las Vegas, and I got to try an In-and-Out for the first time. I also had a very nice dinner one night with Jason Scott and Irongeek.

    Walking around was interesting. Planet Hollywood had strippers at 3AM in the middle of the casino area. Families would be out, with their little children, at 4AM. This truly is the city that never sleeps. I found the hotels very inexpensive ($35/night @ Circus Circus), but everything else – especially the food – was very pricey in the strip.

    Attendees to the conference were handed badges as proof that they had paid. Unlike your typical conference badge, however, these ones contained reprogrammable microcontrollers, a microphone, and a LED. The program that ran on them made the light blink with increasing frequency depending on the ambient noise level. Reprogramming the badge to perform neat tricks was encouraged through the use of a contest. One team managed to make the device wirelessly control a miniature blimp through sound. Really neat stuff. The organizers had put together a number of such cool contests.

    That bit of awesomeness really encapsulates the spirit Defcon. What I liked best about the conference, however, was the sense of community that was always present. I could just strike up a conversation with anyone, whether we were in lines, or while sitting down at a table. We could talk about where we were from, what we were doing, what we thought of the conference – and it would just work. There wasn’t this layer of paranoia, which is something I have encountered in local 2600 meetings.

    Defcon was a great, and I’ll definitively be going back.

  • “Give me your iPod or I’ll snuff you”

    …as I quote the 16 year old girl on St-Laurent boulevard. I say “Ok,” and keep walking on. She rips the headphones off of my head, they drop on the ground (breaking), and I stand there looking at her. She walks off and gives me the finger.

    Her friend looked embarassed. I put the phones back together, they work. Guess she was bored. That’s my fun of the day. *sigh*

  • I am now a man.

    This last Saturday was a milestone for me. I moved into my own apartment. No roommates – just me. With the acquiring of a solid post-university job, along with my own apartment, I’ve progressed from the status of poor student/youth to being my own man.

  • ConfCon; HWHQ Forums Hacked.

    At the end of this month I’ll be attending the seventeenth iteration of DEFCON. I’m excited; I haven’t been to a hacker convention since HOPE, nearly three years ago now. I’ll make sure to report back with photos!

    That brings me to the next topic: ConfCon. Organized by PhreakerD7 and ThoughtPhreaker, ConfCon is going to present talks on a variety of telephony subjects. It’ll all take place over an interconnected network of conference calls, allowing you to join in by simply picking up your phone.

    ConfCon is free and takes place this July 25th.

    In other news, HWHQ‘s forums were irreperably damaged by spammers. HWHQ is home to the fantastic podcast GameRadio, hosted by C4 & Kobar. The database was corrupted, and unfortunately, despite C4’s best efforts, a backup was not able to be restored. Thank you spammers – not only do you fill my email, cellular phone, and instant messaging accounts with garbage, but you also killed a great forum.

  • Rice Tea Audiobook; Life Goes On…

    I’ve started to record an audio book of Rice Tea. You can download it here for free. The aim was originally to do a chapter a day, but it’s been very hard for me to keep up lately. I’ve started a second job, and layoffs at my old job have increased my stress level by quite a bit. I’m now doing the work of three people, which is both highly stressful and frustrating.

    Back to Rice Tea, the production of the audio book has been very beneficial to me. I didn’t realize to what point some of the dialog was bad – I literally laughed out loud in some bits. I haven’t had the chance to read over the whole thing like this, so it’s been nice. I’m thinking of making a film out of it. What inspired me was seeing the great film Primer, which was done on a $6,000 budget. If they can do it, I can do it.

    I’ve been reading a few books as of late. One is “The Rebel Sell” by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter. The book is a critique of the notion of counterculture as it is applied in the mainstream, and why its actually all just part of the ever ambiguous “system.” The other book I’ve been going through is called “Inside the Machine”, by Jon Stokes and published by the ever-excellent No Starch Press. This last one is an introduction to microprocessors and computer architecture. It’s target audience is the average enthusiast, and the author does his best to make sure that you understand the concepts at hand.

    InsideTheMachine
    I’ve also gone on a book buying binge, and have purchased within the last month: Applied Cryptography; Secrets & Lies; Mathematics: In Content, Methods & Meaning; An Introduction to Environmental and Applied Geophysics; Learning SQL; The Filmmaker’s Handbook and Spook Country.

    In other news, I’m almost 24 now. The last few years have just flown by, and that’s making me panicked a bit. It seems like just yesterday I was at HOPE – and yet that was three years ago. I used to think that I needed to accomplish more to justify the time that went by. I don’t know if that’s so true anymore. What I do know is that I’ve been too passive lately. I need to do something. I can’t let this year slip between my fingers.