This past weekend, Rob and I attended Defcon 16 here in Vegas. DefCon is a hacker conference. While there is a lot of nefarious talks (like how to hack the Boston subway which actually got cancelled due to a lawsuit) at the conference, there is also a lot of cool technology and great security information. Rob and I are both hackers — in the good, taking things apart, and making them better sort of way. We are not crackers who break into systems and do bad things.

We had a great time. We managed to stay off of the Wall of Sheep where people who use unsecured network traffic for emails or logging into websites get their logins and passwords displayed to show everyone how stupid they are using the “world’s most hostile network”.

We drank beer chilled from 80 degrees to 40 degrees in 24 seconds in an apparatus consisting of an ice chest, dry ice, isopropyl alcohol, 20 feet of copper tubing, an air compressor, and a red funnel.

From Warballooning, hacking medical equipment, and some cool hardware, it was a great conference. We are definitely planning on going next year.