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Lock Your Laptops, DEFCON is at Riviera This Weekend

By Chuckmonster on Thursday, 30th July 2009 10:18am
  » filed under Las Vegas  comments: 1

   

Everyone has a favorite weekend to travel to Las Vegas... the Super Bowl, New Years Eve, National Finals Rodeo, Country Music Awards, Star Trek Convention, NBA championships or just a regularly scheduled annual trip.

For us, our favorite weekend in Las Vegas is the weekend that we watch the mayhem from afar with delight and amazement brimming from ear to shining ear - the DEFCON Hacking Conference.

For those who don't know, DEFCON (now in its 17th year) is a conference of security freaks - hackers, lock pickers and other super heroes - who take over the Riviera for four days of talks, demonstrations and discussions of the many ways in which people gain access to locations - real or virtual - which other people do their best to keep them out of.

For the casual Vegas tourist who might be in town this weekend, you should keep a keen eye out for airport & casino signs going FUBAR, ATMs acting strangely and hostile wifi networks. If you don't already, be sure to batten down your laptop security if you plan on connecting to any hotel wifi networks (particularly at any hotels surrounding and including the Riviera, the location of DEFCON).

Hackers are the true pioneers of our day... they figure out how to unlock our iPhones, they show banks and other financial institutions that their software sucks, they teach us how to connect or disconnect our this that and the other thing from some other thing that it should/shouldn't be connected to, they show us that the people who charge us a lot of money for software are usually half-assing it. Hackers climb code mountains because they are there, for the sake of all man kind.



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Comments & Discussion:

 jinx73 posted on Sunday, 2nd August 2009 - 7:03 pm

LVA reported that a fake ATM was discovered in the Riviera by one of the conventioneers. Wonder how long it had been there.



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