Welcome to DEF CON Safe Mode. I'm the Dark Tangent. I'll be your host, along with hundreds
and hundreds of other goons, contest organizers, village organizers, and other creatives, trying
to build you a virtual experience for... I have a placement for... Missing Las Vegas!
Far from Las Vegas, I'm in Singapore, where I've been stuck since February,
so I really am coming at you from the other side of the planet.
Recording this just in case the live connection doesn't work.
So, hopefully I'll be at the end of this recording, available for questions and answers,
but if it doesn't work out, sorry, we tried our best.
So, this is the part of DEF CON where, normally, I talk a little bit about the history of the con,
what can be expected for the new year, some cool surprises, how to get the most out of it,
but really, honestly, I don't really know what to tell you a whole lot, besides we're online.
It's new, exciting, the theme this year is discovery. Our color palette are these nice,
bright pastel colors, and we're trying to evoke sort of a sense of wonder, discovery,
new exploration, and there's going to certainly be a lot of that this weekend.
If you look at what the villages are doing, contests and events, so many different platforms
online, we're really stress testing this environment to see what an online community like ours would
be like. So, I'm really kind of excited to do this, and I'm really terrified at the same time,
because this is a lot of skills that we don't exercise in Vegas, and we're all about real life
and in-person, face-to-face, and this is at a distance with keyboards and video chat and memes.
So, I've been watching everybody on LimeCon for the last week, and some great conversations are
happening. I just don't know what's going to happen when we go live. So, I hope to see you
out there. So, let me talk a little bit about the decision to go live with Discord and a new
platform for us. So, when I decided to cancel the in-person, I mean, if you read my post, it was
pretty clear nothing was going to happen in the States, and we've been totally, totally
borne out that that was the right decision. I mean, everything's canceled in the States, forever, as
far as I can tell. So, online it is. It's going to be online for a while. So, we quickly had to discover
how could we do this? And we made a post on forum.defton.org, talked about a whole lot of
different platforms. Do we want to do VR with cartoon-like characters? Do we want to build a
world? Do we want to have it text-only? In the end, it was pretty much down to Riot, which has been
renamed now, and Discord. And we went with Discord because it had a longer history. Gamers are pretty
abusive, and so their platform has been beaten up quite a bit, and they've got some pretty good
moderation and server stability experience. And it was pretty extensible. A lot of people have built
stuff on top of Discord. So, here we are. Now, in the last three months, Riverside, some of the guys
from Wall of Sheep, some of the DEF CON crew, and others have pulled together and really, in three
months, two months, done about a year's worth of work building this Discord server that you're now
on. Please be gentle. We're in beta. This is like Google beta, I guess. So, there's a lot of different
things to explore here. And I'm just going to give you a quick overview, and then we're going to move
on to talk about some of the cool things happening with the show. So, first off, with Discord,
anybody can report an issue. Everybody on the platform has to comply with the DEF CON Code of
Conduct. And because we're guests on Discord's platform, we also have to comply with the Discord's
Code of Conduct. And there's reporting tools. You can file a report, or a ticket, as we call it, and
get a goon to help. If you see a goon in red there on the right-hand side, you can message them and
ask them for help. And then also, there's Discord moderation that can help. And if you have any
questions during operating hours, just go ask the info booth. They're there to help. They're at the
top in the upper left-hand of your channel selection. And once you learn a couple of tricks,
like Ctrl-K to jump to channels, you should start zooming around, and it'll feel more comfortable.
So, we're trying something new this year. We're taking all the talks, all the videos of the talks,
the presentations, PDFs, the music, album, everything, the original soundtrack, and we're dumping it all at once
on Wednesday. So, by the time you've seen this, Thursday or Friday, I don't even know when we're
playing this right now, by the time you see this, all the videos, all the speeches, everything
will become available. We've never done that before because we've never had the speeches ahead
of time. And what we're hoping to do is allow you to time shift. There's a lot of other villages
and content that aren't doing that. They're going live. And we thought, well, if they're going live,
maybe we go pre-recorded and give you some more options to watch however you want. And then,
what we are doing live, our big risky maneuver, is every day, all day, from Thursday to Saturday,
Sunday, we're having Q&A sessions. So, if you see a talk that you like and you want to interact with
a speaker, you get a half an hour every day on each talk. So, just go to the DEF CON.org website,
look at the schedule, you'll see when the Q&As are happening. So, you'll also notice at the end
of the day, we're operating in Pacific time zone, UTC-7, for those of you not familiar with
Americanisms. We close a lot of the rooms at night. And this is because we don't want to burn out our
moderators and our goons waiting around in rooms where nobody's participating. So, you'll see a lot of
rooms lock at night. You might see some with a tag that says closed. You might see some disappear,
depending upon how they're closing their room. But, in the end, they'll pop back up the next day
during normal hours, Pacific time. So, yeah, pretty excited about this. I've got my refrigerator
stock. I've got my caffeine. I've got my stimulants and my alcohol depressants, depending upon what
situation presents itself. We're recording and capturing as much as we can. A lot of the villages
and contests are recording as well on Twitch or YouTube. And so, after the CON, we'll start
gathering all of this video and content and results, and we'll start sharing it with the
community. So, if you miss something, hopefully, maybe it'll have gotten captured and you'll be
able to see it after the fact. And for those of you who became human pluses to help support us
on the server with a little bit of money, that's really appreciated. We've never done a free event
because there's always costs. But this year, it was such a special occasion, DEF CON is canceled,
that I really wanted to give something back to the community. We're all in a pretty stressful
place with COVID. I mean, everybody has somebody that has been impacted by it. And anyway, I just
wanted to make everything open to our community and make this sort of a time of celebration and
discovery. Get us connected one way or the other, because we can't see each other in person in Vegas.
So, yeah. So, this is the best I can do, and I hope it's enough. Now, to bring you closer
together and make new friends, we always have contests. And one of the contests this year was
the badge contest. So, if you purchased a badge, which was a cassette tape, which was kind of a
play on the last time the Lost Boy did a badge for us. It was a record, if you remember that.
But encoded onto audio, and in the program, liner notes, and in the lanyard, there were clues and
hints. And this is really meant to be a challenge for you to explore before the con. And then during
the con, Lost is deploying one of his super famous mystery challenges. This is a full-blown mystery
challenge. So, things that were on the badge, badge challenge. Don't get them confused with
things you're going to see on the forums, which is the mystery challenge. And Lost is primarily
going to perform the mystery challenge contest on forum.defcon.org. But I'd like to introduce
him next, so he can tell you all about the craziness of making a cassette badge at the last
possible minute. Putting in a puzzle, getting the audio encoded, and then building a mystery
challenge. And what he's trying to get you to do. An experience for this show. So, if you don't know
Lost, he's a longtime super contributor to DEF CON. Sort of a jack-of-all-trades. I think he's
been everything you can be from a school teacher, to a linguist, to a police officer, to super
computer hacker, to cryptographer. He's kind of done a little bit of everything. I'm very envious
of his skill set. But he also has a great inquisitive mind and is very detail-oriented
when he gets into music and puzzles. And so, hopefully you've experienced some of his puzzles
in the past. And if you haven't, hey, this is a great chance for you to get involved and start
either at the ground floor with the badge challenge. I mentioned the badge challenge. If you don't have
the badge, that's okay. All the materials are online for free on the DEF CON media server,
media.defcon.org. So, you can still play along. You just won't have the physical item, but you'll
have all the audio files. Anyway, I'm distracted. Now, it's my pleasure to introduce you to Lost
Boy, if you haven't met him before. And take it away, Virtual Lost Boy. Thank you, Jeff.
Hello, everybody. Welcome to DEF CON Save Mode. I hope everybody is doing well in spite of these
challenging times. First and foremost, I'd like to thank DT for letting us even have a badge
and making that happen and making that possible in spite of the fact that we're in
the wonderful COVID times that we are. I'd like to also thank Neil and Nikita in Darrington for
the help that they put forth on making sure that the badge happened, as well as to NellyBot
for the assistance on the lanyard artwork as well. For those of you who are working on the puzzle or
recognize that there is a puzzle in the lanyard, obviously, you've been focusing on that there.
The only recommendation or hint I could give at this point in time would be to shave a little
closer with Occam's razor. Don't overcomplicate things. Don't make it more complicated than it
needs to be. Some people have already figured out quite a few clever things. I would recommend that
you check out the forums or talk to some folks in some of the chat rooms here on the Discord
for that. Recently, as you can probably see from around me, I've been really into
music and synthesizers, such as this record here, the Happy Moog. And it is Moog, it's not Moog.
There's a modular synthesizer there. It seems that synthesizers in the hacker community have
that Venn diagram. It tends to overlap quite a bit. Same thing with electronics and those that
are building things. I mean, clear back when we had folks like Forest Mims giving us RadioShack
books and showing us how to build electronic music instruments. So along with that, during
my earlier years, one of the things that always meant a lot and was a demonstration of a lot of
thought and emotion behind it was the concept of the mixtape, which I think the younger generation
just won't have a need to understand because you carry all of your music around with you on your
phone or you have access to it or you stream it. But back in the day, you used to have to sit and
listen to the radio for hours and then tape your favorite songs in order to get them so you could
listen to them when you wanted to. The cassette tape was the medium that tended to follow right
after LPs and records. There were other tape technologies such as the 8-track, which was a
continuous loop tape, which is very interesting if you don't know how an 8-track works. The tape
is wound around a single spool and is fed actually from the middle. It goes around the roller and the
tensioner and then gets wrapped back around the outside and it's self-tensioning. That's why an
8-track tape doesn't have any access to the winders or the rollers. I've already seen several
people making reference in the forums and on Twitter about the relationship between a cassette
tape and a pencil. For the younger generation, that's because when the tape would get caught up
or not be tensioned properly, you'd shove a pencil through here and use it to wind the tape or spin
it. This is, by the way, one of the original test tapes for the Defcon tape. This isn't the master,
but it is one of the original test tapes. You can see a clear shell there.
One of the early Goon prototype tapes. Experimenting with different colors. There's
the red one. This one, if you notice, has no tape in it at the time. This is just a shell
and the spindles have the clear take-up tape, which is connected. What the manufacturer will
do is they'll come in and they'll splice that and they'll splice the other tape to it and then
wind it up. That's how these are made. The shells for the Defcon badge this year came from Italy
and the tapes themselves were fabricated and recorded here in the United States,
on the East Coast, actually. What I was starting to say earlier was the mixtape...
you made mixtapes for friends or family or whoever that showed that you went to the effort.
Not only the order of the songs was important and the emotion behind why certain songs were
chosen. I mean, some mixtapes were like somebody were dating. Sometimes it was a romantic gesture
like, look, I spent all this time focused. And the thought behind it is I was thinking about you the
whole time that I made this thing. And oftentimes it would be handwritten on there because it would
be a blank tape that was recorded on home equipment. And there were actually... so we
all now have... you wouldn't download a house. Well, back then they used to have advertisements
would be like, tapes are killing the music industry, which it hasn't. Even the original
Pirate Bay logo, you've all seen the cassette tape with the crossbones because the tape was
really the first medium that allowed us to tape. It allowed us to record our music and create
bootlegs, for example, about the same time you started having videotapes as well. But it gave
people an opportunity to preserve music and have music. And as we can see, it didn't kill
the record industry, unfortunately. I have my own thoughts on that. The human badges this year
are the purple color tape there that you can see. We also made two other colors. The artists
all got copies in yellow. It's kind of a neon yellow. I like that color.
And all of the goons got a solid red tape. So the red tapes are actually very rare because,
you know, we only made enough for the goons. Same thing with the artist tapes.
The intent was, you know, people are going to be at home.
They're not going to, we didn't think, sit and wear them around their neck as a lanyard. But
one of the things I wanted to do, and I talked with DT about it, is I want to have kind of a
mini contest that we're announcing right now, which hasn't gone public except for when someone
on Twitter kind of forced my hand. We're looking for the most creative way that someone attaches
their tape to their lanyard. Whether that's 3D printing, sculpting, action figure, clay, model,
electronics. Pick a thing. I'm going to be talking in the badge forum about where you can
send pictures or video submission about what you've done to me. And myself and DT and a couple
other people will vote and we'll see who we think the most creative badge holder creator is. Bonus
points if you make it in such a way that can be copied by other people, points for creativity,
things like that. But it's kind of a mini contest that I wanted to do live that I didn't want to
start until DEF CON actually started. Some other interesting facts about the tapes. So when I was
talking to the fabricator, which by the way is the same house that does the tapes for places like
Disney, which I thought was interesting, and then I started thinking about it and, well, no, there
aren't that many tape fabrication houses anymore. So those that have the capacity to do a large run
and do a professional quality run are limited these days. So it made sense that we wound up
at somebody who would do something like tapes for Disney or for, you know, we kind of have a
resurgence. There's a resurgence in like 80s pop culture interest lately in music too, although
certain genres of music have been around for a while. Groups like Gunship seem to become, have
become more popular recently, and kudos to them. After a live stream that I did, I do a live stream
once a week where I talk about music science and hacking. Immediately following that stream, and
I'd like to think I influenced it, although probably not, Gunship announced that you can
use any of their music on live streams without worried about being worried about copyright. So
kudos to them. They understand the next generation. But the tape, when it's being fabricated, goes
through the machine at 60 miles an hour. Think about that. It's faster than most, like, most cars
on the freeway when the freeway is jammed up. And the, if you think about the acceleration and
deceleration for how fragile the tape itself is, to say that it's going at 60 miles an hour is
pretty impressive. You think about how that, what that machine must be capable of doing.
The other thing is that there is a six hertz tone that they use to tell where the breaks
in the tape should be, as opposed to like the 8-track, who uses an actual piece that is spliced
onto the tape. And unlike splicing of audio tape, where you would do it on the back because you
wouldn't want it to go over the read head, on an 8-track it actually faces the read head, which I
also find interesting. I keep mentioning 8-track tapes because I don't want to show them yet, but
the Uber badge for this year is based on an 8-track tape. So there will be very, very few of
those that DT will be giving out at closing ceremonies to winners of contests, but we made
even fewer than we normally do, just because of the nature of where we're at in terms of COVID and
everything else. But I wanted the tape to be something to be representative of thinking of
friends, missing friends, wishing we were together, but instead of focusing on that
negative aspect of that, something that brings people together. The contest side, the badge
challenge, which for those of you who are new to DEF CON, there are often puzzle crypto slash
pop culture slash picketh subject, I've probably ventured into it at least a little bit,
puzzle challenges that are involved. And some are relatively easy, and some are incredibly
difficult. And the range goes all the way from badge challenge up through mystery challenge,
which is a separate contest. This year, specifically, if you get to a certain point,
I was going to show you just the splash screen of a particular website that you will eventually get
to. If you happen to hit that website, you're on the right track. And so you'll know that you're
doing something right. If you were looking for other people to play the game with, try the DEF
CON forums, or we will have some Discord channels that will be discussing badge challenge. And that
might be a place to find other people that you can connect with even remotely to work on the
puzzles together. Kind of like the crossword puzzles from the New York Times, right? I always
wanted to solve and finish one of those. But again, I'd like to say thanks to DT for letting this
happen. I mean, recently in my life, I've started being really interested in music. I mean, recently
past like five years or so, I've started carrying around one of these guys with me. This is a Zoom
recorder. You'll notice the XY recording head in there. I've been carrying one of these around with
me pretty much everywhere I go. And when I hear interesting sounds or things out in the wild,
I've been recording them and incorporating them into some music and things that I've been making.
Maybe someday I'll start releasing things. I don't know. But again, thank you for coming to DEF CON
safe mode. We hope that we can connect with everybody the best we can in these trying times.
And let's try and have some fun and focus on some positive for a little while. I think we could all
use it. So now back to you, Jeff. So if all went well, we're done with the intro. We're going to
move on now to the question and answer session live. If I'm still here and Lasse is still here,
you should see us popping up any minute in Discord in the chat. And we're ready to take any
of your questions on community, history, why we're doing what we're doing, how you can get more out
of the show. And really looking forward to seeing everybody. And thanks a lot for being here.
Well, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are. Hope you guys enjoyed that video. I am
up in the top corner. You've got pasties and we are here with Lost and DT to answer some of your
questions now that we've got through the video. Jeff, why don't you get started maybe? Why don't
you tell us kind of maybe where you are, how you ended up where you are, and why you're stuck there?
Yeah. Hey, everyone. Hey, thanks for watching that. Welcome to safe mode. Thank you for being
here. It's been really cool just to be in LimeCon last week and watch everybody chat. It's
actually been kind of cathartic to see everybody reconnect with their friends and have conversations
that they would normally do in person. So super cool. Unfortunately, it's midnight here. I'm still
in Singapore trap, but I've been drifting my time two hours a night. So the last week I've drifted
and now this is my morning. It's weird. I get up at 11 p.m. at night to be on Pacific Time.
All for the love of DEF CON. And I've got with me Lost. And normally what we do is we talk about
the show, but I thought we've got a little bit of time. Let's do some Q&A. I'm sure everybody
got questions and doesn't want to hear us talk anymore. So who wants to kick that off first?
Let's see. I've got one maybe easy question. Where can we find out more about Lost streaming
about music, science, and hacking? Do you have a podcast or something like that?
I do live streams twice a week on Twitch. Tuesday nights is Transistor Tuesdays. It's more electronics
and hacking focused. Lately, I've been teaching people how to build a 4-bit microcontroller from
basic logic gates and or not all the way up to how to program an FPGA. The intention is to teach
people where assembly and machine code come from, from a hacker's perspective and why you care,
and to teach you the vocabulary to be able to have those conversations.
Friday nights, I do a stream show called Down in the Park, which is an homage to Gary Neumann.
And on that show, we talk about music and hacking and people that I consider music hackers and
things like that. In fact, there will be a DEF CON dedicated Down in the Park crossover tonight.
There is a link to Lost's Twitch in the track one DEF CON talk track channel,
for anyone that's looking for more information about that.
Cool. Let's see. CryptoCactus asks, are there any plans for making DEF CON safe mode an annual thing
to happen alongside the physical event? So what you're witnessing right here
is like all hands on deck. Everybody on deck for like three months. And there's no way we can do
that on top of the main, you know, physical DEF CON. So it's either one or the other. There's just
enough people to go around. There's been some talk about we could drastically reduce the Discord
and then have reduced rooms and chat and some of the features that we like, but do it in parallel
or use Discord as a sort of organizing tool for on site in Vegas. You know, all that is totally
possible. It's just we can't have all the villages doing their villages in real life and online at
the same time. I hope that answers your question. We're going to be making an announcement at
closing ceremonies on what we decide to do with the Discord. Cool, cool. A question for Lost.
You mentioned an additional Carl Sagan quote on your stream last night. There's one in plain text
on the liner and the one on the site that you just showed in this talk and another in a Pascal case
found via the cassette. Is there another one that somebody should have found already?
There are more that you can't get to yet and it's kudos for using Pascal case instead of
camel case correctly. And a little bit of trivia for you, our badge this year for DEF CON is the
cassette. Carl Sagan wrote all of his notes, took all of his notes for all of his creative works
on cassette tape. Most people don't know that. He dictated 90. Even the notes that are in the
contact, he still did the original dictation and notes for himself on cassette tapes. So the cassette
in a weird roundabout sort of way is also kind of an homage to Carl Sagan. So I've got another
question about the tapes. Is the audio distortion unexpected? Are the tape contents different?
How do we get flax of artist goon? Just go to media.DEFCON.org and we've got an archive of the
lossless versions. And if you want to play the badge challenge that Lost created, everything you
can have, everything you need to play the game or try to solve the puzzle is in an archive file
just on the media server there. Like pictures of the lanyard, the liner notes, and the audio tape.
To piggyback on what Jeff just said too and to answer more of the question,
the original master tape that we had, it's no secret at this point, I'm sure enough
people have talked about it online, if you stereo channel the XY from the tape into an oscilloscope
it does draw things and give you some text and some graphics and things like that.
The original master tape function is just fine, but the cleanest way to get that
is to just go to the DEFCON media servers and get the digital copy. It's just going to work the best.
Well we tried to get the best quality audio tape, right? I mean there wasn't a grade of
tape higher that we could purchase. Correct, not at this point in time. It manufactured itself
during COVID times. There were times when I was on the phone with the fabrication house and they
just didn't have people on staff at the time to do things because people weren't going into work.
Yeah, that's interesting. There's one place in the world that would make the audio
tape shells. There's a couple places to get the audio tape. I mean it's so limited. The supply
chain is so optimized, but it's so fragile. And there's no there's no real competition
not for mass publication of tapes for duplication. Tell me about the quantity,
like how the quantities are so low. So just like when we did the record, because we're using
older media and older formats, when we do a run for DEFCON, we actually technically should chart
because we pass the normal quantity of production. Like most people are ordering two, three hundred
tapes, you know, maybe a thousand, and we're blowing that away. Same thing, like one of the
guys that did the record pressing for us the year we did the record said, you made more vinyl this
year than Taylor Swift. Wow. Because we did. Because everything's digital distribution or CDs,
not vinyl. It's a niche market. It's growing. Same thing with cassettes. Cassettes are starting to
make a comeback, mostly for nostalgia purposes. One of the things I was going to throw out to
watch people have a geek fight about is the discussion and argument about whether or not
a cassette tape is digital or analog. And there is an answer, but I'll leave it as an exercise
to the reader. We were going to try to put an RFID chip inside each case as the cases were
being assembled, but it just ran out of time. Yeah, they didn't have humans on staff able to
do that. So the shells, like Jeff was talking about, in the video you saw, I held up some clear
tapes. The intention of that was that we were going to put RFID tags behind that solid piece,
but they just didn't have the manpower to crack the tapes and feed them in. So it's not like,
and kudos to badge life, but when you're making 200 of something versus, you know, thousands,
we just didn't have the resource to do it. And I don't mean in terms of we,
like the people just weren't there. It didn't even have anything to do with cost or anything
like that. It had to do with the fact that we just didn't have the humans.
So continuing along with the questions about the badges, someone wants to know
where to submit the badge forum or the badge attachment.
So as people who are playing the game know, there are certain websites that have not gone live yet.
I'm going to drop that information into the DEF CON forums, actually, after we finish this
discussion, but I've intentionally held that back because we wanted that to be a secret contest.
And for those of you who follow DEF CON and myself on Twitter, somebody actually started
doing it on their own. And they were like, we're going to do a contest for connecting the tapes.
And El Cantaro actually did a video of using a rubber band origami thing. And I had to jump in
and say, it's really cool. And I don't want to be the jerk guy that steps on you, but we're kind of
going to do that.
That's super cool, though. I love how the community just kicks off.
So watch the DEF CON forums after this and I get something to drink. More Mountain Dew.
Or as my daughter calls it, Daddy's Green Drink.
So I've got a question for Jeff here.
This is kind of a big picture. How has the focus of the CON changed since the CON got started 28 years ago?
Well, 28 years ago, we were quite a different crew of people. So I would say the analogy I make is imagine you were playing rock and roll in garages in
Haight-Nashbury or wherever in San Francisco. And you're making the music you love to make, grunge and battle, whatever.
You're making the music you love to make. You're showing it off to your friends. Your friends are making music. It's awesome.
And then somebody shows up in a car with a lot of money and says, hey, you know, you can get on a jet airplane with me and we can go to Europe.
And everybody in Europe can hear your music, too. And next thing you know, there's money involved.
There's jobs and there's prestige and more ego. And that was I mean, that happened to us, I think, in the early 2000s.
And then it went from being your hobby that you loved and do potentially into a career.
And that was an interesting mental break for a lot of people. You know, you talk to creative people and they're either professionally creative in the sense that they create nine to five.
They either go to Disney and create or an ad agency. And there are those that are not professionally creative. They do it when they feel inspired.
And that sort of forks the community a little bit. And so I think what we've seen is just the community growing up.
And you can see DEF CON, we're trying to respond to that a little bit over the last four or five years where we keep trying to draw this distinction that we don't want to be info tech.
We want to be hackers. And there's a difference there. And it's different. It's not one's good, one's bad. It's just we're different.
And we're trying to not be the professionally creative, where it's your job and you have to perform and do the enterprise thing.
We want to be you're here because you're trying to do something exciting and interesting.
And maybe you fail and the whole thing burns down in front of you. But that sounds fun.
I don't know. What do you think, Lars?
Yeah, my best memories of DEF CON are always with the folks that, like you said, that are passionate about it and it's more like a hobby.
Although a lot of the folks that are like that have found clever ways of hacking even their professional life to incorporate the things that they enjoy.
And I would say so many of the volunteers and people who work with DEF CON have done that.
They're hackers in every sense of the word, including their own life.
Last question for you, Damon from Meyers Circle asks, how many years has it been since the last mystery challenge?
Do you think this is kind of the final level? And then they also ask, do you have the glow?
Do I?
We have the glow. We need the glow to go. We feel the glow.
Sure enough. Julius Carey III is who you're referring to there plays, sure enough, in Barry Gordy's The Last Dragon.
Yes, my mind holds all of that stuff, not consciously. It just happens to be in there.
Mystery challenge in the original incarnation was about eight years ago for the last one.
And then we kind of moved over into the badge. We kind of did a resurgence for some anniversary years and things like that.
And I wouldn't say final level for the glow. I would say this is more of an iteration.
And I think of it as the phoenix, you know, a fabulous bird reborn from the ashes of its former self.
Also the tutor of Achilles for those of you who are 2001 and 2010 fans.
If you know that reference.
Kind of on the on a funnier side, we've got one person asking you if it's milkshake o'clock yet.
It's always milkshake o'clock.
I can't tell you how many years at DEF CON where we would do milkshake o'clock and then like three hours later, someone else would come up and we wouldn't want them to feel excluded.
And so we would do it again. And like one year, I'm sure I'm going to become diabetic in my later life from all of the milkshakes that I've downed.
We have like four milkshakes within the space of six hours. It's almost like that's a challenge in and of itself.
You're not eating hot dogs.
A fun thing to share is for those of you who were on the live stream last night, somebody actually stole a pair of grifter shoes and got them to me.
And I got them this week, which is part of an homage to the original Mystery Challenge stuff with grifter playing and people trying to steal his shoes.
So that's amazing.
Well, good stuff. We are about 10 after the hour. So maybe both of you gentlemen, do you have anything to share with everybody that's come to the Q&A before we get back to the regular schedule?
We have to pick one last question. Who's going to be?
Hmm.
I mean, this one's a little bit intense, but what do you think the future of hackerdom is? We've come so far in 28 years and things have changed so much. When do we hit a critical mass?
You want me to go first?
I think it's... I don't have an answer for you, but after about 10 years of DEF CON, and by then it was like four or five years of Black Hat, I was pretty certain that there's a finite number of people that will get on an airplane and fly to Vegas.
There just is. They care about this stuff. There just can't be that many people in the world.
And every year it grew, and it's grown every single year for 20-something years. And so my opinion doesn't really count because I've been wrong every year. Every year I just think, well, that's it. That's as many people as there are in the world.
But also living in Seattle, I think every year Amazon hires a thousand people. It's just crazy. So I don't know where the top is, but what I think happens is in the early days, the only people that cared about this stuff was us, and it was network, and then it was banking, and then it was financial and military, and then it was access control, and then it was industrial control systems and physical access control, and then it's robots.
It seems to be then it's smart cars. Now it's hack the sea and hack the satellite. So I don't think we've reached the top yet. I think what's happening is everybody's specializing. And so to make a name for yourself and to try to feel like you understand your domain, you're trying to simplify your life and you're trying to specialize to make a name for yourself. And that means we're squeezing out some generalists.
So I guess if I do have a call for anything, it's yes, do what you have to do to succeed in your career, but please try to also become a generalist because we're now probably year five or six of hackers becoming involved in policy and now decision makers.
Now congresspeople are young enough that they've grown up with computers. And so I think what's going to happen is we're going to have gone from a specialty to just we're like another component, security and health care, security and automotive, security and policymaking.
So I think there's plenty of room for us to grow. It's just we have to widen our horizons and think bigger.
I think our influence in society and importance in society is just going to grow. I'm sorry if I'm taking a long answer to this, but remember when you first started watching TV shows and the hacker would be there?
They'd be like the one hacking character. And the purpose of the hacking character was to type at the keyboard, find me the car. Okay, I'll use the kaleidoscope. Oh, they're in San Diego.
And that was the purpose. It's like the MacGuffin. It was to move the plot along. The hacker would type some keys and move the plot along. But now you see with like Mr. Robot, other shows, the hackers or the security people, they're full characters. They're full people now.
We're getting baked in. We're not the oddball anymore. I think that'll continue.
You know that and when we create the Mentat political party, right?
I can't add anything more to what Jeff said from the top down, but what I feel like is my personal mission in life is to go from the bottom up and that is next generation and kids.
I think we are quickly as a society getting to the point where we're teaching kids to not be hackers or tinkerers, whether it's making exploration illegal or tinkering. We're teaching kids that electronics are dangerous or expensive and that you don't own your device. Don't open it. Don't learn how it works. Don't explore.
And so some of the freedoms that I had as a kid, kids are terrified to do these days because things are illegal or whatever. And I think things like DEF CON helping to get that next generation to open the door. And we live in a magical time too, because now we have the benefit of virtualization, both for hardware and software. And so it's like we should see a resurgence of the tinkerers. And I'm looking for the next Forrest Mimms because I know he or she is out there.
So we'll be around. You're going to be around, Lost, in your Mystery Challenge room.
Yep, I'll be all throughout Discord.
Yep, I'll be floating around. Glad everybody's here. Have a good time.
Thank you guys both for joining us. Thank you everyone in the Q&A for asking questions.
We will see you guys around.