We are at the DC Darknet doing the Arts and Hacks badges.
And there's just stuff everywhere.
And I wanted to catch up with one of the teams working on the Darknet Challenges
and hear how it's been going.
Frustrating, but fun.
What's been the frustrating part of the badge?
Well, when you get all the connections laid down and then it doesn't turn on
and there's tape everywhere, so then you've got to find where.
So you've got to backtrack everything, and if I pull off this tape,
I'm going to need to redo the whole thing.
So I'm kind of questioning my life decisions right now.
It's funny because I think when I heard about this badge,
I was like, oh yeah, it's going to be simple.
It's like, yeah, it's a piece of paper and whatnot.
But I think what's so funny about this is it's actually a complicated and difficult task.
Even though, because this is the 2.0, this is the Blinky one.
So the original one was a lot of fun.
Still frustrating, but a lot of fun to do.
But it's a whole other level once you start getting to making a Blink.
Oh my goodness. Gowri, you need to come on over here and get up close of this one,
which has googly eyes on it.
Legitimately, there's just something lovely about googly eyes and DEF CON.
Have you been doing the online challenges as well?
Yeah.
You want to tell us a little bit about those? You can hold on to the mic.
So I've done some of the online challenges.
I haven't done too many. I did a little bit of the coding challenges
because they have a good variety on there.
So some of the online coding.
And then actually here, there's some that you have to go and use a phone to make the call
to go and get the key answer for.
So your team has been doing DarkNet for a long time.
What actually keeps you coming back to DarkNet?
The people, the friends.
The people?
Yeah.
The family at this point.
Let me get that. What was that?
The family at this point.
Yeah.
That's one of the things I think that DarkNet captures is that community.
Fathers, do you have something to say?
Our quiet one.
No, it's been a fantastic contest.
So you have the hardware challenges.
Have you gone through all the different layers of the badges?
Of these?
Yeah.
No, so we're only on the second...
You can hold on to the mic.
So we're only on the second stage of the badges.
So we know that there's three.
So we were hoping to get the second one working.
At least one of us getting it working.
We've gotten close.
We've gotten lights to come on.
But all of ours so far have had a bad circuit part somewhere.
Do you know, have you seen the level three badge?
Yeah, Google me.
It says the 3D one.
That's the 3D one.
Yeah, and there's some actual soldering involved, which we know to do the soldering part.
That might actually be easy for us, but we've got to get this one done first.
We're like, dang it, we could probably actually do three.
Have you ever done soldering like this previously?
Like this? No.
No, not at all.
Never.
I feel like all the conventional things that you would typically do with a badge.
You're like, okay, I put too much solder on it.
Okay, grab the soldering ribbon, desolder it.
Or grab the solder sucker.
You can't really do that with this.
How do you desolder this?
Or can you?
You pull off the regular Scotch tape you have on there.
And then you move, try and wiggle stuff down.
Or the problem that we were all facing yesterday that we solved, we solved with just adding more tape.
Just adding more tape.
Just adding more tape and getting it to stay.
These are hilarious.
I love the googly eye one.
Thanks for just sharing what you've been working on a little bit about DC Darknet.
As always, thank you always for playing DC Darknet.
Of course.
Thank you for watching.
And hack on!