I had a great time and plan on attending next year. ShmooGroup were totally gracious hosts. The crowd was subdued but talkative and intelligent. Very few Shmooballs flew.

Jason Scott's preview of his BBS Documentary series was awesome. We hackers have a very interesting history. This is a must see (I will post a operate review).

Caezar's keynote was very inspirational and smacked of good 'ol common sense.

We pimped stickers and flyers promoting Interz0ne & Packetwars.

Dan Kaminsky's talk was great. It is the first time I have seen him live. Very good energy level and overall good speaker. But the content was what impressed me the most. DNS is evil. Even though a couple of his demos didn't work, most of them did. Streaming video through DNS lookups bypassing firewall rules was very impressive. But his last demo was potentially even more impressive; Spoofed MD5 hashes from a command line utility; no public code available at this time ;(

Shmoocon. Hell Yeah!

They blew Dayton off and I missed it!!!

PBS - Austin City Limits - The Pixies Live

Excerpt: "Other robots being developed could be much better suited to indoor tasks, however. For example, researchers at Case Western University in Cleveland, US, are working on insect-inspired bots that can overcome irregular surfaces and steps."

I welcome our new spooky electronic spook overlords. -Pk

Spherical robot provides rolling security cover

January 23, Associated Press — Armed robotic vehicles headed for Iraq combat. The U.S. Army is preparing to send 18 remote−controlled robotic warriors to fight in Iraq beginning in
March or April. The Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection Systems(SWORDS), will be the first armed robotic vehicles to see combat. Military officials like to compare the roughly three−foot−high robots favorably to human soldiers: They don't need to be trained, fed or clothed. They can be boxed up and warehoused between wars. But officials are quick to point out that these are not the autonomous killer robots of science fiction. A SWORDS robot shoots only when its human operator presses a button after identifying a target on video shot by the robot's cameras. The SWORDS' developers say its tracks, like those on a tank, can overcome rock piles and barbed wire, though it needs a ride to travel faster than 4 mph. Running on lithium ion batteries, it can operate for one to four hours at a time, depending on the mission. The Army has been testing it over the past year at Picatinny and the Aberdeen 2 Proving Grounds in Maryland to ensure it won't malfunction and can stand up to radio jammers and other countermeasures.

Rock'Em Sock'Em Battlebots!!!

] Do this dude edisoncarter cracked open what appears to be
] a cheesy 3rd party PS2 controller (save the good stuff
] for the gaming, we always say), hooked up the lines to a
] parallel port for signal injection, and then hash-cracker
] style used a custom app that ran brute force key
] combinations until he came up with a slew of unreleased
] cheat codes for GTA San Andreas. Damn, dude.

That is so damn cool!

Brute-forcing GTA San Andreas cheat codes

New "hacker sports" event to be launced at Interz0ne IV.

New Hacker Wargame

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Once you have recommended this link, if you do not actually donate some money, you are a jerk.

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Don't be a jerk. Click Recommend.

Tsunami Relief

Check It! Free annual service now begins for the Western United States. The rest of us will have to wait a while.

Free Credit Reports For All!

Nice guy. Cool guy. It's a shame to see him go. It's one thing when a scumbag like Tupac or Biggie gets it for being a piece of shit. It's another thing entirely when your message was positive, you were a nice, rather humble fellow, and you drop dead before your time. He will be missed. Wonder what he's cooking up right now with Jammaster Jay. Guess we will have to wait a while to find out.

Ol Dirty Bastard, Pioneering Rapper, Dead at 35.

Wu-Tang and the world will mourn.

ODB DOA