It has been six months since the world largest hacker conference is over. I am referring to DefCon 15 of course, which was held on August 3 – 5, 2007 at the Rivera Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada.The educational sessions where video-taped, converted to .MOV format (Apple) and pressed on 10 DVD-ROMs, which were then sold for $299 at the conference and for $499 thereafter.Video DVD-ROMS on Google VideoI bought (pre-ordered) the DVD-ROMs at the conference and received the DVDs sometime in September 2007. I uploaded all of them to Google Video. You can find the links to the videos in this article and the three additional articles it refers to.People were asking me constantly for the videos for download rather than on a video sharing site. Some people reported that the download of the original video files (yeah, it???s a trick and not visible to the general user hehe) was also not working for all of the files for unknown reasons. Google must have screwed something up, that???s why is Google Video still in Beta, right?!Video DVD-ROM ISOsSo I spent countless hours to rip the DVD-ROMs, create nice ISO files out of them, then RAR and split them and finally ZIP and upload to Usenet. Ages later (no, I don???t have FiOS) were all ISOs finally up on the Internet. See this post of mine from November with all the details needed to download the ISOs.Well, maybe because of the fast availability of the videos or maybe[…]
Finally, the 10 synchronized DVD-ROM ISOs with all the 125 video and audio recordings of the DefCon 15 educational sessions and panels (price point $499) are now up on the internet.You can find the ten ISOs on Usenet, but I hope that they will find their way into torrent search engines and FTP servers around the internetBelow are links to the .NZB files to retrieve the Usenet posts and .SFV (simple file verification) files that include the CRC32 checksums to verify the integrity of the files. The ISO???s are distributed as RAR archives in 50 MB size chunks and the zipped with NFO file and FILE_ID.DIZ.NZB Files: ISO01 – ISO02 – ISO03 – ISO04 – ISO05 – ISO06 – ISO07 – ISO08 – ISO09 – ISO10SFV Files: ISO01 – ISO02 – ISO03 – ISO04 – ISO05 – ISO06 – ISO07 – ISO08 – ISO09 – ISO10… or download all 20 NZB and SFV files as ZIP archive.I already apologized for this late delivery, but I explained the reasons for the delay in a previous blog post.I put up the audio files one week ago at MediaFire. I just tried to access the files and they are gone, so is my account and other files, like the SACtro videos. Attempting to create a new account returns a vague error message. I contacted support to find out what the heck is going on. The audio files are still available at my backup location at SendSpace (where I pay money for it, so[…]
I mentioned in my first post to the DefCon 15 video uploads to Google Video that I are looking into getting the DVD-ROM ISOs up on the Internet and that I was looking for a better location for the audio recordings of the sessions.So far did I only had partial success with all that. I sent the ISOs once as physical copy and also once via FTP to two different people who promised to make them available online.One of the two people didn’t do anything yet as far as I can tell and the other one fulfilled his promise only to 60% by only putting 6 of the 10 disks in ISO format online. Here is the link to the six DefCon 15 Video DVD-Rom ISOs. It’s a start, but I am not very happy with the development so far.I had more luck with finding a better location for the audio files, 123 of them and a total of 1.3 GB in size. I made the DefCon 15 Audios available for download at Mediafire.com, which allows me to share the files there for free. Sendspace charged me for that and everybody who downloaded from there can thank me for paying the bill for them.I apologize to everybody who hoped for more than that, but it is all I can deliver at the moment. It wasn’t all just up to me and I wanted to share at least this partical success with everybody who is still waiting for it.I hope to[…]
While I was at DefCon in Las Vegas did I check out a vendor who did custom t-shirts. This stuff is often very cheaply done and the t-shirts don’t last very long. Three times washing it and the print would fade out. What caught my interest was the fact that they actually did very professional and high quality print and that for a reasonable price. I always wanted to have some nice ASCII or ANSI printed on a shirt so I showed them a few ASCIIs and asked them, if they could do it. I am not an expert in this kind of stuff, but it turned out that block ASCII was actually very hard for them to do, because they convert the image to vector graphics first and use that pattern when they do the actual print. They said that the creation of that vector pattern will take forever, because it has to break down all the individual lines. And there are a lot of lines in Block ASCII hehe. I agreed for the higher price tag, if I can get in return the vector file, which will allow me to do additional copies fairly easy without spending a lot of money. They agreed and said that it will take a while and that it will be impossible to do it right there at the conference and be done the same day. No problem, the conference was still on for another two days so I agreed to give them[…]
It was several months ago that I noticed the discussion at Jason Scotts blog about the definitions for hacker and cracker. I would add to that mix the term coder, because it will become important in the details of own definition of each of those terms.Three important facts will I mention right from the start: There are hundreds of definitions for the term hacker out there and they are all different ranging from portraying a hacker as an ethical and selfless whiz kid who does things for the greater good to the evil and selfish wannabe who cannot create stuff himself and thus prefers to destroy other people???s work. The meaning of the word hacker did change over time. People used the word in much broader terms in the past and even outside of computers. Mass media put their mark on the term and helped to add to the confusion and misconception. I recommend avoiding the use of the words whenever possible, because everybody perceives and understands it different. Especially if you are using the words in a positive context are misunderstandings just waiting there to happen. Instead of cracker, use “computer-crack” or in instead of hack, use the term ???exploit??? or ???workaround??? instead for example. However, if you have to or want o use the terms, clarify what you mean by them and not just let the terms out there on their own.My definitions incorporate the changes in the computer industry and the fact that it is not the[…]
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