DEFCON

My out of office is on for the next week. Knowing this is an excellent feeling. To celebrate, I decided to have a couple of beers and enjoy an evening of watching Youtube videos and doing nothing productive (apart from writing the post), totally guilt-free.

After catching up with my boy Gus Johnson, the infamous algorithm recommended by a video from DEFCON, the hacker conference in Las Vegas. Back when I was 14, I thought it would be amazing to be a h4x0r, and so I knew the general schtick behind the event. The title was suitably clickbait-y, and like any dutiful millenial, click I did.

And it was excellent. A few hours later, and I am firmly down the rabbit hole. I now want to hack every single IoT device I can find. I want to script a twitter bot. I want to script that script, so I have an army of twitter bots. Having recently learned that Chrome 70 is implementing the Web Bluetooth API, I want to do the most obnoxious things possible with it.

I don't think I have really earned the right to comment on "hacker culture" or "the hacker mentality", but I have huge admiration for the way in which the speakers at DEFCON went about solving their problems. They tried anything and everything, inside and outside the box, reshaping the box, redefining the box, heating and freezing the box, calling the box a cuboid just to see if it made any difference. They never gave up, even in the face of seemingly unsurmountable difficulties. In the end, they often did some good, in a roundabout way. And the whole process seemed a lot of fun.

BRB, rooting my brother's old Android...