The Unsorted BBS Collection/thegreatunsorted.tar/thegreatunsorted/texts/hacking_info_a-l/defcon3.txt

Text File | 2001-02-10 | 4KB | 93 lines

Newspaper Article that appeared in the Orange County Register
on Sunday, August 13, 1995.

Headline:  Hackers rule - at Las Vegas convention

Subtitle: TECHNOLOGY - Events include midnight games of Hacker's Jeopardy
          in which 2,400 buad modems are sent flying in the air.

Story:

    LAS VEGAS  -  First, they cracked into the hotel
television system, reprogramming it to scroll messages
reading "Hackers rule!" across screens in 1,000 rooms.
    Later that night, they set up a pirate radio station
and begun broadcasting from the roof of the Tropicana.

Note - [No doubt your own DnA dj's, running KDNA 104.7]

    But in the end, Def Con III, the computer hacker's
convention, was a lot tamer than many Las Vegas convent-
ions. The approximately 350 computer hackers, crackers,
phone phreaks, 'zine publishers spent most of the week-
end bragging, gossiping, and trying to debug the super
high-speed T-1 line that was suppose to give them
screaming access to the Internet.
    Def Con is named for the military term, "defense
condition," a measure of just how close the country
is to nuclear war. It began three years ago as a mass-
ive party thrown by a young bulletin-board operator
who goes by the name Dark Tangent.

    "I was going to leave for law school and I decided
to throw a huge party for everyone I've met from all
the networks. Then we decided that if it was going to
be a colossal failure, we might as well have it some-
place fun, so we chose Las Vegas."
    Housed in two large rooms across the hall from the
Tropicana's wedding chapel, conventioneers were mostly
bright men in their late teens and early 20's - the
sort who 30 years ago might have been ham-radio opera-
tors.
    Hacking comes from an intense intellectual desire
to figure out how things work and the desire to show
off just how much you know. Grace and skill count for
more thand sheer power, and an elegant solution to a
problem gains more esteem from peers than "kludgy"
fixes.
    Hackers, according to Dark Tangent, are portrayed
in the media only as marauding and destructive, when
in fact they're just curious.
    "(Hackers) are interested in how the network top-
ology is laid out. They're interested in knowledge -
they're not interested in destroying things," the
25-year-old said.

    Hackers provide an important service to the
computer world by spending thousands of hours finding
networks weak points, said former CIA intelligence
officer Robert Steele.
    Out of the 350 participants, perhaps 20 were women.

    The convention broke down into four main portions:
bragging, drinking, hacking, and information exchange.

    One speaker, Winn Schwartau, a privacy expert,
explained to the crowd how it was possible to obtain
plans for using a television to pick up what's being
typed on a remote computer screen - in effect, eaves-
dropping on a computer user without having to hack
into their system.

    Amusements over the course of the weekend included
the ever-popular "Spot the Fed" contest and midnight
games of Hacker's Jeopardy, which required the audience
to duck flying 2,400-baud modems thrown as prizes.
    The first official event of the convention,
Jeopardy, featured Dark Tangent doing a fine impression
of Alex Trebek. The categories ranged from "MS-DOS" to
"the Internet" and "Narcs I've come to love."

    Question: "The rudest mistake Microsoft ever made?"
    Answer: "Starting business"
    Question: "The lowest form of life?"

    The answer accompanied by shouts from the audience:
"What are American Online user?"


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