A few years ago, the idea came up at our local AHA! meeting that our group should host an information security and/or hacking conference here in Austin, Texas. Some venue ideas were tossed around, some preliminary cost research done, but the idea never went much beyond that due to a number of reasons, foremost of […]
It’s been quite a while since I’ve posted anything here other than the occasional conference report, and there are many more of those in draft form from the past two years that I didn’t even get around to finishing up and actually posting… This is due to a variety of reasons, some of which include […]
Yes, that’s right… After many, many years of wanting to attend this conference, I finally made it. CanSecWest has been heralded as one of the best, top-quality security conferences that you can attend, and while I actually made it across the pond a few years ago to speak at EUSecWest, the logistics for getting up […]
This post was originally entitled “SecTor 2010”, however I never actually attended the conference, so it’s not really about the conference but rather my short stay in Toronto during the SecTor 2010 conference.
After a two year absence due to unavoidable other obligations like good friends’ weddings, I finally made it back to one of my favorite hacker conferences, Toorcon. San Diego is always beautiful when I happen to be there with nice weather and a cool mix of people, both locals and visitors who are there for […]
This last weekend I took a trip up to Montreal for REcon. If you’re unfamiliar with REcon, it’s a small security conference focused on topics most interesting to reverse engineers. As such, the talks are more technical than you will find at other more mainstream conferences like BlackHat or DEFCON, and generally require a certain […]
Ok, enough with the APT marketing and journalism diarrhea… It’s really quite simple: ad·vanced – /ædˈvænst, -ˈvɑnst/ -adjective 1. ahead or far or further along in progress, complexity, knowledge, skill, etc.: an advanced class in Spanish; to take a course in advanced mathematics; Our plans are too advanced to make the change now. per·sist·ent – /pərˈsɪstənt, […]
April 1st is always a fun day for technologists. Pranks, jokes, and spoofs have a special place in many geek’s hearts, and what could be more enticing than an entire day devoted to it? The allure is difficult for many to ignore, thus on April 1st productivity essentially goes through the floor as those who […]
Taking place over the last week was the CanSecWest 2010 security conference, with their now annual Pwn2Own contest. For those that are unfamiliar, the Pwn2Own contest presents a number of devices usually consisting of mobile or cellular devices and laptops as targets and allows contestants to attempt to compromise them in some way. These targets […]
Yesterday I came across Cleverbot, an “AI” from icogno. As far as I can tell, it’s an incarnation of their jabberwacky AI which supposedly learns from it’s past interactions. I’m always skeptical of anything that is claimed to be AI, because actually creating a convincing fake AI, much less a real one, is an extremely […]