DefCon 15: A Review

So we just got back from DefCon. It was a pleasure, and I had a great time. We arrived after Bruce Schneier's talk, which I regret, but I got to see some others. I met up with some Cult of the Dead Cow members and took Roger Dingledine & his fiance Rachel to a BBQ party. Roger is smart, a great speaker, and is well matched to Rachel. I ran in to some old buddies just about everywhere I went. One thing I noticed about Vegas is that is appears to have very few banks, but very many $4 ATMs, which is unfortunate as I had some wires transfers to execute.

On the second day I was busy working on my presentation. At 7pm I took the stage and gave it, unfortunately the type from the print shop was so small I couldn't see my notes and there was so much to cover that I didn't get it all out. Some of it got glazed over. I think what I will do is record the presentation for everyone who didn't get to see it, and do the full thing at my own pace, as we had only 45 minutes. Naturally, it will get posted online, here. All in all, however, I would say it went well. I played to a packed house of about 400 or 500 attendees, and we handed out lots of free XeroBank accounts. I really want to thank Myles Long for helping me out, and all those who showed up for the Q&A.

One great thing that happened was I heard about a party for Ninja Networks. Something else I heard from another attendee was that there is a puzzle called Caezar's Challenge, within the party. This party takes place every year, and is supposedly for the most elite (huh?). I ran into one guy from @stake, at a party at the Hilton. On the way out I asked him where the better parties were, and he handed me a badge for the Ninja Networks party, and told me the passphrase to get in. So we are back at the Riviera, and Kristin and I get into the party while a drove stand outside the velvet rope with tearful eyes. When I'm there I recognize a few faces, one of them from my local DC214 group. He informs me about the specific challenge and I read both parts of the challenge. What luck! I instantly knew answers to both the challenge questions, as they dealt with crypto-capitalism. So I located an inebriated Caezar, gave my answers, and he invited me to hang out in his pad in Seattle. Nice fellow.

Guess who I later notice at the party? Roger. At that point I asked him what he was up to; and I liked to imagine he showed up and chopped down the bouncers with his fist of fury, after giving telekinetic lobotomies to the zombie crowd dying to get in. Disappointingly he informed me that he had wandered in using the authority of his Tor Project shirt. Ah well, we can have dreams can't we? In mine, Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson, Paul Syverson, and Steven J Murdoch are all deadly ninja warriors, fighting for anonymity of the body, and privacy of the mind.

Well this post has had very little to do with portable privacy. To give it some sense of legitimacy, I have been listening to the complaints of Jim Verard, and making changes to xB Browser to accommodate. So here is what is new is xBB 2.0.0.6a:

- search and destroy Yahoo Sign & Seal tracking data which compromises anonymity
- disable registry-based Firefox/Thunderbird Plug-ins
- dialog for Xerobank mutex shutdown should no longer destroy profile settings (fingers crossed)
- crippled the mozilla updater system to prevent corruption and security vulnerabilities from update server spoofing.

todo: the profile section needs to be reworked still. We should have soft settings in the user.js, and hard settings in the prefs.js. We have tried one and the other, but not both. I think that will be especially vital in the Tor network version.