Quahogcon!

Things are starting to come together for Quahogcon,  the speaker list is up, the schedule is up, and now registration is open!

http://quahogcon.org/registration/

It's going to be fantastic!

RI's own little security con not far from the home of the Drunken Clam and many other wonders, with a fantastic line up of speakers and two tracks, one devoted to infosec and the other to the maker culture.

What more could anyone want!

Toorcon 11

So Toorcon 11 has come and gone.

With it, we had some good times, some funny times, and some bad times (Post mexican-food mile long walk with upset stomach qualifies as bad times)

I Have to say, almost every talk on saturday impressed me.  Specificly,  Brandon Enright's talk "Controlling a Cyber-Army: Modern Botnet Architecture" was a very good overview of several of the botnets out there.    Julia Wolf's   talk on "Botnets, Ransomware, Malware, and Stuff." was really intriguing,  involved a lot of interesting traffic / breakdowns of pdfs, and Ben Feinstein's talk "Koobface: Malware for the Social Web" gave a very good overview of koobface, along with plenty of interesting data.   Really, there wasn't anything bad on saturday at all. Toorcon has really upped the bar of what I will be expecting in future years.


The saturday night party was much improved over last years, yes while the bar was still not quite open (got 1-2 "tickets" per person, each worth a $5 drink) it was a very enjoyable venue, and had plenty of space -- despite the fact that geeks don't dance, resulting in half the party being crammed and the other half empty :)

Sundays lineup was about 50/50 good talks.    Had a few no-shows, but those simply resulted in hilarious half hour segments of Dan Kaminsky, so you can't go too far wrong there.    I felt that a lot of the talks on Sunday were well done,  and given by people often new to speaking -- such as  Joel R. Voss who gave a very good talk on a new method for static code analysis.   I like seeing new faces added in, and a lot of the content I was really impressed with, such as Ron Bowes' talk on nmap.   I'd love to see some of these people get out there and give more talks, maybe hour slots next time.  A lot of the people seemed to run over their allotted time, but I think the 20 minute talks really help them get the guts up to get up there and talk, so its a great thing to see.

The ending credits did draw on a bit, but they had at least made a valid effort to speed them up.  Honestly, I think the raffle is probably the most time consuming part of it, and that's going to a good place so worth the time.   All in all a very good weekend, and a great way to break the cold and enjoy San Diego weather before the winter sets in.

6 things to do with milw0rm down

1) search twitter for "milw0rm"

Yes, its not quite like milw0rm, but surely there is something entertaining about the thousands of constant tweets "milw0rm down...again"

Here, I'll make it easy, and provide a link!

http://twitter.com/#search?q=milw0rm

2) Follow the less-interesting tweet links you normally would ignore.

You might be surprised, pleasantly, or negatively. Maybe you'll find more people to add to your twitter feeds......maybe you'll realize you should have deleted these people ages ago. Either way, its an adventure.

It has led me to such gems as http://hackaday.com/2009/08/20/interactive-led-block-wall/
which would make a killer platform for item 6 on this list.

3) Track Hurricanes.

At least atm, you can spend hours refreshing weather feeds about hurricane Bill, sure to kill some time!

http://ow.ly/kLoK

4) start a flamewar

Pick your subject, whatever your biggest nitpick is, and go start a flamewar. This is an age old Internet classic and should provide thorough time waste.

My recommendation is to pick a forum like the World of Warcraft ones, they tend to have the perfect group of people for flamewars these days.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/index.html?sid=1

5) Read a (e)book.

Yeah, probably the most productive item on this list. Go read a book if you got this far.

6) Tetris.

Yeah, Tetris should always have its place on any list.

http://www.tetrisfriends.com/