DEF CON
Woke at 05:30 and had breakfast at 07:30. Strange that we kept that schedule for a week. We had breakfast at the same restaurant every day, and usually had the same breakfast, but anyway...
We got to the Alexis by 09:45 to see the USAFA cadet hacking case talk given by Gregory White. He was a good speaker, and went over the background of the case, what people on both sides can learn from what happened, and how the prosecuting side took the presence of traceroute (they thought it was a nefarious tool), BitchX, and one or two other tools on the cadet's box, and two failed log in attempts, as the basis for a possible 15 years in Leavenworth (which he didn't get...).
At 11:00 we saw Robert Graham's talk on evading IDS, then an overview of LDAP. A bunch of people left during that one. We stayed in the room for lock-picking (missed it last year) but it was postponed and we got a Pentagon briefing (I'm being facetious) from a Fed who is a part of the management layer above the CIA, et al. He did an intro then took questions. There was one guy - who pines for the Fjords - who bombarded the fed with questions. He just wouldn't stop. There was another guy with green hair who was picking at his zits then biting the fingernails on the same hand. And one guy in the front asked what was the smallest thing they could see with their imaging satellites. The Fed said that he couldn't answer that, so the guy asked "Okay, what's the next smallest thing." Everyone in the room cracked up, and the Fed admitted "sub-meter."
We took a break for lunch and had pizza in the snacks area while standing, then I snagged a table just before this script kiddie with a huge chip on his shoulder. We ended up sharing, which wouldn't have been a problem except for the fact that the dude couldn't be considerate about it.
At 15:00 I went to Greg Hogland's advanced buffer overflow techniques talk, which he had given at Black Hat. He got into detail, but later said "If anyone wants to talk about some really insane stuff you can do, see me later." Then at 16:00 I stuck around for ghandi's talk on buffer overflows on the SPARC. It was good, though I'm not so hip to assembly. He covered writing optimum assembly, system calls from assembly, using GDB and ADB, assembling instructions to hex, stack altering, et cetera.
We left at 17:00. I didn't see Hacker Jeopardy this year, or a few other events that I was at before. They didn't have the TCP/IP drinking game at all.
Back at the hotel we shared a margarita at MargaritaGrille, then had chinese at the Golden Dragon. And passed out early, of course.