Defcon 3 Caravan Videos, Part 16 of 22: Disassembling the Hotel's Electronic Lock

In which the inner-workings of the hotel's electronic door locks are revealed.

Taken on or around Friday August 4th, 1995

Defcon is an annual hacker convention occurring in Las Vegas. I went every year from Defcon 2 (1994) though 13 (2005). For a number of years, starting with Defcon 3 (1995), I organized a caravan from Orange County / LA to Vegas, though specifically the very first year of the caravan, the unorganized and neglected job got dumped into my lap a few days before the event (hence video 3's subtitle of Seven Sweaty Hackers in a Ford Escort -- too many people, not enough cars).

I brought my parents' video camera the first two years of the caravan. The tape has been collecting dust in the back of my desk drawer for 15 years (the camera, long since broken) and has persisted through 7,000 miles of moves. This year, I finally decided to get it converted to DVD for a nominal fee at a local camera shop, then ripped the DVD for nonlinear editing. I chopped it apart into individual segments, partly to keep the length YouTube friendly and partly because it felt easier to link to individual events along the trip. I suspect most of it is unwatchable in that "I guess you had to be there" sort of way, but figured I would share it as a piece of my (and to a minuscule extent, 1990s hacker culture) history.

Featured throughout the video are Brian Enigma (http://netninja.com), Professor Feedlebom (http://feedle.net), AJ/Two's Complement, Technopagan / Muzak Dave, Brad (Ghost Rider?), Gable/Jackal, Jerrik(?), Trilini(?), and some dude with a mustache whose name I do not know and that I could have sworn that I had never seen before watching the video, and yet there he is, sitting in the passenger seat.

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• defcon
• defcon3
• vegas
• caravan
• 1995