 Welcome to DEF CON 17. I'm dead addict. Can I have a show of hands for everyone that was at DEF CON 1? Everyone that was at DEF CON 1? Excellent. Very good. Now, I hate to ask personal questions of the audience, but is there anyone in the room that's under 16? Anyone under 16? Thank God. I would feel so much older. If this room was packed, I swear to God like five hands would drop up and I'd be like, oh, you weren't born when this all started. There's more staff members at DEF CON 17 than there were attendees at DEF CON 1. This is going to be a rambling long tail of remembrances. I'm essentially going to try to do this speech in the same way, in the same methodology that I did my DEF CON 1 speech. You'll see later in one of these disheveled pictures somewhere my notes from my DEF CON 1 speech that are scribbled on a piece of paper that I wrote an hour before this speech. Let me give you a little background about myself and how this all started. That's who I was 17 years ago. I had longer hair then. Honestly, about two weeks ago my hair was that length, so it's not actually that dramatically different. This is who I am. I'm actually the same person. I'll be honest about that. I'm a little aged, but beyond that I'm the same person. 17 years ago I moved to Seattle and I moved from Arizona and I moved from the jurisdiction of Gale Thackeray. I don't know if anyone here knows who Gale Thackeray is. Any hands for remembrances of one of the more famous prosecutors of hackers, Operation Sun Devil. The prosecuting attorney for Operation Sun Devil lived in my area code. I was 18 or so when I was living in Arizona and I had the judgment of an 18 year old and the curiosity and desire to go where I shouldn't that many people in this room probably have to this day. At one point I asked her several years after knowing Gale, did you ever have a file on me where you're ever investigating me? And she's like, no, I didn't Eli. No, no, no file on you. I kind of felt insulted because there were six members of our crew, five of them got busted by Gale Thackeray. And I'm thankful and was thankful and I'm continually thankful that those other five that were busted didn't look to me as the asshole that ratted them out because I wasn't, I didn't. But it looks bad and hackers are paranoid, particularly when they're getting busted. It's reasonable. It's a reasonable thing. So when I was 19 years old I moved to Seattle and one of the things I did when I moved is I checked out the local bulletin board scene and found the local interesting underground DBSs and I was a little bit of a social engineer at the time and so what I like to do is break into chat with a sysop and convince them how cool I was and how they should give me elite access. Not just to their silly elite areas but I want to be co-admin of everything. And that's kind of was my mentality. I was co-administrator of a lot of boards with lots of fun criminal activity going on. At the time I was a founding member of a group that had sort of dissolved, nearly dissolved that after I left the area which was the NSA, not that NSA, the National Security Anarchist. Years later I met someone from the NSA that they did what they call a background and he created a team called SNAC and he came up with the acronym first and then figured out what it meant later. And I'm like wow what a coincidence because I did the same thing a number of years ago. I think I was more amused about that than he was. So I moved to Seattle and I broke into chat with the dark tangent on the dark tangent BBS and with the intent of trying to con myself some co-admin access, unfortunately the darkest of tangents is more clever than most of us. And not only did I not get my co-admin access but suddenly he was talking about this nifty thing he was going to do and if I wanted to be helpful, which I didn't actually want to be as a co-admin I'll be honest, I just wanted the power and access and whatnot, but if I wanted to be helpful I would help him with a project he was working on called Defcon and I'm like oh that sounds like fun, bring together a bunch of hackers and Vegas was a different place at the time. Vegas wasn't trying to be friendly to families, they were pretty honest about their sin. You go to Vegas for debauchery, for alcohol, for gambling, honestly it was a sinister town filled with sin but there's honesty in the sin then and at the time no one in their right friggin' mind would ever go to Vegas in the middle of the summer. Now there's a huge convention business despite the economy that rolls throughout the entire year but at the time the middle of the summer in Las Vegas was a pretty empty place and a pretty reasonable cheap rate to get some conference space and DT handled all that, he chose the place, he chose the venue, you'll notice throughout this DT was the mastermind and I was the minion but I had vision as well and I had things to contribute. A number of years after Defcon had been existing, I was writing up a little bio about the beginning of Defcon and I was writing the beginning of Defcon, a small group of hackers and Jeff says to me, what are you talking about, a small group of hackers? It was just you and me dude. I'm like, oh okay, it felt like more and someone asked me recently what was Defcon one like and I'm like, well I've been researching it and unfortunately that's sort of true, I have been researching it. I don't know if many of you are veterans of Defcon but it's true that there will be occasional memory lapses if you're doing it right. So let me go back to a little bit about who I was. I was a member of a pirate group, I was one of the founders of that poor idea of the national security anarchists. I was kind of all about group affiliations. I was co-admin of a lot of things. Today I'm co-admin of nothing. I affiliate with no groups, I'm not a member of anything. I give the EF money each year and they're like, great, we'd like to sign you up. I'm like, no, no, here's some more money, I don't need to be on your rolls, that's fine. I guess what you would say more risk averse now than I was and I think that comes with age. And while I am all suited up, I will be honest, this is the first suit I've owned in my life and I just got this to look silly at the conference. So, that's Gail Thackeray. That's a sphere. I'll show you what that is for in a bit. Let me tell you a little bit about the philosophy that I had going into this. And DEF CON, the people talk about, well, was DEF CON the first hacker con? Not at all, DEF CON wasn't even close to the first hacker con. It was possibly, however, the first conference where everyone was invited. That wasn't an invite only conference. And the idea behind an invite only conference is kind of nifty. Well, it'll be secret and we'll just invite our friends and no one will know about it and it'll be an elite bunch of hackers, big secretive meeting. And if you look at the history of the computer background and when I first started, I read everything that was ever published about it, which in 1991 was actually a feat you could accomplish. And consistently, at every one of these conferences, at all these private elite small closed conferences, the feds were there. Law enforcement was there. They knew, they infiltrated all these BBSs. And then so they would bust down some doors because people were doing some stupid things at the conference and I'm sure that doesn't happen at DEF CON. So we decided, look, the feds are going to come and in our mind, feds was a generic term for law enforcement, for the intelligence community, for prosecutors, for all of those people that could possibly get us innocent folks who like to explore, they were the feds. So we're like, fuck it, we'll just invite them. They're going to come anyways and if we invite them and if we ask them to come to our conference, then at least everyone at the conference will be painfully aware, yes, there are feds running around here. Don't be stupid in front of them. Exercise some caution. But also at the time, and it was essentially, I kind of visualized this complex balance of things in my head and I sort of feel that balance is worked through the years and was a reasonable one. So one, let's bring the feds in. Two, well, sometimes feds, particularly back then when they were new to investigating cybercrime, sometimes the feds did inappropriate things. They busted people in inappropriate ways. They didn't follow due process. So we thought we'd invite the press, too. Because if there's anything that bad acts don't like and inappropriate actions by law enforcement government doesn't like, it's a big spotlight. So that was another equation. We'll invite the press. We'll recruit actively to get the press here. And we got the press. And I'll show you a couple of pictures of articles that were taken. Robert X cringely came. Someone from a UNIX world came. And I have a fax that we set off to Rolling Stone trying to get Rolling Stone to come and we're sort of begging them. So the other piece was civil libertarians. Lawyers. Well, let's get the feds here, the press to cover it and then the lawyers to defend and watch over everything if anything goes bad. Which all sounds kind of convoluted and silly but if you look back at the history of DEF CON having the civil libertarians here has been really, really useful. And the EFF turned into an organization instead of a grassroots sort of civil libertarian organization turned into an organization that's lobbying and a litigation based activism. Which I'm thrilled about. I continue to support the EFF. And we invited the EFF. At the time the EFF said that it wasn't their funding. They couldn't get here because of financial reasons. But we invited the CPSR. Which were the computer professionals for social responsibility. A lovely bunch of folks. Initially they were going to call themselves nerds against nukes but they didn't think they'd be taken as seriously if they had that title. So we brought Gail Thackeray in and it wasn't an easy thing. It was probably the most difficult recruiting of any of the DEF CON 1 speakers certainly. I remember this conversation or I remember memories of this conversation because memory is a tricky thing and I don't know if I've given lengthy disclaimers yet but all of this could very well be fiction. It is based on 16 year old memories that alcohol fuzzed potentially. So I called up Gail Thackeray and I'm like, Gail, we have this conference and it's a bunch of sort of hackers. We'd love for you to speak there. And Gail Thackeray and I don't blame her one bit for this. Her reaction was, really. So you want me to speak in front of a group of criminals and what, give them advice, tell them how to evade the law. What exactly do you want from that? And initially the first conversation didn't go well and I called her back a couple weeks later and honestly I have no idea how I convinced her to come and I credit her immensely. I can't credit Gail Thackeray enough. She had bravery. She stepped out of her comfort zone. She did something that undoubtedly her colleagues would tell her she was insane and what she did is she set a precedent I think and the precedent really was communication between law enforcement and the hacker community and there was some hostility, certainly because she'd prosecuted friends of many attendees including myself, but we gained insights about what they cared about and really there are bad people doing bad things and they use computers as tools to do those bad things and she realized and I think the law enforcement and we'll call them feds collectively realized that the people that call themselves hackers even though they might have broken countless laws and did so pathologically and continuously did not have the motivations that they expected from criminals. We were criminals that had no financial motivation. There was no crimes of passion. There wasn't violence associated. There wasn't, we weren't part of a mafia. Well, you know, of sorts. There was, to call the hacker community organized I think would be highly inappropriate and so I think what happened is that when she came she gained insight and then opened the doors to allow further law enforcement and whatnot to come and eventually at a certain point and I'll try not to look too much forward. I do want to focus on DEF CON 1 but eventually the threats that were in cyberspace were not from the hackers anymore. There are actual real scary criminals out there and for the most part law enforcement has all of their energies dealing with those bad scary criminals and so the people that explore not on the top of their agenda. Also at DEF CON 1 there was not a .com so well, or there might have just been a .com and I remember the crossover. I wasn't a university student so I had no .edu accounts and if I wanted to get on the internet largely I had to break the law. If I wanted to use a UNIX system largely I had to break the law and I remember when the first versions of Linux came out and my hacker friends were downloading it so they could hack themselves as opposed to hacking other people so they could hone their techniques on their own systems as opposed to learning how to exploit things on other systems. I'll get to Dan Farmer in a second. I want to talk about another one of my mistakes and there's a number of mistakes that I was involved with. Jeff did a lot of really good ideas that executed really well and I believe I contributed to that complex relationship of all the players that should be involved. I think I might have done that right but one of the things I did wrong was invite a friend of mine who was a mentor to me. His name was Dark Druid. He had more skills than I had. He was several years my junior. I was 18 or 19. I was 16 or so and he had creative abilities and created his own tax and really was a bright guy and he would have been a great speaker and he would have given a great speech. The problem was he was lived in my area code or my old area code 602 in Arizona and he was currently being prosecuted by Gail Thackeray. Dark Druid's speech ended up being about his passion for cars and it probably wasn't the most compelling content but I don't blame him one bit and that was certainly a tactical error on my part. Dan Farmer. Dan Farmer was, if I recall, the first corporate security type that we had and he didn't look like a corporate security type but he was working at Sun Microsystems and he had a lot of skills and he walked in the room with two girls on his side and I believe Robert X Cringley later characterized his presence at the conference as making out with those girls at the back of the room for most of the conference and then getting on stage eventually. And some of the contents of his speech were really quite impressive. Essentially he admonished all the hackers in the room and at first everyone was like, that's going to tell us to quit being bad and to quit messing stuff up. That wasn't really what Dan Farmer was all about. Dan Farmer was all about, you're doing it wrong. You're not using advanced techniques. If you want to hack, here's how you really should hack and then dropped a lot of deep knowledge on everyone and encouraged everyone to get more badass. Dan in some regards and throughout the years at DEF CON there have been other characters that have very large personalities and that are very well known and affectionately we'll call them rock stars. Now it's funny, it's famous rock stars in a global community of, I don't know, 15,000, right? So the rock stars when they go to DEF CON and when they go to other conferences they're not really rock stars but I would say Dan Farmer was the original DEF CON rock star and he was a character. Oh, let me see here. Let me show you some pictures. That is a sketch that DT did and the sketch was of the first DEF CON logo and scribbled on a piece of paper and kind of a rough sketch and I'd like to thank Dark Tangent by the way for getting me addicted and I am dead addict. Mr. Tangent got me addicted to Mountain Dew and I had no caffeine addiction before I met him but working on programs at 3 a.m. really fueled the Mountain Dew addiction and there's some shots from DEF CON there's Kale, ah yes. That was a fun shot. There was a professional photographer present and there was a sister of one of our speakers and the speaker, I explained so we had a civil lawyer at DEF CON and they were like, oh, what do they talk about it? And Curtis Karnaugh who's quite has built up an impressive resume over the years since he's been at DEF CON one but Curtis Karnaugh had a DEF CON one speech and the contents of it was legal implications of autonomous interactions of agents in cyberspace. So you have multiple independent autonomous agents that are authored by various parties and there's a transaction that begins from one and ends at the other and goes through all the ones in the middle and something goes wrong who's liable? And lawyers love that question, who's liable? That's their favorite question. That is a famous picture of people trying to hurt themselves in a bug and I was not in that picture thankfully because I think I would have gotten very hurt. So a little bit about the swag and yeah, come here with this please you're about to see the first DEF CON t-shirt ever and in the front you'll see the evolution of the design I showed you before and I think it's pretty nifty, 1991 that was dark tangent, dark tangent sketched it out I showed you the sketch earlier little gradient, a little work on that it's a clean t-shirt design that front is a good front and if you can turn that t-shirt around I'll show you my contribution that is how you don't design a t-shirt so there's a couple of elements there dense text in tiny fonts that require several minutes of you standing still with your back facing someone until they can finally read it now, just a quick resume advice for everyone here at one point, because I helped design that t-shirt I did the back and I'll tell you what that text is because you sure as heck can't read it easily but I put it on my resume I'm like oh, I did something and one day Microsoft contract agency called me up and say we saw that you have t-shirt design on your resume and there's this group in Microsoft that wants a group t-shirt design for their event and I said oh well I apologize I'm taking that moth my resume right now while I did do that I didn't do it well and you don't want me doing that so the advice is anything you don't ever want to do again or you weren't really good at take it off your resume even if you did it before and it's white so wow, this is nice and faded so let me read you a little bit from this at the top it says if privacy is outlawed only outlaws will have privacy and I think some of these things spoke to the original ethos of DEF CON the original kind of where our minds were protect your privacy protect your data use your rights while you still have them PGP is not a crime at the time Phil Zimmerman was being actively investigated for exporting PGP which he was accused of doing and there was some real concern that there'd be law enforcement action against him along with the EFF we invited Phil Zimmerman to DEF CON 1 and again there were financial issues that prevented him from coming and yeah, I don't one of my favorite moments of DEF CON 2 was pulling out a hacky sack and begging Zimmerman to try this hacking sack thing out and he was puzzled and didn't understand it and I begged him and he did and quickly two dozen hackers ran around in a circle and I did that merely so I could say I hacked with Zimmerman so there's some other dense text here and it's the Fourth Amendment the Fourth Amendment of 1789 the right of the people to be secure in their persons etc etc etc and there's the Fourth Amendment of 1995 and I'll see if I can read it here a little bit it's a quote from J.P. Barlow the right of the people to be secure in their persons houses, papers and effects searches and seizures may be suspended to protect public welfare upon the unsupported suspicion of law enforcement officials, any place or conveyance shall be subject to immediate search and any such places or conveyances or properties within them may be permanently confiscated without certain judicial proceedings so I'm kind of proud of those sentiments and those words were really good words and if any of you in the future should have a chance to design a t-shirt don't use lots of dense text thank you for that I was the other hand that was up when I asked who was at DEF CON 1 another idea we had for Schwag was notebooks at the time it was sort of a custom to have what we call hacker notebooks and it was just a normal notebook and what you would do is write obscure sometimes codified data of IP addresses and telephone numbers and login names and passwords and you'd scribble them incoherently and they'd be in margins and they'd be everywhere and sometimes there was some encoding so if anyone found that they'd have no idea what they're looking at seemed rather impractical so we created these it's a notepad for all this information and so you can write down all the system details and keep track of them in nice clean clear format and be able to refer to them later two large problems with this one, it's inappropriate to try to sell data that is easily duplicated to a bunch of hackers there are a few takers and by takers I mean they saw the pads of paper that we were selling they took one piece of them and then they walked away and if I recall with some exceptions throughout the history of DEF CON largely other than some DJs and if people pay money to DJs for their CDs obviously they can get that music online they're trying to support the artist that's very straightforward but as a rule the selling easily duplicatable data hasn't been done since so much the other concerning thing about these easy to read notepads was Gail Thackeray's endorsement which really wasn't a good thing that wasn't a pleasant thing I don't think it helped sales she was excited about these notebooks and she was explaining what a pain in the ass it was when they busted someone's door down and confiscated their notebooks to decrypt this massive data that was so hard and it was almost useless and if hackers would just use this notepad their job would be so much easier fuck now if she really wanted to help her cause she would have said what a horrible thing it was to tear it away and that'd be that'd be very bad one of the things I remember Gail Thackeray saying at DEF CON 1 was and the quote is drug dealers give themselves better legal advice than hackers do and essentially what that means is when you're hacker buddy that you're sitting next to is trying to know here's how the law works fucking listen to them the EFF has a booth there's actual lawyers running around the device is generally not good an example that she used and she found hilarious was the banners and BBS's and also the quizzes you had to get into the elite access of these BBS's I don't know if anyone remembers this but there was a time when if you wanted to get access to the illegal illicit content or bad things were happening by doing that you would have to I don't know list off what acronyms meant that were computer related and answer a bunch of silly questions and any jack oh also you had to affirm solemnly affirm that you were not a member of law enforcement you did not work for a software company you did not work for the business software association to make all these assertions Gail Thackeray called that intent yeah and the analogy she uses there's no magic words you can say to a hooker to ensure that they're not actually an undercover police officer police are allowed to lie in these things police are allowed to lie and furthermore to I think the community's embarrassment she collected all these banners and like put them all together and pass them around her law enforcement friends and got a huge chuckle over the whole thing there are a number of questions that Gail Thackeray fielded when she spoke and they were pretty hilarious too and they went something like this so Gail if I have or I have encrypted on my hard drive 40 gigs or whatever the appropriate data size of people's hard drives was back then I have no idea of data and then I transfer that data via an encrypted link to my friend on the other side then they get the 40 gigs worth of wares and Gail and a number of these she like rolled her eyes and put her head down and she's like hypothetically you mean hypothetically if you had this data you're trying to transfer from one point to the other and I could see and she didn't have arrest powers and honestly she didn't want to bust anyone there and here I'll go back there's a picture of me and Gail in this picture me and Gail sitting down having some beers, having some drinks having a good time and someone's like hey mind if we take your picture and she's like oh yeah that's great and take pictures no problems and I'm like hey let's cheers to hanging out and having fun and I was 19 at the time Gail lovely lovely person she was might have assumed that I was underage not her problem per se but at that point she's like hey DA you don't happen to have an idea on you with your age on it or anything at the moment do you and I'm like oh shoot I think I left it in my hotel room and she's like so why don't we just put down these beers and then we'll take the picture and that was lovely and I was willing to do so and it was a very gracious thing for her to allow Mark Ludwig was another one of our speakers Mark Ludwig was the author of the little black book of computer viruses and he was quite a character and the Def Con 1 speeches are online and I recommend you review them except for mine which I enjoyed giving that speech it was a fun speech to give Mark Ludwig I think was a very keen representation of the libertarian tendencies within the hacker community and he was very much a libertarian and strongly held libertarian beliefs and he got a lot of resistance from the antiviral community and he had hostility towards them as his little black book of computer viruses contained assembly code so you could yeah and anyone that wants to type in assembly code from a book, I don't know I remember typing in programs from magazines way back one but have fun with that but he believed in the First Amendment strongly and he was passionate about the First Amendment and I think that's something that we've all had throughout the years and has been a running theme of Def Con and I'm thrilled about that and one of the things that he pointed out if I recall in a speech was that in Arizona you needed a license to own a printing press and he was indeed a publisher so this directly affected him but it was very disturbing to him the idea that the government could revoke your right to publish at any time now presumably the reasons for this is if you actually owned a printing press there were dangerous chemicals and you had potentially toxic material that you had a lot of and I won't speak to the merits of that argument or what the intent was of the Arizona legislature and creating that license and frankly I don't even know if the accuracy of the statement but it was an interesting thing he said and worthy of thought for me this was our original badge and it's tiny and it's laminated and I'm not sure if this one was counterfeited but over the years if you notice the progression of badges they get more and more complex there was one I think it was printed in Austria that had oil and little things that moved around in the oil all of these things were to prevent counterfeiters and we appreciate the sentiment of counterfeiters and we never really disliked them but it was a bit of a war and the people would counterfeit our badges and then we'd be like fine we'll make better badges next year and if you've noticed the badges over the past few years if you can recreate those various boards good on you and you'd probably get a prize at one point we tried to track down someone that we had had the understanding he'd been counterfeiting badges for years and years and years and we wanted to talk to him the thing was he wasn't actually mass counterfeiting and he was counterfeiting them for personal use and when we wanted to talk to him we wanted him to speak at our conference about the process that he went through in counterfeiting these materials I'm not sure he ever believed in the sincerity of the offer it was sincere but he didn't necessarily follow through I think there's one more directory here that has some interesting pictures soon soon there are a number of press articles written about us there we go there's the notepads the bust mean notepads I think we later called them the future of the computer underground I believe was my first speech and I ended up speaking two or three times at DEF CON merely because other speakers fell through and they dropped off and suddenly we had an empty slot in DEF CON 1 there's one track of speaking maybe 120 people there but when one person drops out and you only have one track you really need to come up with something else so I had a lot of fun with the future of the computer underground I remember one of the predictions I had would be the ubiquitousness of Windows NT on the internet and essentially it wasn't on the internet at all at the time it was sort of a crazy and silly prediction why would people run Windows machines on the internet still a valid question I'll give you that I'm not sure I was vindicated or saddened by the end result of that ah yes and that picture and you saw a larger picture earlier the woman photographer I think that was an interesting look at what early press was and there were sort of two types of reporters that have covered DEF CON over the years and we tried to get rid of one of those types and I mean no local no offense to anyone who's local to any area anywhere but local media I think they came to DEF CON 1 I think we told them to leave we didn't want those articles and the depth of the reporting and the focus of the reporting oh my god scary hackers was not so much and that picture essentially the photographer chose the most interesting looking people and that was the basis of her composition which is a fair thing she's a photographer she composes images and the relevance of the people involved it really didn't matter she just wanted a pretty picture and later years CNN would show up and in this case photographer doing some personal photographs no end game and showed up in this magazine new media magazine which has since been defunct but CNN would later come to DEF CON and they would use the same strategy well we see a guy with a mohawk we would like to talk to him we have three minutes that we're going to show about your conference and there's several people with piercings that look menacing that we would like to talk to really well we have lots of bright people here some of them kind of look different no no no we want the mohawks and if you've noticed there hasn't been any CNN coverage or CBS or any nighttime news or anything like that no three minute spots we don't want them and in the beginning I had a passion about media and since then I've been a press goon for the past number of years and at one point I said I was about 40% of DEF CON 1 and DEF CON 1 was a lot of planning and I didn't realize how much work it was until I went through my old files and then I saw all this source material all these people we tried to contact all this work that we did beforehand and I didn't have that memory at all and now is incredible and there's probably 200 staff members and months and months of prep work that go into it before the conference the article that you see if you'll notice it's called what was your best hack and I think that was also indicative of the quality of the media and I know that journalist and she was a lovely woman and I have nothing against her but that was the sort of perspective that the security there was no such thing as security press by and large and it was mainstream media attempting to cover these security related issues now there's not only technical press that's focused on technical issues but there's also security technical press and there's actually reasonable coverage that's being given to issues and by and large we try to vet those reporters that try to get into this conference so hopefully they're not jackasses and there I am if you look under the over heard if you can read that at all this is from Unix World 1993 and I guess you'd say at the time I might have been considered what you call a media whore and I was happy to talk to all media about anything now I'm happy to give them background on things and don't really want to be quoted as much one of the good things about our friend Unix there's source code there which wasn't entirely true because Unix didn't exactly come with source code Linux came with source code and I misspoke and Unix World happily quoted me and I found that very interesting Robert X Kringely he was the biggest reporter that we had that came to DEF CON and he was an interesting character one of the lovely things about Vegas 17, 16 years ago all cellular traffic was analog this made for a lot of fun the amount of people with radios percentage wise was much, much higher than it is now and those radios were modified so they could listen on anything they wanted and listening in on telephone conversations hasn't really been a hobby of mine but it's been a hobby of friends of mine in the past and I've been at their house while they're going through and listening to various conversations and much like reading email telephone conversations are boring not only are strangers telephone conversations boring but if you think about it over here what your friends are saying on the phone sometimes and just listen to their conversations boring honey I'll be home at this time okay we'll pick up some eggs and stuff I'm going to be late for this sorry boss I'm not feeling well people have boring telephone conversations similarly they have freaking boring email unless you're targeting some attack to read someone's email reading volumes of emails about as interesting as reading youtube comments there was an exception however and that was Las Vegas Las Vegas is an interesting city telephone conversations in Las Vegas are a lot more fun some of the toughest drug laws in the country and yet apparently lots of drugs being consumed in this city and people were happy to chat about that on their cellular phones that's fun again prostitution it's illegal in this city very very interesting illegal in this city as it is most places in the country it's illegal in the state but it's illegal in the city and yet lots and lots and lots of conversations regarding prostitution and essentially sex and drugs I mean all you have left is rock and roll and you can listen to that you don't need to listen to conversations about that it was good stuff Robert X cringely received a phone call because all there was was analog cell phones he received a phone call while I was at the conference he was in the main conference room and to be polite he started to move outside of the conference room so we could have a conversation without a little bit of privacy but as his phone rang four or five scanners suddenly went off and his conversation there was almost feedback going on and while I did leave the room I think he realized there wasn't much of a point of it yeah cringely was lots of fun Vegas hackers reveal hidden calls in Windows 3.1 to LA party girls which pretty much was typical of his writing style at the time and the info world articles that he wrote but at the time info world for me was this sort of seminal publication to keep track of the industry was a weekly magazine there wasn't a worldwide web when DEF CON started so how you got your information was weekly magazines like this and I read them thoroughly and it was quite a thrill to have cringely around does anyone have any questions does anyone have any wonder about what happened at DEF CON 1 I'll admit there are certain things that I will not reveal on stage taped and I'll also admit that makes for potentially somewhat of a less interesting talk but as Gail Thackeray told me several years after knowing her when I was pretty excited because I quit being active at about right before DEF CON 1 and after 7 years passed by I was thrilled because suddenly all of those potential crimes that I had committed were all eased away by history now I'm going to tell you this but please don't take it as legal advice please go see a lawyer if you have questions about this sort of thing um Gail told me this about the Statue of Limitations as I was giddily bouncing about being able to suddenly tell all these fun tales about my poor judgment youth and I'm like yeah I can finally talk and Gail says well you misunderstand how the Statue of Limitations works he's dead addict the way it works is the clock starts ticking the moment we realize a crime occurred fuck not fair I mean it's true I never got caught for anything but the mere fact that I never got caught maybe means that no one ever knew that any crimes were committed so 15 years later as I'm telling old war stories I don't want cuffs slapped on me again this is not legal advice but you might want to think about this before telling your war stories or fuzz them appropriately um we've come a long way since then I think DEF CON have stayed the same and those elements that made it interesting and there are other things that went on at DEF CON like rating AT&T and trashing them in Las Vegas arguably the most secure city in the country let's go rate the local telco um and these were things that were initiated by attendees and essentially that's been a tradition that sort of started at DEF CON where everyone will go ahead and do something and attendees have essentially created all of the auxiliary content the things other than the speeches, the contests the game shows, all of these things have been created by attendees who have an idea and they say wow wouldn't it be cool if we could do this and Dirk Tangent's response is oh if you want to do this then we'll provide some space and if it works out maybe we'll advertise you next year and essentially this entire conference is created by the attendees and by the people who have a passion for the conference and one of the things we always like to say is DEF CON is not a spectator sport and I there are legitimate complaints to be had with the crowding the hallways at times, the logistical problems that occur but by and large when people complain about their DEF CON experience as a whole I tell them DEF CON is what you make of it um and throughout the years I often think about the time in between DEF CONs as just filler time between when I really live and I hope you all have an excellent time at DEF CON and thank you for coming and thank you