 Welcome to DEF CON Safe Mode. I'm the Dark Tangent. I'll be your host along with hundreds and hundreds of other goons, contest organizers, village organizers, and other creatives. I'm trying to build you a virtual experience for a replacement for Missing Las Vegas. Far from Las Vegas, I'm in Singapore where I've been stuck since February, so I really am coming at you from the other side of the planet. Recording this just in case the live connection doesn't work, so hopefully I'll be at the end of this recording, available for questions and answers, but if it doesn't work out, sorry we tried our best. So, this is the part of DEF CON where normally I talk a little bit about the history of the con, what can be expected for the new year, some cool surprises, how to get the most out of it, but really honestly I don't really know what to tell you a whole lot besides we're online. It's new, exciting, the theme this year is discovery. Our color palette are these nice bright pastel colors and we're trying to evoke sort of a sense of wonder, discovery, new exploration, and there's going to certainly be a lot of that this weekend. If you look at what the villages are doing, the contests and events, so many different platforms online, we're really stress testing this environment to see what an online community like ours would be like. So, I'm really kind of excited to do this and I'm really terrified at the same time because this is a lot of skills that we don't exercise in Vegas. We're all about real life and in-person, face-to-face, and this is at a distance with keyboards and video chat and memes. So, I've been watching everybody on the line con for the last week and some great conversations are happening. I just don't know what's going to happen when we go live, so I hope to see you out there. So, let me talk a little bit about the decision to go live with Discord and a new platform for us. So, when I decided to cancel the in-person, I mean it was, if you read my post, it was pretty clear nothing was going to happen in the States. And we've been totally, totally borne out that that was the right decision. I mean everything's canceled in the States forever as far as I can tell. So, online it is. It's going to be online for a while. So, we quickly had to discover how could we do this? And we made a post on forum.defconn.org, talked about a whole lot of different platforms. Do we want to do VR with cartoon-like characters? Do we want to build a world? Do we want to have a text only? In the end, it was pretty much down to Riot, which has been renamed now, and Discord. And we wanted Discord because it had a longer history. Gamers are pretty abusive, and so their platform has been beaten up quite a bit. And they've got some pretty good moderation and server stability experience. And it was pretty extensible. A lot of people have built stuff on top of Discord. So, here we are. Now, in the last three months, Riverside, some of the guys from Wall of Sheep, some of the Defcon crew and others have pulled together, and really in three months, two months, done about a year's worth of work building this Discord server that you're now on. Please be gentle. We're in beta. This is like Google beta, I guess. So, there's a lot of different things to explore here. And I'm just going to give you a quick overview, and then we're going to move on to talk about some of the cool things happening at the show. So, first off with Discord, anybody can report an issue. Everybody on the platform has to comply with the Defcon Code of Conduct. And because we're guests on Discord's platform, we also have to comply with the Discord's Code of Conduct. And there's reporting tools. You can file a report or a ticket, as we call it, and get a goon to help. If you see a goon in red, they're on the right-hand side. You can message them and ask them for help. And then also there's Discord moderation that can help. And if you have any questions, during operating hours, just go and ask the Infobooth. They're there to help. They're at the top in the upper left-hand of your channel selection. And once you learn a couple of tricks like Control-K to jump to channels, you should start zooming around and it'll feel more comfortable. So, we're trying something new this year. We're making all the talks, all the videos of the talks, the presentations, PDFs, the music, album, everything, the original soundtrack, and we're dumping it all at once on Wednesday. So, by the time you've seen this, Thursday or Friday, I don't even know when we're playing this right now, by the time you see this, all the videos, all the speeches, everything will become available. We've never done that before because we've never had the speeches ahead of time. And what we're hoping to do is allow you to time shift. There's a lot of other villages and content that aren't doing that. They're going live. And we thought, well, if they're going live, maybe we go pre-recorded and give you some more options to watch however you want. And then what we are doing live, our big risky maneuver, is every day, all day from Thursday to Saturday, Sunday, we're having Q&A sessions. So, if you see a talk that you like and you want to interact with a speaker, you get a half an hour every day on each talk. So, just go to the DEF CON.org website, look at the schedule. You'll see when the Q&A's are happening. So, you'll also notice at the end of the day, we're operating in Pacific time zone, UTC-7, for those of you not familiar with Americanisms. We close a lot of the rooms at night. And this is because we don't want to burn out our moderators and our goons waiting around in rooms where nobody's participating. So, you'll see a lot of rooms lock at night. You might see some with the tag that say closed. You might see some disappear, depending upon how they're closing their room. But in the end, they'll pop back up the next day during normal hours, Pacific time. So, yeah, pretty excited about this. I've got my refrigerator stocked, I've got my caffeine, I've got my stimulants and my alcohol depressants, depending upon what situation presents itself. We're recording and capturing as much as we can. A lot of the villages and contests are recording as well on Twitch or YouTube. And so, after the CON, we'll start gathering all of this video and content and results and we'll start sharing it with the community. So, if you missed something, hopefully maybe it'll have gotten captured and you'll be able to see it after the fact. And for those of you who became human pluses to help support us on the server with a little bit of money, that's really appreciated. We've never done a free event because there's always costs. But this year, it was such a special occasion. DEF CON has canceled. Then I really wanted to give something back to the community. We're all in a pretty stressful place with COVID. I mean, everybody has somebody that has been impacted by it. And anyway, I just wanted to make everything open to our community and make this sort of a time of celebration and discovery. Get us connected one way or the other because we can't see each other in person in Vegas. So, yeah. So this is the best I can do and I hope it's enough. Now, to bring you closer together and make new friends, we always have contests. And one of the contests this year was the badge contest. So if you purchased a badge, which was a cassette tape, which was kind of a play on the last time, the Lost Boy did a badge for us. It was a record, if you remember that. But encoded on the audio and in the program, liner notes and in the lanyard, there were clues and hints. And this is really meant to be a challenge for you to explore before the con. And then during the con, Lost is deploying one of his super famous mystery challenges. This is a full blown mystery challenge. So things that were on the badge, badge challenge, don't get them confused with things you're going to see on the forums, which is the mystery challenge. And Lost is primarily going to perform the mystery challenge contest on forum.deafcon.word. But I'd like to introduce him next, so he can tell you all about the craziness of making the cassette badge at the last possible minute, putting it in a puzzle, getting the audio encoded, and then building a mystery challenge and what he's trying to get you to do. An experience for this show. So if you don't know Lost, he's a longtime super contributor to Defcon. Sort of a jack of all trades. I think he's been everything you can be from a school teacher to a linguist to a police officer to super computer hacker to cryptographer. He's kind of done a little bit of everything, a very envious of his skill set. But he also has a great inquisitive mind and is very detail oriented when he gets into music and puzzles and so hopefully you've experienced some of his puzzles in the past and if you haven't, hey, this is a great chance for you to get involved and start either at the ground floor with the badge challenge. I mentioned the badge challenge. If you don't have a badge, that's okay. All the materials are online for free on the Defcon media server, media.defcon.org. So you can still play along. You just won't have the physical item, but you'll have all the audio files. I'm distracted. Now, it's my pleasure to introduce you to Lost Boy if you haven't met him before and take it away, Virtual Lost Boy. Thank you, Jeff. Hello, everybody. Welcome to Defcon Save Mode. I hope everybody is doing well in spite of these challenging times. First and foremost, I'd like to thank DT for letting us even have a badge and making that happen and making that possible in spite of the fact that we're in the wonderful COVID times that we are. I'd like to also thank Neil and Nikita and Darrington for the help that they put forth on making sure that the badge happened as well as to Nellie Botte for the assistance on the lanyard artwork as well. For those of you who are working on the puzzle or recognize that there is a puzzle in the lanyard, obviously you've been focusing on that there. The only recommendation or hint I could give at this point in time would be to shave a little closer with Occam's razor. Don't overcomplicate things. Don't make it more complicated than it needs to be. Some people have already figured out quite a few clever things. I would recommend that you check out the forums or talk to some folks in some of the chat rooms here on the Discord for that. Recently, as you can probably see from around me, I've been really into music and synthesizers such as this record here, the Happy Moog and it is Moog, it's not Moog. There's a modular synthesizer there. It seems that synthesizers in the hacker community have that Venn diagram tends to overlap quite a bit. Same thing with electronics that are building things. I mean, clear back when we had folks like Forrest Mims giving us Radio Shack books and showing us how to build electronic music instruments. Along with that, during my earlier years, one of the things that always meant a lot and was a demonstration of a lot of thought and emotion behind it was the concept of the mix tape, which I think the younger generation just won't have a need to understand because you carry all of your music around with you on your phone or you have access to it or you stream it. But back in the day, you used to have to sit and listen to the radio for hours and then tape your favorite songs in order to get them. So you could listen to them when you wanted to. The cassette tape was the medium that tended to follow right after LPs and records. And there were other tape technologies such as the 8-Track, which was a continuous loop tape, which is very interesting if you don't know how an 8-Track works. The tape is round around a single spool and it's fed actually from the middle, goes around the roller in the tensioner and then gets wrapped back around the outside and it's self-tensioning. That's why an 8-Track tape doesn't have any access to the winders or the rollers. I've already seen several people making reference in the forums about the relationship between a cassette tape and a pencil for the younger generation. That's because when the tape would get caught up or not be tensioned properly, you'd shove a pencil through here and use it to wind the tape or spin it. This is, by the way, one of the original test tapes for the DEF CON tape. This is the Master, but it is one of the original test tapes. You can see a clear shell there. One of the early Goon prototype tapes. Experimenting with different colors, there's the red one. This one, if you notice, has no tape in it at the time. This is just a shell and the spools, the spindles have the clear take-up tape which is connected and so what the manufacturer will do is they'll come in and they'll splice that and they'll splice the other tape to it and then wind it up and that's how these are made. The shells for the DEF CON badge this year came from Italy and the tapes themselves were fabricated and recorded in here in the United States on the east coast, actually. What I was starting to say earlier was the mixed tape, you made mixed tapes for friends or friends or family or whoever that showed that you went to the effort, not only the order of the songs was important and the emotion behind why certain songs were chosen. I mean, some mixed tapes were like somebody were dating, sometimes it was a romantic gesture like, look, I spent all this time focused and the thought behind it is, I was thinking about you the whole time that I made this thing and oftentimes it would be handwritten on there because it would be a blank tape that was recorded on home equipment and there were actually so we all now have you wouldn't download a house well back then they used to have advertisements would be like tapes are killing the music industry which it hasn't even the original pirate bay logo you've all seen like the cassette tape with the crossbones because the tape was really the first medium that allowed us to tape to tape, allowed us to record our music and create bootlegs for example about the same time you started having video tapes as well but it gave people an opportunity to preserve music and have music and as we can see it didn't kill the record industry unfortunately I have my own thoughts on that the human badges this year are the purple color tape there that you can see we also made two other colors the artists all got copies in yellow it's kind of a neon yellow I like that color and all of the goons got a solid red tape the red tapes are actually very rare because we only made enough for the goons same thing with the artist tapes the the intent was people are going to be at home they're not going to we didn't think sit and wear them around their neck as a lanyard but one of the things I wanted to do and I talked with DT about it is I want to have kind of a mini contest that we're announcing right now which hasn't gone public except for when someone on Twitter kind of forced my hand we're looking for the most creative way that someone attaches their tape to their lanyard whether that's 3D printing sculpting action figure clay model electronics pick a thing I'm going to be talking in the badge forum about where you can send pictures or video submission about what you've done to me and myself and DT and a couple other people will vote and we'll see who we think the most creative badge holder creator is bonus points if you make it in such a way that it can be copied by other people points for creativity things like that but it's kind of a mini contest that I wanted to do live that I didn't want to start until DEF CON actually started some other interesting facts about the tapes so when I was talking to the fabricator which by the way is the same house that does the tapes for places like Disney which I thought was interesting and then I started thinking about it and well no there aren't that many tape fabrication houses anymore so those that have the capacity to do a large run and do a professional quality run are limited these days so it made sense that we wound up at somebody who would do something like tapes for Disney or for you know we kind of have a resurgence there's a resurgence in like 80s pop culture interest lately in music too although certain genres of music have been around for a while groups like gunship seem to have become more popular recently and kudos to them after a live stream that I did I do a live stream once a week where I talk about music science and hacking immediately following that stream and I'd like to think I influenced it although probably not gunship announced that you can use any of their music on live streams without being worried about copyright so kudos to them in the next generation but the tape when it's being fabricated goes through the machine at 60 miles an hour think about that it's faster than most like most cars on the freeway when the freeway is jammed up and the if you think about the acceleration deceleration for how fragile the tape itself is to say that it's going at 60 miles an hour is pretty impressive you think about how that machine must be capable of doing the other thing is that there is a 6 hertz tone that they use to tell where the breaks in the tape should be as opposed to like the 8 track who uses an actual piece that is spliced onto the tape and unlike splicing of audio tape where you would do it on the back because you wouldn't want it to go over the reed head on an 8 track it actually faces the reed head which I also find interesting I keep mentioning 8 track tapes because I don't want to show them yet but the uber batch for this year is based on an 8 track tape so there won't be very very few of those that DT will be giving out closing ceremonies to two winners of contests but we made even fewer than we normally do just because of the nature of where we're at in terms of Covid and everything else but I wanted the tape to be something to be representative of friends, missing friends wishing we were together but instead of focusing on that negative aspect of that something that brings people together the contest side the badge challenge for those of you who are new to DEFCON there are often puzzle crypto slash pop culture slash picket subject I've probably ventured into it at least a little bit but there are still challenges that are involved and some are relatively easy and some are incredibly difficult and the range goes all the way from badge challenge up through mystery challenge which is a separate contest this year specifically if you get to a certain point I was going to show you just the splash screen of a particular website that you will eventually get to if you if you if you happen to hit that that website you're on the right track so you'll know that you're doing something right if you were looking for other people to play the game with try the DEFCON forums or we will have some Discord channels that will be discussing a badge challenge and that might be a place to find other people that you can connect with even remotely work on the puzzles together I kind of like the crossword puzzles from the New York Times I always wanted to solve and finish one of those but again I'd like to say thanks to DT for letting this happen recently in my life I've started being really interested in music I mean recently passed like five years or so I've started carrying around one of these guys with me this is a zoom recorder you'll notice the XY recording head in there I've been carrying one of these around with me pretty much everywhere I go and when I hear interesting sounds or things out in the wild I've been recording them and incorporating them into some music and things that I've been making maybe someday I'll start releasing things I don't know but again thank you for coming to DEFCON Safe Mode we hope that we can connect with everybody the best we can in these trying times let's try and have some fun and focus on some positive for a little while I think we could all use it so now back to you Jeff so if all went well we're done with the intro we're going to move on down to the question and answer session live if I'm still here and Lars is still here you should see us popping up any minute and discord in the chat and we're ready to take any questions about community history why we're doing what we're doing how you can get more out of the show and really looking forward to seeing everybody and thanks a lot for being here