I should have published this right after I got back from Defcon when it was all fresh in my mind. Sadly as things go I forgot to and now most of my memories of it have a shadow around them.
BlackHat this year was pretty good with some good talks this year. There are some very good presenters and there are some not so good ones. The information can be good but if you don’t know how to present it then a lot gets lost in translation. Not meaning dialect but meaning in what you mean and what the listener hears. One of the better speakers at the show was Jeremiah Grossman and also Dan Kaminsky who both know how to engage an audience.
Defcon was a bit more of the same old but I enjoyed the capture the flag as always. I don’t know why it interests me so much but it does. The parties were great also. The Freakshow went awesome. I think it was all about the contortionist though. She seemed to have a pretty captive audience for most the night.
The big thing I took away from this year was that you should spend your time looking into the easy solutions before you hammer away at the more difficult. So often we get caught up in the thing that looks coolest but is more likely to fail than trying to just walk in the front door. Low tech hacks are usually faster than a more complex (or even cooler) hack.
