Aug 04 2009
The Dark Cough – DEFCON 17
Thanks to everyone who showed up to the Dark Visitor meetup at DEFCON 17. It was a lot of fun and I had a great time joking around and talking shop with everyone. The only gambling that I did was deciding on the Korean BBQ place close to the con hotel – the food was pretty good and they reserved a nice area for the group (of 21) so I guess the gamble paid off. I hope everyone had as much fun as I did. There was a lot of praise for Heike’s book as well as the work we’re doing together on the blog – that was all very much appreciated. We need to convince Heike to come out to DEFCON18 next year… Come on, Vegas isn’t so bad.
I spent most of my time at the con attending presentations. There were at least two presentations that featured a slide devoted to Xiao Tian and the Dark Visitor got mentioned in two presentations. I think that we should setup a scholarship fund to sponsor Xiao Tian so she can come to Vegas next year and meet with us.
So I decided to put together a give away for people who attended the meetup and settled on a CD packed full of Chinese hacker papers and videos. I put a nice lightscribe label on all of them and included “The Dark Visitor” in Chinese characters. Well apparently I entered the characters rather hastily and instead of 黑客, I put 黑咯, which means Dark Cough (according to Ming Zhou). So at least I learned a new character and maybe that will be the name of the next big disease that comes out of Asia. Who knows? Maybe the flawed Dark Visitor CD will turn out to be the next ultra rare one-eyed beanie baby or something (I’ll start planting them on ebay tomorrow).
Heike and I have talked about having some TDV wearable stuff. Perhaps a Titan Rain Suit? Maybe a “Certified Great Firewall Engineer” T-Shirt? How about a Javaphile Coffee Shop baseball hat? Sunwear tanktop? Let us know what you think. We’ll think of something clever to do with the proceeds like buy Xiao Tian an HD webcam.
