Blackhat/Defcon Report

Joe Barr writes "NewsForge [ed. note: part of OSTG along with Slashdot] is running its concluding piece on the week-long Blackhat/DEFCON hackerfest in Las Vegas. Want to know how little our police/intelligence agencies seem to have learned from their failures prior to 9/11? Or how a very large goon known only as Priest prevented outright political violence at a DEFCON presentation on Civil Disobedience? Or which of the two conferences is right for you? It's all here in the Blackhat/Defcon: Final report." Reader M. Curphey writes "The Web Application Security Consortium (WASC) announced at Blackhat the release of a 'Threat Classifications' document. This document attempts to clarify web security terminology such as Cross Site Scripting, Session Fixation, Cookie poisoning, and HTTP response splitting (to name a few)."

Re:Hmm...

[Maestro4k]

• Looks like the 503 Errors with Firefox are really slowing down discussions.

They're not just in Firefox, they're affecting everyone. Slashdot's been more like SlashNOT this week so far.

Re:Girls

[DecoDragon]

First off, there are females at DefCon, and not all of them are there, because they think it's an easy place to pick up guys.

That said, have her look at the program and see if any of the talks are interesting to her. If she knows only a bit, maybe the technical talks won't be that interesting, but the talks that delve into the overlap between politics and technology might be of interest. I'm guessing if she's not that into it, the contests wouldn't be very fun to her.

If it's not her thing at all, have her look and see if Vegas is something interesting to her, and she can join you later. But, I'd be more inclined to say, if it's not her thing, plan a different trip that both of you would enjoy before or after DefCon.

Re:About one of the articles posted...

[stanmann]

Did you read the same article I did? IN the article I read, the security showed up and sat next to him during his diatribe and only removed him AFTER one of the spectators appeared to be on the verge of violence toward the speaker(and this was during or after the Q&A portion of the presentation).

Too crowded

[Rorschach1]

I haven't been to Def Con in a couple of years. I went the first year they were at the Alexis Park, and it was OK. Went back the next year, and they'd clearly outgrown the venue. Wasn't able to get a seat for ANY of the talks.

I don't know if they've signed some sort of long-term contract, or maybe they've just gotten kicked out of everywhere else, but I'm not going back until they get a considerably larger place.

Re:Hmm...

[Cramer]

There have been a high number of occurances of 503's since the zero-notice updates a few weeks ago. (at the same time, all web pages started returning "no-cache" so simple brower navigation is forced to redownload every byte on every mouse click. When I logged a bug about this, it was immediately dismissed without comment.)

Re:Only on Slashdot...

[IncarnadineConor]

It is interesting, it had never dawned on me.

Here's the bug entry on sourceforge.net

[Zeroth_darkos]

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=deta il&aid=1002056&group_id=4421&atid=1044 21 [sourceforge.net]

Re:What police/intelligence agencies have learned.

[Otter]

Well I didn't jump up and say it but I've been wondering myself why we need one, as you point out, what's Tom Ridge for? I thought he, and his new department of Homeland Security, were supposed to at least coordinate info from various agencies.

Putting aside the question of whether either position is a good idea, I don't quite get what you guys are so puzzled about. Homeland Security is supposed to maintain domestic security operations and, as you say, filter relevant intelligence info. It's not supposed to be responsible for intelligence operations in general -- that's why the Coast Guard has been put under their authority but the CIA and NSA haven't.

Re:Hmm...

[garcia]

The 503 errors were not just with Firefox. I was getting the same error while being logged in on either Firefox or IE. Only if I cleared my cookies and loaded the page would I be allowed to get past the 503.