Why anyone would want to spend any time in Las Vegas in the middle of August is beyond me, but that’s exactly what I did. I attended DEFCON 30 last week. The trip was interesting, exhilarating, and exhausting all at the same time.
I flew in Wednesday, so that I could teach a one-day Tech class on Thursday in the Ham Radio Village (HRV). 40 people signed up for the class, but only about half that number showed up. That’s what happens when there’s no charge for the class. At least they were able to accommodate a couple of people that were on the waiting list.
The class itself went smoothly enough, and it was really nice to be teaching an in-person class again. This was my first in-person class since the pandemic was declared. It’s just so much more fun. There’s more give and take, and because I can see the students’ faces, I can better tell if they’re really understanding the material.
One way that I can tell that the class is paying attention and is engaged by the questions they asked. This class asked a lot of good questions. There were so many questions that the class ran about 45 minutes long. Fortunately, the volunteer examiners (VEs) were very forgiving and hung around while I finished up.
17 people decided to take the test that day. 15 passed. The HRV had test sessions on both Friday and Saturday, so some decided to get in a little more study before attempting the test. I’m going to guess that the 2 who didn’t pass on Thursday, and those that didn’t take the test then, eventually did pass. Over the weekend, the HRV VE team administered 381 exams, resulting in 147 passes. The test sessions resulted in 113 new hams and 24 upgrades. Great work, HRV!
I had intended to take part in a little Las Vegas nightlife that evening—maybe even play a little blackjack—but I’d had some minor surgery the week before that I was still recovering from, and I don’t sleep very well in hotels, so I was pretty beat by the time the class was over. I found some place to eat and then headed back to my hotel room, where I promptly crashed.
Friday was my first real taste of DEFCON. I was amazed at how many people were there. The conference hall was packed, and to get into any of the sessions, one had to line up. These lines were monitored by the “goons,” who were not only responsible for keeping attendees in order, but also for ensuring that everyone wore a mask. They took this latter responsibility very seriously.
For a newbie like me, the first day of DEFCON was really overwhelming. I attended a couple of talks, then thought I might go purchase a t-shirt. Sales of “merch,” as they call it is a big revenue source for DEFCON. When I got to the Merch Store, I noticed a small line outside the room and dutifully got in line. A goon immediately jumped on me and informed me that the line started down the hall. There must have been more than a hundred people in line! I wasn’t willing to wait that long and went to find something else to do.
That’s when I decided to go find the Hardware Hacking Village (HHV) and the Soldering Skills Village, which were located away from the conference center in the Flamingo Hotel. The Hardware Hacking Village sponsored a couple of interesting challenges, including:
– Make Your Own Use, in which entrants are encouraged to take a device and make it do something completely different from the application it was originally designed for.
– HHV Rube Goldberg Machine Event, which encourages entrants to create a series of devices that combine to form an end-to-end Rube Goldberg machine for transmitting messages.
The HHV also sponsors the Soldering Skills Village. In this village, folks are given a small kit that they can build to learn how to solder.
One of the things that I did Monday afternoon was visit the No Starch Press booth in the vendor area, where I got to meet Bill Pollock, the head honcho of No Starch. We’ve swapped a lot of emails over the past couple of years, but never met in person, so I wanted to shake his hand. He is as nice a guy in person as he is over email or on the phone.
Bill has been after me to write a book on ham radio—tentatively titled Ham Radio for Hackers—for a while now. I’ve even gone so far as to develop an outline and write the introductory chapter. Writing about ham radio for hackers is a lot harder (for me, anyway) than is writing about ham radio for hams, which is why I kind of put this project on the back burner. Bill hasn’t soured on me or the project, though, so I might have to start working on it again.
Bill and I were talking right behind a table where a couple of No Starch authors were signing copies of their books. When one of them heard my name and call sign, he turned around and introduced himself. It was Travis Goodspeed, KK4VCZ. Travis is well-known in both ham radio and hacker circles, having worked on the OpenRTX and MD380Tools projects. As it turns out, he used my study guides to get his ham radio licenses!
I wandered around a bit after that, but I was really tired. I dragged myself back to the hotel room, had some dinner, and then just fell asleep. No parties for me.
On Saturday, I discovered the Hacker Tracker app. This is a great app that not only includes a schedule of the “official” DEFCON talks, but lists the talks being given in the different villages. Without the app, I wouldn’t have found two really interesting talks that I attended on Saturday.
The first was in the Aerospace Village: Building Your Own Satellite Ground Station by Eric Escobar, W6WD. Eric described how to build a low-cost ground station called TinyGS to receive and operate LoRa satellites, weather probes and other flying objects, using cheap and versatile LoRa modules. These ground stations are not only able to receive data from LoRa satellites, but they’ve even figured out how to use them to send messages via these satellites.
During the Q&A period, I brought up the fact that there are many amateur radio satellites in orbit, and that folks with an amateur radio license can build a similar, open-source ground station called SatNOGS. After the talk, I was approached by several people interested in getting more information on that.
In the afternoon, I attended a talk in the Radio Frequency Village, located just down the hall from the Ham Radio Village. This village is hosted by the RF Hackers Sanctuary, and is, oddly enough, sponsored by the Open Research Institute (ORI). The talk described how a woman who was having gastrointestinal issues used an SDR to hack the pH sensor she ingested to determine what foods caused her acid reflux to spike. She then described–in rather gross detail–how she recovered the sensor after it passed through her and some of her other experiments with it before the battery died.
While I was in the Flamingo, I stopped by the Girls Hack Village. According to their website, “The organization offers resources and programs in Science Technology Engineering and Math (STEM), Information Technology (IT), and Cybersecurity to help to increase diversity in Cybersecurity.” I didn’t get to talk to anyone at any length, and I’m not sure how good a fit they are with ARDC, but I did give them one of my cards.
I wandered around a bit more, but again I was pretty beat after my third day at DEFCON. I had an early dinner at a Mexican restaurant in the Flamingo, attended a talk on social engineering, and headed back to my room. I had intended to go to Movie Night, but again, I was just too tired. What a party pooper! I left Sunday morning. That’s a whole ‘nother story, but this post is already getting too long.
Some random thoughts:
- I should have brought a stack of ARDC stickers. DEFCON is sticker city. There is a sheet of DEFCON stickers in the registration package, and there is even a Sticker Swap event. Stickers for every conceivable interest are on tables everywhere.
- ARDC should consider sponsoring the Ham Radio Village. I’m not sure what this would entail, or how much money we’re talking about, but I think this would be a good thing. For example, they didn’t really have any demos of the latest technology. I was standing by one of the tables in the HRV, and one of the attendees asked if they had any SDRs. The guy behind the table replied, “No, I don’t think we have any SDRs here.” So, I’m thinking that maybe ARDC could sponsor an SDR demo in the HRV. Another idea might be to purchase the equipment to set up a small mesh network in the HRV. If we got creative, perhaps we could even figure out a way to make a game of it that attendees could play. I, of course, would be happy to return and do another one-day Tech class there next year.
- I definitely need to get more sleep if I go next year. I definitely missed out by not taking part in the DEFCON social events.
Rob W4ZNG says
Thanks for the trip report Dan, and thanks for helping to spread ham radio to an audience that otherwise might not get the word. Still looking through the No Starch Press catalogue. That thing’s going to cost me some money, but I’ll learn a lot.
Dave New, N8SBE says
I heard a lot of folks trying to leave Sunday morning had an issue at the airport, where a loud noise was reported as a gunshot by a skittish passenger, and the concourses were then emptied out, resulting in a five hour delay . Just another day in Las Vegas, I guess
You may have seen folks running around with HTs. The DEFCON simplex frequency is 146.58 MHz, and when I was there last, there was some chatter on there. There are also some local FM and DMR repeaters, so my RFinder radio was useful.
Yeah, the HRV could use some better demo material. The kind of ‘game’ that DEFCON folks enjoy is CTF (Capture The Flag), so think along those lines. For example, if you set up a mesh network, ask the players to ‘discover’ various attributes of the connected nodes, like their MAC address, etc. Some of the challenges should be relatively easy, but reserve a couple of rather difficult ones for the smart guys that get in there and breeze through all the simple stuff, so you can have a ‘prize’ or two for the winning team(s).
Since I don’t think that the HRV has ever had a CTF, if you get the attention of the DEFCON folks, they may award the winners a black badge (lifetime DEFCON attendance) which will really elevate the interest level in the village.
Dan KB6NU says
I’ll be talking to you about this further. I think that this is a great idea. I have to get the ARDC folks and the Ham Radio Village folks to agree on a sponsorship thing first.
Yes, Sunday morning was a real shi*tshow at the airport. We can talk about that more, too.