ian - DEFCON 16

Tech: Charles W. Clark (Quantum Crypto)

eoghan — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 21:54:45 +0000

At Defcon 16 I had a chat with Charles W. Clark of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Joint Quantum Institute on the topic of Quantum Cryptography.

He covered a variety of physics topics, such as the No-Cloning Theorm, Qubits and Photon Polarization. I also queried him on the real world use of quantum cryptography systems.

The full interview is available under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC-BY-NC 3.0) license.

Transcript to follow…

Tech: John Bos (DEFCON CTF)

david — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 20:55:53 +0000

At DEFCON 16 I managed to interview John Bos, the Team Captain for the Capture the Flag team: Sk3wl0fr00t (who won the tournament).

John explained how the CTF tournament worked. Eight team’s are provided with a server each which they must defend. All severs contain the same custom services. Teams are also give a disk containing an image of their server, allowing them to disassemble the executables which are running on their server.

A larger number of points are awarded for breakthroughs, where a team discover a new vulnerability and exploit it on other servers. Teams must also maintain a service level, to ensure their services are accessible to others. This models the real world, where unavailable services result in lost revenue.

John explained that the Capture the Flag contest kept his commercial skills sharp, as he was learning at the cutting edge. He also explained that DEFCON was an important networking and social ground, with a “group of highly intelligent people”.

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

Transcript to follow…

Tech: Cameron Hotchkies (TippingPoint DVLabs)

david — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 19:26:03 +0000

One of the speakers at DEFCON 16 was Cameron Hotchkies of TippingPoint DVLabs (DEFCON Speaker page, project homepage). He spoke on OSX vulnerabilities.

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

Transcript to follow…

Tech: Jason Scott (textfiles.com)

eoghan — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 17:53:33 +0000

At DEFCON 16 I spoke with Jason Scott Sadofsky (Homepage, Wikipedia, Twitter) of textfiles.com.

Jason is a technology Historian, and archives websites. He discussed legal restrictions on archiving, such as the Lanham Act, and mentioned Wikipedia’s attitude to archiving.

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

Transcript to follow…

Tech: Eliot Phillips (Hack-a-Day)

david — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 09:59:04 +0000

At DEFCON 16 I got a chance to interview Hack a Day’s Head Editor, Eliot Phillips (Homepage, Twitter).

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

Transcript to follow…

Tech: Austin Appel (Rockbox)

david — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 09:52:25 +0000

At DEFCON 16 I spoke with Rockbox admin Austin Appel (Rockbox Homepage, Rockbox Wikipedia Page, Austin’s Rockbox page).

Rockbox is a replacement 3^rd-party firmware for digital audio players which has been ported to a wide range of devices, it offers more codec options than many commercial firmwares and is one of the ways you can get Doom running on your iPod.

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License (CC-BY-SA).

Transcript to follow…