My Defcon 2000 Review

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July 2000: I’m stealing this old review of mine from Defcon 8 from UPL021. And there’s nothing linear can do about it!

So I went to this thing called DefCon and now I’m going to write about it. We were stupid enough to book our flights with PriceLine.com which got us better rates but really crappy flight times and days. My flight left Illinois at 10:30pm on Thursday night and arrived at 1:00am Friday morning.

LogicBox was supposed to meet me at the airport but he was 20 minutes late so I ended up leaving with these two old people who were there. Well, actually they were my parents. See, I had never met them before and this DefCon was my first time ever meeting them (long story). So I’m proud to say that I’m probably the only person who’s ever met their parents for the first time at a hacker conference.

I arrived at the Alexis Park Hotel on Friday morning and was lucky enough to get there before the registration line started wrapping itself around the hotel. I paid my money, got my badge and walked around in the lobby. I walked 2 full circles around the sitting area. Then I ventured outside and walked up to the pool. It got hot so I walked back inside for awhile and got a Coke for the low low price of $2.00, tax included. Then I walked around the eating area in circles and back into the lobby. I walked over to
the pay phones and slapped some PLA stickers on the phones. Then I walked around the lobby some more for a few minutes. Much later I walked out the front doors and discovered that I could hang a right, walk along the side of the building and get into the lobby through the side doors or from the pool area. So I did this a few times and then did it again in reverse. Then I walked around the pool area, through the courtyard and to another pool, around that pool and turned around, then repeated the process. From there I walked a few more circles in the hotel lobby. This is where I started to get kind of bored. I walked up to a guy standing by a wall.

“Hi, are you here for Defcon?,” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Cool.”

I walked back down the hall towards registration so I could walk around the registration lines and see if I knew anybody and a DefCon Goon was like, “You can’t go in there!” and I said “It’s okay, I’m RBCP!!” and he threatened to take away my badge and throw me out. So I had no choice but to go down the street to Subway and have something to eat. I got a footlong sandwich
on white bread, turkey, lettuce and mayo and a large Pepsi. It was really good. On the way back some nerdy kid beat me up for looking stupid. That really sucked but only lasted for a few minutes because I pretended to be unconscience.

I went back to the hotel and made a bunch of phone calls to people who were supposed to be there but none of them answered their phones. After sitting around in the lobby for awhile, The Public and Nekid Amy approached. We walked around for awhile, went up to his room and I got to meet Zens who I hadn’t heard from for awhile. Just an hour or so later I got a call from LogicBox who told me to come into the con room and find their table. Funny, because I’d already passed by his table a few times and had a look at the shirts they were selling but I guess we didn’t notice each other. I went up to the table and stared him down until he said, “Oh, hi!”

Pesto was there and broke into tears and started telling me how much he loved me and how cool I was and stuff. Then he jumped up onto a table and started dancing for me and that’s when I left the con room forever. Okay well, that didn’t really happen. Awhile later I met up with el_jefe and Apok0lyps and I walked around with el_jefe for awhile and finally told him that he was really boring and I was going to go find someone else to hang out with.

That night we geared up for a huge party in barkode’s room! We got all kinds of booze and black lights and a big-ass sound system. Then el_jefe came in and started dancing this scary jig in front of me and soon after that some dude’s girlfriend puked all over the floor. Just as things were getting crazy I noticed that it was after 10:00pm which is way past my usual bedtime so LogicBox said I could stay on his floor at the Excalibur so I went there and went to sleep, however I DID stay up to nearly 11:00pm watching dumb 80’s movies. Man I’m nuts sometimes.

Throughout the weekend, me and Logicbox caused as much trouble as we could on the FRS frequencies. The FCC thought these channels would be used by a few family members at a time to keep in touch at the malls or while camping or whatever. I bet they never thought that a few thousand hackers would all be using the same channel at once. This made for some interesting conversations with people we didn’t know. We kept yelling at everyone to get the hell off OUR channel. They would yell back that it was THEIR channel. We would tell them that we bought the channel from the FCC just last week and we had the receipt to prove it. They would start yelling obscenities and playing tones at us. It was like being on a conf. only on a much larger scale.

We also yelled at girls when they came on the channel, told them that girls didn’t know how to use radios, girls belong in the kitchen and not at hacker cons, girls shouldn’t be wasting time on the radio when they could be pleasing a man. Needless to say, the girls didn’t think this was very funny.

Hmm, so that’s about it for my DefCon experience. I finally got to meet linear but it took so long to find him that by the time we met it was almost time for him to leave. Damn you, linear!

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DEFCON 8 PICTURES:

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	My Defcon 8 paass
	Soon after arriving at Defcon I got a call from Cal on my cell phone who told me to meet him out front in a few minutes. I wasn’t surprised to find out that he rides the short bus.
	This is one of those stupid I’m Taking A Picture Of You While You’re Taking A Picture Of Me pictures. That’s SlapAyoda. I didn’t take this, someone must have swiped my camera. Damn hackers!
	SlapAyoda walking around on the walls in Barkode’s room.
	This is the phone in Barkode’s room. It’s got an elite PLA sticker on it. See? That’s why I took the picture okay? Even though it’s all blurry and you can’t even see the stupid thing.
	LogicBox and Pozer bridging a couple of walkie talkie channels together hoping to annoy everyone listening.
	My birthmom & I, up in the mountains somewhere
	In a swimming pool, somewhere in Vegas
	Barkode gets a little crazy and tells us that money is insignificant or something and throws a few thousand dollars up into the air saying he trusts us all not to steal it. I pocket a few hundred and quickly go home.
	After the money incident, this picture shows SlapAyoda comforting Barkode as if trying to talk him down from a high ledge while Pesto is scooping up money like a madman and shoving it down the front of his pants.
	This is a picture of me, Logicbox and Carolyn Meinel. You can listen to Carolyn Meinel’s hilarious ranting about hackers on my sound clips page. I stole this picture from Barkode’s site and there’s nothing he can do about it.