Shmoocon rocked! The con was well organized, entertaining and often brainborkingly insightful. We were fortunate enough to interview some amazing hackers for the show this year too. It was also great to meet so many cool Hak5 fans! Hell yeah! Of course with any con comes crazyness so here are a few of my observations.

The Shmoocon staff really nailed it this year too. Registration was super smooth and the badges were awesome. If you haven’t seen yet check ‘em out, they’re red laser engraved acrylic punch cards. There were several versions with different dot patterns that supposedly when put together were XOR’d PDP-8 machine code that led to other clues as part of a contest. Suffice it to say nobody won. The network was also very well put together this year. There were two official networks, and over 100 rogue networks as RenderMan pointed out at his talk. One SSID Shmoocon with no security and one with WPA2. Connecting to the insecure network allowed you to sign up for the WPA2 network and download the certificates. I unfortunately didn’t have a free moment to check out the labs but I assume they were loaded with fun blinkenlights. While the network’s main firewall had enough physical horse power to handle the client load the software was throttling traffic at initial setup. Bruce Potter, Shmoocon organizer, remarked at opening ceremonies something to the effect of “So we’re using my personal BSD box instead. If you root the firewall please don’t kill the BIOS. No. Seriously.” To my knowledge the firewall didn’t die a horrible death.

The Hak5Live show however… Well, lets just say we learned some very important lessons about doing live events. The podcasters meetup was a great event. We all had a ton of fun, there was free beer and fun people and a great pool of talented hackers on the panel. Ustream went through a lot of trouble to hook us up with a beta high-res codec and even specially configure the embedded flash chat to sign into our servers. And when the network worked the stream was pretty damn smooth. But we were at a hacker con. On a wireless network full of other hackers. Hackers like to do fun things with packets. My apologies for the intermittent choppyness. That kinda made the live show a little sucky. Sorry, that’s lesson learned number one.

Oh and we didn’t bring a PA so nobody in the crowd could hear us. You’d think we would have had some foresight on that one but, nope! I’ll tell you what though, we’re likely never to forget that vital piece of gear again. Again a little more suckage. Our bad, lesson learned number two.

Oh and the network went out half way through Wess’ thought provoking security talk with Simple Nomad & Co. Ouch. Ok suckage is putting it lightly now. Lesson learned three?

And finally I guess we were just really trying to learn some live show lessons this time because amazingly we kinda forgot to plug the little red and white RCA cables into the mixer that send the meticulously managed audio to the video recording unit. Yes, we verified the tape, no audio what so ever. Lesson learned number^H^H oh who and I kidding at that point we were checking luggage and boarding the fail bus with one way tickets to EpicFailLand. *sigh* We did however learn that we could from now on monitor the audio coming out of the VTR rather than the mixer. We promise not to record a silent episode again.

Oh a happier note we did manage to successfully enjoy what can only be described as Club Shmoocon on Saturday night. From what I remember of the night there were a couple hundred geeks packed into a night club with a free bar, awesome free style nerdcore by eighty of Dual Core, and Mubix’s alcohol inspired conga line as well as other miscellaneous shenanigans… To that affect if you were at the party Saturday night and happen to have found Hak5 stickers on your back the next morning, that wasn’t me.

Honest.

To top off a crazy night we ended up crashing nearby Katsucon. Without going into too many details I’ll just give mad props to Surbo from I-Hacked.com for social engineering us all some badges. The closest thing I had ever been to an Anime con was Fan Expo in Toronto a couple years back. So I had seen a little cosplay. This made Fan Expo look normal. And while the rave resembled a high school dance with added light show, techno, and scantily clad con goers it was nothing short of, um, insightful? Yeah. Oh who am I to speak we were at a hacker con. To each their own but I’d have to read a lot of Naruto before I’d “get it”.

Rockband on the other hand I get. And where there’s anime there is sure to be video games. So when Paul, Matt and I walked into a hall filled with geeks lined up to rock out we were home. It was amusing watching drummer after drummer nearly fail out on easy as makeshift bands threw down. We were all too eager to lay down the rock in what can only be described as the most amazing rock band stage show evar. 5 stars for the Technosluts.
 
 
 

Overall Shmoocon was just what the doctor ordered. A concentrated dose of hackerdom that reinvigorated our technolust, an opportunity to talk to some amazing hackers, learn new tricks, meet awesome people, and much more. I only wish we could have shot the conference documentary style, capturing the shmoocon experience. Unfortunately the stressed photography section of this years conference rules prohibited any filming in public spaces without consent of everyone in frame, thus making the docu approach a near impossible feat. We did however compile a set of conversations with some really interesting hackers in the press room.

The only lesson learned there has to do with scheduling. Next time we’ll try to get all the media stuff out of the way on Friday so that we can attend more talks on Saturday. Regardless we had an awesome time and we’re looking forward to the next. I think you’ll all really enjoy the upcoming episode!

And last but not least a big thanks to Mubix for organizing the podcasters meetup, coordinating with Shmoo staff, Hak5 logistics and of course being our personal 6’6″ bouncer guy!