Oh no! Hackers!

Entry #470
Thursday, June 7, 2001

My first day at the security conference was Tuesday and I was feeling a bit out of place when I looked around my table at lunch and noticed the conference badges. Large corporations, military research centers, security vendors.

Some kooky fifty-something CTO and I were talking for a bit, and he handed me his business card. I looked at it and was instantly taken aback.

"John Draper?" I asked in awe.

"Have we met?" he responded.

"No, but you're john Draper" I responded, still in awe.

He didn't seem to catch on the fact that he was famous. "Did we meet at Defcon?"

"No, but we don't need to meet for me to know who you are!"

For those non-hardcore geeks, John Draper is Captain Crunch. Think 1970s cereal box toy whistles generating 2600 hertz tones, think blue boxes, think Jobs and Wozniak selling such boxes. (Think also arrest and jail.) The kooky CTO is John Draper!

John and I hit it off well -- he himself was probably a bit out of place in this crowd. He's with some company making an OpenBSD-based firewall product with a bunch of nifty shit in it. Another developer from the company, Orion, was with him. They were attending the same session as me, so I ended up hanging with them. Thirty minutes into the session, John leans over to me and points out the guy who just walked in and sat next to us. It's Kevin Mitnick. Holy shit, I think.

Afterwards, Dan, the CEO of John's company, takes us all to dinner -- me, Orion, John and Kevin. We talk lots of geeky geeky stuff from tracing back forged-address packets using ipv4 (which none of us thought possible) to pirate radio. Hare Krshnas play the entire time on the street, which provided a great background music. Afterwards, we went to some fancy place were Draper had an interview with the AP. Orion and I were excluded from that, and talked even more geek stuff -- this time focusing on open source licensing (GPL vs BSD), DeCSS and other code-equals-speech cases, and Orion's various Windows programs (he wrote "Mouse Odometer" -- a wonderfully full-featured useless program).

After that, John and I hung out with a local friend of his, and guess what, talked even more geek stuff -- military fabrication techniques (John's friend is a metallurgist), php and John's current language du jour, python.

Wednesday and Thursday, I've been doing the conference thing. Kevin and I have been hitting almost all the same sessions, so we've been hanging out most the day. Since he can't touch computers until 2003, I checked his email for him. (I find that to be extremely funny.)

There's actually a lot of interesting folks here who we've been chatting with. Robert Graham from Network ICE (the makers of BlackICE Defender) talked to Kevin and I for quite some time about Altavore, his open-source version of Carnivore. Lance Spitzner from the Honeynet Project gave a great presentation on their research this morning.

All in all, it's pretty fun. I really hate this town, but there are some brilliant fucking people down here that make it worthwhile a thousand times over.

Comment on this entry

*wow*

Fuckin\' name-droppin\' sumbitch.

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I went to the park with my dog.....