C33 Technology

DEFCON 28 Wrap Up

DEFCON, the world’s largest hacking convention and always one of the highlights of my year, was last weekend and, of course, remote. I missed being in Vegas with tens of thousands of hackers, but there were still some fantastic talks and conversations over Discord. A quick “Top Five” highlights: If your password is eight characters or less, you essentially don’t have a password.

Project

A Home Office DND Button

I’m extremely fortunate that I have a true home office at our house. It’s my favorite room in our whole place with an both an internal door and a door to to the back yard, and it affords me plenty of room to store my various projects and geeky collections. Of course, the most important aspect of my home office is that it’s a room where I can get some time work on…well…these days I work on work in there.

Work

The Infosec Cold Call

I get asked occasionally about ways to improve corporate information security or what kinds of things get easily missed, and while I’m no expert, and there are an endless number of little things you can miss these days, there’s one way I rarely hear mentioned and I like to remind technical leadership about:

Travel

The Sandwich List

I’m a sandwich guy. Ok, that’s an understatement. I’m really in to sandwiches. I love the variety, the simplicity (or occasionally the complexity), the different textures, the bread, the meat (yes, meat), and usually, the cheese! I’ve spent my nearly 40 years in existence looking for the best sandwiches and then going to great lengths to eat them again and again.

Business

Paywalls are OK, but Dumb Paywalls Aren’t

I have hacked the paywall of my hometown newspaper’s website, STLToday.com, two or three times now. The first time came with more fanfare than I expected and the subsequent times have been more quiet, but each time I get some version of this pushback: Look, I understand this point of view.

The Top Five Highlights of Defcon 27

I love Defcon. For years, since I was a young script kiddie in high school, I had attending Defcon, the crazy huge hacker convention held every year in Las Vegas, on my bucket list. Now, Defcon 27 was my third Defcon and I seem to enjoy the conference more every year.