One of my funny moments at Black Rock City last year was meeting a random guy early one morning on deep playa, chatting and finding out we both were involved in IT security. He’d been at the defcon conference just before Burning Man, we talked for just a minute about industry publications and the hacker contests, before getting distracted with shinier things. I’m not going this year but everyone I know is buzzing about BM this year:)

I was just reminded of this randomly just by reading this list of new tools released at the Defcon this year. Sounds like a busy conference, with a lot of hackers who love what they do. Good stuff.

It has become more like a global fair than what most people think of conferences; even the badge is highly unique. I say this because there are so many things to do at DEFCON, other than going to talks, that you could spend your whole weekend looking at the “World’s Largest Boar!” so to speak. One of the CTF (Capture the Flag) contest winners this year actually exclaimed that he only made it to 2 talks in 12 years! I am also one of those individuals who barely get a chance to go to talks and now that the speaker pool is so diverse it’s hard to find all of the “stuff” they release.

Read the list and full article here