This has been my 21st year lurking at DefCon in Las Vegas, most of my badges has been destroyed or lost but there was a few I did and have found from the past.
I have basically lurked around a bit, it was hard to go between 4 buildings to see and follow up and such so I stayed out of some events like OpenCTF and such normally because I was a bit late to a few and wanted to check out things.
I wanted to get some what involved this year but I couldn’t figure out where to begin I am a bit lost mainly due to losing both my best friend and mother. Even though growing up poor and such she was a great social engineer if she could bend the law to save a day or 2 or get something free she would exploit the crap out of it. She never went for money, but she did had her moments with me and always harassing me because I am successful with InfoSec and IT career based and when I got into computers in the late 90’s so did she but she would always be afraid of getting into anytype of “hacking scene” because the news but yet she would participate in password cracking and doxxing either me, my friends, any her friends she found online etc… It was hard to get my mind off of her since she passed away, but this event somehow helped me gain some strength again.
I started joining defcon in 1998, just for talks and other stuff. I was super big into it and since I was online alot during that time mostly various IRC channels from Efnet, Dalnet and my own net “WRNet”
I started with defcon on Thursday with just getting my pass and then went looking around to see what is going on. I left early as there was just way too many people to visit everything and everything was at capacity and most meets I couldn’t make. Friday I was able to start early at 9am and started showing up to some talks like I normally do ventured around meeting some people I knew online and ventured to Alexis Park for QC16. got cool badges that broke a few days later.
It was a blast, next year will be better as they reveled the new Ceaser’s Forum space that they will be focused in. Maybe next year I’ll participate in sometype of CTF.