This year DefCon was hosted at the Alexis Park Hotel in Las Vegas. Some of the members of Moloch were there and attended the parties and lectures throughout the three days. Dark Tangent made some great improvements, especially the new IDs that he had created. The days we packed with three rooms of lectures going on at the same time, a newbie room, a break-out room and the large conference room. There was also a room dedicated to the vendors and networked computers. I don't know too much about the guest rooms in the Alexis Park hotel because I stayed next door at the St. Tropez Hotel.

The room I stayed in at the St. Tropez Hotel was equipped with a bedroom, a living room and a decent size bathroom. It had some other extras such as a fridge, coffee pot and two televisions but my favorite was the telephone. The telephone in the room was connected to two lines. One of the lines was accessible though a dataport on the side for modem connectivity. This was convenient because a local call was priced at 75¢ so, the best thing to do was to call your ISP and stay connected 24/7.

On Friday, after signing in at the pre-registered desk, I headed to the Break-Out room for a Novell lecture but the speaker didn't show. So instead of that they had a commentary on IPv6, I don't remember who gave the lecture but I did get a lot of information that I didn't know before and it did bring up some new conspiracies that I would like to put to rest. I also attended the phreaking lecture given by gh0st. The lecture had lots of information about all aspects of telephony but I hate to say, the most talked about item of the lecture was gh0st fainting out during the lecture. I guess he was nervous about speaking but he turned out ok and finished his lecture without any problems. I went to the Hacking Las Vegas lecture around 5pm. I thought the lecture was going to be a little more than what I received. The lecture was mostly about how the casino business works and the vulnerabilities around it. The last lecture I attended was given by Angus Blitter titled Fear and Loathing in Cyberspace. I didn't like this lecture for one reason and I don't like to criticize. The speaker seemed to wanting hackers to contribute to a product that he will get rich on. I also attended the Hacker Jeopardy which was very good with an intermission showing the 10 minute clip form 2600's movie Freedom Downtime. The crowd really appreciated the movie trailer.

Saturday I apologize, because I was really hung over so I didn't get out until later in the day. I tried getting into the Cult of the Dead Cow release of BO2K but to my disappointment the room was so packed I didn't really have a good view. It got really hot due to the air conditioner breaking down for a period of time and finally someone just smelled really bad, so I left. Around 4pm I headed to the Macintosh Security lecture. This lecture gave me more information that I knew about, since I am a PC and Unix user. I did plan to go to the Social Engineering contest at 6pm but they pushed it back a couple of hours but I have heard that it was very entertaining.

Sunday morning I headed to the lock picking demonstration given by V1RU5. There was a a lot of good info at this lecture but there was one problem. It appeared that there was so many people and the video feed was not working so no one could really see the demo. After the lock pick demo, I headed over to the How to use BO2K lecture given by A.J. Reznor. The lecture by Jason Scott was running a little overtime so I sat in on it. Jason Scott was very profession in his manner and even took verbal shots at the script kiddies. When Jason's time was finally over, A.J. took over. A.J. handled this demo more professionally than a lot of the speakers and I was very impressed. BO2K looked as if it was very complicated but there was a lot of effort put into this piece of software. After this lecture I thought it was time to spend some of my trip exploring Vegas and gamble. I came home with money in my pocket, so the trip was good and I am happy for the great job that Dark Tangent put into this convention. I did hear about two people getting kicked out. One for cheating on Capture the Flag and another for fraudulently using their press credentials but I will not get into that since there is too much controversy about it. Just a great trip