Yes boys and girls, it’s the annual start of the conference season for hackers, geeks, nerds and security people (and those are not mutually exclusive titles). ShmooCon, in it’s fifth year, has grown to 1500 attendees in an effort to spread the gospel about information and physical security and other novel topics that you’d be surprised to see any any con. While last years’ con had interesting neighbors (a CosPlay convention), the sheer size of this years has people scrambling to see how to make a homebrew UAV (members of HacDC), how the Srizbi BotNet was taken down (aka “The Day The Spam Stopped“), how your local Home Depot is selling you insecurity (“How To Defeat the Kwikset SmartKey“) and the keynote speaker, Matt Blaze, more famously known for helping defeat the use of the Clipper Chip and open up the government’s attempt at putting encryption backdoors into almost everything. There are some great talks planned for Saturday, which we’ll cover on “Day Two”, but if you’re in the Woodley Park area and see a lot of black t-shirted individuals crossing the street, trust me, they won’t hurt you…they just want your base. (If you want to view past conferences, the videos are located here – c’mon learn a little bit!)
