It’s that time of the year again when hackers of all types get together for their annual celebration of discoveries made throughout the year. We call this DefCon, and every year, new exploits in software and hardware are released to the public.
I had the opportunity to attend the conference for my sixth year there (for the 15 years it’s been held now) along with more than 8,000 other hackers at the Riviera Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. Presentations were given on about 120 different subjects ranging from drive reanimation to international information warfare. More than $15,000 was raised to support the EFF. Breakout sessions were held for two full days on both wireless WEP and WPA cracking as well as lock picking.
Contests are also held every year including the infamous Capture the Flag contest designed to find the best team of network and server security gurus that runs continuously from the beginning of the conference to the very end. Hacker Jeopardy provides a test of knowledge of both technical details as well as political and related events. More than 10 other contests are also run including WarDriving, Lock Picking, DefconBots (build an automated robot to accomplish a specific task in the shortest amount of time possible), and a Mystery Box Challenge (you have no clue what you’re up against until the competition starts).
Highlights from this year’s conference included:
August’s Geek Lunch will be held at The Pie Pizzeria at the University of Utah at one o’clock.
For our July meeting, Cole Joplin will present on dynamic PDF generation. Explore the capabilities of turning your dynamic database information into downloadable PDF documents. The presentation will be introducing two open source PDF creation libraries for PHP: FPDF and R&OS. These
library functions show the use of dynamic text, drawing, and inserting images for PDF output will be shown.
July’s Geek Lunch will be held at Buca di Beppo in Midvale.
July 6th @ 13:30
Buca di Beppo
935 East Fort Union Boulevard
Midvale, UT 84047
801.561.9463
Please RSVP to Victor Villa so weknow how many seats to ask for.
For our June meeting, Boguslaw Gil will present on a project called SOWA (Service Oriented Web Architecture). He will cover building applications, concept, content object protocol for exchanging content objects between the browser and web server, and collaborations with web services.
SOWA is a software architecture and design methodology for processing and exchanging content in a Web environment over services. SOWA is an extension for current Web technologies and simplifies the design and development of interactive Web applications by separating content layout and UI events from content, and making browser a state-full client to Web server.
Our next Geek Lunch will be held Friday, June eighth at Thankgiving Point in Lehi. There will be free wireless intenet access so be sure to bring your laptop.
Thanksgiving Point Cafe
(meet beneath the water tower)
8 June 2007 @ 13:00
For our May meeting, Victor Villa will present on the Dojo DHTML toolkit.
Looking to expand your toolset to include web 2.0 eye candy and killer AJAX functionality? For the average PHP consultant, you face 2 main problem: 1. Server environment changes from job to job and you’re not always able to install software. 2. There are no less than 20 AJAX frameworks out there. What is a code poet to do? Enter Dojo Toolkit – the server-side agnostic solution that rolls out easily, extensible and has a solid developer base that won’t leave you stranded in a couple of years. Dojo is an Open Source DHTML toolkit written in JavaScript. Dojo allows you to easily build dynamic capabilities into web pages and any other environment that supports JavaScript sanely. You can use the components that Dojo provides to make your web sites more usable, responsive, and functional.
For our April meeting, Brandon Stout will present on the iCalendar standard and PHP. An outline of his presentation is as follows:
MGeary helped me clean a complex function—containing many lines and loops—up into four concise lines by utilizing the shuffle function. I thought that I would posted it here in case it helps anyone else. I was trying to randomly select five unique items from a multi-dimensional array and although I had achieved the results I wanted, his suggetion allowed me to shorten my code considerably.
$howmany_want = 5;
$author_keys = array_keys($authors);
shuffle($author_keys);
$author_keys = array_slice($author_keys, 0, $howmany_want);
Berkeley Data Systems, creators of Mozy Online Backup, will be holding its second semiannual coding deathmatch on Saturday, April 14. Billed as a “thinly disguised recruiting effort to find the best local engineers,” the competition is open to all Utah residents.
The previous deathmatch saw over 100 participants and was a success both for the 8 finalists who received prize money, and for BDS who hired 4 new engineers in the process.
administered by Anavi Design
colocated at Tier Four