Photos show the cultural difference between Black Hat and Defcon hacker events
Thousands of security professionals, hackers, federal agents and media descended on Las Vegas this week to attend the Black Hat and Defcon conferences. The two conferences exhibit the extremes of hacker and security culture, with federal agents and major corporations descending on Black Hat in large numbers and mohawk-styled hackers and Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyers attending Defcon. It’s like the difference between law enforcement and pranksterism, where both have the object of protecting freedom.
Defcon … Continue Reading
Author Steven Levy tells young hackers about their religion
Steven Levy wrote his first book, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, in 1984. At the Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas today, he talked about the word “hacker” and its origins amid a crowd of young practitioners of the craft, many of whom weren’t born when he published that book.
Levy said that over the years, the word “hacker” became corrupted to mean people with pimples who were getting into trouble with the law … Continue Reading
