Another year has past and another trip to Blackhat 2010 and Defcon 18 has been completed. Overall both conferences were great. However Defcon 18 (aka Barely Legal) did have its problems. One was the amount of new people who showed up. During the closing Ceremony DarkTangent asked who all was here for the first time, most of the people in the room I was in rose their hands. When asked if they would return next year, almost all of them stayed up. The problem that this caused was that one, they ran out of Human badges (They only made 7,000 of them). Luckly I got one of them, and once again Kingpin did a awesome job making the badge this year. So there were thousands of people who received the “paper” badges. From what I have been reading there are estimates that there were between 10 and 12,000 people at the Con this year.
Because of the massive amount of people there, there were talks that I was unable to get in to that I really wanted to see. Hopefully they will be up on iTunes soon and I will be able to see them. The one big announcement that DarkTangent made was that this would be the last year for Defcon at the Riviera Hotel. Next year it is going to be at the Rio.. Which is Freaking awesome. In addition to being at the Rio, they will be doing 5 TV channels in the hotel that will be run to the rooms so that if one of the talks gets full, you can go to your room and actually watch it live on TV. I see this becoming a huge benefit and success for Defcon 19.
The one bad part about the trip, USAirways… We had originally set up our return flight to only have about a 1 hour layover in Phoenix. Unfortunately, USAir decided that was too short, and changed the flight so that it had a 4 hour layover. Which turned in a trip that if they still flew direct from being 4 hours to being almost 9 hours. My total travel time for my return home, 16 hours… WTF.