Collaborate Disseminate
DEF CON has become the de facto showplace of the #Badgelife movement. It’s a pageant for clever tricks that transform traditional green rectangular circuit boards into something beautiful, unique, and often times hacky.
Today I’ve gathered up about three dozen badge designs seen at DC27. It’s a hint of what …read more
Continue reading Pictorial Guide to the Unofficial Electronic Badges of DEF CON 27
Engineering creativity comes to life when you have to design around a set of constraints. We can do just about anything with enough time, talent, and treasure, but what can you do when shackled with limitations? Some of the most creative electronic manufacturing tricks spring to life when designing conference …read more
Continue reading The Badgies: Clever, Crazy, and Creative Ideas in Electronic Design
We had our biggest Breakfast at DEF CON ever on Sunday. So big, in fact, that the carefully laid plans went awry immediately.
This is the fifth year we’ve hosted the event, which kicks off the final day of DEF CON with some hardware show-and-tell. We really thought we had …read more
We had our biggest Breakfast at DEF CON ever on Sunday. So big, in fact, that the carefully laid plans went awry immediately.
This is the fifth year we’ve hosted the event, which kicks off the final day of DEF CON with some hardware show-and-tell. We really thought we had …read more
Year over year, the Queercon badge is consistently impressive. I think what’s most impressive about these badges is that they seemingly throw out all design ideas from the previous year and start anew, yet manage to discover a unique and addictive aesthetic every single time.
This year, there are two …read more
Continue reading Hands-On: Queercon 16 Hardware Badge Shows Off Custom Membrane Keyboard
Mike Szczys and Kerry Scharfglass recorded this week’s podcast live from DEF CON. Among the many topics of discussion, we explore some of the more interesting ways to move a robot. From BB-8 to Holonomic Drives, Kerry’s hoping to have a proof of concept in time for Supercon. Are you …read more
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) 5 has been around since 2016 with the most recent version 5.2 published just this year. There’s not much hardware out there that’s using the new hotness. That didn’t stop [Damien Cauquil] from picking apart BLE 5’s new frequency hopping techniques and updating his BtleJack tool …read more
Continue reading New Bluetooth 5 Channel Hopping Reverse Engineered for Jamming and Hijacking
Scarcity on the Internet is the siren song of bot writers. Maybe you’ve lost an eBay bid in the last milliseconds, or missed out on a hacker con when tickets sold out in under a minute — your corporeal self has been outperformed by a bot. But maybe you didn’t …read more
Continue reading Bots That Snag the Hottest Fashion While Breaking Social Trust in Commerce
We’ve all stared at that button in the elevator with the phone icon on it, supremely confident that if the cab came to a screeching halt while rocketing up to the 42nd floor, a simple button press would be your salvation. To be fair, that’s probably true. But the entire …read more
Continue reading Those Elevator Emergency Call Buttons Are Actually Pretty Janky
Yesterday we published a first look at the hardware found on the DEF CON 27 badge. Sporting a magnetically coupled wireless communications scheme rather than an RF-based one, and an interesting way to attach the lanyard both caught my attention right away. But the gemstone faceplate and LED diffuser has …read more
Continue reading DEF CON 27: The Badge Talk; or That One Time Joe Grand Sourced 30,000 Gemstones