Toorcon this year was awesome and fun, with the exception of cstone breaking his femur, of course. I had originally been slated to talk, but a clerical error left my name off of the schedule. Instead I took the role of ’staff photographer’ and shot the whole event and all the speakers. A few interesting occurences took place:
- Mckt decided to leave early, and gave me his speaking spot, which I took. Before I was able to speak, barkode approached me and kindly asked me to give my speaking slot to his panel since they desperately needed more time. I agreed. I went from speaking, to not speaking, to speaking to not speaking in one day. I was still a little sad to not be able to give my peoplehacking talk though.
- Jolly approached me starting out his query with “So Viss, you’re a social engineering guy…” and explained how he wanted to pwn the counting jar contest (explained below)
- I met a really neat guy from San Francisco that lapses into a really bad scottish accent when I do my really bad irish accent. This made all the dinners and parties we went to hilarious.
- I spent some time in the lockpicking village teaching new folks how to pick locks (this is fairly standard for me at this point)
Jolly comes up to me with a few friends and asks “So we want to pwn the counting jar contest”. I smile. We step out onto the balcony outside and I start going over ways on how to sleight-of-hand the jar off of the table and replace it with a duplicate. After about 10-15 minutes of showing them techniques, it’s clear they aren’t really into the sleight-of-hand method. I talked a little bit about distraction methodology and how to get the target to turn their back on the jar and after another volley of ‘meh’ responses I said “Fine. I’ll go distract them, YOU nab the jar.”. They smiled.
I approached the counter and asked the people sitting behind it if I could get their picture:
You can see Jolly in the background on the right making the switch.
Poof! A jar appears!
I didn’t get to talk about social engineering, so I just did it instead.
I did however leave the con with a warm sense of friendliness and a brain tingling from stimulation. I love the smaller hacker cons because there is so much insightful conversation and so many awesome smart people to talk to, meet and hangout with. I always leave these things feeling a deep sense of gratitude.