It’s easy to forget that you are in the middle of the desert in Las Vegas. Our goal at the moment is to remind ourselves. And not just by making the daring journey across the strip from one casino to another. We’re doing it right. We’re strapping as much water to our backs as we can carry, renting a car, and driving out into the void until we find some secret military bases. Right? They’re out there. And we will be too. We might shoot machine guns. They have those here too. It’s time for all of this CSI Las Vegas that I have rattling around in my brain to pay off.

We came to this godforsaken oasis for our much needed first corporate retreat, and to attend “the Largest Underground Hacking Convention in the World”, Defcon 15. I came 3 years ago and I thought it was lovely. Lots of delightfully nerdy folks talking about delightfully nerdy stuff, and having delightfully nerdy parties. This year I learned about Tor, SQL injection, the inherent insecurity of widgets, police procedure, the Z-phone, among other things.

Sadly, all of the Defcon folk are now packing up and heading home. Even sadder, arriving in their place are members of the Tau Kapa Episilon fraternity from all over the world. A noticeable change, to say the least. If you aren’t familiar with real hacker culture, picture something between “The Crow”, “Hackers”, and “Office Space”. If you aren’t familiar with frat culture, watch “Animal House”. Now picture these two groups colliding amid nickel slots and blackjack tables in the run-down, surreal landscape of the Riviera hotel at the far north end of the Las Vegas strip. I was kind of daydreaming about a West Side Story clash between the two in the elevator today while listening to a group of buffed-up TKEs try to decide whether they would be getting free drinks at the Hooters Casino tonight. It would start with a TKE accidentally tripping over the cord to one of the Hackers Wardriving devices. After some posturing and shit-talking by the DCers (which would probably revolve mainly around the TKEs moms reputation on the #skankyho IRC channel), the TKEs would administer severe beatings, encountering little resistance (”Minus 100 hit points - need food badly!”, one of them would scream), until the TKEs would get distracted and try to invite a group of passing strippers back to their rooms for a brunchtime beerbong, only to find that, by the time they got there, they had been locked out of their rooms due to a computer glitch, and the national TKE website had been DOS’d into oblivion. Back in he elevator, in response to the Hooters question, they decided: “we goddamn well better get free drinks.”

This morning I walked down to the concierge to ask where I would find the nearest internet cafe because the internet in our room wasn’t working. The man immediately outed me as “one of those computer security guys” and accused me of bringing the network down myself. I congratulated him on his shrewd observational skills and intuition and proceeded to wonder around in the 100 degree heat for an hour, failing to find anywhere with a connection with witch I could check on the disaster unfolding in Second Life.

Sometimes I think developers are just trying to give us ADD. While plenty of competitive video sites put two videos head to head, new project You3b thought it would be all the better if they added one more. Hence, you can now max out your connection by watching three YouTube videos simultaneously, all auto-playing when you hit the page. Users can create collections of three to be shared and rated.

Above: the contrast between German kids’ cartoon character “Schnappy” and a real-life croc catching and killing its prey in a gory bloodfest. Ah, the Internets.

Recommended: Piczo Stuff at Mashcodes!

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