TBOY - The Best One Yet
ZaCon III has come and gone this last weekend. It was a blast, solid content including some exciting first timers and more than doubling the original research output, an extension to include a Fri night, and the first time we ran with volunteers. The fact that the con seems to be getting better each year is important for me.
"It looks a bit eclectic"
Friday night kicked off around 7 at an uber-chilled venue, described by Roelof as "what I always imagined ZaCon should be" which was pretty great. Despite a projector failure, and nowhere to put the backup one, Roelof and Marco both presented some really entertaining talks. It was a nice mix of entertaining (and freaky) OSint followed by some hardcore vuln research. The time on either side to meet and talk to people was fun as a change to the usual brain-bending long day that is ZaCon.
Coffee was Flowing, Hangovers were Showing
Saturday kicked off with some more projector and microphone troubles followed by a power failure to one side of the room, but by the first tea break we had a duct taped alternative projector stand up and running, the lapel mic microphone replaced and power piped in from the surrounds. The talks started with more than 100 people filling the uncomfortable benches, and the three upstream tubes providers taking some strain thanks to the RF-busting styles of our internet volunteers, Peter Stayt & Prince Sihlahla. Our local site (local.zacon.org.za, up for a few days more if you want to get your ratings in) ran smoothly for a change thanks to Ralfe Poisson.
My favourite talks of the day go to Jeremy du Bruyn on practical password cracking and Reino Mostert on NNTP cache enumeration and poisoning. Partly because they were first time speakers, delivering original research output, and partly because they were awesome speakers with awesome talks even without the caveats. The "can I go to jail if" talk from Matt Erasmus and Helaine Leggat with Matt collecting and asking the questions, and Helaine answering was also great, and we're thinking of making it a regular feature if they agree. The only thing I missed there, was a light of hope. I got the feeling that in ZA vuln research has *no legal protection* and your only defense is not to do it. There were several other talks I greatly enjoyed too.
We'll be collecting slides, DiscussIT will be publishing audio, and some time later we'll try get the videos out.
ZaCon IV
We've got pages of things to improve on for next year, and hopefully we'll be able to retain the TBOY label. In the meantime, it's never too early to start pondering a submission for next year, start talking it over at the next 0xC0FFEE session, subscribe to the community@zacon.org.za mailing list or join the #zacon chan on irc.atrum.org.
Thanks
So many people did so many things, here's a brief list of people who need thanking in no particular order
- The speakers - without you guys there's no con
- People@ - you know who you are
- The volunteers
- Local site - Ralfe
- Internets - Peter, Prince
- Registration - Tim, Ross
- Badges - Andrew
- Venue - Sagi <-- Big shouts to this guy, who did some some hard work
- Audio & Video - Tony and Jameel
- Attendees - presenting to an empty room wouldn't be as much fun
- University of Johannesburg - for hosting us
- Cafe Pronto - for the coffee