The Next HOPE!

This year's Hackers On Planet Earth conference was awesome! Probably my favorite year so far, in fact. I managed to catch talks of several friends of mine, sadly missed a few others (Sorry Jimmie!). HOPE #6 was where I first learned how to pick locks, so this conference always holds a special place in my heart.

Deviant Ollam & Babak Javadi gave an awesome talk on behalf of TOOOL, put together at the last minute to fill in for Barry & Han, who, unfortunately, weren't able to make the trip. The talk was fantastic, and though I am loathe to admit it, I actually learned something new! I hadn't previously known how Ving Card locks worked. Deviant's superb (as always) animations were illuminating. The two of them play very well off one another and it's not just on stage, their personalities have always been a good complement to one another. Their topic centered around hotel security and had the audience cheering and laughing most of the way through.

Mouse, Ches & Matt Blaze gave a great talk on the history of security/vulnerability. They covered everything from the Trojan Horse (which did not happen the way I thought it did!) to Mozart, to the the great lock controversy of 1851! Gotta say, though, Matt's info on that was super-biased. I'm not saying that Matt is biased, whatsoever! I'm saying that most of the information available on that period of time is crazy-biased and you see it bleed through whenever people discuss it. I'm working on a project right now that could end up anywhere from a talk to a book about all of that. We shall see! Either way, the talk was really quite good and Mouse introduced me to Ches and Matt prior to the talk, who were both exceptionally nice. It's always a treat to see Mouse at cons.

I met Alex Muentz at the University of Advancing Technology in Arizona a few years ago when I first started running lockpicking workshops with their students. He is the only other presenter I have seen every year I go back to UAT. Unfortunately this is usually the only time I see him all year. However, I got to catch up with him before his talk on Sunday, which was great. He was speaking with Joe Cicero & Seth Schoen about the need for a Computer Crime Innoncence Project. This was the most sparesly attended talk I saw, which was heartbreaking because it was also the most important. My big takeaways are that the current state of expertise in computer forensics is allowing innocent people to be convicted and guilty people to go free. It's a mess. At the end I asked them if there was any progress to establishing an actual innocence project, they said this was literally the first step, the first conversation, and the room wasn't even half full.

In entirely lighter news, my friend Jeff Potter, of Cooking for Geeks, gave a really fun talk covering a lot of bases. This was also the only talk I saw that was genuinely interactive. Jeff not only had kits for everyone to test if they were a super taster or not, but also provided everyone with agar to use in their own food experiments later on. Quinn Norton, reporting for Gizmodo, wrote a great article about the talk.

And, of course, there was lockpicking! I actually tend to avoid the lockpicking village when I'm at cons. Cons are a big playground of interesting talks, good friends I only see once or twice a year and parties. I pick locks all year long, yanno? However, set up a competition, and I will be there with bells on. Case in point:

THE NEXT HOPE - LOCKSPORT WIZARD (2010) from danny on Vimeo.

That's my buddy Danny that shot the video, failed to edit out my really unfortunate f-bombs (sorry sorry!) and spelled my name wrong...however, I think it's awesome he got this on video and it looks great, so I'm happy! That was Locksport Wizard, hosted by the fine folks at Locksport International. I also participated in Defiant Box with jgor, the guy who dethroned me at last year's DefCon. This time, though, we were partners and won this challenge by a single lock. He's the one that got that all important last lock open. It was a blast. I made a few new friends, finally met a couple people I had previously only known digitally, and won the lockpicking contests I entered. What could possibly have made the trip better?

The Highline!

—Schuyler

The Next HOPE!

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