Return
to Story Page
To print: Select File and then Print from your
browser's menu
JOHN NAUGHTON
If you wandered into the Alexis Park Resort hotel in Las Vegas last weekend, you would have seen an extraordinary sight thousands of hackers, crackers, anarchists and other code-based non-conformists en fete. Mingling with them, staring at computer displays, eavesdropping on incomprehensible talks about `VHDL in a Field Programmable Gate Array' are a few spooks attempting (unsuccessfully) to look unobtrusive in pressed jeans and T-shirts bearing defamatory remarks about Bill Gates. Welcome to Def Con 7.0, the seventh annual convention of the computer underground. Def Con brings together people whose prime obsession is computer security breaching it or enhancing it. When Def Con started in 1993 it was an intimate affair – about 100 hackers who met to talk about viruses and about cracking into people's networks.
``For me,'' recalled one old hand, ``the best part of Def Con I (besides the drinking) was the socialising. Hours were spent in the Holy Cow (a great bar if you're in Vegas) getting wasted androving through rows of slot machines looking for creative ways to cause trouble. It was a blast. Meeting people face-to-face whom you'd only known by reputation or from hanging out on underground BBSs (Bulletin Boards) like Lunatic Labs.'' Now Def Con has grown up. The programme (www.defcon.org/html/defcon-7-pre.html) encourages the party game of `Spot the Feds' and includes the usual incendiary stuff calculated to terrify readers of the Daily Mail, but also schedules talks by Responsible Adults on serious subjects like `Firewalls: Trends and Problems'. For my money, the incendiary stuff is still the great attraction. The Cult of the Dead Cow, for instance, is using Def Con 7.0 to launch the latest edition of its `Back Orifice' software, which enables one to take remote control of Windows machines. The new version `Back Orifice 2000' is designed to handle Windows 2000, on which many corporations will rely for their `back office' operations. The Cult's press release announcing their product spoofs the bilgethat mainstream software companies churn out. ``Back Orifice 2000,'' it burbles, ``puts the administrator solidly in control of any Microsoft network''. Back Orifice 2000 was written by two `code monsters' known as Dildog and Sir Dystic. ``Now we've enhanced the Windows administration experience,'' says Dildog, ``we hope Microsoft will do its best to ensure its operating systems are robust enough to handle the control we've given to them.'' Bet it goes down a bomb in Seattle.
--The Observer News Service
Copyright © 1999 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
------------------------------------------------------------
This story was printed from Net Express located at http://www.expressindia.com. Net Express provides a portal to India, with news from The Indian Express and The Financial Express along with sites on travel and tourism, the entertainment industry, the power sector, the environment and much more.
------------------------------------------------------------