Today was a fun but sad day. New friends, new fascinations, and like kid summer camp, sweet goodbyes, and promises to write just as soon as you get home.
Regardless, the day was packed with great talks and fun. The day started with another talk on PLCs (I really like PLCs and ICS) from Matt Caldwell over at Tophat security who showed how Ironmap had scanned some 7.5+ million devices. Its as bad as you think, and possibly worse.
As exciting as this was, halfway through I scrambled out of my row (and over other Con goers) to get to LambdaCalculus of Hackers.town fame. His talk, The Enshittified Internet and How We Can All Rewild the Internet was a throwback defcon talk. Introducing the kids to Fido, Gopher, Tim Berners Lee, WWW, et al., Booing photos of Gates, Musk, and Zuck, and street preaching frenetic energy. It was obvious LC was passionate, and he gave lots of good recommendations for de-googling your life and helping draw people back to the fun of the web circa 1995-2005. In no certain order: Browsing
- Vivaldi (created by Opera’s former dev)
- LibreWolf (Firefox with out the Mozilla/Google stuff)
- Dillo (Super small footprint spec’d browser)
- Cuta
- Fastmail
- Posteo
Source Management
- Codeberg
- Sourcehut
Navigation
- Open Street Maps
Search
- NOAI.DuckDuckGo.com - NO AI ( DDG with a specific AI-less UI)
- StartPage
Video
- Jellyfin
- OSMC
- Ersatsz
Social Media
- Mastodon (Twitter replacement)
- PixelFed (Instagram replacement)
- PeerTube (YouTube replacement)
- Loops (TikTok replacement)
- Diaspora (Facebook replacement)
Cloud Storage/Docs
- NextCloud
- CryptPad
Special mention to LC’s own PirateBox (look for the project to move to Codeberg soon) and the YUNO Host software (Why you no host?) which allows someone to spin a mastodon, Jellyfin, or other server, in a few moments to help ease the transition into self-hosting and privacy respecting tech.
If you didn’t get a chance to catch this one, LC will be reproducing the talk in full this weekend at HOPE conference this Saturday August 15th at 1500 in the Gramercy Park Suite.
From LCs talk, Alex and I decided to head to Hackers.town’s booth and check out the work being done on Veilid. Much to my surprise, @Dildog and @TheGibson were at the booth. After some explanation, we come to understand that Veilid is kind of like if IPFS and Tor had a baby, but it actually worked. And to prove it, TheGibson had been side-loading Veilid nodes on to Qualcomm devices and stuffing them into 3D printed Atari 2600 cartridges. I’m happy to say that I’m now the proud owner of a new Veilid node, (along with Alex and xRichless).
From here we headed over to Bade Life’s Kitsu’s talk on Shitty Add On Design with No Code. This is of extreme interest to the group as we’d already been drawing circuits to figure out what kind of cool stuff we might could make for DC35. The creativity that the Badge Life guys and gals bring to the table is unmatched, and between them and Hardware Hacking Village, I’ve received a crash course in soldering and through-hole component work this week. Skills I’m excited to take home with me. (His talk will be Github’d in a few days, and I’ll get a link here for anyone interested.)
After this, we headed to our final talk, which didn’t really hold our attention as the impending and sinking feeling of the con ending settled like a cloud over the city. (Consequently, after a week of 115F weather, storm cells had settled in over the city.) Regardless, after making some new friends, making another round to collect stickers, and swapping socials, defcon had finally come to an end. Alex, xRichless, and I hailed a cab, and headed towards our hotels. But this wouldn’t be the end for our intrepid trio. Later that night, the team would brave 4 city blocks to eat at a Hard Rock Cafe and buy a roll-y luggage from the underground Marshall’s. (Yes, Vegas has an underground Marshall’s on the strip. Its next to Hard Rock Cafe.)
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#HackThePlanet