went to b-sides dfw over the weekend to unwind and have a bit of fun. it was great.
// betwix >
b-sides dfw, like last year, was held at ut arlington. not a terrible drive for me, so i wasn’t particularly annoyed with getting there. this time around however, there was only one talk that seemed interesting, but it was later in the day and i didn’t want to be there for too long. the original objective was to head out there with my son to teach him how to solder since he asked, but he ended up getting double-booked with a class project and couldn’t make it.
i wanted to get there super early, but we ended up arriving at around ~11am. went straight to check-in to get our t-shirts and badges before heading over to the hardware hacking village. there was a decent amount of people–enough to occupy all soldering stations at the hardware hacking village–but not so many that it was overwhelming, which i was ok with.
instead of waiting for a station to open up, we decided to check out some of the vendor booths for some free swag. i ended up getting another t-shirt, some hack-the-box socks, and a few stickers.
// skill improved >
after that, we moved over to the locksport village to kill some time. i ended up buying some quality lockpicks and trying to shake off the ring rust on a few locks.
either the lock they handed me was too new and the pins/tumbler were too mechanically precise, or i was really rusty going into it, so i wasn’t able to pop the lock they gave me.
a couple of years ago, after flying back in from las vegas and being stuck in traffic for 2 hours in an uber, i had arrived home with nobody to answer the door. i didn’t have my keys and i needed to take a dump, but i remembered i had my lockpicks with me, so i did what any (in)sane hacker would do–pop the locks. i was able to get in and handle business, which is all that mattered to me.
// use after free >
after about ~30 minutes of failing at lockpicking, we decided to move back over to the hardware hacking village since that was what i really wanted to do. they handed me an esp32 and some header pins to solder onto the badge and after about 10 minutes of waiting, a station was freed up. since it was just soldering on some headers and this esp32 dev board that needed to be solder on–that, and bridging two pads together–it didn’t even take me 5 minutes to wrap up. after having someone inspect it, i went over to have it flashed. not sure if they have the firmware publicly available (it would be cool if they did), but i didn’t bother asking anyway.
so, the explanation i was given about the badges was that they were programmed to light up when the keys on a synthesizer (out in the main area) were pressed. all badges were configured in a mesh using zigbee protocol, so they all lit up with the same pattern based on the keys that were pressed. they also mentioned something about wireshark, but not exactly sure if that was just for showing the protocol or doing something with the transmission of the keypresses over to the badges.
// eof >
i do appreciate that they gave t-shirts and badges this time around. last year, you had to donate money to get a badge and a t-shirt, and they didn’t even have any new ones, either. i was able to get a badge and t-shirt from the previous year that i couldn’t attend, though, so it wasn’t too bad.
i hope b-sides dfw continues to be free and that people continue to attend. it’s definitely a great conference for people to learn cool things and meet new people.
- an0malous