“Today was the day that Defcon has shown that it has really
outgrown the Alexis Park Hotel’s facilities. The number I heard was
~5000 people had registered. The meeting rooms for the 3 tracks
hold a total of ~1800 people. Do the math. This is not meant
to be a dig on the Defcon people. They do a great job, and I know I
couldn’t do as well, please consider it constructive
criticism.”
“On the issue of the talks, the 2 that I most looked forward to
were the talk from Bruce Scheiner of Applied Cryptorgraphy fame,
and the Cult of the Dead Cow. The one I most dreaded, was my own on
tunneling and firewalls.”
“Bruce opened the floor to questions from the very beginning and
talked about a number of topics, some of the more interesting
discussions where about his company having submitted their
algorithm, twofish, to the National Institute of Standards and
Technology to be considered as a replacement for DES. He also
talked about the RSA’s patent expiring in September not being a
huge deal which surprised me until he talked about how
Diffie-Hellman’s patent has already expired making public key
encryption available. I disagree with Bruce on this because I
believe that cheap SSL will enable e-commerce on open source
platforms to take a big step forward.”