Hackers paradise

A quick suggestion for anyone heading to Las Vegas this weekend - what ever you do, turn off your mobile phone. This weekend Vegas hosts the notorious hacker conference Defcon. It is apparently the high point of the hacker calender and if there's something they can mess with, they will mess with it.

I have just been talking to a hacker about this and he says it's all in the spirit of fun and these guys are getting together to break into things just to show the manufacturers where their weaknesses are. He himself was a victim at the conference a couple of years ago - he turned on his computer to find all the settings had been changed but the hacker had left instructions on how to change them back and some advice on laptop security!

So basically for the next few days Vegas turns into a hackers paradise. Last year this apparently culminated in a bit of jolly japery that brought down the satellite TV system across Nevada.