To start out, I have been busy for the past few weeks and actually have been traveling a bit. Last weekend I was in Indiana for umm *cough* business and this weekend I was in our nations capital, Washington D.C. for Shmoocon.

This was my first Shmoocon as well as the first for many members of Chicago 2600. As we did at Defcon, many of us participated in a few of the contests. The main one that many of us were excited about was the Shmoo crypto. It was a lot of fun when a few of us completed it last year outside of the con. So we figured it would be even better if we competed during the con. Oh man, were we right.

Not only was it a lot of fun, we managed to place 1st in it. We completed the crypto at about 30 minutes after midnight on Friday. It got pretty easy near the end, but it was still a lot of fun. We not only won 1st but after that, we decided to try and win one of the other contests that a speaker was running.

GMark, was running this contest. For those that don’t know GMark, you can find more info about him at his site http://www.gmarkhardy.com/. Anyways, his contest was a lot of fun as well. It had us do a bit of running around to try and find different colored beads, and calling a few special numbers. It was a bit more complex than the Shmoo contest, but that only made it a lot more entertaining. We ended up placing 1st in that contest as well. Infact, I think we might have been the only team to even complete it. But I’m not 100% certain on that, I’ll be emailing GMark to find out about that. The prize for winning this contest is pretty freakin sweet if I do say so my self, we all won round trips to Las Vegas for Defcon.

After being 2 for 2, we decided to try the 3rd and final contest that we would enter. It had to do with the Shmoo badges, and was using a punch card system. This proved to be the most difficult of the 3, and none of us had was was needed to complete the contest. Infact, no one at the convention did. We got pretty far, but never dealing with punch cards was a big pitfall for the competition. Perhaps, I will take the time and try to learn a bit more about punch cards, but I don’t know if I’ll have the time to do that.

I’ll post about some other crypto challenge that appeared on the 3rd day of Shmoo later in the week. That one deserves it’s own post, but I don’t feel like writing it all up at the moment. Stay tuned as I’ll update more about that and others soon.