some hillarity from the RSA Conference

[theprez98]

Re: some hillarity from the RSA Conference

UPDATE 2: viewing the page info certainly makes something look weird... see here.

That avatar looks familiar...

[Deviant Ollam]

Re: some hillarity from the RSA Conference

well, i've determined it's somehow related to the NoScript plugin, although that's strange because it never did this before with earlier versions of FireFox. i was running NoScript 1.9.9.45 and have just now upgraded to 1.9.9.50 to no effect. Both the DEFCON Forums as well as deviating.net are on the permanent whitelist.

we're veering off-topic and i'm not reiterating all this here as a means of seeking answers (i'll sort out this weirdness when i get back from New York on monday) but simply so that anyone else who may be having this problem can see what we've turned up thus far.

UPDATE: wickedly weird... i just saw that the "FBI pen" image that i hotlinked displays just fine in my browser. it's just content from my own site that is being denied somehow. damn, that's odd. rDNS mismatch perhaps? some whacko security feature somewhere that i do not know about? to be determined later, i suppose.

UPDATE 2: viewing the page info certainly makes something look weird... see here. the content from my site is greyed out and italicized. however, clicking on any entry in this list displays the image just fine in the box below, including images from my site. weird, man! gah, ok... i need to shower and hit the road before i get any later. curse my inability to stop fussing with an interesting problem when one has arisen!

[sintax_error]

Re: some hillarity from the RSA Conference

I see em just fine in FF3.5.8, IE8, Safari 4, and Opera 10.50

[TheCotMan]

Re: some hillarity from the RSA Conference

I see the images from FireFox 3.6 and 3.5.8 and MSIE.

Maybe an extension you are using that breaks your browser images because of upgrade? Maybe extensions need to be upgraded? Try on a "Stock" Firefox and see if the problems exist there.

so, i just upgraded FireFox and am noticing something for the first time that one or two people have told me about in the past. currently now, if i view this thread, i see this.

how many other people are unable to view the images that i often hotlink directly in my posts? i'm going to tinker with FireFox a bit to see about how to enable this for myself. i'm 99% sure it has to do with the fact that the forums are HTTPS and i'm asking the browser to fetch content via HTTP as it loads the page.

in the past, that would generate merely a warning message... but now there seems to be no easy way to just mark a site as "allowed" or anything.

[Deviant Ollam]

Re: some hillarity from the RSA Conference

so, i just upgraded FireFox and am noticing something for the first time that one or two people have told me about in the past. currently now, if i view this thread, i see this.

how many other people are unable to view the images that i often hotlink directly in my posts? i'm going to tinker with FireFox a bit to see about how to enable this for myself. i'm 99% sure it has to do with the fact that the forums are HTTPS and i'm asking the browser to fetch content via HTTP as it loads the page.

in the past, that would generate merely a warning message... but now there seems to be no easy way to just mark a site as "allowed" or anything.

[Deviant Ollam]

Re: some hillarity from the RSA Conference

That's funny about the 'public' terminals.

heh, since DT tweeted something about it i've gotten a few emails from people who found this kinda funny.

in response, i've decided to add one more thing in this vein... a YouTube video of the public cluster that i recorded, too. hah.

it is, indeed, two dozen machines. all these people and not a single one of them turned around and said a word to me. totally oblivious. particularly funny is the fact that they're basically all on work email except for the last lady who was playing a game of scrabble.

it could be thought of as comical since she wasn't "working" but in fact that's just about the only thing that i would trust for these inane machines.

[SecurityBarbie]

Re: some hillarity from the RSA Conference

That's funny about the 'public' terminals.

I so bad wanted to log on a fake facebook account to one of the terminals and see what would happen..... would it be pillaged, or would a 'good security person' just kindly log it off?

[Deviant Ollam]

Re: some hillarity from the RSA Conference

more goofiness of the sort commonly seen at RSA... Robert McMillan reports on people laughing at the choice of pens that the FBI had at their expo booth.

people are calling it "the government's supply chain illustrated in a nutshell"

[renderman]

Re: some hillarity from the RSA Conference

I'm wondering what happens when we get a group of Defcons finest to crash the RSA show and do a full up black bag audit :)

[theprez98]

Re: some hillarity from the RSA Conference

I have never been to RSA but it seems that everything I have heard about it, is true.

[Deviant Ollam]

Re: some hillarity from the RSA Conference

one last segment that i couldn't post above (one too many images up there)...

Fake Badge Fun

Right in the Moscone Center there was a UPS Store with public machines for copy/print/etc. Not wanting to be hassled by marketing morons on the expo floor, we made ourselves "exhibitors" in about 30 seconds for the cost of a single black-and-white print job. that way, if anyone tried to slam us with sales pitches we could look at our phone and say "oh, that's our boss... he needs us back at our booth right now... you know how that is" and walk away.

again... we were surrounded by other attendees and staff as we did this, but no one seemed to notice or to care. it was surreal. and these are the people with the biggest budgets who are calling the shots for much of the tech world's security these days?

[Deviant Ollam]

as promised, i've gotten up some of my funnier photos from the RSA Conference this past week. while the con itself seemed like a place with your typical informed batch of speakers, the attendees were just ghastly. as with any event that grows too large and focuses more on the Expo Floor than the briefing sessions, RSA seems to have completely gone round the bend and is attracting people with only the most tenuous ties to the "security" industry...

Buzzword Mania
It seemed like RSA Expo was running a vendor contest called "Just how many buzzwords can you cram into a booth display?"







when someone handed me this business card, i all but fell down laughing right there...



... it's great that the "ringtone" sounds like one of those novelty answering machine messages from the 80s, btw.

Public Terminals
Holy hell, can you imagine the following at Black Hat or DEFCON? There were dozens of "public" machines lined up in rows for attendees to use in-between talks. They were all right next to one another, had no privacy shielding, and people's backs faced the milling crowds...



like J0hnny Long, i started taking photos of everyone logged into their office email, oblivious to strangers right over their shoulder...



... but then i eventually got bored and realized that literally no one was questioning my actions in the least.