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Comment by iwwr | Hacker News Reader

The atmosphere seems to be so rife with paranoia that it looks best not to take any digital device with you there.

A pen and paper would probably do just fine for taking the odd note.

However I'd probably take a cheap old laptop off ebay, bought for the event and then discarded afterward. I'd feel I was missing out if I wasn't able to at least dip a packet sniffer into the famously hellish torrent of exploits I've heard so much about. I'd never take any of my personal machines though.

One year I took a pocket-sized notebook and a slide rule. The next year I took an iPhone and a eee PC. I experienced the same level of hacking both times.

Wow, what'd they do to the slide rule?

Speaking of packet sniffers, DEFCON would be, by far, the best event to try out a Wireshark packet dissector 0-day!

There's plenty of those to go around...

That's a little extreme. Unless you expect them to get into your low level hardware (BIOS etc), just format it clean afterwards.

Always have an obscure old phone with almost no feature (except voice and text). Generally the OS is so minimal that there's little room for an exploit, and by little room I mean that you will not have enough memory to add your rootkit.

Obscure old phones are fairly trivially exploitable via SMS. Check the CCC presos from last December if you are interested.

One link I readily found was http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bkg3AjY6fs but maybe there was more than one preso, I don't remember.

If I were to go to this gathering, I'd go with a pen, paper, and a video camera.

You hopefully also don't have any phone conversations or send any text messages you mind becoming public? GSM is thouroughly broken.

I don't really care about my phone conversations or text messages. If I need privacy I use other media.

However I would mind being rootkited, as it could serve as an entry point to infect other systems.

If you're in the UK, take a phone with a Three sim card in it, they can't connect at all without 3G.

Is 3G really that much more secure than GSM?

http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/013.pdf

From what I've been told, yes, but I could be utterly wrong.

That works for you, it won't work for everyone. UMTS and LTE don't have the capacity to replace GSM, not even close, they can barely keep up with the growth of additional demand. GSM is broken and here to stay for a long, long time.

The Motorola RAZR (and probably similar phones) have serious exploits and backdoors.

See: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1029-6140191.html

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