*Defcon Keeps Hackers Hooked*
*By Declan McCullagh
2:00 a.m. July 16, 2001 PDT


	

LAS VEGAS -- Bram Cohen's latest project is nothing if not ambitious: a
novel way to share files that he hopes will best rivals like Napster,
Freenet, and Gnutella.

Cohen, a
25-year-old programmer with elbow-length, blond-streaked hair, showed up
at the Defcon hacker convention this weekend to evangelize his
Bit Torrent system.

"It turns out the hard part in peer-to-peer is paying for the resources
used and to get people to offer uploads," Cohen says.

Cohen solves that by borrowing a concept from the bulletin board systems
of the 1980s: upload-download ratios. Bit Torrent software keeps track
of how much you contribute compared to how much you take, and enforces
this social contract through protocols, not laws.

Cohen is just one of thousands of hackers, would-be hackers, consultants
and federal agents who gather at Defcon each
year for a rollicking good time and the chance to share alcohol, ideas,
and -- for the luckier ones -- casual sex in one of the suites of the
Alexis Park Hotel.

Conference organizers call it the "annual computer underground party for
hackers," and Defcon is known as much for its technical content as its
beer-tinged hijinks. Pranks like smoke bombs in hotel pools, portions of
telephone trucks mysteriously appearing in the convention hall, and
concrete dumped in toilets have earned Defcon a reputation as a kind of
annual hacker bacchanalia.

This weekend wasn't that different: Defcon security officers, called
"goons," ejected a handful of hackers for distributing an anonymous
brochure that urged attendees "don't pay for DC registration ... steal a
badge ... reclaim your culture ... hack the exploiters ... ignore the
rules ... don't buy anything...."

An ambulance hauled off one conference-goer who allegedly overdosed on a
cocktail of drugs, and witnesses said one hapless attendee had his
laptop smashed after displaying an unflattering PhotoShop-edited photo
of another hacker who happened to be nearby.

When a Defcon goon got into a tiff with a member of the Cult of the Dead
Cow group in the hotel lobby, the goon demanded that Wired News not
photograph the altercation. In another incident, goons physically
removed a man from the swimming pool area, claiming he did not have a
conference badge. He merely happened to be staying at the Alexis Park
Hotel and knew nothing about Defcon.

Such awkward run-ins are inevitable when an underground event swells to
thousands of people -- over 4,200 people showed up last year, and this
year was even better-attended -- and for the most part, the conference
received favorable reviews from both first-time visitors and Defcon
veterans.

"It was good to see both sides of the presentation -- the system
administrators trying to secure their machines and the hackers trying to
break into them," says Tom Walters, a 36-year-old network operations
manager at Bechtel Hanford government contractor.

"I've learned a lot from the free-form nature of the presentations and
from the Capture the Flag presentations.... This has been good. This has
been fun," Walters says. Capture the Flag is an annual event where teams
seek to secure servers from intrusion while breaking into other teams'
machines.

But some old-timers decry what they call the growing bureaucratization
of Defcon, marked by everything from noose-tight security and paid
security guards to daily press conferences for the dozens of journalists
in attendance and a two-page sheet of rules reporters are required to sign.

"It's a lot more locked down, a lot more fascist," says a 24-year-old San 
Francisco hacker who goes by the alias Gweeds and says he was cuffed by a 
goon. "It's got a police state mentality."

An English hacker said European hacker conventions are far more relaxed and 
egalitarian: "When you sign up (for a European convention), you sign up as 
a volunteer. You're expected to make a contribution."

The increasing corporatization of Defcon, however, hasn't kept away programmers 
like Cohen, who was hoping to talk to as many people as possible about his 
Bit Torrent software. "I've reached my first milestone, which is getting this 
thing working by Defcon," Cohen says.

Bit Torrent is a cross between the Web and the venerable File Transfer Protocol 
(FTP), and allows users to download software through standard Web browsers 
through torrent:// followed by the site address.

Until this spring Cohen was a programmer for Autonomous Zone, the so-far 
unsuccessful producer of MojoNation software which is now looking for a buyer.

Cohen's experience at a for-profit company that, like so many others, has been 
slammed by the technology slump spurred him to take a noncommercial approach by 
releasing Bit Torrent sans copyright: "I figure I just want people to use it 
and do what's easiest for people. Having it be unowned is the best way."

When a user begins a download via Bit Torrent, the computer on the other end 
will recommend perhaps a dozen other sites that downloaded the file recently 
and therefore have a copy.

Cohen predicts that'll allow the network to scale up quickly and serve 
communities like etree.org, which has gigabytes of legal audio files from 
bands like Phish and the Grateful Dead that allow fans to record concerts -- 
but severe bandwidth problems because of the high demand.

Other events this weekend included a scavenger hunt, a "Defcon shoot" that 
takes geeks with guns out into the Nevada desert, and a Black and White ball 
that drew attendees in everything from goth garb to cyborg-like outfits.

Many Defcon loyalists said they were disappointed that the Dead Cow (cDc) 
wasn't able to finish its censorship-circumvention software Peekabooty in 
time for the conference. At previous Defcon gatherings, cDc had released 
influential software like the cracker-tool Back Orifice.