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“In a way,” he said, “it just helps me filter my communications.” “And I’m still not all that comfortable communicating with people on my Facebook profile, under my real name.” “People want to reach out all the time,” he said. Harewood, maintaining his alias is partly about creating a personal brand - a retro nod, in a sense, to the era when using a hacker handle was a more essential element of the trade. “How are you going to learn to navigate in this world if you never get to make a mistake - and if every mistake you do make follows you forever?”įor Mr.
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“The thing I worry about today,” he added, taking a more serious tone, “is that people don’t get do-overs.” Young people now have to contend with the real-name policy on Facebook, he said, along with the ever-hovering threats of facial-recognition software and aggregated data. And in time, as Defcon’s popularity ballooned, his list of formal appointments grew, too: membership at the Council on Foreign Relations, a seat on President Obama’s Homeland Security Advisory Council. “My address book doubled in size,” he said with a laugh. During the dot-com boom, many hackers transitioned to “real jobs,” he said, “and so they had to have real names, too.” He also remembers when everything changed.
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I’d learned how to manage identities I’d learned how the scene worked.” “In my case, I had a couple previous identities,” he said, “but when I changed to The Dark Tangent, I was making a clear break from my past. And every once in a while, he explained - if a friend let slip your name, or if you outgrew a juvenile, silly alias - you’d have to burn your identity and come up with a new name. Aliases provided cover for such activity. Like many of his early online friends, he was interested in hacking and phone phreaking (the manipulation of telecommunications systems) - “stuff that wasn’t really legal,” he said. Moss, perhaps the epitome of a hacker who has jettisoned anonymity and entered the public sphere, has had an evolving relationship with aliases. “Turns out it’s not very secure after all,” he said with a grin, before vanishing around a corner. He had obtained a version of it - how, he wouldn’t say - and, having now subjected it to the ever-probing Defcon crowds, had disproved the company’s claims. An agribusiness giant, he said, had recently heralded the impenetrability of the security systems built into one of its new computing components. He was wearing an odd contraption on his back, with wires and antennas protruding from its frame and with a blinking black box at its center.
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The ethos of Defcon is perhaps best embodied by a gentleman I encountered in a hallway toward the end of the conference. One could describe all of its 28 constituent “villages” (including the Voting Machine Hacking Village, where attendees deconstructed and scrutinized the vulnerabilities of electronic voting machines, and the Lockpick Village, where visitors could tinker with locks and learn about hardware and physical security), offer a complete list of this year’s presentations (including one by Rob Joyce, a senior cybersecurity official at the National Security Agency), catalog its many contests and events (like the Tin Foil Hat Contest and Hacker Karaoke) and still not get at its essence. It’s difficult to characterize the conference without being reductive. By contrast, this year’s convention, the 26th, drew some 27,000 attendees, including students, security researchers, government officials and children as young as 8. gathered about 100 of his hacker friends for a hastily assembled party. Defcon has grown exponentially since its founding in 1993, when Jeff Moss - or, as many of his hacker friends know him, The Dark Tangent, or simply D.T.