03 August 2007

My Defcon 15 Badge

This thing is awesome. The display starts out saying "I <3 DEFCON 15," but you can program the lights to display a <= 16 character scrolling message. Hmm. I want to figure out how to make animated characters.

Let's see... what else is on this thing?

At the bottom, on the back, it says "0100011101001111001000000101011001001111010010010100001101000101" ("GO VOICE" in ASCII).

The coordinates 42.34202 -71.069441 are at the top of the badge. According to Google, that's on Waltham Street, in Boston, MA. The closest address I can find is 44 Waltham Street, which appears to be the address of "Boston Pest"...?

Hmmm... gotta think thru this...

Update (8/4/2007):

After Kingpin's "Making of the Defcon Badge" session yesterday morning, people asked about the geocoordinates and "GO VOICE" in binary. He didn't explain the geocoordinates (said it was a part of hacker history that we should all know), but he did explain "GO VOICE." It's a tribute to the good ol' days of the Internet--after talking to someone on IRC or in your trusty BBS, you'd say "go voice" instead of "call me." Too bad; I was hoping it was something awesome like secret voice activation (visions of Denholm at the end of Yesterday's Jam run thru my mind).

No luck yet with the "hacker historical reference." I've googled names, technologies, locations... nothing. Let me know if any of you out there figure it out.

Update (8/5/2007, really, really early in the morning):

Aww, maaan, it was so obvious! I even thought of it earlier, but apparently didn't google the right things. 42.34202 -71.069441 are the geocoordinates for the old location of "l0pht heavy industries" (which later became @stake, which was even later sucked into Symantec). Kingpin, the badge designer, was in l0pht. They were located at 46 Waltham Street, Boston. I was so close!! Sorry for the delay in getting the info out. I'll do better next time, I promise.

I will add that Google Maps thinks 44 Waltham Street is at that location, not 46 Waltham Street. Bad software. Bad!! No treats for you.

2 comments:

kost said...

Hello! I tried to decode the badge also. Still don't know why are these GPS coordinates there... any clue?

kost said...

Oh, yes, I missed the URL of my discoveries.