A BalCCon postscript: Armed and dangerous in the Balkans, and DEF CON Returns

In September, Serbia's city of Novi Sad hosted the first-ever official hacker conference in the Balkans, BalCCon: First Congress (First Contact).

I attended the conference and quickly learned that to understand Balkan hacker culture is to know Balkan history. Serbia, as it was explained to me one night over beers by the conference's jovial keynote, "Is where everyone is armed and dangerous, you know?"

BalCCon opened its doors for two days of hacker community building not quite fifteen years after the city of Novi Sad survived ethnic cleansing, deadly nonstop NATO bombings, and before that, the terror of a war whose arms were partly funded by abduction and organ harvest of its citizens.