The incredibly intricate badges of Def Con
Three days before the 24th annual Def Con hacker event, badge designer and builder 1o57 (aka Ryan Clarke) had a problem. "The lion's share of the 20,000 badges showed up this year not programmed," he told Engadget. He gathered up a team and they went into "hell mode" to hand-program blinking pieces of electronic riddled with cryptographic puzzles.
When the conference opened last week, every one of those robot skull-shaped pieces of electronics found their way onto a lanyard and around the neck of an attendee. For Clarke and other badge makers, it was the end of a long building process: time to see how their months of hard work would be received by the hacker masses. The excitement on the faces of the attendees as they start posting photos online of their newly acquired gadget is proof that this community will only continue to grow.
