Our first group project after the con has been to try and hack our DefCon 16 badges. Round one was a complete failure. There was a lame attempt to save money by desoldering USB connectors from dead Blackberry devices because everyone was too lazy or cheap to purchase some actual USB connectors. After two unsuccessful attempts at using these second-hand ports we finally ordered a set of 4 connectors from the good folks at Digi-Key and met with some degree of success. .

At this point no actual “hacking” has occurred. Just lots of soldering… testing… desoldering… more testing… soldering… etc. Eventually we had a working connection and were able to find the correct device driver from the interwebs as the software provided on the DefCon CD failed to provide a working one. This took up most of our last meeting so time will tell if we’ll actually do something cool with this device now that we have access to its inner goodness.