Hacker Conventions Ranked By Bandwidth-Per-Visitor 55
An Anonymous Coward writes "Ever wondered how much bandwidth you will get at a hacker con? This web page tells you how much. It shows the total bandwidth and bandwidth for each visitor for all the recent hacker cons." It looks like Defcon attendees get the short end of the stick, while those at metarheinmain chaosdays are practically swimming in bandwidth. There are a lot of other cons (a few examples listed here) which I'd like to see added to this list.
Re:I don't get it. (Score:5, Informative)
You don't got to *do* hacking, you go to learn about hacking from people in the same building (thus requiring little to no B/W).
You have clearly never been to defcon, and/or miss the point of the con altogether. Sure, there are great speakers giving talks about important and relevant topics. Some of them are even useful...
But the larger part of con the for a lot of the attendees is to get together with like-minded individuals and...wait for it...hack.
Here [defcon.org] are some examples of the hacking that went on at this year's defcon. The Lost@con Mystersy Challenge results aren't there, and as a participant I can tell you that it required breaking crypto, circumventing physical security measures, debugging code, hardware hacking skills, and trick-or-treating, among other things. I don't know what your definition of "hacking" is, but it should probably include a few of those.
This also doesn't mention some of the cool things going on in the lock-picking village, the hardware hacking village, the wi-fi village, etc...
And from what I have heard about Defcon you are best to not bring any of your own devices at all, lest you end up hacked yourself and on the wall of shame.
Most people I know wipe and reimage their machines after spending any time at all on the defcon network. They call it the most hostile network environment on the planet for good reasons. That being said, the Wall of Sheep has absolutely nothing to do with being "hacked", it simply displays usernames and (partial) passwords for people who are too stupid or lazy to use encrypted protocols. If you show up at a hacker convention and can't be bothered to use TLS or SSL for your email, you deserve to be shamed.
CCC's network information can be found here (Score:2, Informative)