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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

Nearly 30,000 people came to Las Vegas last week for the 26^th edition of DEF CON, the iconic security conference. And no small amount of the mental energy of that vast crowd was spent on one particular thing: the conference badge.

This year's badges, designed by Tymkrs, were elevated works of printed circuit board art with a collection of LED-lit features, including red and green human figures and a color-shifting DEF CON logo. But it quickly becomes apparent that there was a lot more going on here than just blinking lights.

DEF CON alternates year to year between electronic, hackable badges and non-electronic ones; last year's badges were a throwback design intended to celebrate the conference's 25^th anniversary. But every year, the badges include some sort of clue to a cryptographic challenge—three years ago, the badge was an actual vinyl record that required attendees to find a turntable to hear the puzzle clue.

DEF CON's theme this year was "1983," and the Tymkrs badge itself is, among other things, a gaming platform that evokes 1980s text-based adventures and handheld button-mashers. It's also a hardware hacking challenge.

[...] By plugging a USB-C cable into the badge and connecting it to a computer, attendees were able to access a game screen in a character-based terminal—either by using a terminal application such as PuTTY on Windows or using Linux or MacOS command line tools such as screen. The DEF CON logo at the bottom of the badge doubles as a directional controller, and the "26" on the badge is action controls.

Source: Ars Technica

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