A Brief History of HoH (Sorry Mr. Hawking)

Hi. My name is Wesley Shields (WXS) and I happen to be the guy who has inherited the Hack side of Hack or Halo for the past few years. I should probably give you some long and boring post about me but instead I'll give you a brief summary of the history of HoH and where we are taking it this year. In future posts I will be giving information about what you can expect from this years game.

Hack started off as a drag-race: plow through as many targets as possible in a very short time period. We had a lot of hacks in place to make this work seamlessly and it wasn't sustainable nor very interesting for our players. I mean, honestly, who the hell wants to maintain some patch to Linux (or was it VMWare) to do some of the insane tricks we did? The scoreboard code ran only once and has never been able to work properly since, and the whole concept just seemed very rushed. My contribution was to port some of the trigger mechanism over to Win32.

When I took the reigns at Shmoocon III I decided to advocate for a longer game using something I was inspired by at Defcon 7 (a series of puzzles). This worked well for Shmoocon III. The reaction to the change was very positive and many people commented on the fact that we made the game fun instead of overly challenging. For Shmoocon IV we repeated the puzzle-based system but this time got some gear and help from our friends at Whitewolf Security. One interesting that we noticed was that because we had released as much of the puzzles (read: everything that wasn't Windows - which was like 95% of the puzzles) to the world some people had studied the unsolved ones. If there is one thing you can expect from a group of hackers it is that we are lazy. So studying the previous years system turned out to be a good one because we repeated the unsolved puzzles for Shmoocon IV.

So that brings us to this year: Shmoocon V. We are going with a puzzle based game again, but this time it will have a twist. We are loosely tying things together with a story. I hesitate to call it a series of puzzles because they are all loosely related; as opposed to our previous two incarnations where none of the puzzles had anything to do with each other. I think going with "goals" is a much better description of this years system. This one has a clearly defined starting point, any number of ways to go about reaching your goals and a clearly defined ending point. To further make things interesting we will be going with a single round for hack, instead of the two rounds we were doing before. No longer will you have 55 minutes to go through our game. You will now have 1 hour and 50 minutes (we need 10 minutes to clean up before we get our drink on) to go through roughly the same amount of work. We will continue to focus on making it a fun event for all skill levels. We are also going to include some interesting new challenges and possibly some things you may never have thought you would see at a hacking competition.

We will begin to build things up starting late November so you can likely expect more from me in a couple of weeks. I hope to see everyone at this years HoH. Stop by the table and say hi and join us for the best HoH ever.