VMs Posted and The Future

The VM used for the game has been posted. Included in the distribution are the PDFs handed out to players and a README which has the username and password needed to login. There is also a bug in the VM that we never got around to fixing that requires one command to be run to start up all the jails on the VM. Please seed the torrent if you can.

With the VM posted our work for this year is pretty much done. With nothing left to do for this year I've been thinking about the future of Hack. I really don't know how much further we can take the puzzle concept while still keeping the game fresh. One idea I had is to change the game completely - instead of one VM with people hacking on it we would give out one VM per team and we hack it while others defend it (an idea inspired by something done years ago at Defcon by the Ghetto Hackers). The idea is that they can't just drop all traffic to the VM. Our code would make sure it's the VM and then exploit it using custom exploits we come up with. The defenders have to either patch the vulnerability or manage to convince our code that the VM is there while it's actually a replacement. I'm not sure this will work since our goal has always been to provide a short (2 hour) burst of fun and easy entertainment before we go drinking. The kind of work I'm talking about would be fun but may be a bit much for the goals we have.

The other piece that has been discussed internally has been the scoreboard. This year we got slammed with attendance and getting scores recorded was more difficult than it should have been. There is talk of expanding the scoreboard to work on mobile phones so that we can easily update scores during the game.

Of course, this is all just talk at this point. We want to encourage people to give us new ideas so please mail me your ideas and I'll make sure they get out to our mailing list.

One last thing is that while I will remain on the HoH list (unless Chris removes me) I do not intend to participate beyond forwarding any mails I get. I'm going to take the couple of months leading up to next years conference and enjoy them by working on other projects. I'm not sure what this means for the future of the game but with this post I've made my ideas known and leave it up to the rest of the team to figure out where to go from here.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.

-- WXS