Blog de Joe Freeman

Prescription lens wearers know that their glasses can catch monitor reflections that can be seen whenever they are "on camera", in meetings, or when creating content.  This can be exacerbated by blue light, anti-reflective, or other coatings applied to the lenses. We can remove monitor reflections by covering webcams with polarizing filters. Effect Flat-panel monitors often have polarizing filters that emit light waves oriented in a particular direction. The light on our glasses and in our reflection is essentially polarized. We can remove the monitor reflections by covering the camera with a polarizing filter. The filter needs to be rotated to orient the polarization to the minimum visible reflection.  The picture on the left shows the monitor reflection in my prescription lenses.  The picture on the right shows the lens reflection after putting a polarizing filter in front of my webcam. Polarizing filters will not remove the entirety of the reflection. The monitor l...

AWS provided a great session experience for the AWS Public Sector Summit breakout sessions. All the breakout sessions for the 2019 AWS Public Sector summit ran simultaneously in the same room Silent Disco  style.  There was no in-room PA system. Speakers were mic'd into a multi-channel broadcast system.  Attendees wore individual headsets tuned to the talk of their choice. Attendees were provided with multi-channel headsets that could be tuned to any of the talks.  Each talk was on a different color.  Each headset had independent volume and channel controls that could be set by the listener. This picture shows 2/5 of the simultaneous talks.  You cannot really see it but the the earpiece colors are different for these two talks. This picture shows people listening to three different stages.  It is hard to tell here so you'll have to take my word for it.

DEFCON is the   hoodie conference that follows the BlackHat  suit  conference.  It has a very different feel from other security conferences with no corporate sponsors, no advertising, no marketing mailing list and an aggressive inclusion policy.  Normally I can go to a conference, sit in some sessions and do a little lab work and feel like a success.   DEFCON is all about participation and inclusion.  There is an entire wall of competitions often called Capture the Flag (CTF)  that originate in the various villages.   It has 20+ semi-structured lab tracks.  Attendees literally wear the results of their conference activities. DEFCON 26 was my first visit to the Las Vegas hacker conference.  I was completely unprepared for the almost any of the lab / village sessions that I worked on.  It was still awesome but I would have gotten so much more out of it with some serious preparation. Prepare There is a g...

The CON is what you make of it . I arrived in Las Vegas at my first DEFCON the night before registration.  We finally got to bed around 1:30 in the morning.  The registration line had already started... DEFCON 26 Registration The main part of the conference starts on Friday.  Workshops start on Thursday. Registration starts Thursday morning at Caesars. Most of the activities start on Friday. I got in line Thursday at 5:30 AM along with several thousand of my closest friends.  Some folks spent the night in order to make sure they got the electronic badges.  Another few thousand joined the line behind me. You basically show up at Caesars with $280 in registration cash for plus whatever cash you need to purchase shirts and other SWAG.  I'd recommend having access to other cash in case you run into other swag you want from the villages or vendor area. Registration opened at 6:00 AM.  They register approximately 20,000 people on Thursday. Regist...