Thursday, July 26, 2012

OMG WE NEED THOSE STINKING BADGES

Game over. Mind blown.

For many years now, the "badges" for the Defcon annual hacker party (15,000 this year) have consisted of circuit boards, with tiny micro-controllers that hackers can, well, hack. During/with Defcon, Ninja Networks sponsors an even more exclusive party, with even more complex badges. You can google "Ninja Badges" for examples from past years. Every year people ask "how can they top last year's badges?".

Well, this year, they're done: this year's badge cannot be topped. It's not a simple microcontroller, it's an ARM processor. It's not just blinking lights, it's a full LCD. It's not infrared or ISM communications between badges, it's GSM. It runs Android. In other words, its a mobile phone.

The carrier is "ninjatel". They have a freaking van in the back of the vendor area that's the mobile tower. The van is full of equipment, with a USRP, OpenBTS, and Asterisk (the usual suspects).

If you got a quarter, you can also make a hard line call:

This is your SIM card. I wonder if it'll work in other phones:

It comes in a white box. Puny normal Defcon badge next to it for size comparison. (anybody know an easy way to rotate this picture and retain EXIF info?)

The unboxing. The RFIDed arm band is for your +1 that you take to the party, because YOUR badge is the freaking cellphone:

About to insert SIM card and turn it on:

This is the video turning on the phone for the first time. Does that person saying "ninjatel" on startup sound familiar? It's because they freakin' got the same person who did the voice prompts from AT&T to do the voice prompts here.