[HacktionLab] Steelcon 2023 (was: Thoughts on where we could go now with HL)

[Chris Clemson]

Hi everyone,

I went to steelcon last weekend.

Sadly I left it too late to get any tickets for the workshops, so 
arrived on friday and wandered around Sheffield with friends instead.

We went to the National Video Game Museum (https://thenvm.org/) which 
was worth a trip. Not very museum-y but you can play old games in arcade 
cabinets and on consoles which was good fun for a couple of hours, and 
it was fairly quiet, so we didn't really have to wait to play anything.

Steelcon itself was good. All 3 tracks were being recorded, only the 
first (but very interesting) video has appeared on youtube so far 
https://www.youtube.com/@SteelConSheffield/videos about the Post Office 
Horizon scandal. That one is definitely worth a watch.

Ian Thornton-Trump gave an entertaining talk about security, and there 
was a a good talk about a couple of ransomware gangs and their 
techniques, although one of them was as low-tech as emailling someone a 
password-protected attachment and getting them to run it <sigh>.

There were probably about a couple of hundred people there.

It was also good for geeky kids - there was a quiz and sort of treasure 
hunt, which sounded like it went well.

Quite a lot of the audience must have been regulars, as there were loads 
of in-jokes we didn't get!

It was a bit weird not to see people messing about with laptops etc 
(unlike other hacker cons). We chatted to a few people on the Friday and 
Saturday nights although it was funny - some people kinda wandered off 
mid-conversation I guess because they'd just seen someone in the 
distance who was more interesting.... that was odd, it's not happened 
before, and I'm pretty sure I haven't got /that/ much more boring in the 
last year.... 10 years ago I would have been a bit paranoid, but these 
days ... meh.

For the price it was good and included breakfast and lunch, which was 
nice. I'd probably go again next time.


On 23/06/2023 10:02, Mike Harris wrote:
>
> On 23/06/2023 09:17, Chris Clemson wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Would you be up for doing a short review of it back to the group? 
>>
>> Yes, no problem!
> lovely, thanks :)