Last week I was in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada for the annual BlackHat and Defcon hacker conferences. I say in my title that I was in “HOT Las Vegas” thats because it was extremenly hot outside.  On sunday, it was 110 degrees outside.  The best way to describe the heat is when you are making something in the oven and open the door to check if your food is ready ; it was that hot!  My high school buddy, Mathieu, who now lives in Toronto, joined me in Las Vegas for 3 days; we had a great time visiting the hotels, walking around “The Strip”, seeing the sights and taking a drive to Hoover dam on the last day.

Here is the hotel I stayed at ; the Treasure Island. It is right on Las Vegas Boulevard in the thick of things.

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My two KPMG-Montreal hacker buddies Benoit-Luc and Jean-Sébastien assisted the conferences. It was great to see them.  We had a great time!

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At the Defcon there is a public wireless network people can use to check their email, surf the web, etc.  However, it is dubbed “the most hostile network in the world”.  If you happen to check your email without any encryption (security), they will capture your password and put you to shame on this board for everyone to see that you dont practice good security. Considering that everyone who assists are security professionnals, it does not look very good.

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One evening, Mathieu & I went up the Stratosphere tower.  I was really happy to see Mathieu and spend some quality time with him ; both us us are really busy guys and of course we live 3000km away …

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The view from Hoover Dam is great.  However, you can see the water level has dropped a lot.  It is down 30 meters in the last few years.  Considering that Las Vegas and other cities depend on lake Mead for drinking water, it is unfortunately not very good news.

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Of course, Las Vegas being what it is, we actually got to see an arrest Live!  These guys were driving around with beer cans in their hands and got stopped by cops on bicycle for what I assume will be a DUI (Driving under influence) charge.  Getting arrested on the Las Vegas strip is probably the worst place to get arrested since you have masses of tourists looking, filming and taking pictures.

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