Gallery: Hidden Circuits and Handmade Clockwork: The Striking Intricacies of Def Con Badges
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DefCon's black Uber badges, designed by Ryan Clarke (aka LostboY and LosT), include a mechanical watch that's an homage to Clarke's grandfather, a former jeweler and watchmaker. Clarke hand-crafted each timepiece, using parts sourced from Europe and Asia, and painstakingly pieced them together.
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A collection of the hand-crafted timepieces that are embedded in every Uber badge, the black badges handed out at the end of the conference to the winners of DefCon contests. Whether the timepiece is a fully functioning mechanical watch -- or whether there are parts missing -- is one of the puzzles that participants will have to solve.
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Ryan Clarke (aka LostboY and LosT) designed all of the badges and puzzles. Here he's shown piecing together the mechanical pieces of a watch for the Uber badges.
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Clarke created more than 40 variations of the human, vendor, speaker, press and goon badges this year, meaning that fewer people will have identical badges.
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The hacker, ace, crypto and king cards spell out HACK. Many of the conference badges contain Easter eggs that are based on interactions between the badges. In some cases, the interactions have nothing to do with solving the badge puzzle but are simply there for amusement.
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Vendor and speaker badges.
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The DefCon press badge this year is a deuce, Clarke's subtle dig at journalists.
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In addition to the ace and face cards of a royal flush, Clarke designed a hacker and a crypto card. Many of the face cards are homages to fictional hackers and musicians.
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The goon badge -- worn by the DefCon security staff who manage the speakers and enforce order at the conference -- is an image of Lisbeth Salander from the Swedish version of the film *The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo*. In her hand she holds the rotary dial from a phone -- the DefCon symbol for phone phreakers -- as a pair of brass knuckles.
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The name Dark Tangent on this badge refers to DefCon founder Jeff Moss, aka Dark Tangent. Clarke says there are copper elements in some of the badges that "may or may not be physically connected through metal wires or conduits within the board to other points on the board. And maybe contacts through a particular way will produce a path that didn't exist before, that will take something like a digital multimeter to determine."
