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Other sessions focused on the security issues with social networks, exploiting Google gadgets, and medical identity theft, among many other topics.

The show, typically not vendor-oriented, also had a “Buzzword Survivor” event in which 10 people signed up to listen to 30 straight hours of vendor pitches. Whoever lasts through all that marketing speak will share a $5,000 prize. (The original price of $10,000 was lowered after the organizers failed to get enough sponsors, a Defcon spokesman and event judge said.) Oddly, non-contestants were also sitting in.

Click here for more coverage from Defcon.

Then there’s the CoffeeWars event where people can have their best coffee selections judged, a Guitar Hero contest, Hacker Jeopardy, a TCP/IP drinking game, lock-picking contests, a Toxic BBQ, an area called “Queercon,” and a Defcon shoot at a private range (often with fully automatic weapons, as Nevada law permits).

In one popular two-hour session security researchers explained how to make a fake key out of a credit card that can open certain types of Medeco M3 locks.

(Credit:
CNET News.com/Declan McCullagh)

The Defcon badges themselves are works of art and hackable electronic devices. Attendees are encouraged to come up with the most ingenious and “obscene” badge modifications as part of an official contest.

A press liaison for Defcon said the men, Marc Brami, Dominique Jouniot, and Mauro Israel, had called and canceled shortly before the scheduled hour.

LAS VEGAS–At the Defcon hacker conference, which opened on Friday, some of the biggest buzz was in the press room.

Three journalists who allegedly sniffed the network in the press room were ejected from Defcon’s sister event, the Black Hat security conference, on Thursday. On Friday, the journalists, with Global Security Magazine in France, asked to hold a news conference at Defcon to tell their side of the story. But when the hour arrived, the men were nowhere to be seen.

Outside the event and up in the air a specially rigged weather balloon was launched to demonstrate airborne surveillance, and a van set up as a mobile hacker space was on display.

An FBI agent who was at the event to speak on the “Meet the Feds” panel said he had sent the information about the case to the local FBI office in Las Vegas.

“Because of the nature of this, involving (citizens) from another country, it might be sent to the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Department at the Justice Department,” James Finch, assistant director for the FBI’s cyberdivision, told CNET News. “I would assume that we’d bring it to the State Department, too.”

Out in the halls and side rooms, hackers were involved in a wild assortment of activities that would make any rational network administrator shudder. One of the most controversial is a “Race to Zero” contest in which contestants modify sample viruses and throw them at antivirus products to see if they are detected.

While the brouhaha was the topic of conversation in the press room, a world of software and hardware hacking and events was unfolding in the Riviera conference center all around.

Updated Saturday with change in price for “Buzzword Survivor” winners.

One of the many rooms at the Defcon hacker conference. The large screen in the upper right is Buzzword Survivor, where contestants stare at execrable vendor pitches for 30 hours straight–to share in a $5,000 prize.

He also wrote that Google is pretty far along in the development of this initiative and could launch it soon, if it wanted to.

On the other hand, none of those outfits, even Massive, have Google’s ability to dramatically alter the playing field when it comes to new venues for ads.

To which I sigh.

“Sources close to the matter said the company has developed an in-game advertising technology that allows it to insert video ads into games,” Takahashi wrote. “In demos of the technology, a game character can introduce a video ad, saying something like, ‘And now, a word from our sponsor,’ before showing a short video at the end of a sequence in a game.”

Google and the established in-game ad providers, however, see green at the end of that reality check. The Yankee Group has predicted that the in-game ad market could be worth nearly $1 billion by 2011. And while that is the kind of money that Google finds under the cushions of its couches, it’s still nothing to sneeze at.

Some, including Takahashi, question why Google hasn’t gotten into the game earlier, particularly because “the seeds of AdSense for Games were planted in early 2007.”

Either way, the field seems to have room for Google and the other players. One reason–which I have lamented before and will continue to each time this topic comes up–is that studies have shown that video game players actually like in-game ads because it makes their experience more realistic. As in, because there are ads everywhere we go in real life, finding them in games means our playing experiences have more veritas.

Of course, when and if Google does launch the program, it will hardly stand alone in the in-game ad market. Rather, that market already has one 800-pound gorilla, Massive, which is owned by Microsoft. In addition, IGA Worldwide, Double Fusion, and others, like Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell’s NeoEdge, are working on inserting advertisements into just about every kind of game.

Over at Venture Beat this morning, Dean Takahashi has a piece about what appears to be a fairly well developed in-game advertising program that has been under stealth development at Google.

Disclosure: CBS, one of RockYou’s past clients, has agreed to acquire CNET Networks, publisher of News.com. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter.

Along with Slide, RockYou is one of the biggest companies in the social-network application development space. And with the $35 million, RockYou plans to work on “additional tools and services” to further improve its advertising platform for brands and marketing campaigns that want to jump on the social-application craze.

“DCM believes that RockYou will be the catalyst of this new global ecosystem that delivers next-generation advertisements through its innovative advertising network and social applications,” DCM co-founder and general partner David Chao said in a release. “With the current momentum, RockYou is positioned to become a top-10 Internet property in the world in the near future.”

That rumor of a $400 million valuation might not be too far off base: social-media application powerhouse RockYou announced Monday that it has raised $35 million in Series C venture capital.

The round was led by venture firm DCM, with contributions from several private investors. Previous RockYou investors include Lightspeed Venture Partners, Partech International, and Sequoia Capital.

It’s the kind of money that may raise a few eyebrows, considering many believe the social-application space doesn’t offer a proven business model yet. RockYou is responsible for a number of popular applications–SuperWall, Vampires, Likeness, X Me–on Facebook and several OpenSocial-compatible platforms (MySpace, Hi5, Friendster, Bebo, and Orkut), as well as an ad network. The company has already done marketing campaigns for clients like Paramount, New Line Cinema, Sony, Microsoft, and CBS, and claims to have 87.5 million monthly unique visitors with 2.7 billion page views.

With Word’s macros enabled, double-click the AutoCorrect.dot file inside the AutoCorrect.zip download. Choose Backup, and when the Save As dialog box opens, select the removable medium or network address you’ll use to transfer the settings to the other system.

Make sure macros are enabled in Word before you run the AutoCorrect backup script.

Repeat the steps on the second system, but choose Restore rather than Backup when the macro runs, click Yes at the warning, point to the backup file you created, and click Open.

Run the AutoCorrect.dot macro to back up your settings and restore them on another PC.

Tomorrow: a free program warns you about potentially dangerous sites just before you click the link.

First, make sure macros are enabled. In Word 2003, click Tools > Macro > Security > Security Level, and select either of the bottom two options. In Word 2007, click the Office button, choose Word Options > Trust Center > Trust Center Settings > Macro Settings, select “Enable all macros (not recommended; potentially dangerous code can run),” and click OK twice.

Years ago, Dave Rado wrote a Word macro for backing up and restoring the program’s AutoCorrect files. It still works for Word 2007–or at least it did on my PC.

(Credit:
Dave Rado)

(Credit:
Microsoft)

If you create custom AutoCorrect entries to speed up your typing in Microsoft Word as I described on Monday, you might need to move those entries to another PC someday.

But that suggests a downside. SourceForge does all the provisioning and patching. That makes it quick and probably more secure, but also means you depend on SourceForge for all the updating. Yeah, infrastructure issues are taken off your shoulders, but sometimes being able to tinker is what it’s all about. This is sure to rub some SourceForge developers the wrong way.

SourceForge isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel. If there’s an open-source tool out there that already works, it can now provide it easier to developers. That’s smart. The first three being announced are LimeSurvey (survey app), MediaWiki, and phpBB (forum app). These were chosen based on usage patterns across the site, and there is a mechanism for requesting ones you want. There’s plenty of Twitter chatter about it this morning, most of it very positive.

Still, it’s good to see SourceForge pushing to get good tools in the hands of the developers. It’s not the first time that tools have been provided this way, but it’s on a large scale, and it directly benefits open-source developers. If they build on this by adding more and more useful apps, it could turn into a really useful toolbox.

SourceForge is trying to get development and collaboration tools in the hands of their users more quickly these days. They are announcing on Monday a new service for developers that provides fast, virtualized access to popular open-source apps. This is not a perfect solution, but a good quick way to answer some developer needs.

Kamen’s devices are meant to be distributed directly to small communities where they’re needed the most. The water purification system, for example, can clean up to 1,000 liters of water per day–that’s more than enough for the needs of 100 people. One of the electrical generation devices can generate all the energy needed to power one of those devices with enough left over to provide basic electrical needs for that same community.

That’s where the Nokia contest could help. The contest is split into three categories: Eco-Challenge, Emerging Markets, and Technology Showcase. The Eco-Challenge is designed to create an application that could help consumers, for example, manage their environmental impact. The Technology Showcase is exactly that: It asks for the best single application that runs on a Nokia mobile device.

Kamen believes the devices could be built for less than $2,000 each once they get into mass production. The trick, of course, is getting them into mass production.

“Expecting big government to do this is a fool’s errand,” Kamen said in an interview here at the Web 2.0 Expo at the Jacob Javits Center. But asking a consumer electronics company that can enjoy some positive publicity and stir enthusiasm for its devices in the process of doing some good may be a more reasonable pursuit.

Click here for full coverage of Web 2.0 Expo

Thursday morning, Nokia is expected to announce its “Calling All Innovators” competition, a global contest that will split up to $150,000 among several winners. The contest, Kamen hopes, will help get two devices he’s built–one that purifies and even desalinates water and another that can generate electricity from a variety of fuel sources–into mass production and make it easier to distribute and manage them throughout the world.

(Credit:
Dean Kamen)

But Kamen, also the creator of an array of medical devices and the founder of a worldwide organization that encourages students to study science, is perhaps most passionate about solving third-world health problems as basic as getting access to drinkable water and electricity.

NEW YORK–In technology circles, Dean Kamen is probably best known as the guy who invented the Segway.

The Emerging Markets category probably cuts closest to Kamen’s aspirations: It asks developers to build applications that could, for example, improve access to weather or health information, create a micropayment system to pay for the distribution of those Kamen devices, even help monitor those water and electrical devices once they’re distributed.

The unlikely Nokia partnership is part of what Kamen views as a bottoms-up approach to solving global health programs. While large international agencies and governments may be focused on big projects like building dams, Kamen believes going straight to the people who need it the most can be the right answer.

Now he thinks cell phone manufacturer Nokia may be able to help out.

It may sound overly ambitious, but Kamen takes inspiration from the mass distribution of cell phones in countries such as India and groundbreaking micro-loan programs that have helped entrepreneurs and communities in poor countries. (He’s not the only one looking toward cell phones as an answer. A 2007 CNET News series featured several similar efforts). He joked that in his “ever-optimistic perspective,” he’d like to think developers will embrace his project as enthusiastically as they do more mercantile efforts.

“We need smart people to focus on the real issues,” Kamen said. “In a free culture, you get what you celebrate.”

But for those that really want to go deep, the company on Wednesday posted an even more detailed look at the thinking that went into building touch into Windows 7.

Microsoft has already gone into plenty of detail about the touch features in
Windows 7. In fact, touch was the first thing that the company shared when it came to how Windows 7 would look and feel.

The blog goes into a lot of detail on how the gestures work and how the company tests the features. Because it’s sometimes easier to see something in action, I’ve included two videos–one that I did last fall and another that Microsoft posted on Wednesday along with its blog.

The company also noted that it continues to tweak the way gestures work as it gets more feedback from the beta version of Windows 7 that was released in January. For example, in its earlier incarnation, the recognition engine was missing many quickly performed gestures.

Here’s our earlier video:

“We tuned the gesture detection engine with sample gesture input provided by real people using touch in pre-release builds,” Microsoft said in the blog posting. “These tuned gestures are what you will see in the (release candidate) build.”

and Microsoft’s:

The company also notes which touch-capable machines already in the market support the pre-release versions of Windows 7, namely HP ’s TouchSmart All-in-One PCs (IQ500 series & IQ800 series), its TouchSmart tx2 Tablet PC, and Dell’s Latitude XT or XT2 Tablet PC.

Video: Windows 7 Touch Gestures

In recent months, perhaps as a reaction to Facebook’s explosive growth and domination of the social-networking landscape, MySpace has been making numerous efforts to return to its roots as a music and media hub.

MySpace announced Monday a twofold partnership with Microsoft: first, a MySpace mobile application for Windows Mobile phones, and second, support for Microsoft’s Silverlight technology in the News Corp.-owned social network’s developer platform.

The Windows Mobile application will be available this summer for Windows Mobile 6.1 phones and then more broadly in the fall. It’ll be preloaded on Windows Mobile phones manufactured by LG, too. The app joins existing MySpace mobile products for
iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Sidekick, Palm, and Nokia handsets.

The announcements themselves are fairly mundane. But here’s what’s really interesting: Microsoft has invested $240 million in Facebook, which was at one point the second-place name in social networking–behind MySpace. But while MySpace still has more users in the U.S., Facebook is now significantly bigger worldwide.

As for the Silverlight announcement, this means that developers building applications for MySpace’s platform–which is based on the Google-created OpenSocial standard–have access to Adobe Flash competitor.