NBC reporter outed spying at DefCon [Purple Avenger]

I have this theory about finding interesting news - you can always find something interesting with 5 drill down clicks starting at Google News page.
So here's this story about a moron NBC reporter who thought she'd infiltrate the DefCon hackers conference posing as a geek and get the goods on lord knows what.

She was of course outed and escorted off site. Geeks ain't stupid - they can smell when someone is a fraud a mile away. Her tradecraft was apparently quite sloppy. She's also kinda hot which naturally invited close scrutiny from a geek crowd.

Note to NBC - want to infiltrate a geek conference? Get a fucking geek to do it you morons! A reporter won't be able to fake it more than 15 seconds if someone engages them in a conversation. YouTube vid of the unmasking and escorting out below the fold.

--- update ---

I wanted to add a concrete example of how quickly geek posers might be unmasked. Suppose you're bullshitting with some tool who claims to be a programmer. Just ask'em what the hex encoding for the NOP instruction on the x86 architecture is (answer: hex 90). No semi-geek worth their salt who works with the Intel chips will fail to respond correctly. Follow up question - what does 55 8B EC mean? (answer: That's the function entry code sequence most compilers will emit when they're going to build a stack frame)

posted by xgenghisx at 10:22 AM

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