There are no rules at DefCon, the world's largest computer hacker convention. Earlier this month, about 5,000 folks - including network and security folks of every ilk - attended the show, held annually at the Alexis-Park Hotel in Las Vegas.

Between the conference's "vendor area" and "hacking zone" were a few dozen round banquet tables, loaded with innumerable laptops, monitors, routers, cabling - and at least 23 antennas. Cheating is allowed at DefCon. In fact, it's expected.

I've hosted Hacker Jeopardy for 10 years, and part of the ritual is to catch people cheating, getting remote help from the audience or a distant room with wireless earphones. One year they tried to hack the answers out of my computer. Then they tried to download the memory files from the hotel computer that I had used to make hard copy printouts. It was all in good fun - with reasonable paranoia.

The lack of rules at DefCon includes massive violations of dozens of federal felonies: password theft, telecom interception, system penetration. If you go to DefCon, caveat emptor: Your mere presence makes you a target - all in good fun. The last thing you want is to see your name and passwords projected onto "The Wall of Shame."

So there you are, a fine upstanding corporate network type and you need to get a bit of work done. What do you do? Use the free high-bandwidth 802.11 wireless networks, right? Think again: Those 23 antennas are sniffing and air-snorting every digital broadcast stream for hundreds of yards. That's a real easy way to end up on the Wall of Shame.

You could elect to use the hard-wired LAN DefCon offers instead. But what dangers lurk? Is the DefCon system administrator storing traffic for later analysis? Will your communications become part of DefCon history and a question in next year's Hacker Jeopardy? Maybe, if you use the supplied network.

You could use your hotel room dial-up. It's slow, but it's secure, right?

DefCon is a hacker convention. In past hacker conventions, attendees have completely taken over the hotel phone systems. Yes, DefCon and the Alexis-Park Hotel have a strong détente in place, but I wouldn't advise using the hotel's telephone company networks for anything important. There's a better than even chance that the phones are compromised, too.

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