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Defcon's annual badge has always been a design competition dressed up as a conference lanyard.
Past editions came loaded with hidden puzzles, encrypted challenges, Easter eggs, and gear trains that replicate a mechanical watch, with each year's creator pushing to top the last and impress an audience of hackers who are, by definition, hard to impress.
This year's version, created by legendary hardware hacker Andrew "bunnie" Huang, makes the design secondary. The chip inside it is the argument.
What Huang built and why it matters Defcon asked Huang to design this year's badge, and he embedded an open-source chip of his own creation in each one.
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