Opening Remarks

[Applause] for those of you that don't realize that's Mr Mark Carney the person who's responsible for besides leads um even existing I really wanted when we started to talk about this so one of the things I wanted to do was say the first voice I want to hear is Mark Mark was meant to be here to do sort of a little intro and to hand over and to sort of push yours in as a new crew looking after it he couldn't make it at the last minute so you'll just have to make do with my Dorset tones and no Persian poetry and all the other bits Mark's famous for so first off thank you all for coming I

I still it it now for the first time felt real um yeah up until now it was just a stressful thing on the horizon 15 minutes ago he started filing goodness like God people have turned up this is actually happening we now have to make this happen it's not just some sort of fever dream I'm having I'm not going to talk much this morning we've got so so many good speakers to fit in that I think you want to do is hear me ramble on for a bit so all the usual bits bit of housekeeping there are no fire drills today um if you hear the alarm go off and um yeah just get out it's it's a fire

it's um We're not gonna mess around um we have a sorry Nick I'm trying to stay here we have a code of conduct read it it's plastered on the walls it's on the rotating boards it's on various bits and bats it's on the website we we um besides these is one of the first UK conferences to have a code of conduct we've we've carried that forward and we take it very very seriously you're here to have fun you're here have a great time don't screw over other people's fun and great time um again this is a wonderful venue it's one of the reasons that we took so long to um to get um back in here after the

pandemic is that we couldn't find a venue like it in Leeds anywhere so please treat it with respect the staff here at Ace they've been absolutely wonderful I know you know your hackers it's cool but look after the place it's it's amazing building um downstairs obviously there is food on at lunchtime there was tea and coffee at various breaks on there Avail yourself of those things at lunch we do it yeah lunch two sittings is very deliberate we've put on very very good speakers at lunchtime not because we want to be mean to them and think well you got a choice of speaker or food but because we actually need good speakers over lunch because we need to split that

fit into two the capacity the 350 tickets that we've got out there is based on this room you'll notice downstairs there's a lot smaller if you all go for lunch at the same time it's going to get very busy so yeah so what one at 12 101 so don't feel you have to rush for the first sitting there is a second one later on um we've all been out of practice at this you know not that many conferences gone being in a big group of people is a bit of a weird experience for the first time in a few years for a few people so we have got a quiet room upstairs if you need a break if you need a little bit of

a cut off just go and chill for a bit upstairs there is a room marked up there there's an hour that it's not available if you really need it in that hour we've actually got somewhere over the third you can use but um yeah no yeah if you feel you want to break that's exactly what it's there for um sorry you can tell how prepared I am the fact that I wrote These slides a couple of days ago and I have no idea what's on them I've not prepped any of this so I'm going to read them at all um we have to leave out the venue quite quickly after the closing space talk so

don't if you want to sort of hang around in chat don't feel upset that we're going to shift you out very very quickly the good news is the after party is just and I've got this from Mark just over there um you can't go that way you're starting to go through doors and things but um it's literally out the front door turn left and you should be able to see it's a place called Aspire if you find yourself crossing a road that's bigger than an access road you've gone the wrong way it's literally all that so as soon as we finish disappear over there I believe there's a bit of money behind the bar and things like that so um

so for those of you at the precise last night you might have actually filled already I know I certainly don't really fancy another night on the beer tonight um Wi-Fi there is Wi-Fi around um lots of any of the flat surfaces out there and just generally just random stuff there there are details of what the Wi-Fi is it involves you texting a number and getting some stuff like but it's a bit fluffy but once you're on there it does work again our host here Rob gracious we want to come back next year so don't dick around with the Wi-Fi please and the same goes for Aspire it happened at a security conference not ours we don't know what

it is but we assumed somebody was playing with the owner got you or some sort of the author don't do that we're grown-ups it's not big and it's not clever anymore um again come and have fun but tell people the fun you're having this is our first year doing this we we want to follow in Mark's footsteps we want to spot on something at least as good as he did we want to keep pushing it forwards so if you're having a great time go throw it out on social media uh hashtag besides leads if you're not having a great time come and find one of us one of us in the purple shirts any of the guys in the red

shirts um suggest not the guys in blue shirts because okay the speakers um feel free to go and tell me you're having a [ __ ] time if you want to but it's probably not ideal but um yeah if anything's going on come find us come talk to us with say we're we're doing this for you if we can make it better let us know is there any problems at all fine sorry not allowed to call them humans come and find one of the MVPs yeah one of the folks here in the in the red shirts um so when we talk about the the people in the church we we were trying to work out

coloring themes we've done the whole red blue and purple teaming thing and who gets what and the idea of red shirts being sort of in Star Trek terms completely Expendable amused me but um but for whatever reason I think it was a dc151 our local hacker group here somebody mentioned getting the goons prepared and getting them trained um somebody put in my mind the idea of Del Preston from the the Wayne's World film and it's like okay Rosie I know this is late don't want to show us I want everybody in in the black waistcoats in the weeks that's that's what we want for doing so we need to make that happen next time that seemed

like a great idea until somebody pointed out that if I gave him my glasses Me and Mrs me and Mr mcgree decent workers actually um actually pull off a a fairly possible Wayne and Garf so maybe not so anyway the goons the goons were sorry the MVPs are around we're around common Hustlers uh if you need any help or anything goes wrong you've all got badges I don't know how many actually I can look around the room I can see lots of stickers so that worked quite well but in case you missed it on the way in we've got loads of sticker on your badges to indicate whether you're open to um people talking about recruitment

whether you just want to be left alone whether you can be filmed or not they're they're there I'm sure other people please don't force that you know so if you're please follow that don't just go and annoy people that are desperately not to be annoyed uh nearly there um what we've got in store for you I've been worried about this for weeks now about you know it's our first time doing this with marks at a very very high bathrooms to live up to something stand back here um however that image is the one that suddenly made me realize we've done something special here that speaker lineup is stunning all the people that went down to infosec this weekend it's

been a bit flatty on the speaker I look like we have got some of the best speakers on here and they're all doing it for free they're all doing it for a lot of them it's costing them quite a lot of money to come and they're doing that for you for nothing so I'm I am so proud of our speaker we've all

[Applause] save that for the closing thing because I need something to talk about so we can do all the Clapping about how awesome people is there but yeah we've got three tracks of amazing speakers we have got three Keynotes when we did this whole red blue purple thing we we had the idea it's like oh we can have multiple Keynotes um and we've got three amazing Keynotes any one of those would have been proud to have the fact that we've got three are amazing uh and we've got the panel later and the people on the panel we've got is a stunning line of people's up Mr colony is not on there I'm not forgive him for that and if you're watching Mark

you're a kid don't do it again um no sorry generally Mark I'm sure mark would have loved to have been here if you could make it workshops we've got four amazing workshops as well um missing the torch we've got at least Cooper wherever he is hiding has got an amazing team filming those you can watch those later the workshops you don't get that chance you miss them and they're gone with um three excellent Villages again um minty if he's around a percent immediately doing the car hacking Village anyone that's been the grandest community knows minty doesn't do the car hacking footage nobody goes to see him and he he might be the one with the

fantasy job and the car in a bottle and things but it's biggie that actually ruins the show so go down see big in if biggie lets you talk to minty about car hacking as well um but yeah it's if you've never done it before that it seems monstrously intimidating if you're just like I've never really hacked anything why would I start on a car but spend some time talking to him because I did this at Liverpool a few years ago and it's amazing how much you can talk you and how terrifying and easy is as well and if you don't know he's got an entire car in a box down there he's literally got an old Peugeot 206 well not the body

work and the wheels and the stuff we don't care about but all the electronics is all set out there and it can show you how easy it is to tear apart um lock picking obviously lock picking has been a long time sort of Star War of um again if you've never done that before go and give it a go um one of the great one of the great things at the pre-sides party last night was somebody very young that's just started interning at a company yeah so um five minutes later she'd pop to First Lock and that look on her face I'm like I've just popped my first sock it's like yeah you're one of us now we owe you you

but it it's one of those things again it sounds scary and intimidating but actually the folks we've got doing that are lovely people and it's such a great fun skill to use in there third one BattleBots I haven't actually seen Ben this morning I don't know he is here is it somewhere um yeah it sounds very much like Ben as you said five to anything yet um so for those that you don't know BattleBots is not a ripoff of the copyrighted or the TV show of the same name these aren't the big these are what they're called amp weights there's a little tiny robots Ben's brought some other people have been building their own there's a little

Arena that you can absolutely it's quite a big arena that you can go on which should take part and it's Ace and without going into too much the backstory Ben and Grant that organized this have moved Heaven and Earth to actually make this happen there were some problems that meant it almost didn't happen it's involved shipping a BattleBots Arena from um from the Dublin somewhere in Ireland shipping it over here to make sure it happens so those guys have done some amazing work and again it's all self-funded it's customer absolute Fortune um and they've got to go for me to try and keep BattleBots going so go and have a play and I encourage you you know

throw some money that way because it like all these Villages it costs them not just the time but it cost them a lot of money to make this happen and they do it just to make you guys happy so okay um so the three footies we've got on top of that and this is something that started out as a little bit of a fun extra it's kind of taken over because I'm loving what's happening with this so if it's your scavenger hunt uh we were going to do a CTF reasons men couldn't do CCF so we said we'll focus on scavenger hunt I know someone who's done this before weirdly I bumped into it in

a slightly tidy emotional state at Defcon at the scavenger hunt it's like potatoes and it's like what are you doing here more importantly it's like oh it's a scavenger hunt of course you're here this is what you've got if you don't know what's going on is it's basically it's a big long list of things you can do collect or otherwise you know sort of um yeah yeah um and the the the rules around that are very very flexible basically convince James that you deserve those points uh lateral thinking is very much and it's great fun it's not just a you know go get me a pen or go and get me a you know an ankle socket it's actually really

clever geeky stuff and that's something we've we've seen the list there is some absolutely hilarious stuff on there so have a go at that James uh where is it I've seen him sorry yeah where were you actually set up so where where are you are you not feeling around so yeah go go find James registrations via Discord and also yeah go find it and have fun because that is little things like that that make these conferences to me that so easily missed all you can actually have so much on there sticker stall is around somewhere I think we put it with the yeah over the lock picking and um uh um I mean it's got hacking Village

upstairs uh for those I again don't know sticker store is an idea that started out in steelcon years ago and we kind of took it on the road and it's now grown its own legs the idea is we go around all the vendors and all the cool companies we collect their huge parts of stickers we put them all in the box and then we let you guys fight them back I think you're saying guys sorry uh people uh um um will you let you buy them back from a charity donation and at the end of the conference we give all that money to charity it's a very very easy way of making a little bit of money for charity

and it's an awesome way of making your laptops look even cooler than they already are also the flip side that if you've got any stickers on you and I know a lot of you just come back from infosec so you've probably got pockets full of things Chuck them in the box it all you know all the money from that goes back to the charities yep there's we've got a big mingling area downstairs there are vendors in it there are people in it find people to chat to me the greatest parts of a lot of these conferences are finding people to chat to and having those conversations um we've got a whole bunch of other random stuff that I won't talk about for

people of a certain age in a certain level of geekery I.E me and Nick and Graham there is an old BBC master I'm looking just looking around the room thinking actually there's a whole bunch of people are gonna get quite excited about this there is a BBC Master around have a play there is something very very special running a lot master that came from Tom and and Leeds hackstock so and that's that's that also there's a that ties in that to the scavenger as well sponsors it's like we're nearly there you nearly actually get to somebody interested in a minute um we couldn't put this on without sponsors um one of the things we're besides the

barrier to entry is meant to be as low as possible the tenant we charge is mostly about making sure you turn up we passed the point where it's almost it's costing more than 50 pounds ahead to actually put this on so that 40 missing pound that is coming from those sponsors without those sponsors this couldn't happen and it's been a really really tough year for sponsors out there there are a lot of companies who have been over the last 12 months saying yeah well sponsored sponsor will sponsor you then I've had to do massive rounds of layoffs and um Suddenly It's like well actually sponsoring events is a bit you know it's not a good look for us when we're laying

staff off so those people are on there are amazing companies they stuck by us they've made this possible some of them are downstairs in the vendor area go and talk to them some of them um those are the people that are really helping and supporting this community those are the ones that are really looking after us and several of those are actual fairly sizable local employers that good people I want to talk to if you want the job oh that's it I'm now going to hand it over briefly to Chloe to talk about Pac-Man and as the resident Retro Gaming expert that sounds a bit odd but it will all make sense a minute okay right this is going to be really

quick for me because this is nice and easy we're friendly people this is a friendly conference it's always been a friendly conference the idea of the Pac-Man thing I think there's a guy called Eric I could be wrong but ideally like you stood in a circle leave a gap for a new person to come join be friendly make friends be happy don't be a dick that's all I've got to say just be nice people we'll do a b-sides it's gonna be great and yeah that's it for me so yeah so thank you very very much for coming I would don't know how we're doing for time but at this point yeah right in that case thank you very much

we can now go straight into Well yeah if if the AV gods are with us because we were stressing others a few minutes ago it's gonna work perfectly on the first attempt

have we got yeah it works perfectly on the first attempts