PyCon AU 2013, day 0

Posted on July 6, 2013 by Graeme

PyCon Au 2013 started yesterday with miniconferences for Django and OpenStack and snow on Mt Wellington.

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The DjangoCon AU miniconference had a capacity audience and an excellent set of presentations, with keynotes from Alex Gaynor and Dylan Jay.

The opening night was devoted to Code Wars (not Cod Wars), with a fiendish set of puzzles to whittle the competing teams down to the eventual winners: team IC. The theme of the night revolved around PRISM, the NSA, conspiracy theories and Geocities-styled web pages. The puzzles were:

  1. Find a backdoor on a website to access a login page and then convert CSS tags into binary and then ASCII to get the password
  2. Convert a base64 encoded string into a PNG image, recreate the original image through rotating image tiles (to get an image of a prism) and do some bit manipulation of the image to get another password
  3. Convert an embedded Midi file into a CSV, decode data in the CSV file to get yet another password (this was the round where desperate people resorted to Ruby and Perl…)
  4. The creative round for the final showdown: Create a UFO tracker for the Canadian government, with an NSA backdoor
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