Raising Awareness For Safety’s Sake. Hackers Are Keeping Us Alive.

Today’s topic is all about raising awareness for safety’s sake—and we are harkening back to a Black Hat and DEFCON recap conversation we had with one of the original organizers for the Car Hacking Village, Kirsten Renner.

While we didn’t get a chance to talk to her in-depth during DEFCON, we were fortunate enough to find some time after the conference to connect with her. And, as with most of our podcasts, we cover a lot of ground. In today’s episode, Kirsten shares the experience she had during the con, what it’s like to be a “villager”, the value of volunteering as part of the career development program, what took place during the Car Hacking Village and what the future holds for the research-driven program.

There’s still quite a bit of controversy over the term “hacker” — are they good people or bad people? what does their work represent? what are they trying to accomplish?

While the visual ‘edge’ presented by some of the folks in attendance at DEFCON might add to these questions, if you were to take a few minutes to talk to any of the attendees, volunteers, villagers, organizers and goons, you would quickly realize that—even though there will always be exceptions to the rule—the hackers at DEFCON are there to learn, share, collaborate and make things better for us as humans and for our society overall.

To help us with this conversation, we asked Kirsten to provider her opinion on the term. While her response recorded in the podcast has much more to it than a single quote, her message does sum it up quite nicely:

“Hackers are the people keeping us alive, literally.”

We hope you enjoy listening to Kirsten as much as we enjoyed chatting with her.