Kiwicon 8: Hackers just wanna have fun

Every year, the Kiwicon Crue's inbox is inundated with ridiculous crack-headed emails from people whose TV has been hacked, or whose wife's hotmail needs hacking, or who have some VALUABLE OPINION which must IMMEDIATELY be UNDERSTOOD, typically expressed with inline CAPITAL LETTERS, red and sometimes simultaneous bold italics. Quite how our mail client manages to acceptably kern this we don't know. Conveying the true glory of such missives, their markup and tone in dramatic reading is a challenge, and is the one we lay before you, our most thespian hackers.

Contestants will be given some paragraphs each from the best email of the year, and will read their paragraph aloud to the audience. The audience will judge the most dramatic and effective, based on:

• Dramatic performance
• Expression of markup, capitilisation and colouring of the text
• Extra points for simultaneous interpretive dance
• Extra extra points for doing so in the style of Kate Bush in Wuthering Heights
• Triple extra points for a red dress

The winner wins a prize. A good prize. Honest.

For the 6th year running, Lateral Security and DRoc proudly present the Kiwi Warrior Challenge. This is a lockpicking competition to be run on Thursday night. Contestants will be handcuffed in a cell and be required to circumvent multiple locks in order to gain their freedom. Each task will have 3 levels of difficulty so the event will be newbie-friendly. The entire run is timed and points are awarded for each completed task.

This event is inspired by the original Gringo Warrior Challenge and will follow similar rules as found here.

For full details, check out the Te Kuiti Warrior 6 page

Would you like to play a game?

Celebrate the 1980s with a screening of the 30th anniversary re-mastered edition of the classic hacker flick War Games, starring Matthew Broderick, Ally Sheedy and Joshua the WOPR in a terrifying tale of war dialing, cracking, and GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR.

(before you ask, yes, this is a legal public screening authorised by the relevant distributor, for which we paid a princely sum, so no, you can't phone the MPAA or whatever and collect a bounty for dobbing us in you ungrateful trout)

In a misguided fit of enthusiasm and optimism, the Crue have decided to chance both Wellington weather and the ability of our constituents to tolerate sunlight. On the Saturday afternoon (not before midday, because sweet zombie jesus, we have not lost all our sense) there will be a Day After Event that's definitely Not A Party.

Held up at the Wright's Hill Fortress, you can eat, drink, shelter from the conditions inside the portaloos, and realise that in the event of an invasion by another empire* New Zealand would probably be totally fucked.

We'll provide the transport to and from, food (Spit Roast BBQ!) some drinks, toilets(!), shelter and entry to the fortress. You'll need to say you're willing to come along, we have a strict limit of 100 people due to the venue requirements. You'll also have to pay something towards covering our costs. The Fortress is still pretty damn awesome, and groups of you will be shown around by that particular type of semi-retired guy who always has the remnants of grease under his fingernails and can probably jury-rig almost anything.

We recommend cheap sunglasses.