Well, this was quite a fun experience. I had been planning on going to this conference for a while now, and when I asked my friend if he wanted to come, he was rather interested. Now, I had used a code I found on Google to give me free access, but unknown to me, the code expired on the 17th, so he couldn't register for free.
Not put off by that, as most of us know, there is ALWAYS a way.. we went anyway. I got my badge, and we went to work on getting his. As feared, the first couple of people at the registration desk told us that we needed to pay the $140+ fee for the expo pass, which was not going to happen.
So then we figured, if I have a badge, are they really going to check for his? Well, the answer is yes, they were pretty adamant about not letting anyone down without a badge, however, this building had another registration booth, this one for exhibitors, but they had expo card-holders, so why not try them? From the first desk, we got referred to the "manager" or whatever he was of registration, who was sitting nearby. When confronted, he pretty much printed out a badge with no second thought, and gave it to my friend.
Security conference breach - Win!
Now onto the actual conference..
Apparently they have stepped up the technology since last time I have been to a conference, we attempted to get into one of the sessions that looked interesting, and as we were entering the room, we had out badges scanned - apparently each badge has an RFID chip, go figure. So as mine was scanned, I got a "access denied" message. That didn't seem to deter the woman scanning my card, so she tried again. Sure enough - "access denied" at which point, she told me to go in. Well, awesome, not going to complain there. While my friend was getting scanned, another woman walked up to the woman scanning him, and told her that people with the expo pass weren't permitted to sit in on the sessions.
Crap.
Slightly put off, we went towards the expo hall, and were told off due to the fact that the hall doesn't open for another hour. That leaves us with one option; back to the sessions! We then headed towards the next interesting-looking session on our list. By this time, the session was about half over, but we figured we'd try anyway. As we approached the door, we saw the same deal, one woman sitting at a desk with pamphlets and other advertising material, and one with the badge scanner. We walked up to the door, and instead of being asked to have our badges scanned, she informed us that it was half over, and allowed us to walk in.
That at least gave us something to do until the expo hall opened up.
On the way out, we noticed something.. people in chef's garb running around.. We looked farther down the hall, and hey, free food! As we started getting muffins/fruit and a soda, we see that we're the only people with expo passes in sight, not that surprising, but then we see another badge-checker at the entrance to the hall we had walked through earlier to get to the session. Guess they were away from their post when we came in.
After waiting a bit longer, the expo hall opened, so we decided to head down there. Our first stop was the WhiteHat Security booth, as they had emailed me and offered me free access to lunch that they were hosting at Jillians, which my friend and I promptly signed up for. We then randomly walked around the rest of the hundred or so booths, and got some random free stuff, including a laser pointer which made our day. We ended up getting a meals worth of free appetizers, beer and got to play billards for about an hour. I would call this event a success.
Overall, this was an extremely entertaining event, and all it cost us was the $10.50 BART ticket.
