As long as people have been talking on two-way radios, other people have wanted to listen to them. But where do you begin? Radio comms rely on practices and jargon to optimize communication in a domain where you can’t transmit only to the person you want to talk to, you don’t know if your transmission can reach them, or if their transmissions can reach you.

If you simply eavesdrop on people talking on the radio, you’ll probably have no idea what they’re talking about. This workshop will first teach you how to effectively communicate on the air so that you can understand the transmissions that you will also learn to intercept — within the bounds of the law.

You will learn the basics of handheld radio operation, radio language and etiquette, and use them to actually communicate on the air. Then we’ll cover how to identify frequencies used and intercept them using low-cost, off-the-shelf equipment, including directional antennas and software-defined radio (SDR). Finally, we’ll explore the limits of radio interception, including dealing with trunking systems and encrypted comms.

This is going to be a cool as hell workshop where we will learn by doing. No radio experience is expected or required! Folks who have never so much as held a walkie-talkie are strongly encouraged to participate. You just have to be ready to go outside — rain or shine!

The world has changed…

It began with the forging of the modern enterprise. To the cloud were given vast kingdoms of compute. To the mobile apps, a presence in every pocket. To the machines that now think, knowledge stolen from the creators. And to bind them, to let each speak to each across the dark spaces between systems, the architects forged the APIs.

But in the forging a flaw was hidden. For an API answers any who ask it correctly, and it does not always stop to learn who is asking. So it came to pass that buried among ten thousand harmless calls there waited a single request. One request with dominion over all the others. One request to read what was meant to stay hidden, to act in the name of any user, to claim the powers kept for admins alone.

One Request to bring the whole realm to ruin, and in a single call, destroy it.

Game-based learning can be fun. You may (or may not) have heard about Cyber Defence Dice or Security Cards. In this interactive workshop, attendees will get hands-on experience with our new security cards - an extension that bridges threat discovery and defense. Teams will allocate scarce budget and re-evaluate residual risk on a matrix.

https://blackhoodie.re/BsidesPDX2026/

When you think of robot vision you might think: collect a dataset, label thousands of frames, train a model, and run it on a GPU. Nope! The gate detector that qualified my drone for an autonomous racing competition was plain OpenCV on a single camera feed, and I am going to teach you how to make it in this workshop!

If you’ve never written a line of computer vision code, you’re the person this course was built for!

Together we will cover: Segmentation, Lighting Invariance, Target Selection, Partial Gates, and Confidence Ranking. Each stage presents a new problem for us to solve and eventually our code will be able to handle real drone footage from an actual flight.

Everything you need is provided in a Docker container. No GPU needed. A laptop from the last decade will work. You’ll leave with a detector you wrote yourself, a graded test set to keep improving it, and the first steps toward flying a drone on vision alone!

CTFs. The thrill of getting a flag is unmatched, but the narratives tend to be … flat. But they don’t have to be! Play an analog-horror, ARG-style capture-the-flag set in the heart of Portland. OSINT, cryptography, web application vulnerabilities unlock a story about how a fictional man went missing (mostly) without a trace.

A bit of background regarding the story and infrastructure will be shared before opening it up for live play. The difficulty ranges from easy to medium but experience is not necessary (non-cyber participants were able to solve this as well)! Participants learn practical OSINT, cryptography, network enumeration, and web-security techniques by solving an interconnected narrative CTF.