Ever have something stolen and want to get back at the bastard that took it? Come learn from Ken Westin some of the crazy tricks that GadgetTrak uses to reunite people with their devices and catch the crooks that dare steal their gadgets in Gadget Bounty Hunting.

Also, we're proud to announce David Bryan / VideoMan will be talking about hacking embedded systems and how often times service providers screw up with their custom solutions and how you can find these vulnerabilities yourself in I pwned your router. Oops.

We're proud to announce 2 workshops today. The first one focuses on sexism in the tech/hacker/geek industry/community and how all of us can be better at responding to it. Taught by Danielle Hulton and Leigh Honeywell, How you can be an ally to us females, is not to be missed!

Also on the agenda is one that we're very excited about. Hex will be teaching people how to brew Shadow Mate, a drink similar to Club Mate, that is typically highly caffeinated and fuels many of the multi-day hackathons in Seattle. If you don't know what Club Mate is, it's a popular German drink that many hackers and tech enthusiasts drink, that's lightly carbonated and sweetened Yerba Mate iced tea -- a south american herb that contains caffeine but has slightly different effects than traditional coffee. Come to DIY Soda / Brewing Shadow Mate!

There’s been a lot buzz lately about UEFI Secure Booting, and the ability of hardware and software manufacturers to lock out third-party loaders (and rootkits). Even the NSA has been advocating the adoption of measured boot and hardware-based integrity checks. But what does this trend mean to the open source and hacker communities? In Hacking Measured Boot & UEFI, Dan Griffin will give a demo of measured boot, show the data that’s collected, and discuss the weaknesses of the system.

Also, in Sai's talk, Cognitive Psychology for Hackers, he will be showing how to experience firsthand some of the most interesting, surprising, and perspective-changing findings from cognitive and social neuropsychology. With perceptual illusions, priming, biases, heuristics, and unconscious influences, humans have tons of firmware "bugs". All have exploits; some even have patches. Learn how to improve your own thinking, use others' bugs to your advantage, and gain new perspective on the unconscious and often illusory processes involved in your perceptions.

Leading up to announcing our preliminary lineup on May 1st, we'll be announcing 2-3 talks each day.

Starting off we're very proud to announce that Rob Flickenger will be talking about how he built a Five Fists of Science inspired Lightning Gun and his adventures with making use of many of the Hackerspaces in Seattle in his talk It takes a village to make a lightning gun.

Also, we'd like to feature Beth Kolko who will be discussing how her lab is discovering new ways of saving lives around the world with inexpensive and practical hacker-style solutions in her talk Shift Labs: Changing the World one Hack at a Time.

Want to stake your claim? Organize a campsite! Hackerspaces and groups can request sectioned off parts of the camp to build their own structures, show off their projects, host parties and events, and whatever they feel like doing to contribute to ToorCamp. Help make the camp awesome by getting your friends together and planning a campsite! To sign up for organizing a campsite, please fill out our campsite sign-up form. Here's some inspiration awesomeness from Hackerbot Labs!

Hackerbot Labs at ToorCamp 2009 from Rob Flickenger on Vimeo.

A few weekends ago we started work on building the dome structures for the camp. Here's a video of how we're building the PRIME Dome -- a 50' diameter (25' tall) dome that will house our main stage and some of the seating. It's a 6V dome that consists of 555 struts of 9 different lengths. Take a look at the video to see how we made all of the parts and stay tuned to see it being built in the next couple weeks!

PRIME Dome - Part 0: Fabrication from ToorCon on Vimeo.

The other weekend all of the ToorCamp staff took a trip out to the campsite to get a feel for the location and meet with the locals. We managed to get some good pictures and our good friend noid, who came out with us to check out the site for his hackerspace -- Black Lodge Research, put together a fantastic write-up on the location that I think you should definitely check out if you want to get a better idea for the location this year. Thanks noid!

To help you guys convince all of your friends to come out to the best event of the year we've extended the first increase in the pre-registration price to May 1st. Now start a village, submit a talk, and tell all of your friends to get off their butts and register for ToorCamp!

ToorCamp is back! We're preparing for ToorCamp 2012 to happen on August 8th-12th, immediately after Defcon & Blackhat. Since the last ToorCamp (the first large-scale hacker camp in US history) was a bit extreme, we've decided that this year's camp is going to be all about relaxing and taking it easy -- consider it a vacation after your Defcon vacation. The venue features beach side camping and 26 cabins with full utilities and plenty of space for villages, talks and workshops. The first round of pre-registration is currently open and can be purchased by going to ToorCamp 2012 Pre-Registration.

We just wanted to thank everyone for coming out and helping make ToorCamp a success! I don't think that any of us anticipated the sort of conditions and hilarity that was to be had at ToorCamp but I think we all managed to make the best of it and had an awesome time. How we adapted to the environment and circumstances really demonstrated the hacker spirit and determination. That being said, we've learned a lot from this camp and one thing we're 100% sure of is that the next camp will be a lot less hot, windy, and dusty :-).

There has been tons of press, videos, and pictures about the event that I'm sure most of you have already seen, but in case you haven't here's a few searches that we found to be interesting.

- Flickr ToorCamp tag
- Google Video ToorCamp Search

NEW!
- Hackerbot Labs Camp Video
- Hack your ToorCamp badge into an RFID decoder!