Click City Episode 3 is live: Beth Fixes a Leak and Stokes a Flame.

http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Click-City-Episode-3-Fixing-a-leak-stoking-a-4975297.php

A little background on the hacker contests:

The residents of the hacker hostel AT 101 enter bug bounty competitions for extra money. Companies offer cash prizes to anyone who finds a bug that can crash their server.  There are also sponsored Iron Chef-style competitions, where a target computer is placed on the network and the first team to crash it wins. The bug bounties usually don’t pay that well—here are some of the bigger ones that have been paid:

Google Chrome on Windows 7 ($100,000)

Microsoft Internet Explorer, either

–         IE 10 on Windows 8 ($100,000), or

–         IE 9 on Windows 7 ($75,000)

Mozilla Firefox on Windows 7 ($60,000)

Apple Safari on OS X Mountain Lion ($65,000)

Web Browser Plug-ins using Internet Explorer 9 on Windows 7

–         Adobe Reader XI ($70,000)

–         Adobe Flash ($70,000)

–         Oracle Java ($20,000)

Not all contests pay cash prizes.  The Defcon conference attracts people from around the world — white hats, back hats, and a number of people whose hats are various shades of gray, plus an assortment of people from various government agencies.  The conference includes multiple tracks of presentation on security and hacking topics but many come to compete in the numerous contests. One popular game is “spot the Fed” where attendees are invited to expose government employees.  Winners get a “I spotted the Fed” T-shirt while unmasked agents are awarded “I am the Fed” shirts of their own. The highlight is probably the Capture the Flag contest where close to 1000 teams were narrowed down to 20 finalists who competed for a top price of leather jackets and the Defcon Black Badge.

In Click City, Noah wears his Defcon hat as a symbol of respect and solidarity

For some, Defcon is the ultimate job fair. People have hired hackers with a track record without asking too many questions about what they actually did to get that record, and whether their job included 100% legal activities.