On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 09:37:28AM +0530, Amarendra Godbole wrote:

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> It would be a pleasure meeting folks on this mailing list, including

> OBSD developers' at BH or DefCon. Thanks.

The great majority of OpenBSD developers are from outside the United

States, and I would guess that most of us prefer not to visit the US now

thanks to the murderous foreign policy, authoritarian domestic

surveillance, and invasive border control. You'll find few of us there.
Personally I've been refusing invitations to go to, or even transit

through the United States for about 6 years. 
> It is generally said that the BH or DefCon wireless network is

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> "hostile", and sane individuals must not use their laptop for the risk

> of being compromised. My question is: if I use OpenBSD -current, with

> not much additional configuration (apart from the Intel wifi

> firmware), will the connection be reasonable secure? (Not sure if this

> hostility is a publicity stunt). Thanks again.

While in general the Internet is a pretty hostile place, you probably

need to worry about local network attacks (sniffing, man-in-the-middle)

more than usual.
Don't trust DNS, and tunnel tunnel your outgoing connections out through

ssh or ipsec (look at the -D flag to ssh, and make sure that your

browser uses the socks proxy for DNS lookups as well)
This advice applies equally to any time you're on an untrusted network

(Internet cafe, Open wirless access point, etc)