Not my fault! My trip to LayerOne 2025

Last Updated: 2025 June 18 (Sun Jun 15 2025)

• Qualcomm employee held hostage at Hilton Hotel elevator
• The Badge of Glitch and Fault Injections
• Sushi at GameStop
• WINE for Video Game Hackers
• DIABLO II ?!
• Career Village
• Meshtastic War of Spam and Denial of Service
• Ready LayerOne? (2026)

For LayerOne 2025, two friends and I carpooled to Pasadena bringing with us:

• an old gaming PC from the early 2010s
• a fancy soldering needle that displays the temperature the needle is heated to
• lockpicking sets
• Meshtastic radios
• just enough gasoline to avoid refueling in Los Angeles (almost twice as expensive as the cheapest in San Diego)

When we got to Pasadena, we met up with our 4th.

Again, I brought three printed copies of my resume (updated slightly from SCaLE 22x). Bringing three copies of a resume to a convention works out well as the following has happened:

Resume #1 gets written all over by a resume reviewer.

2. gets traded after meeting an acquaintance.
3. either gets stolen or disappears into the ether.

LayerOne takes place at the Hilton Hotel in Pasadena. For each day of the event, fancy breakfast and fancy dinner is served by Hilton.

Qualcomm employee held hostage at Hilton Hotel elevator

When we got to the elevators, someone hurried in after us: the guy we all recognized to host Capture the Flag (CTF) and work at Qualcomm.

“Fourth floor, please,” he said.

The elevator doors closed.

“Oh,” my friend closest to the panel paused. Out of all of us, he’s the one with the goofiest and heaviest southern Californian accent. “I’m not pressing the button unless you give us all the CTF answers.”

(It’s a joke. We didn’t get the CTF answers out of this.)

The Badge of Glitch and Fault Injections

Introduction to Fault Injection: https://youtu.be/watch?v=0QpGPSgR7Ao

The best part of LayerOne is soldering on shakey tables and having my elbows bumped.

The badge for 2025 has 48 LEDs that don’t seem to display anything in a pattern. The LEDs aren’t in order; LED7 is right next to LED41. (Maybe there’s a puzzle.) However, in the opening remarks, it was said that the theme for the badge was glitch and ‘fault injection’. But for the time at the conference, I only soldered it together.

Because I got the $40 extension kit, I got the following in total onto the board.

• battery holder (default, not part of the kit)
• FGPA (partially), seated by staff with a better needle and microscope.
• flash memory
• a bunch of headers

Sushi at GameStop

(Again)

Visiting Pasadena for the second time this year, we took the opportunity to get sushi at “GameStop” for dinner on Friday and lunch on Saturday. On Saturday, I had little expectation that all the acquaintances I met would be willing to eat raw fish, but it turns out, everyone eats sushi.

(Saturday) when we walked from the Hilton Hotel to the sushi place, the waitress asked how many of us are to be seated. I counted the three of us that walked right in then the four of us waiting outside, telling her “seven”. This earned a chuckle from another table in the sense that we just zerged a tiny sushi place.

But back when we had walked to the sushi place, we met one guy (“Sushi Guy”) also from the convention that just so happened to be on the same street looking for lunch. So in total we occupied 8 seats.

WINE for Video Game Hackers

“Why do some video games insist on kernel-level cheat detection?”

My friends and I complained about this for a while, but we find out the answer at WINE for Video Game Hackers (https://youtu.be/watch?v=9JcIHbmwV6w).

The most basic anti-cheat is:

BOOL IsDebuggerPresent()

If the current process is running in the context of a debugger, the return value is nonzero. If the current process is not running in the context of a debugger, the return value is zero.

— https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/debugapi/nf-debugapi-isdebuggerpresent

If a game is running through Wine and the user attaches a debugger from Linux, this function will still return zero. It also turns out WINE breaks other user-mode cheat detection methods, and a cheater on WINE has the advantage as because the game application is running without Windows drivers.

It’s been a while since I touched gamehacking. I might return to it once I have more time.

Gamehacking or cheating gets a dirty reputation. But not every game developer is receptive to feedback, and not every idea warrants developing a new game from scratch. The best hacks are the ones that add features to the game, and the first step usually involves a health or money hack.

DIABLO II ?!

“DEVIL 2?!”

“YOU BROUGHT YOUR GAMING PC?!”

One of the most hacked PC games of the early millenium is enthusiastically recognized at Layer One. (This is the original CD version from 2001 as opposed to Diablo II Resurrected.)

I lugged a gaming PC into the Chillout Room with a plan for LAN gaming on Saturday night. We could’ve planned this better: we only brought an ethernet switch. Without a router, we were dealing with self-assigned ip addresses until someone set up a DHCP server using dnsmasq. We also didn’t have a power strip until one of the staff volunteered one.

With a longer than anticipated set-up time, we barely had much of a gaming session as the hotel started to close rooms earlier than in previous years. However, I don’t regret the effort involved. I was able to showcase a hacked version of the game with quality of life enhancements with unmodified gameplay or balance. So next year, I anticipate bringing that PC again to showcase some of my gamehacking projects.

Career Village

“There’s no right answer to writing a resume,” couldn’t have been more emphasized on the day I sat in for a resume review.

“You should put the most impressive project at the top even if it’s old.”

— my resume reviewer from SCaLE

“You should be putting your current job at the top.”

— my resume reviewer at LayerOne

“Eh! Don’t care about that.”

“Really? She told you to put that at the top?”

— Sushi Guy’s comment that my current job is irrelevant to the domain of cybersecurity, information technology, or software engineering.

“This is a beautiful resume. Give it to humans at events, but it’s going to confuse ATS.”

— another attendee of the Career Village

I had done the most editing to my resume after SCaLE. But later on, I was caught in a mix of my job, filing taxes, and coursework. I didn’t manage to revise the entire thing before LayerOne. The part I hadn’t updated much was my introduction/self-description at the top. Before I got to LayerOne, I could admit it could be the weakest part. But here, the reviewer wents nuts on picking at it.

A terrible choice of words?

While I think the snippet is now too cringe to quote here. I did use the word “dreams” in the context of actualizing an idea. I was hoping to convey ambition, originality, ideation, ability to derive unique insights from data sets. But the reviewer interpreted that I was an unrealistic/fantasical thinker not a realistic or objective one needed for analytical or software roles. The resume review was frustrating because I was tacked with the concept that I have to be analytical or creative but not both, or that creativity was restricted to entertainment-related career paths.

(I don’t think I could get across to her that I don’t have an art portfolio. Also I think a gamehacking project had reinforced the image of a game development role in her mind despite gamehacking having little overlap with game development.)

As much as I don’t like it, her feedback might be reflective of how hiring managers associate traits with roles. An interview doesn’t have the bandwidth to discuss the applications of creativity outside of entertainment media. Anyway, here’s what she suggested:

• rewrite the introduction to be an objective: that I am looking for a role/position within some industry at a (small/medium/large) company
  • she says “the hiring manager is like a waiter”
• put my W-2 employment history at the top; otherwise, it looks like I’m looking for an “open source job” not a new W-2

Can’t say I agree with her nor that this was a good experience. But definitely, I’ll remove the part that’s easiest to pick at.

Another interesting note, from the attendee that used to work at Boeing:

“Saying ‘I like hacking and CTFs’ on resumes scares companies like Boeing,” she says, because they think you will break things in the process of hacking and tinkering for fun. That’s a strong presumption of lack of self-control, to think an applicant can’t be meticulous when the environment demands it or have nuanced personalities and passions. But what the companies think isn’t in my sphere of influence.

Meshtastic War of Spam and Denial of Service

I was talking with a girl I had met at the Career Village when my friend found us and said.

“Don’t say ‘bee’ on Meshtastic or I’ll ban you.”

She interpreted ‘bee’ as the letter ‘b’, missing all of the context, and was innocently confused on what was going on.

“…You left your radio in the bathroom?” she asked.

This year, a spammer who likes Pixar movies too much virtually ruined any chance of meaningful interactions over Meshtastic. However, my friend who found a critical vulnerability last year, exploited it to “ban” or deny service to the spammer.

A rough summary of how it works is getting the message ID of the spammer and pre-empting the next n messages broadcasted. When other radios see the next messages from the spammer, the new message is assumed to be a duplicate and ignored. This worked until the spammer took notice and worked around the “ban”.

So on the spot, the exploit was updated to ban not only a single sender but multiple. Then later on the spammer changed the script from Bee Movie to Shrek to avoid getting banned, and so on.

Ready LayerOne? (2026)

A trip to LayerOne entailed…

• a discounted stay at a Hilton hotel
• having breakfast and dinner served each day of the event
• a new shirt
• the badge
• the hardware hacking workshop to complete said badge
• attended cool presentations

I didn’t hang around the lockpicking village as much this year, but there typically is cool stuff.

This year I got a fair amount of interest in my gamehacking projects. Sushi Guy seemed interested, and lugging and old gaming PC was worth the effort. I’ll have to not only to pull up the data I collected on the games but make sure the hacks and cheats are working on Linux as they did on Windows.

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