This month marks a rare IVU; the first meeting at a new location! This was our first meeting at Blue Hummingbird Coffee and Kitchen after the official closing of Gulliver’s. This inaugural location meeting was a general hangout focused on DEF CON prep. Blue Hummingbird served coffee, matcha and food.

We had ~35 attendees this meeting, and people were excitedly sharing their projects and plans for DEF CON 34!

Today marks the end of IVU’s time at Gulliver’s Restaurant in Irvine. After years of graciously supporting IVU and the local hacker community, Gulliver’s is closing for good on June 30th, 2026. This came as a surprise, and details on what’s happening to Gulliver’s and El Torito can be found online:

https://www.ocregister.com/2026/05/27/storied-irvine-steakhouse-announces-closure-after-56-years/

This meeting was instead left as a hangout, or better described as an extra long parking lot con; the casual kickback and chats that normally occur after an IVU meeting. Considering the conditions of the meeting, there was a very large turnout, with most showing to catch one last IVU at Gulliver’s. It’s hard to fully illustrate both the thankfulness we have to the time Gulliver’s gave us, as well as the uncertainty for future meeting locations. Please stay tuned to the website, as well as the IVU for updates on IVU’s future home.

To Gulliver’s, Dennis, Juan, and Deb, thank you for the years of support, and providing IVU a cozy home!

Here are some photos of the final Gulliver’s IVU, and of Gulliver’s.

This is a quick post, but IVU had a table at LayerOne this year! Thanks to all the people who came and chatted, we met a lot of new faces who live near by and plan on attending an IVU in the future.

We hope to see you all one day at a meeting!

This month’s talk came from Wade Wells @WadingThruLogs, a DC858 regular. The talk focused on detection engineering, and how it can be augmented with to use LLMs. As always, IVU was full of excited hackers sharing their experiences, projects, and passion!

Augmented Detection Engineering by WadingThruLogs

Today marks the return of the Artemis II crew, after a 10 day trip around the moon the crew splashed down off the coast of San Diego a few hours before the meeting safely! Everyone at IVU is excited for what the future holds with returning to the moon, and Artemis.

In line with a day of innovation, today’s talk covered a growing hot topic; LLMs. Aask, an IVU regular gave a talk geared around how she learned to love and use the LLM, coming from a place of someone who traditionally disliked LLMs and enjoys the passion of engineering yourself.

Attendance was strong today at 58 attendees!

Dr. StrAIngeLove: Or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to love the LLM by Amelia “Aask” Wietting

For more on ask, she can be found online at aask.ltd

Welcome to another scary Friday the 13th! In the spirit of today, we planned a scary hacker themed movie night. While not necessarily a scary movie, we ended up watching Sneakers, a hacker classic.

This months meeting has good turnout with 59 attendees. Outside of the movie, there were lots of good chats, people sharing projects and just having an overall good time!

Happy Valentine’s Day!

For two years in a row, IVU got to share their Valentine’s week IVU with a talk from Ghriz!
Ghriz is a repeat speaker, and long time helper of IVU.

What’s in my Hacker Backpack by Ghriz

Happy 2026!

IVU started strong into the new year! With high Santa Ana winds, we met in Gulliver’s banquet room instead of the patio. We had 60 attendees, with a healthy number of first timers. The banquet hall was still decked out in Christmas decor, which made for a fun meeting!

Today’s talk came from a DEF CON Game Hacking Village volunteer and walked through the process of game hacking. The talk covered techniques ranging from modifying local values with cheat engine, to writing and injecting custom scripts into a running game process to cheat.

Advanced Modding Workshop: C++ External Doom Trainer by Trevor Mooney

Happy Holidays!

This months talk took a while to compile, but that’s the fun in it as it was put from scratch using Gentoo!

Gentoo Linux: An Introduction by Rocco

Attendance was still strong through the end of the year with 47 attendees!

This months talk featured a repeat speaker, one of our helpers!

Plurality by Remnant

This month featured an interesting maker focused talk on Rose Parade float building by one of IVU’s organizers!
What it Takes to Build a Rose Parade Float by Zhoratrope

Welcome back from DEF CON!

This months featured talk:
“How I Learned to Rob AI” by ProBro(Gold Leader).

DEF CON 33 overlapped with IVU this month so in addition to our monthly meeting, we also hosted a DEF CON party in conjunction with San Diego’s DEF CON group!

The in-person meeting at Gulliver’s still took place, and was a small hang out.

One month out from DEF CON!

This meeting featured two back to back talks:
Nintendo Switch (1) hacking by Remnant
and
A general DEF CON Primer

Our speaker this month came down with COVID last minute, and we instead occupied the meeting with casual hangout night, along with hacker movies!

Duald also brought a portable mock CCDC competition environment and some laptops for people to hack on during the meeting.

Even during a casual meeting, we still had a great turnout of 75 people!