Welcome back to IVU! This month’s IVU took place on the 3rd Friday of the month due to scheduling conflicts. Regardless, attendance was good with ~60 attendees! This month’s talk came from snow, an IVU organizer.

Your Data Would Like a Word by cryoticbytes (snow)

The talk was data privacy focused, and there was lots of excited audience participation, and discussion around the growth of modern surveillance.

Outside of the talk, there was lots of hacker show and tell.

• A member’s active cyberdeck project
• Another member’s CTF hosted entirely on an ESP32 (coming to a future IVU for a full showcase)

Happy August IVU!

IVU this month did not overlap with DEF CON, so there was a larger crowd than normal for August, topping out at ~45 attendees. This was a DEF CON recap meeting, with no formal speaker. There was a swag and sticker swap table, and a few impromptu discussions.

• IVU Helper Ghriz led a short open discussion on the Delta Flights WiFi Pineapple incident. More about the incident can be found here.
• IVU Attendee Amoeba had a show and tell of their PC backpack for playing Warframe on the go. Built around a mini PC, and a Vietnam era military surplus radio carrier.
• ScavHunt organizers DualD and Zhora celebrated the ScavHunt team “Broke Through”‘s historic list clearing win with an Elmo cake! The themed cake pokes fun at the consistent return of Elmo themed items and shenanigans across DEF CON ScavHunt years.

This year, IVU hosted another joint party with DC 858!
A few IVUers got black badges this year, some wanted to go unmentioned, but one group of IVUers won black badges by winning The DEF CON Scavenger Hunt! This comes with a historic achievement for ScavHunt; in the first time in 29 years, they were the only team to complete the entire list.

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).