No, my absence from posting has not been a thinly veiled ploy to give myself lots of air time on my own blog. But just in case you missed the video of me scroll down. Enough about me. I want to talk to you about sheep.

The primary reason for my blog absence was a genuine fear to open my computer on my maiden voyage to the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas. Black Hat is a computer hackers conference. And ding dong network security neophytes like myself are easy prey to being hacked. Which is kind of the idea. Learning from experiencing.

Along with nefarious hackers, the benevolent hackers that run Black Hat sniff the wi-fi and wired networks to search for anyone who has unwittingly compromised their own computer security by sending a login and password in the clear. This can happen when logging into an email, facebook or any other online account. The plain as day transmission is captured and placed on the wall of sheep. It is a way of publicly embarrassing you into smarter security practices. If your name ends up on the wall of sheep, there are a room full of seasoned hackers available to teach you how to secure your network practices and your computer.

The social scene at Black Hat is antithetical to what I’m used to in Hollywood. No-one talks about what they do. Conversely, as I found out, asking people what they do is a brilliant way to get a fish eye look and to lose 30 points from your credit rating.

Black Hat attracts hackers of all levels and genres. At any time you could be chatting with a notorious computer criminal or a patriotic counter terrorism expert. No one ever knows. And it is that adherence and respect for anonymity that makes Black Hat so amazing. Everyone there is talking and sharing information.

I lost count of the different languages I heard. And I’m still trying to absorb all the information I was exposed to. But thanks to many of the folks there who regard no question as stupid I learned and incredible amount that has already benefitted me and my company. I also made some brilliant new friends. Although I couldn’t tell you what any of them do.