Trivia Walkthrough (DefCon CTF 2008 Qualifier)
The Trivia category was mostly a challenge for exercising your Google-foo if you didn't immediately know the answer out-right.
100: Hack ___ planet
This is the same 100-level question as from 2006 and 2007, only with the last remaining possible word dropped. A really serious "are you paying attention?" trivia question, especially given the write-ups here from prior years. :) Perhaps the 2009 Quals Trivia 100 will be "____ the ______".
Either you immediately recognize this quote and can't stop yourself from shouting "Hack the planet!!", or you have no idea in the world what this could be. This is a quote from the uber-leet movie "Hackers".
200: EAX = 0. EDX is undefined. What is the mnemonic of the one byte instruction to make both zero?
This question received a few updates during the earlier hours of the quals, due to earlier phrasing being valid for many situations or too few. This refers to the x86 instruction set. If one examines a list of instructions, you'll eventually find CDQ, which is used to extend a 4-byte value in EAX to a 8-byte value in EDX:EAX.
300: This security "professional" claimed that while in Colombia, getting a shot in the ass was "the worst thing that ever happened to [him]"
No references were found when answering this question. Due to the quotes around "professional", we could only assume this was Kevin Mitnick, given Kenshoto's undying love for him (and 2006's "Put Kevin Back" sticker campaign). After the quals, we were pointed to this article.
400: What is the value of the $13 register after the attached ASM sequence? file
First, one has to answer "what sort of assembly is this?". Looking for the register names lands us with "Alpha". Looking up Alpha register names, we find that $13 refers to "Saved registers. Preserved across procedure calls." Since the ASM is calling exec, we know the entire process space is being thrown away and restarted. We guessed that the saved register state on a new process would all be "0"s.
500: What kind of motorcycle did metr0 recently buy?
After a little Google-stalking, one can find Metr0's Twitter feed. Going back a few days, there is a lot of discussion about riding, ultimately leading to his GSXR 600 comment. (And some distraction was had watching a turbo charged one.)
After Quals, Google seems to now produce some interesting results when trying to find Metr0's motorcycle.

DefCon CTF 2008 quals