It's a wet Saturday afternoon at a hacker convention in an industrial section of Hamilton, Ontario. Treven Watson's Lucite badge is flashing: blue, green and red. The LED lights are controlled by a circuit in the laser-etched ID. That little bundle of electronics is about to be probed and reprogrammed by Watson and the three dozen other coders, anxious to make it do anything but alternate primary colours.

"There's a tradition in hacker conventions of making badges that can be expanded, can be hacked to do other things," said Watson.

Watson is a member of the Hamilton hacker space think|haus. Attendees at the convention each got their own badge and spent hours seeing who could hack it best.