If you are in the Cleveland, Ohio area you should check out the local con called Notacon. Similar to Defcon or ShmooCon but much smaller and in my opinion more unique. From the Notacon web site:
“NOTACON, an annual conference held in Cleveland, Ohio, explores and showcases technologies, philosophy and creativity often overlooked at other “hacker cons”. Our desire is not to supplant other events, but complement them and strike a balance that has gone unnoticed in our community for far too long.
With each new year we build upon the successes and knowledge of the previous years. Our goal is to enlighten, educate, and entertain attendees, presenters, and staff alike. We try to do this by finding new ways to apply technology to graphics, art, music, or social interaction.
Notacon espouses an ethos of exploration, participation and positive contributions. Hence, while some of the material we may cover is controversial or potentially “black hat” in nature, we feel it is important to bring light to all topics so that everyone can learn from the experience and create something good, fun or interesting from it.
Events during Notacon run from Friday morning through Sunday afternoon. These include over 40 presentations, contests such as “Anything but Ethernet”, game shows, prize giveaways and a whole lot of who-knows-what. Anything can happen, and usually does. “
It’s also affordable! $50 gets you into the con for the whole weekend. Looks like they have some interesting talks planned including “Bagcam – How did TSA and/or the airlines manage to do that to your luggage?” and the “Exploit-Me Series: Firefox Plug-ins for Application Penetration Testing”.