This time of year can be pretty rough in Atlanta. Our humidity hangs right around “Amazonian jungle” levels and the temperature varies between “too hot” and “Bob just burst into flames, I call dibs on his iPod.” My psyche is already in a delicate condition. That might be why news from two conferences, Black Hat and Defcon, have inspired me to entertain the notion of going off the grid.

Black Hat is a technical security conference and Defcon is a convention for hackers. Both conferences hold panel discussions about computer security and system vulnerabilities. And every year journalists report on the dozens of ways computer hackers could send the modern world shrieking into the Dark Ages with a few deft keystrokes. That might be a slight exaggeration but these guys have me concerned.

Here’s a roundup of some of the stories that broke at the two conferences:

At a Black Hat demo, a couple of hackers unveiled a flaw in smartphone technology — including Apple’s iPhone — that would allow a hacker to hijack a phone simply by sending an SMS message. Apple has since released a patch that addresses this vulnerability. More stories behind the jump.