When DEF CON partners with the U.S. Army

I'd love to go to defcon, but I fear it'll end up like every other conference I go to: wandering around, watching a few talks, ending up at a few semi-boring cocktail hours, etc. Maybe I'm that anti-cool enough to get auto-filtered?

I joined a local discord / defcon chapter, and it was mostly reminiscing about the good old days and most people saying they weren't going this year.

As a longtime attendee myself, this is absolutely true.

Also, DEFCON and DT specifically have not shifted anywhere. A large demographic of attendees shifted hard to the left, mirroring our culture in general. They are also not "counterculture" as these are mainstream/televised points of view.

I had to stop dealing with certain parts/people of DEFCON and infosec in general because of this intense noise. That's not pegging myself as being on the right, it's just that my DEFCON experience has always been about expanding my worldview and fun... this very loud and influential group isn't about either of those things.

Feds and criminals coming together is the point for many clandestine operations

"it's counterculture if you ignore all the military/mass surveillance stuff" doesn't strike me as a strong defense

Kool-Aid man lives in the world of corporate logos...

Yeah... shots of water is as "counter-culture" as it gets...

Skytalks happened this year and was better attended than ever. Getting a seat was extremely competitive, people lined up for several hours for a single talk token. I would have loved to go to some, but unfortunately there was a ton of other stuff I wanted to see so I didn't have time to stand in line.

They were a side conference to a side conference, but the structure let them run things the way they wanted, which is important.

Scared them off? Is there any documentation of that? My understanding is that the split was amicable. SkyTalks has immunocompromised people on staff and they chose to voluntarily leave defcon because they wanted to continue masking mandates while Defcon did not. Bsides welcomed them with support in their conference(helping with Token Drops and scheduling) and Skytalks occupies a space that is physically separated from Bsides(as in a different hotel on its top floor).

SkyTalks are as awesome as they always were, I'd argue its even better since now you dont have to sacrifice other things at defcon to see skytalks. You can now have dedicated time for skytalks.

That Skytalks still requires masking is absurd. I saw the organizers at DEFCON walking around with no masks. The last skytalks at DEFCON a couple of years ago was pretty bad anyways, really disappointing.

what happened with the lock pick village?

Felt like counter culture to me when I went to my first one (DC11). I remember punk kids selling manuals and lineman sets they stole out of the back of telco trucks outside the entrance of Alexis Park.

Vegas (and Orlando) are probably the two cheapest places to travel to in North America. Hotels and flights are both plentiful and cheap. Before Covid you could get like $60 a night hotels on the strip and $150 flights.

CCC would be better but REcon is kind of niche because it’s focus is reverse engineering and not “hacking”in general.

CCC is just Euro-Defcon. It's fine if you prefer Europe over Vegas (understandable!) or winter to summer, but otherwise: it's the same thing.

Something something discreet hookers and a company credit card.

Congress may be considered "better" in the sense that the MIC would not find a forum there (and would be relentlessly made fun of). More importantly and as to your point about the expensiveness: The Club and all the volunteers put an inordinate amount of work in making Congress as accessible as possible on many levels.

I go to CCC and Defcon every year and they are night and day.

CCC actively discourages companies from advertising unless they are fully open source community driven orgs. Governments are even less welcome.

While even the Privacy Village at Defcon asks you to agree to the terms of service of Discord, Slack, Youtube, and other corpos... CCC self hosts everything including Voip, IRC, Matrix, 3G, 4G, and DECT, all linked together in various ways.

While Defcon has strictly controlled talks approved by sponsors and appointees of the Defcon corporation that themselves work for mostly proprietary corporations, CCC is an entirely volunteer driven organization from top to bottom and you can give a talk anywhere you want about anything 24 hours a day as long as someone else has not already reserved that spot.

While Defcon has villages reserved and approved by committee and corporate sponsors, at CCC any community can apply for table or an area and almost all are granted as space relative to the size of the community. You can do basically anything you want with your space. You can also access the event and your space 24/7 so the hacking and party never fully stops.

I go to Defcon because it is the corporate paid excuse a handful of actually capable hackers I like to hang out with have to hang out. And maybe two or three talks worth seeing.

I go to CCC because it is the nearest place I can go experience thousands of actual hackers that believe in making the world better through open source, right to repair, music, art, and maximizing sharing and collaboration. Almost every person I talk to is an instant friend. People who largely agree technical talents are meant for more than raising shareholder value.

I love CCC and I keep going in hopes I can bring some of that back with me to silicon valley.

If anyone goes to CCC be sure to visit the Church of Cryptography which I am usually around.

Defcon is a "joke" compared to CCC.

You do 10 things at a small conference, everyone says "we need more of X{0}..X{9}", you have more things next year, more people, everyone wants more of whatever, more people, more problems with more people (security, cost, sponsors,..), more attention of mainstream media, more people next year, more push for politics, more people, more issues with more people, etc., and in the end, you get a boring business conference like many others.

I'm pretty sure that each of the niches could make their own conference now, at some small venue where a 100, 200, 500 people would come... SNES hacking and development? Sure, a small, really nice conference... but then someone would want NES too, and N64, and sega, and PS1, and corporate sponsors, and you end up with E3 instead of 50 retro developers and 150 curious people doing interesting stuff.

It is but you have to intentionally keep it small and limit tickets. I think one of the issues that Defcon has is that they just don't cap tickets; historically they could not, because you could only buy a badge with cash so there was no way of predicting how many people would show up.

CCC might be able to survive because it’s European and multi lingual

> This happens to literally every convention ever, not surprising at all.

The CCC would never.

Europe, for all its authoritarianism and infringements of human rights (even in relatively liberal places like Germany) still seems to be trying to not backslide into full-on military-industrial complex like the US is/has.

Maybe What Hackers Yearn or CCC?

This implies that you believed Moss was somehow a black hat before he got involved with Homeland Security Advisory Council, which is pretty funny. People just make these things up and state them confidently.

DEFCON talks are for watching on Youtube when they get uploaded weeks/months from now. It's always been about contests/challenges and partying. It's a con of cons.

Would be a great idea, except they couldn't even operate WiFi with any stability (to which I heard was a LVCC problem, but I don't know that for sure).

Cool, whats your handle so I can suggest your name to organizers to set it up for them