DEF Con 28: Safe Mode | Hacker News Reader

DEF Con 28: Safe Mode

defcon.outel.org

108 pointstodsacerdoti44 comments

Attending DEF Con 28 virtually will be made easy for you. Soon you will be sent an .EXE in email. Just click to run it. Click Install when it opens.

Then you can easily attend DEF Con 28 remotely.

Thank you so much for that long Laugh! Oh, and uh... can you give me a hand, I really want to attend DEF Con 28 virtually, but I'm having a bit of a problem logging in with this .EXE file on my Linux box.

Try it in WINE in a VM?

There is no such .exe. Talks have been pre-recorded and online Q/A sessions are being conducted: https://defcon.org/html/defcon-safemode/dc-safemode-quicksta...

They were both joking! Sending out an executable to attend an event is the exact type of action DEFCON hopes to prevent.

Oh my lol

What are your favorite talks you've watched so far?

I enjoyed Bill Graydon's talk on "bruteforcing" physical/metal keys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suN0IsifTyY

Another minimalist view of this I recommend is the Hacker Tracker app. I think it defaults to DEF CON, but if not, you can change the conference it's tracking in the settings.

I want to watch docs but I don't even know where to start with this massive page:/

I agree its hard to find things on that page. These links might help:

https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2028/DEF%20CON%20Safe%20M...

https://www.youtube.com/user/DEFCONConference/videos

Thanks.

The page was terrible.

I'm open to constructive criticism and comments. What would you change to improve it? What made it bad?

I'm not the person you're replying to, but I'll offer my 2 cents.

Frankly, there is a TON of info present, and as someone who hasn't yet attended an on-site DEFCon (though I hope to someday), it's a bit overwhelming.

I certainly understand the appeal of a plain text format, but personally, I think it would be a big improvement to have a schedule grid (think TV guide or similar) with the village on one axis and the time slot on the other.

I think this would make skimming over the schedule a lot easier overall, as well as making it easier to focus on a particular village or time slot, while still being able to relate/compare it to the others. I also think this is especially helpful since the talks vary in size and can overlap with each other, so having a visual representation would IMO make it a lot easier to see at-a-glance what the conflicts are.

Of course, this could just be my personal preference, as this is what is used by several of other conferences I have attended or do regularly attend. I'm certainly no UI expert.

The srt files add noise. There could be topic tags or some otjer structure.

I can chat on Discord any day.

I wish people would not use Discord.

I wish they would use open source tools like Matrix or Zulip.

Dark Tangent (created DEF CON) stated in the Welcome video that they chose Discord based on moderation and tooling built on its extensibility. Also that had stability under load; “gamers are pretty abusive”.

https://youtu.be/pn68aAZc5Sg @2:57

Discord is really good, I would drag people to federated open alternatives if it were good. Zulip looks, feels, and runs kinda okay overall. I could probably do it well if it were my job, the stuff Discord does well is in my wheelhouse.

I want to get off of it because of the PRC connection, but it's where the community is at for now.

XMPP is probably the worst thing that ever happened to open standard instant messaging.

Sigh, thanks for pointing this out. I didn't realise Discord also had strong ties to Tencent.

I really avoid it anyway as I'm already on WAY too many chat apps. But some communities like the one for Home Assistant are really strongly into it.

Yeah Discord is really well-made. That's why I didn't tell that it was shit and that open source is better.

It's just that maybe it would help if cool people used the open source one. It would give them visibility, more bug reports, more pull requests, more donations.

Matrix isn't bad. Sure it's better to host your own server right now since their main one is often overloaded.

And the UX stuff is getting better and the p2p changes should be awesome.

Matrix for HOPE was solid as hell.

From the backend of it (I was on the team for it) Even with our "light" load, Matrix/Riot is a overbloated product overall. To handle the scale of Defcon would require hardware I don't think exists

I ran the Matrix server for HOPE and have fairly extensive experience administrating Matrix. For HOPE, we didn't even begin to approach anything that looked like capacity; any resources that were maxing out were either due to the DoS attack we were enduring (and made numerous changes to mitigate) during the conf, or applications in different threads that matrix metrics were picking up on (bug filed, will fixed in new versions).

Even so, we could easily - without a sweat - get 2000 people on a server. I wasn't even using more workers than we had cores. Make that a bigger box and you get a few thousand more. Then use a few different servers that are federated with each other for DEFCON and you have instant scale.

The matrix.org people run the matrix.org homeserver for over ~200k active users. You can see an outdated version of the stats here: https://matrix.org/faq/#what-is-the-current-project-status and they've said their active userbase has grown 300% in the past year.

The original plan for HOPE was to run multiple homeservers, but we didn't even begin to need to.

Also soonish, we'll have dendrite (go) and conduit (rust).

EDIT: And eventually p2p which might change everything.

The matrix.org server deployment handles around 100K concurrent users these days across ~4M rooms, with ~30Hz of messages in and ~3000Hz of messages out - and these days has average traffic send time under 100ms.

DEFCON should be trivial by comparison, and as others have said, the HOPE server (2500 users or so) was a resounding success - so much so that it’s been set up as permenant fixture now post conference.

Now, it’s true that the Synapse server implementation has to be tuned - for large userbases you need worker processors and to dial up the caches a bit. And needless to say you need postgres rather than sqlite.

Kinda depressing that nobody from DEFCON synced with the Matrix team (to my knowledge) on how best to do this, rather than just writing it off as slow and bloated.

>XMPP is probably the worst thing that ever happened to open standard instant messaging.

Could you elaborate? I'm curious as to why you think that.

XMPP works with a lot of extensions (XEP), used for things like file transfers, avatars, alerts... and every client implements different XEP... so the interoperability is non-existent.

While the various xep might be a confounding factor - the biggest issue I see today with xmmp is that end to end encryption and perfect forward secrecy is optional and bolted on.

I think Facebook and Google's embrace-extend-extinguish (both fb messenger/chat and gtalk used xmpp - neither allowed federation - and created artificial silos) was probably the worst thing for open standard chat.

Gmail isn't quite big enough to have been able to fracture email yet - but not for lack of trying (years of poor imap support, strange handling of threads/top-posting etc).

Eh, there are discovery mechanisms for which features are supported by which server/client.

The biggest problem with XMPP, is that it's really confusing and has a steep learning curve. The barrier for someone to get into XMPP as a developer is quite high, unfortunately. There are libraries like Smack that makes it a lot easier to use, but to understand it... that's something entirely different.

The abundance of XEP's doesn't help, and like you mentioned, everyone implements their own XEP based on their interpretations - right or wrong.

There's also a lot of peculiarities with XMPP that aren't expected in a modern world, such as offline messaging and multi-device messaging (receiving messages on both your phone and desktop simultaneously). XMPP was never intended to support these things. Some servers will attempt to imitate these features, but it's always a hack and works with varying degrees of reliability.

With all that said - we drove an XMPP Server (Openfire) and clients within our company for well over a decade. For that use - it's amazing.

>Some servers will attempt to imitate these features, but it's always a hack and works with varying degrees of reliability.

That is no longer true in practice...

>Discord is really good

It's not good. It kills the battery on my pixel 3 in less than 18 hours if I use it. Under no circumstances can such an app be described as "really good".

Discord’s TOS prohibits, among other things, the posting of political cartoons, even in DM. You are not allowed to use the service to ridicule anyone.

That sounds preposterous. Do you have more info on this?

EDIT: From the Discord TOS - https://discord.com/new/terms

As an example, you agree not to use the Service in order to:

- post, upload, transmit or otherwise disseminate information that is objectionable as outlined in our Community Guidelines;

- defame, libel, ridicule, mock, stalk, threaten, harass, intimidate or abuse anyone;

- engage in conduct that is fraudulent or illegal or otherwise harmful to Discord or any other user;

- ...

Also from the community guidelines - https://discord.com/new/guidelines

Here are some rules for interacting with others:

- Do not organize, participate in, or encourage harassment of others. Disagreements happen and are normal, but continuous, repetitive, or severe negative comments may cross the line into harassment and are not okay.

- Do not organize, promote, or coordinate servers around hate speech. It’s unacceptable to attack a person or a community based on attributes such as their race, ethnicity, national origin, sex, gender, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, or disabilities.

- ...

Did you notice the part where you can't use alternative clients and Discord scans all your messages?

I'm guessing it's this clause?

>Do not organize, promote, or coordinate servers around hate speech. It’s unacceptable to attack a person or a community based on attributes such as their race, ethnicity, national origin, sex, gender, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, or disabilities

I can definietly imagine some religious people claiming to be "attacked" by a political cartoon, eg. the charlie hebdo cartoon

It is the clause that literally says ridicule (“defame, libel, ridicule, mock, stalk, threaten, harass, intimidate or abuse anyone”).

No mocking anyone, political leaders included, anywhere on Discord, per the TOS.

I wish the open source tools were better, the gap is just too wide.

Or IRC!

Absolutely! The lack of 'features' like stickers, giphys, videos etc is a feature in itself for me!

Honestly though, after having used slack at work, i definitely feel that not having random thingies dance in the corner of my screen is the killer feature of irc

You might like: https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack

Thanks, that actually looks perfect.

And a searchable history.

One day, brother...

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