It’s also painfully corporate. It used to be Defcon attendees would make fun of black hat attendees. Now they’re the same people.
It’s no where near the same feeling it was years ago. Too expensive for the value you get out of it.
It’s no where near the same feeling it was years ago. Too expensive for the value you get out of it.
I'm confused about this part of your comment.. To my understanding "black hat" means that you are not caring about laws and ethics. Yet it sounds like you are using the word to describe the corporate security types?
Now Defcon is the same way. They even take pre-payment and I'm old enough to remember when DT would've NEVER even floated that idea. I went for 20 years. I quit going after 2018. IMO it died around 2010 but kept floating for a while before sinking.
There are regional conferences that are much closer in spirit to the Defcon of the 1990s, but while some of that is due to not having a vendor expo (not my favorite Black Hat innovation either), some of it is also due to early Defcon being pretty superficial and non-rigorous. Better if you're looking for a particular kind of social scene, worse if you actually want to see interesting new research.
What a bizarre complaint. Are we talking about the ability to buy tickets online? Do people not know how to make online payments anonymously?
FYI just about every long running convention sells early bird tickets before they've even secured the exhibits and speakers. Cashflow is critical for making anything happen IRL
Defcon was quite literally the target of federal fishing expeditions. They were especially heavy when Defcon was often hosting some of the best hackers the planet had to offer. Long before the asinine term "offensive security researcher" was a thing. You operated entirely by handle (unless you were an idiot) and there was even a "spot the fed" competition. Famously, a journalist was ran out of the conference trying to film To Catch A Hacker (or something, the memory is fading).
The cash-at-the-door was a safety mechanism to prevent such fishing expeditions. At Defcon you were always under attack. That is, until it became a corporate playground. Now it's a place where skids go to buy the newest pineapple and stuffy suits go to network with other "researchers".
You really had to be there to understand. Woodstock For Hackers is a close approximation. For those of us that were there during it's hey-day seeing what it is today is like watching your favorite hero live long enough to become the villain. 15 years ago the idea of "responsible disclosure" would've been the punchline of a joke at a small Track 3 talk.
You were at an in-person event, thinking that cash somehow kept you more anonymous than online payments?
I think this is just a generational gap.
The hacker community is alive and well (even at DEF CON), but in my experience you have to look harder to find it.
The AP _hated_ us but they had a multi-year contract.