DEF CON's response to the badge controversy
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Defcon stiffs badge HW vendor, drags FW author offstage during talk - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41207221 - Aug 2024 (118 comments)
I don’t know the terms of their contract, but that wouldn’t fly in a typical contractor setup. You can’t just cut out the contractors labor costs after the fact. I’d be more inclined to give DEFCON the benefit of the doubt if they canceled the entire project earlier on and engaged a different contractor to build an entirely different badge from scratch.
Given that dimitri wasn’t even paid for the firmware(!), my guess is this was low budget. For something of DEFCON’s scale, this can’t really be a “for fun” hacker project if you want to guarantee results. The “for fun” part is ensuring the attendees can all have a good time hacking on the badge, not the people doing the labor.
I was on a defence project that overshot by a cool billion dollars on the SOW...
I was under the mistaken understanding that EE was not paid out at all. Rereading their statement, they say they were partially paid, so I think I was overly harsh. This is firmly in “boring, messy contract dispute” territory now, I’d say. :)
After going overbudget by more than 60%, [and] several bad-faith charges
Which, again, pattern matches to a pretty common mode in which consulting projects blow up: you give an optimistic estimate, learn partway into the project that you were hopelessly off, and then try to invoice your way through it.
If you agree to get monthly invoices instead of one fixed cost project, then you are implicitly agreeing that costs are variable.
Once a month, we billed for our work and submitted an updated estimated per badge final cost - committing as costs built to discount our work as necessary in order to hit DEFCON’s per unit cost targets.
In June, after 5 months of late night work, badges were fully designed, prototypes were working, and mass production was ongoing with the manufacturers we contracted on behalf of DEFCON. We billed DEFCON for our most recent work, discounting our labor by 25% in order to meet the agreed upon targets. Unfortunately, we were instead met with a work stoppage request and informed we would no longer be paid for services already rendered.
Easiest way for me to reconcile these is by assuming that DEF CON’s statement about going 60% over budget is referring to the estimated per badge final cost, not actual invoices. But yea, it’s hard to know what happened here just based on these statements.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31526196
I'm guessing that's not what they did, though, since DEF CON comes right out and says they submitted bad-faith invoices. That's a factual, falsifiable claim, and a commercially damaging, actionable claim if it's false.
Entropic Engineering should not have gone through with this project on this timescale of 6 months with a new chip. Defcon badge team doesn't know how to properly outsource electronics, collaborate and do risk management.
This also seems to be implied by Entropic, which say they did work on the badge after DEF CON stopped paying them for it.
Its not after the fact, thats exactly what Stop-Work Order was for.
Entropic statement:
https://www.entropicengineering.com/defcon-32-statement
dmitrygr statement:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41207469
dmitrygr being removed:
I still think DEFCON should've done better. their brand is in the shitter over what $20k?
The idea that DEF CON's brand is "in the shitter" seems risible. I say that ruefully, as (in my declining years) I get more and more bitter about the comic convention spectacle the event has become. Whatever the outcome from "badge-gate", I assure you, they'll set attendance records next year regardless.
Let him give his talk like they promised.
Given literally everyone in that room is using his work in that same moment and they are literally there to hear him speak.
And the original question of how the situation could have been handled better is the most interesting one. The rest is a game of he said/she said, which hn commenters tend to enjoy arguing about but is ultimately not very instructive.
With hindsight it is clear that the situation had been brewing for some time, and the conflict had been escalating slowly. Perhaps due to the pressure and stress (and time pressure) of organising an event like that nobody managed to have enough distance to deescalate it, which culminated in someone being escorted off stage by security, not a good experience for anyone.
Most likely once the invitation to talk had been rescinded the dice were thrown. It would have been hard for the speaker not to be offended, and unfair on him to expect him to take it quietly and move on without reacting. Someone should have been aware of that and worked with him to control the impact of this on his own reputation.
They made the software for the badge of your entire conference, for free, and then you won’t let them talk about it because what you got for free, wasn’t what you expected/wanted?
That’s just dumb on so many levels I don’t even know where to begin.
It’s like playing, no, selling someone elses mod and complaining it’s not up to the standards of a finished game.
I think an easter egg that includes a monetary solicitation is (at best) in poor taste, regardless of the circumstances. But canceling his talk 30 minutes prior to its start time for that? Nope, not cool. DEFCON's behavior in disinviting him was much much worse than his action that triggered it.
You are saying this like it is unreasonable, but it seems entirely reasonable to me.
Just because you do something for free does not entitile you to a conference talk about it. If you wanted to be paid for it (and make no mistake, a conference talk is a form of compensation. In many conferences companies pay huge sums of money to have a platform) then they should have got a contract.
Especially since they were okay with him giving the talk as long as he apologized. And he offered to say “I didn’t mean to offend anyone”.
So for a misunderstanding and mistake to drag him off the stage is stupid and ridiculous.
> What should they have done better? They didn't have the option of doing better with Dmitry, right? He deliberately set up the confrontation with security.
Maybe I misunderstood, I previously read that as “what could they have done better about the situation”.
Did you mean “what could they have done better once he was at the stage?”
The "drag him off the stage" thing was his own arrangement.
It sounds like defcon was mad at EE for going over budget - which honestly is fair even though they didn’t handle it well. And thought (wrongly) that Dmitry was a salty subcontractor of theirs. Their actions make some sense in that context. Not great, but eh.
But Dmitry has totally owned them in messaging - by forcing them to physically eject him (making a scene), and getting out ahead of the story. It’s great drama. He’s positioned defcon to look like an evil corporate buffoon hating on a hacker who was just donating his time.
At this point, defcon should take the L and apologise, and let him have a session talking about the code. That would be a very satisfying end to the drama for attendees. (Even if it does encourage more drama in future years.)
Either way, I agree - I’m sure attendance will go up next year too. People love this stuff.
It probably shouldn't have had the Bitcoin address, but it doesn't sound like that would have been treated much differently.
But it's objectively an easter egg. Why the scare quotes?
And unpaid programmers doing cheeky things with code because they want to is the heart of DEFCON.
I can see where DEFCON is coming from with the calls they made here. But it’s a mistake to treat Dimitri as if he were a vendor. He's not.
>PS: there are a few easter eggs in the stock badge firmware, try to find them or come to the badge talk at DEFCON to see for yourself ;)
I surveyed the ground tonight and found two that are interesting: Recon (in Montreal) and CCC (in Hamburg).
What do you think?
I've never heard anyone say anything but good things about REcon. I have FOMO about having never been.
It is an excellent conference that I've enjoyed every single time I've gone
Is it though? With 20+ attendances behind my belt, I was already sour on the experience at 2018 and didn't go in 2019 due to a family conflict and haven't been back since.
Not only did "badgelife" absolutely ruin the whole fucking experience, but I started seeing large numbers of people start getting othered and excluded because of running afoul of idpol which IMO is entirely counter to the spirit of what the con had always been about.
It permeates throughout the meta events of the con, like Ollam's Shoot, where you're warned very much in advance with overt threats to not express an opinion that even remotely smells right-wing while his staffers proudly wave antifa banners and shout the merits of being radleft.
At the same time, my experience with the security industry as a whole is that most vendors are completely full of shit and spend all of their time chasing after fake clout (and all of the shady bullshit that goes along with it).
Y’all need project managers, at least someone with a plan! jeez.
It requires a very specific skill set to be able to lead a technical project and cut through the bullshit on BOTH SIDES: the client asking for features and the team building the product.
Clients always either ask for stuff they don't really need or have vague requirements that crystallise only 3 days after the deadline. "Of course when we said it needs to do foo, it also MUST do bar, doh!"
And teams tend to overestimate their ability to deliver and underestimate the work needed to get to the finish. (Infinite coast problem).
An exaggerated/anonymized version of a recent one I got, from an otherwise-really-strong senior engineer: "Of course when I said we would put a button there, it also meant we MUST build an entire UI framework from scratch, with full test coverage for the entire thing!"
...actually, that's not even that exaggerated. Shipping software at big companies can be unreasonably difficult, sometimes.
I've studied project management, I've managed projects and lead teams, but holy crap those people are on a whole other level with how well they gather and disseminate information and communicate it effectively.
None of them could code themselves out of a wet paper bag, but that's not the skill they get hired for.
We have better tools today, but it takes a skilled practitioner to wield them well. Yes I'm talking about Jira and I hate sitting down and pointing things too, but managing a large complex project with a large number of humans is real actual work and a full time job in and of itself. sometimes even more than one person can handle. places that I've seen are successful are able to recognize that, and don't treat it as dead weight.
Or do what every other event does, and don't make your badges so complicated they need a project manager
Every other event has badges that look like they cost substantially less than $1. I'm not saying they have to go that cheap - but when you're hiring a project manager to coordinate the multiple teams, schedule challenges, and providers biting off more than they can chew? Maybe scale things back a bit.
Me and a partner designed an insert that fit into that injection molded part and it had games. You could even connect via RS232 if you had the right board and it would print out DEFCON in ASCII then it had whole menu of games.
We sold this add on for $20 at cost to recoup our costs. Sold about 100+ of these add ons.
DEFCON definitely bit off more than they could chew.
We designed our add on around a cheap STM32 series chip and wrote the code ourselves in C. It didn’t have an emulator like this as this is like an entire gaming platform that DEFCON created. But ours was more like DOS level game add on that took us a couple months to make and have produced. We made the stickers ourselves and cut acrylic ourselves.
As for the cost of the badge, sourcing even sub-$1 badge is still a project. And especially when your target audience is somewhat skilled at counterfeiting such things.
If you're saying not to have a cool gizmo at all, I think that's too harsh of a lesson.
The fact that Dmitry was still pushing changes on the aeroplane, although he seemed to frame this as a positive, doesn't exactly inspire a lot of confidence in their professionalism, viewed from the outside.
Ah yes, classic "insert an unauthorized coin wallet soliciting money from badge owners" easter egg. Timeless prank, how could anyone be mad at such a normal and anodyne "easter egg"?
lmao DEFCON's "brand" isn't in any danger.
edit: And now he's pulling the classic hacker move of (checks notes) enforcing strict software IP ownership rights? Guy's a class act all around. Hope everyone learned an important lesson about Dmitry and Entropic with this mess.
When I write code that nobody is paying for, you better believe I’ll write it how I damn well please. If you aren’t paying, you aren’t the customer. And you don’t get to control the output of my work.
The wallet address soliciting donations is for the hardware company, not on his own behalf. But even if it was on his own behalf, would you still be mad? Since when is it a crime to be proud of the code you’ve written, for free, to bring joy to an hacker conference? That deserves mad credit in my book.
I fail to see the problem.
And in this case it wasn’t an ad. It was a page saying you could donate to the hardware company if you want, who were out of pocket $100k for making the hardware. That’s an incredibly tame prank by Defcon standards.
Even if Entropic shat the bed so badly that DEFCON's takeover of badge production was actually warranted (I'm super skeptical of this claim), the badges still consisted nearly entirely of Entropic's & Dmitry's work. DEFCON's removal of credit from the badge case was deeply unethical.
You're under no obligation to write code. You are under an obligation not to sneak an advert into someone else's conference via essentially fraudulent means.
Just because nobody is paying you, doesn't mean you have carte blanche to do whatever you want.
I dont think this is a controversial opinion. If someone created a piece of open source software but hid a trojan or cryptominer in it people would find it objectionable. You could quibble about where the line is, but i think everyone agrees that just because something is free does not give you the absolute right to do whatever you want.
We aren't talking about client work here. We're talking about defcon, where cheekily thumbing your nose at authority through code is the heart and soul of the conference. This single, hidden page asking for donations on behalf of the hardware company is a total nothingburger. Getting up in arms about it for being unprofessional is ridiculous.
People in this thread do seem to be very upset about a hacker doing hacker things. For a bit more irony, we're on Hacker News...
Doing it as counterplay to a lack of credit is a great hack.
Just imagine what would happen if you created a shareware scene in the software of some company you work for. You would get fired (and possibly sued) so fast it would make your head spin.
"They expressed that they specifically wanted to work with us as a woman-owned, queer- and POC-driven engineering firm to develop an electronic badge with a gaming element for this year’s conference."
I would have expected the core criteria to be ability to execute on time. Choosing an engineering firm based on the race, gender, or sexual orientation of the owner is foolish, and DEF CON is ultimately to blame for introducing superfluous criteria and missing the core criteria.
They could have easily rephrased that sentence to simply say “They expressed interest in working with us” and the point they’re making is the same.
It could easily be that multiple teams looked qualified during bidding for the job and that this was the distinguishing factor.
If it was meant to be a point then it can make people think that those with that societal lean are poor performers. It’s not helping their cause.
Obviously as a private group DEF CON’s organizers have every right to contract with whatever companies they want to. In the same way, obviously the private individuals paying DEF CON’s organizers have every right to criticize them when they treat their contractors so poorly. However , I think it’s short-sighted and self-defeating to suggest that they shouldn’t ALSO have the right to criticize their choice of companies they work with when it impacts the quality of what they’re paying for.
This is not a sexist, anti-POC, or anti-trans criticism. Deciding on contractors for the reasons they claimed they did would be illegal in the public sector under France’s anti-discrimination laws, under Germany’s Grundgesetz, under Japan’s GPA, under the UK’s Equality Act in many cases, etc.
If I remember correctly there are some laws about discrimination by sexual orientation etc
To explain myself, try to imagine that they said to have been picked because white cis men
>and, especially, keeping a community eye on law enforcement and conference security to help ensure our friend Dmitry’s safety in the last 48 hours.
Has there been anything in all this that would suggest anyone was in danger at the conference?
This kind of comment about safety is pretty standard among very progressive communities anytime anyone disagrees with them.
Depends on how much you danger you consider someone making unwanted physical contact and restraining your movements.
Not only did they have law enforcement intervene in his removal, but goons continued to threaten his removal and he was banned from the discord.
If I look at the Defcon30 badge from 2022. It's the same thing. A small random engineering shop is selected and gets the order. And you get a nice little badge that can do stuff.
For the Dutch hacker camps we look a bit more long term and the engineers and designers have been part of the core team since 2017. And for 2025 we're already well underway.
There's a nice overview website with all the events around The Netherlands. https://hackeropuit.nl/
How can you say that when badges were on time and working at the end of the day?
But this breakdown in trust, too short timescales, using a new chip, not backing it up with extra funding and choosing this engineering company remains Defcons responsibility for running the project and realising a product.
Without full payment of the development costs, the IP for the PCB probably was still owned by EE and they could have stopped production. This shit show could have been prevented.
[0] the boring version without moving obstacles, PVC pipes, or fiberglass dinosaurs - further adding insult to injury
Or some less formal consent was understood, and considered low-risk?
Or were they otherwise legally empowered to do that?
(I'm thinking about civil and criminal liability.)
I'm asking out of curiosity about how that actually works, in practice, not what arguments we could imagine.
(For example: Say, someone rushes up on stage during a rock music concert. Was removal covered in the fine print terms of the ticket? Are the security personnel deputized by local law enforcement? Are there special ordinances applying to security at some kinds of events? Do the event organizers fall back on the claim that they felt safety was threatened? Do the event organizers think any risk of penalties or lawsuit is less than the cost of disrupting the event? Does setting precedent for response also factor into the calculus? How is insurance and venue contracts involved? Etc. There's a some related history, involving the Hell's Angels at a concert, but I don't know how practice has evolved since then.)
Cops do not want to be called for every bouncer action.
The owner (or the one renting the property) has legal rights and set the rules. You break the rules, by beeing somewhere you are not supposed to be - any staff member can act as security to physically remove you.
They may not beat you, though. Or otherwise act escalating.
But forcefully leading (or carrying) out someone breaking the house rules (by using minimum of violence) is legal and standard procesure on every big event.
America relevant: It's similar to security anywhere, including "loss prevention" at a grocery store. They can tell you to leave, and if you don't, they can physically remove you from the property. That's pretty well established. It also applies to kicking someone out of your house that doesn't have a right to be there.
If they hurt you inappropriately (there's a wide range between a trespasser bruising their fist on a guard's face and a guard holding someone down and pummeling them for no reason), they've committed a crime and might lose a civil lawsuit. Some places won't let guards touch trespassers. Other places lean on discretion and the training they've given to the guard, the cameras they have spammed everywhere, etc.
The removal is usually covered in something like "we have the right to kick you out at any time, even if you paid." That doesn't cover all bases, but it covers a lot. If you never signed a contract with a venue, the removal is covered by the fact that you have zero intrinsic right to be there.
For more examples, you can look at casinos in Vegas trespassing people. If you act out of line or gamble in a way they don't like (like successfully counting cards at blackjack,) they'll boot you. They might spread your name to other casinos if they really don't like you. And if you enter one again, it's criminal trespass. They can do it for anything that isn't legally protected.
They can not grab you and physically remove you. This is called battery and it’s illegal. You can actually be charged with a crime as a security officer for this. Along with fined and lose your license.
What actually happens is them physically restraining you is a form of citizens arrest. They then hold you and call police to take you.
The issue with trespassing is it can only be charged if the individual continually refuses to leave. This means the moment they choose to leave, you must let them.
If in the act of being arrested they fight or assault people. They can be arrested for that. If they are violating the peace or committing another crime, they can be arrested for that.
However if it’s SOLELY trespassing. The moment they agree to leave; you need to let them leave.
The casinos do have police officers inside them and some security officers ARE deputized. A security officer can have powers to arrest as a security officer and powers to arrest as a police officer. They are entirely different things and have different levels of responsibility and liability.
Certainly, and usually in broad terms, like "event security may remove any person from the premises for any reason they believe is necessary to ensure the security and safety of the event". Once designated agents of the owners of the venue have told you to leave, you are illegally trespassing if you stay.
My priors align with the client having unreasonable expectations and then squabbling over the inconsequential bill. That is totally a thing that clients sometimes do.
When your project blows up, the professional thing to do is to resolve the problem with the client before billing another hour over the SOW. The common, crazy thing to do instead is optimistic invoicing: the client must share our priors, we're all reasonable people, so we'll just implicitly revise the SOW to match our learnings on this project and proceed, prioritizing what we believe would be a successful delivery of the project over everything else. That rarely works.
Serious consultancies routinely eat billable weeks of time in order to meet client success criteria and retain relationships.
Why reach for a stop work order if the whole thing is a rounding error. Entropic seems like they were able to finish, except that cost was an issue
My interpretation is that the project was at risk of not being delivered. No doubt Entropic had made and broken many promises leading to the stop work, and at some point DEF CON needs to take ownership of the project in order to ensure delivery.
My alarm bells go off loud when people invoke tropes indirectly and lazily, hoping it'll influence my perception of a situation
DEFCON isn't the pointy-haired boss stereotype that needs you to deliver exactly $X, this quarter, with duct tape and glue. They know tech and wouldn't have talked a team saying they can't do it until 2025 into 2024.
Well, what if they really wanted it for publicity?
DEFCON had 0 stake in a new Raspberry Pi release, and Entropic self-reports they were the ones with early access to an unreleased product and decided it was the right vehicle. [2]
[1] We were clear as early as our first conversation in January that the risk in trying to push to mass production of this size and on this timeline was immense, even advocating for a DEFCON 2025 release of this particular badge. DEFCON’s Badge Team remained confident that they could meet and mitigate this risk.
[2] The specifics of what they requested in January were extremely difficult / almost impossible, but we had been working with Raspberry Pi as a Design Partner and had early access to the unreleased Raspberry Pi RP 2350, a chip that would enable exactly the kind of device DEFCON was requesting.
And that’s not even mentioning the Easter Egg! Good grief!
I read about the $20 target price, which I find quite hard to reach, but that is something you know before you agree to deliver X by date Y costing Z
This year, it blew up in everybody's faces. Whose fault is it? Defcon, for having unrealistic budgets? Contractors, for taking on an unrealistic project for the prestige?
IMO there's plenty of blame to go around.
My reaction was "only 60% over budget"? This is a low volume custom computer. The way Defcon pushes promotion and recognition, I do not think they paid full commercial price.
EE claims, they stayed in Budget while also claiming they did not receive the agreed upon payment.
DC claims, EE went 60% over budget
A run with 30k badges is not that small and eight months is not that short of a timeframe.
Somewhere I read about a $20 target price all in which I find realistic for PCB parts and assembly, but not if the cost include injection molding ($10k / mold and $1/pcs I guess) and especially not if it contains hardware and software development cost
If (like me) you hadn't seen this one, I think it is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41172531
(Some of the top-level comments do indeed seem a bit oddly negative to me)
> We were clear as early as our first conversation in January that the risk in trying to push to mass production of this size and on this timeline was immense, even advocating for a DEFCON 2025 release of this particular badge. DEFCON’s Badge Team remained confident that they could meet and mitigate this risk.
> Once a month, we billed for our work and submitted an updated estimated per badge final cost - committing as costs built to discount our work as necessary in order to hit DEFCON’s per unit cost targets.
> In June, after 5 months of late night work, badges were fully designed, prototypes were working, and mass production was ongoing with the manufacturers we contracted on behalf of DEFCON. We billed DEFCON for our most recent work, discounting our labor by 25% in order to meet the agreed upon targets. Unfortunately, we were instead met with a work stoppage request and informed we would no longer be paid for services already rendered.
https://www.entropicengineering.com/defcon-32-statement
It feels to me like DEFCON is relying on being able to say "well, we're DEFCON" when defending themselves, and people like you are just blindly trusting their word. How many times have big organizations like this screwed their suppliers? And yet DEFCON is "clearly" innocent? You must be joking.
At least wait until we get a better picture of everything before deciding on a judgment of any of the parties involved. It's going to take time before we find out what actually happened.
This doesn't really add up to me. Ultimately we'll never know for sure. Personally I'm inclined to believe Entropic more on this one (though I'm sure neither party is blame-free, regardless of where the bulk of fault lies), but I can see why you'd be more inclined to trust DEFCON's response.
(I just don't consider "DEFCON made a falsifiable claim and Entropic didn't" to be strong evidence either way.)
It’s perfectly possible for Entropic to be calculating to a $100k total cost (for the board), while Defcon is calculating the cost for everything (case/lanyard, etc.), and gets to $160k for the entire project, then says they’re 60% over budget.
I imagine Entropic was discounting their bills to say within the 100K, while Defcon already felt they were over.
(Numbers made up)
A fairly simple mold costs 5-10k, a complex mold 10-20k. Since this is a limited production run, I would argue that they didn't need the highest tolerances.
Thus my guess would be ~$50k for the molds and ~$5 for the parts.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Defcon/comments/1en7jxz/
EE: It will cost us $300K to make those
Def CON: Ok too bad, see you around.
EE: No no, what I meant to say is 'it would cost us $300K, but we will gladly do for $200K, we will "discount" our work.
Def CON: Dont care about your internal accounting, can you do it for $200K or not?
EE: Where do I sign up?
...time passes...
EE: keeps trying to send invoices totaling $300K
Where are you getting that, though? EE says:
> Once a month, we billed for our work and submitted an updated estimated per badge final cost - committing as costs built to discount our work as necessary in order to hit DEFCON’s per unit cost targets.
And:
> We billed DEFCON for our most recent work, discounting our labor by 25% in order to meet the agreed upon targets.
So it sounds like they were billing with an expected total of $200k, not anything higher. Perhaps they were listing in their invoice all the actual costs, but then had a "discount" line item to bring the cost back down, but if so... so what?
Assuming this is true it’s simple: you walk away. If you’re being contracted to do something you don’t think you can do, you don’t sign the contract. Anything else is a recipe for pain.
Arguably it still is amazing publicity, at least for the people who will end up believing Entropic's version of events. Maybe not a good look when it comes to people who side with DEFCON on this.
Its an event kids go to to have fun with their friends.
They have game rooms and furry parades karaoke and cool badges!
And their website doesnt work.
https://forum.defcon.org/calendar
Its not a serious event any more.
What are the real infosec conferences these days?
There is still zero days being dropped and you meet a lot of the smartest people in infosec.
1. The badge manufacturing issue and subsequent non-payment due to contract dispute.
2. The firmware author (not hired by the manufacturer) put in unauthorized 'easter egg' code that asks for money via crypto.
I am not familiar with 1 so I can't comment on a contract dispute.
But 2 is definitely over the line, and this is coming from me who is supportive of some usage of cryptocurrency. You don't put in unexpected monetization mechanisms into your volunteer work, without asking the charity organization for permission. Asking for money secretly is way different than putting in a harmless Easter egg. At that point, it's not a harmless easter egg anymore.
Maybe the money is for the manufacturer. In that case, do what a normal person would do and raise the issue on a social channel (eg. Twitter, Thread, blog).
Yes, it was for the manufacturer, not for the firmware author himself.
I agree that he shouldn't have put in the donation solicitation, but I think DEFCON's response to kick him out of his talk was an overreaction. Especially considering what prompted the easter egg was DEFCON removing the Entropic's badge credit from the badge case that they were promised. Even if DEFCON's statement about the manufacturing/cost issues with the badge (your point 1) was entirely true, the final badge that ended up in attendees' hands was still almost completely Entropic's and Dmitry's work, and they deserve credit for putting together something of that complexity in such a short time frame.
No one is coming out of this looking perfectly rosy, regardless of the truth behind things. The donation link was over the line, but DEFCON's change to the badge case was completely unethical, and disinviting Dmitry from the badge talk over an inappropriate easter egg was a dirty thing to do.
> The DEFCON community is and has always been near and dear to my heart; I started my local DEFCON group as a kid growing up in Malaysia decades ago
Sad that people (defcon) use and abuse the passion of others. EE let DEFCON step all over them. EE even discounted the labor in the invoices to defcon to meet whatever vague budget they had.
This is just a reminder that you should never meet or work with your childhood heroes. The reality is they will most likely take advantage of this.
If the person just passed a hat, i think that would be fine (albeit weird and cringe) because the objectionable part was sneaking it into the badge. Asking for mony outside of the badge would not raise the same concerns with me.
>discount our work as necessary in order to hit DEFCON’s per unit cost targets
Sounds like DEF CON established a budged and you kept going over it. No wonder they did a stop work order.
(Obviously doing crowd control, providing information, and front line emergency response is absolutely fine, although tbh even that they should probably have guard cards in most jurisdictions for liability reasons. If someone is violently disruptive, as a private citizen go for it, but unauthorized speaking on stage is pretty far from that. Would be hilarious if dude makes more money from that than he was stiffed by his employer.)
Given this complexity and confusion, short of conducting a full court trial with months of document subpoenas and depositions under oath, IMHO, confidently believing you've arrived at a complete, objective understanding of who is right or wrong is as likely to be incorrect as it is correct. And, at this point, this probably holds true for most of the actual participants too.
I base this on decades of experience untangling screwed up business transactions and communications. No matter how thorough, credible and complete a certain retelling seems, I've often discovered there is another layer (sometimes even unknown to many of those involved) which changes enough to shift whatever I initially believed. I've had this cycle of "Aha, now I understand" / "Oh... wait. No I don't" repeat several times while digging through a single incident.
It sounds like Dmitry was a subcontractor of Entropic and producing a screen asking for money after their contract had been terminated (for good-sounding reasons) was bad form. I'm not commenting on the legalities (I don't know anything about contract law) and I don't necessarily take either side's account at face value, but this response doesn't sound unreasonable to me.
Does sound like "asking to be paid", even if it's then switched to "it was all a prank, bro" when it turns out that wasn't the greatest idea.
The reports I've seen have said "Go to the about screen and press the select button". That's not difficult.
From his time-line https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Moss_(hacker) "Later career" he seems to be CIA: Council of Foreign Relations member, and Atlantic Council member. But it would fit to the other folks who I got to know from this background.
> (dang) Previous related thread: Defcon stiffs badge HW vendor, drags FW author offstage during talk
Despite the project being "impossible," EE made some sort of agreement to complete the work and deliver within time and budget. EE, not DC, made the decision to work with Dmitry.
> I am not a subcontractor of anyone. I was doing this in my own free time for fun so attendees have a fun badge. There exist no contracts between me and anyone. It was an evenings-and-weekends project for me [1]
This work by Dmitry was unpaid, presumed: uninvoiced and not under contract directly with DF, and is not an agent of ES.
> While we as a company did not ask Dmitry to program the easter egg, the outpouring of support and community for EE has been appreciated and inspiring. [0]
EE did not request the Easter egg be included by Dmitry. As a free agent (not under contract) Dmitry is free to do as they wish. Dmitry's involvement with DF was an invitation to participate on a panel. Given the discovery of the Easter egg, DF withdrew the invitation. Without any explicit agreement, it is irrelevant as to why DF would withdraw their invitation as it is presumed DF can withdraw any such privileges at anytime for any reason, though a reason was given in the case.
> At this point, all work had been completed except our physically attending the overseas production run and providing ongoing troubleshooting/debugging. In fact, the day we received this surprising news, we were actively working on the SD card debug that became a central concern earlier this week. [0]
This sounds consistent with DF's claim that the product was still in pre-production and all services had not yet fully been rendered, therefore, the original agreement may already have been breached at this point. What is "owed," is likely no longer stipulated under the main clauses of the contract.
> EE has tried multiple times over the past months to negotiate fair compensation for work completed prior to June 7th, but attempts at resolution have been unsuccessful. [0]
> Once a month, we billed for our work and submitted an updated estimated per badge final cost - committing as costs built to discount our work as necessary in order to hit DEFCON’s per unit cost targets. [0]
> Once the manufacturing was fully completed, we were offered a one-time “take it or leave it” amount worth well under half of what we were owed pre-stoppage. Given that what we were owed was already discounted by 25% in order to hit agreed upon cost targets, this has had a huge impact on our small team. [0]
> We have also continued to pour lots of time, effort, and love into the project post-stoppage. I want to be clear that we never expected to be paid for this post-stoppage work, but simply did it as a labor of love for the community. [0]
This is contract dispute. What EE is "owed" is defined (or should be defined) in the agreement. What is "invoiced," despite any "discount", does not, on its own, constitute what is owed by DF. Unbilled and discounted labor significantly complicates this, especially if it was not itemized as such on the invoices sent to DF. Parts and materials, which come with invoices attached, should be paid per the agreement.
> Any claims that DEF CON did not pay Entropic Engineering for its hardware or firmware development are false.[OP source]
My assumption is the agreement was for a fixed-cost fixed-timeline per-badge payment and the targets were not met, despite EE trying their best. The claims made by both sides are verifiable by receipts and, should it come to that, can be arbitrated either by a court of law or the court of PR (public relations, ie, the internet).
Regarding Dmitry's experience and the Easter egg, for better or worse, DF can make whatever decision they please at their conference. The Easter egg was antagonistic towards DF and is significantly unrelated to the payment dispute with EE. The Easter egg being a "prank" or "difficult to find" or "not technically owned by DF," is also unrelated (although the code seems to be part of services rendered to DF by the agreement with EE [0]).
> We were clear as early as our first conversation in January that the risk in trying to push to mass production of this size and on this timeline was immense, even advocating for a DEFCON 2025 release of this particular badge. DEFCON’s Badge Team remained confident that they could meet and mitigate this risk. [0]
EE' admissions illustrates that DF's decision to push forward with this vendor was ill-advised. Given their experience, it would have been charitable to not put EE in this position. Arguably, DF did mitigate their risk (financial and reputational risk) by issuing a stop order and seeing the product to completion by other means; attendees did get their badges after all. By admission, EE also recognized the risk themselves and continuing their attempt to render the agreement under the circumstances was also ill-advised. Their risk (to reputation) was also managed by providing free labor. This is unrelated to the payment dispute as both parties chose, and were not forced, to continue to engage under the terms of their agreement until such time the agreement was made null. The only dispute is in regards to the original agreement, which should be rendered whole by the terms of the contract that were completed and satisfied by EE.
[0]: EE's statement. https://www.entropicengineering.com/defcon-32-statement
defcon cheats, defcon loses.
A hacker conference is upset that someone "hacked" their badges. and put unwanted code into the firmware. Users are (meant) to be hacking these boards. That is the entire point isn't it?
Have guys who did it come in in, talk about the exploit, share how they did it. Then the corpDefCon can talk about what they missed and how to avoid it. Have a talk "How DefCon got hacked"
Have some fun for f-sake. Tangent man, come on.
"" Unfortunately, shortly before the talk was set to take place DEF CON became aware that unauthorized code had been included in the firmware we had paid Entropic Engineering to produce, ""
Some years had ctf challenges in the firmware this year there was a playable game boy emulator.
I'm not commenting on the legalities (I don't know anything about contract law) and I don't necessarily take either side's account at face value, but this response doesn't sound unreasonable to me.
Cool spin though.
Did Entropic promise to deliver the firmware?
And assuming Entropic did promise a firmware, would the "stop work" order also affect firmware? Apparently the "easter egg" was added after that order.
This really is the fulcrum of which way this drama tips.
> The specifics of what they requested in January were extremely difficult / almost impossible, but we had been working with Raspberry Pi as a Design Partner and had early access to the unreleased Raspberry Pi RP 2350, a chip that would enable exactly the kind of device DEFCON was requesting. Dmitry and Entropic had already been working on a GB emulator and were thrilled to be able to contribute our work to a project directly for and by the community.
...
> Despite the near impossibly short timeline to achieve 30k unit mass production, our team of 5 worked tirelessly alongside Dmitry. He handled all of the emulator software while we sourced components, designed all of the hardware, wrote production test software, and organized all circuit board manufacturing, prototype manufacturing, facilitated large volume production manufacturing and logistics, and general project coordination. Through this period, Defcon’s responsibility was the game-specific software, badge accessories (i.e.: plastic case and lanyard), and the printed circuit board artwork including the cat shape, colors, and silkscreen.
-- -- --
It appears that Defcon contracted with Entropic. Entropic was working with Dmitry.