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Comment by simpaticoder | Hacker News Reader

Thank you. This stood out to me:

"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.

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That sentence seems like the most irrelevant part of all of what I’ve read.

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.

Isn’t the implication of the sentence that they were chosen specifically for those properties and wouldn’t have been chosen otherwise?

The implication is that they were chosen because of that, but not that this was the only qualification.

It could easily be that multiple teams looked qualified during bidding for the job and that this was the distinguishing factor.

And yet, a party to this conflict thought it was a relevant piece of information to the audience. Now, the fact that OP noted it as interesting is not completely without merit. After all, interested party certainly thought it was worth to mention.

It’s supposed to provoke an emotional response

In who, I wonder? Most people I see reacting emotionally appear to be opposed to even mentioning that.

To those sympathetic to awarding contracts to those with that societal lean. It’s irrelevant to their ability to perform a contract for DEFCON. If that was never mentioned it would have never been a point at all.

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.

If they have to reach for idpol at the start to make their case, my immediate suspicion is the case is not that strong.

DEFCON did not do proper estimation, risk analysis and due diligence with ordering these badges. Also if the cat design and other things were done by the Defcon orga and the electronics by EE, then this already sounds like a complicated mess.

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.

https://badge.team

I'm definitely going to have to look into these Dutch events, not only did Defcon feel like much less value for money this year (and all the badge drama) but the Netherlands is way easier for me to get to as well.

The Dutch event is WHY2025. https://why2025.org

There's a nice overview website with all the events around The Netherlands. https://hackeropuit.nl/

Thank you!!!! I moved to NL last year and have been missing this.

>did not do proper estimation, risk analysis and due diligence

How can you say that when badges were on time and working at the end of the day?

I would say that it seems a miracle there were working badges on time. Both EE and Defcon gave everything they could to make this happen.

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.

In Entropic's statement they say:

>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.

>Has there been anything in all this that would suggest anyone was in danger at the conference?

Depends on how much you danger you consider someone making unwanted physical contact and restraining your movements.

I don't consider you trespassing and the people who have the authority to remove you removing you as danger. Additionally, it's arguable he gave permission when they told him to leave or they'd remove him and he told them to remove him.

I'd consider a bunch of untrained goons giving me the bum's rush a danger regardless of the circumstances.

But their statement was just that they removed him from the talk without banning him from the conference, which turns out in practice to not be correct.

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.

This makes DEF CON look foolish and past it's prime. You would think technical requirements would be the only criteria used but I guess they wanted this project to make political gains with a certain community instead of just making badges.

It’s concerning to me that this has been downvoted so heavily.

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.

There are _much_ better ways to help the causes of Women, People of Color, or People of Different Sexual Orientations then making it a criteria of who you happen to create small one time contracts with.

>> Obviously as a private group DEF CON’s organizers have every right to contract with whatever companies they want to.

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

In the US Federal contract system, these preferences are formalized; has been for decades. It's a heavily-exploited game by those who play by its rules. Basic classes are "Service disabled veteran owned" "minority owned" "women owned" etc. I think "veteran owned" counts a bit too.

In 2024, that statement doesn't really indicate much of anything. Traditionally, interfacing with the business world involved retaining an underemployed white guy who would wax poetic about the virtues of playing golf [0] or owning a boat. Now the trends have shifted to professing a different type of identity politics. The vectoralists with the old fashioned motif have even landed on their feet, spawning a cottage industry of bemoaning how unfair the world is. Plus ça change.

[0] the boring version without moving obstacles, PVC pipes, or fiberglass dinosaurs - further adding insult to injury

when did they actually start working on it? ToyMakers starts their work right after a conference ends to prepare for the next conference. The logistics and scale even for several hundred badges is immense.

It's also an odd thing to bring up in their statement.

Another productivity victim to the woke movement.

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