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Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

It was a huge mistake to uninvite him from the session.

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.

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It sounds to me like they were mad at Dmitry for including an "easter egg" in their badge firmware that solicited donations to a Bitcoin address.

Yep. Given that they thought Dmitry was a subcontractor of EE, them being mad about that makes a lot more sense.

It was definitely an easter egg. A secret screen that gives credit to someone that worked on a thing and otherwise wouldn't get credit is the textbook example of an easter egg.

It probably shouldn't have had the Bitcoin address, but it doesn't sound like that would have been treated much differently.

I think you're going to find that firms who contract embedded designs have viewpoints about "easter eggs" that would be surprising, even off-putting, to message board communities that savor them like single malts. Generally, when firms arrange to deliver hardware/software to their own customers sourced from vendors, they want a clear understanding of what the software actually does.

I know some companies dislike easter eggs a lot, and some of their reasons are valid.

But it's objectively an easter egg. Why the scare quotes?

Because it solicited money.

I will note that it's not soliciting money for the person that put it there. So I don't think that's even close to disqualifying it.

Yep. But again, it’s really not clear in this case if DEFCON was paying their vendor (EE) for software at all. I can see how it was ambiguous from their side given Dimitri was friends with the hardware design company. But from the POV of Dimitri and EE, DEFCON was paying for hardware and a separate 3rd party (Dimitri) volunteered to write the software. It’s very spicy to attack people in your community who volunteer their time.

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.

This is a hacker con, not an enterprise engineering con, Easter eggs have always been a part of hacker culture.

It's not that letting him do the talk would be any better for defcon, given that he literally said he will present these "easter eggs".

>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 ;)

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