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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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