When DEF CON partners with the U.S. Army
jackpoulson.substack.com
jackpoulson.substack.com
The conference has gotten too big for its own good. It now inhabits the Las Vegas Convention Center, which is less convenient than when it was in one of the hotels (or multiple hotels clustered together). The one positive of the LVCC is that it has a ton of room but there are still issues with things like sound equipment that plague the villages and their talks/workshops.
This happens to literally every convention ever, not surprising at all. The broader question is is something like the original spirit of DefCon even still possible? The industry (and the stakes) are so much higher now that it seems impossible.
(That's not to say that there aren't conferences that are explicitly anti-MIC, because there are. But if you just sample by size, I suspect you'll find no correlation there.)
Speaking of culture, RIPE NCC allows individuals to have ASNs, with or without a case of Club Mate.
The CCC would never.
Europe, for all its authoritarianism and infringements of human rights (even in relatively liberal places like Germany) still seems to be trying to not backslide into full-on military-industrial complex like the US is/has.
EDIT:
If you don't believe me, ask the USMC about their nice new H&K service rifles. Did we need to do that? No, we could have thrown a nice piston upper on M16 lowers, but that doesn't keep the bier flowing in Oberndorf am Neckar. Or ask someone in the Pentagon about their partners at BAE.
And also don't forget they're the second largest global arms exporter after the United States. Which is amazing when you realize they only have one manufacturer (Airbus) in the global top 15...
Ehh forget how Vietnam started?
Although yes that is a little longer than 50 years ago already. Crazy how fast these things go.
You expect hackers to be like, "we love capitalism! We love strong hierarchies!"? Don't be daft.
At least dale never fucked kids.
are you saying Corley did this? a work-safe search didn't turn anything up.
The other thing you have to realize is that in the infosec orbit, information is closely guarded currency.
No it hasn't. It started as counterculture. 90's hacker ethos might as well make you a fascist these days.
Hacker's Manifesto (1986)
You should ask the old-schoolers, if they can hear you over the roar of the air conditioning in their cushy corporate offices and the engines of their Volvos.
When all you have left is petty political bitching, the conference has lost its meaning, it's just a Reddit meetup at that point.
Personally I'm also working in a corp but I remain very leftist and activist. Luckily my employer also remains pretty progressive even with all the pressure from the US.
But, are those people hackers anymore?
And, for what it's worth, how many of them have ever really been that?
Also, it's not kind to call someone 'daft' for expressing a political view you disagree with. Nobody's saying you should accept their perspective uncritically, but you don't need to be mean-spirited or engage in name-calling to critique their perspective. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I got up and pointed out that the first group that tries to push something like this will be the first group elected out of office in record time and companies like Tesla didn't form in a vacuum, they formed partially as a response to how ineffective government has been at moving the tech stack forward.
I also pointed out at how the talk was too Euro centric and that the presenters should visit the US or Canada and see why its so car centric. The presenters acknowledged that they haven't actually been to the US but pushed back with the NYC subway as an example of the US (which at the time was slowly collapsing).
The audience gave them a round of applause for that response. It really revealed to me how these guys act like they are so smart but they have this enormous blind spot because of the bubble they are in.
Funny enough after Trump got re-elected and all the right wing shifts started accelerating in Europe, they finally started to wake up in the "Illegal Instructions" theme of the subsequent conference.
This is like complaining about water being wet. Hacker culture has always been anti-right wing.
I'm pretty sure that each of the niches could make their own conference now, at some small venue where a 100, 200, 500 people would come... SNES hacking and development? Sure, a small, really nice conference... but then someone would want NES too, and N64, and sega, and PS1, and corporate sponsors, and you end up with E3 instead of 50 retro developers and 150 curious people doing interesting stuff.
Just curious as I didn't find many package deals that were much cheaper than finding each individually. I was just using stuff like Expedia and similar.
I wouldn't call it crazy that a pure volunteer event that constantly has to switch places because they use up ALL available space of their venues does have a ticketing system that is still better than the one of a lot of big pop stars.
It probably also keeps commercialization down to a minimum.
Yes, sucks that what you describe isn't possible, but I think in perspective it's not exactly "crazy".
It's still always sold out with whole conference areas and more used up.
I guess, it's obnoxiously "American," if that makes sense.
And yes I "worship" people like Doctorow. :)
I've considered going there once or twice but the hotels were ridiculously expensive. It was around €200-250 a night, for me that's way too much. And the travel on top of that (i don't drive and live in southern Europe so I make less than most Germans). And I'm too old for shared room hostels. Here in Spain I can get a 4* hotel for 70€ most of the time.
It's a bit similar to DefCon in that sense. Except that it's held in real cities and not a casino resort.
this is still cheap compared to Vegas. even in the middle of august, when the temperature routinely tops 40C, hotels are upwards of $300-400USD/night
From where did you get the idea that Germany is the most expensive country in Europe? My experience differs.
> It was around €200-250 a night
Get a hotel that is a little away and use public transport to get to the event venue. Using this, rather 100-150 € per night is realistic (if you find a good offer, even below 100 € is very possible).
Germany is _far_ from the most expensive country in Europe, FWIW.
> It was around €200-250 a night
That seems very high; you'd do better booking in advance. And the transport is decent and runs late; you don't need to be right near the venue.
CCC actively discourages companies from advertising unless they are fully open source community driven orgs. Governments are even less welcome.
While even the Privacy Village at Defcon asks you to agree to the terms of service of Discord, Slack, Youtube, and other corpos... CCC self hosts everything including Voip, IRC, Matrix, 3G, 4G, and DECT, all linked together in various ways.
While Defcon has strictly controlled talks approved by sponsors and appointees of the Defcon corporation that themselves work for mostly proprietary corporations, CCC is an entirely volunteer driven organization from top to bottom and you can give a talk anywhere you want about anything 24 hours a day as long as someone else has not already reserved that spot.
While Defcon has villages reserved and approved by committee and corporate sponsors, at CCC any community can apply for table or an area and almost all are granted as space relative to the size of the community. You can do basically anything you want with your space. You can also access the event and your space 24/7 so the hacking and party never fully stops.
I go to Defcon because it is the corporate paid excuse a handful of actually capable hackers I like to hang out with have to hang out. And maybe two or three talks worth seeing.
I go to CCC because it is the nearest place I can go experience thousands of actual hackers that believe in making the world better through open source, right to repair, music, art, and maximizing sharing and collaboration. Almost every person I talk to is an instant friend. People who largely agree technical talents are meant for more than raising shareholder value.
I love CCC and I keep going in hopes I can bring some of that back with me to silicon valley.
If anyone goes to CCC be sure to visit the Church of Cryptography which I am usually around.
They were a side conference to a side conference, but the structure let them run things the way they wanted, which is important.
SkyTalks are as awesome as they always were, I'd argue its even better since now you dont have to sacrifice other things at defcon to see skytalks. You can now have dedicated time for skytalks.
This might just be FOMO with the organizers. It's probably time for DefCon to drop in person registrations, get smaller, and return to a hotel. Villages and village talks need to be better curated and basically the focus needs to be tightened up.
The author of the article decided to wander down the Military Industrial Complex track, and seems to be complaining that it had too much Army stuff. I didn't see any of that this year, because that's not what interests me. I met up with a large number of cipherpunks and activists that I don't get to see very often, and had some extremly productive conversations regarding various projects we're working on for the next year.
Also, DEFCON and DT specifically have not shifted anywhere. A large demographic of attendees shifted hard to the left, mirroring our culture in general. They are also not "counterculture" as these are mainstream/televised points of view.
I had to stop dealing with certain parts/people of DEFCON and infosec in general because of this intense noise. That's not pegging myself as being on the right, it's just that my DEFCON experience has always been about expanding my worldview and fun... this very loud and influential group isn't about either of those things.
All of your politics and news has been swinging hard right for over a decade.
But genuinely, what do you define by saying that American culture has shifted hard to the left and what do you define by left.
I am really not looking into fight, but that's not a take I've heard often and I want to hear you out.
Politics in the US have become more polarized, but a historical view shows this as more of a reversion to the mean than a novel phenomenon, as we are increasingly distanced from a period of greater economic prosperity for large swathes of the middle class, which seemed to have a (now disappearing) byproduct of a degree of psychological satiation with "big picture" concerns.
There is a documented tendency for the political left, at least in the US, to accept and tolerate a much narrower range of thought, that is to say, the left has a much smaller Overton Window, than the political right in the US, who mostly seem unified only around opposition to the policies of the political left. (https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjso....)
I suspect, but do not necessary assert as fact, that the above effect on the left may be partially explained by a rigid adherence to the paradox of tolerance, which itself demands an unwillingness to tolerate people who hold intolerant ideas, views, or beliefs, even if those people do not act on those ideas, views, or beliefs to meaningfully practice intolerance. The end result, from my perspective as someone who fits cleanly in neither political camp (I'm more of a libertarian than anything else) is that the left makes little to no room for allies and increasingly engages in litmus testing with an end goal of ostracizing and socially shunning even LGBTQ+ people who don't fit neatly into the smaller Overton Window. As an example, it is considered intolerable by many on the left to merely be vocally supportive of adult LGBTQ+ rights, while expressing discomfort with the idea of children being exposed to pride parades with fully naked adults embracing all manner of sexual diversity and kinks, or discomfort with the idea of irreversible chemical gender affirmation therapy for minors on grounds of bodily autonomy / age of consent considerations. Meanwhile, to the surprise of some of my friends on the political left, large swathes of the political right (though not the most extreme fringes), in my lived experience as an LGBTQ person in Texas (which to be fair, may not be entirely representative of the rest of the country), hold more of a "live at let live" philosophy that, paradoxically, is more tolerant of LGBTQ+ persons with nuanced views than the political left is. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance)
I think as the emotional investment of typical political partisans increases, there is a widespread perception of hostility or outrage from the political left at nuanced positions that are nominally but insufficiently progressive, like the one in the example above. Anecdata for this might include the perspective of Bill Maher, who was once considered to be subversively progressive, then gradually seen as "center left", and is now perceived by many on the left as "right of center", in spite of a rock-solid track record of being notably left of Republicans on almost every issue.
To be clear, I'm not trying to assert normative views that either side is "right", morally superior or inferior to one another, just attempting to offer my perspective on what I think the underlying mechanisms driving the disconnect between perceptions of the political system itself (which is increasingly dominated by right-of-center figures in all three branches of the federal government, particularly at the SCOTUS level in the judiciary), and perceptions of cultural values. That cultural perception is probably further strengthened by widespread, rapid, and vocal adoption of DEI values across almost all institutional settings (academia, corporate America, public sector, even institutions that are traditionally conceptualized as right of center, like Wall Street firms) following the protests over the death of George Floyd; the relatively swift mainstream acceptance of LGBTQ+ rights (marriage equality went from fringe to mainstream in under two decades); climate change moved from "environmental issue" to a mainstream economic/social concern in roughly the same period; social media amplification of progressive voices and causes, including, at times; coordination between left-leaning administrations and social media companies to suppress right-leaning perspectives, some of which are now widely acknowledged to have likely been true (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files), to name a few large changes over both the last two decades and the last five years or so.
And again, I'm not asserting that any of these changes were good or bad (regardless of how I personally feel about any of the changes in question), nor am I trying to assert a normative framing one way or another, just attempting to dissect the mechanisms of the perception itself.
Say you are restaurant owner that is tolerant of any consumer, it brings in money. Left, right, center, no matter the political spectrum; gay, straight, bisexual, no matter the sexuality. You provide them a good meal and they gladly pay. Now comes in a client and he starts trashing the place, tipping over tables, spitting in people's food. Do you stay tolerant and let it happen or brake your tolerance and deal with the situation and get him out? Your clients will no longer be tolerant of you and your business if you keep letting having is way.
Reality, you have defined "tolerance of others" with axioms that they do not maliciously destroy the property in our restaurant and they don't spit in the food of your clients. _Paradox of Tolerance_ highly resembles an inconsistent formal system pertaining to the proof of tolerance. "Tolerance of others" is a constant formal system in order to be tolerant.
Both you and your clients have agree upon definition of tolerance. It is the man destroying your property, you, and your clients that have differences in the definition of behavioral tolerance. The three do not share the same axioms. A universal definition of tolerance cannot be obtained.
Tolerance is also contextual, based on set and setting; who else is around, making it a malleable definition. This means _tolerance_ is a set / highly parameterized function. Location of public or private is just one parameter of many. For instant the scenario above about the business would most likely be accept if the setting was on set for a scene in a move.
It's one thing to shun a customer for practicing intolerance, it's another to shun a customer for holding intolerant beliefs without actually practicing intolerance or materially affecting the quality of life of anyone around them, is it not?
Don't get me wrong, I don't like having to fear for my safety around genuinely bigoted and threatening people, I just don't like the "wave our flag or you're a literal nazi / rotten flesh / subhuman who should be excommunicated from the entire linux community" type of messaging coming from the opposite camp either. Those extremes both make me feel profoundly uncomfortable and unsafe.
> And I say this as someone who is themselves not heterosexual, and who has a non-cisgender partner.
That really doesn't mean much.
https://www.reddit.com/r/punk/comments/1ama4ld/the_nazi_bar_...
As a movement they're dependent on other organisations to carry them forward, hence why they infiltrate political parties, bully media outlets into disseminating their talking points and so on.
Using lawfare to try to take out a political opponent (ridiculous NY charge with no precedent, no victim, and from a DA who was famous for reducing felonies to misdemeanours but for Trump did the opposite)
Applying govt pressure to social media companies to censor content (twitter files etc)
Using the intelligence apparatus to try to take out a political opponent (russian collusion hoax, fake dossier)
Relying on the media lies to maintain power (border is secure, Biden is mentally competent etc)
Well these are all features of Stalin, Putin, the CCP and now the modern Democrat party.
At the very least you're repeating propoganda. Every one I could easily refute, but what would be the point? I'm not going to convince you. You're happy in your bubble.
But don't think for a moment that you are certainly right.
Especially given the very questionably censorious nature of its new owner, who placed himself at the centre of that particular "conspiracy theory".
Texas has more registered Democrats than Republicans, interestingly enough.
(But neither Democrats nor Liberals are leftists.)
Yes -> right-leaning
No -> left-leaning
"Progress" implies there is an inevitable way forward, for which other beliefs are leading society astray from.
When it comes to things like "Are you prejudiced against groups of people?" the progressive answer is always "no". People on both "sides" can find valid reasons to say "no" to this question, but it's hard to maintain an internally consistent worldview if you're left-leaning (oppose hierarchies) and still want others to be lesser (which requires a hierarchy). Mainstream racism, homophobia, etc. naturally concentrate on the political right, but up until a few years ago, opposition to same-sex marriage was a mainstream position for liberal Democrats, too.
This is all to say, there is no actual significant leftist representation in American politics.
For what it's worth as a European who has never been to the US (and certainly won't now!) I've spoken to many US LGBTQ people and the ones from Texas mentioned this "live and let live" thing as a specifically Texan thing. Texas seems to be more open in that sense than other Southern states.
However like I said this is just hearsay but the two Texan people I spoke to mentioned exactly this phenomenon independently.
And yeah I can imagine you consider us leftists more purist. But I don't think you can say that America is heading leftward. Compare Trump with even a hard-line right winger like George W Bush and the latter is like a model president. I recently saw his congratulation speech to Obama and it exuded respect and sanity. It's kinda amazing that a president we considered pretty bad is now a role model.
Whereas Trump started the Capitol raid when Biden wijand now wants to redact history at the Smithsonian if it doesn't suit his narrative.
You'd be forgiven for thinking that the mainstream cultural values of the US should have set the political preference for the US government in what is nominally supposed to be a "democratic" country - that entirely logical and rational assumption increasingly appears to be false.
As weird as it might sound, I think the "live and let live" thing is actually quite sociologically interesting - it seems to present a framework rooted in individualism that achieves social tolerance outcomes comparable to China's ideas around "social harmony" (which I admittedly am far from an expert on). Perhaps it's just a rehashing of "the golden rule" wearing a cowboy hat, but as someone who leans towards what Europeans would call classical liberalism, it's hard for me to not appreciate the parallels with the "non-aggression principle", as well.
And for what it's worth, I harbor no ill will towards anyone from any political background or perspective, even the purists. I'm fond of the idea of treating everyone with dignity, kindness, and compassion, even when I disagree with their ideas or would criticize their actions.
Why do you consider him a role model? Based on how he spoke instead of the actions he took? Most politicians, put on a facade. They play the crowd, kiss the babies, etc. They change their positions with whatever way the polls go. What good is a smile and manners if someone is robbing you when you're not looking?
Bush started an entire war on a completely fabricated lie. And Obama carried the torch, despite running originally against the Iraq war! Maybe you don't feel the consequences of this because you don't have to pay the bill and your family members were never deployed to a war zone.
Trump, for all his flaws, his instincts are for negotiation and peace. He just negotiated a peace deal between Rwanda and Congo:
https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/rwanda-democratic-repub...
And again between Azerbaijan and Armenia: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c39dzl1lzrgo
He also seemed to handle the Iran-Israel conflict in a way that for befuddling reasons to me, actually deescalated the situation, despite the controversy at the time.
I'll take mean tweets and strong negotiation over smiling faces and reckless invasions any day of the week.
I totally agree he did a lot of actions that were very questionable like the iraq war and also the extreme surveillance. I just meant Trump makes him look good :)
I disagree about Trump but I don't want to get into that.
This issue is most embodied by the various little social experiments on YouTube where people will ask college students what think about action [x], [y], and [z] that they invariably agree with, then they're told it was done by a politician they don't like, and you can see, in real time, the cognitive dissonance kick in where they suddenly try to figure out why they don't "actually" like these actions. Or vice versa for disliked actions by a politician they do like. This, more than anything, sums up the divides in America today.
That's a pretty wild statement given that he just invaded Iran. He's also made direct military threats towards allied Denmark, even in press conferences. There's also the less overt threats about making Cananda a US state and giving Ukranian land to Putin.
Pretty militant for the first six months, even from an objective historical context. Should he keep up that tempo for a full term of office, that would measure up with the more intervention oriented presidents including Nixon himself.
I was also taught in my state-approved Saxon science books that the earth is 6000 years old, and bad weather is because God is mad at sinners. The worst of which of course being the gays which go directly to hell no matter how kind they are.
Also was raised very sexist, that women paying for things or working is a result of the men in their lives failing them, and that they are property to be earned like capturing a wild horse.
Texas outside of the cities is a deeply backwards uneducated place full of people living in constant fear of attack by sinners.
Incidentally Texas is also home to NASA and Moody Gardens, and my many visits to those gave me an interest in science and technology that allowed me to confirm everything I was taught was propaganda and nonsense and ultimately go my own way in life.
I've leaned pretty libertarian most of my life... I have conservative friends and pretty progressive friends (and those that I do NOT talk politics with).
A lot of this will come down to is definitely regional. A lot of the U.S. identity itself isn't the same, and different regions are very different. Texas itself is larger than like 80% of the countries in the world. The U.S. as a whole is massive. It's every bit as diverse in some ways as going anywhere in the E.U. despite mostly speaking the same language.
As to the U.S. and going left or right... it varies and depends. I think a lot of the left's "big tent" is falling, in that there is a very outspoken subset of the left that has shifted farther away from where most people are comfortable with. It's fractured, but there. There's also a bit of a yearning towards some more conservative values and a return to a stronger national identity. Both can be, and are true.
In my experience, most people in the US have a pretty live and let live pov... that of course stops to a large extend at coercion of children.
“populist” isn't an ideological position at all, its a rhetorical approach that can go with positions pretty much anywhere in ideological space.
Above is a long text that completely rests on small statements such as the above, stated with full confidence. I could easily argue for the opposite. And historically speaking, where these terms originate, it's quite clear that the left had to build a larger tent, as the saying goes.
Without these small but confident statements of questionable veracity, the rest of the text sort of fizzles down to one big anecdote about Texas living. Which is nice, but Texas is big and while I have never lived there myself I understand there are large differences between big cities like Austin and the rest.
Much can be said about how forgiving the debate climate is, and how heterogenous different political groups are. But one observation I think can be made is that it shifts with where the center is, the center being the deciding socioeconomic group in a modern democratic society. The opposition needs to rally support and needs to be much more allowing and accepting, and their Overton window as you call it grows wider. The ones with the political wind in their backs, winning elections, will find the power to hone their political skills and sharpen their issues, thereby shrinking this window.
So I believe much of it can be explained by who are winning elections and whose questions are being heard. These are slow processes, society does not change every election, but we did have an almost decade long period where traditional leftist questions were being heard in mainstream media, but right now it's quite clear the wind is blowing in the opposite direction in most Western democracies.
More generally, I think politics has shifted such that left/right is no longer meaningful, as people tend to be much more split on libertarian/authoritarian world views - particularly on the degree to which accredited individuals ought be able to impose their views on society in an effort to 'tweak' people's behaviors. That nuance, more or less, immediately leads to the shifting winds on the issues I mentioned.
I suspect that your individual position within each of those axes has drastically changed even though the axis labels have not.
"Left" and "right" remain meaningful. Right means supporting stronger hierarchies and left means supporting weaker hierarchies. They have always meant this since they were originally coined about the french pro/anti monarchist parties. It's "liberal" and "conservative" that have poorly defined meanings. You will not find much right at CCC.
Scientific studies show a real difference in brain structure - the part of the brain that processes fear is bigger in rightists - so it appears to be an intrinsic evolutionary thing and it makes sense it remsins the same thing in each generation.
can you point to a few studies on this topic? I am struggling to imagine how one would design a study to measure this
---
I'd also add on this issue that considering political issues among college students is itself silly. Our political positions on things is impacted by our life experience, and at the point of college one has very little life experience to formulate views off of. Political identity will often shift radically from age 20 to 40, which against suggests a genetic basis as being farcical - at least beyond the point that your brain structure will typically correlate, to some degree, with the development of skills, identity, etc.
The rightward shift as people age is pretty easily explained by self-interest. When you start with almost nothing, you want a fair share because that's more than you have now. Once you climb the ladder, you don't want a fair share because that's less than you have now. Once you get above the average, you want to stretch the pyramid taller because that puts you at a higher absolute position, and the higher up you are, the more you want to stretch it. When you're below the middle, you want to shorten the pyramid because that puts you at a higher absolute position (the pyramid extends below the floor).
But that's assuming wealth dynamics continue to work how they did for boomers. IIRC millennials were the first generation to shift leftwards with age, because they mostly didn't get to above-middle positions on the pyramid.
It's the subtle things that keep society stable.
The study you mentioned was, even at the time of its publication, quite dubious - finding a negligible correlation (0.23) in amygdalae size in a very non-representative sampling. In a replication attempt that correlation was found to overstate it by more than 3x, finding a correlation of 0.068, which is essentially statistical noise. There's nothing there except clickbait media doing their thing. I'd also add that framing the amygdala as the 'fear center' is itself also quite ridiculous. There also remains the question of identity. I consider myself liberal. I imagine you would object. Who's right? Ah modern 'science', but there I go again challenging that hierarchy.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarianism
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Authoritarianism&...
I'd say a more overt example is playing out on the national stage, where protests in support of (murdered, raped, and starving) Palestinians in Gaza are crushed, because the alternative is to have the executive branch try to extort a $Billion dollars from the host campus, putting universities in peril, to help buy another gold-plated plane or something.
The assertion that Wikipedia has more content than it did in 2004 is also logically void.
In it Charles Schneck was convicted for an absolutely abhorrent crime. He sent out fliers to men drafted for WW1 informing them of a legal defense against the draft - of it constituting involuntary servitude, which was prohibited by the 13th Amendment, and encouraging them to consequently assert their legal rights and work to resist the draft.
For this, he was arrested and put in prison, with the government claiming that his mailed fliers were akin to 'shouting fire in a crowded theater.' This is why free speech means free speech. Limitations are invariably weaponized by authoritarian forces to shoehorn essentially everything into that limitation.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States
The quote is literally part of the government's [successful] argument that their right to imprison somebody for shouting fire in a crowded theater naturally grants them the right to imprison somebody for handing out informative fliers that run contrary to warmonger interests.
There's no stronger argument for free speech means free speech than the quote you chose.
What about the speech of "I will pay you $50 to stab that guy right now"? Constitutionally protected or do you believe that should be past a limit?
Not only does this prevent trampling on speech and minimize abuse, but it's also far more to the point. Because why is shouting fire uniquely awful while shouting penis is just some kids being annoying that should simply be kicked out of a theater? It's not because of the words obviously, but because of the consequence created.
I think it should be illegal to spread Nazism, but Nazism is spread using speech so people keep telling me that would be a first amendment violation.
The paradox of tolerance is largely nonsensical, because the key to a free society is free speech but stringent, and blind, enforcement against actions. Somebody can larp out with their swastikas and roman salutes all they want, but the second they lay hands on anybody - they're going to have a few years in a cage to rethink their life decisions. If they repeat this onto a third time, the key gets thrown away.
In general I think that the liberties of the worst of society work in many ways like a canary in the coalmine for the rest of us. As soon as that canary dies it's not long before your government, with its 29% approval rating, is trying to do things like ban the highest polling party in the country under ridiculous mental gymnastics that, in reality, come down to little more than 'we want to stay in power.'
In this regard I also think hate crimes miss the mark, because is something like 'the knockout game' a hate crime? Probably not, but I think it should be treated in a similar fashion because it's essentially the same problem - of some ideology driving somebody to violence, as opposed to a normal personal conflict.
As far as I can tell both sides have their intensely loud groups, but only noticing one means you're closer (by varying degrees) to the other. And that's OK, but slightly less OK if you're not aware of it.
Maybe if you're talking about culture in general it will exist as some sort of U shape in general terms no doubt, but any hyper online subcultures turned into an IRL organization/insular collection of people like defcon is liable to go hard in identifiable directions which is distracting to more disinterested parties there for the original purpose of the show.
it might not be true, and surveys and voting patterns say otherwise, but it can definitely feel like one side is dominant. It can definitely be true that a particular place/activity/group is dominated by one side, which is what GP seems to be claiming, rather than that the US in general has shifted to the left?
I had always identified hacker culture as principally left. Maybe the US is specifically different.
Which in the US puts it somewhat orthogonal to the left-right divide.
It mirrors the divide on the public at large - a disappointingly large number of people are wildly ready to jump on the authoritarian bandwagon, because the alternative has a few leftist ideas that make them feel icky.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_Inside_a_Bag_of_Milk_Insi...
The problem here is that society and culture in general has got more authoritarian so it cut across the left-right divide (which IMO has got meaningless anyway since it no longer reflects a consistent difference in economic policy) but leaving the non-authoritarians practically without politically representation.
* Throwing a bag over your head and sending you to a tropical gulag for life without trial or access to a lawyer, contrary to the explicit ruling of a judge reviewing your case.
* Requiring you to wear a piece of cloth on your face in the middle of a deadly pandemic that's killing millions of people.
(Its not that we can't tell the difference between them, any child above the age of 8 can grasp the distinction, it's that people who love the former and are mildly annoyed by the latter are being deliberately obtuse about it.)
It's authoritarian-minded people that don't want to listen to anyone (and want to force you to do what they want through hacking). When they get want they want, they don't care about trampling on the rights of or oppressing the people that disagree.
Microsoft lobbying for mandatory TPM to get on a network or whatever.
The left of the 90s would have never stood for that. They were the die hards for free speech then. Something shifted.
Don't fool yourself, conspiracy theories are usually marginalized in US culture, the left didn't welcome conspiracy theories back then either.
Also, now that political correctness and censorship mostly coming from the right again (with the Moral Majority going after music then, and video games/porn now), we now see the civil libertarian elements of the left standing up to fight censorship once again.
In both cases, there was a time when both were exclusively people-powered and "the man" was entirely absent.
"There are some authentic nuggets if you know where to go" are the last kicks of a fast-gentrifying neighborhood, to use mixed metaphors. In the past anywhere/everywhere you could go was authentic.
IMO, the web was authentically p2p before online Paypal, banner ads and Bonzi Buddy. It's still possible to subscribe to blogs (said nuggets) via RSS - which is miraculously having a renaissance - but it's all going to be drowned out by the relentless, unfeeling firehouse of AI slop.
The goal DARPA was trying to accelerate by funding self-driving, btw, was to "achieve the fielding of unmanned, remotely controlled technology such that ... by 2015, one third of the operational ground combat vehicles are unmanned". [0]
[0] https://www.grandchallenge.org/grandchallenge/docs/Grand_Cha...
By way of explanation: rocketry was funded and developed for military ends, including von Braun's earlier work on the V2 and later work on missiles across the Atlantic and the development of ICBMs. IMO, there's no military presence in human spaceflight[1], but you may see it differently due to the heritage of the propulsion system.
When the internet became a public thing the counterculture quickly moved there.
How does one tell the difference?
I joined a local discord / defcon chapter, and it was mostly reminiscing about the good old days and most people saying they weren't going this year.
People were generally super friendly and willing to hang and chat.
Fox-IT was founded by a former AIVD employee which is the Dutch NSA basically.
I remember a friend sending me a job ad from some new cyber team in the military. And I really had to laugh, no way would I ever work somewhere where I'd have to mindlessly obey orders I might disagree with. Or wear a uniform. Or go like "yes sir" to someone who is probably dumber than me.
And really pretty much everyone in the hacker community has an anarchist streak like that. You can tell by the way people behave, how they structure things without strong leaders etc. Everyone just helps at these events where they want, nobody tells them to do anything. This is also why I love these events. No wonder the army can't fill those teams lol. If they want people like us they have to adapt to us.
But I understand in the US this may be different because patriotism seems to be big there.
But yeah my view of the hacker scene is very much tailored by these events. I wouldn't even go to something like Black Hat - way too corporate. Even though I work in "cyber" myself.
There were a lot of white hat people that were made during Snowden --- at Snowden. Glem Greenwald didn't help matters much.
(Obviously also a lot of white hat people pissed for the opposite reason! I'm only saying it's a diverse group.)
It was wrong to assume these worlds are aligned in opinion.
Being in tech and partnering with the US Army on 2025 is counterculture.
For the $500 entry fee you would think they could provide earphones and someone would hack together an app that would let you listen through those earphones based on some sort of proximity detection. No doubt the first year someone would find a vulnerability in it and would need parallel deployment to the existing infrastructure, but still.
There's not even a need to create anything. Rent from a silent disco company. Done.
ex: ai village was a new weird thing just a small number years ago, but now that ai is the #1 topic at blackhat (commercial side), it even has its own big event that overshadows blackhat proper . imo that's a success story for defcon fostering doers.
That is me! :) I do not know where the counterculture hangs out at DC, because I have never been a cool kid, just a brainy weird kid among the brainy weird kids, even as an adult! But there are often quite a few insightful papers at DEF CON. I didn’t go this year, I think my managers are on to me. :)
"When I first started coming to Defcon, it was full of hackers and we played spot-the-fed. Now you're all feds and we play spot-the-hacker."
Way back in the times of hippies and yippies many were subsequently recruited by the empire. While he was troubled in other ways Abbie Hoffmann was, as far as I know, a notable exception.
Most there don't trust government. And besides security holes can be used by all sides so it's imperative to fix them asap.
What was surprising was the intense applause from a hacker con to this pitch.
Given what was to come, also notably absent discussion from the audience or speaker about how working for CISA did or did not mean working for DHS. Assurances of firm segmentation on this aspect from speakers after the formal talk ended were similarly a bit weak.
Not that anything was inherently bad about her recruiting pitch, but for a hackercon, it was a bit close to the flagpole. And notably that CISA crew is “no longer at CISA” and under prosecution, or intense social pressure, or otherwise.
Feels worth evaluating!
Most cybersecurity work in the US, by volume, rolls up to one of about five organizations - all of whom are US government entities.
Most cybersecurity work has nothing to do with keeping Russian bot farms out of outdated WordPress installs.
And he seems really well loved, as evidenced by https://www.reddit.com/r/Defcon/comments/1mlaw4s/comment/n7p...
Hackerdom has always had a relationship with Defense, Intelligence & LE.
Most hackers are deeply benevolent and care greatly about the world, and insecurity at large, mostly fostered by Business.
Building relationships with defense & intel are often the best avenues towards moving towards a more secure future, working within the system for positive change. Our way of life, and our freedoms are not secure with imminent threats on the horizon.
Please, disabuse yourself of the notion that Mainland China is not weaponizing their hackerdom against us simultaneously.
it's fine, hackers were probably one of the few constructive successes to come out of it ever. Personally, I suspect the hacker project was on the scale of what the US did during the cold war with abstract expressionist art[1] and literary magazines[2].
As a funnel for getting great, principled talent into the IC, we should be happy and grateful there were people to balance what was coming out of the colleges.
Just because the classified world values hacker skills doesn't mean people shouldn't. I'd say the opposite. There is absolutely a secret world that is accessible on a need to know basis, and it hides everywhere in plain sight for those with the skills to see it. All you have to do is be the among the very best at what you do, in whatever field you are in, and you will encounter it. Saying the Army undermines the subculture that was defcon misses the point. The message of hacking was, develop elite skills and others will find you. not only has this not changed, it is more true than ever.
[1]https://www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/en/did-you-know/la-cia-y-e... [2]https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p037t501
Oh stop.
There was zero intelligence at any of the five CuervoCons ...
The world has changed.
Not what people are saying. There would be little noise if there were talks at defcon about Ukrainian cyberwarfare or hacking Russian military infrastructure.
This is about the united states military industrial complex. Can you even point out a military that did more harm to the world at large in the last 50 years? How many dead? How many human right violations?
The head of the NSA as well, post-snowden? Come on.
Broken clocks, all that.
State of the clock pending what's going to come out in the news about Orange guy's meeting with Putin where they are discussing the surrender of Ukrainian territories without Ukraine's opinion.
You can cherry pick a few good things. Ukraine, Kosovo, Korea, maybe Libya, the first Gulf war, the Berlin air-lift
Then you come back to reality. The war on terror, El Salvador, Chile, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Laos, arming the Saudis, Irak, Afghanistan
If you engage in 50 or so interventions and all except one fail miserably, often in horrifying ways that result in the deaths of millions of people, it’s really hard to maintain that that’s a good record.
>preserving the rules-based international order
The USA's foreign policy is anything but rules-based. They're brutal and barbaric. You can agitate China and Russia as being scarier, that doesn't make the U.S. military a force of good.
If you're asking the whether they have their place being shoved at the center of Defcon you have to take in the whole picture
The world hasn't changed.
While there certainly are some Western hackers who eschew all military applications because of their extreme pacifism, the examples in the article (e.g. pro-Palestinian activists) are not necessarily pacifist. I'd describe them more as out of alignment with their country's current governments, or perhaps actively aligned against them.
And given recent (and not-so-recent) behavior of the US government, I don't think it's irrational for hacker in the US to conclude that their own government presents a greater threat to their freedom than Putin or Xi. (I don't necessarily agree, I just don't think it's an irrational conclusion.)
How dare them being opposed to that poor military sector, that nobody ever speaks up for. Completely forgotten by politics and media, nobody ever takes their side and see how in reality they make the world a much better place.
After hundreds of thousands of deaths and daily news about one war crime chasing another by all sides, daily uncovered cruel lies, essentially all wars being illegal and not defensive according to UN laws. Laws that the very countries that now break them established. Only not being sanctioned because of vetoes by these countries.
And all of them being lobbied against by some nerds meeting in their spare time to follow their interests. Those horrible, horrible extreme pacifists!
Though I must say, it's stange to go to the certified fed conference because the "non-fed" option is "too pro-fed" now.
I'm sure other venues and community events will take up the mantle given time, but it's still a bummer to see an event that used to be so fiercely independent out here cheering on the feds.