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Comment by lrvick | Hacker News Reader

The "Crypto and Privacy" village at Defcon demands you agree to the privacy policies of Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, and Discord to interact with them. It is a disgrace.

Defcon stopped caring about privacy, hacker ethos, and digital sovereignty a long time ago.

Go there if you want to talk to their military recruiters or buy/sell proprietary snake oil security SaaS. It is really just another corpocon at this point. Hackers should probably skip it unless using it as a chance to hang out with friends in vegas on their corporate credit card.

The hackers are mostly at HOPE and CCC these days.

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Defcon was always the most government-aligned conference. Historically, BlackHat was Defcon's slightly more counter-culture counterpart/foil. These days, I don't think anti-establishment hackers have any physical conference gathering.

> These days, I don't think anti-establishment hackers have any physical conference gathering.

HOPE still exists

I think you got them confused, DEF CON is the more counterculture and Blackhat is the corporate conference.

While I agree that was the original intention, modern DEFCON is just as corpo but for those that cannot afford blackhat. European hacker cons like CCC are now what DEFCON once was rumored to be long ago.

> These days, I don't think anti-establishment hackers have any physical conference gathering.

Wouldn't you be essentially doxxing yourself by attending?

Privacy centric cons allow paying cash at the door. That is maybe the one thing Defcon still gets right.

Paying cash is nothing compared to all of the cameras installed in and around the location of the con. Which also means nothing towards the hotels definitely not accepting cash unless you're willing to stay at hotel with the working girls and dealers.

Agreed. It is simply the one privacy thing they do right.

>These days, I don't think anti-establishment hackers have any physical conference gathering.

MoneroKon and Monerotopia.

BSidesLV is still pretty chill, although it's more focused on cybersecurity professionals than on the hacking side of things.

> The "Crypto and Privacy" village at Defcon demands you agree to the privacy policies of Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, and Discord to interact with them.

Do you have a citation for this? I am not seeing anything on their website and they did not come up to me and demand I sign anything when I was there?

Last time I was there the only ways to engage with the community were via slack, google groups, github, or discord. All centralized proprietary surveillance capitalism products, and no decentralized/FOSS options.

https://cryptovillage.github.io/ shows nothing has changed.

https://toorcamp.org/

> The "Crypto and Privacy" village at Defcon demands you agree to the privacy policies of Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, and Discord to interact with them. It is a disgrace.

What does this look like in practice?

They have a sign similar to the ones at stadiums or events that say recording is in progress and that by being there you agree to be recorded... being here means you agree... not that there is any enforcement but very flocky and thus ironic.

That's not Google though?

You have your choice of salesforce, google, or discord to interact with them.

They even virtue signal with their "crypto means cryptography!" sign without actually promoting tools that let people have control of their own keys.

They do not use or support any privacy preserving comms, and thus, they are just yet another surveillance capitalism marketing village.

I actually encourage Defcon attendees to visit the village with context, as it really is a symbol of everything wrong with privacy advocacy in America, and why we are so so so far behind Europe.

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