Don't expect much from that food court unless it's improved a lot over the last few years.
DEF CON 32 Was Canceled. We Un-Canceled it
351–360 of 408 posts
Re: DEF CON 32 Was Canceled. We Un-Canceled it
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uh, yes, it does? There’s a huge difference between: “if you do X, you will be asked to leave” and “if you do X, the police will arrest you” Like, when I invite someone over to a dinner party, it is against my policy to insult my dog. If you do that I will kick you out (not actually, he’s a dumb klutz, you can insult him all you want), but that doesn’t make it illegal to insult my dog.
True but not relevant. Police and legality do not need to be involved with certain kinds of casino justice. Security may just offer to beat your ass if you won't cease and desist, avoiding the paperwork. Could be bluff but they know where cameras are and have cop friends..
> Security may just offer to beat your ass if you won't cease and desist
To be clear, if they tell you to stop playing, and you don’t, then they absolutely can call the police for trespassing, which is a crime.
I don’t think most casinos have private security that will beat you any more, since they can tell you to stop playing and enforce that with police.
Re: DEF CON 32 Was Canceled. We Un-Canceled it
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
Convention space and room blocks are fairly cheap to rent in Las Vegas. No other city in North America has a similar amount of space or options for low cost block booking. Also, plenty of DefCon attendees and sponsors are also attending BlackHat at around the same time, so it makes it easier to justify expensing most of the cost as an employee.
Also, why go outside? Vegas is very comfortable inside the buildings.
Now you're thinking like a hacker!
Re: DEF CON 32 Was Canceled. We Un-Canceled it
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
Again: I'm not trying to sell you on Black Hat. But re:Invent is nothing at all like Black Hat. Black Hat is a peer-reviewed research conference focusing on presentation of security research results. You pay to see Black Hat talks if breaking the encryption on police TETRA radio or defeating Apple's PAC pointer authentication is professionally useful to you. For most Black Hat talks, that stage will be the first publ…
> For most Black Hat talks, that stage will be the first public airing of that research. I find this aspect intriguing, and seems to contribute to the buzz around the event? Used to be true in some other areas of computer science too, but outside of security I can't think of an academic conference where it still happens. Nowadays you can almost always expect talks at top conferences to have preprints posted on arXiv…
Yeah, it's an idiosyncrasy of vulnerability research and "zero day" status. Things will get discussed with the media in advance of the conference, but if you blog your whole talk before the review board sees the submission, that'll get used to shoot down accepting. Which sort of makes sense, because even if it's good, your submission will be competing with 5 more really good talks on the same track.
I'm a longtime reviewer for Black Hat, and I've reviewed (shadow) for ACM and (publicly) for Usenix (I was a PC for WOOT a few years ago). It's a different vibe. Nobody's WOOT submission got dinged for having been disclosed in advance, but Black Hat submissions will get dinged for having been presented at regional conferences prior to BH.
Again though: the single easiest way to make sure a talk has no chance at BH is to make it vendor-y. Reviewers will LinkedIn-stalk the names on the presentation to make sure nobody's connected to marketing or sales. If you're submitting something that's even tangential to your product (smart toaster firewalls), even if it's good research (elite-level zero-day vulnerabilities in smart toasters), you have to go way out of your way to assure reviewers you won't pitch on stage.
Black Hat is pretty sensitive to making sure the talks themselves aren't commercial, even though the conference trappings are extremely commercial. "This would make a better RSA talk" is an extremely common epithet.
Re: DEF CON 32 Was Canceled. We Un-Canceled it
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
I attended an earlier DEF CON (5 or 6?) where the attendees: 1) Hacked the in-circuit TV system and broadcast their own pirate show 2) Gained roof access and removed the satellite dish 3) Spilled hookah coals onto the bed starting a fire 4) drove the janitor's golf cart into the pool and that is only what I witnessed firsthand. I can only imagine what else went on. Maybe the attendees low spend was only part of the e…
Among some other really cringey behaviors. I've seen bottles of alcohol passed around doing talks and heard more than a few really off color jokes about criminal sex acts and such. Vegas waitresses have seen it all also but there was over the top behavior. We're in a victim dominant culture now, "it's not you or what you've done, you're just a victim of evil or something" but at more than a few Def Cons and more than…
Defcon was always a very boozy conference. It's not a professional event. It's Burning Man for high school AV clubs.
Re: DEF CON 32 Was Canceled. We Un-Canceled it
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
what was it related to? I thought someone reported a suspicious bag in the venue.
It was someone called in “a suspicious backpack with wires” which is absolutely hilarious at DEF CON
Hah...that could easily have been MY backpack.
When I'm at DEFCON, I bring a fun little device. It's an ESP8266 that constantly listens for WiFi probes coming from people's mobile devices. It then displays the SSID (the network name) on a scrolling LED text display. I keep it plugged into one of those Anker battery banks. 10,000 mAh will power it for ~16 hours, so it lasts the entire day.
Re: DEF CON 32 Was Canceled. We Un-Canceled it
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
Among some other really cringey behaviors. I've seen bottles of alcohol passed around doing talks and heard more than a few really off color jokes about criminal sex acts and such. Vegas waitresses have seen it all also but there was over the top behavior. We're in a victim dominant culture now, "it's not you or what you've done, you're just a victim of evil or something" but at more than a few Def Cons and more than…
Yes, counter-culture is counter-culture. It was meant to make normals uncomfy.
Guess what? Hotels are run by normals.
Re: DEF CON 32 Was Canceled. We Un-Canceled it
#358This may be a blessing in disguise. DEF CON has grown massively to the point where the number of attendees who want to go to the various villages all day equals or even surpasses the attendees interested in the main talks. However, those villages have historically been given very small spaces. This past DEF CON, the Cloud Securitt village had a line down the hallway and escalator pretty much all of Friday and Saturda…
Yeah, this might actually change my mind about skipping DEFCON.
I started going to DEFCON in 2017 (DEFCON 25). After last year's event, I had decided I wasn't going to go anymore. The villages were always extremely crowded, so trying to actually participate would be a huge wait. The talks were nice, but I can just watch them on YouTube a month or so later. Hacker Jeopardy is always a blast, but I'm not going to spend $2,500 to fly and stay in Vegas just for that.
The fact that Red Team village would only be given this tiny conference room with only like 50 chairs to listen to talks was just bullshit.
If the new venue has more room and solves all my complaints, maybe I'll still go.
Re: DEF CON 32 Was Canceled. We Un-Canceled it
#359The problem is the casino doesn't want a bunch of hackers playing casino games the way the hackers want to play them...
If hackers could hack casino games, they would have fixed the hacks a long time ago.
Re: DEF CON 32 Was Canceled. We Un-Canceled it
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am very doubtful. Outside sports betting (where you can actually outsmart the house) we loved winning players when I worked in online gambling. Winning players are much more likely to return and lose more than they ever won.
How did you handle winning sports betters? Did you decline to take their bets, cap their bet size or just move the line to compensate?
You ban them off your platform when they win.