Just starting a thread, for those looking for where folks might end up.
reserving post. words are wordier words.
words are wordier words. reserving post.
You going to be there @henrygab ?
Sorry for the delay, I was there; Both underwhelmed by BlackHat, and found DefCon awesome.
BlackHat
I’d wager most of the show floor was AI-related … and most I’d characterize as shovel-ware. The talks were OK, but the researchers were rarely available for questions afterwards, which rather defeated a major purpose, imho.
DefCon
I’m proud to have gotten my first challenge coin (Blue Team Village), while I also gave away a ton of hardware (a stack of dual-frequency magic RFID cards; a stack of RPi 2040 boards; and even gave away a BusPirate5 to one of the SAF(un)LOK researchers).
People at DefCon actually talked to each other (unlike blackhat), and the overall vibe was very friendly … more like PAX, where the primary rule is “don’t be a jerk”.
The badge was a fun add-on, and DefCon helped me put faces to many names I’d only interacted with virtually over the years.
There was some truly frightening research (such as a demo that exported an Intel TEE ECDSA private key … it was onscreen for >30 seconds), while some other hacks were personally interesting to me (such as the continued application of RowHammer style attacks).
My impression
I’d go to DefCon again. I cannot say the same for BlackHat… Just didn’t get the same value for the time.
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Side effect of that one being focused on the C-Suite level.
If you ever find your way across the pond: the CCC congress is also community-focused (and its actively kept free of commerce/advertising).
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I’m glad you got to go and enjoy yourself. I think all of us “hackers” need to experience a big con like that at least once. Also, congrats on the challenge coin, bet cool!!!
I totally agree with both impressions based on my
trip a few years ago. BH is so C-Suite focused. I will say the pre conference trainings were great, though.
DefCon is definitely much cooler. I was at a talk in the RF village; relatively small, maybe 100 people. Speaker asked who hadn’t eaten yet that day and a few raised their hands. He threw baggies of casino chips to those people and told them “there’s a snack bar just outside the door that will take these chips for food - go get something to eat and come back in”. That’s the kind of atmosphere I want to be in.
Luckily I went in the last year before people started talking about LLMs, so there was no pollution of content/talks with that crap.
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