Hi!
Given my occasional good-natured trolling on Twitter, and since many have asked me the last few weeks, I want to set the record straight. I will be in Las Vegas next week, for real. I arrive tomorrow evening and leave the following Sunday. This is the first time at BH/DC in several years for me.
Between Monday and Wednesday I will be doing the corporate thing around Mandalay and adjacent to the Black Hat event. I am not actually attending the conference, thus ‘adjacent’. Each day already has several meetings lined up so I won’t be readily available for parts of the day. When not in a meeting, happy to meet up with anyone looking to better understand the nuances of the vulnerability intelligence landscape. On Tuesday evening I will be at the Guidepoint Party at the Aureole in Mandalay Bay for several hours. Wednesday night I hope to crash the BSidesLV pool party and enjoy the cool 94 degree temperatures Vegas has to offer at night.
Between Thursday and Sunday I will be doing the hallway thing at DEF CON primarily. On Thursday at 3:30p I will be on the DC101 panel, apparently because I am old, to dish out horror stories about our industry to those attending. On Friday and Saturday I will no doubt be around Skytalks on and off to harass and support that track. Otherwise, you can likely find me roaming around Caesar’s and Flamingo checking out villages and side events.
I have a Twitter client on my phone but it doesn’t have any alerts, so that won’t be a reliable way to reach me. I hope to check Twitter every so often but my lizard brain isn’t wired to check that really. If I do camp down at a spot in a hallway or bar I hope to remember to Tweet my location in case anyone wants to discuss wildlife rehabilitation or vulnerability databases or anything else interesting really. As for spotting me, I will be one of ~ 100 wearing the DC26 Attrition badge, and a T-shirt that has an animal on it. As many have said, I too am really bad at remembering names while fairly good at remembering faces. Worse, when I do remember trying to figure out if you prefer to go by real name or handle at what events. Please don’t be offended and please re-introduce yourself! It may take me a minute to remember our history, my brain is a tad broken these days.
Finally, this will be my last year attending DEF CON. I attended DEF CON 2 back in 1994 at the Sahara, so this will be my 25th anniversary. I see a lot of value in DEF CON and continue to volunteer reviewing talks on the CFP panel to help shape the conference and try to make the content the best possible. Next year I will stay on with CFP in a more limited role, but still offer my input for certain types of talks. That said, as many say before and after ‘hacker summer camp’, the week is emotionally and physically draining, and many of us often come back with ‘con flu’ or some other kind of crud. The last time I attended, I went a full week not seeing some friends that were in Las Vegas, because the meta-convention is just so big and spread out. I hope that doesn’t happen this year, but it is one discouraging aspect of a week in Vegas.
While DEF CON doesn’t work so well for me personally, I see a lot of potential in it especially with the huge rise of villages. More and more that I talk to say that the villages are the first part of the conference that attracts them, more so than the main lineup of talks. Villages are an evolved modern evolution of old “birds of a feather” sessions at conferences back in the day, before ‘hallway con’ was a thing even. A group of people that share a particular interest and want to focus on a given topic have the ability to do it. Even better, often times that comes with elaborate and painstakingly designed networks and challenges to test your skills and learn more. In addition to villages are the side events for runners, shooters, coffee-drinkers, and more. I encourage everyone, especially newcomers, to embrace these side events and villages. DEF CON will be what you make of it, and there is more opportunity now than ever before to make the best of it.
