The Def Con hacking conference banned hackers Pablos Holman and Vincenzo Iozzo, as well as former MIT Media Lab director Joichi Ito, from attending the annual conference after their reported connections with Jeffrey Epstein.
Defcon is my biggest regret about the whole “US going to shit” situation. I’m from Europe, and I was planning to eventually attend, but there’s no way I’m going there until USA gets their shit together, which I suspect won’t be during my lifetime at this point.
They should move it to Europe, especially for this kind of event, I’d suspect that for a lot of attendees and speakers, who tend to be pretty anti-systemic, going into US safely at this point is not an option.
Partially true, and it’s not hidden — the NSA has had a recruiting presence at DefCon for years, which is its own kind of surreal. The ‘Spot the Fed’ contest is a literal DefCon tradition.
But the conference is genuinely dual-use. The same talks that help government agencies understand attack surface also help defenders, researchers, and incident responders. The vulnerability research presented there has driven real patch cycles at major vendors.
The more honest framing: DefCon is where the US security-industrial complex and the independent research community share the same hallways and pretend that’s fine. Whether that’s a feature or a bug depends on your politics. CCC in Germany has a much cleaner separation — explicitly anti-surveillance, explicitly political, and the research quality is comparable. If you’re European and skeptical of that government entanglement, CCC is the better fit.
explicitly anti-surveillance, explicitly political, and the research quality is comparable. If you’re European and skeptical of that government entanglement, CCC is the better fit.
Any recommendations? My only experience with defcon is through recordings of the talks from there, and they’ve always been phenomenal, and some videos from the events like various CTFs. Never really looked into it more. I think I also saw a documentary a few years ago that was pretty sick.
Defcon is my biggest regret about the whole “US going to shit” situation. I’m from Europe, and I was planning to eventually attend, but there’s no way I’m going there until USA gets their shit together, which I suspect won’t be during my lifetime at this point.
They should move it to Europe, especially for this kind of event, I’d suspect that for a lot of attendees and speakers, who tend to be pretty anti-systemic, going into US safely at this point is not an option.
Defcon is where USA scouts and recruits, isn’t it?
Partially true, and it’s not hidden — the NSA has had a recruiting presence at DefCon for years, which is its own kind of surreal. The ‘Spot the Fed’ contest is a literal DefCon tradition.
But the conference is genuinely dual-use. The same talks that help government agencies understand attack surface also help defenders, researchers, and incident responders. The vulnerability research presented there has driven real patch cycles at major vendors.
The more honest framing: DefCon is where the US security-industrial complex and the independent research community share the same hallways and pretend that’s fine. Whether that’s a feature or a bug depends on your politics. CCC in Germany has a much cleaner separation — explicitly anti-surveillance, explicitly political, and the research quality is comparable. If you’re European and skeptical of that government entanglement, CCC is the better fit.
Political how?
Europe has way better alternatives. Fuck fedcon
Any recommendations? My only experience with defcon is through recordings of the talks from there, and they’ve always been phenomenal, and some videos from the events like various CTFs. Never really looked into it more. I think I also saw a documentary a few years ago that was pretty sick.
I would say look into the chaos Computer Congress in Germany.
It takes place every year between Christmas and new years.
There is also plenty of other chaos events throughout the year which are smaller abut still very much worth the visit.
https://www.ccc.de/en/