
DEF Con 28: Safe Mode - todsacerdoti
http://defcon.outel.org/
======
HashThis
Attending DEF Con 28 virtually will be made easy for you. Soon you will be
sent an .EXE in email. Just click to run it. Click Install when it opens.

Then you can easily attend DEF Con 28 remotely.

~~~
Mister_X
Thank you so much for that long Laugh! Oh, and uh... can you give me a hand, I
really want to attend DEF Con 28 virtually, but I'm having a bit of a problem
logging in with this .EXE file on my Linux box.

~~~
anticensor
There is no such .exe. Talks have been pre-recorded and online Q/A sessions
are being conducted: [https://defcon.org/html/defcon-safemode/dc-safemode-
quicksta...](https://defcon.org/html/defcon-safemode/dc-safemode-
quickstart.html)

~~~
ladberg
They were both joking! Sending out an executable to attend an event is the
exact type of action DEFCON hopes to prevent.

------
cwkoss
What are your favorite talks you've watched so far?

I enjoyed Bill Graydon's talk on "bruteforcing" physical/metal keys:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suN0IsifTyY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suN0IsifTyY)

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sp332
Another minimalist view of this I recommend is the Hacker Tracker app. I think
it defaults to DEF CON, but if not, you can change the conference it's
tracking in the settings.

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setheron
I want to watch docs but I don't even know where to start with this massive
page:/

~~~
donpdonp
I agree its hard to find things on that page. These links might help:

[https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2028/DEF%20CON%20Safe%20M...](https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2028/DEF%20CON%20Safe%20Mode%20video%20and%20slides/)

[https://www.youtube.com/user/DEFCONConference/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/DEFCONConference/videos)

~~~
Krasnol
Thanks.

The page was terrible.

~~~
qumqats
I'm open to constructive criticism and comments. What would you change to
improve it? What made it bad?

~~~
bblough
I'm not the person you're replying to, but I'll offer my 2 cents.

Frankly, there is a TON of info present, and as someone who hasn't yet
attended an on-site DEFCon (though I hope to someday), it's a bit
overwhelming.

I certainly understand the appeal of a plain text format, but personally, I
think it would be a big improvement to have a schedule grid (think TV guide or
similar) with the village on one axis and the time slot on the other.

I think this would make skimming over the schedule a lot easier overall, as
well as making it easier to focus on a particular village or time slot, while
still being able to relate/compare it to the others. I also think this is
especially helpful since the talks vary in size and can overlap with each
other, so having a visual representation would IMO make it a lot easier to see
at-a-glance what the conflicts are.

Of course, this could just be my personal preference, as this is what is used
by several of other conferences I have attended or do regularly attend. I'm
certainly no UI expert.

------
microcolonel
I can chat on Discord any day.

~~~
brunoqc
I wish people would not use Discord.

I wish they would use open source tools like Matrix or Zulip.

~~~
microcolonel
Discord is really good, I would drag people to federated open alternatives if
it were good. Zulip looks, feels, and runs _kinda okay_ overall. I could
probably do it well if it were my job, the stuff Discord does well is in my
wheelhouse.

I want to get off of it because of the PRC connection, but it's where the
community is at for now.

XMPP is probably the worst thing that ever happened to open standard instant
messaging.

~~~
brunoqc
Yeah Discord is really well-made. That's why I didn't tell that it was shit
and that open source is better.

It's just that maybe it would help if cool people used the open source one. It
would give them visibility, more bug reports, more pull requests, more
donations.

Matrix isn't bad. Sure it's better to host your own server right now since
their main one is often overloaded.

And the UX stuff is getting better and the p2p changes should be awesome.

~~~
NikolaeVarius
Matrix for HOPE was solid as hell.

~~~
jrwr
From the backend of it (I was on the team for it) Even with our "light" load,
Matrix/Riot is a overbloated product overall. To handle the scale of Defcon
would require hardware I don't think exists

~~~
n010n3
I ran the Matrix server for HOPE and have fairly extensive experience
administrating Matrix. For HOPE, we didn't even begin to approach anything
that looked like capacity; any resources that were maxing out were either due
to the DoS attack we were enduring (and made numerous changes to mitigate)
during the conf, or applications in different threads that matrix metrics were
picking up on (bug filed, will fixed in new versions).

Even so, we could easily - without a sweat - get 2000 people on a server. I
wasn't even using more workers than we had cores. Make that a bigger box and
you get a few thousand more. Then use a few different servers that are
federated with each other for DEFCON and you have instant scale.

The matrix.org people run the matrix.org homeserver for over ~200k active
users. You can see an outdated version of the stats here:
[https://matrix.org/faq/#what-is-the-current-project-
status](https://matrix.org/faq/#what-is-the-current-project-status) and
they've said their active userbase has grown 300% in the past year.

The original plan for HOPE was to run multiple homeservers, but we didn't even
begin to need to.

~~~
brunoqc
Also soonish, we'll have dendrite (go) and conduit (rust).

EDIT: And eventually p2p which might change everything.

