DEF CON 23 is OVER. What did you like or hate and how have DC 24 be better?

[Deviant Ollam]

Don't like Defcon? Don't come. It will make the lines you hate so much shorter for the rest of us.

for real.

thank you for playing, sorry you didn't make the bonus round, Sand. better luck at whatever thing you do instead of this next year.

disagree with me? if you really think that DEF CON is that sucky and awful, feel free to email me your thoughts at: deviant@gofuckurself.today

[badlock]

Most people have echoed my main opinions...
+ Goons did a great job. Very little yelling and random abuse of power (unlike previous years... DC13 was particularly bad with Goons mostly acting like thugs, or DC20 where Goons intentionally gave bad directions just for shitz and giggles. This year, every goon seemed friendly and helpful.)
+ DCTV was really useful -- after they worked out some of the bugs.
+ Great large conference rooms and large hallways. (People who complained about the crowds never stayed at the Alexis Park.)
+ Great temperature control. Not freezing cold, not sitting in a tent on the Alexis Park roof hot.
+ Wow! A selection of restaurants!
+ Never hearing the words "fire marshal" is really great.

Things people already mentioned that need improvement:
- Elevators
- Signage would have been useful.
- Dark gray on black printed schedule = unreadable.
- Vendor area congestion. Perhaps split it into two vendor areas -- one in Paris and one in Bally's?

Things not mentioned but that need improvement:
- Physically put the tracks in numerical order. "4 1 2 3" made everyone looking for 4 walk down to 3 and back.
- Vendors not allowed to setup the night before.
- Black badge confusion. For the first half-day of registration, nobody knew how to handle black badges. (Paper list is good. Not knowing where the paper list is located is bad. Having a dedicated area for black bad registration is good. Having goons not know where to send black badge holders and sending them all over the registration area is bad. Holding out my black badge and having a goon say "what is that?" is really bad.)
- I get that people like to dick with the cellphone network to show it is not secure. But don't fuck with calls during a family emergency. Perhaps there should be a contest for people to track down and take down fake/MitM cell sites. (You find it, you keep it. Maybe sponsored by the FCC?) Why should the attackers have all of the fun?

[Sand]

Def Con is ComicCon 2.0. Don't even pretend you aren't all over Mr. Robot's jock trying to get them signing people's kindles or whatever for next year.

[The Dark Tangent]

I really appreciate the feedback so far, Sand excluded, and I usually lurk for a while to not influence feedback or to alter the course of it.

badlock Had some great points in his "not mentioned" section, and like most things there is a story behind each one and why things didn't go as planned. For example, a Black Badge Hall of Fame (https://www.defcon.org/html/links/dc-black-badge.html) was created to help track everyone who has earned entry, but the procedures for check in didn't get get tested which lead to confusion.

I'm not going to go point for point on everything, but I will start joining the conversation now that some time has passed. Also if you have confidential feedback please message me here.

DT

[TieShort]

Wanted to give a huge shout of praise to everybody involved in the villages and contest area. This is my 9th DEF con and 8th year hanging at the HHV . There was a lot of work and thought put into the setup as usual, and I think it worked really well this year, especially with all the challenges of a new venue and the space available. Thanks Lockpick and Tamper for sharing the space with us. I think this year worked better than many of the previous.

A big second to all of Deviant's Thank Yous with a couple extras:
- The HHV Volunteers - you ran a tight ship and no fires! Thanks for the time and effort put into this year.
- DCDarknet - You had a great crowd and great engagement with the community. You are getting big though, and maybe will need your own conference soon. :)
- All those that came and learned something at the villages. The villages, and speaking especially for the HHV, are all about the community. You are the ones that make it a success. Thanks for putting up with some of our failures and learning. We keep trying to make each year better than the last.

Biggest feedback I have heard, is more and more organized workshops/interactive demos. I know there were some issues and shuffling this year, but there is a huge need and want for this part of the Con to grow.

I talked with a number of representatives from other villages and am hoping to do more cross pollination for next year. Also I think the HHV can do better at providing more of our experts opportunities to share with the community and am brainstorming how we can do that.

[Sand]

Whatever DT. If you only want to hear what you want to hear then keep your head in the sand.

Put some couches (like 25 of them) in the inside DJ'ed areas so people can chill out. DEF CON doesn't need that much dance space... No one wants to stand around watching a terrible DJ play, after standing in lines all day. Also, I must have been at the DEF CON KIDS Party because they kicked everyone out of the Indigo tower at 12:00am Saturday night..

RE: Lines..

I'm not going to try and act like I'm the smartest guy on this thread.. But there are only a finite number of talks and seats for those talks. A seat reservation system that at the least could keep the number of people down to appropriate levels seems like a reasonable solution to cut down maybe even half of these lines. Reserve your seats, scan something (Barcode,RFID,__ !!! HINT ALERT >> Badge << HINT ALERT !!!___,Phone, eyes, ears, tattoos whatever) to get pass the line of people who want to wonder in and out of talks. After a period of time, if you don't show, you lose your seat in the reservation system. Try to make the system anonymous so the privacy nerds don't cry. A similar model could be applied to the villages.

Maybe support the things that people really loved this year. The Darknet challenge seems really cool. It is fucking bull shit that I need to wait in a line for an hour to hopefully get something like a Darknet badge before it sells out just so I can wait in another line before something else books up. The DEF CON LAMP Bash 2015 challenge looks really cool and has nice prizes. What's that about? You don't even know do you?

Now you can spend the rest of the winter crying about how doing the above mentioned is impossible. You guys have lines like disney/six flages in the 90s.

#BLM #FTP FTG

[The Dark Tangent]

Sand, I welcome and encourage all feedback, it's just your casual insults of people I don't like.

[TheCotMan]

Whatever DT. If you only want to hear what you want to hear then keep your head in the sand.

Put some couches (like 25 of them) in the inside DJ'ed areas so people can chill out. DEF CON doesn't need that much dance space... No one wants to stand around watching a terrible DJ play, after standing in lines all day. Also, I must have been at the DEF CON KIDS Party because they kicked everyone out of the Indigo tower at 12:00am Saturday night..

RE: Lines..

I'm not going to try and act like I'm the smartest guy on this thread.. But there are only a finite number of talks and seats for those talks. A seat reservation system that at the least could keep the number of people down to appropriate levels seems like a reasonable solution to cut down maybe even half of these lines. Reserve your seats, scan something (Barcode,RFID,__ !!! HINT ALERT >> Badge << HINT ALERT !!!___,Phone, eyes, ears, tattoos whatever) to get pass the line of people who want to wonder in and out of talks. After a period of time, if you don't show, you lose your seat in the reservation system. Try to make the system anonymous so the privacy nerds don't cry. A similar model could be applied to the villages.

Maybe support the things that people really loved this year. The Darknet challenge seems really cool. It is fucking bull shit that I need to wait in a line for an hour to hopefully get something like a Darknet badge before it sells out just so I can wait in another line before something else books up. The DEF CON LAMP Bash 2015 challenge looks really cool and has nice prizes. What's that about? You don't even know do you?

Now you can spend the rest of the winter crying about how doing the above mentioned is impossible. You guys have lines like disney/six flages in the 90s.

#BLM #FTP FTG

I don't speak for DT or for DEF CON, but I do speak for myself, and this is the kind of criticism I like. You identify problems and your propose a solutions. Questions about DJ's though, and artists: What would you propose as an adequate DJ or artist for entertainment? It is the style of music? How would you identify and encourage artists you find talented to come to DEF CON?

I've seen reservation systems discussed at other cons. I think this is something that was used at a ComicCon, which lead the secondary markets of people selling services of holding seats or making reservations. Do you see these as problems? If so, how would you address them? How would you manage a reservation system in such a way as to avoid risks of it being "hacked" and not create bottlenecks of validating/scanning each person every hour when rooms empty and re-fill, decreasing speaking time from delays?


More? If you were supreme commander of all that is DEF CON, how would you change things, and why? (This goes not just for you, but anyone reading this thread.)

Things to understand:
* The more services/space you want to provide, the greater the cost
* The greater the cost, the higher the fees for attendees
* You can refuse hotel offers and contracts, or counter them
* Hotels can refuse your counters to contract changes, and deny access/service

Maybe move outside of Las Vegas? Are there venues large enough to support the villages, speaker tracks, and parties? Do they have adequate supplies of booze? Do they tend to have a ~24 hour cycle with things being open, to provide a match to strange sleep patterns of hackers or would-be hackers?

Seriously, open things up to any kinds of solutions you might have to the problems you perceive.

Thanks!
-Cot

[jsr]

Put some couches (like 25 of them) in the inside DJ'ed areas so people can chill out. DEF CON doesn't need that much dance space... No one wants to stand around watching a terrible DJ play, after standing in lines all day.

That is actually a good point. I didn't make it to the 26th floor this year (I wont go off on another elevator rant), but this has always been an issue for me in previous years. My body is killing me from all of the standing by the time 1 or 2am rolls around. It doesn't have to be anything fancy, but even a just lining up chairs along the walls would be nice so you can listen to the music without having to stay on your feet the whole time.

[Sand]

This is the problem. Organizers throw out high cost as an excuse, then say making the conference better will make admission more expensive. People end up missing the entire conference, because they would prefer not to wait in lines all day, the end result, they are consuming 0 services from the conference, meanwhile DT is walking out the back door with a bag of admission fees cash.

The second reason I don’t think organizers care, is the fact that every year Krisz Klink is out there soldiering it out, alone, at all of these official DEF CON parties, and not once, does ANY DEF CON organizers even bother to show, at any of these offical parties. To me, that speaks volumes of the quality of these offical parties, and care organizers have for my experience. Being too busy is an excuse. Make time.

DEF CON Suites needs a complete overhaul. You promise it would be open and inviting. It was closed, and uninviting, at all times (with the exception of WP, good job to those guys.) It’s obvious DEF CON Suites is used as nothing more then club houses, for people who run tight in the organizers/goons circles, to impress girls. This was by far the biggest disappointment to me. It’s 1:00am, Friday/Saturday night, DEF CON has every suite on the floor, not a single door is open except WP. Fix it please.

DEF CON needs to move away from this obsession with VIP status and exclusive parties. As much as DEF CON preaches about openness and coming together, I find DEC CON can be the worst offender, with status obsessed goons and speakers, that are sometimes not the most friendly people, especially the more popular ones, among other issues..

Contests are a complete cluster fuck. I think it’s time DEF CON ditch their shitty website and have something dedicated to the conference that can get people the information they need. You know, something architected with software design patterns from this millennium. Prizes need a serious upgrade, something official. I’m not going to run around Las Vegas for a competition just for someone else's amusement. You have given people black badges in the past for throwing crap on motorized wheelchairs. It is time for you to see what contests are out there, and what else is worthy of a black badge (i.e. the badge counterfeit competition.) or other official prizes. I should be able to get reasonably realtime stats of all the competitions going on from a single source. I should be able to register for these competitions. I also don’t have a year of my life to waste on a single DEF CON competition.

I’m being a bitch about the DJs, I’ll admit that. That is a particularly hard weekend to book entertainment in the summer, because there are so many other major events that same week/weekend. I do think DEF CON needs to take a hard look at itself and decide if nerdcore and chiptune is really our culture’s music. I don’t think this Weird AL, novelty, star wars, pokemon gangsters deserve the big room. Maybe I’m wrong. On the other nights, I feel like I’m a better DJ, than these people you have been letting play from off the streets, who have no following.

As far as the seat reservation system discussion. I don’t go to DEF CON for the talks (I watch them later), so I don’t care. I also doubt there is much of a second/black market, for scalpers selling a seat to see Nate Cardozo yell at a room full of nubs, that the internet will shutdown this year, so the smart thing to do, is buy EFF t-shirts and hats. But, you know, take care of your nerds.. You don’t get to see them cry at night, like I do, because their poor little hairy troll feet hurt..

[TheCotMan]

This is the problem. Organizers throw out high cost as an excuse, then say making the conference better will make admission more expensive. People end up missing the entire conference, because they would prefer not to wait in lines all day, the end result, they are consuming 0 services from the conference, meanwhile DT is walking out the back door with a bag of admission fees cash.

I don't know much of anything about how the money is spent, but I have seen some of the costs of a few things, and the hotel has union obligations that it must include in contracts and services it provides to conventions. If many of the other expenses are like the few that I have seen, the only way to get away from that is find a cheaper venue. On the strip, that really is not an option.

The second reason I don’t think organizers care, is the fact that every year Krisz Klink is out there soldiering it out, alone, at these official DEF CON parties, and not once, does ANY DEF CON organizers even bother to show, at any of these offical parties. To me, that speaks volumes of the quality of these offical parties, and care organizers have for my experience. Being too busy is an excuse. Make time.

Many goons are still working when parties are happening. The roles they play need staffing. The only way for them to make time is recruit more goons to take their place while they go to parties. I think methods to allow goons to have more down-time by getting more volunteers was discussed. What method would you propose for giving goons more time to attend parties? Overlapping coverage? Shifts? 3 days on, 1 day off?

Speaking only for me, I do not organize anything at DEF CON. Most parties have not been my thing. It has not been because of DJ quality or music selection, but because the volume makes it hard to socialize. My preference has been the quieter, "room parties," where people I know have small get-togethers where we can talk and hear each other. The Chill-Out spaces also support this when the music is not too loud. However, I am a minority in having places to talk. "Semi Quiet" spaces (no music, just hang out and talk) have been tried in the past, and were underutilized. Suggestions for space-use that leads to more use wins out over space-use that is infrequently or under-utilized. "We" want to provide things our attendees will use.

DEF CON Suites needs a complete overhaul. You promise it would be open and inviting. It was closed, and uninviting, at all times (with the exception of WP, good job to those guys.) It’s obvious DEF CON Suites is used as nothing more then club houses, for people who run tight in the organizers circles, to impress girls. This was by far the biggest disappointment to me. It’s 1:00am, Friday/Saturday night, DEF CON has every suite on the floor, not a single door is open except WP. Fix it please.

Is this a matter of better signage being needed, or would you propose a policy requirement for suite users to have published, open hours, or impose some other requirement on suite "owners" ? What change would you make to suites to make them more open and inviting?

DEF CON needs to move away from this obsession with VIP status and exclusive parties. As much as DEF CON preaches about openness and coming together, I find DEC CON can be the worst offender, with status obsessed speakers, that are sometimes not the most friendly people, especially the more popular ones, among other issues..

Parties are not really my thing, unless I can hear the people and they can hear me. From what I have seen in the past, the official DEF CON parties (supported by DEF CON) have been open, while private parties outside of DEF CON were outside of DEF CON. There were a few exceptions. Some parties would be exclusive for a few hours, to thank the people that made them possible, and provide a meet-and-greet for the family and friends of the people that are running the party, but then open the party to everyone after the initial meet-and-greet.

As for parties "outside of DEF CON" (outside of space we get from the hotel as part of our contract) we have no control over those parties and how they are exclusive or inclusive.

How would you fix these two items?

Contests are a complete cluster fuck. I think it’s time DEF CON ditch their shitty website and have something dedicated to the conference that can get people the information they need. You know, something architected with software design patterns from this millennium. Prizes need a serious upgrade, something official. I’m not going to run around Las Vegas for a competition just for someone else's amusement. You have given people black badges in the past for throwing crap on motorized wheelchairs. It is time for you to see what contests are out there, and what else is worthy of a black badge (i.e. the badge counterfeit competition.) or other official prizes. I should be able to get reasonably realtime stats of all the competitions going on from a single source. I should be able to register for them. I also don’t have a year of my life to waste on a single DEF CON competition.

This is some quality feedback, right here. Thanks! (No, I am not being sarcastic.)

I’m being a bitch about the DJs, I’ll admit that. That is a particularly hard weekend to book entertainment in the summer, because there are so many other major events that same week/weekend. I do think DEF CON needs to take a hard look at itself and decided if nerdcore and chiptune is really our culture’s music. I don’t think this Weird AL, novelty, star wars, pokemon gangsters deserve the big room. Maybe I’m wrong. On the other nights, I feel like I’m a better DJ, than these people you have been letting play from off the streets, who have no following.

You have outlined styles of music that you do not enjoy, and find not representative of hacker culture. What styles of music would you propose? Are there are specific artists that you would like to see on stage? There were complaints ~10 years ago about all music being techno, and no rock-band style music. What are your suggestions for styles and artists?

As far as the seat reservation system discussion. I don’t go to DEF CON for the talks, so I don’t care. I also doubt there is much of a second/black market, for scalpers selling a seat to see Nate Cardozo yell at a room full of nubs, that the internet will shutdown this year, so the smart to do, is buy EFF t-shirts and hats. But, you know, take care of your nerds.. You don’t get to see them cry at night, like I do, because their poor little hairy troll feet hurt..

So, here are some suggestions, and anyone reading, please criticize them as you see fit:

Lines for talks within stanchion could have an estimate of how many people are in line up to each stanchion post, and below that, a specification of how many people fit in the room. This is a hard problem, because people will bunch together more or less making such estimates difficult. Additionally, as the width of line space from stanchion to wall is changed for whatever reason, the estimates quickly become more inaccurate as looking from the front of the line to the back.

Overflow rooms with video feed?

Audio-only of presentation over radio (FM, etc.)

Mobile video "carts" directed at people in line, (or projectors on walls) showing the present talk? (Might be a fire code issue, and power/video feed might be a problem, and how would audio work, especially when one hallway shares 2 entrances to 2 different speaker tracks, and each audio stream might make it hard to hear the other.. It may also cause crowds to gather in hallways, and create gridlock.

Chairs against the wall in lines? This might be a fire hazard and not allowed. It is also inefficient for space-use, and likely would create problems for people that are in wheelchairs, but would make prediction of people in line ahead of you more accurate.

I can't think of any kind of reservation system that would be unhackable, and not lead to a bottle-neck of checking reservations for seats and slow things down to a crawl. If you have ideas on how to do this, please let us know! Even a partial solution could help.

To you and everyone: thanks for being patient with me/us and providing so much valuable information.

[Sand]

Fair enough. I do appreciate Cots for reaching out to people to have this discussion. That means a lot to me. I appreciate DT peeking his head up, and trying to see what is going on.

Sorry for being insulting to anyone (don't take the internet serious?) Just trying to get level set on my personal expectations for the largest hacker conference in the world.

[TheCotMan]

Fair enough. I do appreciate Cots for reaching out to people to have this discussion. That means a lot to me. I appreciate DT peeking his head up, and trying to see what is going on.

Sorry for being insulting to anyone (don't take the internet serious?) Just trying to get level set on my personal expectations for the largest hacker conference in the world.

Thanks for being reasonable and working with us/me in identifying possible solutions to address some of the concerns you have. Please, if at any point in time, you find other ideas to address these issues and make DEF CON into something you would prefer, please follow-up and let us know. (Though we have some talented people working with DEF CON, they can't think of all solution to all problems, especially if we have not heard about the problems. Reports of problems help bring them to the attention of people that can take action.)

No guarantees anyone will change anything -- the only thing I help with are some service(s)/server(s) like the forums ; I don't set any policies or make any decisions for any other departments.

As stated in the top of this thread, I'll be creating an executive summary of complaints and suggestions and providing this as a report to all the department heads at DEF CON. It is up to them and their peers to decide which things are actionable, and which are not, and then prioritize those actionable items.

Thanks to you and all others that have helped with constructive criticism on problems found and how to make DEF CON better!

I'm going to begin assembling this report next weekend from any information provided here, and found on twitter. (I'll leave facebook and linkedin information gathering to people that use those on a regular basis.)

Thanks everyone!
-Cot

[Sand]

To DEF CON's credit, they don't have a Free Barrett Brown Tent where we can look at sexy photos of Jeremy Hammond, Matt DeHart and Lauri Love with crocodile tears in our eyes. For that I am eternally grateful.

[Deviant Ollam]

As an organizer of tons and tons of contests over the years, I will mention that a particular point of frustration for me has been the ongoing decline of prizes offered by DEF CON. Contest organizers (at least all of the ones that i see) put a ton of themselves into their events, for free. They then staff the event for free, give up time to run it, etc etc etc. It's really a kind of disappointing situation that the winners of DEF CON contests aren't given anything beyond whatever the organizers can beg, borrow, or steal. Honestly, this is a big part of why I've reduced the number of contests that I run over the past few years... i really feel as though DEF CON doesn't support the contests and events folk as much as they used to.

The Vendors wind up being hit up for prizes dozens of times throughout the weekend, but instead back in the day it used to be Black Badges for all winners. I know that this point has been hammered to death and therefore I don't expect to open up that same topic again... DEF CON wants to cut down substantially on the black badges, that's their call. But in the past couple years there was talk of a "Silver Badge" or something equivalent that meant "free DEF CON admission next year" and this was a great idea.

As far as I am aware, that didn't happen at all this year.

Also, the few events that ARE still Black Badge events are not announced in advance. Keeping everyone in the dark about this -- from contestants to organizers to goons -- just makes no sense at all to me and I'd love an explanation as to why this policy was adopted.

Mostly, though, I'd appreciate it if DEF CON would give free admission the following year to the winners of official contests. The "cost" of this kind of prize is a drop in the bucket for DEF CON but it makes a whole world of difference to the attendees and the contest organizers.

[Deviant Ollam]

Even better idea: create a new color of badge (purple? pink? have they been used yet?) and call them "Winner" badges... contest winners (who give up so much of their time at DEF CON to participate) can use them in the future to skip to the front of the long talk lines.

zero cost to DEF CON, other than printing the badges. huge benefit to the winners.

possible hurdles...
1. abuse / pass-back of one badge between multiple people
2. logistics of managing "two" lines outside of talks, perhaps?
3. tampering / faking of such a badge

solutions to those hurdles...
1. only allow use of such a badge up until the moment the talk starts filling. up until that moment, a "Winner" badge-holder can walk up to the large queue and the goon there slides them in to the front of the pack. once doors open and the talk starts filling, however, the badge is worthless... the line is already moving
2. no need to manage two lines. there's just one huge line. anyone walking up to the front of that line with a "Winner" badge gets put at the front of the line... the only "hassle" is the rest of the crowd having to shuffle back a little bit. this is solved by always leaving some space at the front of the line area
3. i see this as a Black Badge style roster system. Contest Winners work with the CnE people at the end of DEF CON to have their names put on a Winners list (along with a special token passphrase of their choosing) and then Winners go to InHuman reg in future years... they still paid whatever the full retail price of DEF CON is, but they get a Winner badge for that DEF CON (modeled after each year's regular Human badge, but in a different color)

Fuck, i really hope that DT reads this because I goddamn love this idea.

* Zero cost to DEF CON. (aside from some minor logistical overhead and the printing of a new color of badge... maybe we call it "super manageable cost to DEF CON")
* Huge benefit to contest winners
* Relatively easy to implement
* Relatively hard to abuse
* It would strongly encourage more participation in DEF CON contest
* It would strongly reward repeat DEF CON attendance by past winners