DEF CON Safe Mode Platform Discussion

[Dark Tangent]

Great to 8.8 here! Welcome!

[8dot8]

Hi everyone, we at 8.8 (www.8dot8.org) together with Green Events (www.green.events) are doing something similar but on a smaller scale and with less complexity. Based on what we've discussed, this would be a setting that you could apply to Defcon. AWS was chosen because they have services in China (CN). We did not include VR design because we are not yet sure of a good user experience. We in 8.8 discard it. If you are interested we could discuss it and do it together, greetings!
Streaming: https://drive.google.com/file/d/11S_...3kmGjN57Z/view
Social: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mvQ...66wFH4aIA/view

[rand0macc3ss]

Dark Tangent

I have run multiple Riot/Matrix servers and they are much MUCH better than just plain IRC. Multiple channels that can be end to end encrypted, can be bridged to other media, etc. Better than discord as discord has a bad track record with privacy and they will immediately shutdown our discord server if someone slightly steps foot out of line, even if they are trolling.

For BROADCAST though, it would be better to stick with twitch or youtube: the infrastructure for thousands of viewers is already in place.


JRWR and I have a matrix server built for the defconmeshnet, which is also encrypted, and can be scaled.


Another thing about matrix/riot is you can create "communities", which would allow villages a distinction.

Completely agree with this. I was coming in here to make the same point, but I'm glad I read the thread. It looks like Riot/Matrix checks almost all of the boxes regarding chat. It can be broken up and segmented in a way that could represent villages already, it has the ability to assign moderation within a community, and it can plug into pretty much anything else, like IRC, discord, etc. And it's all FOSS and self-hosted.

As for the streaming stuff, I have less experience with that, but something like Twitch or Youtube would be best in my opinion because they can be viewed without having to sign up.

Happy to help with testing or implementation efforts for Riot/Matrix if that would be helpful.

[DevVar]

I'm jumping into this late... if there is a late under the circumstance... but noting apps like HackerTracker, is it conceivable to build something fast enough with needed features/streaming platforms API'ed into it?
I've been wanting to dive into something similar as a personal project... but historically (and unfortunately) I've been more of an integrator than a coder.
It seems to me that within a mobile or vr (steam/oculus) environment (in unity for instance), a YT/Discord/Riot stream could be embedded on "stage". Any unity programmers here? I haven't looked into vfairs... and will... but that seems similar to what I'm imagining.

[McL0v1n]

Dark Tangent: For Discord we are making channel folders for each Village and they can self manage within, saving administrative time. For Riot can you delegate permissions like that to a community?

Yes! There's more documentation than what I sent you previously. I grabbed that while on my phone.

[Dark Tangent]

For Discord we are making channel folders for each Village and they can self manage within, saving administrative time. For Riot can you delegate permissions like that to a community?

[Dark Tangent]

If you come up with a recommendation please let us know!

[kustid]

Might be over the top for DEFCON but this platform looks pretty cool, will service attendees, vendors etc all under the one platform. Also used by big Players like IBM etc. https://www.vfairs.com/features/

[McL0v1n]

Dark Tangent

I have run multiple Riot/Matrix servers and they are much MUCH better than just plain IRC. Multiple channels that can be end to end encrypted, can be bridged to other media, etc. Better than discord as discord has a bad track record with privacy and they will immediately shutdown our discord server if someone slightly steps foot out of line, even if they are trolling.

For BROADCAST though, it would be better to stick with twitch or youtube: the infrastructure for thousands of viewers is already in place.


JRWR and I have a matrix server built for the defconmeshnet, which is also encrypted, and can be scaled.


Another thing about matrix/riot is you can create "communities", which would allow villages a distinction.

[gurneyh]

I think we to need to consider that some attendees won't be able to or won't be willing to juggle multiple application or be willing to create multiple accounts to attend. I think this might be a barrier to many. It would be nice to have one integrated platform but I don't know if there is a single, inexpensive/free, solution.

[n0madpather]

personally i think discords your best bet though it will be my first defcon so i dont really understand the dynamics of the con goers, the panels or the con itself really so grain of salt and all

[Dark Tangent]

Thank you s1lv3r for that. It matches with my experience. We have been having planning calls with friends in China and hear about the same, that the live streaming part is hardest. Our partner is interested in streaming something, it is just a question of how and what.

For all the social if people can't direct connect to discord.gg (You can but it was really slow so GFW must be throttling) then it will be up to them to find a way. It's too bad because building hacker community is hard enough without the added challenges.

[abaranov]

Yeah but I have no people on it. :)

Probably the best people to chat to are the ThugCrowd guys. They have a very busy server and they are very into Riot over Discord and Slack.

[abaranov]

The main issue is that messages on a DefCon Slack will disappear in a manner of hours, if not minutes.
Also, Discord have a "clean" version which is pretty useable.
And Discord has a really cool RBAC (yes, role-based-access-control) so you can assign people different roles and they will have access to different channels and different abilities on those channels. When I saw this - this alone sold Discord for me.

[EvilMoFo]

I had to stream to a service in China once and we bounced the packets through the GCP region in China to avoid external forces; so that's one way to avoid the problem of getting a stream there intact.