DEF CON Safe Mode Platform Discussion

[zokuniok]

I agree with @supersat. If the talks are pre-recorded, the quality will be way better. There won't be the issues you can have in a live talk:

* Internet connection problems
* People disturbing the speaker at his home
* Noise outside
* Mic problems
etc.

A detailed tutorial with guidelines could be provided for speakers on how to pre-record their talk, such as this one.

Also, this will give speakers more time to work on what they say, and submit their pre-recorded talk when they're satisfied about it. Speakers could then answer questions by being available for a live Q&A.

[3mul0r]

Full disclosure I haven't seen any evidence of a twitch integration already existing. Throwing that into my comment along with youtube was just wishful thinking of the possibilities on my part.

[3mul0r]

I hadn't heard of Riot until now. It looks like it ticks so many boxes. It even has voice and video chat. I think dc253 might start using it instead of discord.
https://about.riot.im/features

The possibility of integrating another app like youtube or twitch right into a channel is really interesting.

[Dark Tangent]

I'm looking to fill in the blanks, and have changed the "Cost" column to a "Guest Access? column. Basically can attendees use the service as a guest without needing an account .For example Twitch allows anyone to stream, same for YouTube. I'm not sure about FaceBook.

My current thinking is to use Twitch for the streamed content, but to disable chat. All the chat would happen on whatever platform Twitch is connected to like Discord, Zoom, etc.

Yes ndex the China column is if the service can be accessed natively in China. We know YouTube, FaceBook, Twitch are not, but we are looking into streaming platforms in China that we could connect to for talks and then publish a schedule here that China users can access.

[FZFalzar]

I was doing some reading and came across a potential solution, but I am not too sure about the privacy concerns (WebRTC related)

Basically, making use of peer-to-peer streaming, or "peer-casting" as they call it
https://www.wowza.com/resources/guid...cast-streaming

There seems to be a Torrent-based P2P-streaming platform https://www.tribler.org/ that is worth a look, but I am no expert

https://www.tribler.org/Tutorials/LiveStreaming/
Source: https://github.com/Tribler/tribler

[TunnelJumper]

Another good thing about pre-recorded talks would be that it gets past the China blocks that affects all the streaming services that we have listed in the decision matrix. Simply upload all the talks to the media server and boom, crisis averted.

[ndex]

Firstly, if supporting China is required, we really need to poll China for input. If we're trying to exclude them then, I'm done, especially right now.

The next person who suggests "a beefy server" for running an IRC hive needs to hush up, grown ups are talking.

Any "servers" have to be either hardware virtualized or running in an MLE, this is still DefCon FFS. head->desk

What if talks were pre-recorded and posted to the media servers and then only the Q&A would be scheduled. This could allow the Con to be spread over a week to ten days, distributing the load across a longer time and allowing folks to consume more of the content.

There should be no earthly reason Hacker Jeopardy should not go on, because I have needs and I can get my own damn beer.

Vendors should be getting their merch ready for online vending on the regular schedule and consideration should be made for vending directly via some kind of merch mall.

We need multiple solutions, not just one. For example, DJ's are the best folks to talk to about live stream hosting for.

Don't Facebook, Amazon AND Twitter have RED in their books where this community is concerned?? Don't they actually owe us??

If not, can I please make them pay anyway? I am so bored.

My skills are known here. Contact me if you need me.

[DJFelix]

I work for a larger managed security company, and for large online events with thousands of viewers, we use the ON24 platform. They have the capability to scale very large, have an interactive platform that works on desktop and mobile, and have been able to repel attacks fairly well so far for us. We know we are a target whenever we give online presentations, so we were very careful about the platform we chose to do so. I've hosted several events there, and the system has been not only very easy to work with, but very reliable. I don't know much about what the costs are for ON24, but they can most certainly handle the volume, and are at least in our case, accustomed to handling information security discussions online. One platform at least to consider.

It may also be a good idea to look at multiple platforms. A platform like Twitch may be good for presentations that aren't very interactive, but is not as good for something like a workshop that is intended to be more interactive.

Platforms that can integrate with an SSO/SAML for authentication may make it easier for the con to charge an attendance fee (virtual badge) and allow con attendees to easily authenticate to any paid events.

Executive summary:

• Video streaming to thousands: Yes
• Moderated chat during presentations: Yes
• Ask presenter questions in a queue: Yes
• Platform to show presenter video as well as slides without using OBS/video production equipment: Yes
• Recording of streams for download, playback, or CDN distribution afterwards: Yes
• Mobile support: Yes
• Desktop support: Yes
• Self host: No
• Privacy: TBD
• Cost: Paid - TBD
• SSO/SAML: Yes

One great thing about ON24 is that the event can be setup to only allow feedback from attendees by the integrated Q&A system. That allows the questions to be moderated, and you don't have an endless stream of people unmuting themselves and interrupting the speaker, or flooding the chat stream with spam.

[gourry inverse]

A/V For Talks:
I don't think there's a realistic solution that doesn't include some combination of Youtube/Twitch/Facebook. These are pretty much the platforms that people will expect, and if you do anything else, you're heavily suppressing accessibility. For better or worse - people are lazy.

One thing to consider - pre-recording talks and premiering them during the con rather than requiring live presentation. This has major upsides

• Totally subverts the many, many, many technical issues that come with live-streaming.
  • Far less coordination required between the CON and presenters. They submit a video, the video gets published. The End.
  • No technical issues stemming from "my streaming software doesn't work with that other platform you're using"
  • Gets around region locking issues. xyz video service not available in xyz country? Publish the video for download via torrent or wherever at the time it premiers. Everyone gets it.
• Screening for quality and giving people multiple takes is a huge plus.
• Everyone gets to use their own preferred recording software
• Allows for possibility of anonymous publications (submitter can go by pseudonym and mask their voice)
• Allows the authors/presenters to engage with the community DURING the talk.
  • Fielding questions (or collecting questions to be fielded afterwards)
  • allow for pop-up discussion groups on particular topics to happen organically ("hey this talk seems to have created a ton of buzz, but we're moving on to the next talk, everyone who wants to keep going join this server/channel)
• Gets around time-zone issues with a distributed event like this
• Can even choose to live-stream the initial premier (to give people "The Platform") and then immediately archive the talk for playback.

Downsides:

• It doesn't have the same buzz as a live stream.
• Mitigations
  • You could get around this by scheduling releases and running streams before publication of the individual videos.
  • Treat it like a hacker talk show - You can have emcees.
  • Can have the presenters call in for their time slot to field questions after the presentation wraps
    • Emcees select questions from the the hoard
    • Discussion groups are set up for the authors to engage after their time slot expires

Chat / Audience Interaction
For attendee interaction, having separate moderated rooms for general discussion and Q&A on a per-track basis would be best.

• IRC is cute, but it's troublesome in the modern age of ease-of-use.
• Discord is a good idea, but it does require software/app download.
• Slack has message limit issues and it quite clunky to moderate in my experience.
• Twitter is a nightmare.... but people might actually prefer to submit questions / discussion via tweets. (Discord and Slack bots can ingest these)

You're not going to find a "best" solution in this realm - if there was one we'd all be using it. Just pick one and go with it.

My preference is Discord because it has easy Direct messaging, abilities for people to screen share / audio chat built in, rooms, moderation, and multiple servers can be made to organize things better (Main track server, village servers, etc). People can quickly and easy spin up new servers and rooms for side discussions and info sharing, hacking, etc. The Darknet Project uses it for their event and event planning, and it has worked extraordinarily well.

Edit: As I understand, Riot is basically the FOSS version of discord that can be hosted internally, this is heavily preferred if easy-of-use is as good as it claims to be and the management can handle the load. Although as i understand it there's no VOIP, so that sucks.



Other major concerns

One of the biggest issues I can see is setting agreements with those companies not to tear down streams / content if they dislike what's being discussed. That's a huge no-bueno, and there will probably be people raising concerns over potential privacy and censorship issues (i.e. am I free to discuss an epic 0-day i found in google's infrastructure... live on Youtube).

I don't see any way of ensuring this without discussions directly with the companies. You're (we're?) DEFCON, I imagine every platform is going to want to have a piece of the "First Canceled DEFCON" hyped up revenue stream. But there has to be a non-censorship agreement.

[savagejen]

Twitch is free to use, but if you set it up properly you can make money off your stream. You need affiliate, partner, or event status to do this.

[EvilMoFo]

Twitter also has video streaming, thanks to bringing periscope into their offerings; I have seen it handle hundreds of thousands of viewers, though that was with the coordination of their engineers. For the "broadcast" elements of the con, it makes sense to simulcast on multiple platforms for added reach / differing tastes. Imagine each track being on Twitch, Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter all at the same time; that said, copyright music needs to be avoided on those platforms and then there's that minor issue of them potentially taking offense to the content in general.

One thing that I haven't seen mentioned is to "self-host" the video streams as it were. Push the master high bitrate signal to a CDN with cloud transcoding; I know that Akamai and AWS offer this. Couple that with a CDN backed page with a videojs player pointing at the video streams and it should handle the load just fine.

[abaranov]

You will probably need a combination of things.

My experience is that Zoom and Discord and Youtube make a good combination.

To add to your table:
Zoom can have about 1000 users all at once but you should pipe it into youtube/facebook/twitch for the presentations.
Youtube can handle pretty much anything you throw at it - Coachella had millions of views over a weekend.
Apparently Ariande Grande concert was streamed over Facebook Live and it hit over 500k viewers
Drake set the Twitch record with over 1 million views.
Btw, you don't have to pick just one network. And it may make sense to have multiple for redundancy purposes

Altspace is cute and I think you should definitely use it but not for the main presentations. You can pipe video into rooms and I am building a room for DCG11613 now but it is slow going. I want to have it ready for Defcon tho so my members can watch together. It would be nice to have an official DC room but I'd keep it as a nice to have.

Discord is a lot easier to manage than Slack and it has some interesting features. Discord can also be accessed from IRC. Discord also doesn't have a message limit - if you use the free version of slack then you'll reach the message limit in hours.

OBS is pretty cool and you'll probably want something like it to make banners and such. Branding. But that needs to be managed centrally - you don't want your speakers having to bother with OBS and things when they are already nervous about presenting remotely.

One thing you want is a way for the audience to interact with the speaker and Discord is good for that. Ensure you have a QA channel. Zoom tried hard with their QA feature but it doesn't work. Best I have seen is the MC asking the questions on behalf of everyone.

[TunnelJumper]

Ok here’s what I’m getting from the info we have so far:

>Mumble
Max users: Possibly more then 3k according to @JRWR.
Self host: Yes
Censored: No
Mobile: Yes
Available in China (Just assuming that's what this means cuz I’m not really sure): Self Hosted so in theory yes.

>IRC
Self host: Yes
Censored: No
Mobile: Yes but it has problems as outlined by @number9
Available in China: Depends on who’s hosting it but in theory yes.

>Riot
Self host: Yes
Censored: No
Mobile: Yes
Notes: Other communications can be bridged into Riot such as IRC, Slack, and Discord.

[TunnelJumper]

No section for IRC? It might as well go on there so we can look at the pros and cons even if we end up not going with it.

Edit: Additionally I haven't been able to find anything about self hosting a Discord instance despite what the decision matrix says. Am I wrong?
Edit 2: Would adding a section for whether or not the project is open source be useful at all? I know that at the end of the day this is primarily a business decision but I feel like it might matter to the more paranoid among us (myself included).

[guilt]

There's two things good at streaming for cheap, for lots of users - YouTube and Twitch. They are free.
Both are blocked in China though, but work through most VPNs.

Most people with OBS should be able to live-cast their talks to Twitch quite easily.

Youtube's mobile live streaming is okay, but definitely quite annoying with the ads.

Discord + Twitch seems to be a pretty decent setup.

AltSpaceVR does not look like it has a regular 2D mode on the phone, seems to be a VR only experience, a small % of gamers have it.

Facebook live streaming is not something I have seen being that popular in the last 2 years, and nobody wants to create an account to be on it.

I run an IRC app on the phone, but it pretty much pales in comparison to Discord. Discord and Slack are mobile friendly, but I like Discord better here, because Discord is way better integrated with Twitch and people on one are usually on the other.