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DEFCON again... 33.
I had a great time and a bad time in the same journey, as always. Anthony Bourdain said that better.
Las Vegas has a peculiar way to show me how to enforce restraint and make me a better observer and tactician: The hard way, excess everywhere. Sometimes luckily I can seem to achieve that focus, and when it happens, is always an enlightning snapshot of a moment.
DEFCON is always a blast in some way, and a thermomether of the real state of matters in the cybersecurity community, when you strip a conference of brands and false selling speeches, everything becomes bare bones true.
#### And also getting beated by a national chess champion after a very interesting match at the beat of techno-house, Cirque du Soleil, and learning how to get out of handcuffs is really fun.
But leaving fun and techno a little behind... When I returned I was really sad/tired (more than usual) and I asked myself: why?
Because I saw three worring sings of decay:
01
As we entered the strip-club the emptiness of the place was noticeable, my friend P3p3-m1l said to me "did you remember this place?" , to be honest I didn't remembered it well, last year it had the same dim light and really loud speakers with rithm&blues music almost generic of every high-end bar, but something astonished me: there where less than a half strippers, bartenders and clients than last year.
It was almost empty on a saturday night.
"Every girl prefers to have onlyfans pages and shit like that nowadays, they say it pays better, and peolpe are going away slowly!" (P3p3-m1l shouted loudly over the last notes of a melody fading).
10
It was around midnight and I was walking trough the MGM casino returning from the monorail, I was really tired and my feet hurt, my knees where in bad shape too, I was walking really slow. My mind was wandering about some electric gambling machine that a guy was giving maintenance to, those that look like an upward giant cellphone (mmm I didn't recognize that linux flavor in the black screen). I kept walking submerged in my toughts when something made me stop and look around.
The AC with pumped oxygen was refreshing, it was quiet, cool, inmense ... it was totally empty.
I guess paying so much money in flights and hotels isn't such a good deal just to play in front of a slightly bigger screen than my cellphone, I have some of those games in apps in my phone. All screens are similar.
11
We where in the midst of an informal but lively conversation about "being present" in one of the tables inside a DEFCON village:
"I think one should come to DEFCON to see and do things that we can't do regularly, and require social interaction, like meeting hackers IRL and making acquantainces, maybe even friends, I really like physical security village" I said.
Everyone in the table slightly agreed, some nodded and some of them continued the conversation for a few minutes.
Half an hour later the table emptied for people to participate in a "social" CTF.
-O >>
I'm not impressed that the Las Vegas entretainment industry has falled into the malevolous deception of changing the analogue machines and card dealers for screens, losing millions of dollars in the way. They have always been greedy mofos.
Neither I'm impressed by the girls making more money trough an app, they are just as greedy as the casinos.
But I'm sad and dissapointed about my fellow hackers.
I'm worried about myself too, all the times that I have wasted a conversation with a friend for some social media scrolling, or even writing these lines in this moment. All those moments that I passed along someone who was making the effort to talk to me. And I'm not talking about that empty hallway office talk that the on-site enslavers are trying to sell us again, I'm talking about REAL conversations.
I'm guilty too of choosing the easy way of ignoring everyone while the world is going to hell in a basket. I used to do it too.
The distopyan and lonely future has not "arrived", we as hackers are also making it true.
But we can make it right... to a small extent, talk to someone, turn your screen off and your phone away even for a little while,
15 minutes of real conversation, of contemplation, meditation or silence can make a lot of difference in your life.
We will not unplugg totally, but we can learn to live in balance.
See you around 1337 and thank you for reading me.
D3lt4 M1cr0
👾💀👨💻