What happened to DCTV Movies at Defcon 14?

[Snowblind]

To sorta change the direction of the thread slightly (read: does not want to re-open the pandora's box of Smoking vs. Non-smoking), what ever happened to DCTV during the Con? My friend and I were hoping to see the Oscar-award winning "War Games" and "Hackers," but every time we turned on the tube in our room we got a poor-quality loop with Friday's schedule at the top of the screen. Perhaps this could be rectified for DC15?

I liked Jur1st's suggestion of a PPV system that you don't have to pay for (included in the room rate or something?), and think that this should be considered a DC expense for the future. In the end, though, it is DT's call...

[TheCotMan]

Re: What happened to DCTV Movies at Defcon 14?

Moved to its own topic, as it it could easily be a whole new thread.

Enjoy! :-)

[converge]

Re: Ideas for Defcon 15

A detailed mention was made during closing ceremonies on Sunday, but iirc it came down to control/access that the hotel allowed. It sounds like better arrangements are already being worked on for next year.

[mage2]

Re: What happened to DCTV Movies at Defcon 14?

From what I understand over all the hotel did not know what defcon was or what was heading there way. I think they underestimated and or didnt listen when DT and everyone told them what was going on. I really hope that next year the hotel is more prepaired.
So I do have a question.
What was that a loop of that was playing?

[Deviant Ollam]

Re: What happened to DCTV Movies at Defcon 14?

the hotel's official line was that they objected to the films slated to be shown. they made the argument of "copyright blah blah" and mentioned how the content would be shown across all TVs and to all guests (non-defcon guests included)

my personal belief is that they objected to the films not on the grounds of copyright but because it would severely undercut the hotel's ability to sell on-demand movies via their overpriced lodgenet system to the hotel guests. if you've ever noticed, it's often only the shitty, seedy motels these days who actually offer HBO or other premium channels. your mainstream hotels have televisions that get like six stations, three of which show nothing but garbage. that's how they hook people into their ass-rape movie rental system. of course, you can have a load of fun with all that stuff (anyone else see major malfunction's talk at the first shmoocon?) but it makes these places wary of incorporating any content that could undercut their market.

next year when (hopefully) we're all in the monaco tower they'll (likely) be able to allow DCTV for just us and all will be right with the world again.

as for what you saw when you watched this time around... in an effort to improvise and at least show something on channel 26, the DCTV organizers made DVDs on the fly during con with some updated info, etc. and gave them manually to the hotel staff who would pipe them through a DVD player. this system, too, eventually broke down i think, however and resulted in that repeating loop of WiFi related footage from way up in the air or something.

[Lockheed]

Re: What happened to DCTV Movies at Defcon 14?

There was pre-con concern about issues between LodgeNet's revenue generating movies and what movies we were going to show. But it was a fairly minor concern, and ultimately was pretty much a non-issue.

Granted, I did need to have the hotel review that list of movies before the con, and my requests for the line-up information were being blatently ignored.

My biggest concern was that I kept asking the hotel for technical requirements and expecations for how we would hook up our PC's to the cable system. The issue being that I wasn't getting anything back from the hotel.

It wasn't until we arrived and started talking to local staff about how to do it all that, couples with a couple other external events, really fubar'd everything.

Monday morning, we got together with Convention Services early and said "Right, where can we hook up our PC's to plug into your head end?" They called over the hotel A/V guy who said "um, yeah, I don't think that's going to be possible." (This after he told us the TV channels were different than what we had been told (which was his fault, not convention services) and what had been printed in the program -- neither I nor Convention Services were happy about that one!).

The thing mucking up the works was a pretty serious security incident the night before. Said incident happened in proximity to the "secure area" where the CATV room was. At that point, everyone up & down the management chain was full-on paranoid. The trust had not been built up between mgmt and DefCon staff yet.

I explained how normally, with DCTV channels in the past, we have a remote connection into the PC's, which output an A/V signal which plug into the head end. After said security issues, they were not willing to provide any network/remote access to the PC's. Fine. Maybe we could come up periodically to provide the dynamicly updated data. Convention Services went back to see if that were possible.

I got a call about an hour later, asking for exactly what we wanted to do, based on our previous conversation. She said that sounded OK to her. She said she was going to have one of the hotel VP's call me to explain to him and see if we can work something out. Ok, fine.

Time goes by. It's about noon now, no call. I call her back. Here's the bad news. Every high-up part of management had decided it was too risky to let us have PC's in that head-end room. They were, quite literally (and I know this sounds ridiculous), that our isolated PC's, outputting solely a video signal into the LodgeNet system, might somehow spread a virius or trojan into the LodgetNet system. I almost wanted to laugh (though didn't out of respect to Convention Services, who was very sympathetic to our plight, and was doing her best to defend and support us!) The only thing they (hotel mgmt) were willing to provide us was a DVD player, so we could burn DVD's and provide them to them and they would cycle them.

Not having any of the master source material for the movies, there wasn't much we could do about that. We were lucky that Derek from Rant Radio (who runs our Info Channel) had all his DVD authoring stuff with him and was able to put stuff together for that.

And THANKFULLY the speaker lineups and locations hardly changed at all this year (good going to AgentX and his guys for that one!) - so we were able to burn 3-4 hrs worth of schedule at a time with confidence that it wouldn't change. So every few hours I was running a DVD up to convention services. I'd sit there while they called in the electrician on-call who would take it and cycle out DVD's.

So yeah, I was pretty disappointed that all the cool things we'd lined up for DCTV this year got torpedoed at the last minute. Now that we've danced this dance with the hotel this year, we all know each other, we all know what to expect, what services are possible & the like... we've already started talking about next year and what might be possible. I don't yet know how "dynamic" we'll be able to be. We'll start talking 6-8 months in advance, and get a plan worked out with the hotel, and plan around that.

And as always, I want to take input from you guys on what you want to see on DCTV. I can't promise I'll see every suggestion here - so either PM me here, or drop us a line at dctv@defconnetworking.org so we can put it into our Bag O' Ideas.

Cheers,
Lock

[erehwon]

Re: What happened to DCTV Movies at Defcon 14?

Quick stupid question!

If there was no DCTV, why was it I was watching looped highlights of last year's WiFi shootout on one of the channels Saturday night at the Riv?

[Lockheed]

Re: What happened to DCTV Movies at Defcon 14?

Quick stupid question!

If there was no DCTV, why was it I was watching looped highlights of last year's WiFi shootout on one of the channels Saturday night at the Riv?

It's not that wasn't DCTV - it was just, shall we say, "much reduced in scope" based on last minute issues.

What you were watching was the improvised info channel portion of DCTV. The movies didn't happen (maybe we can resume those next year).

[Vyrus]

Re: What happened to DCTV Movies at Defcon 14?

just to set the record straight, the movie thatwas playing was the 'war rockiting' clip yea ?

[jur1st]

Re: What happened to DCTV Movies at Defcon 14?

No, the clip was from the WiFi Shootout from DC13 where the world record for 802.11 connectivity was broken. I remember watching the same thing only because of the roadrunner. Coincidentally, an actual roadrunner with a CD tied to his back will give the same data transfer speed as my ISP's upstream bandwidth.

The clips from the "WarRocketing" presentation were shorter...showing the crew trapsing through fields looking for their rocket.

[Vyrus]

Re: What happened to DCTV Movies at Defcon 14?

ic, thanx for clearing that up :P

[alklloyd]

Re: What happened to DCTV Movies at Defcon 14?

It's not that wasn't DCTV - it was just, shall we say, "much reduced in scope" based on last minute issues.

What you were watching was the improvised info channel portion of DCTV. The movies didn't happen (maybe we can resume those next year).

Lock,

Hopefully next year we'll get Riv/DCTV, but thanks for your efforts. Sounds like you went through a total PITA.

Al

[Abby_Normal]

Re: What happened to DCTV Movies at Defcon 14?

I didn't know about it until after the fact. It seems part of the Rivs idea of VIP treatment was a broken TV from 1985 in the penthouse.