Hey Dave,
More and more, I think it’s to prepare things for the next generation. It’s easy to think that way when the 7 y/o boy who seems to have budded from me (with only some of his mother’s characteristics) is listening to a Stairway to Heaven Cover (by FirstToEleven) while coding in Scratch on an iPad I couldn’t have dreamed of as a child (though I started at on computers 6 myself, some forty plus years ago), but we have an immense opportunity to do things right. I had a conversation earlier with a Norwegian sales guy about how we got to where we are today, and once you put aside all the marketing fluff we all have to slog through daily, the realisation that security wasn’t always built into things to begin with means that when we modify or create things today, we can do it right. This, to me, is what’s next. It’s not a point in time thing, either, but more of a continuum. (Apparently we’ll also have to do the same things on Mars soon, but that’s a conversation for another time.)
Tom
On 16 Aug 2022, at 23:56, Dave Aitel via Dailydave wrote:
As you wander the halls of the inaptly named Caesar's Forum, amidst a living sea of the most neurodiverse Clan humanity has ever seen, you cannot help but stop for a second to close your eyes amidst the cacophony and mentally exclaim, "Look. Look at the world we have created!"
Sitting in the one cafe in the Paris hotel with food, a tattooed thirty-something who has been to Defcon twice gives you advice on how to do the conference. "Take the unirail." they say. "Also, you should have a hacker name! Mine is 'youngblood''"
"Noted!" you respond. These are good ideas. The unirail in particular, probably, because Vegas is overflowing - and decent food options and anywhere to sit that is not beeping at you or showing grungy dystopian TV ads the Cyberpunk 2077 developers would find over-the-top are impossible to come by, making the conference ten times more exhausting than usual.
In that sense, you miss the Alexis Park days, sitting with Halvar Flake next to a pool where everyone was more larval than they knew, watching Dildog lauch BO2K to a thousand screaming fans in the same room Dino Dai Zovi explained Solaris hacking an hour earlier.
Some of the best talks this year had no attendees at all - Orange Tsai's talk was over Zoom, to a huge room, but with few butts in the seats. There were a hundred "Villages" it seemed like, living a half-life between physical space in the conference room and a Discord channel.
Defcon may be the worst and best place to learn anything in that way - the environment is hopelessly chaotic, with two talks happening inches away from each other, and only feet from a DJ pumping out house music. But perhaps the best environment to learn in is the one in which you are most inspired?
My friends, we've conquered the world. What's next?
-dave _______________________________________________ Dailydave mailing list -- dailydave@lists.aitelfoundation.org To unsubscribe send an email to dailydave-leave@lists.aitelfoundation.org