As many of you may have already read, this year was my first DEFCON, so perhaps my views are swayed because I'm not a hardcore DEFCONian/DEFCONite (what is the correct term?). Anyways, I'm going to do more than rag on DEFCON here, but first let me rag on DEFCON.

Problem #1 was with badges. I showed up at BlackHat at 7:45 and picked up my badge in about 15 minutes. Quick and easy. With DEFCON I nearly fell asleep standing in line... only to find out that I was getting a temporary badge that I would have to return to swap out if I wanted the board designed by Kingpin. Sounds harmless enough, but it took over 2 hours to get my final badge. Maybe some people moved faster, but I bet a lot of people had even longer wait times. I'm attending a three day con, of which I'm already losing a day to travel and I've just lost another 1/4 day just getting my badge. Pick it up early you say? That's all fine and dandy, except that 'early' conflicted with a little something called BlackHat.

The next problem I had was the odor in Tracks 2 & 4... now maybe this was a one-time thing, but it really ruined my first DEFCON experience. Everything I had intended to see was either in track 2 or track 4, and I had to skip the talks because the stench in the room was awful. I realize that this was more the fault of the Riviera, but really now... it was just horrid. I ended up seeing speakers that I didn't want to see, or had never heard of. Which is cool... first time, unknown speakers sometimes have cool things to say. Sometimes, however, they don't.

Which brings me to my next point... the quality of the talks. Granted, most of the talks I intended to see where great (from what I heard / read) but schedule conflicts and that awful, awful odor kept me away. The talks I did see were primarily low quality, with inaccurate/incorrect information and someone who didn't know how to present, so they mumbled or talked very quietly. This was actually a point that I heard time and time again as I spoke with other attendees. Everyone seemed to feel that a number of the talks sucked. In the spirit of truthiness, if everyone said the talks sucked… they sucked. Look it up on Wikipedia.

Now, by this point I'm sure I'm being called all sorts of names or people are thinking, 'he just doesn't get the point of DEFCON, that it's representative of the underground, of the scene.' I get doing something because it's part of the scene... but some value would be cool. I spent most of my formative years on BBSes, Newsgoups and IRC and the time not spent there was spent at punk shows in the middle of a mosh pit. My parents didn’t get it, but there was value.

Also, don't get me wrong... as I've mentioned there are a number of talks that I really wanted to see, so maybe this really was just due to a bad first impression. Now... I said I wouldn't fully rag on DEFCON and I'm not going to... if you take away the talks, smells, and registration... DEFCON was awesome. Something tells me I've lost a lot of people by this point, and they didn't read that last line. No problem… this will be our little secret.

DEFCON was exactly what I wanted from a Social Scene... The Content Room and CTF were both a lot of fun, the vendor area was small enough to not be annoying and had some really cool stuff in it... I still haven't unpacked my 'H4ck3rs are People Too' DVD but I'm really looking forward to it. The same goes for the get togethers. The Freakshow Party was a blast, and again I met some great people. The Hardware Hacking village was great as well, and many thanks to the people that helped with soldering the mini-USB onto my badge.

So to sum up… registration, stench, and talks sucked; social scene was awesome. If things don’t work out in Security Research, perhaps I’ll become a social engineer. I don’t know if I’d be good at it, but I got you to read this post. ?

I am really looking forward to attending DEFCON next year... and my goal here was to provide some feedback that can hopefully improve the quality of the CON.

I was shooting for a five part write-up, and this is #3, which means at least two more blog posts... The 5th post, as scheduled right now, will actually be a discussion on ways to improve the cons... but then again I've never ran one... I'm simply another attendee. I don’t know if that makes me more or less qualified to speak up.