00:00:00.042-->00:00:05.042 >>So welcome this is the 25th anniversary of Def Con I am the Dark Tangent uh started this 25 00:00:07.167-->00:00:12.167 years ago and this is the welcoming session so with that welcome to Def Con 25 00:00:15.208-->00:00:20.208 [applause][cheering] Very good so uh so with that said I have now welcomed you, goodbye 00:00:29.708-->00:00:33.708 [laughs] Um I wanna just kinda I want to see by a show of hands how many people is this a first 00:00:33.708-->00:00:40.417 year kind of deal okay right on so normally we do a session that's like a normal session 00:00:40.417-->00:00:46.167 called uh Welcome to Def Con and it's about 45 minutes and we talk about history and we cover 00:00:46.167-->00:00:51.375 a lot of ground and I usually do that with LostboY um and so we have a couple different 00:00:51.375-->00:00:57.875 perspectives and but he couldn't make it this year so it's just me and so I'm gonna reduce my 00:00:57.875-->00:01:03.375 time and I'm down to 20 minutes, I'm against Garry Kasparov um which is kind of a hard hard guy 00:01:03.375-->00:01:08.333 to be against so I wanna just kinda go a little bit over our history kinda how we got here 00:01:08.333-->00:01:12.917 and where I think we're going um and give you just a couple pointers on how to get the most 00:01:12.917-->00:01:17.917 out of the Con, so I sort of act as the conductor, the Con around Def Con 3 got so large like I 00:01:21.458-->00:01:26.458 have no idea what's happening in my own Con. Awesome stuff was happening at Def Con 3 and I 00:01:26.458-->00:01:31.458 heard about it like on IRC a week later and i felt- at first I felt really bummed like I 00:01:33.500-->00:01:38.042 don't even know what's happening in my own home you know like maybe I shouldn't let it- maybe 00:01:38.042-->00:01:43.250 we shouldn't grow anymore I feel like left out of my own thing and then I realized no that's a 00:01:43.250-->00:01:47.625 good thing we need this thing to be growing and things to be happening and side stories and 00:01:47.625-->00:01:54.042 secret stories and secret parties and uh and so then I just embraced that it was gonna 00:01:54.042-->00:01:59.833 grow and I wasn't going to be able to control it the best I could be was sort of like a 00:01:59.833-->00:02:06.000 conductor trying to steer traffic and from that first year we had about 100 people and now 00:02:06.000-->00:02:11.000 I think this year we're at about 23-->000, 24-->000 and uh and it is crazy like never in my wildest 00:02:15.583-->00:02:21.042 dreams I never thought we'd do a second Def Con and it just- you know it's got this gravity and 00:02:21.042-->00:02:26.500 this kind of inertia but it's also got all this energy and everyone of us that organize it 00:02:26.500-->00:02:31.500 ask a redshirt after Con we are just exhausted, we are drained and it's always like all these 00:02:33.542-->00:02:39.833 resignations come in at the end like I quit this sucks and then about a month later they're like 00:02:39.833-->00:02:44.917 I could do better next year you know we could do this again and that's like this emotional 00:02:44.917-->00:02:49.750 roller coaster we all go on and so we all hide and then we start planning on how to make it 00:02:49.750-->00:02:56.333 better um and so it's like this- I don't see that stopping if anything it just seems to be 00:02:56.333-->00:03:02.833 getting you know bigger and when we started small it was all word of mouth and remember there was 00:03:02.833-->00:03:07.833 no real internet and no Amazon or Google you know not even Alta Vista so [laughter] you couldn't 00:03:10.083-->00:03:16.250 find information on anything it was all word of mouth or it was like text files bulliten boards 00:03:16.250-->00:03:21.333 and in the early day you know IRC so we didn't advertise it just wasn't a culture of 00:03:21.333-->00:03:26.333 advertising and so we just cast a really wide net, hackers, phreakers, you know, privacy 00:03:29.125-->00:03:35.250 advocates, and uh and so we just sort of invited everybody who was interested in this tech and 00:03:35.250-->00:03:39.417 I think that's how we ended up with such a broad section of people attending I think that 00:03:39.417-->00:03:43.333 also turned out to be one of our strengths I'd like to say by- it was by design and I was a 00:03:43.333-->00:03:50.042 mastermind but it just sort of happened to be the right move and then also when we started 00:03:50.042-->00:03:53.667 there was some other pre-existing hacking cons which were great there was Summer Con 00:03:53.667-->00:03:58.667 it Atlanta, held in the Summer, there was Ho Ho Con, held in the winter, and then there was a 00:04:01.208-->00:04:08.042 Pump Con that was just starting, held at Halloween, and so when I started Def Con and they were 00:04:08.042-->00:04:12.958 invite only, when I started Def Con it was like f**k this invite only stuff like everybody's 00:04:12.958-->00:04:19.500 invited not realizing what road that takes you down [laughter] 'cause once you make that 00:04:19.500-->00:04:25.333 decision that fork in the road if you're not limiting attendance you know, certain 00:04:25.333-->00:04:30.958 avenues are closed off to you, but I thought that was the better way to go, because in 00:04:30.958-->00:04:36.500 Vegas unlike New York or San Francisco you actually have to want to get here [laughs] I 00:04:36.500-->00:04:41.208 mean, you're in the middle of the desert, there's no hacking community in Las Vegas, so you 00:04:41.208-->00:04:46.917 had to care enough to get on an airplane, fly to Las Vegas, and that act is this natural like 00:04:46.917-->00:04:52.667 geographic filter, only those who sort of cared enough came. And maybe that's changed as 00:04:52.667-->00:04:56.792 we've grown up and we've gotten more money but still to this day you know y- if there's a little 00:04:56.792-->00:05:01.042 bit of commitment it's not like just getting on a train to New York and going downtown or you 00:05:01.042-->00:05:07.792 know in San Francisco hopping on BART so there is a little bit of effort involved and word of 00:05:07.792-->00:05:13.875 mouth I still don't advertise. Um it's just if people want to tell their friends that's the 00:05:13.875-->00:05:18.375 best advertising in the world and really if I take a full page ad out in the newspaper do I 00:05:18.375-->00:05:24.292 really want those people to show up? [laughter] You know it just- so um I'd like to say that was 00:05:24.292-->00:05:30.542 also a brilliant marketing move but that's because really I had no money and then the big 00:05:30.542-->00:05:35.042 turning point I think for us as a culture- as a community was the dot com the first dot com 00:05:35.042-->00:05:40.042 crash um and this was really for me the inflection point we went from we went from hackers with a 00:05:44.917-->00:05:50.417 passion this is our hobby this is what we love to do and then all of a sudden money came 00:05:50.417-->00:05:56.333 along, jobs came along, because if you needed to secure your shit online, who do you turn to? 00:05:56.333-->00:06:01.208 Well we were the only game in town pretty much, so we all got jobs. And I remember there was 00:06:01.208-->00:06:06.125 one Def Con where people were talking about their incentive stock options and what kind of- 00:06:06.125-->00:06:10.375 and it was like the conversation just changed and really what happened there is we had to go 00:06:10.375-->00:06:17.208 from being creatively independently creative on our own whim to being professionally 00:06:17.208-->00:06:23.208 creative, now it's your job, now it's your career, you don't get to tinker when you feel like it, 00:06:23.208-->00:06:28.708 you gotta get up in the morning and do this professionally, and that was a big change, and I 00:06:28.708-->00:06:32.208 think that was sort of what happened during the countercultural music revolution 00:06:32.208-->00:06:36.417 in say San Francisco you know imagine that you're jammin' out in the audience- I mean in a 00:06:36.417-->00:06:40.750 warehouse with an audience that they just love you and then all of a sudden these people fly in 00:06:40.750-->00:06:45.333 with jets with all this money and they say Europe wants to hear you, you know, east coast 00:06:45.333-->00:06:50.417 wants to hear you, you're a big star, let's get your music out and then musicians are like hell 00:06:50.417-->00:06:56.625 yeah I want to rock out London and I want to do Paris, and next thing you know, it changes 00:06:56.625-->00:07:01.417 right? You're not in the warehouse in San Francisco, you're all over the world. And 00:07:01.417-->00:07:06.208 we went through that I think during the dot com revolution and now we're in this sort of 00:07:06.208-->00:07:10.375 steady state, we've been around for awhile, we've gotten through our teething period, and now 00:07:10.375-->00:07:16.958 here we are, 25 years, silver anniversary, and we've got a community now that we've built 00:07:16.958-->00:07:21.958 by word of mouth, and by sort of an inclusive atmosphere, and now instead of people coming to us 00:07:24.458-->00:07:31.292 with a lot of money and jobs trying to say we need your help it's starting to be what we do 00:07:31.292-->00:07:36.292 really influences society like we're actually becoming more important policy people are 00:07:40.500-->00:07:46.458 listening to us companies want our advice people are embedding things in pacemakers and ATMs 00:07:46.458-->00:07:51.458 and automobiles and it's no longer kind of ha ha ha it's we collectively are the people that 00:07:54.167-->00:07:59.750 are going to be securing you know the next 50 years of technology for not- if not the 00:07:59.750-->00:08:06.208 country the world so in the back of my mind it's like well it's just a party and we're just a 00:08:06.208-->00:08:11.583 fun community and then the other part of my brain is saying well yeah but what we're doing 00:08:11.583-->00:08:18.292 actually has consequence and how cool is that? We get to have fun and be consequential who else 00:08:18.292-->00:08:22.458 gets to say that, right? We're in a really unique period in history where we're 00:08:22.458-->00:08:27.458 acknowledged, um, we don't- we have full employment for life unless we fix it [laughter] 00:08:31.208-->00:08:36.208 [applause] And everyday there's a new challenge and so I just want to say that you know we're 00:08:42.292-->00:08:48.375 going to be really close to these levers of power, levers of creating default permissions um 00:08:48.375-->00:08:52.125 are we going to be secure by default, or insecure by default, you know, we're going to be in 00:08:52.125-->00:08:58.833 that room when decisions are made so just don't give yourself less credit than is due like 00:08:58.833-->00:09:05.000 you're gonna be uh influential and and hopefully through Def Con you're gonna meet other 00:09:05.000-->00:09:10.000 people and we're gonna kind of hopefully you learn that that um that nobody no one person is 00:09:12.917-->00:09:17.250 gonna solve these problems, no one person is gonna hack everything, right? We've gotta- 00:09:17.250-->00:09:22.583 gotta make friends and it's really a balance of social and technical and in the early days 00:09:22.583-->00:09:29.542 I was all about the technical so it's like better talks more people and I really judged how 00:09:29.542-->00:09:33.375 the conference was going based on how many people were in a room, how many people showed up, 00:09:33.375-->00:09:38.375 what the killer talks were, and as time went on I realized that- and I was really worried that uh 00:09:40.417-->00:09:45.833 video conferencing was going to kill kill the the conference world and I realized, no, as 00:09:45.833-->00:09:50.375 video conferencing got better, and bandwidth was increasing more and more people were still 00:09:50.375-->00:09:54.750 coming to the conference because it was that human interaction, it was the social component that 00:09:54.750-->00:09:59.833 you couldn't you know transmit that's what people were responding to it actually was 00:09:59.833-->00:10:04.708 that the talks were the secondary thing and the social was the primary thing so we 00:10:04.708-->00:10:09.708 really try to balance out the two when- and by doing that as I said it's conference is too big 00:10:12.125-->00:10:17.583 we can't track it all so instead I kind of turned into like a landlord and my strategy was 00:10:17.583-->00:10:22.125 I'll give you enough rope to hang yourself with your contest or your event you get one free 00:10:22.125-->00:10:27.833 try if you convince us you've got an idea and if people respond to it you can try again 00:10:27.833-->00:10:33.000 but if you really screw up we're taking your space away and we're giving it to someone else and 00:10:33.000-->00:10:36.917 then it really became about seeing what the community comes up with seeing what you guys are 00:10:36.917-->00:10:40.875 doing and we've gotten- you know it started with the Hardware Hacking Village and the Lock 00:10:40.875-->00:10:45.875 Pick Village now we have a Car Hacking Village where they're giving away a vehicle, 00:10:45.875-->00:10:50.875 Biohacking where they're trying to go to a Vet and inject themselves with things 00:10:54.292-->00:10:58.750 [laughter] you know we have a uh I'm wearing this shirt the our democracy has been hacked from 00:10:58.750-->00:11:05.125 uh the Mr. Robot shirt from the Voting Machine Village Hacking uh contests we're doing and this 00:11:05.125-->00:11:09.583 track we're doing this year, well that didn't exist until it was an idea of like four months 00:11:09.583-->00:11:14.583 ago. So we're gonna be a platform for hacking anything we can get our hands on and we 00:11:16.708-->00:11:20.667 don't have to hack it right and we don't have to hack it perfect, let's just hack on it, 00:11:20.667-->00:11:26.875 and figure it out and- and pass on what we learn and so when you're walking around, remember 00:11:26.875-->00:11:31.250 you're gonna get a lot out of this conference by just even just the social aspects and so I 00:11:31.250-->00:11:35.458 don't feel hurt anymore when people say oh I'm not gonna go to any talks, Hallway Con is 00:11:35.458-->00:11:40.458 where it's at. I'm like that's cool Line Con, Bar Con, Pool Con, I don't care [laughter] 00:11:43.042-->00:11:48.042 it's just important that you know, that that we are here meeting our peers and having a 00:11:52.083-->00:11:58.958 beer, right? So um some of the things we do every year uh is I'm a big believer in sharing 00:11:58.958-->00:12:05.375 the knowledge and so that's also because I grew up kind of as a software pilot so I try to carry 00:12:05.375-->00:12:11.000 that forward so we release all of our talks, all of our materials, everything's for free 00:12:11.000-->00:12:16.000 in case you didn't know, we- um takes a couple months, we did this um uh English captioning um 00:12:18.917-->00:12:23.917 one year um somebody that was um hearing impaired wanted to come and because the ADA you're 00:12:26.208-->00:12:30.750 required by law to do that but it also seems like a really good thing to do, just make it more 00:12:30.750-->00:12:36.250 accessible and uh and so we hired a sign language interpreter and uh and the 00:12:36.250-->00:12:41.792 person didn't show up so I've got the sign la- and you can't hire just one sign language 00:12:41.792-->00:12:45.667 interpreter, you need two because they have to take a rest uh in between they get burned 00:12:45.667-->00:12:52.000 out so then I thought okay why don't I just caption it for everybody and then people can 00:12:52.000-->00:12:55.917 run this through translators and maybe they can translate it into different languages and now all 00:12:55.917-->00:13:01.875 of a sudden I can share these talks to everybody because now there's this metadata um and 00:13:01.875-->00:13:06.750 then it turns out California passes a law saying that you can't use any talks or materials 00:13:06.750-->00:13:11.750 in the universities unless there's uh a second audio program or a transcription so as 00:13:14.667-->00:13:18.792 more and more states go that way what do you know our talks are going to be able to be used as 00:13:18.792-->00:13:23.917 in uh universities and so I'll always try to do things and spend money to try to make talks 00:13:23.917-->00:13:27.417 more accessible so for example this year all the villages that are having talks, we're 00:13:27.417-->00:13:33.833 recording, because, you know, you could argue, well you don't have to come to Def Con we're 00:13:33.833-->00:13:39.792 streaming two tracks uh we're going to give everything away why show up? Like I'm fine with 00:13:39.792-->00:13:45.750 that, I'm just trying to get the information out there because I want us, I just want more of us 00:13:45.750-->00:13:50.750 [laughter] um so with that said I want you to you know enjoy, we've got live music tonight, uh 00:13:53.125-->00:13:57.583 silver anniversary, we've got some secrets, we've got some challenges, um and I'm just 00:13:57.583-->00:14:02.583 really proud of how far we've come and uh and I just want to welcome you all and if you have 00:14:02.583-->00:14:08.500 any questions ask anybody in a red shirt give us feedback because we live on feedback, 00:14:08.500-->00:14:13.875 feedback at Def Con dot org um and then afterwards a lot of times people go to for- the 00:14:13.875-->00:14:18.625 forums, forum dot Def Con dot org and we do this sort of after action report where everybody 00:14:18.625-->00:14:23.792 b**ches about what went wrong and then how we can make it better and we actually have 00:14:23.792-->00:14:28.458 giant lists of everything that went wrong and we come up with a plan on like can we fix it or 00:14:28.458-->00:14:34.208 can we not fix it? You know and uh and that's how we kinda just iterate year after year. So with 00:14:34.208-->00:14:38.292 that said thank you very much, thanks for listening to me, and uh have a great Con! [applause] 00:14:38.292-->00:14:43.292 Thanks!