[00:00.000 --> 00:02.160]  This is gallery from off camera.
[00:02.160 --> 00:07.340]  So my question, and one of the most interesting things that I've seen year over year,
[00:07.340 --> 00:14.620]  is that there's always this sense of the next organizer has to one-up the last organizer
[00:14.620 --> 00:17.840]  for the CTF's design. Or in some senses, right?
[00:17.840 --> 00:21.160]  So in the one year, we had the custom architecture.
[00:21.180 --> 00:22.340]  And in the other year, we had...
[00:22.340 --> 00:23.760]  Lightning wrote that. She's over there.
[00:23.800 --> 00:28.080]  And in another year, we had a switch of architectures in the middle of the game.
[00:28.080 --> 00:29.680]  And we've seen those things.
[00:29.680 --> 00:31.740]  You've been playing CTF for a long time.
[00:31.740 --> 00:31.920]  Yeah.
[00:31.920 --> 00:36.520]  Do those, I'll say, tricks actually slow people down?
[00:36.520 --> 00:43.140]  Or is there... I'm sure in the middle of the first time it happened, there was an,
[00:43.140 --> 00:45.480]  oh crap, what is this?
[00:45.480 --> 00:53.020]  But what do you think that CTF is going to evolve into based on what we've seen so far?
[00:53.020 --> 00:53.320]  Yeah.
[00:53.320 --> 00:56.880]  And maybe I don't want to give spoilers about what Nautilus is doing this year.
[00:56.880 --> 00:59.760]  I don't know as much even the details about what they're working on.
[00:59.760 --> 01:03.100]  Because I'm working on this component we can talk about in a little bit.
[01:03.780 --> 01:04.380]  But that's... yeah.
[01:04.380 --> 01:05.240]  So it's a great question of all.
[01:05.240 --> 01:06.300]  It's a couple of pieces to unpack there.
[01:06.300 --> 01:07.320]  First of all, yeah.
[01:07.320 --> 01:08.160]  So Lightning is over there.
[01:08.160 --> 01:14.300]  She built the most horrible architecture that has ever been invented.
[01:15.940 --> 01:17.880]  And inflicted great pain upon competitors.
[01:17.880 --> 01:20.400]  I actually personally knew about it in advance.
[01:20.980 --> 01:23.200]  And in fact, at the time, she was even like,
[01:23.200 --> 01:25.760]  do you want to build a binary ninja architecture plugin for it?
[01:25.760 --> 01:28.520]  Because I make binary ninjas.
[01:28.520 --> 01:29.140]  It's my day job.
[01:29.140 --> 01:30.740]  It's reverse engineering software.
[01:31.060 --> 01:32.880]  And there was a question of, do you want to add support for it?
[01:32.880 --> 01:38.480]  And we looked at it and we were like, it's nine bits width instead of a power of two.
[01:38.520 --> 01:39.640]  It's middle-endian.
[01:39.640 --> 01:41.240]  So not little-endian or big-endian.
[01:41.240 --> 01:41.680]  It's middle-endian.
[01:41.680 --> 01:42.900]  I was just like, nope.
[01:42.900 --> 01:43.560]  No, I don't.
[01:43.560 --> 01:44.840]  I have to do real work.
[01:44.840 --> 01:45.240]  I can't.
[01:45.240 --> 01:46.900]  I'm not going to spend the amount of time it would take.
[01:46.900 --> 01:47.520]  Oh, goodness.
[01:47.520 --> 01:50.020]  But the teams were told the week of.
[01:50.020 --> 01:54.200]  They're like, by the way, here's a CPU specification for this virtual architecture
[01:54.200 --> 01:55.820]  that the game is running on this year.
[01:55.820 --> 01:56.640]  Good luck.
[01:56.940 --> 01:59.380]  And to tell you the truth, I actually told the organizers that year.
[01:59.380 --> 02:00.780]  I was like, I think this is a bad mistake.
[02:00.780 --> 02:02.760]  I think it's too much and teams won't be able to do it.
[02:02.760 --> 02:03.400]  I was wrong.
[02:03.400 --> 02:06.540]  And I was happy to be wrong because I think it worked out great.
[02:06.540 --> 02:09.520]  Teams adapted and they built their own tools.
[02:09.520 --> 02:12.100]  They cobbled together stuff on the fly and they made it work.
[02:12.100 --> 02:18.260]  And so that, I think, is the hallmark of what makes CTF fun, is that you don't know.
[02:18.640 --> 02:22.420]  But there is also this sense that over the years, there's a progression
[02:22.420 --> 02:24.880]  and institutional knowledge.
[02:24.880 --> 02:28.520]  A lot of the changes, whether it's broken or not, whether you have these sort of what
[02:28.520 --> 02:31.960]  are called Superman defenses where you move things around, and sort of knowing and having
[02:31.960 --> 02:36.620]  played before, you do kind of come in with a sense of, I think I know some general techniques
[02:36.620 --> 02:37.640]  that I'm going to use.
[02:39.020 --> 02:40.760]  So who knows where it's going to go?
[02:40.760 --> 02:45.540]  I will say that I don't think most organizers look at this explicitly with the goal of,
[02:46.000 --> 02:48.300]  I have to absolutely outdo.
[02:48.320 --> 02:50.260]  They want to make a good game.
[02:50.260 --> 02:53.260]  They want to make a game that challenges the competitors, that showcases the best, that's
[02:53.260 --> 02:54.600]  smoothly run.
[02:54.720 --> 02:57.880]  So especially a team's first year taking over, they don't want to rock the boat too much,
[02:57.880 --> 02:58.860]  you tend to see.
[02:59.780 --> 03:03.200]  Because you just want to show people, no, no, no, we understand what CTF is.
[03:03.200 --> 03:04.620]  We're not going to make something it's not.
[03:04.620 --> 03:07.380]  We're not going to make it totally an unpleasant thing.
[03:07.380 --> 03:11.200]  We still want this to be the premier catch-the-fly competition.
[03:11.500 --> 03:14.820]  So it's usually in later years, people start to experiment and try different things.
[03:14.820 --> 03:17.880]  But yeah, there's been a bunch of crazy stuff over the years.
[03:17.880 --> 03:25.000]  And so much of that gets lost to the annals of people's minds and history, unfortunately.