Jason Scott's Weblog
I posted a new weblog entry over at the Internet Archive weblog, combining two stories.
The first is that a Cray hard drive was magnetically recorded and people are invited to download this magnetic image to analyze. Help find the operating system and the software!
The second is that a new Hackerspaces book has come out, and it’s totally free.
The entry is here.
I asked for the nicest presentation space at DEFCON, I got a nice rented tux, and I steeled myself up to give my all onstage. And it paid off! May I proudly present my DEFCON 19 talk: Archive Team: A Distributed Preservation of Service Attack.
Here’s the full talk on YouTube:
And here’s the full talk on Vimeo:
I’m really happy with how this came out. Issues with anything I have to say will come from content, not form. I’m sure I’ll get the usual “woah, profanity” complaints, but fuck those guys. The core messages, I think, come off really well: the importance and relevance of user-generated content, the mission of Archive Team in this time of great data destruction, and how at the end of the day, computer data is a human story, worthwhile of preservation. It may be the most energetic preaching of data preservation in modern times. I hope it spreads far and wide.
There’s good and bad in the Star Trek franchise, but certainly The Next Generation had some mighty subtle portrayals buried in among the episodes, especially as things got a bunch of seasons in. One that has always struck me, personally, is a short scene in the beginning of an episode called The Chase, where the captain’s old mentor in archaeology tries to convince him to take a leave of absence to go on a hunt for something or other; the rest of the episode concerns this, and isn’t relevant to what I’m saying. What is relevant is where he direct’s the captain’s attention to an artifact on the table and asks him to check it out.
I’m in no mood to discuss Star Trek canon, but just want to point out that Patrick Stewart, on the right, is an excellent actor. The scene called for him to be told that this artifact, rare enough as it is, was also intact, containing smaller statues inside and therefore unbelievably rare. To show his character reacting to this fact, Stewart put a lot into his performance – his incredulity that the statue was there at all, and then a wide-eyed releasing of breath to realize it’s complete, that he is holding in his hands one of the rarest (and most precious) things he could want to find, especially as an archaeologist. It is, like I said, remarkably subtle and way too subtle for what the scene calls for, which is mere motivation to later avenge the professor’s death and go on a chase through the galaxy.
But that feeling, of encountering something thought long gone and realizing you not only can see this thing that once was, but see it complete and whole is one of the strongest motivations I’ve had in the last 15 years of all this collecting materials of online life. I’ll see some site with a handful of badly scanned remembrances of something no longer active, and a few cramped words, and then we’re expected to be happy this is all there is left. Well, maybe we’re not happy and we wish there was so much more. And if I have to be the one to assemble the much more, so be it.
When I bring something online or assemble something from distant or obscure sources, I’m doing it for someone who is not me. I’m doing it for a person who has a whisper of a memory, be it a turn of phrase or a hacker’s handle or a BBS name or even some sort of image, like a toy robot or a smiling girl holding up some product in an ad. I want them to find, as easily as possible, that very thing, and get not just exactly what they sought, but to have the entire pantheon and context of what they were searching for.
So, remember Compute! magazine?
Boy, I sure do. Compute! was one of the biggies, one of the magazines you’d see down in the magazine rack at the bookstore and which was filled with bright, happy pages promising the world if you just typed in one of the programs, or which gave an optimistic outlook on how much wonderful stuff you could do with computers. If you subscribed to it (or merely bought every issue, like I tended to), then Compute! was a centerpiece of your computing experience at that time.
Well, here you go. Here’s every single issue of Compute! Magazine on archive.org.
Go ahead, browse around. You can open any issue, read it online, or download a PDF or kindle/e-reader-ready version, and look back on that awesome time, with breathless ads and helpful tips and ideas on what the next best thing was going to be, with the added advantage of knowing when they were right and wrong. Smile with knowing delight as someone predicts the future, and wince when they get so close but not close enough. The fact that nearly every person ended up becoming a self-contained GPS, communications and information hub wasn’t really on the horizon, so in many cases they’re amazingly off, assuming that machines would continue to be tethered to desks and the phone system would be a constant thorn in the side with its zone calls and strange mechanics.
You know, Compute! had a spin-off magazine? It was called the Compute! Gazette, and focused directly on Commodore machines. (Commodore 64, 128, Amiga, and so on.) It was also really well-put-together and some folks subscribed just to the Gazette if they were particularly Commodore-oriented. (Although most just ended up buying both magazines.)
Well, good news, because here’s every single issue of Compute! Gazette. Again, all browsable, all readable, all downloadable, every single issue. There were about ninety issues of Compute! Gazette, and something in the 170 issue range for Compute!, depending on how you count the specials and the one-off issues. Or maybe Atari computers were more your style, which is fine because here’s every issue of Antic Magazine, an Atari-oriented periodical, and there were eighty-five of them in all.
Gosh, well, maybe Ham Radio was more your deal, and just over this corner, we can see every single issue of Ham Radio Magazine, all two hundred and sixty-eight issues.
Go more obscure? Diehard, the Magazine for Commodore 8bitters was a mid 1990s phenomenon, all 23 issues there. If you weren’t a computer user in the UK, you probably never encountered the full run of Big K Magazine. I guess that’s about it… no, wait, here’s 85 issues of Your Commodore magazine, can’t forget that one.
Folks, I just dumped five hundred magazines into your lap.
Let’s be clear – I didn’t scan any of them; an army of volunteers, fans, historians and romantics did so, over a number of years. The indexing, generally, didn’t come from me (I did write some up), but came from sites such as atarimagazines.com that have been doing this whole “bringing in the magazines” thing for years before I focused on it. What’s different, mostly, is now these items are in a library, the archive.org archives, where they can be read and experienced in one place, in a uniform interface, although I will be the first to admit the interface can be much better at some of the other sites. I merely wrote scripts to ingest them into archive.org and did the occasional call for volunteers to help describe the issues without descriptions, a task that continues to the present.
I got these 500 magazines up in about 3 days. 72 hours. Imagine what things are going to be like by the end of the year. An exoskeleton, indeed.
Let’s step back, though, and this is what I actually want to talk about.
The often-automatic and frankly entirely valid question that comes from encountering, say, a 500-issue online stack of 1980s computer and technology magazines is “Why are you doing this? What purpose could this serve?” And my general answer has always been “Get the fuck out of the way, we’re losing precious items while we dawdle and diminish“, and while that is definitely still the case and my fight goes on to rescue lost data and artifacts, the question’s relevance and merit begins to leak into the margins of my work.
How much stuff is too much? I don’t have an answer for that and I don’t really see encountering “too much” in terms of acquisition, ever, where computer history is concerned. I’ve been in a room with basically every train set piece the Lionel Company ever made and that’s a lot of trains, folks, and I don’t see anything wrong with that. I don’t have an upper limit for the actual containing of items. But I do have concerns about the capacity of the potential audience to gain any amount of context or relevance onto the items.
So, being all Archive Team and stuff has gotten me running with a large social group of archivists, and that’s been a rather interesting experience. Archivists are not, professionally, a particularly bold bunch. Oh, off hours they are fucking insane but within the confines of the kinds of institutions that tend to hire archivists, being someone like, say, me, isn’t a recipe for long-range job security, so there’s a lot of contrast between my outlook/expressions and “the industry”. But often I’ve used different terms for things the “industry” has been dealing with for years, maybe decades, so forgive me if I keep doing that, forever, because I don’t tend to go to many archivist cons and I believe there’s something like a dozen librarian bloggers who would tie my shoelaces together if they saw me waiting near a train platform.
So like every industry, they have the usual things that linger in the background that drive everyone nuts but the solutions are rather difficult, and then there’s someone standing up one day going “pie is bad!” to much hmmmphing and rumbling, accompanied by “pie is good!” arguments and “why are you all arguing about pie” hand-wringing from the sidelines. Every group does this, there’s no shame in it. But the issues they discuss relevant to my growing pile of magazines and items are metadata and curation.
When John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants worked in publishing (the basement of Conde’ Nast), he would often encounter strange images that then got incorporated into the band’s album artwork and flyers. To a Flansburgh, curation and metadata have no relevance – he would just go through everything as a matter of work, and then come in with “this is weird” and set it aside. Life provides a lot of opportunity for stumbling, endlessly. Nobody should be worried about the Flansburghs.
But if there’s someone who looks at a massive stack of magazines, online or off, and the question is “When did Synapse Software begin advertising in these issues and when did they stop, and what products did they advertise from their catalog?” then metadata becomes critical. Especially if the questions keep coming; a one-0ff crazy search is one thing (Pixar will do things like find every jailbreak scene, or every bank robbery scene, for reference material, from the corpus of known films), but if this is all you’re doing, all the time, then metadata is the difference between getting things done and focusing all your energy on convincing people with requests they don’t actually want to make that request, i.e. Asshole Librarian Approach.
Curation, the flip side, is presenting a smaller portion of an archive or container in such a way to focus on a subject and bring clarity to an audience or yourself – images of consumer-based robots, perhaps, or video games in which someone has been taken hostage. A curator wants metadata badly, but depending on the quality of the curation or its needs, they can get by with a minimal amount. The quality of the curator, by the way, leads to low-hanging fruit getting put out there (oh boy, another image of “Pac Man” to illustrate any sort of video game) while also bringing in a breathtaking amount of amazing work when done right, like Jambe Davdar’s beyond belief series on Star Wars, which is one of the most masterful commentary/annotations of a film series you will ever see. But the amount of work involved… well, that’s the secret pain of the curator.
Again, you’ve been handed 500 magazines. What’s your response? Do you smile, grab your iPad, find a quiet part of the house, and read? Or do you make a fist and pump it because you’re finally going to be able to type in that program way back when that you played as a kid? Or does just the fact that it exists comprise your entire interest in it, that you want to know that it’s out there, somewhere, being held “just in case”?
Or maybe you look at the pile and go “But we need to mark who wrote for what article! We need to list the companies in each issue! We need…” and what you do next tells me if you’re a complainer or a doer. I don’t have time for complainers, frankly. I’m too busy doing.
This flood is rising. It’s been around for a lot of other subjects and I’m going to help bring the flood to what we call “classic home computing”. Steady yourselves and decide what you’re going to be to it.
We had a little discussion on one of my mailing lists about the origin of the phrase “LOL”, which has a couple claimed fathers – but I thought I’d throw this into the mix. Reprinted from The Annals of Hygiene, Volume 6, published by the Pennsylvania State Board of Health. Official date of publication: 1891.
Laughing by Telegraph.
Telegraph operators lead a highly monotonous life, and are entitled to all the diversion they can extract from the unemotional machine over which they preside. A laugh transmitted over the wires cannot be of a very infectious nature, but it can be accomplished, nevertheless. When an operator becomes lonely, says the Indianapolis News, and his sounders are clicking out messages not intended for him, he calls up some friend and opens a conversation. This, of course, cannot be continued long before something ” funny” is said. It then becomes the duty of the operator to laugh, which he does by making four dots, then one dot and a dash, thus: . . . . . —, spelling ha. Thus, to all jokes he replies h-a, h-a. From the same authority we learn that surprise or incredulity, as well as amusement, can be conveyed by a few clicks; thus four dots followed by two dashes make the expression “hm,” the precise meaning of which, in any given instance, is to be judged, no doubt, by the context.
And from a book entitled Historical Sketch of the Electric Telegraph, published in 1852:
To expedite transmission, the communications are made as brief as possible, by the elision of letters, and syllables, and sometimes of half a word; besides which, many conventional signs are made use of. ‘We have,’ says Mr. Walker, ‘a signal for the period or full stop and for paragraphs; and we have one for underlining words. And we have many very valuable special signals. There is also a signal among the clerks for laughing, and one for the whistle of astonishment.’
A certain phrase of interest to the contemporary internet set appears in The New England Farmer, 1869:
There sat the little fellow, busy with his blocks, and in reality not heeding a word of what was being said. But no sooner did the paus’e come than he turned round, and rolling on the floor, laughing as though his little sides would burst, shouted: “Go right on! that’s just such as I like to hear every day!”
If you look hard enough, everything’s already there.
I don’t know if it’s entirely public knowledge, and obviously it’s not like the concerts hand out programs with the full staff listing or anything, but for the past few years I’ve been the person who edits the videos that play in the background of MC Frontalot’s concerts, specifically the PAX events but usually anywhere he plays with the opportunity to put a video screen nearby. I started doing this a while after I shot the It Is Pitch Dark video for Front, and then it’s continued as songs have been added or deleted out of the rotation.
Unlike some bands that use a click track forced on the drummer (and sometimes other performers) to keep time with a video that they have to listen in headphones, Frontalot just prefers the video be sort of relevant to the song but untethered to the action. I think part of what has always interested me in this project is that this is a situation completely unlike my work with documentaries and short films, where I obsess over every frame, and sometimes even transition counts and individual syllables. The resulting works have to be offset by minutes and still have vague relevance to the music being played. They also have to be a few minutes longer than the song being played, so there’s always a guarantee they’ll still be doing “stuff” if the intro goes long or they play slower than usual for a reason.
Additionally, PAX will often cut out the footage completely, fading over to live cameras filming the performance. You’ll often get a glimpse of the video footage with no context and then it’ll fade again.
Since I don’t go to every PAX, I don’t often see the result of my work – looking on Youtube, and I can occasionally see the result: Here’s a montage of language videos played during Tongue-Clucking Grammarian, here’s It Is Pitch Dark which has additional footage from the taping session to pad it out, and this work during Shame of the Otaku has more screen time during the second half of the video.
They’re never meant to be the focus of the event, but support his lyrics or performance – they repeat footage and almost none of it is original footage, but youtube stuff scooped from everywhere.
It’s made me a better editor – breaking out of my own box and style to produce something completely off the wall really lets me get perspective on my “usual” approach to getting things right. And can it ever get better standing at one of these concerts knowing I’m a contributor to the stage show without anyone there knowing?
Frontalot’s performing at PAX on Friday, which means three or four new videos will make their debut. The new Frontalot album, Solved, has come out, and the man hasn’t lost a step in making some of the wildest nerdcore rap (with a strong, strong musical bent) after doing this for over a decade. It comes highly recommended.
Enjoy the show.
Let’s get the numbers out of the way immediately before they’re misreported. Archive Team rescued, roughly, 20 percent of all the profiles on Friendster. This took us many months and reflects the sheer mass of Friendster’s data, well into the 70-80 terabyte range, behind custom software, and which they summarily deleted from their user accounts. We got maybe 10-15 terabytes of it, as best we could.
If you were firemen and going into a burning home, you’d grab the people, then the pets, and then you’d let the fucker burn because no fireman or person’s life is worth the risk. If you were the person in the house, however, you’d probably go after the other people and then grab family photos and maybe that sack of gold under the dresser and perhaps that Picasso you hang over the coat rack. In other words, you prioritize.
Now, instead of a fire, imagine it’s the Bagger 288 moving over the landscape towards an apartment complex with 112,000,000 apartments in it, and there’s this asshole shouting over a megaphone thanking everyone for living in their apartments for so long, and Archive Team is there with hacked-together go-karts flying down hallways and grabbing as much as they can with robot arms.
IT WAS EXACTLY LIKE THAT.
As a result, we prioritized ourselves – going after the first millions, then scattershot through the whole range of IDs, grabbing representative examples of profiles, up through to the deadly end, where we had Friendster accounts of our own (it took having profiles to acquire some information, and a couple brave Bothans who wrote custom scripts to yank out the un-yank-out-able). As a result, we got pretty unique directory structures, including blogs, photos, “shout-outs” and messages, all available to the general public. Oh yeah, Friendster killed tens of thousands of blogs, and millions of photos, and… great job, people.
This one was much more of a learning experience than Geocities, and the next time we’re faced with such a huge place going down in flames, we’ll be sure to use what we learned. Until then, we have these blocks of data.
We had one soul go through the entire userbase and groups of Friendster to produce this social graph/database of all the membership inter-relations, for the purposes of historical and academic study. Those aren’t too bad in size.
But the main data… that’s pretty big stuff.
But enough introduction: may I present the first million Friendster accounts. There are still gaps as I put together the in-flooding collections from dozens of team members, which will take some time – the way the archive.org system works, I can inject the missing fils into the gaps as time goes on. Believe me, though, with 112gb of data, there’s plenty to check through as it is.
I know it might seem we should be proud of our work, but to be honest, I just consider it all with a blanket of sadness. It’s terrible this is happening – it’s awful that years of work are being destroyed in a ill-advised, greedy, misdirected moments. For years after this, people will go to check on their Friendster account, find it wiped, and find the whole thing has been sold down the river and is unable to help them get any of it back. With luck, Archive Team got it, but there’s no promise of that, and the form we have it in will be like finding out someone burned your place down (that metaphor again!) and Archive Team has a generic cardboard refugee box that we jammed some percentage of your stuff into and stuck into a massive shelf. That’s no replacement for the platform of expression and self and network of friends you had. None at all.
But it’s all we got.
How many more times?
On the post I did about Floppy Disks, that’s gotten a lot of attention in its own right, there was a comment the weblog software marked as suspicious, and possible spam. The content itself was rather innocuous and in theme:
I will always keep a few floppies and a 3.5 inch drive. Can’t install older versions of XP or 2003 without them to load custom drivers at setup.
I also have the 5.25 inch drive and disks (just in case).
In 25 years some government secret on a floppy will need to be read and I’ll have the last drive and hardware to read it. Then I’ll be rich. Mark my words.
But yes, it was definitely spam – the website attached to the user, their e-mail address, and the name of the user were all references to a specific fruit that appears to be the new thing garnering the need for attention and weblink juice to get its message of “please fucking buy me” out to as maximum an audience as possible. It is, without question, spam.
There’s a range of commentary I make where I am probably not saying something new to a lot of people, and I get a lot of response of “well duh”, but I still feel the need to mention it, for historical context later.
Spam, as you know, is the idea of unsolicited commercial speech being thrust upon audiences without their consent, assent, knowledge or awareness. I’m going to leave it at that general definition for the purposes of what I’m talking about. Originally a reference to endless messages on Usenet (and emulating the Monty Python Spam Sketch), it expanded out to e-mail as e-mail became more prevalent. From e-mail, where it got the most hand-wringing and programmatic work to divest it away, it has followed, at various paces, to every single platform in which any amount of people congregate. Spam has cropped up in twitter, facebook, online games, IRC chat, Flickr, wikis, and places infinite.
Someone solved the spam problem a while ago: go after the tiny handful of banks that the spammers take payment from. But, knowing how to solve something and solving it are two different plateaus on a very large landscape with dangers and silliness fraught between.
So instead, let me focus on what I’m observing here, in this specific situation, and why I think it needs to be made into a historical note.
A person made this. For me.
It was weird to have machines scripting spam in the 1990s beyond the standard “and take this pre-written pitch and shove it in as many newsgroups/e-mail addresses as possible”. You wouldn’t have it, say, look at the writing of a newsgroup, re-arrange the last major topics talked about, plagarize items from a year or two previous, and compose a “new” message that turned out to be links to spam. If Usenet had survived into the later 2000s, it would have. And that’s what I’ve been seeing – scripts that knock on my doors with composed text taken from the weblog itself. So there’s been advancement there.
But this… I checked. This is a valid comment. They’re saying something reasonable and clear, something that would be a perfectly fine comment about Floppy disks, their perspective to them, and what they might have said if they were some pleasing retro-nerd happy I was talking about 5.25″ floppies. It was composed for real, for this weblog posting.
This is an enormous human cost, compared to just scripting once and blowing it out across a thousand million weblogs. It means, and I knew it was coming to this, that hiring humans to do things so bone dull has become enough of a commodity that spammers are employing this to get their messages injected into the conversation. If my software didn’t show me the spammy e-mail and website attached to the posting, I’d have approved it.
I don’t like it at all. I don’t know where this is going to lead. But it’s worth noting, for the future.
Update: It turns out this was a spam script, which took one of the comments on a Reddit link to my entry and then refashioned it into my commenting structure. Brilliance. So, we’re still in machine land. I am actually rather relieved. There are some things human beings just shouldn’t be doing.
Hello Jason,
I read your blog now since a long time and you've also open for me a
new (old) world again and I love your project, which is a kind of your
personal life-work (and also for us too).
But for me - and maybe for other readers of your blog - is the
interesting and fascinating question... was there ever a moment or
time, where you have enough of it? Can't see and don't want to work
longer with thousands of files? Do you ever had think about, to throw
everything away? Thought, that it doesn't make any sense? Do make a
complete other thing in life, to stop everything? Or is this, what you
make, do and work on a kind of never ending story, where you really
never get tired of it?
Because I've worked more then ~15 years with computers - and last year
there was a kind of break down inside me. Can't see computer-work
suddenly, quit also my job, start a new life with a new job - without
computers - and use them now & today just for fun, to read and to blog
and free stuff. I'm impressed, that it doesn't look like, that you
ever have enough of it...? That's cool!
Sorry for my bad english!
Cheers from Europe!
Emanuel
Thanks, Emanuel. Glad to hear you’re getting something out of the various projects I have up, which still surprises me sometimes due to the amount of years they’ve been around – I’ve had people write me about websites I’ve had up for all their lives, which is sobering, but also rather enlightening because they’re coming to the sites without context, that is, they just are.
I’m going to draw a difference between Productivity and Longevity.
Productivity is just the amount of stuff you get done in any given period of time, and is different for everyone. With the use of scripts, pre-existing information and materials, as well as a dedication to getting every last bit of data mopped up and into somewhere, I can seem rather productive indeed, although it’s on the shoulders of giants and I don’t lay claim that everything that is related to me was 100% done by me. So I’m productive by some standards, and an embarrassing sloth by others – and that’s quite all right. I’m happy with the general result of my efforts.
Longevity, separate from your productivity, is staying at the same task or class of tasks over time – and for that, I’ve got that going as well. 13 years on TEXTFILES.COM, been using computers for 32 years, pissing people off since 1977… definitely keeping on track.
I don’t think there’s much secrecy in how I keep going, and no, I don’t really burn out except for the occasional, rare day when I’m just sick of everything and then a nice solid nap will do the job.
For one thing, all my projects tend to be display or sharing-oriented – when I finish something, I turn immediately to distributing it, and ensuring it can be easily accessed is one of the top priorities baked into the process. If I find a trove of old data, my first thought is getting it up, online, out somewhere – so I get the feedback, the knowledge that it’s getting spread around, and a sense of saving something from oblivion. That’s endemic.
My happiest moments with computers or collections is thinking something might be what it sounds like, and finding out it’s that and more. This is absolutely the opposite of a lot of marketing, which over-promises and under-delivers. I used to think I hated all marketing, but I don’t. I hate bad, misleading marketing. Getting the word out about work I’ve done, to blow some minds and make some days? More of that. So knowing stuff I’m doing gives that feeling every single day definitely motivates me.
My projects tend to be accumulative, and contributory – I add things, I don’t take old things away, and I encourage people to help me and be engaged. To want to walk away from these projects would be strange for me, as a result. Since they basically run themselves if they aren’t added to, I don’t have to be there for every second. Webservers provide the data, rsync shares the information to mirrors, and my weblog software just keeps humming along waiting for an entry, whenever it shows up. It’s nice.
You know the old saw, “Enjoy what you do and you’ll never work a day in your life?” Like that. But with more Apple II crack screens.
Hope that helped.
I have done my first weblog posting on the Internet Archive Weblog: Scanning a Braille Playboy.
I could probably count on half of one hand the amount of group weblogs I’ve posted on, and I can count on one finger the amount of time any institution or company I’ve ever worked for has let me have the ability to post directly to their weblog with something I’ve written. I hope I’ve done the place right. Go ahead and find out the story of the Braille Playboy, which is in fact about how the Internet Archive scans and adds a new book to their collection every ninety seconds. Isn’t that amazing?
Great wagon my star is hitched to.
As per my usual methodology, I’ll be attending the DEFCON hacking and security conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, starting this upcoming Wednesday and going through to Sunday. With a couple exceptions, I’ve been there every year since 1999, so it’s kind of a thing I do. I also happen to love Las Vegas, so going down there for a good part of a week works well for me. DEFCON has one of the largest sets of people who like the work I do, all in one place, and it’s nice to connect with folks who normally I only communicate with via e-mail.
Also as per my usual methodology, I am speaking at same DEFCON, and my talk is, not surprisingly, about all the work and events with Archive Team.
From the description of the talk in the DEFCON program:
“For the last few years, historian and archivist Jason Scott has been involved with a loose, rogue band of data preservation activists called The Archive Team. As major sites with brand recognition and the work of millions announce short-notice shutdowns of their entire services, including Geocities, Friendster, and Yahoo Video, Archive Team arrives on the scene to duplicate as much as they possibly can for history before all the data is wiped forever. To do this, they have been rude, crude and far outside the spectrum of polite requests to save digital history, and have used a variety of techniques to retrieve and extract data that might have otherwise been unreachable. Come for the rough-and-tumble extraction techniques and teamwork methods, stay for the humor and ranting.”
So yeah, that.
I know it’s weird that I have to say this, but it’s been proven that I miss out if I don’t: I go to this conference (and other conferences) to meet people, to talk about projects, and to engage with folks. I go much less for the speaking sessions, and I certainly do not go to be off in a corner, unapproachable, while you wonder if you should “bother” me with saying hello. Come up, say hello. It’s what I’m there for.
The conference is at a new hotel this year, the Rio, which is off the strip and has this strange little Brazilian theme it conclusively messes up, but most importantly does not have the vibe of a dying old man coughing up the last of his life while staring at you suspiciously, like the Riviera had. And most notably of all, DEFCON has secured the use of the Penn and Teller theater for the conference, which will be a place a smaller set of folks will be doing presentations from.
I will be one of them. Nicest room I’ve played.
See everyone there.
Update: It went amazing. Video should become available in coming months.
