Defcon is no longer a counterculture conference, and arguably hasn't been for a while. It's a place for security professionals to go to hang out in Vegas for a few days on their company's dime, or to extend their stay after Black Hat.
The conference has gotten too big for its own good. It now inhabits the Las Vegas Convention Center, which is less convenient than when it was in one of the hotels (or multiple hotels clustered together). The one positive of the LVCC is that it has a ton of room but there are still issues with things like sound equipment that plague the villages and their talks/workshops.
This was my 23rd DEFCON, and was just as counterculture as it was decades ago if you know where to go, and don't get distracted by the big pretty signs. DEFCON has always been about feds, policymakers, corpos, kids, and straight up black hat criminals partying together and shaping the future of infosec.
The author of the article decided to wander down the Military Industrial Complex track, and seems to be complaining that it had too much Army stuff. I didn't see any of that this year, because that's not what interests me. I met up with a large number of cipherpunks and activists that I don't get to see very often, and had some extremly productive conversations regarding various projects we're working on for the next year.
I'd love to go to defcon, but I fear it'll end up like every other conference I go to: wandering around, watching a few talks, ending up at a few semi-boring cocktail hours, etc. Maybe I'm that anti-cool enough to get auto-filtered?
I joined a local discord / defcon chapter, and it was mostly reminiscing about the good old days and most people saying they weren't going this year.
As a longtime attendee myself, this is absolutely true.
Also, DEFCON and DT specifically have not shifted anywhere. A large demographic of attendees shifted hard to the left, mirroring our culture in general. They are also not "counterculture" as these are mainstream/televised points of view.
I had to stop dealing with certain parts/people of DEFCON and infosec in general because of this intense noise. That's not pegging myself as being on the right, it's just that my DEFCON experience has always been about expanding my worldview and fun... this very loud and influential group isn't about either of those things.
From what I see and hear, the US is moving to the left in a similar way to gravity lifting objects from the ground.
As far as I can tell both sides have their intensely loud groups, but only noticing one means you're closer (by varying degrees) to the other. And that's OK, but slightly less OK if you're not aware of it.
It can also depend on where you are and who you know. The groups are not evenly spread through society. In the UK and one side in politics dominates all my social circles - colleagues, people I went to school with, people I meet locally (to be fair, that does depend on what you do and who you meet - but I tend to "cultural" activities), people who share stuff on FB that I know (as opposed to the stuff in the feed - is which often ridiculously extreme both ways).
it might not be true, and surveys and voting patterns say otherwise, but it can definitely feel like one side is dominant. It can definitely be true that a particular place/activity/group is dominated by one side, which is what GP seems to be claiming, rather than that the US in general has shifted to the left?
> but only noticing one means you're closer (by varying degrees) to the other.
Maybe if you're talking about culture in general it will exist as some sort of U shape in general terms no doubt, but any hyper online subcultures turned into an IRL organization/insular collection of people like defcon is liable to go hard in identifiable directions which is distracting to more disinterested parties there for the original purpose of the show.
I am not the person you are responding to, but I think the ground reality is nuanced. What follows is my opinion / perspective, which I do not assert as irrefutable fact, nor as the only opinion / perspective which should be considered.
Politics in the US have become more polarized, but a historical view shows this as more of a reversion to the mean than a novel phenomenon, as we are increasingly distanced from a period of greater economic prosperity for large swathes of the middle class, which seemed to have a (now disappearing) byproduct of a degree of psychological satiation with "big picture" concerns.
There is a documented tendency for the political left, at least in the US, to accept and tolerate a much narrower range of thought, that is to say, the left has a much smaller Overton Window, than the political right in the US, who mostly seem unified only around opposition to the policies of the political left. (https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjso....)
I suspect, but do not necessary assert as fact, that the above effect on the left may be partially explained by a rigid adherence to the paradox of tolerance, which itself demands an unwillingness to tolerate people who hold intolerant ideas, views, or beliefs, even if those people do not act on those ideas, views, or beliefs to meaningfully practice intolerance. The end result, from my perspective as someone who fits cleanly in neither political camp (I'm more of a libertarian than anything else) is that the left makes little to no room for allies and increasingly engages in litmus testing with an end goal of ostracizing and socially shunning even LGBTQ+ people who don't fit neatly into the smaller Overton Window. As an example, it is considered intolerable by many on the left to merely be vocally supportive of adult LGBTQ+ rights, while expressing discomfort with the idea of children being exposed to pride parades with fully naked adults embracing all manner of sexual diversity and kinks, or discomfort with the idea of irreversible chemical gender affirmation therapy for minors on grounds of bodily autonomy / age of consent considerations. Meanwhile, to the surprise of some of my friends on the political left, large swathes of the political right (though not the most extreme fringes), in my lived experience as an LGBTQ person in Texas (which to be fair, may not be entirely representative of the rest of the country), hold more of a "live at let live" philosophy that, paradoxically, is more tolerant of LGBTQ+ persons with nuanced views than the political left is. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance)
I think as the emotional investment of typical political partisans increases, there is a widespread perception of hostility or outrage from the political left at nuanced positions that are nominally but insufficiently progressive, like the one in the example above. Anecdata for this might include the perspective of Bill Maher, who was once considered to be subversively progressive, then gradually seen as "center left", and is now perceived by many on the left as "right of center", in spite of a rock-solid track record of being notably left of Republicans on almost every issue.
To be clear, I'm not trying to assert normative views that either side is "right", morally superior or inferior to one another, just attempting to offer my perspective on what I think the underlying mechanisms driving the disconnect between perceptions of the political system itself (which is increasingly dominated by right-of-center figures in all three branches of the federal government, particularly at the SCOTUS level in the judiciary), and perceptions of cultural values. That cultural perception is probably further strengthened by widespread, rapid, and vocal adoption of DEI values across almost all institutional settings (academia, corporate America, public sector, even institutions that are traditionally conceptualized as right of center, like Wall Street firms) following the protests over the death of George Floyd; the relatively swift mainstream acceptance of LGBTQ+ rights (marriage equality went from fringe to mainstream in under two decades); climate change moved from "environmental issue" to a mainstream economic/social concern in roughly the same period; social media amplification of progressive voices and causes, including, at times; coordination between left-leaning administrations and social media companies to suppress right-leaning perspectives, some of which are now widely acknowledged to have likely been true (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files), to name a few large changes over both the last two decades and the last five years or so.
And again, I'm not asserting that any of these changes were good or bad (regardless of how I personally feel about any of the changes in question), nor am I trying to assert a normative framing one way or another, just attempting to dissect the mechanisms of the perception itself.
Above is a long text that completely rests on small statements such as the above, stated with full confidence. I could easily argue for the opposite. And historically speaking, where these terms originate, it's quite clear that the left had to build a larger tent, as the saying goes.
Without these small but confident statements of questionable veracity, the rest of the text sort of fizzles down to one big anecdote about Texas living. Which is nice, but Texas is big and while I have never lived there myself I understand there are large differences between big cities like Austin and the rest.
Much can be said about how forgiving the debate climate is, and how heterogenous different political groups are. But one observation I think can be made is that it shifts with where the center is, the center being the deciding socioeconomic group in a modern democratic society. The opposition needs to rally support and needs to be much more allowing and accepting, and their Overton window as you call it grows wider. The ones with the political wind in their backs, winning elections, will find the power to hone their political skills and sharpen their issues, thereby shrinking this window.
So I believe much of it can be explained by who are winning elections and whose questions are being heard. These are slow processes, society does not change every election, but we did have an almost decade long period where traditional leftist questions were being heard in mainstream media, but right now it's quite clear the wind is blowing in the opposite direction in most Western democracies.
When I think of the _Paradox of Tolerance_ I always think of Gödel's _incompleteness theorems_.
Say you are restaurant owner that is tolerant of any consumer, it brings in money. Left, right, center, no matter the political spectrum; gay, straight, bisexual, no matter the sexuality. You provide them a good meal and they gladly pay. Now comes in a client and he starts trashing the place, tipping over tables, spitting in people's food. Do you stay tolerant and let it happen or brake your tolerance and deal with the situation and get him out? Your clients will no longer be tolerant of you and your business if you keep letting having is way.
Reality, you have defined "tolerance of others" with axioms that they do not maliciously destroy the property in our restaurant and they don't spit in the food of your clients. _Paradox of Tolerance_ highly resembles an inconsistent formal system pertaining to the proof of tolerance. "Tolerance of others" is a constant formal system in order to be tolerant.
Both you and your clients have agree upon definition of tolerance. It is the man destroying your property, you, and your clients that have differences in the definition of behavioral tolerance. The three do not share the same axioms. A universal definition of tolerance cannot be obtained.
Tolerance is also contextual, based on set and setting; who else is around, making it a malleable definition. This means _tolerance_ is a set / highly parameterized function. Location of public or private is just one parameter of many. For instant the scenario above about the business would most likely be accept if the setting was on set for a scene in a move.
The issue I think arrives when there is an unwillingness to tolerate people who hold intolerant ideas, views, or beliefs, even when those people do not act on those ideas, views, or beliefs - i.e. when the people with intolerant views are not actually practicing intolerance.
It's one thing to shun a customer for practicing intolerance, it's another to shun a customer for holding intolerant beliefs without actually practicing intolerance or materially affecting the quality of life of anyone around them, is it not?
Someone who takes no actions based on their beliefs effectively doesn’t hold those beliefs, as far as anyone else knows, and doesn’t get shunned for them. So you’re trying to define some level of advertising your beliefs as “not acting on them”. What’s that level? An op-ed on the problem of gay people, or just a casual remark that of course gay marriage is a sin?
I'm thinking more along the lines of the OpenSUSE project banning contributors who wouldn't concede to a demand to wave a trans pride flag, referring to all conservatives as "Rotten Flesh", NixOS purging "Nazis" (read: people who didn't openly and vocally support all aspects of LGBTQ+ culture), etc. And I say this as someone who is themselves not heterosexual, and who has a non-cisgender partner.
Don't get me wrong, I don't like having to fear for my safety around genuinely bigoted and threatening people, I just don't like the "wave our flag or you're a literal nazi / rotten flesh / subhuman who should be excommunicated from the entire linux community" type of messaging coming from the opposite camp either. Those extremes both make me feel profoundly uncomfortable and unsafe.
I read about the opensuse story and... It seems like the project acted quite reasonably? It seems that certain bigoted snowflakes were triggered over the pride themed open suse lizard thing on reddit.
> And I say this as someone who is themselves not heterosexual, and who has a non-cisgender partner.
It shouldn't get that far. Once you invite one fascist, and the first one is typically polite, there will be more coming so you've got to "nip it in the bud".
They usually protest, if that's what you're asking.
As a movement they're dependent on other organisations to carry them forward, hence why they infiltrate political parties, bully media outlets into disseminating their talking points and so on.
Using lawfare to try to take out a political opponent (ridiculous NY charge with no precedent, no victim, and from a DA who was famous for reducing felonies to misdemeanours but for Trump did the opposite)
Applying govt pressure to social media companies to censor content (twitter files etc)
Using the intelligence apparatus to try to take out a political opponent (russian collusion hoax, fake dossier)
Relying on the media lies to maintain power (border is secure, Biden is mentally competent etc)
Well these are all features of Stalin, Putin, the CCP and now the modern Democrat party.
All of your examples tell me you need to find a wider circle of news to read.
At the very least you're repeating propoganda. Every one I could easily refute, but what would be the point? I'm not going to convince you. You're happy in your bubble.
But don't think for a moment that you are certainly right.
Your comment is just meaningless words disconnected from reality.
And a very large number of people agree with me on some level.
We saw the evidence of that at the last election.
So my "bubble" is pretty large actually.
What about yours?
> Meanwhile, to the surprise of some of my friends on the political left, large swathes of the political right (though not the most extreme fringes), in my lived experience as an LGBTQ person in Texas (which to be fair, may not be entirely representative of the rest of the country), hold more of a "live at let live" philosophy that, paradoxically, is more tolerant of LGBTQ+ persons with nuanced views than the political left is.
Texas has more registered Democrats than Republicans, interestingly enough.
(But neither Democrats nor Liberals are leftists.)
I've definitely taken preference to the term leftist or progressive over "liberal"... I don't think the modern left could be described as liberal in any classic sense of the term. That said, I don't think many on the left are particularly progressive either.
Do you believe our society should value tradition and hierarchy?
Yes -> right-leaning
No -> left-leaning
"Progress" implies there is an inevitable way forward, for which other beliefs are leading society astray from.
When it comes to things like "Are you prejudiced against groups of people?" the progressive answer is always "no". People on both "sides" can find valid reasons to say "no" to this question, but it's hard to maintain an internally consistent worldview if you're left-leaning (oppose hierarchies) and still want others to be lesser (which requires a hierarchy). Mainstream racism, homophobia, etc. naturally concentrate on the political right, but up until a few years ago, opposition to same-sex marriage was a mainstream position for liberal Democrats, too.
This is all to say, there is no actual significant leftist representation in American politics.
> in my lived experience as an LGBTQ person in Texas (which to be fair, may not be entirely representative of the rest of the country), hold more of a "live at let live" philosophy that, paradoxically, is more tolerant of LGBTQ+ persons with nuanced views than the political left is
For what it's worth as a European who has never been to the US (and certainly won't now!) I've spoken to many US LGBTQ people and the ones from Texas mentioned this "live and let live" thing as a specifically Texan thing. Texas seems to be more open in that sense than other Southern states.
However like I said this is just hearsay but the two Texan people I spoke to mentioned exactly this phenomenon independently.
And yeah I can imagine you consider us leftists more purist. But I don't think you can say that America is heading leftward. Compare Trump with even a hard-line right winger like George W Bush and the latter is like a model president. I recently saw his congratulation speech to Obama and it exuded respect and sanity. It's kinda amazing that a president we considered pretty bad is now a role model.
Whereas Trump started the Capitol raid when Biden wijand now wants to redact history at the Smithsonian if it doesn't suit his narrative.
Grew up in Texas, and while southern kindness and acceptance can certainly be found, it is often surface level. I was raised to refer to black people as the N word, and that athiests, muslims, and LGBT people are dangerous, and that we should carry guns just in case they try to hurt us.
I was also taught in my state-approved Saxon science books that the earth is 6000 years old, and bad weather is because God is mad at sinners. The worst of which of course being the gays which go directly to hell no matter how kind they are.
Also was raised very sexist, that women paying for things or working is a result of the men in their lives failing them, and that they are property to be earned like capturing a wild horse.
Texas outside of the cities is a deeply backwards uneducated place full of people living in constant fear of attack by sinners.
Incidentally Texas is also home to NASA and Moody Gardens, and my many visits to those gave me an interest in science and technology that allowed me to confirm everything I was taught was propaganda and nonsense and ultimately go my own way in life.
George W. Bush was never hard-right. For that matter, Trump isn't hard-right either. GW was pretty centrist all around (as far as US politics is concerned) and Trump is a right-leaning populist, which is kind of a weird position.
I've leaned pretty libertarian most of my life... I have conservative friends and pretty progressive friends (and those that I do NOT talk politics with).
A lot of this will come down to is definitely regional. A lot of the U.S. identity itself isn't the same, and different regions are very different. Texas itself is larger than like 80% of the countries in the world. The U.S. as a whole is massive. It's every bit as diverse in some ways as going anywhere in the E.U. despite mostly speaking the same language.
As to the U.S. and going left or right... it varies and depends. I think a lot of the left's "big tent" is falling, in that there is a very outspoken subset of the left that has shifted farther away from where most people are comfortable with. It's fractured, but there. There's also a bit of a yearning towards some more conservative values and a return to a stronger national identity. Both can be, and are true.
In my experience, most people in the US have a pretty live and let live pov... that of course stops to a large extend at coercion of children.
It is entirely irrelevant to whether the ideology is conservative and/or hard-right, since populism describes not the substance of policy or ideology but style of rhetorical framing in a way which is largely orthogonal to ideology.
The original claim, which my message was trying to substantiate towards the post I was replying to that expressed confusion at the , was the idea that American culture has shifted hard to the left, which is not the same as saying that the American government or political system has necessarily shifted hard to the left. To the contrary, I attempted to clearly distinguish this in my post by noting that all three branches of government in the US have indeed been moving to the political right in the last decade or so, even has the wider culture did appear to be shifting towards the left for much of that time period.
You'd be forgiven for thinking that the mainstream cultural values of the US should have set the political preference for the US government in what is nominally supposed to be a "democratic" country - that entirely logical and rational assumption increasingly appears to be false.
As weird as it might sound, I think the "live and let live" thing is actually quite sociologically interesting - it seems to present a framework rooted in individualism that achieves social tolerance outcomes comparable to China's ideas around "social harmony" (which I admittedly am far from an expert on). Perhaps it's just a rehashing of "the golden rule" wearing a cowboy hat, but as someone who leans towards what Europeans would call classical liberalism, it's hard for me to not appreciate the parallels with the "non-aggression principle", as well.
And for what it's worth, I harbor no ill will towards anyone from any political background or perspective, even the purists. I'm fond of the idea of treating everyone with dignity, kindness, and compassion, even when I disagree with their ideas or would criticize their actions.
> It's kinda amazing that a president we considered pretty bad is now a role model.
Why do you consider him a role model? Based on how he spoke instead of the actions he took? Most politicians, put on a facade. They play the crowd, kiss the babies, etc. They change their positions with whatever way the polls go. What good is a smile and manners if someone is robbing you when you're not looking?
Bush started an entire war on a completely fabricated lie. And Obama carried the torch, despite running originally against the Iraq war! Maybe you don't feel the consequences of this because you don't have to pay the bill and your family members were never deployed to a war zone.
Trump, for all his flaws, his instincts are for negotiation and peace. He just negotiated a peace deal between Rwanda and Congo:
He also seemed to handle the Iran-Israel conflict in a way that for befuddling reasons to me, actually deescalated the situation, despite the controversy at the time.
I'll take mean tweets and strong negotiation over smiling faces and reckless invasions any day of the week.
That's a pretty wild statement given that he just invaded Iran. He's also made direct military threats towards allied Denmark, even in press conferences. There's also the less overt threats about making Cananda a US state and giving Ukranian land to Putin.
Pretty militant for the first six months, even from an objective historical context. Should he keep up that tempo for a full term of office, that would measure up with the more intervention oriented presidents including Nixon himself.
I meant a role model relatively speaking to trump. He was at least presidential.
I totally agree he did a lot of actions that were very questionable like the iraq war and also the extreme surveillance. I just meant Trump makes him look good :)
I disagree about Trump but I don't want to get into that.
And I think what he is saying is that a person should be judged by their actions, and consequences, rather than their rhetoric. This is even more true in modern times when people generally have no clue what people who they don't like are actually saying. Because they are listening to media that also generally don't like the same people and who will regularly take things out of context, disingenuously interpret them, or even just plain lie. And since we're talking about people that are disliked by somebody, they'll never know any better - because it's not like they're ever going to actually go seek out what the person said; they want their biases confirmed.
This issue is most embodied by the various little social experiments on YouTube where people will ask college students what think about action [x], [y], and [z] that they invariably agree with, then they're told it was done by a politician they don't like, and you can see, in real time, the cognitive dissonance kick in where they suddenly try to figure out why they don't "actually" like these actions. Or vice versa for disliked actions by a politician they do like. This, more than anything, sums up the divides in America today.
Not the GP, but I feel the same. The reason is that my views haven't really changed, yet somehow my political positioning went from quite liberal to something most people, below a certain age, would consider conservative. I value: free speech, equality of opportunity, antiwar, anti political correctness, anti megacorp, and view the liberty of the individual mattering vastly more than than dictates of authority/hierarchy.
More generally, I think politics has shifted such that left/right is no longer meaningful, as people tend to be much more split on libertarian/authoritarian world views - particularly on the degree to which accredited individuals ought be able to impose their views on society in an effort to 'tweak' people's behaviors. That nuance, more or less, immediately leads to the shifting winds on the issues I mentioned.
All the values you cited are so vague they can encompass almost any position. For example, "antiwar" can mean refusing to bomb other countries to get their resources and it can also mean that if another country threatens to bomb your house you give them whatever resources they want. Free speech can mean free to challenge the government, free to spam or free to brainwash. Liberty of the individual to shoot or liberty of the individual to not be shot?
I suspect that your individual position within each of those axes has drastically changed even though the axis labels have not.
"Left" and "right" remain meaningful. Right means supporting stronger hierarchies and left means supporting weaker hierarchies. They have always meant this since they were originally coined about the french pro/anti monarchist parties. It's "liberal" and "conservative" that have poorly defined meanings. You will not find much right at CCC.
Scientific studies show a real difference in brain structure - the part of the brain that processes fear is bigger in rightists - so it appears to be an intrinsic evolutionary thing and it makes sense it remsins the same thing in each generation.
> Scientific studies show a real difference in brain structure - rightists have enlarged fear centers - so it appears to be an intrinsic evolutionary difference and it makes sense it remains the same across time.
can you point to a few studies on this topic? I am struggling to imagine how one would design a study to measure this
It was a 2011 study that found a 0.28 correlation in amygdalae size vs conservative political identity among a tiny group of college students. A replication attempt dropped that correlation to 0.068 which is basically nothing, and completely failed to replicate at all the other, even weaker, findings of the previous study. And the media called the amygdala the "fear center", which is dumb. It plays a key role in memory - especially long term memory, emotional processing, the understanding of social cues, and more. Removing it would render someone extremely mentally retarded.
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I'd also add on this issue that considering political issues among college students is itself silly. Our political positions on things is impacted by our life experience, and at the point of college one has very little life experience to formulate views off of. Political identity will often shift radically from age 20 to 40, which against suggests a genetic basis as being farcical - at least beyond the point that your brain structure will typically correlate, to some degree, with the development of skills, identity, etc.
I meant to say that the left/right divide is built in to humans, not that each individual human is predisposed to always be left or always be right.
The rightward shift as people age is pretty easily explained by self-interest. When you start with almost nothing, you want a fair share because that's more than you have now. Once you climb the ladder, you don't want a fair share because that's less than you have now. Once you get above the average, you want to stretch the pyramid taller because that puts you at a higher absolute position, and the higher up you are, the more you want to stretch it. When you're below the middle, you want to shorten the pyramid because that puts you at a higher absolute position (the pyramid extends below the floor).
But that's assuming wealth dynamics continue to work how they did for boomers. IIRC millennials were the first generation to shift leftwards with age, because they mostly didn't get to above-middle positions on the pyramid.
They're not vague in the least, but pointing this out drives anger and cognitive dissonance in people because people want to imagine that they support these values, particularly if they did so when they were younger. For the most unambiguously and plainly obvious - free speech means free speech, not approved speech. You can actually see this cognitive dissonance play out most overtly in Wikipedia's definition of authoritarianism. [1] The meaning of the term has been edited to the point of completely redefining it, relative to its definition of 20 years ago [2], even though the definition of authoritarianism has itself not really changed in that time frame, and the older definition matches the normal definition (and connotation) of it vastly more than the 'modern' version.
The study you mentioned was, even at the time of its publication, quite dubious - finding a negligible correlation (0.23) in amygdalae size in a very non-representative sampling. In a replication attempt that correlation was found to overstate it by more than 3x, finding a correlation of 0.068, which is essentially statistical noise. There's nothing there except clickbait media doing their thing. I'd also add that framing the amygdala as the 'fear center' is itself also quite ridiculous. There also remains the question of identity. I consider myself liberal. I imagine you would object. Who's right? Ah modern 'science', but there I go again challenging that hierarchy.
> You can actually see this cognitive dissonance play out most overtly in Wikipedia's definition of authoritarianism.
I'd say a more overt example is playing out on the national stage, where protests in support of (murdered, raped, and starving) Palestinians in Gaza are crushed, because the alternative is to have the executive branch try to extort a $Billion dollars from the host campus, putting universities in peril, to help buy another gold-plated plane or something.
"Free speech means free speech" is a tautology and does absolutely nothing to counter the idea that it could mean either freedom to oppose the government, freedom to spam, or freedom to yell fire in a crowded theater. In fact it's very conspicuously a purely emotional statement with zero logical content; anyone who uses this response is conspicuously asserting that they don't care about logical argument.
The assertion that Wikipedia has more content than it did in 2004 is also logically void.
The 'freedom to yell fire in a crowded theater' argument against free speech is such a perfect illustration of the issue. That was an argument made by Mr. Eugenics himself, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, in a famous case Schneck vs United States. [1]
In it Charles Schneck was convicted for an absolutely abhorrent crime. He sent out fliers to men drafted for WW1 informing them of a legal defense against the draft - of it constituting involuntary servitude, which was prohibited by the 13th Amendment, and encouraging them to consequently assert their legal rights and work to resist the draft.
For this, he was arrested and put in prison, with the government claiming that his mailed fliers were akin to 'shouting fire in a crowded theater.' This is why free speech means free speech. Limitations are invariably weaponized by authoritarian forces to shoehorn essentially everything into that limitation.
When I say "freedom to yell fire in a crowded theater" I mean "freedom to yell fire in a crowded theater" and not "freedom to hand out fliers informing people that the draft is illegal involuntary servitude".
It doesn't matter what you think such a restriction means. What matters is what politicians would use it for. That's why this is such a beautifully ironic quote, because when I say the right to ban such speech would open the door to abuse, I don't need to draw on hypotheticals.
The quote is literally part of the government's [successful] argument that their right to imprison somebody for shouting fire in a crowded theater naturally grants them the right to imprison somebody for handing out informative fliers that run contrary to warmonger interests.
There's no stronger argument for free speech means free speech than the quote you chose.
So you do believe everyone should have the right to walk into a crowded theater and yell FIRE! and this should be constitutionally protected, because if there's any speech that isn't constitutionally protected, no speech is constitutionally protected?
What about the speech of "I will pay you $50 to stab that guy right now"? Constitutionally protected or do you believe that should be past a limit?
The consequences of an action can be prohibited without touching the action itself. For instance most of every state has laws against signaling a false alarm. It doesn't matter whether you do that by triggering a fire alarm, playing an extremely loud fire alarm type sound, shouting fire, or whatever else - it's all illegal.
Not only does this prevent trampling on speech and minimize abuse, but it's also far more to the point. Because why is shouting fire uniquely awful while shouting penis is just some kids being annoying that should simply be kicked out of a theater? It's not because of the words obviously, but because of the consequence created.
Absolutely, those are great examples of things that are protected by free speech. When the ACLU was at the height of its reputation, and the US at the height of its soft power, we even had things like the ACLU defending the right of a literal nazi group to stage a march. And the various death cults the US has had were also all operating completely legally.
The paradox of tolerance is largely nonsensical, because the key to a free society is free speech but stringent, and blind, enforcement against actions. Somebody can larp out with their swastikas and roman salutes all they want, but the second they lay hands on anybody - they're going to have a few years in a cage to rethink their life decisions. If they repeat this onto a third time, the key gets thrown away.
In general I think that the liberties of the worst of society work in many ways like a canary in the coalmine for the rest of us. As soon as that canary dies it's not long before your government, with its 29% approval rating, is trying to do things like ban the highest polling party in the country under ridiculous mental gymnastics that, in reality, come down to little more than 'we want to stay in power.'
I would also add that, once they do lay their hands on someone (or actively conspire to), I think it's perfectly fine to respond with heftier penalties if the motivation for it is Nazi ideology or other similar stuff. It's not a free speech matter at that point.
Absolutely. The situation where a couple of guys get into a relatively normal fight, and one where a guy seeks somebody out because of any reason are obviously very different - and should be treated differently under the law.
In this regard I also think hate crimes miss the mark, because is something like 'the knockout game' a hate crime? Probably not, but I think it should be treated in a similar fashion because it's essentially the same problem - of some ideology driving somebody to violence, as opposed to a normal personal conflict.
Actual hard left (as opposed to milquetoast liberals calling themselves "democratic socialists") is most certainly not a mainstream or televised point of view.
Yeah that's the thing about counterculture, eventually large portions of it end up mainstream culture so if you like being contrarian you have to constantly be on the move.
The left used to be more individualist in the U.S. (circa 90s most definitely) but it developed a toxic groupthink as it came to dominate pop culture and media in the 00s and 10s, and began to leverage that to employ censorship, deplatforming, doxxing, etc and it became incredibly dogmatic and if anyone diverged from a particular narrative (ie skeptical covid came from wet market), they would be ridiculed, shouted down, laughed off, shamed, kicked off social media platforms, ostracized, etc which is cult like behavior.
The left of the 90s would have never stood for that. They were the die hards for free speech then. Something shifted.
Yeah, the left of the 90s would never excommunicate anyone for being completely certain Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and that climate change was a hoax, and the moon was made of cheese, and bringing these things up at every opportunity, because the left of the 90s believed in free speech.
Individualism has been failing Americans, while the quality of life has improved dramatically in less individualist cultures, in many ways surpassing Americans (health care, housing, education, upward mobility, etc), so it shouldn't be surprising that collectivism is starting to win mindshare.
Don't fool yourself, conspiracy theories are usually marginalized in US culture, the left didn't welcome conspiracy theories back then either.
Also, now that political correctness and censorship mostly coming from the right again (with the Moral Majority going after music then, and video games/porn now), we now see the civil libertarian elements of the left standing up to fight censorship once again.
The boomers got old. They were flawed but the heavy anti-authoritarian vibe of the old left was largely carried over from the 60s. Imagine a zoomer lefty burning their covid card the way hippies burned their draft cards. Nope! The thing that shifted was authoritarianism; the terminal end-stage of socialist ideology.
Hacker culture is principally 'don't tell me what to do'.
Which in the US puts it somewhat orthogonal to the left-right divide.
It mirrors the divide on the public at large - a disappointingly large number of people are wildly ready to jump on the authoritarian bandwagon, because the alternative has a few leftist ideas that make them feel icky.
If I had a debug console on reality, I'd be curious to query how big the intersection is between those who thrive in hacker culture and people with PDA.
To me, the Wikipedia page of "Pathological demand avoidance" looks like those in power are again inventing some new psychological disorder to pathologize (and perhaps hospitalize) non-docile people.
Interesting. In the UK it tends to be right wing ideas people find icky about the alternative. Maybe one party on the left but it is really small.
The problem here is that society and culture in general has got more authoritarian so it cut across the left-right divide (which IMO has got meaningless anyway since it no longer reflects a consistent difference in economic policy) but leaving the non-authoritarians practically without politically representation.
The definition of authoritarianism has widely expanded into uselessness, because it colors with the same brush concepts as disparate as:
* Throwing a bag over your head and sending you to a tropical gulag for life without trial or access to a lawyer, contrary to the explicit ruling of a judge reviewing your case.
* Requiring you to wear a piece of cloth on your face in the middle of a deadly pandemic that's killing millions of people.
(Its not that we can't tell the difference between them, any child above the age of 8 can grasp the distinction, it's that people who love the former and are mildly annoyed by the latter are being deliberately obtuse about it.)
During Covid, many of the Hackers in the infosec community supported government-mandated vaccination (this was what I saw through Twitter). I think this changed my view of activists and hackers after this.
It's authoritarian-minded people that don't want to listen to anyone (and want to force you to do what they want through hacking). When they get want they want, they don't care about trampling on the rights of or oppressing the people that disagree.
He did say "government mandated". It is perfectly possible to think people should have vaccinations (I did - and had them myself) without thinking the government should force them to have vaccinations.
If that's your mindset, the internet must be similarly disappointing to you. In either domain, you can select where you want to go and what you want to do.
> In either domain, you can select where you want to go and what you want to do.
In both cases, there was a time when both were exclusively people-powered and "the man" was entirely absent.
"There are some authentic nuggets if you know where to go" are the last kicks of a fast-gentrifying neighborhood, to use mixed metaphors. In the past anywhere/everywhere you could go was authentic.
Yes but the internet wasn't really where digital counterculture started. That was the BBSes. Until the early 90s only some universities had access to the internet and very few of them outside the US.
When the internet became a public thing the counterculture quickly moved there.
DARPA funds all kinds of things without being involved / having a military or government presence in the thing - a contemporary example would be DARPA kick-starting self-driving vehicles.
IMO, the web was authentically p2p before online Paypal, banner ads and Bonzi Buddy. It's still possible to subscribe to blogs (said nuggets) via RSS - which is miraculously having a renaissance - but it's all going to be drowned out by the relentless, unfeeling firehouse of AI slop.
OK, but that seems like a funny definition of "military presence", since DARPA is the military.
The goal DARPA was trying to accelerate by funding self-driving, btw, was to "achieve the fielding of unmanned, remotely controlled technology such that ... by 2015, one third of the operational ground combat vehicles are unmanned". [0]
It appears we e have different thresholds on what counts as "military presence".
By way of explanation: rocketry was funded and developed for military ends, including von Braun's earlier work on the V2 and later work on missiles across the Atlantic and the development of ICBMs. IMO, there's no military presence in human spaceflight[1], but you may see it differently due to the heritage of the propulsion system.
I'm curious to lern when this phase of absence of the man and its entities - like publicly funded agencies and labs and suchlike - from the internet happened and how?
Once they scared off the people running the Sky Talks, which were always awesome, and messed with groups like the lockpicking folks ability to fundraise, I think the idea of it being a hacker con really died and it turned into just another corporate convention.
Skytalks happened this year and was better attended than ever. Getting a seat was extremely competitive, people lined up for several hours for a single talk token. I would have loved to go to some, but unfortunately there was a ton of other stuff I wanted to see so I didn't have time to stand in line.
They were a side conference to a side conference, but the structure let them run things the way they wanted, which is important.
Scared them off? Is there any documentation of that? My understanding is that the split was amicable. SkyTalks has immunocompromised people on staff and they chose to voluntarily leave defcon because they wanted to continue masking mandates while Defcon did not. Bsides welcomed them with support in their conference(helping with Token Drops and scheduling) and Skytalks occupies a space that is physically separated from Bsides(as in a different hotel on its top floor).
SkyTalks are as awesome as they always were, I'd argue its even better since now you dont have to sacrifice other things at defcon to see skytalks. You can now have dedicated time for skytalks.
That Skytalks still requires masking is absurd. I saw the organizers at DEFCON walking around with no masks. The last skytalks at DEFCON a couple of years ago was pretty bad anyways, really disappointing.
Nothing DEFCON-related that I know of. A few years back TOOOL's co-founder resigned and (unrelated) they were defrauded & had 20k stolen from them, but neither of those had to do with DEFCON.
Would CCC and Recon be better? TBH I never understand why people (not companies) need to go to Vegas. It's expensive, corrupting and hot during the summers. Montreal is a much affordable place.
Vegas (and Orlando) are probably the two cheapest places to travel to in North America. Hotels and flights are both plentiful and cheap. Before Covid you could get like $60 a night hotels on the strip and $150 flights.
The time between Thanksgiving and Christmas is historically slow. Not much going on then, and things are quite cheap usually. Weather is also not miserable.
You still can, depends on where you go and where you stay. I'm seeing $300 for two nights and round trip flights from the other side of the USA right now if you don't mind staying at the Flamingo, Luxor, or Linq. Add $50 for something like Park MGM or Paris.
Are you finding those in a package deal? What platform are you using?
Just curious as I didn't find many package deals that were much cheaper than finding each individually. I was just using stuff like Expedia and similar.
CCC still have this crazy way of selling tickets, where you cannot know more than month in advance if you will be able to get a ticket, i.e. impossible to book hotel/flight that late.
To be fair CCC is theoretically primarily a German club with an event that is overbooked by so so many people, all of that is done by people NOT being paid for anything (from security to health emergency to infrastructure, ticket checking, audio, recording, etc.).
I wouldn't call it crazy that a pure volunteer event that constantly has to switch places because they use up ALL available space of their venues does have a ticketing system that is still better than the one of a lot of big pop stars.
It probably also keeps commercialization down to a minimum.
Yes, sucks that what you describe isn't possible, but I think in perspective it's not exactly "crazy".
It's still always sold out with whole conference areas and more used up.
If you are even unofficially part of CCC or a loosely-CCC-affiliated group, you stand a decent chance of getting a ticket during the first phase, where tickets are distributed to these groups.
Yeah and CCC is in one of the most expensive seasons (between Christmas and New year) in the most expensive country in Europe.
I've considered going there once or twice but the hotels were ridiculously expensive. It was around €200-250 a night, for me that's way too much. And the travel on top of that (i don't drive and live in southern Europe so I make less than most Germans). And I'm too old for shared room hostels. Here in Spain I can get a 4* hotel for 70€ most of the time.
It's a bit similar to DefCon in that sense. Except that it's held in real cities and not a casino resort.
> Yeah and CCC is in one of the most expensive seasons (between Christmas and New year) in the most expensive country in Europe.
From where did you get the idea that Germany is the most expensive country in Europe? My experience differs.
> It was around €200-250 a night
Get a hotel that is a little away and use public transport to get to the event venue. Using this, rather 100-150 € per night is realistic (if you find a good offer, even below 100 € is very possible).
Congress may be considered "better" in the sense that the MIC would not find a forum there (and would be relentlessly made fun of). More importantly and as to your point about the expensiveness: The Club and all the volunteers put an inordinate amount of work in making Congress as accessible as possible on many levels.
I go to CCC and Defcon every year and they are night and day.
CCC actively discourages companies from advertising unless they are fully open source community driven orgs. Governments are even less welcome.
While even the Privacy Village at Defcon asks you to agree to the terms of service of Discord, Slack, Youtube, and other corpos... CCC self hosts everything including Voip, IRC, Matrix, 3G, 4G, and DECT, all linked together in various ways.
While Defcon has strictly controlled talks approved by sponsors and appointees of the Defcon corporation that themselves work for mostly proprietary corporations, CCC is an entirely volunteer driven organization from top to bottom and you can give a talk anywhere you want about anything 24 hours a day as long as someone else has not already reserved that spot.
While Defcon has villages reserved and approved by committee and corporate sponsors, at CCC any community can apply for table or an area and almost all are granted as space relative to the size of the community. You can do basically anything you want with your space. You can also access the event and your space 24/7 so the hacking and party never fully stops.
I go to Defcon because it is the corporate paid excuse a handful of actually capable hackers I like to hang out with have to hang out. And maybe two or three talks worth seeing.
I go to CCC because it is the nearest place I can go experience thousands of actual hackers that believe in making the world better through open source, right to repair, music, art, and maximizing sharing and collaboration. Almost every person I talk to is an instant friend. People who largely agree technical talents are meant for more than raising shareholder value.
I love CCC and I keep going in hopes I can bring some of that back with me to silicon valley.
If anyone goes to CCC be sure to visit the Church of Cryptography which I am usually around.
You're not missing anything; it's not really a party in the first place. Like one big expo, obnoxious kids (the wrong kind) and they all clap to some nonsense. Outside of select villages, not much diversity anyway. They worship Doctorow and man-babies like him. The same stupid jokes, think Hitchhiker's references, and they don't even do dress-up right :-)
I guess, it's obnoxiously "American," if that makes sense.
Felt like counter culture to me when I went to my first one (DC11). I remember punk kids selling manuals and lineman sets they stole out of the back of telco trucks outside the entrance of Alexis Park.
>Defcon is no longer a counterculture conference, and arguably hasn't been for a while.
This happens to literally every convention ever, not surprising at all. The broader question is is something like the original spirit of DefCon even still possible? The industry (and the stakes) are so much higher now that it seems impossible.
You do 10 things at a small conference, everyone says "we need more of X{0}..X{9}", you have more things next year, more people, everyone wants more of whatever, more people, more problems with more people (security, cost, sponsors,..), more attention of mainstream media, more people next year, more push for politics, more people, more issues with more people, etc., and in the end, you get a boring business conference like many others.
I'm pretty sure that each of the niches could make their own conference now, at some small venue where a 100, 200, 500 people would come... SNES hacking and development? Sure, a small, really nice conference... but then someone would want NES too, and N64, and sega, and PS1, and corporate sponsors, and you end up with E3 instead of 50 retro developers and 150 curious people doing interesting stuff.
It is but you have to intentionally keep it small and limit tickets. I think one of the issues that Defcon has is that they just don't cap tickets; historically they could not, because you could only buy a badge with cash so there was no way of predicting how many people would show up.
I don't think it's really a matter of limited attendance. Smaller hacker conferences in the US are not much different in terms of baseline acceptance of government/defense presence. It's more of a cultural thing, and not a new one.
(That's not to say that there aren't conferences that are explicitly anti-MIC, because there are. But if you just sample by size, I suspect you'll find no correlation there.)
You really may want to look up where and how CCC was founded. I’m always amazed at people being shocked that left to extreme left politics are the norm on an event from an organization that was founded in Kommune 1 in hippy Berlin
So far I haven't met anyone there who was into politics. People there are sometimes slightly anarchic, but definitely not interested in any left and right. But there are a lot of furries - the biggest visible group of visitors - they're just there for sex and party.
As far I can tell only some of the organizers (the people with the money for equipment) seem to have some ties to the fascist left. (Nowadays called Europe Socialism - they absolutely don't like Europe Socialism being called National Socialism - Europe is absolutely not National... But they don't really do anything that looks like CCC - they just spend some money there - and put a little bit of fascist propaganda on display...
Then you have ignored the majority of the event. Don’t get me wrong, I’m also there for the technical talks or at least tech-related talks. But most of the tracks aren’t that.
And I would say at least 50% of the assemblies and Co are political. The Sea Watch people, the ones who are regularly detained by Italian authorities have their home base there.
The CCC, as an organisation, always has been a political organisation first. I wouldn’t call them a particularly successful one. But they are the opposite of agnostic or worse apolitical
CCC is not counterculture for ~10 years now. They have also become way too big and the vast majority of presentations are (extremely left-leaning) politics.
There is another framing/view that the authoritarianism-anarchism axis is perpendicular to the left-right axis. Nobody's suggesting that fascism isn't fundamentally authoritarian, but "left leaning" is not mutually exclusive with "authoritarian", nor is it a synonym for "anarchist". See: East Germany, Soviet Union, China, North Korea.
Also, it's not kind to call someone 'daft' for expressing a political view you disagree with. Nobody's saying you should accept their perspective uncritically, but you don't need to be mean-spirited or engage in name-calling to critique their perspective. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
When accusing someone of being a pedophile, it helps to have evidence, or else it's just illegal libel. Note that baselessly accusing someone of being a pedophile at CCC could get you prison time, since defamation is taken very seriously in that country.
> You expect hackers to be like, "we love capitalism! We love strong hierarchies!"?
You should ask the old-schoolers, if they can hear you over the roar of the air conditioning in their cushy corporate offices and the engines of their Volvos.
When all you have left is petty political bitching, the conference has lost its meaning, it's just a Reddit meetup at that point.
> You should ask the old-schoolers, if they can hear you over the roar of the air conditioning in their cushy corporate offices and the engines of their Volvos.
But, are those people hackers anymore?
And, for what it's worth, how many of them have ever really been that?
I did notice that a bit with some old heroes like Phil Zimmermann. Very underwhelming. Many of them got absorbed by the corpo culture.
Personally I'm also working in a corp but I remain very leftist and activist. Luckily my employer also remains pretty progressive even with all the pressure from the US.
> We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and
you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals. Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like.
Whenever I see vitriolic comments like this describing the board the user is posting on, I legitimately wonder why they are sticking around. It can’t be that bad without you implicitly saying “…which is fine.”
I stick around for the remnant of actual hacker culture and what's left of the interesting non-startup non-AI conversations to be had around here. It's fine for the moment.
God this event still frustrates me two years later but sometimes they are left leaning to the point of ignoring reality. There was this talk about how corporations are not the solution to fixing climate change and the presenters wanted to push policy to mandate people use busses and public transportation(im summarizing).
I got up and pointed out that the first group that tries to push something like this will be the first group elected out of office in record time and companies like Tesla didn't form in a vacuum, they formed partially as a response to how ineffective government has been at moving the tech stack forward.
I also pointed out at how the talk was too Euro centric and that the presenters should visit the US or Canada and see why its so car centric. The presenters acknowledged that they haven't actually been to the US but pushed back with the NYC subway as an example of the US (which at the time was slowly collapsing).
The audience gave them a round of applause for that response. It really revealed to me how these guys act like they are so smart but they have this enormous blind spot because of the bubble they are in.
Funny enough after Trump got re-elected and all the right wing shifts started accelerating in Europe, they finally started to wake up in the "Illegal Instructions" theme of the subsequent conference.
> This happens to literally every convention ever, not surprising at all.
The CCC would never.
Europe, for all its authoritarianism and infringements of human rights (even in relatively liberal places like Germany) still seems to be trying to not backslide into full-on military-industrial complex like the US is/has.
If you honestly think that they're not either backsliding into the full-on military-industrial complex or benefiting from the American military-industrial complex, I have some nice ocean-front property in Kansas City to sell you.
EDIT:
If you don't believe me, ask the USMC about their nice new H&K service rifles. Did we need to do that? No, we could have thrown a nice piston upper on M16 lowers, but that doesn't keep the bier flowing in Oberndorf am Neckar. Or ask someone in the Pentagon about their partners at BAE.
I mean, in the last 50 years, US called Italy, Germany more than the reverse. And if you don't count logistical units, US has France on speed dial, not the reverse. The one time France asked the US something military-wise, Obama refused.
France doesn't need to call anyone, they have spies everywhere. They're the world leader in industrial espionage with a few hundred-years head start over everyone else.
And also don't forget they're the second largest global arms exporter after the United States. Which is amazing when you realize they only have one manufacturer (Airbus) in the global top 15...
Defcon went fed when Jeff Moss went fed. But the crowd size has done way more to change the vibe. The 30% crowd post-covid year was a short return to old defcon.
This implies that you believed Moss was somehow a black hat before he got involved with Homeland Security Advisory Council, which is pretty funny. People just make these things up and state them confidently.
Being white hat is a very different thing to being aligned with the government. Especially with all the secret spying they do which many white hats don't agree with because most of them are also strong privacy advocates. The whole white hat hacker community was very upset about the Snowden revelations. And I don't think that lost trust every returned.
It is absolutely not the case that "the whole white hat hacker community was very upset about the Snowden revelations", but Moss himself was upset as well, so I don't know what that has to do with anything.
It was here in Europe. At the OHM2013 event there were some government contractors (Fox-IT in particular) and the atmosphere was very grim apparently. Tents got damaged and they had to pull out.
Fox-IT was founded by a former AIVD employee which is the Dutch NSA basically.
I remember a friend sending me a job ad from some new cyber team in the military. And I really had to laugh, no way would I ever work somewhere where I'd have to mindlessly obey orders I might disagree with. Or wear a uniform. Or go like "yes sir" to someone who is probably dumber than me.
And really pretty much everyone in the hacker community has an anarchist streak like that. You can tell by the way people behave, how they structure things without strong leaders etc. Everyone just helps at these events where they want, nobody tells them to do anything. This is also why I love these events. No wonder the army can't fill those teams lol. If they want people like us they have to adapt to us.
But I understand in the US this may be different because patriotism seems to be big there.
Really? Even at events like EMF? I'd be really surprised.
But yeah my view of the hacker scene is very much tailored by these events. I wouldn't even go to something like Black Hat - way too corporate. Even though I work in "cyber" myself.
I spoke at the 2nd Black Hat and was rewarded with a spot on Jeff Moss's hotel room couch because he forgot to obtain a hotel room for me; the firm I cofounded in 2005 (Matasano Security) was acquired by NCC Group, the largest "white hat" firm in the UK. I'd just say: "white hat" is a much more diverse community than most HN commenters intuitions about security people would indicate.
There were a lot of white hat people that were made during Snowden --- at Snowden. Glem Greenwald didn't help matters much.
(Obviously also a lot of white hat people pissed for the opposite reason! I'm only saying it's a diverse group.)
True, I understand, I just go by my own experience. I'm more aligned with the defcon style, privacy activists, breaking DRM, reverse engineering of products to make them do things they weren't designed for etc than the bug hunting or more corporate community which is more at black hat (as far as I've heard, I've never been to either). Also because I'm much more maker than "hacker".
It was wrong to assume these worlds are aligned in opinion.
I went, while I enjoyed myself this year I feel it's gotten too big and too disorganized. Also I went to a couple of talks that would seemingly have been bread and butter talks for defcon that were very sparsely attended and I just wondered where everybody was.
This might just be FOMO with the organizers. It's probably time for DefCon to drop in person registrations, get smaller, and return to a hotel. Villages and village talks need to be better curated and basically the focus needs to be tightened up.
DEFCON talks are for watching on Youtube when they get uploaded weeks/months from now. It's always been about contests/challenges and partying. It's a con of cons.
For the $500 entry fee you would think they could provide earphones and someone would hack together an app that would let you listen through those earphones based on some sort of proximity detection. No doubt the first year someone would find a vulnerability in it and would need parallel deployment to the existing infrastructure, but still.
Would be a great idea, except they couldn't even operate WiFi with any stability (to which I heard was a LVCC problem, but I don't know that for sure).
Doesn't have to be wifi. There are many different ways to communicate. It's a matter of finding the best one. Unfortunately, the largest drawback is the potential for malicious/mischievous actors to interrupt them given the crowd. Something as simple as FM transmission, like at a drive-in, could be an option.
>> It's a place for security professionals to go to hang out in Vegas for a few days on their company's dime, or to extend their stay after Black Hat.
That is me! :) I do not know where the counterculture hangs out at DC, because I have never been a cool kid, just a brainy weird kid among the brainy weird kids, even as an adult! But there are often quite a few insightful papers at DEF CON. I didn’t go this year, I think my managers are on to me. :)
if you s/counterculture/maker/g , so less about anti and more about doing, i'm with the others -- it's just bigger, with some individual subcommunities having ossified while new topics have opened their own new shiny & vibrant communities
ex: ai village was a new weird thing just a small number years ago, but now that ai is the #1 topic at blackhat (commercial side), it even has its own big event that overshadows blackhat proper . imo that's a success story for defcon fostering doers.
Doesn't everything counterculture ends up absorbed by the capitalism system eventually? I think I learned that from Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space, or maybe from a youtube video about it.
In 2022, Google TAG were awarded a "lamest vendor" award at defcon for fixing a Chrome vulnerability they discovered was being exploited in the wild... without asking for permission from the NSA first. That was the turning point for me.
Ok that's weird indeed. Here at European hacker events this action would be applauded. Getting permission from spy agencies before fixing something would be a surefire way to get lamest vendor, lol.
Most there don't trust government. And besides security holes can be used by all sides so it's imperative to fix them asap.
It's not exactly new. Mudge is the current CIO of DARPA, and other people around the L0pht went on similar trajectories. Feds openly participating in DEFCON is itself a rather old flashpoint.
Way back in the times of hippies and yippies many were subsequently recruited by the empire. While he was troubled in other ways Abbie Hoffmann was, as far as I know, a notable exception.
The top two winning teams of that xTech AI pitch competition were not even AI solutions. It just seemed like a vehicle for the Army to now be able to award those companies non competitive contracts.
Not a new topic - few years ago, the Jen Easterly-era CISA made a hard recruiting pitch at defcon. Patriotism and service-messaging one might recognize from their own time in the military.
What was surprising was the intense applause from a hacker con to this pitch.
Given what was to come, also notably absent discussion from the audience or speaker about how working for CISA did or did not mean working for DHS. Assurances of firm segmentation on this aspect from speakers after the formal talk ended were similarly a bit weak.
Not that anything was inherently bad about her recruiting pitch, but for a hackercon, it was a bit close to the flagpole. And notably that CISA crew is “no longer at CISA” and under prosecution, or intense social pressure, or otherwise.
Spooks have been doing keynotes for a few years now. The so-called hackers are on toes, because deep down they wish to be daddy'd up to get to do some silly, secret-type shit. Contrary to the past, when spooks despised computer people (that's how cypherpunk came about.) On the other hand, Clearances are not what they used to be, too; every fart having to do with computers, analysis, collection is classed TS by default.
Hackerdom has always had a relationship with Defense, Intelligence & LE.
Most hackers are deeply benevolent and care greatly about the world, and insecurity at large, mostly fostered by Business.
Building relationships with defense & intel are often the best avenues towards moving towards a more secure future, working within the system for positive change. Our way of life, and our freedoms are not secure with imminent threats on the horizon.
Please, disabuse yourself of the notion that Mainland China is not weaponizing their hackerdom against us simultaneously.
at some point someone is going to discover the history that the hacker subculture was intelligence influenced all the way down. it has never not been within a degree of separation at every angle from the IC.
it's fine, hackers were probably one of the few constructive successes to come out of it ever. Personally, I suspect the hacker project was on the scale of what the US did during the cold war with abstract expressionist art[1] and literary magazines[2].
As a funnel for getting great, principled talent into the IC, we should be happy and grateful there were people to balance what was coming out of the colleges.
Just because the classified world values hacker skills doesn't mean people shouldn't. I'd say the opposite. There is absolutely a secret world that is accessible on a need to know basis, and it hides everywhere in plain sight for those with the skills to see it. All you have to do is be the among the very best at what you do, in whatever field you are in, and you will encounter it. Saying the Army undermines the subculture that was defcon misses the point. The message of hacking was, develop elite skills and others will find you. not only has this not changed, it is more true than ever.
I can't help but think that Putin and Xi must feel very happy about the Western strain of extreme pacifism that encourages smart hackers to eschew military applications entirely. European hackers in particular can just look east to get a glimpse of the future.
The issue isn't software developers working with the military. It is a matter of offensive U.S. military operations and the associated self-serving geopolitics being treated as countercultural.
While there certainly are some Western hackers who eschew all military applications because of their extreme pacifism, the examples in the article (e.g. pro-Palestinian activists) are not necessarily pacifist. I'd describe them more as out of alignment with their country's current governments, or perhaps actively aligned against them.
And given recent (and not-so-recent) behavior of the US government, I don't think it's irrational for hacker in the US to conclude that their own government presents a greater threat to their freedom than Putin or Xi. (I don't necessarily agree, I just don't think it's an irrational conclusion.)
I think a lot of folks just aren't stoked on making things that could be used against them. And a lot of us are smart enough to see how that could happen.
Ah yeah that "extreme pacifism" that has grotesque ideas like people shouldn't murder other people just because their governments think so.
How dare them being opposed to that poor military sector, that nobody ever speaks up for. Completely forgotten by politics and media, nobody ever takes their side and see how in reality they make the world a much better place.
After hundreds of thousands of deaths and daily news about one war crime chasing another by all sides, daily uncovered cruel lies, essentially all wars being illegal and not defensive according to UN laws. Laws that the very countries that now break them established. Only not being sanctioned because of vetoes by these countries.
And all of them being lobbied against by some nerds meeting in their spare time to follow their interests. Those horrible, horrible extreme pacifists!
>Western strain of extreme pacifism that encourages smart hackers to eschew military applications entirely
Not what people are saying. There would be little noise if there were talks at defcon about Ukrainian cyberwarfare or hacking Russian military infrastructure.
This is about the united states military industrial complex. Can you even point out a military that did more harm to the world at large in the last 50 years? How many dead? How many human right violations?
The head of the NSA as well, post-snowden? Come on.
The only reason there still is a Ukraine is the US so-called "military industrial complex." And guess who the ooga-booga scary NSA is probably giving intelligence products to, or at least probably was until January?
The flimsy support for Ukraine doesn't erase 50 years of catastrophic effects of USA interventionism
You can cherry pick a few good things. Ukraine, Kosovo, Korea, maybe Libya, the first Gulf war, the Berlin air-lift
Then you come back to reality. The war on terror, El Salvador, Chile, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Laos, arming the Saudis, Irak, Afghanistan
If you engage in 50 or so interventions and all except one fail miserably, often in horrifying ways that result in the deaths of millions of people, it’s really hard to maintain that that’s a good record.
OK, so we're just going to handwave away any positive impact the US has had in preserving the rules-based international order for the past 70 years and amplify every US failure, while not even taking into consideration the alternatives like Russia and China. Keep living in your bubble.
The USA's foreign policy is anything but rules-based. They're brutal and barbaric. You can agitate China and Russia as being scarier, that doesn't make the U.S. military a force of good.
If you're asking the whether they have their place being shoved at the center of Defcon you have to take in the whole picture
Who do you think are the ones actually supporting Ukrainian cybersecurity and hacking Russian military? Ill give you a hint they are the ones sitting in office parks in maryland writing software for the NSA and DOD.
State of the clock pending what's going to come out in the news about Orange guy's meeting with Putin where they are discussing the surrender of Ukrainian territories without Ukraine's opinion.
* employers can rescind job offers over 20-year-old social media posts.
* rents are sky high and constantly increasing.
* health insurers routinely kill people if they are deemed too expensive to be alive.
* a literal fascist rapist billionaire is now president.
Consequently, we have a society no one will defend. It’s not that people like Putin or Xi. What Putin is doing in Ukraine is unforgivable, even if the West is partially at fault too.
The human rights issues of US-led capitalism have always been severe, but 50 years ago there were redeeming qualities, at least domestically. These days, those are gone, and I don’t blame Gen Z for deciding there is nothing about our society to defend.
Not only does that not even come close to aligning with the original claim, as barbazoo points out, but there is also a difference between having a "positive view of the military" and wanting to partner with them at work.
Hacker culture is and has always been anti-fascist and anti-capitalist by nature, at least the version that grew in the west. It was an offshoot of hippie culture in the 60s, grew in the 80s phreaking scene, and highly entangled with open source in the early to mid 90s.
I think anti Fascist is way too narrow, it's anti establishment, any establishment period. Anything anyone with power does is bad, that's the mentality for 50 years.
Thanks for another stark reminder of how comments here are disconnected from reality. Most IRL are tired of people who call everything fascist and froth at the mouth about “anti-fascism.”
Let me assure you that the population that you will find at Congress is rather anti-fascist. And so is the constitution of country where the event happens. As far as I remember from a few side-notes in my history classes, there are a few historic reasons for that. One may go so far as to call those reasons pretty stark reminders of why anti-fascism is a good thing...
Yeah this is exactly the sort of anti-historical menacing puffery I was talking about. The vast majority of polled WW2 GIs were against racial integration and homosexuality and in favor of white supremacy by the way. Somehow I don’t think they’d fit your idea of “anti-fascist.” Neither them nor the literal fasces on the wall in the US Senate.
Exactly: we live in a capitalist society which has been in decline into fascism for generations which makes the counter culture the opposite of those things.
I get the sense that because people can think of a few examples of mercenary security people or a few white supremacist groups that "hack" that this is somehow a refutation. It's not. You know about these people because 1) they usually are mean and suck and 2) they are outliers.
As you say: the phreaking / hacking / hobbist subcultures have always been collectivist by nature and the product of those subcultures will always chafe at the profit motive.
The considerable number of libertarians and anarchists among the old-school hackers would probably be rather surprised to hear themselves described as collectivist.
anarchism as a philosophy is obsessed with non-hierarchical collectivism. same with libertarianism, at least by the common definition of the term outside the united states (it often carries a leftist sentiment in other places).
Hacker culture is and has always been anti-Marxist and anti-Communist by nature, at least the version that grew in the west. It was an offshoot of hippie culture in the 60s, grew in the 80s phreaking scene, and highly entangled with libertarian open source in the early to mid 90s.
This isnt anywhere near my experience at all. People don't like empire and if you look around your life and think everyone you see would be pleased to do military contracts you're in a ( really disconcerting ) bubble.
This isn’t the gotchya you think it is and I don’t think the majority of people who benefit from empire aren’t aware. The violation of common sense here is the notion that 1) these people are living the good life and 2) removal of empire would result in worse standard of living.
Based on their omission I assume you're computing these numbers with them split out but it hardly seems fair to say you're spending "900" on defense when the total cost of paying that "900" is going to be much more since you had to borrow.
It's like saying a house only costs 1M when you end up paying over 1M in interest as well as the principal for 2M.
I don't think this is your point, but semantically, doesn't this necessarily assert that either:
1. African Americans were not Americans, or
2. African Americans, the victims of slavery, somehow benefited from it?
I would disagree with both of those assertions.
Further, consider that a vast majority (90%+) did not own slaves. Were non-slave-owners beneficiaries of slavery? What about poor, unskilled whites, who had their own wages effectively suppressed due to the negligible labor costs of slavery - were they really net beneficiaries of slavery? They certainly were not the main victims, but that doesn't automatically make them beneficiaries, either. Slavery was overwhelmingly a horrific practice by wealthy elites for wealthy elites, not by all white people for all white people.
It ended with one half of a country being so mad about their standard of living changing that they had a bloody civil war about it. You're proving my point entirely.
I was never talking about right or wrong, I was talking about whether people are willing to sacrifice their standard of living substantially just to be "right" about something.
Sure, I can agree that companies using gender dysphoria as only a way to increase profit is a bad thing, and I recognize that pharmaceutical companies are this way with _every_ drug and not just ones that benefit people. However I do disagree with the idea that people should be stripped of their right to free speech if you disagree with their statements, or stripped of their right to choose how to live their own lives.
I would offer that this is entirely different than the lack of choice we have in regard to how our government uses the military to "spread democracy at the point of a gun" while taking more and more of our tax dollars and liberty without improving our lives or tackling the problems that ordinary Americans face.
Using one egregious example to illustrate how those who ID as “anti-fascist” love imperial coercion, totalitarian speech controls, and the state’s destruction of families and bodies when it suits their particular perversion. Everyone loves centralized power when it promulgates and protects what they actually care about.
If all we did was supply arms to our allies who are under attack without making egregious profit off of it, then yeah I think folks would feel better about the MIC, but as you're well aware we are only granting small shipments of weapons along with big demands including currently asking Ukraine to give up it's land to russia. We also have a long history of giving weapons to sow chaos around the world leading directly to things like isis and others. Arguably worse than that, we're now using these military weapons to suppress liberty in American cities.
Damn, DEF CON used to be a real one. It's a damn shame to see this happen to a group of hackers.
I'm sure other venues and community events will take up the mantle given time, but it's still a bummer to see an event that used to be so fiercely independent out here cheering on the feds.
Defcon is no longer a counterculture conference, and arguably hasn't been for a while. It's a place for security professionals to go to hang out in Vegas for a few days on their company's dime, or to extend their stay after Black Hat.
The conference has gotten too big for its own good. It now inhabits the Las Vegas Convention Center, which is less convenient than when it was in one of the hotels (or multiple hotels clustered together). The one positive of the LVCC is that it has a ton of room but there are still issues with things like sound equipment that plague the villages and their talks/workshops.
This was my 23rd DEFCON, and was just as counterculture as it was decades ago if you know where to go, and don't get distracted by the big pretty signs. DEFCON has always been about feds, policymakers, corpos, kids, and straight up black hat criminals partying together and shaping the future of infosec.
The author of the article decided to wander down the Military Industrial Complex track, and seems to be complaining that it had too much Army stuff. I didn't see any of that this year, because that's not what interests me. I met up with a large number of cipherpunks and activists that I don't get to see very often, and had some extremly productive conversations regarding various projects we're working on for the next year.
I'd love to go to defcon, but I fear it'll end up like every other conference I go to: wandering around, watching a few talks, ending up at a few semi-boring cocktail hours, etc. Maybe I'm that anti-cool enough to get auto-filtered?
I joined a local discord / defcon chapter, and it was mostly reminiscing about the good old days and most people saying they weren't going this year.
I went maybe 7 years back as an undergrad doing a biochemistry degree and met plenty of cool people both on the con floor and at random parties.
People were generally super friendly and willing to hang and chat.
Find a village or contest that matches your interests, spend the whole weekend there and you will have an incredible experience.
As a longtime attendee myself, this is absolutely true.
Also, DEFCON and DT specifically have not shifted anywhere. A large demographic of attendees shifted hard to the left, mirroring our culture in general. They are also not "counterculture" as these are mainstream/televised points of view.
I had to stop dealing with certain parts/people of DEFCON and infosec in general because of this intense noise. That's not pegging myself as being on the right, it's just that my DEFCON experience has always been about expanding my worldview and fun... this very loud and influential group isn't about either of those things.
From what I see and hear, the US is moving to the left in a similar way to gravity lifting objects from the ground.
As far as I can tell both sides have their intensely loud groups, but only noticing one means you're closer (by varying degrees) to the other. And that's OK, but slightly less OK if you're not aware of it.
Anyone who can't find the extremists in their own group should spend some time on self reflection.
That's a true thing, but nonsequitur from GP's comments.
It can also depend on where you are and who you know. The groups are not evenly spread through society. In the UK and one side in politics dominates all my social circles - colleagues, people I went to school with, people I meet locally (to be fair, that does depend on what you do and who you meet - but I tend to "cultural" activities), people who share stuff on FB that I know (as opposed to the stuff in the feed - is which often ridiculously extreme both ways).
it might not be true, and surveys and voting patterns say otherwise, but it can definitely feel like one side is dominant. It can definitely be true that a particular place/activity/group is dominated by one side, which is what GP seems to be claiming, rather than that the US in general has shifted to the left?
> but only noticing one means you're closer (by varying degrees) to the other.
Maybe if you're talking about culture in general it will exist as some sort of U shape in general terms no doubt, but any hyper online subcultures turned into an IRL organization/insular collection of people like defcon is liable to go hard in identifiable directions which is distracting to more disinterested parties there for the original purpose of the show.
been going since forever but dont tell anyone that asks. cant stand it anymore
If you don't mind, I have a genuine question. (as in, I'm not looking for a fight and I won't comment furthermore even if I can't agree.)
But genuinely, what do you define by saying that American culture has shifted hard to the left and what do you define by left.
I am really not looking into fight, but that's not a take I've heard often and I want to hear you out.
I am not the person you are responding to, but I think the ground reality is nuanced. What follows is my opinion / perspective, which I do not assert as irrefutable fact, nor as the only opinion / perspective which should be considered.
Politics in the US have become more polarized, but a historical view shows this as more of a reversion to the mean than a novel phenomenon, as we are increasingly distanced from a period of greater economic prosperity for large swathes of the middle class, which seemed to have a (now disappearing) byproduct of a degree of psychological satiation with "big picture" concerns.
There is a documented tendency for the political left, at least in the US, to accept and tolerate a much narrower range of thought, that is to say, the left has a much smaller Overton Window, than the political right in the US, who mostly seem unified only around opposition to the policies of the political left. (https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjso....)
I suspect, but do not necessary assert as fact, that the above effect on the left may be partially explained by a rigid adherence to the paradox of tolerance, which itself demands an unwillingness to tolerate people who hold intolerant ideas, views, or beliefs, even if those people do not act on those ideas, views, or beliefs to meaningfully practice intolerance. The end result, from my perspective as someone who fits cleanly in neither political camp (I'm more of a libertarian than anything else) is that the left makes little to no room for allies and increasingly engages in litmus testing with an end goal of ostracizing and socially shunning even LGBTQ+ people who don't fit neatly into the smaller Overton Window. As an example, it is considered intolerable by many on the left to merely be vocally supportive of adult LGBTQ+ rights, while expressing discomfort with the idea of children being exposed to pride parades with fully naked adults embracing all manner of sexual diversity and kinks, or discomfort with the idea of irreversible chemical gender affirmation therapy for minors on grounds of bodily autonomy / age of consent considerations. Meanwhile, to the surprise of some of my friends on the political left, large swathes of the political right (though not the most extreme fringes), in my lived experience as an LGBTQ person in Texas (which to be fair, may not be entirely representative of the rest of the country), hold more of a "live at let live" philosophy that, paradoxically, is more tolerant of LGBTQ+ persons with nuanced views than the political left is. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance)
I think as the emotional investment of typical political partisans increases, there is a widespread perception of hostility or outrage from the political left at nuanced positions that are nominally but insufficiently progressive, like the one in the example above. Anecdata for this might include the perspective of Bill Maher, who was once considered to be subversively progressive, then gradually seen as "center left", and is now perceived by many on the left as "right of center", in spite of a rock-solid track record of being notably left of Republicans on almost every issue.
To be clear, I'm not trying to assert normative views that either side is "right", morally superior or inferior to one another, just attempting to offer my perspective on what I think the underlying mechanisms driving the disconnect between perceptions of the political system itself (which is increasingly dominated by right-of-center figures in all three branches of the federal government, particularly at the SCOTUS level in the judiciary), and perceptions of cultural values. That cultural perception is probably further strengthened by widespread, rapid, and vocal adoption of DEI values across almost all institutional settings (academia, corporate America, public sector, even institutions that are traditionally conceptualized as right of center, like Wall Street firms) following the protests over the death of George Floyd; the relatively swift mainstream acceptance of LGBTQ+ rights (marriage equality went from fringe to mainstream in under two decades); climate change moved from "environmental issue" to a mainstream economic/social concern in roughly the same period; social media amplification of progressive voices and causes, including, at times; coordination between left-leaning administrations and social media companies to suppress right-leaning perspectives, some of which are now widely acknowledged to have likely been true (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files), to name a few large changes over both the last two decades and the last five years or so.
And again, I'm not asserting that any of these changes were good or bad (regardless of how I personally feel about any of the changes in question), nor am I trying to assert a normative framing one way or another, just attempting to dissect the mechanisms of the perception itself.
> the left has a much smaller Overton Window
Above is a long text that completely rests on small statements such as the above, stated with full confidence. I could easily argue for the opposite. And historically speaking, where these terms originate, it's quite clear that the left had to build a larger tent, as the saying goes.
Without these small but confident statements of questionable veracity, the rest of the text sort of fizzles down to one big anecdote about Texas living. Which is nice, but Texas is big and while I have never lived there myself I understand there are large differences between big cities like Austin and the rest.
Much can be said about how forgiving the debate climate is, and how heterogenous different political groups are. But one observation I think can be made is that it shifts with where the center is, the center being the deciding socioeconomic group in a modern democratic society. The opposition needs to rally support and needs to be much more allowing and accepting, and their Overton window as you call it grows wider. The ones with the political wind in their backs, winning elections, will find the power to hone their political skills and sharpen their issues, thereby shrinking this window.
So I believe much of it can be explained by who are winning elections and whose questions are being heard. These are slow processes, society does not change every election, but we did have an almost decade long period where traditional leftist questions were being heard in mainstream media, but right now it's quite clear the wind is blowing in the opposite direction in most Western democracies.
When I think of the _Paradox of Tolerance_ I always think of Gödel's _incompleteness theorems_.
Say you are restaurant owner that is tolerant of any consumer, it brings in money. Left, right, center, no matter the political spectrum; gay, straight, bisexual, no matter the sexuality. You provide them a good meal and they gladly pay. Now comes in a client and he starts trashing the place, tipping over tables, spitting in people's food. Do you stay tolerant and let it happen or brake your tolerance and deal with the situation and get him out? Your clients will no longer be tolerant of you and your business if you keep letting having is way.
Reality, you have defined "tolerance of others" with axioms that they do not maliciously destroy the property in our restaurant and they don't spit in the food of your clients. _Paradox of Tolerance_ highly resembles an inconsistent formal system pertaining to the proof of tolerance. "Tolerance of others" is a constant formal system in order to be tolerant.
Both you and your clients have agree upon definition of tolerance. It is the man destroying your property, you, and your clients that have differences in the definition of behavioral tolerance. The three do not share the same axioms. A universal definition of tolerance cannot be obtained.
Tolerance is also contextual, based on set and setting; who else is around, making it a malleable definition. This means _tolerance_ is a set / highly parameterized function. Location of public or private is just one parameter of many. For instant the scenario above about the business would most likely be accept if the setting was on set for a scene in a move.
The issue I think arrives when there is an unwillingness to tolerate people who hold intolerant ideas, views, or beliefs, even when those people do not act on those ideas, views, or beliefs - i.e. when the people with intolerant views are not actually practicing intolerance.
It's one thing to shun a customer for practicing intolerance, it's another to shun a customer for holding intolerant beliefs without actually practicing intolerance or materially affecting the quality of life of anyone around them, is it not?
Someone who takes no actions based on their beliefs effectively doesn’t hold those beliefs, as far as anyone else knows, and doesn’t get shunned for them. So you’re trying to define some level of advertising your beliefs as “not acting on them”. What’s that level? An op-ed on the problem of gay people, or just a casual remark that of course gay marriage is a sin?
The vast majority of people take no meaningful actions based on their beliefs.
I'm thinking more along the lines of the OpenSUSE project banning contributors who wouldn't concede to a demand to wave a trans pride flag, referring to all conservatives as "Rotten Flesh", NixOS purging "Nazis" (read: people who didn't openly and vocally support all aspects of LGBTQ+ culture), etc. And I say this as someone who is themselves not heterosexual, and who has a non-cisgender partner.
Don't get me wrong, I don't like having to fear for my safety around genuinely bigoted and threatening people, I just don't like the "wave our flag or you're a literal nazi / rotten flesh / subhuman who should be excommunicated from the entire linux community" type of messaging coming from the opposite camp either. Those extremes both make me feel profoundly uncomfortable and unsafe.
I read about the opensuse story and... It seems like the project acted quite reasonably? It seems that certain bigoted snowflakes were triggered over the pride themed open suse lizard thing on reddit.
> And I say this as someone who is themselves not heterosexual, and who has a non-cisgender partner.
That really doesn't mean much.
What if the restaurant gets a customer who is perfectly polite, tips well but is wearing a red maga hat?
It shouldn't get that far. Once you invite one fascist, and the first one is typically polite, there will be more coming so you've got to "nip it in the bud".
https://www.reddit.com/r/punk/comments/1ama4ld/the_nazi_bar_...
What if your the fascist?
They usually protest, if that's what you're asking.
As a movement they're dependent on other organisations to carry them forward, hence why they infiltrate political parties, bully media outlets into disseminating their talking points and so on.
No I mean what if YOU are the fascist?
What if you were a limp camel?
The point I was making is that:-
Using lawfare to try to take out a political opponent (ridiculous NY charge with no precedent, no victim, and from a DA who was famous for reducing felonies to misdemeanours but for Trump did the opposite)
Applying govt pressure to social media companies to censor content (twitter files etc)
Using the intelligence apparatus to try to take out a political opponent (russian collusion hoax, fake dossier)
Relying on the media lies to maintain power (border is secure, Biden is mentally competent etc)
Well these are all features of Stalin, Putin, the CCP and now the modern Democrat party.
All of your examples tell me you need to find a wider circle of news to read.
At the very least you're repeating propoganda. Every one I could easily refute, but what would be the point? I'm not going to convince you. You're happy in your bubble.
But don't think for a moment that you are certainly right.
Your comment is just meaningless words disconnected from reality. And a very large number of people agree with me on some level. We saw the evidence of that at the last election. So my "bubble" is pretty large actually. What about yours?
what is a fascist? Were the Allies "fascists" for kicking out the fascists?
The same thing they should do if someone walks in with a red arm band on.
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Please don't comment like this on HN, no matter what you're replying to. Just flag it and move on.
> Meanwhile, to the surprise of some of my friends on the political left, large swathes of the political right (though not the most extreme fringes), in my lived experience as an LGBTQ person in Texas (which to be fair, may not be entirely representative of the rest of the country), hold more of a "live at let live" philosophy that, paradoxically, is more tolerant of LGBTQ+ persons with nuanced views than the political left is.
Texas has more registered Democrats than Republicans, interestingly enough.
(But neither Democrats nor Liberals are leftists.)
I've definitely taken preference to the term leftist or progressive over "liberal"... I don't think the modern left could be described as liberal in any classic sense of the term. That said, I don't think many on the left are particularly progressive either.
Do you believe our society should value tradition and hierarchy?
Yes -> right-leaning
No -> left-leaning
"Progress" implies there is an inevitable way forward, for which other beliefs are leading society astray from.
When it comes to things like "Are you prejudiced against groups of people?" the progressive answer is always "no". People on both "sides" can find valid reasons to say "no" to this question, but it's hard to maintain an internally consistent worldview if you're left-leaning (oppose hierarchies) and still want others to be lesser (which requires a hierarchy). Mainstream racism, homophobia, etc. naturally concentrate on the political right, but up until a few years ago, opposition to same-sex marriage was a mainstream position for liberal Democrats, too.
This is all to say, there is no actual significant leftist representation in American politics.
> in my lived experience as an LGBTQ person in Texas (which to be fair, may not be entirely representative of the rest of the country), hold more of a "live at let live" philosophy that, paradoxically, is more tolerant of LGBTQ+ persons with nuanced views than the political left is
For what it's worth as a European who has never been to the US (and certainly won't now!) I've spoken to many US LGBTQ people and the ones from Texas mentioned this "live and let live" thing as a specifically Texan thing. Texas seems to be more open in that sense than other Southern states.
However like I said this is just hearsay but the two Texan people I spoke to mentioned exactly this phenomenon independently.
And yeah I can imagine you consider us leftists more purist. But I don't think you can say that America is heading leftward. Compare Trump with even a hard-line right winger like George W Bush and the latter is like a model president. I recently saw his congratulation speech to Obama and it exuded respect and sanity. It's kinda amazing that a president we considered pretty bad is now a role model.
Whereas Trump started the Capitol raid when Biden wijand now wants to redact history at the Smithsonian if it doesn't suit his narrative.
Grew up in Texas, and while southern kindness and acceptance can certainly be found, it is often surface level. I was raised to refer to black people as the N word, and that athiests, muslims, and LGBT people are dangerous, and that we should carry guns just in case they try to hurt us.
I was also taught in my state-approved Saxon science books that the earth is 6000 years old, and bad weather is because God is mad at sinners. The worst of which of course being the gays which go directly to hell no matter how kind they are.
Also was raised very sexist, that women paying for things or working is a result of the men in their lives failing them, and that they are property to be earned like capturing a wild horse.
Texas outside of the cities is a deeply backwards uneducated place full of people living in constant fear of attack by sinners.
Incidentally Texas is also home to NASA and Moody Gardens, and my many visits to those gave me an interest in science and technology that allowed me to confirm everything I was taught was propaganda and nonsense and ultimately go my own way in life.
George W. Bush was never hard-right. For that matter, Trump isn't hard-right either. GW was pretty centrist all around (as far as US politics is concerned) and Trump is a right-leaning populist, which is kind of a weird position.
I've leaned pretty libertarian most of my life... I have conservative friends and pretty progressive friends (and those that I do NOT talk politics with).
A lot of this will come down to is definitely regional. A lot of the U.S. identity itself isn't the same, and different regions are very different. Texas itself is larger than like 80% of the countries in the world. The U.S. as a whole is massive. It's every bit as diverse in some ways as going anywhere in the E.U. despite mostly speaking the same language.
As to the U.S. and going left or right... it varies and depends. I think a lot of the left's "big tent" is falling, in that there is a very outspoken subset of the left that has shifted farther away from where most people are comfortable with. It's fractured, but there. There's also a bit of a yearning towards some more conservative values and a return to a stronger national identity. Both can be, and are true.
In my experience, most people in the US have a pretty live and let live pov... that of course stops to a large extend at coercion of children.
> Trump is a right-leaning populist, which is kind of a weird position.
“populist” isn't an ideological position at all, its a rhetorical approach that can go with positions pretty much anywhere in ideological space.
Yes, and it isn't exactly conservative or otherwise hard-right.
It is entirely irrelevant to whether the ideology is conservative and/or hard-right, since populism describes not the substance of policy or ideology but style of rhetorical framing in a way which is largely orthogonal to ideology.
The original claim, which my message was trying to substantiate towards the post I was replying to that expressed confusion at the , was the idea that American culture has shifted hard to the left, which is not the same as saying that the American government or political system has necessarily shifted hard to the left. To the contrary, I attempted to clearly distinguish this in my post by noting that all three branches of government in the US have indeed been moving to the political right in the last decade or so, even has the wider culture did appear to be shifting towards the left for much of that time period.
You'd be forgiven for thinking that the mainstream cultural values of the US should have set the political preference for the US government in what is nominally supposed to be a "democratic" country - that entirely logical and rational assumption increasingly appears to be false.
As weird as it might sound, I think the "live and let live" thing is actually quite sociologically interesting - it seems to present a framework rooted in individualism that achieves social tolerance outcomes comparable to China's ideas around "social harmony" (which I admittedly am far from an expert on). Perhaps it's just a rehashing of "the golden rule" wearing a cowboy hat, but as someone who leans towards what Europeans would call classical liberalism, it's hard for me to not appreciate the parallels with the "non-aggression principle", as well.
And for what it's worth, I harbor no ill will towards anyone from any political background or perspective, even the purists. I'm fond of the idea of treating everyone with dignity, kindness, and compassion, even when I disagree with their ideas or would criticize their actions.
> It's kinda amazing that a president we considered pretty bad is now a role model.
Why do you consider him a role model? Based on how he spoke instead of the actions he took? Most politicians, put on a facade. They play the crowd, kiss the babies, etc. They change their positions with whatever way the polls go. What good is a smile and manners if someone is robbing you when you're not looking?
Bush started an entire war on a completely fabricated lie. And Obama carried the torch, despite running originally against the Iraq war! Maybe you don't feel the consequences of this because you don't have to pay the bill and your family members were never deployed to a war zone.
Trump, for all his flaws, his instincts are for negotiation and peace. He just negotiated a peace deal between Rwanda and Congo:
https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/rwanda-democratic-repub...
And again between Azerbaijan and Armenia: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c39dzl1lzrgo
He also seemed to handle the Iran-Israel conflict in a way that for befuddling reasons to me, actually deescalated the situation, despite the controversy at the time.
I'll take mean tweets and strong negotiation over smiling faces and reckless invasions any day of the week.
> is instincts are for negotiation and peace
That's a pretty wild statement given that he just invaded Iran. He's also made direct military threats towards allied Denmark, even in press conferences. There's also the less overt threats about making Cananda a US state and giving Ukranian land to Putin.
Pretty militant for the first six months, even from an objective historical context. Should he keep up that tempo for a full term of office, that would measure up with the more intervention oriented presidents including Nixon himself.
I'm not aware of any ground forces holding onto positions in Iran or controlling any ongoing surface movement at all, in any way.
I meant a role model relatively speaking to trump. He was at least presidential.
I totally agree he did a lot of actions that were very questionable like the iraq war and also the extreme surveillance. I just meant Trump makes him look good :)
I disagree about Trump but I don't want to get into that.
And I think what he is saying is that a person should be judged by their actions, and consequences, rather than their rhetoric. This is even more true in modern times when people generally have no clue what people who they don't like are actually saying. Because they are listening to media that also generally don't like the same people and who will regularly take things out of context, disingenuously interpret them, or even just plain lie. And since we're talking about people that are disliked by somebody, they'll never know any better - because it's not like they're ever going to actually go seek out what the person said; they want their biases confirmed.
This issue is most embodied by the various little social experiments on YouTube where people will ask college students what think about action [x], [y], and [z] that they invariably agree with, then they're told it was done by a politician they don't like, and you can see, in real time, the cognitive dissonance kick in where they suddenly try to figure out why they don't "actually" like these actions. Or vice versa for disliked actions by a politician they do like. This, more than anything, sums up the divides in America today.
Trump literally just invaded Washington DC, which he has the right to do because the constitution says so, but that's what it is.
Well, he only had that right for 48 hours if I understand correctly.
30 days, but it's likely that it can/will be extended.
The Twitter Files you linked to seems to be a pretty tenuous "likely to be true" example.
Especially given the very questionably censorious nature of its new owner, who placed himself at the centre of that particular "conspiracy theory".
Not the GP, but I feel the same. The reason is that my views haven't really changed, yet somehow my political positioning went from quite liberal to something most people, below a certain age, would consider conservative. I value: free speech, equality of opportunity, antiwar, anti political correctness, anti megacorp, and view the liberty of the individual mattering vastly more than than dictates of authority/hierarchy.
More generally, I think politics has shifted such that left/right is no longer meaningful, as people tend to be much more split on libertarian/authoritarian world views - particularly on the degree to which accredited individuals ought be able to impose their views on society in an effort to 'tweak' people's behaviors. That nuance, more or less, immediately leads to the shifting winds on the issues I mentioned.
All the values you cited are so vague they can encompass almost any position. For example, "antiwar" can mean refusing to bomb other countries to get their resources and it can also mean that if another country threatens to bomb your house you give them whatever resources they want. Free speech can mean free to challenge the government, free to spam or free to brainwash. Liberty of the individual to shoot or liberty of the individual to not be shot?
I suspect that your individual position within each of those axes has drastically changed even though the axis labels have not.
"Left" and "right" remain meaningful. Right means supporting stronger hierarchies and left means supporting weaker hierarchies. They have always meant this since they were originally coined about the french pro/anti monarchist parties. It's "liberal" and "conservative" that have poorly defined meanings. You will not find much right at CCC.
Scientific studies show a real difference in brain structure - the part of the brain that processes fear is bigger in rightists - so it appears to be an intrinsic evolutionary thing and it makes sense it remsins the same thing in each generation.
> Scientific studies show a real difference in brain structure - rightists have enlarged fear centers - so it appears to be an intrinsic evolutionary difference and it makes sense it remains the same across time.
can you point to a few studies on this topic? I am struggling to imagine how one would design a study to measure this
Also curious what is a fear center and what an enlarged one would look like if removed via surgery.
It was a 2011 study that found a 0.28 correlation in amygdalae size vs conservative political identity among a tiny group of college students. A replication attempt dropped that correlation to 0.068 which is basically nothing, and completely failed to replicate at all the other, even weaker, findings of the previous study. And the media called the amygdala the "fear center", which is dumb. It plays a key role in memory - especially long term memory, emotional processing, the understanding of social cues, and more. Removing it would render someone extremely mentally retarded.
---
I'd also add on this issue that considering political issues among college students is itself silly. Our political positions on things is impacted by our life experience, and at the point of college one has very little life experience to formulate views off of. Political identity will often shift radically from age 20 to 40, which against suggests a genetic basis as being farcical - at least beyond the point that your brain structure will typically correlate, to some degree, with the development of skills, identity, etc.
I meant to say that the left/right divide is built in to humans, not that each individual human is predisposed to always be left or always be right.
The rightward shift as people age is pretty easily explained by self-interest. When you start with almost nothing, you want a fair share because that's more than you have now. Once you climb the ladder, you don't want a fair share because that's less than you have now. Once you get above the average, you want to stretch the pyramid taller because that puts you at a higher absolute position, and the higher up you are, the more you want to stretch it. When you're below the middle, you want to shorten the pyramid because that puts you at a higher absolute position (the pyramid extends below the floor).
But that's assuming wealth dynamics continue to work how they did for boomers. IIRC millennials were the first generation to shift leftwards with age, because they mostly didn't get to above-middle positions on the pyramid.
It's the subtle things that keep society stable.
They're not vague in the least, but pointing this out drives anger and cognitive dissonance in people because people want to imagine that they support these values, particularly if they did so when they were younger. For the most unambiguously and plainly obvious - free speech means free speech, not approved speech. You can actually see this cognitive dissonance play out most overtly in Wikipedia's definition of authoritarianism. [1] The meaning of the term has been edited to the point of completely redefining it, relative to its definition of 20 years ago [2], even though the definition of authoritarianism has itself not really changed in that time frame, and the older definition matches the normal definition (and connotation) of it vastly more than the 'modern' version.
The study you mentioned was, even at the time of its publication, quite dubious - finding a negligible correlation (0.23) in amygdalae size in a very non-representative sampling. In a replication attempt that correlation was found to overstate it by more than 3x, finding a correlation of 0.068, which is essentially statistical noise. There's nothing there except clickbait media doing their thing. I'd also add that framing the amygdala as the 'fear center' is itself also quite ridiculous. There also remains the question of identity. I consider myself liberal. I imagine you would object. Who's right? Ah modern 'science', but there I go again challenging that hierarchy.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarianism
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Authoritarianism&...
> You can actually see this cognitive dissonance play out most overtly in Wikipedia's definition of authoritarianism.
I'd say a more overt example is playing out on the national stage, where protests in support of (murdered, raped, and starving) Palestinians in Gaza are crushed, because the alternative is to have the executive branch try to extort a $Billion dollars from the host campus, putting universities in peril, to help buy another gold-plated plane or something.
"Free speech means free speech" is a tautology and does absolutely nothing to counter the idea that it could mean either freedom to oppose the government, freedom to spam, or freedom to yell fire in a crowded theater. In fact it's very conspicuously a purely emotional statement with zero logical content; anyone who uses this response is conspicuously asserting that they don't care about logical argument.
The assertion that Wikipedia has more content than it did in 2004 is also logically void.
The 'freedom to yell fire in a crowded theater' argument against free speech is such a perfect illustration of the issue. That was an argument made by Mr. Eugenics himself, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, in a famous case Schneck vs United States. [1]
In it Charles Schneck was convicted for an absolutely abhorrent crime. He sent out fliers to men drafted for WW1 informing them of a legal defense against the draft - of it constituting involuntary servitude, which was prohibited by the 13th Amendment, and encouraging them to consequently assert their legal rights and work to resist the draft.
For this, he was arrested and put in prison, with the government claiming that his mailed fliers were akin to 'shouting fire in a crowded theater.' This is why free speech means free speech. Limitations are invariably weaponized by authoritarian forces to shoehorn essentially everything into that limitation.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States
When I say "freedom to yell fire in a crowded theater" I mean "freedom to yell fire in a crowded theater" and not "freedom to hand out fliers informing people that the draft is illegal involuntary servitude".
https://x.com/raffysoanti/status/1403093629086965760
It doesn't matter what you think such a restriction means. What matters is what politicians would use it for. That's why this is such a beautifully ironic quote, because when I say the right to ban such speech would open the door to abuse, I don't need to draw on hypotheticals.
The quote is literally part of the government's [successful] argument that their right to imprison somebody for shouting fire in a crowded theater naturally grants them the right to imprison somebody for handing out informative fliers that run contrary to warmonger interests.
There's no stronger argument for free speech means free speech than the quote you chose.
So you do believe everyone should have the right to walk into a crowded theater and yell FIRE! and this should be constitutionally protected, because if there's any speech that isn't constitutionally protected, no speech is constitutionally protected?
What about the speech of "I will pay you $50 to stab that guy right now"? Constitutionally protected or do you believe that should be past a limit?
The consequences of an action can be prohibited without touching the action itself. For instance most of every state has laws against signaling a false alarm. It doesn't matter whether you do that by triggering a fire alarm, playing an extremely loud fire alarm type sound, shouting fire, or whatever else - it's all illegal.
Not only does this prevent trampling on speech and minimize abuse, but it's also far more to the point. Because why is shouting fire uniquely awful while shouting penis is just some kids being annoying that should simply be kicked out of a theater? It's not because of the words obviously, but because of the consequence created.
If there was a law against forming a suicide cult you'd still count it as a first amendment violation since cults are formed using speech, right?
I think it should be illegal to spread Nazism, but Nazism is spread using speech so people keep telling me that would be a first amendment violation.
Absolutely, those are great examples of things that are protected by free speech. When the ACLU was at the height of its reputation, and the US at the height of its soft power, we even had things like the ACLU defending the right of a literal nazi group to stage a march. And the various death cults the US has had were also all operating completely legally.
The paradox of tolerance is largely nonsensical, because the key to a free society is free speech but stringent, and blind, enforcement against actions. Somebody can larp out with their swastikas and roman salutes all they want, but the second they lay hands on anybody - they're going to have a few years in a cage to rethink their life decisions. If they repeat this onto a third time, the key gets thrown away.
In general I think that the liberties of the worst of society work in many ways like a canary in the coalmine for the rest of us. As soon as that canary dies it's not long before your government, with its 29% approval rating, is trying to do things like ban the highest polling party in the country under ridiculous mental gymnastics that, in reality, come down to little more than 'we want to stay in power.'
I would also add that, once they do lay their hands on someone (or actively conspire to), I think it's perfectly fine to respond with heftier penalties if the motivation for it is Nazi ideology or other similar stuff. It's not a free speech matter at that point.
Absolutely. The situation where a couple of guys get into a relatively normal fight, and one where a guy seeks somebody out because of any reason are obviously very different - and should be treated differently under the law.
In this regard I also think hate crimes miss the mark, because is something like 'the knockout game' a hate crime? Probably not, but I think it should be treated in a similar fashion because it's essentially the same problem - of some ideology driving somebody to violence, as opposed to a normal personal conflict.
So you believe it should be legal to yell FIRE in a crowded theatre as long as you don't physically batter anyone?
If all you have is a ridiculous strawman, why bother posting?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44908426
Actual hard left (as opposed to milquetoast liberals calling themselves "democratic socialists") is most certainly not a mainstream or televised point of view.
Yeah that's the thing about counterculture, eventually large portions of it end up mainstream culture so if you like being contrarian you have to constantly be on the move.
>A large demographic of attendees shifted hard to the left, mirroring our culture in general.
I had always identified hacker culture as principally left. Maybe the US is specifically different.
The left used to be more individualist in the U.S. (circa 90s most definitely) but it developed a toxic groupthink as it came to dominate pop culture and media in the 00s and 10s, and began to leverage that to employ censorship, deplatforming, doxxing, etc and it became incredibly dogmatic and if anyone diverged from a particular narrative (ie skeptical covid came from wet market), they would be ridiculed, shouted down, laughed off, shamed, kicked off social media platforms, ostracized, etc which is cult like behavior.
The left of the 90s would have never stood for that. They were the die hards for free speech then. Something shifted.
Yeah, the left of the 90s would never excommunicate anyone for being completely certain Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and that climate change was a hoax, and the moon was made of cheese, and bringing these things up at every opportunity, because the left of the 90s believed in free speech.
Individualism has been failing Americans, while the quality of life has improved dramatically in less individualist cultures, in many ways surpassing Americans (health care, housing, education, upward mobility, etc), so it shouldn't be surprising that collectivism is starting to win mindshare.
Don't fool yourself, conspiracy theories are usually marginalized in US culture, the left didn't welcome conspiracy theories back then either.
Also, now that political correctness and censorship mostly coming from the right again (with the Moral Majority going after music then, and video games/porn now), we now see the civil libertarian elements of the left standing up to fight censorship once again.
The boomers got old. They were flawed but the heavy anti-authoritarian vibe of the old left was largely carried over from the 60s. Imagine a zoomer lefty burning their covid card the way hippies burned their draft cards. Nope! The thing that shifted was authoritarianism; the terminal end-stage of socialist ideology.
This is equally funny if you read it in both RFK Jr, and Elon Musk's voice.
Hacker culture is principally 'don't tell me what to do'.
Which in the US puts it somewhat orthogonal to the left-right divide.
It mirrors the divide on the public at large - a disappointingly large number of people are wildly ready to jump on the authoritarian bandwagon, because the alternative has a few leftist ideas that make them feel icky.
If I had a debug console on reality, I'd be curious to query how big the intersection is between those who thrive in hacker culture and people with PDA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathological_demand_avoidance
I've been trying to figure out a name for whatever the heck the MC of this game had! Thank you!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_Inside_a_Bag_of_Milk_Insi...
To me, the Wikipedia page of "Pathological demand avoidance" looks like those in power are again inventing some new psychological disorder to pathologize (and perhaps hospitalize) non-docile people.
Interesting. In the UK it tends to be right wing ideas people find icky about the alternative. Maybe one party on the left but it is really small.
The problem here is that society and culture in general has got more authoritarian so it cut across the left-right divide (which IMO has got meaningless anyway since it no longer reflects a consistent difference in economic policy) but leaving the non-authoritarians practically without politically representation.
The definition of authoritarianism has widely expanded into uselessness, because it colors with the same brush concepts as disparate as:
* Throwing a bag over your head and sending you to a tropical gulag for life without trial or access to a lawyer, contrary to the explicit ruling of a judge reviewing your case.
* Requiring you to wear a piece of cloth on your face in the middle of a deadly pandemic that's killing millions of people.
(Its not that we can't tell the difference between them, any child above the age of 8 can grasp the distinction, it's that people who love the former and are mildly annoyed by the latter are being deliberately obtuse about it.)
During Covid, many of the Hackers in the infosec community supported government-mandated vaccination (this was what I saw through Twitter). I think this changed my view of activists and hackers after this.
It's authoritarian-minded people that don't want to listen to anyone (and want to force you to do what they want through hacking). When they get want they want, they don't care about trampling on the rights of or oppressing the people that disagree.
It’s shocking to me that people whose job is to find and fix vulnerabilities would support vaccinations!
I sure hope opposition to government-mandated infosec measures would be a complete nobrainer.
Microsoft lobbying for mandatory TPM to get on a network or whatever.
He did say "government mandated". It is perfectly possible to think people should have vaccinations (I did - and had them myself) without thinking the government should force them to have vaccinations.
My body, my choice. Shocking indeed.
It is your choice.
No where else in the world would describe anything in American politics as going hard left.
All of your politics and news has been swinging hard right for over a decade.
Feds and criminals coming together is the point for many clandestine operations
> Feds and criminals
How does one tell the difference?
One faces consequences when breaking the law, the other is tasked with breaking the law in the name of upholding it
The new administration efficiently makes no such distinction.
"it's counterculture if you ignore all the military/mass surveillance stuff" doesn't strike me as a strong defense
If that's your mindset, the internet must be similarly disappointing to you. In either domain, you can select where you want to go and what you want to do.
> In either domain, you can select where you want to go and what you want to do.
In both cases, there was a time when both were exclusively people-powered and "the man" was entirely absent.
"There are some authentic nuggets if you know where to go" are the last kicks of a fast-gentrifying neighborhood, to use mixed metaphors. In the past anywhere/everywhere you could go was authentic.
The Internet was originally funded by "the man" (DARPA) so this isn't entirely accurate.
Yes but the internet wasn't really where digital counterculture started. That was the BBSes. Until the early 90s only some universities had access to the internet and very few of them outside the US.
When the internet became a public thing the counterculture quickly moved there.
Dark Tangent is/was a fed so it’s true of DEFCON too
DARPA funds all kinds of things without being involved / having a military or government presence in the thing - a contemporary example would be DARPA kick-starting self-driving vehicles.
IMO, the web was authentically p2p before online Paypal, banner ads and Bonzi Buddy. It's still possible to subscribe to blogs (said nuggets) via RSS - which is miraculously having a renaissance - but it's all going to be drowned out by the relentless, unfeeling firehouse of AI slop.
OK, but that seems like a funny definition of "military presence", since DARPA is the military.
The goal DARPA was trying to accelerate by funding self-driving, btw, was to "achieve the fielding of unmanned, remotely controlled technology such that ... by 2015, one third of the operational ground combat vehicles are unmanned". [0]
[0] https://www.grandchallenge.org/grandchallenge/docs/Grand_Cha...
It appears we e have different thresholds on what counts as "military presence".
By way of explanation: rocketry was funded and developed for military ends, including von Braun's earlier work on the V2 and later work on missiles across the Atlantic and the development of ICBMs. IMO, there's no military presence in human spaceflight[1], but you may see it differently due to the heritage of the propulsion system.
I'm curious to lern when this phase of absence of the man and its entities - like publicly funded agencies and labs and suchlike - from the internet happened and how?
The difference being that I don't think anyone in their right mind would declare the internet as a whole as counterculture in the first place anymore.
This goes for Defcon in my opinion too
I think it's fair for someone to have the impression that defcon is a predominantly counter culture space, even if it really isn't.
the internet isn't a single centrally planned social context, and it has five plus billion users, of course it isn't counterculture
Counterculture also isn't a centrally planned social context
defcon is
Yeah... shots of water is as "counter-culture" as it gets...
Kool-Aid man lives in the world of corporate logos...
Once they scared off the people running the Sky Talks, which were always awesome, and messed with groups like the lockpicking folks ability to fundraise, I think the idea of it being a hacker con really died and it turned into just another corporate convention.
Skytalks happened this year and was better attended than ever. Getting a seat was extremely competitive, people lined up for several hours for a single talk token. I would have loved to go to some, but unfortunately there was a ton of other stuff I wanted to see so I didn't have time to stand in line.
They were a side conference to a side conference, but the structure let them run things the way they wanted, which is important.
Scared them off? Is there any documentation of that? My understanding is that the split was amicable. SkyTalks has immunocompromised people on staff and they chose to voluntarily leave defcon because they wanted to continue masking mandates while Defcon did not. Bsides welcomed them with support in their conference(helping with Token Drops and scheduling) and Skytalks occupies a space that is physically separated from Bsides(as in a different hotel on its top floor).
SkyTalks are as awesome as they always were, I'd argue its even better since now you dont have to sacrifice other things at defcon to see skytalks. You can now have dedicated time for skytalks.
That Skytalks still requires masking is absurd. I saw the organizers at DEFCON walking around with no masks. The last skytalks at DEFCON a couple of years ago was pretty bad anyways, really disappointing.
what happened with the lock pick village?
Nothing DEFCON-related that I know of. A few years back TOOOL's co-founder resigned and (unrelated) they were defrauded & had 20k stolen from them, but neither of those had to do with DEFCON.
From my understanding they were told they were no longer allowed to fundraise in the village, which meant they could not afford to continue coming.
Would CCC and Recon be better? TBH I never understand why people (not companies) need to go to Vegas. It's expensive, corrupting and hot during the summers. Montreal is a much affordable place.
Vegas (and Orlando) are probably the two cheapest places to travel to in North America. Hotels and flights are both plentiful and cheap. Before Covid you could get like $60 a night hotels on the strip and $150 flights.
Ah I don't about know about that, thought it is extra expensive. Guess summer is actually the low season due to weather?
Strictly speaking, I don't think Vegas has a low season. It's cheap to visit and stay in because they bilk you on everything else.
The time between Thanksgiving and Christmas is historically slow. Not much going on then, and things are quite cheap usually. Weather is also not miserable.
Getting people to Vegas is heavily subsidized under the assumption that while they are there they will spend rather freely.
The summer is a "dead" season for that specific reason.
You still can, depends on where you go and where you stay. I'm seeing $300 for two nights and round trip flights from the other side of the USA right now if you don't mind staying at the Flamingo, Luxor, or Linq. Add $50 for something like Park MGM or Paris.
From what I am reading, that is not the final price.. that is the room price and they add a ton of fees to that price
Are you finding those in a package deal? What platform are you using?
Just curious as I didn't find many package deals that were much cheaper than finding each individually. I was just using stuff like Expedia and similar.
CCC would be better but REcon is kind of niche because it’s focus is reverse engineering and not “hacking”in general.
CCC still have this crazy way of selling tickets, where you cannot know more than month in advance if you will be able to get a ticket, i.e. impossible to book hotel/flight that late.
To be fair CCC is theoretically primarily a German club with an event that is overbooked by so so many people, all of that is done by people NOT being paid for anything (from security to health emergency to infrastructure, ticket checking, audio, recording, etc.).
I wouldn't call it crazy that a pure volunteer event that constantly has to switch places because they use up ALL available space of their venues does have a ticketing system that is still better than the one of a lot of big pop stars.
It probably also keeps commercialization down to a minimum.
Yes, sucks that what you describe isn't possible, but I think in perspective it's not exactly "crazy".
It's still always sold out with whole conference areas and more used up.
If you are even unofficially part of CCC or a loosely-CCC-affiliated group, you stand a decent chance of getting a ticket during the first phase, where tickets are distributed to these groups.
REcon is as much an exploit developer conference as it is a reversing conference.
CCC is just Euro-Defcon. It's fine if you prefer Europe over Vegas (understandable!) or winter to summer, but otherwise: it's the same thing.
Yeah and CCC is in one of the most expensive seasons (between Christmas and New year) in the most expensive country in Europe.
I've considered going there once or twice but the hotels were ridiculously expensive. It was around €200-250 a night, for me that's way too much. And the travel on top of that (i don't drive and live in southern Europe so I make less than most Germans). And I'm too old for shared room hostels. Here in Spain I can get a 4* hotel for 70€ most of the time.
It's a bit similar to DefCon in that sense. Except that it's held in real cities and not a casino resort.
> in the most expensive country in Europe.
Germany is _far_ from the most expensive country in Europe, FWIW.
> It was around €200-250 a night
That seems very high; you'd do better booking in advance. And the transport is decent and runs late; you don't need to be right near the venue.
> €200-250 a night
this is still cheap compared to Vegas. even in the middle of august, when the temperature routinely tops 40C, hotels are upwards of $300-400USD/night
That’s only if you’re at the luxury hotels, with upgraded rooms.
Is Flamingo a luxury hotel?
No, it's like $100 a night
> Yeah and CCC is in one of the most expensive seasons (between Christmas and New year) in the most expensive country in Europe.
From where did you get the idea that Germany is the most expensive country in Europe? My experience differs.
> It was around €200-250 a night
Get a hotel that is a little away and use public transport to get to the event venue. Using this, rather 100-150 € per night is realistic (if you find a good offer, even below 100 € is very possible).
I mean, you wouldn't catch the CCC partnering with the German army.
Something something discreet hookers and a company credit card.
I thought they are more into techs.
Congress may be considered "better" in the sense that the MIC would not find a forum there (and would be relentlessly made fun of). More importantly and as to your point about the expensiveness: The Club and all the volunteers put an inordinate amount of work in making Congress as accessible as possible on many levels.
I go to CCC and Defcon every year and they are night and day.
CCC actively discourages companies from advertising unless they are fully open source community driven orgs. Governments are even less welcome.
While even the Privacy Village at Defcon asks you to agree to the terms of service of Discord, Slack, Youtube, and other corpos... CCC self hosts everything including Voip, IRC, Matrix, 3G, 4G, and DECT, all linked together in various ways.
While Defcon has strictly controlled talks approved by sponsors and appointees of the Defcon corporation that themselves work for mostly proprietary corporations, CCC is an entirely volunteer driven organization from top to bottom and you can give a talk anywhere you want about anything 24 hours a day as long as someone else has not already reserved that spot.
While Defcon has villages reserved and approved by committee and corporate sponsors, at CCC any community can apply for table or an area and almost all are granted as space relative to the size of the community. You can do basically anything you want with your space. You can also access the event and your space 24/7 so the hacking and party never fully stops.
I go to Defcon because it is the corporate paid excuse a handful of actually capable hackers I like to hang out with have to hang out. And maybe two or three talks worth seeing.
I go to CCC because it is the nearest place I can go experience thousands of actual hackers that believe in making the world better through open source, right to repair, music, art, and maximizing sharing and collaboration. Almost every person I talk to is an instant friend. People who largely agree technical talents are meant for more than raising shareholder value.
I love CCC and I keep going in hopes I can bring some of that back with me to silicon valley.
If anyone goes to CCC be sure to visit the Church of Cryptography which I am usually around.
ah, the almost rhytmic background sound of club mate bottles falling down
Defcon is a "joke" compared to CCC.
How so? I've been to the European parties but never to defcon. So I'm wondering how they compare.
You're not missing anything; it's not really a party in the first place. Like one big expo, obnoxious kids (the wrong kind) and they all clap to some nonsense. Outside of select villages, not much diversity anyway. They worship Doctorow and man-babies like him. The same stupid jokes, think Hitchhiker's references, and they don't even do dress-up right :-)
I guess, it's obnoxiously "American," if that makes sense.
It sounds the same as the European non-corporate events tbh. Pretty good. It doesn't sound super American. More just hacker counterculture.
And yes I "worship" people like Doctorow. :)
I was at Defcon in the 1990s and it was never a counterculture conference. It has always been Nerd Spring Break Daytona Beach.
Felt like counter culture to me when I went to my first one (DC11). I remember punk kids selling manuals and lineman sets they stole out of the back of telco trucks outside the entrance of Alexis Park.
>Defcon is no longer a counterculture conference, and arguably hasn't been for a while.
This happens to literally every convention ever, not surprising at all. The broader question is is something like the original spirit of DefCon even still possible? The industry (and the stakes) are so much higher now that it seems impossible.
You do 10 things at a small conference, everyone says "we need more of X{0}..X{9}", you have more things next year, more people, everyone wants more of whatever, more people, more problems with more people (security, cost, sponsors,..), more attention of mainstream media, more people next year, more push for politics, more people, more issues with more people, etc., and in the end, you get a boring business conference like many others.
I'm pretty sure that each of the niches could make their own conference now, at some small venue where a 100, 200, 500 people would come... SNES hacking and development? Sure, a small, really nice conference... but then someone would want NES too, and N64, and sega, and PS1, and corporate sponsors, and you end up with E3 instead of 50 retro developers and 150 curious people doing interesting stuff.
It is but you have to intentionally keep it small and limit tickets. I think one of the issues that Defcon has is that they just don't cap tickets; historically they could not, because you could only buy a badge with cash so there was no way of predicting how many people would show up.
I don't think it's really a matter of limited attendance. Smaller hacker conferences in the US are not much different in terms of baseline acceptance of government/defense presence. It's more of a cultural thing, and not a new one.
(That's not to say that there aren't conferences that are explicitly anti-MIC, because there are. But if you just sample by size, I suspect you'll find no correlation there.)
I've heard that toorcamp is the only US attempt to mirror a European hacker camp and that it doesn't work because the culture is just too different.
Speaking of culture, RIPE NCC allows individuals to have ASNs, with or without a case of Club Mate.
There are plenty of quieter, smaller conferences.
CCC might be able to survive because it’s European and multi lingual
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You really may want to look up where and how CCC was founded. I’m always amazed at people being shocked that left to extreme left politics are the norm on an event from an organization that was founded in Kommune 1 in hippy Berlin
So far I haven't met anyone there who was into politics. People there are sometimes slightly anarchic, but definitely not interested in any left and right. But there are a lot of furries - the biggest visible group of visitors - they're just there for sex and party.
As far I can tell only some of the organizers (the people with the money for equipment) seem to have some ties to the fascist left. (Nowadays called Europe Socialism - they absolutely don't like Europe Socialism being called National Socialism - Europe is absolutely not National... But they don't really do anything that looks like CCC - they just spend some money there - and put a little bit of fascist propaganda on display...
Then you have ignored the majority of the event. Don’t get me wrong, I’m also there for the technical talks or at least tech-related talks. But most of the tracks aren’t that.
And I would say at least 50% of the assemblies and Co are political. The Sea Watch people, the ones who are regularly detained by Italian authorities have their home base there.
The CCC, as an organisation, always has been a political organisation first. I wouldn’t call them a particularly successful one. But they are the opposite of agnostic or worse apolitical
See also: complaints that Star Trek has “gone woke” recently.
CCC is not counterculture for ~10 years now. They have also become way too big and the vast majority of presentations are (extremely left-leaning) politics.
> (extremely left-leaning) politics
This is like complaining about water being wet. Hacker culture has always been anti-right wing.
Hacker culture has always been left leaning, lol. Open source is a grand anarchist experiment.
You expect hackers to be like, "we love capitalism! We love strong hierarchies!"? Don't be daft.
There is another framing/view that the authoritarianism-anarchism axis is perpendicular to the left-right axis. Nobody's suggesting that fascism isn't fundamentally authoritarian, but "left leaning" is not mutually exclusive with "authoritarian", nor is it a synonym for "anarchist". See: East Germany, Soviet Union, China, North Korea.
Also, it's not kind to call someone 'daft' for expressing a political view you disagree with. Nobody's saying you should accept their perspective uncritically, but you don't need to be mean-spirited or engage in name-calling to critique their perspective. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I've been in this scene 40+ years and for every Emmanuel Goldstein-type there's also a Dale Gribble.
At least dale never fucked kids.
> At least dale never fucked kids.
are you saying Corley did this? a work-safe search didn't turn anything up.
One of the benefits of modern sensibilities is that nyc2600 finally shook off all of its groomers. Of which there were many.
The other thing you have to realize is that in the infosec orbit, information is closely guarded currency.
When accusing someone of being a pedophile, it helps to have evidence, or else it's just illegal libel. Note that baselessly accusing someone of being a pedophile at CCC could get you prison time, since defamation is taken very seriously in that country.
> You expect hackers to be like, "we love capitalism! We love strong hierarchies!"?
You should ask the old-schoolers, if they can hear you over the roar of the air conditioning in their cushy corporate offices and the engines of their Volvos.
When all you have left is petty political bitching, the conference has lost its meaning, it's just a Reddit meetup at that point.
> You should ask the old-schoolers, if they can hear you over the roar of the air conditioning in their cushy corporate offices and the engines of their Volvos.
But, are those people hackers anymore?
And, for what it's worth, how many of them have ever really been that?
I did notice that a bit with some old heroes like Phil Zimmermann. Very underwhelming. Many of them got absorbed by the corpo culture.
Personally I'm also working in a corp but I remain very leftist and activist. Luckily my employer also remains pretty progressive even with all the pressure from the US.
> Hacker culture has always been left leaning
No it hasn't. It started as counterculture. 90's hacker ethos might as well make you a fascist these days.
> We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals. Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like.
Hacker's Manifesto (1986)
I was using computers in the 80s, Usenet by the late 80s. The hacker ethos back then was about as far from fascism as one might imagine.
Example please
We are on a message board run by a VC firm.
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Whenever I see vitriolic comments like this describing the board the user is posting on, I legitimately wonder why they are sticking around. It can’t be that bad without you implicitly saying “…which is fine.”
I stick around for the remnant of actual hacker culture and what's left of the interesting non-startup non-AI conversations to be had around here. It's fine for the moment.
You have it backwards. This board began its life as Startup News. There are no remnants of which you speak.
They're around. Maybe they haven't been here since the beginning,and they're definitely drowned out by the wantrepreneurs, but they're around.
God this event still frustrates me two years later but sometimes they are left leaning to the point of ignoring reality. There was this talk about how corporations are not the solution to fixing climate change and the presenters wanted to push policy to mandate people use busses and public transportation(im summarizing).
I got up and pointed out that the first group that tries to push something like this will be the first group elected out of office in record time and companies like Tesla didn't form in a vacuum, they formed partially as a response to how ineffective government has been at moving the tech stack forward.
I also pointed out at how the talk was too Euro centric and that the presenters should visit the US or Canada and see why its so car centric. The presenters acknowledged that they haven't actually been to the US but pushed back with the NYC subway as an example of the US (which at the time was slowly collapsing).
The audience gave them a round of applause for that response. It really revealed to me how these guys act like they are so smart but they have this enormous blind spot because of the bubble they are in.
Funny enough after Trump got re-elected and all the right wing shifts started accelerating in Europe, they finally started to wake up in the "Illegal Instructions" theme of the subsequent conference.
> This happens to literally every convention ever, not surprising at all.
The CCC would never.
Europe, for all its authoritarianism and infringements of human rights (even in relatively liberal places like Germany) still seems to be trying to not backslide into full-on military-industrial complex like the US is/has.
If you honestly think that they're not either backsliding into the full-on military-industrial complex or benefiting from the American military-industrial complex, I have some nice ocean-front property in Kansas City to sell you.
EDIT:
If you don't believe me, ask the USMC about their nice new H&K service rifles. Did we need to do that? No, we could have thrown a nice piston upper on M16 lowers, but that doesn't keep the bier flowing in Oberndorf am Neckar. Or ask someone in the Pentagon about their partners at BAE.
Well yes we have military industry and back room deals but the industry here doesn't have the big lobby clout the MIC has in the US.
That's easy to do when you have the US on speed dial.
I mean, in the last 50 years, US called Italy, Germany more than the reverse. And if you don't count logistical units, US has France on speed dial, not the reverse. The one time France asked the US something military-wise, Obama refused.
France doesn't need to call anyone, they have spies everywhere. They're the world leader in industrial espionage with a few hundred-years head start over everyone else.
And also don't forget they're the second largest global arms exporter after the United States. Which is amazing when you realize they only have one manufacturer (Airbus) in the global top 15...
> The one time France asked the US something military-wise, Obama refused.
Ehh forget how Vietnam started?
Although yes that is a little longer than 50 years ago already. Crazy how fast these things go.
To do what? Blow up our pipelines? Use us as staging for bullshit invasions?
Maybe What Hackers Yearn or CCC?
Defcon went fed when Jeff Moss went fed. But the crowd size has done way more to change the vibe. The 30% crowd post-covid year was a short return to old defcon.
This implies that you believed Moss was somehow a black hat before he got involved with Homeland Security Advisory Council, which is pretty funny. People just make these things up and state them confidently.
Being white hat is a very different thing to being aligned with the government. Especially with all the secret spying they do which many white hats don't agree with because most of them are also strong privacy advocates. The whole white hat hacker community was very upset about the Snowden revelations. And I don't think that lost trust every returned.
It is absolutely not the case that "the whole white hat hacker community was very upset about the Snowden revelations", but Moss himself was upset as well, so I don't know what that has to do with anything.
It was here in Europe. At the OHM2013 event there were some government contractors (Fox-IT in particular) and the atmosphere was very grim apparently. Tents got damaged and they had to pull out.
Fox-IT was founded by a former AIVD employee which is the Dutch NSA basically.
I remember a friend sending me a job ad from some new cyber team in the military. And I really had to laugh, no way would I ever work somewhere where I'd have to mindlessly obey orders I might disagree with. Or wear a uniform. Or go like "yes sir" to someone who is probably dumber than me.
And really pretty much everyone in the hacker community has an anarchist streak like that. You can tell by the way people behave, how they structure things without strong leaders etc. Everyone just helps at these events where they want, nobody tells them to do anything. This is also why I love these events. No wonder the army can't fill those teams lol. If they want people like us they have to adapt to us.
But I understand in the US this may be different because patriotism seems to be big there.
The UK white hat scene is full of GCHQ people!
Really? Even at events like EMF? I'd be really surprised.
But yeah my view of the hacker scene is very much tailored by these events. I wouldn't even go to something like Black Hat - way too corporate. Even though I work in "cyber" myself.
I spoke at the 2nd Black Hat and was rewarded with a spot on Jeff Moss's hotel room couch because he forgot to obtain a hotel room for me; the firm I cofounded in 2005 (Matasano Security) was acquired by NCC Group, the largest "white hat" firm in the UK. I'd just say: "white hat" is a much more diverse community than most HN commenters intuitions about security people would indicate.
There were a lot of white hat people that were made during Snowden --- at Snowden. Glem Greenwald didn't help matters much.
(Obviously also a lot of white hat people pissed for the opposite reason! I'm only saying it's a diverse group.)
True, I understand, I just go by my own experience. I'm more aligned with the defcon style, privacy activists, breaking DRM, reverse engineering of products to make them do things they weren't designed for etc than the bug hunting or more corporate community which is more at black hat (as far as I've heard, I've never been to either). Also because I'm much more maker than "hacker".
It was wrong to assume these worlds are aligned in opinion.
I went, while I enjoyed myself this year I feel it's gotten too big and too disorganized. Also I went to a couple of talks that would seemingly have been bread and butter talks for defcon that were very sparsely attended and I just wondered where everybody was.
This might just be FOMO with the organizers. It's probably time for DefCon to drop in person registrations, get smaller, and return to a hotel. Villages and village talks need to be better curated and basically the focus needs to be tightened up.
DEFCON talks are for watching on Youtube when they get uploaded weeks/months from now. It's always been about contests/challenges and partying. It's a con of cons.
Talk attendance was much higher the last time I went, but that might have been 10 years ago.
"still issues with things like sound equipment"
For the $500 entry fee you would think they could provide earphones and someone would hack together an app that would let you listen through those earphones based on some sort of proximity detection. No doubt the first year someone would find a vulnerability in it and would need parallel deployment to the existing infrastructure, but still.
Would be a great idea, except they couldn't even operate WiFi with any stability (to which I heard was a LVCC problem, but I don't know that for sure).
Doesn't have to be wifi. There are many different ways to communicate. It's a matter of finding the best one. Unfortunately, the largest drawback is the potential for malicious/mischievous actors to interrupt them given the crowd. Something as simple as FM transmission, like at a drive-in, could be an option.
Could use Meshtastic maybe
this is probably why it never works - silly overcomplex ideas.
There's not even a need to create anything. Rent from a silent disco company. Done.
I think you may have a need to create a sense of humor. Perhaps you have heard about the Meshtastic talk at defcon by now.
Cool, whats your handle so I can suggest your name to organizers to set it up for them
I'd be open to working on it if they actually want to pursue it and want to provide contact info for whatever subgroup handles the comms/networking.
Join their discord or forums and whatever and get crackin
https://defcon.org/html/links/get-involved.html
>> It's a place for security professionals to go to hang out in Vegas for a few days on their company's dime, or to extend their stay after Black Hat.
That is me! :) I do not know where the counterculture hangs out at DC, because I have never been a cool kid, just a brainy weird kid among the brainy weird kids, even as an adult! But there are often quite a few insightful papers at DEF CON. I didn’t go this year, I think my managers are on to me. :)
if you s/counterculture/maker/g , so less about anti and more about doing, i'm with the others -- it's just bigger, with some individual subcommunities having ossified while new topics have opened their own new shiny & vibrant communities
ex: ai village was a new weird thing just a small number years ago, but now that ai is the #1 topic at blackhat (commercial side), it even has its own big event that overshadows blackhat proper . imo that's a success story for defcon fostering doers.
>Defcon is no longer a counterculture conference
Being in tech and partnering with the US Army on 2025 is counterculture.
this is an extremely creative use of the word "counterculture"
How so?
Doesn't everything counterculture ends up absorbed by the capitalism system eventually? I think I learned that from Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space, or maybe from a youtube video about it.
When I went to Defcon a few years back, one of the speakers started his talk by saying:
"When I first started coming to Defcon, it was full of hackers and we played spot-the-fed. Now you're all feds and we play spot-the-hacker."
I think many would be surprised how many people 20+ years ago were feds.. or became feds
In 2022, Google TAG were awarded a "lamest vendor" award at defcon for fixing a Chrome vulnerability they discovered was being exploited in the wild... without asking for permission from the NSA first. That was the turning point for me.
Ok that's weird indeed. Here at European hacker events this action would be applauded. Getting permission from spy agencies before fixing something would be a surefire way to get lamest vendor, lol.
Most there don't trust government. And besides security holes can be used by all sides so it's imperative to fix them asap.
I think this award was satire, not to defend defcon, but yeah
A Pwnie for "unilaterally shutting down a counterterrorism operation”
It's not exactly new. Mudge is the current CIO of DARPA, and other people around the L0pht went on similar trajectories. Feds openly participating in DEFCON is itself a rather old flashpoint.
Way back in the times of hippies and yippies many were subsequently recruited by the empire. While he was troubled in other ways Abbie Hoffmann was, as far as I know, a notable exception.
The top two winning teams of that xTech AI pitch competition were not even AI solutions. It just seemed like a vehicle for the Army to now be able to award those companies non competitive contracts.
Not a new topic - few years ago, the Jen Easterly-era CISA made a hard recruiting pitch at defcon. Patriotism and service-messaging one might recognize from their own time in the military.
What was surprising was the intense applause from a hacker con to this pitch.
Given what was to come, also notably absent discussion from the audience or speaker about how working for CISA did or did not mean working for DHS. Assurances of firm segmentation on this aspect from speakers after the formal talk ended were similarly a bit weak.
Not that anything was inherently bad about her recruiting pitch, but for a hackercon, it was a bit close to the flagpole. And notably that CISA crew is “no longer at CISA” and under prosecution, or intense social pressure, or otherwise.
Feels worth evaluating!
Spooks have been doing keynotes for a few years now. The so-called hackers are on toes, because deep down they wish to be daddy'd up to get to do some silly, secret-type shit. Contrary to the past, when spooks despised computer people (that's how cypherpunk came about.) On the other hand, Clearances are not what they used to be, too; every fart having to do with computers, analysis, collection is classed TS by default.
Is it really surprising that DEF CON went where the money was?
Most cybersecurity work in the US, by volume, rolls up to one of about five organizations - all of whom are US government entities.
Most cybersecurity work has nothing to do with keeping Russian bot farms out of outdated WordPress installs.
Hammond didn't protest during a talk but clearly after its end if https://www.reddit.com/r/Defcon/comments/1mlaw4s/jeremy_hamm... is to be believed. And removed by venue guards not DefCon goons.
And he seems really well loved, as evidenced by https://www.reddit.com/r/Defcon/comments/1mlaw4s/comment/n7p...
Hammond is very well loved by the kind of people who think that Stratfor was a shadowy mercenary private CIA, and not a glorified Substack.
There are two key truths:
Hackerdom has always had a relationship with Defense, Intelligence & LE.
Most hackers are deeply benevolent and care greatly about the world, and insecurity at large, mostly fostered by Business.
Building relationships with defense & intel are often the best avenues towards moving towards a more secure future, working within the system for positive change. Our way of life, and our freedoms are not secure with imminent threats on the horizon.
Please, disabuse yourself of the notion that Mainland China is not weaponizing their hackerdom against us simultaneously.
at some point someone is going to discover the history that the hacker subculture was intelligence influenced all the way down. it has never not been within a degree of separation at every angle from the IC.
it's fine, hackers were probably one of the few constructive successes to come out of it ever. Personally, I suspect the hacker project was on the scale of what the US did during the cold war with abstract expressionist art[1] and literary magazines[2].
As a funnel for getting great, principled talent into the IC, we should be happy and grateful there were people to balance what was coming out of the colleges.
Just because the classified world values hacker skills doesn't mean people shouldn't. I'd say the opposite. There is absolutely a secret world that is accessible on a need to know basis, and it hides everywhere in plain sight for those with the skills to see it. All you have to do is be the among the very best at what you do, in whatever field you are in, and you will encounter it. Saying the Army undermines the subculture that was defcon misses the point. The message of hacking was, develop elite skills and others will find you. not only has this not changed, it is more true than ever.
[1]https://www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/en/did-you-know/la-cia-y-e... [2]https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p037t501
"... the hacker subculture was intelligence influenced all the way down ..."
Oh stop.
There was zero intelligence at any of the five CuervoCons ...
The x files def con was always a defense conference
I can't help but think that Putin and Xi must feel very happy about the Western strain of extreme pacifism that encourages smart hackers to eschew military applications entirely. European hackers in particular can just look east to get a glimpse of the future.
The world has changed.
The issue isn't software developers working with the military. It is a matter of offensive U.S. military operations and the associated self-serving geopolitics being treated as countercultural.
> Western strain of extreme pacifism
While there certainly are some Western hackers who eschew all military applications because of their extreme pacifism, the examples in the article (e.g. pro-Palestinian activists) are not necessarily pacifist. I'd describe them more as out of alignment with their country's current governments, or perhaps actively aligned against them.
And given recent (and not-so-recent) behavior of the US government, I don't think it's irrational for hacker in the US to conclude that their own government presents a greater threat to their freedom than Putin or Xi. (I don't necessarily agree, I just don't think it's an irrational conclusion.)
I think a lot of folks just aren't stoked on making things that could be used against them. And a lot of us are smart enough to see how that could happen.
Guess who cooperates with any security conferences in Russia that aren't abysmal and how many smart hackers attend those.
The world hasn't changed.
Ah yeah that "extreme pacifism" that has grotesque ideas like people shouldn't murder other people just because their governments think so.
How dare them being opposed to that poor military sector, that nobody ever speaks up for. Completely forgotten by politics and media, nobody ever takes their side and see how in reality they make the world a much better place.
After hundreds of thousands of deaths and daily news about one war crime chasing another by all sides, daily uncovered cruel lies, essentially all wars being illegal and not defensive according to UN laws. Laws that the very countries that now break them established. Only not being sanctioned because of vetoes by these countries.
And all of them being lobbied against by some nerds meeting in their spare time to follow their interests. Those horrible, horrible extreme pacifists!
>Western strain of extreme pacifism that encourages smart hackers to eschew military applications entirely
Not what people are saying. There would be little noise if there were talks at defcon about Ukrainian cyberwarfare or hacking Russian military infrastructure.
This is about the united states military industrial complex. Can you even point out a military that did more harm to the world at large in the last 50 years? How many dead? How many human right violations?
The head of the NSA as well, post-snowden? Come on.
The only reason there still is a Ukraine is the US so-called "military industrial complex." And guess who the ooga-booga scary NSA is probably giving intelligence products to, or at least probably was until January?
The flimsy support for Ukraine doesn't erase 50 years of catastrophic effects of USA interventionism
You can cherry pick a few good things. Ukraine, Kosovo, Korea, maybe Libya, the first Gulf war, the Berlin air-lift
Then you come back to reality. The war on terror, El Salvador, Chile, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Laos, arming the Saudis, Irak, Afghanistan
If you engage in 50 or so interventions and all except one fail miserably, often in horrifying ways that result in the deaths of millions of people, it’s really hard to maintain that that’s a good record.
OK, so we're just going to handwave away any positive impact the US has had in preserving the rules-based international order for the past 70 years and amplify every US failure, while not even taking into consideration the alternatives like Russia and China. Keep living in your bubble.
You do whatever you want.
>preserving the rules-based international order
The USA's foreign policy is anything but rules-based. They're brutal and barbaric. You can agitate China and Russia as being scarier, that doesn't make the U.S. military a force of good.
If you're asking the whether they have their place being shoved at the center of Defcon you have to take in the whole picture
Exactly. We can just look at the North/South Korea divide to see the alternative world histories that could have been.
Who do you think are the ones actually supporting Ukrainian cybersecurity and hacking Russian military? Ill give you a hint they are the ones sitting in office parks in maryland writing software for the NSA and DOD.
It doesn't erase the last 50 years
Broken clocks, all that.
State of the clock pending what's going to come out in the news about Orange guy's meeting with Putin where they are discussing the surrender of Ukrainian territories without Ukraine's opinion.
In the US:
* employers can rescind job offers over 20-year-old social media posts.
* rents are sky high and constantly increasing.
* health insurers routinely kill people if they are deemed too expensive to be alive.
* a literal fascist rapist billionaire is now president.
Consequently, we have a society no one will defend. It’s not that people like Putin or Xi. What Putin is doing in Ukraine is unforgivable, even if the West is partially at fault too.
The human rights issues of US-led capitalism have always been severe, but 50 years ago there were redeeming qualities, at least domestically. These days, those are gone, and I don’t blame Gen Z for deciding there is nothing about our society to defend.
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Where are you getting this claim from?
>Most Americans continue to express positive views of the military: 60% say it has a positive effect, while 36% say its effect is negative.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/02/01/the-u-s-mili...
Based on those numbers I’d be surprised to not “find a single one who would be offended if their employer partnered with the military”.
Not only does that not even come close to aligning with the original claim, as barbazoo points out, but there is also a difference between having a "positive view of the military" and wanting to partner with them at work.
If we hadn't gone to Iraq, Afghanistan, and supported the Israelis, I imagine these numbers would be much higher with the young.
February 1, 2024
There have been some salient events that may have altered that perspective in the intervening 18 months.
There are at a minimum fascist adjacent.
Hacker culture is and has always been anti-fascist and anti-capitalist by nature, at least the version that grew in the west. It was an offshoot of hippie culture in the 60s, grew in the 80s phreaking scene, and highly entangled with open source in the early to mid 90s.
I think anti Fascist is way too narrow, it's anti establishment, any establishment period. Anything anyone with power does is bad, that's the mentality for 50 years.
You know what, the more I think about this, I think you're onto something.
Thanks for another stark reminder of how comments here are disconnected from reality. Most IRL are tired of people who call everything fascist and froth at the mouth about “anti-fascism.”
This very much mirrors the scenes I grew up with in the late 80s and through the 90s, early 2000s.
I just checked and there's still an old .gif image in the center of one of the websites with an upraised red fist.
A lot of those folks are security researchers, CISOs, network engineers, and software devs now.
Let me assure you that the population that you will find at Congress is rather anti-fascist. And so is the constitution of country where the event happens. As far as I remember from a few side-notes in my history classes, there are a few historic reasons for that. One may go so far as to call those reasons pretty stark reminders of why anti-fascism is a good thing...
Yeah this is exactly the sort of anti-historical menacing puffery I was talking about. The vast majority of polled WW2 GIs were against racial integration and homosexuality and in favor of white supremacy by the way. Somehow I don’t think they’d fit your idea of “anti-fascist.” Neither them nor the literal fasces on the wall in the US Senate.
Yes, it is often missed but hippies are at hacker cultures core, in terms of the root file directory. John Perry Barlow’s resume shows it all.
Exactly: we live in a capitalist society which has been in decline into fascism for generations which makes the counter culture the opposite of those things.
I get the sense that because people can think of a few examples of mercenary security people or a few white supremacist groups that "hack" that this is somehow a refutation. It's not. You know about these people because 1) they usually are mean and suck and 2) they are outliers.
As you say: the phreaking / hacking / hobbist subcultures have always been collectivist by nature and the product of those subcultures will always chafe at the profit motive.
The considerable number of libertarians and anarchists among the old-school hackers would probably be rather surprised to hear themselves described as collectivist.
Not sure you know very many anarchists.
anarchism as a philosophy is obsessed with non-hierarchical collectivism. same with libertarianism, at least by the common definition of the term outside the united states (it often carries a leftist sentiment in other places).
Hacker culture is and has always been anti-Marxist and anti-Communist by nature, at least the version that grew in the west. It was an offshoot of hippie culture in the 60s, grew in the 80s phreaking scene, and highly entangled with libertarian open source in the early to mid 90s.
This isnt anywhere near my experience at all. People don't like empire and if you look around your life and think everyone you see would be pleased to do military contracts you're in a ( really disconcerting ) bubble.
Everyone living in a western nation today is a direct beneficiary of empire.
Ask them to swap their standard of living with that of someone living without the influence of empire and you'll get nothing but hard stares.
This isn’t the gotchya you think it is and I don’t think the majority of people who benefit from empire aren’t aware. The violation of common sense here is the notion that 1) these people are living the good life and 2) removal of empire would result in worse standard of living.
Now realize there are 8 billion people on the planet, and the 95.6% of people are... really tired, and really upset with the 4.4% of that empire.
So you only care about one specific empire then. Got it.
The US federal budget goes to:
(based on FY 2025 budget proposal )
category, billions, % of federal spending
Social Security 1,543 21.2%
Medicare 936 12.9%
Medicaid 589 8.1%
Food Stamps (SNAP) 94 1.3%
WIC 8 0.1%
Section 8 33 0.5%
Defense 900 12.4%
Other Entitlement Programs 1,168 16.1%
Other Agencies (Non-Defense Discretionary) 1,029 14.2%
Where's interest payments?
Based on their omission I assume you're computing these numbers with them split out but it hardly seems fair to say you're spending "900" on defense when the total cost of paying that "900" is going to be much more since you had to borrow.
It's like saying a house only costs 1M when you end up paying over 1M in interest as well as the principal for 2M.
oops....
Net_Interest $965 billion, 13.3%
250 years ago, every American was a beneficiary of slavery too. Help remind me how that one ended, will you?
I don't think this is your point, but semantically, doesn't this necessarily assert that either:
1. African Americans were not Americans, or
2. African Americans, the victims of slavery, somehow benefited from it?
I would disagree with both of those assertions.
Further, consider that a vast majority (90%+) did not own slaves. Were non-slave-owners beneficiaries of slavery? What about poor, unskilled whites, who had their own wages effectively suppressed due to the negligible labor costs of slavery - were they really net beneficiaries of slavery? They certainly were not the main victims, but that doesn't automatically make them beneficiaries, either. Slavery was overwhelmingly a horrific practice by wealthy elites for wealthy elites, not by all white people for all white people.
It ended with one half of a country being so mad about their standard of living changing that they had a bloody civil war about it. You're proving my point entirely.
I was never talking about right or wrong, I was talking about whether people are willing to sacrifice their standard of living substantially just to be "right" about something.
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Sure, I can agree that companies using gender dysphoria as only a way to increase profit is a bad thing, and I recognize that pharmaceutical companies are this way with _every_ drug and not just ones that benefit people. However I do disagree with the idea that people should be stripped of their right to free speech if you disagree with their statements, or stripped of their right to choose how to live their own lives.
I would offer that this is entirely different than the lack of choice we have in regard to how our government uses the military to "spread democracy at the point of a gun" while taking more and more of our tax dollars and liberty without improving our lives or tackling the problems that ordinary Americans face.
What on earth are you talking about?
Using one egregious example to illustrate how those who ID as “anti-fascist” love imperial coercion, totalitarian speech controls, and the state’s destruction of families and bodies when it suits their particular perversion. Everyone loves centralized power when it promulgates and protects what they actually care about.
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Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
You can unsupport the US military industrial complex without that.
Even the parts supplying Ukraine?
If all we did was supply arms to our allies who are under attack without making egregious profit off of it, then yeah I think folks would feel better about the MIC, but as you're well aware we are only granting small shipments of weapons along with big demands including currently asking Ukraine to give up it's land to russia. We also have a long history of giving weapons to sow chaos around the world leading directly to things like isis and others. Arguably worse than that, we're now using these military weapons to suppress liberty in American cities.
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Whelp might as well just only go to black hat now
If you have $3000 for a ticket, sure.
Though I must say, it's stange to go to the certified fed conference because the "non-fed" option is "too pro-fed" now.
Damn, DEF CON used to be a real one. It's a damn shame to see this happen to a group of hackers.
I'm sure other venues and community events will take up the mantle given time, but it's still a bummer to see an event that used to be so fiercely independent out here cheering on the feds.