Too bad. Now I will definitely never go there. My work sometimes gets free tickets for black hat but that's a totally boring business conference. Not worth going to on its own. I hate mingling with sales suits, I'm a real techie.
Def con was something I would be looking forward to and if my work paid for black hat I could have stayed the extra days to go there.
Black Hat is the largest North American venue for vulnerability research. It's one of the closest things in the industry to a serious, peer reviewed conference, at least at this scale. It's certainly not the social scene Defcon is (indeed, it replaces that social scene with an enterprise sales hookup scene), but it's definitely not a "totally boring business conference". Black Hat talks are generally much better than Defcon talks.
> It's certainly not the social scene Defcon is (indeed, it replaces that social scene with an enterprise sales hookup scene), but it's definitely not a "totally boring business conference".
It's the enterprise sales hookup thing that attracts most visitors though. The people from our company that go there go mainly for that. They're all VPs and other suits that have no interest in specific vulnerabilities. They just want the free wine and dine and to feel important.
I couldn't imagine going to that kind of thing. I'd only put up with it if it would give me a chance to go to Def Con :)
And it's really the Def Con social scene I'd be interested in. I'm not a vulnerability researcher either, I'm just very informal, I'm not comfortable socialising with business people even though I work in enterprise security. So I think for me black hat would be pretty boring.
What I love about the grassroots hacker conferences is the free sharing of information without commercial strings attached (in fact here in Europe people get booed off stage when they pull out the sales pitch) The presentations not vetted by PR departments. The tongue in cheek remarks against big tech. The activism. Drunkenly running into other makers and making good friends. Exchanging business cards and finding a new vendor is definitely not on the list. I don't normally go to too many of the talks either, especially not the huge ones.
If you're not a practitioner and you're looking for a social scene, you want Defcon, not Black Hat. But if you are a practitioner, the lobby conference at Black Hat is better than the Defcon scene. The talks are much better at Black Hat, but the guts of the important ones are public immediately and all of them are published eventually. Nobody should have FOMO about Black Hat, but to dismiss it as a commercial event (like RSA is) is to misunderstand it.
This is me being opportunistic, but I'm an organizer for indie tech conferences [0]. We're not selling tickets with set venue dates yet (although a fundraiser is happening.)
If nothing else, you might join the newsletter to see if it's your cup of tea later in the year.
Thanks! I'm very unlikely to fly to the US for conferences though (in fact I've never been there in my life!). Especially to Seattle as it's so far away from me in Europe. I'm in Spain which is pretty much a low-wage country so things like intercontinental flights and foreign hotels are prohibitively expensive.
Boston might be an option if it just happens to be around a time I might visit for work (but again I've never been there in my life so it's not all that likely even though we have a major office there).
Def con was something I would be looking forward to and if my work paid for black hat I could have stayed the extra days to go there.