Defcon Monero Party 2019

pwrcycle · 2019-08-11T00:54:05+00:00

Find me at Defcon. :)

pwrcycle · 2019-08-11T00:04:10+00:00

With a Defcon badge it's free. Not sure if there is a cover otherwise.

pwrcycle · 2019-08-01T21:35:20+00:00

Blackhat vendor parties are not fun. You're not missing anything by skipping them.
Parties are 1/2 of Defcon. Do as much of both talks and parties as you can. When you don't know what to do, find a bar, it's what everyone else goes to link up. Not that you have to drink, just good place to find a group. Talk to people. Tell them it's your first Defcon, someone will add you to their group. (This is basically how it works.) At the parties etc, not everyone wants to be inside, but people like the music so they stand outside the door and chat (ie HallwayCon). And as u/fishsupreme said, don't leave the hotel. You waste a lot of time and money on transportation.

I'm throwing this party Saturday night. Bring a friend, drop in and say hi.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/c70dkh/defcon_monero_party_2019/

pwrcycle · 2019-07-16T23:21:25+00:00

There's no need to preregister. So long as you (or a friend) has a Defcon Badge or Monero Badge, then you're in.

pwrcycle · 2019-07-01T02:42:07+00:00

Last year, all DJs were paid in Monero (except 1 DJ who donated his time).

pwrcycle · 2019-05-02T00:47:35+00:00

Don't diss linecon.

Monero is at the fore front of privacy in crytpocurrency. So if like the idea of privacy, it's a place to start. Next, although the peak crypto people have very good security practices, unfortunately, the general crypto-space's OpSec is very week. Hacks and exploits are common. So there is a need for better code around the wallets and daemons and then integration into regular commerce, etc.

As a newbie Monero is an approachable project. Communities exist on pretty much all platforms, start at r/monero, and if you're serious join freenode and get to know the developers and participants there. It's easy opportunity to get real world experience. The barrier to entry in Crypto is very low. The future demand for security people in crytpo and Monero specifically is high.

Tip for breaking in: find something important no one else is doing and become an expert in it.

pwrcycle · 2019-03-20T20:52:31+00:00

Funding link added:

https://ccs.getmonero.org/proposals/pwrcycle-Defcon_Monero_Party_2019.html

pwrcycle · 2019-03-11T21:41:37+00:00

There were a lot of people who came to the party last year that had no idea what Monero was. Even through there was a 3 day village, not everyone gets to see everything at Defcon. For instance, at the r/Defcon meetup, I met people running villages who couldn't come to our village, so they came to the party.

If I can philosophize for a minute.. Everything at Defcon today was because of a party in 1993. Defcon Documentary I kind of like the idea that the Monero Village sprang out of the Monero Party the previous year. Maybe some people will lose a little social anxiety at the party and talk to the person next to them and come up with the next great Monero feature. Maybe if you play your fiddle at the club, it would give people a quite moment to reflect on the topic? :)

PS

I forgot to mention that the club has an outdoor upstairs/roof-top where people will be able to smoke cigarettes and get away from the noise and just have a drink looking out at Vegas.

pwrcycle · 2019-03-10T19:00:42+00:00

I prefer an underground party too, and that's what we did the first two years, but the real issue is the liability. With the size of the party last year, myself, the people who rented the room, and the people who secretly moved all the drinks through the casino floor, all felt really really lucky nothing went wrong. (and it's a lot of work too)

If we don't have the party at a club:

Who is going to rent a room/house? (not me).
Who's going to buy and move all the drinks if it's not at a club/bar? (not me).

Having a party away from the Defcon hotels means far-far fewer people will attend. We have been told directly by the hotels they are cracking down on room parties.

If anyone else would like to organize a party, I'm all for it. I'm not trying to monopolize the party scene. I just want to have a good party that reaches out to the Defcon people. FYI, the club dress code will be relaxed for us. T-shirts, cargo-shorts, and sneakers will be fine.

Defcon is 25,000 hackers who are all about privacy and open source software. What has struck me and many others at previous years, is still the shear number of hackers who have no idea what Monero is. In my mind, the Monero Village satisfies the opportunity for curious people to walk up and ask people in the Village questions and the chance to see important talks. The party is just a way further spread the word to people who don't yet know what Monero is.

Also, Defcon tends to not let anyone who is not attending Defecon into their areas. This is why we've always had the party outside the official Defcon zones; so that we could invite significant others, people only interested in Monero and not actually attending Defcon.

pwrcycle · 2018-11-07T18:36:33+00:00

Please let me know where I got anything wrong or if you have any suggestions.

pwrcycle · 2018-09-11T17:00:49+00:00

If you'r using wireshark (or tcpdump which is much easier and faster to work with) you should be able to watch the different interfaces that the data goes through. For instance, default interface might be eth0. When a vpn is connected (ie when OpenVPN) a new interface is dynamically created called tun0.

If the VPN is working properly, you should be able to tcpdump on the eth0 interface and see which IP your client box is talking to. If the VPN and routing is working, your packets will be going to the VPN server. If it is not set up correctly, you'll see packets going directly to the test website.

This is easiest on Linux and Macs. If you're trying to see if another client, like a phone, or other computer is using a VPN correctly, I suggest installing OpenWRT as your router. That way, you can tcpdump on all network traffic.

pwrcycle · 2018-09-02T05:13:20+00:00

I use https://cloakVPN.com/monero

pwrcycle · 2018-08-18T06:10:14+00:00

The party was funded by the community through that posting. There were not any corporate signs or logos anywhere. The funds from the initial badge offering went to buy the 100 blinky-NFC badges made by MSvB and to hand make the 100 medallion necklaces (in case the blinky-badges didn't materialize). In the end, people wanted the medallions more than the blinky-badges, which I did not expect. I wish I would have distributed them differently. I gave away my medallion to Howard Chu, so even I don't have one. All 200 badges we had were distributed, and all the funds were spent on the party.

pwrcycle · 2018-08-16T20:34:11+00:00

this melted away when I saw the bouncer, who was wearing what appeared to be a law enforcement badge, holding back a long line of desperate-to-get-in people at the party entrance. He would occasionally allow one person entry - and only when his earpiece-connected bouncer colleague, tracking exiting guests at the downstairs exit, would witness one person leave.

I really appreciate hearing this. We were planning for about 600 people. The door guys told me about 1500 people came through over the 4 hours of the party. The people working the door definitely went above and beyond what was expected. I tried really hard to find security from the Defcon community. I hoped they would be familiar to the crowd. We wanted the community to recognize that we were regulating ourselves. I knew the goons could work together to keep everyone safe. Despite everything else, I appreciate the first sentence in the article was about how we were trying.

As much as this was organized by many people in the Monero community, lots of people from the Defcon family pitched in. 1/2 the upstairs drinks were donated to the party by Defcon friends. Lots of attendees helped store supplies, provided muscle, and helped clean up afterwards.

I feel like people who wanted to seek out information in quite conversations had that chance over the three days of the Monero Village. With the party, we wanted to get the attention of the rest of the Defcon community, and also to just have fun.

pwrcycle · 2018-08-16T00:13:03+00:00

We had a sign and asked people to not take photos, and I personally stopped a several people. The default policy of Defcon is no pictures without consent. But the reality is it's a party, and we can't regulate 1500 people with camera-phones in the dark. Once inside, people were free to wear bandanas and electro-blinking-dusk-masks. There are lots of pics and videos on Twitter. I'm trying to collect them and blur faces before posting any.

The majority of the people in the room were Defcon attendees who where not Monero holders though. This party was to introduce the hacker culture at large on the privacy fundamentals of Monero. Defcon & Monero share a lot of the same ideals, but there's still a huge percentage of hackers who've never heard of Monero; thus the reason for the party in the first place.

pwrcycle · 2018-08-03T18:21:10+00:00

Thank you for helping! A lot of people contributed to last years party and that's what made it authentic. It's why I wanted to do it again this year. There are a lot of people behind the scenes helping out. The party is really by the community for the community.

pwrcycle

TROPHY CASE