DEF CON is canceled! No, really this time – but the show will go on It's an annual meme that DEF CON infosec conference has been canceled, but this time it actually happened, ish. The world's largest hacking conference, held since 1993 and lately drawing in as many as 30,000 attendees, has been held in venues owned by the Caesars Entertainment for well over a decade. According to conference …
It's understandable that they want to do that.
So let's not mention Caesers and hackers together on the Internet. It'd be bad if people associated Caesers with hacking, because hackers and Caesers just don't go together.
Caesers' hackers should never be associated with Caesers or their hacking because if people discovered that Caesers had been hacked, they might associate Caesers with hackers and hackers being associated with Caesers would be just awful.
No, if you figure out how to use *their* rules in your favour, they'll ban you, negate your win under rules already enacted to stop you using your skill to beat them at their own game, or even sue you.
It's their territory, people have already tried that, and they'll fix the rules to stop anyone winning excessively, regardless of how fair that would have been otherwise.
You'll win if they *want* you to, i.e. just enough to keep up the pretence.
At least they won't whack you like they'd have done in the Mafia-owned era.
Indeed - plus its really popular with sales teams who go there and party hard all night, then stand hung over on a booth scanning badges in the day. Given sponsor/show floor booth revenue is often a significant part of conference income then it makes sense to pick somewhere that sales teams want to visit (so that they persuade their management to buy a booth).
Had the opposite problem. It's bad optics for taxpayers money to be seen going to Vegas, so a lot of meetings/conferences that will have a lot of government attendees can't be in Vegas.
Instead they end up being in some mid-west city that is hard and expensive to fly to, where the few hotels can charge 10x the rate as the conference sells them out.
One environmental conference alternated between Hawaii and a small town in Colorado. Hawaii was a fraction of the cost to fly and hotel but always raised eyebrows compared to spending $1000s to go to Co
I firmly believe this... "Lottery tickets are a tax on fools". The odds of winning anything significant are so far out there that you'd probably have a far greater chance of being dead on that day than winning a jackpot. For example,. the 6/49 lottery (sampling with replacement), your chances of winning with all 6 numbers are something like 1 in 15,000,000
Even with instant gratification tickets like "scratch and win", the serious prizes are VERY rare. The $2 and $20 etc. prizes you win occasionally are unlikely to cover the costs of all the money you waste on tickets. I have family members that buy me those at xmas or birthday time and dropping hints didn't work, so it was "Don't waste your money on that, it never pays out. I can't even be arsed to scratch them to be honest" which resulted in a disappointed "oh..." from my sister.
I don't understand why people will happily shell out for booze, or for over-priced coffees, but then turn their nose up at a Christmas-time scratch card. It's a bit of fun, with an outside chanceo of winning a couple of quid. Way more wastage of money happens at that time of year for way less pay-off.
I guess it's because a lot of us don't understand where the fun is. Scratching some metallic foil off a piece of card doesn't on the face of it appear to be any fun.
I'm not anti-gambling in broad terms. I can get behind the idea of placing a bet on a football match - you were going to watch the match, now you get to watch the match and also maybe win some money. I play poker quite regularly.
I do not get lotteries which can be equated to "Pay a dollar and press this button. You have no control over the result. There might be money but there probably won't be." I don't understand slot machines for the same reason.
There's nothing wrong with buying scratchcards or lottery tickets for fun. We occasionally buy them at Christmas or family get togethers, then we all scratch them or check the numbers together.
The problems start when:
- you buy them with the serious expectation that you're going to win
- you buy them with money you can't afford
- you buy them because you always have, and are scared that that one time that you DON'T buy them, your numbers come up. That's a crack addiction waiting to happen.
"Lottery tickets are a tax on fools"
For people who buy them frequently and 'en masse'*, absolutely. However one often-overlooked benefit of buying a lottery ticket is the small hit of pleasure it gives when thinking about the possibility of winning. Even if the probability of winning is effectively zero, that hit of pleasure is still there. So by spending $5 on a lottery ticket you are buying a small daydream. It's a small indulgence, similair in many ways to grabbing a barista cup of coffee for $5 even though you know it costs 5c to make.
Indeed, psychological studies have shown that such positive daydreaming is far more beneficial when the brain has a 'hook' through which it can be made real. Visualisation techniques (a common and effective psychological tool) work better when the brain on some level believes that the visualised outcome is possible. Just as long as one does, indeed, spend only what is a small indulgence rather than a small (or even big) fortune!
*While it is perfectly mathematically true that buying 10 times the tickets increases your chances of winning by 10X**, what heavy gamblers miss is that 10X f**k-all is still f**k-all.
**or more, if it's a combinatorial where sub-combinations win smaller prizes
"Where I live, we have a state-run lottery whose proceeds (supposedly) go to funding education. "
Those lotteries were sold as a way to continue having many of the non-core classes that schools were having to delete. The problem was that once lottery money was flowing into the schools, government started reducing their allocations which put those classes and activities back on the block next to the axeman.
At least not the ones that I've worked with and used. The older card readers did total ballots but they also collected them and one thing the poll workers had to do at the close of polls was to balance the totals with the card count. The newer ones just print ballot forms, the don't total votes.
But don't let reality get in the way of myth......
"At least not the ones that I've worked with and used. The older card readers did total ballots but they also collected them and one thing the poll workers had to do at the close of polls was to balance the totals with the card count."
From a statistical sample of how many, you make the sweeping statement that all voting machines are honest?
Just as important as the machines giving honest outputs is they are SEEN doing so. A paper ballot filled out and deposited at a supervised polling site is much harder to hack. It's also very difficult to do in large numbers for a low cash price. It's also easier for people without any technical skills to envision the process since they'll have tangible examples to use as a model. Hollywood has made plenty of people think that it's easy to hack systems in minutes and take over something to inject false data. That goes back even before Matthew Broderick's character in War Games was fiddling his school grades via modem.
If paper ballots were counted in a "tell me three times" manner by different people and tabulators, it could allay a lot of FUD, rumor and innuendo. It would also help if the CCTV didn't show a few people pulling boxes out from under tables and doing some after-hours work at the counting sites.
"Just as important as the machines giving honest outputs is they are SEEN doing so. "
Absolutely, which is why I don't agree with electronic-only voting - you cannot guarantee a persistent record. The process has to be
- voter indicates their vote on a card
- machine scans the card, displays it's reading of the card clearly to the voter
- if the voter agrees that their voting intentions are correctly displayed by the machine, vote is confirmed and voting card goes into a locked box
- if the voter disagrees, card is shredded, and process starts from step 1 on a new card.
This way, votes can be counted electronically very quickly, but the original cards still exist and can be counted manually in case tampering is suspected
"It would also help if the CCTV didn't show a few people pulling boxes out from under tables and doing some after-hours work at the counting sites."
Don't believe the idiot Rudy. You do realise he has lost his case and has to pay $148 million for saying the same bollocks.
The problem with conspiracy theories is when you get idiots that have never been involved with the process think they know what is going on in the "CCTV footage". Much like the UK elections. All the nut jobs came out and "examined CCTV" because they thought they'd lose, they all went quiet after they didn't. I think it was the referendum. They were all saying "Take your own pen, they can't rub out pens" and the CCTV footage showing them "rubbing out votes".
Pencils are used because they don't run out of ink!
The CCTV footage of the "rubbing out votes" was idiots not understanding the count process. You have a group of people at a table counting. The count supervisor for that group then takes the total count to the election workers who have the tally in their system. If the tally in the system doesn't match how many people turned up, it means the count at the table is wrong. So the count supervisor goes back to the table, the counters recount and the supervisor rubs out the incorrect number and waits for the new result. THAT is what they were rubbing out in the CCTV footage.
"The problem with conspiracy theories is when you get idiots that have never been involved with the process think they know what is going on in the "CCTV footage""
The footage was posted online and it was very obvious that the staff had been dismissed for the day and the time stamp showed a late hour. There should have been nobody in the facility and all ballot boxes should have been locked in the secure areas. Conspiracy theory? If it is a misinterpretation of the CCTV, it still showed people in the facility after-hours doing things that looked dodgy when the building should have been empty and locked. IIRC, there was another facility where the CCTV was turned off overnight so there was no record at all which was also not part of policy.
I haven't been involved in vote counting but had a friend that worked at a voting machine company writing software and his hints were rather ominous about odd goings on. He had no trust in electronic voting. His worry was violating the NDA's they made everybody sign. Apparently, they were rather frightening and unsmiling people in short haircuts and suits watched them sign those papers very attentively.
""It would also help if the CCTV didn't show a few people pulling boxes out from under tables" So where are they supposed to be stored?"
At the time, the counting facility was supposed to be closed and locked since the staff had been dismissed for the day. It wasn't a matter of where things were stored, but that activities were recorded showing odd behavior. Generally, the ballot boxes would be taken from one fenced area where they were stacked on pallets to the counting floor and across to another fenced area where counted ballots were stacked on pallets. At no point would ballot boxes be put under tables for any reason. It's set up that way for the human monitors to watch and for CCTV to record.
I'm told that most "nerd conferences" such as the AGU and the IEEE conferences, have a pretty poor reputation amongst the hospitality industry.
Given that such conferences are generally packed with broke grad students and faculty on limited per diem, they're not as profitable as a big business meeting where the sales people are wining and dining potential customers.
I was told by a bar hop at the San Francisco AGU a few years ago that they don't see that much uptick in business and the tips are relatively thin.
If the hotels, bars and restaurants aren't doing well, that's their own lookout. A casino hoping to draws people out of a conference and onto the gaming floor might not have thought enough about it. People going to Vegas to gamble are the people going to gamble. Give those people the meal vouchers and reduced pricing on rooms. Somebody going to attend CES will be pressed for time just to get through everything at the show. Maybe a disinterested spouse will venture off to other things, but if one is going to Defcon, even on a company expense account, it's Defcon they want to be there for. I'll be making a trip to a convention in Las Vegas later this year (long drive so I'm working out in preparation). I won't be gambling as I've allocated just enough time to do show things before I need to head back home. Even with some of the best prices for hospitality (mostly), it's still expensive.
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For a global and technical attendees going to a casino for a conference was weird.
If one cares about "why" the cancellation happened they should find a business nerd and ask them. They may have some interesting financiers from oppressive regimes etc. Sometimes the explanation could be very basic.
E.g. find a way to make an ordinary Arab to circumvent Saudi billion dollar firewall and post it on "X". Watch what happens.
"For a global and technical attendees going to a casino for a conference was weird."
Cesar's has good conference space, food, drinks, rooms, etc. Nobody needs leave the building for anything if they don't want to. Alexis Park was a good place before the conference got too big. There used to be a Pho place just a block away that was awesome. The convention center has a food court, but it's as bad as the food you find at Disneyland or a Six Flags. They make it a few days in advance, reheat it in a microwave and then stick it under a heat lamp to cool down to unpleasantly warm. I swear they save money by not hooking up CO2 tanks to the drinks dispenser. If you like flat cola, LVCC is your place to be. CES is not too bad as the turnover on concessions is much bigger so the food seems to be fresher. I'm going to a show there in March so I'll see how well they do with a show about the size of DEFcon.
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