[Dailydave] Celebrations

[Chris Eng]

For the record, much of what you see in the Kaspersky pictures are non-alcoholic. Nobody is pressured to drink, but people still like to participate in the traditions. Most of the spirits consumed on stage are the same color as water... just saying. ;-)



On Mar 12, 2018 10:54 AM, David Aitel <dave at immunityinc.com> wrote:
[drinky1][drinky2]

So today I'm going over the reports released at Kaspersky's SAS conference and for some reason the images of people drinking on stage stuck out at me. I think it's because half my facebook feed, when I bother to log in to see what the schedule at the local BJJ gym is, is people in our community talking about their recovery from addiction.

I know DefCon has this tradition of drinking on stage too, and GCon did, of course, as have many other conferences I've been to.

Conferences are partially celebrations. And drinking is part of celebrating, for a lot of people, but it's always been weird in our culture because for so long we were all so young (and so overwhelmingly male). I don't know about you, but it's always seemed insane to me when people post tweets about how they're drinking to commemorate Barnaby Jack's death as if that wasn't the very shit that killed him.

INFILTRATE has open bars - basically during the whole conference. But we also have non-alcoholic cocktails and drinks the whole time and we don't drink on stage because it's not great for new, younger members of the community to link technical excellence and addiction. This isn't "Drunken Master 5: iOS return-to-libc". This is hard stuff now and spending two days a year talking to the top of the offensive community about their plans for the year, and what didn't work last year, sometimes requires a mostly-sober headspace.

Although we don't advertise it heavily, we have a huge uptake this year in our non-alcohol included INFILTRATE ticket. It's at a small discount from the main ticket price, but I don't think that's why people are buying it.

Anyways, it's something to think about while we piece over what we know and don't know about SLINGSHOT and SOFACY...
-dave

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