[Dailydave] Paid-for Vendor talk .... seems legit?

[Michal Zalewski]

> Perhaps the people who should get worked up about it are the folks who
> paid sometimes thousands of dollars for the business value of attending
> a conference, go to the talks with sincere interest, and later learn
> that someone else had paid even more to turn it into a sales event.

Well, it's seldom a surprise, right? If you go to RSA, you're going to
an overt trade show with mostly-bad talks. If you're going to a niche
conference (REcon, B-Sides, whatever), you will probably mostly see
passionate people talking about the things they care about - but there
will be relatively little "business legitimacy" or A-stars.

If you go to BlackHat or CanSecWest, you get a mix of both.

But I doubt that most of the attendees to RSA Conference or BlackHat
really have any issue with what they get. Many go there to socialize,
learn about the basics, stay in the loop on all the PR buzz, discover
cool products, and earn CISSP / CISM points or so.

/mz