 Hello. Welcome everybody. We're going to start introducing DEF CON 10 at New York City. Michael Soltres and Jimmy Caplovis are local team members and are going to explain what what is all this about. Thank you. So yeah, we're so next year DEF CON will be in New York City and just giving you a intro of what it'll be like next year. Answer a bunch of questions. So first we'll talk about the local area, then we'll talk about the venue we've chosen. Then as I know a lot of you have questions about how to getting to the US and we'll answer we'll answer those as best we can and then then we'll take questions in the conclusion. So local team so far the more core people there's several people helping out are me, Jimmy, I think we're fine with doing the digressions and then doing the useful stuff later, Caplovis. Richard also I'm allergic to fun so it could possibly be painful if I went DARS aka Mr. Beige who also did a lot for this conference as well and Brian Gupta who's doing a contact for the local press and user groups and so forth. Michael Soltres lives in Indiana, not New York, but he's still helping out a lot and so can many of the rest of the several hundred Debian developers in the US. We have more than any other single country. Yes, even Germany, but certainly not a majority. So this is a open-street map map of New York City. The red arrow is pointing to roughly where Columbia is that island. It's on its Manhattan. LaGuardia is the LGA a little bit to its lower right. That's the nearest airport, but mostly domestic. Near the bottom right of the screen is JFK, the major international airport and a little further up on the screen, mostly near the bottom toward the left is Newark Airport, the other international airport, also pretty major. So the neighborhood it's in is Morningside Heights. There's a lot of schools there, a lot of students. This is a listing of some Columbia, Barnard Manhattan School of Music, Union Theological Seminary, Jewish Theological Seminary and Thanks Street College are all in that neighborhood. As you can see, it caters to the rigors of student life. There's a lot of things to do there that don't cost very much money, you know, places to eat, drink, listen to music, lots of parks around Central Park, Riverside Park, Morningside Park are three very nice parks in the area. You'll see pictures of those. St. John's Cathedral, one of the largest in the world and one of the former US president's tombs. And it's 15 minutes from Times Square, really close to the Empire State Building, similar distance. You know, it's easy to get around mass transit goes there. So here's a picture of one of the cafes on Broadway right near the venue. Here's more, there's lots of them. Typical residential street in the area. This is another one that leads to that large cathedral at the end of the street. Plenty of parks. This is one of the closest parks to the venue, Morningside Park. Here's Riverside Park right near the Hudson River facing New Jersey. Here's another picture of that park. There's lots of places to buy food including a huge sort of relatively gourmet supermarket and farmers markets from the surrounding hundreds of miles, farmers come in and bring fresh local produce and baked goods and so forth. The transportation is very good. The subway system never closes, not on New Year's Day, not at 4 a.m. on a weekday. It was always there. There are changes sometimes, but you can always get from point A to point B. And if you want to get to a little north of the city, a little east of the city, a little west of the city, there's a regional rail to get there. The bus system also sort of works in tandem with the subway system. You can transfer between them and so forth. But a lot of people walk around to get places. It's very pleasant to walk through. There's the weather's decent. There's things to look at and places to get snacks. And about three-quarters of New York City residents, unlike the vast majority of the rest of the US, do not own cars. A lot of the cars are tourists or taxis or commuters. So as I said, there's two major international airports. John F. Kennedy International in Eastern Queens in New York City, Newark Liberty International with very easy rail connections to New York City. And both of them have, as I said, rail and ground transportation, lots of various buses from a wide variety of companies and government agencies. And LaGuardia is mostly domestic. I'll mention an exception later. It's about a half an hour single municipal bus ride from the venue. It's very nice. And if you find a cheaper flight to Boston or Philadelphia or various other cities in the Eastern US, you can still get there. You have to do a longer commute, but it's still doable to arrive and depart shorter than some of the past commutes from airports to venues in Debcombe history. So what can you do in New York? I think you already know this. But here's some specifics. There's a company called Circle Line, which gives you a cruise around Manhattan Island. You can see a lot of sites. You can see Broadway show theater, very nice plays. You can go up to the 80 something floor of the Empire State Building and go to the observatory deck and look out over the whole city. You can go up as of this past July 4th. You can even go up into the crown of the Statue of Liberty and you can see it very close up, a plan ahead for that one. Ellis Island, where a lot of immigrants went through in the early part of the 20th century. You can take bus tours, walking tours. You can see museums ranging from the Museum of Modern Art to the Museum of Sex to the Museum of Comic Books, Museum of the City of New York. Yeah, there is a real Museum of Sex. I'm not kidding. You can visit Central Park or Prospect Park or any of the other huge number of parks or cemeteries. And there are some websites where you can get more information from the city government and from one of the local weekly magazines. So for the day trip, certainly, as it says at the bottom, there's all the normal tourist stuff, such as what I just mentioned. We can choose some parks to hike in either in the city or nearby. There's a national park with a wildlife refuge, again, in Eastern Queens, which is a lot of bird watching goes on there. There's a huge number of tours, boat rides, other things we can do. We can go to a beach if we want. There's so many options. That'll be decided closer to it. But you are here for a conference, so don't get too distracted. However, it's also New York, so what we're doing this year in 2009 is having a siesta in the afternoon. Next year, we're thinking of, instead of having a siesta, we're having maybe a go see New York esta or something. And we will hope to have some volunteers who can help you navigate, not get lost, and maybe give suggestions of things to do. But it's also easy to get around, even if you get separated on the day trip or if you want to go do something else, see a relative, you can get around yourself. The subway, lots of people will be happy to help you as the maps are free, so forth. And if you want to do a longer stay, we may see about ways to get lodging for more than just the depth of duration, which of course wouldn't be sponsored, but it could be discounted if we do the right sort of booking. So the venue itself, Columbia University in the city of New York, it's a major research university, six oldest in the United States, going back to 1754, about 10 years older than my university, consistently ranked in the top 10 in a lot of rankings, and here's a library which doesn't contain books on campus. A lot of good architecture, it's sort of a standard university campus, a little small but very nice, right in the middle of a city, which you wouldn't expect. We can't include the maps of Columbia, the licensing doesn't allow that, but they are viewable online and very nice. I could probably even show you, but there's a disability access map too for those in wheelchairs and who need other assistance. The main entrance looks like this, it sort of goes right from Broadway into the nice campus area. Here's a view of the sort of lower sort of street level part of the campus. The main lawn, people playing frisbee it looks like. There's some residence halls and some lawns outside of those, outside the mathematics building, a lot of greenery. So we'll be in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences as the main venue, hack lab, talk, food space. Several different sized lecture halls and cafeterias, ranging from 30 person to 200 person, and if we need a larger capacity room, there's lots more on campus. There's also other rooms, but those have to be arranged later. Yeah, this is one of the other university classrooms. We can book those pretty easily for a little while or for, you know, a few large keynotes, but those would be booked in 2010 closer to the actual event. It's a picture of our venue, the engineering and computer science area. The plaza outside of it, another picture. This is from one of the atrium areas inside, looking out. This is outside one of the larger auditoriums in that building. Any inside? Smaller room, lots of other spaces. All right, a lot of you have asked when the conference is going to happen. We don't know exactly. The reason we're waiting is because the Columbia Conference Housing Office can't give us a confirmed definite reservation until October of this year. So if we wanted to set the dates now, they can informally guarantee us that they would give us enough space, but we might not be in as few buildings as we possibly can be, or we might be more spread out or something like that. So given that October is still plenty far in advance to make any bookings you might need, we're going to announce the dates in October, and it'll definitely be in the U.S. summer between mid-June and mid-August. Networking is a plus here. There's lots of connectivity, especially to the internet at large and to the internet too, which is a sort of nationwide network of large companies, research universities, government agencies with really fast connection amongst them, including to the MIT mirror. We also actually, there's already an official Columbia Debian Mirror, and we're in touch with a really high-level person in their central IT department, CUIT. I can put you in touch with the right people at CUIT to make sure your needs are met, he said, and there's really no one higher than him who has jurisdiction over that sort of thing, so that's a really good thing. When I was last there, the campus wireless did not need any authentication, it did not need any encryption. I have no idea about a few dead spots maybe exist, but we can supplement them. If there's any filtered ports, I'm sure we can work something out as we have in the past. And of course, there's ethernet ports in the rooms, and including dorm rooms and wireless. All right, so the dorms, that's a US term for you, those of you in the UK, it's residence halls, but we have a link on the website to the amenities that are provided by the dorms for the conference housing guests, and maps and links of the campus also online, our website. And in the surrounding area, there's lots of hostels and hotels within easy walking distance, five to 15 minutes, and subway as well as available. Over 1200 beds, we're not going to run out of space, although we may, we'll see, we may run out of sponsor space, but there's always inexpensive options. So the two, two of the large buildings, the one, hold on, I can point. So this building around here is one of the residence halls, this building around here is another, so you can see they're pretty sizable and can hold a lot of people. This is a residence that's maybe one or two blocks away from the campus, not far. So for food, we can do what we usually do and have group meals in the cafeteria, which I think you'll see pictures of if you haven't yet. And that works fine. We are not forced to use Columbia's caterers, we can choose competitively. There's also the option if we want to have sort of better quality food for the same price, we can give sponsored people a special debit card that is provided by Columbia and only works either at Columbia or at a variety of nearby restaurants that have an agreement with Columbia and cater to students. And for sponsored people, we could give them a fixed amount of money and say, here's your food budget for the, for the week, have your choice of food from these many restaurants and go in small groups, chat. So, so that's one option. And we also had the idea of maybe doing sign-up sheets for large group reservations at some sort of slightly higher, you know, higher price range restaurants or whatever people want to sort of preserve large group experience in the restaurant scenario. We'd love input on that and the day trip and such things. Yeah, here's a, here's a picture of probably part of the cafeteria in our building. And I think it sees a hundred people with that earlier. Here's some example of the food service facilities. So, other people we know, we're not just name-dropping here. We've talked to all these people. They're all giving support and working with us. So, Epin Moglin, in addition to being FSF, former FSF, FSF General Counsel and Director of the Software and Freedom Law Center, is a professor at Columbia Law School and I'm sure he will attend. We are working with a computer science professor who until July 1st was the department chair. We're working with one of the people at the director level in the school who's maybe even going to be able to spend some paid time working on our issues and paid by, you know, for his job, I mean not by us. And we've attended a meeting of the Columbia student chapter of the ACM, the Association of Computing Machinery and it looks like they are likely to be a source of volunteers among many other sources. So, we don't think Columbia's going to fall through. If for some reason we're wrong, while we are still deciding our exact venue, we in-depth investigated Hofling International, which is a hostel that has some function rooms as well. 600 beds, they're in the same neighborhood, so we wouldn't have to change that much. We have to be creative about a few things, but overall it would work. Now on to a bunch of slides with a lot of text that are based on stuff our lawyer sent us to give you information on the visa and border passals. So the U.S. absolutely depends on and welcomes foreign visitors. We actually have a lot of tourism in our budget, in our economy, especially in New York City. I think in 2007 there were like 46 million visitors to New York City, both domestic and foreign, over 8 million foreign visitors, about as many people as live in New York City. And you'll hear a lot of sort of anti-immigrant bashing in the political world in the U.S. It's really not how things work on the ground. People are, especially in places like New York, which are relatively cosmopolitan, you're very welcome to visit. And given that you're coming to tourists, the U.S. doesn't want you to overstay your visa, that's the main thing they're concerned about. If you can convince the U.S. that you're going to leave when your visa, before your visa expires, they're happy to let you in. We will do what we can to help. We don't have magic inside connections, but we'll provide a lot of instructions and support and answer questions. And we have volunteer attorneys, at least one we may expand the team, available to provide individual legal assistance, if necessary. So most attendees of DEBConf and most Debian developers should have no problem getting in. We checked the numbers of attendees by country for this conference, and out of about 200-ish attendees, maybe 33 would have needed a visa to come to the U.S. So we're definitely going to do our best to help everyone come, but either way, we'll be able to make the conference work. So from, I believe, 2007 to 2008, or I'm not sure exactly how the fiscal years work, but over a period of about a year recently, the U.S. granted over 35 million requests to come visit the U.S. And over 17.5 million were granted to the various countries that don't need a visa to visit the U.S. This number probably did not include Canada, which is a large chunk as well. So we'll provide an invitation letter, such as we usually do, but this one's actually written by our lawyer with some input from the rest of us and customized for each person. We'll provide an explanation of what sort of visas you need, mainly a business slash tourist visa, this attending a conference counts as business, and we'll provide help getting the application filled out if you need that sort of thing, including for the Visa Waiver program. So if you're from Mexico, Bermuda, or Canada, yes, Bermuda, there's special rules. Mexicans need a 10-year visa that many of them already have, and I've been told by Mexicans that it's actually pretty easy to get, but it's for multiple entry. You can just come as much as you want. It fits in your wallet like a credit card instead of a passport. Bermudans don't need a visa. I think that's at least if they're coming from Bermuda. And Canadian citizens don't need a visa either. Permanent residents are treated based on their... Permanent residents of Canada are treated based on their citizenship country, not based on Canada. So aside from Canada, there's 35 countries in the Visa Waiver program that makes them not need a visa for typical tourism stays. If you are a citizen, not a permanent resident, but a citizen of any of the 35 countries listed here, mostly in Europe, but also in other continents, you don't need a visa to come. And I have heard that Greece is likely to be added to this list by September. So there is a web form to fill out to get this, just like there is for people from several countries traveling to Australia. The US has it too now. It's a pretty simple form, pretty similar to the sort of thing that you'd fill out on the plane when entering any country. Eventually you won't have to do that if you fill out the web form, but you still right now have to do both. This valid for two years for as many trips as you want. So if you've done it recently enough within the past year, you don't need to do this again. And if you do it for DEBCOM 10, it's still valid for two years, not just for the conference trip. If you can do this apply now, you don't need to know the exact dates. You don't need to know the exact flight number. It's okay if you move later, you can update the info. It usually gives you an answer within minutes. If I need to think about it, you can get an answer within a few days. And if for some reason it doesn't work out, it doesn't mean you can't come, and that way there's plenty of time to apply for a visa. This is really not going to apply to many people. The vast majority of you will get approved very quickly and probably I'm hoping all of you. Do you need a visa? If you're not from one of the 35 countries or the US or Canada, yes. If you are in one of those countries, but the web form says no to you, then you can still apply for a visa, yes. You have to go to one of your local US consulate or embassies and have an interview after making an appointment. And you just have to convince them that you have some sort of residence abroad, with a lease or a mortgage, or just some place that you're living abroad that you actually plan to return to that you're not giving up, you're not going to stay beyond the visa, and will provide a letter that you can bring to the appointment so that they believe you about coming to the conference. They're just looking for proof you're not staying. So, again, a real estate holding like a lease or a mortgage helps. Bank records, like paystubs coming in from a job help. Maybe you've started a job recently, but being a student is not as persuasive and having family there is not as persuasive because, as I'm sure many of you know, we all travel all over the world while being students or while having just been students or having family in a country. Some embassies allow you to sort of temporarily lend the money to prove your intentions, but I don't know. If you need a visa, contact them to schedule an interview. Mostly the way times are reasonable, but not all of them. And we'll give you a letter to take to your interview. We have updated visa at depconf.org. No longer goes to Anto. Thank you for his work on depconf 9, but now it goes to our lawyer and me, currently, for an invitation letter. So the way times are available online. Apparently you can speed things up if you contact the embassy console directly, but here's a few way times. Apparently Baghdad, Iraq, has a way time of one day. This is news to me. There's a lot of other ones that are pretty quick. Some take two to four weeks, not so horrible. Can someone give him a microphone? In any case, there are some political exceptions. Even though it says Venezuela takes all about 240 days to get an appointment, we actually had a Venezuelan who got an appointment the week after he inquired. These are samples, and it can be longer or quicker. If you're from Havana, Cuba, or from Cuba in general, I'm amazed that we actually offer visas to Cubans, but I'm sorry it won't be in time for the conference, 795 days. Overall, if you're not from one of the few countries where there's weird political stuff, if you plan ahead, you'll be fine. Yeah, so book early. Usually it should be just a one appointment. If there's any sort of reconsideration necessary, just allow time for that, but it shouldn't really apply to many people. This is our lawyer, Frank Bynum. He's assisting us with the visa and border stuff. He's in the National Lawyers Guild's National Immigration Project. He came to a DevConf NYC key signing. He uses Debian and Ubuntu. He's a good guy. He will be in New York for the event. So look online first at our site and at other reputable government sites and things like that, and you can email that address, visaatdevconf.org. Given that I'm included in the mailing, the mail alias right now don't send legally privileged stuff, but don't include too many details. Just say who you are, say that you need assistance with the process, and Frank will contact you directly, confidentially via encrypted OpenPGP encrypted email. I signed his key. So, pre-clearance. If you're sort of a little unsure about your rights in front of U.S. immigration or just a little nervous about the process, if it's convenient for you, this might make you a little more comfortable. If you travel to the U.S. through most of the Canadian airports or a few in the Caribbean, or Shannon Airport in Ireland, and I think either now or very soon Dublin as well, U.S. officers do your immigration and customs while you're still in the foreign country, and then you land at a domestic terminal, maybe even a domestic airport like LaGuardia, and then you can get your bags and walk out. There's no more immigration at that point. So the nice thing about this is foreign law applies in general, like U.S. law doesn't. So that might make you feel more comfortable if you're familiar with your foreign law. At the same time, so the immigration officials can arrest you, but at the same time, you still have to satisfy the relevant entry requirements. That doesn't change. Any duties that apply for those things you're bringing in still apply. And they can still search and question you and deny you entry, but that's true for any immigration officials anywhere in the world. But you're still in the foreign country until you actually travel on the plane. So that's reassuring to some if it's convenient for you. I wouldn't really worry about it either way, but it's up to you. These are the airports where you can do that. You can't see the colors too much on the projector, but the upper two on the left column are Ireland. The lower four on the right column are the Caribbean, and the others are all in Canada. These slides are also going to be online, so you can look at it there in this version too. So regarding your passport, you do not need to have a passport with fingerprints. Make sure that your passport won't expire until at least six months after the conference. This matters more or less for different countries, different nationalities, but still do it. You need to have machine-readable passwords, but that doesn't mean the chip. Certain countries need a chip, such as the ones listed at the bottom. If they're coming in through the Visa Waiver program, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, the Republic of Korea, and the Slovak Republic. But in general, the machine-readable passport requirement is just the two lines with a sort of monospace block print, which is at the bottom of most of our passport pages, and has been for years. So unless you're going through a pre-clearance airport, you clear immigration and customs when you enter the US, not when you're done traveling. So if you fly into Atlanta, you clear it in Atlanta. If you fly into Los Angeles, you clear it in Los Angeles, and then you can get your bags, and then go in again and connect to your other flights. So it's simplest to just fly straight to New York if it works. There's a lot of direct flights. It should go pretty smoothly because you either have your Visa or you have your Visa Waiver authorization or you're Canadian or American, and it should be pretty smooth. We don't expect any problems at the border. If there are problems though, we do have our lawyer ready in New York as of the conference time to help if there are any issues that we really don't expect. So start soon with regard to that. And here are the credits for our pictures. A lot of them were taken by Mr. Bayes. Good work for him. All right, so questions and see you there. I'm sorry I didn't want to sound aggressive as I did when I interrupted. What I meant by those times are not true. Well, those are the advertised times to get a Visa interview. Depends a lot on too many factors. I know, I mean, for many people, that getting it in the wrong time of year can take, well, for Mexicans, can take weeks, although it's usually one day. So, well, whatever. The thing is, if you are from a country that requires a Visa, go apply for it as soon as possible. Most probably you will be processed soon, but who wants to gamble on it? Yeah, those are sample times. Those are not guaranteed minimum or maximum or average times, but it can be quicker or slower. So Gunnar is right. You can even do the web forum for the Visa waiver program soon. And actually on that note, if Steve McIntyre is in the audience, yep, at some point could someone give him the microphone because he agreed to say a few words about his experience filling out the web forum for a different trip to the US. So, at some point could someone give him a microphone to say about that. Where is he? That would work. Yeah. If you raise your hand, it would be helpful. Thanks. Yeah, just to confirm for Jimmy, filling in ASTI, ETSI, I can never remember which way round it is. ESTA, yeah. Yeah, the ESTA form took me two minutes. I'll be honest, I didn't even know about it in advance. A friend warned me that I should do it. It was well under the three days, and in fact I got a confirmation back in minutes that yeah, not a problem. I could travel to the US. I'm told that you should go through and make sure you update things like your flight details and your hotel address, that kind of thing for each trip. I've already gone in and done that for subsequent trip. Yeah, easy. It's, yeah, the updating things is recommended, but just like the 72-day advanced period is recommended, but it's actually not as important, but yes, do it if you can, yes. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, in fact, I was, this was right at the beginning of when the program came in, so I was asked again at the airport to fill in the green I-94W form as well, and the person on the desk at immigration, in fact, waved me through and said, yeah, whatever, it's fine. Yeah, yeah, the people at immigration are not out to stop you. They are not out to be rude to you, although they're sometimes not paid enough to be polite, but they're just real people too, and if you're nice to them and you do what they ask, they'll generally be nice to you to the extent that they are ever nice, you know what I'm saying, so just treat them as humans too. Yeah. I'm redirecting an RC question from the RC and he said, how many attendees are you expecting and if you expect to host all of them? We are... This was from Mr. Bage. Okay. We're expecting maybe about 400 to 600, we're hoping. I mean, there's no reason for it to be smaller than Edinburgh because there's a lot of pent-up demand in the US. A lot of US people don't get to Europe or South America very easily and it hasn't happened there and there's a huge number of people who use Debian who are involved in Debian and as for hosting them, yeah, we can host several hundred in the dorms. Some will want to use external lodging or will be local. Yeah, I think we can manage that. If capacities go way, way high, we'll see about how we want to sort of allocate our sponsored resources, but I think it shouldn't be much of an issue. I seriously suggest that if you are expecting that much interest, limiting the amount of people by setting a maximum number should be achieved because this is mostly a social thing to get to know people and I would not be so interested in attending something with 500 people as something this size. We are totally fine with setting a maximum on either total attendance or sponsored lodging or sponsored food. It's definitely something we've thought about. It's just something we could discuss. Totally, it's an option. Any other questions? There's one? No? Where? No. Okay, thank you all for coming. I hope you all come next year. Enjoy the... Oh, yes. We've given out a bunch of these promotional cards. We encourage you to pick one up and show it to people and get them excited and hopefully we'll see you all next year in New York. Enjoy the rest of the conference this year. Mr. Abish. Yeah, hello. Hi, in our New York City, Mr. Abish do funny questions. I don't know. The question was... Oh, yeah. What will you do to prevent people from using DevCamp to get a free New York vacation with only minor Debian work? I don't know. How do you prevent that? Same as every other year. If they're coming for DevCamp, they need to give a sponsored... They need to give a work plan. If they're coming for anything else, they need to pay for their own travel unless we sponsored them with the usual methods of deserving people. It's nothing different than any other year. Any more questions? And next up, one more. So in terms of the dates, you suggest sometime between mid-June and mid-August? It'll definitely be in that range. From what I've heard, the engineering school would likely find it easy to accommodate us in late June or July, but the housing is also a consideration. And thank you for reminding me. I will pull up the website. And we actually already have devcomp10.devcomp.org with lots of information. It has a practical information page. And most of the other pages, there's our logo. There's a nice background. Thank you for Wouter and Daniel Silverstone for helping make the background. And under practical information, you can see the temperatures for June, July and August. Average low, average high. The average lows in Celsius range from 17 to 20 degrees. The average highs in Celsius range from 26 to 29 degrees. What did you have a specific question about with it? Yeah, can I be cheeky and try and push through as early as possible so it fits my vacation plans? Oh, you don't have any more questions. We are finished with this talk and this talk will be about hardware design with Debian. Thank you for coming.