 So welcome. This is the 25th anniversary of DEF CON. I am the dark tangent. Started this 25 years ago. And this is the welcoming session. So with that, welcome to DEF CON 25. Very good. So with that said, I have now welcomed you. Goodbye. I want to just kind of, I want to see by a show of hands, how many people is this a first year kind of deal? Okay, right on. So normally we do a session that's like a normal session called welcome to DEF CON. And it's about 45 minutes and we talk about history and we cover a lot of ground. And I usually do that with Lost Boy. And so we have a couple different perspectives. But he couldn't make it this year. So it's just me. And so I'm going to reduce my time. I'm down to 20 minutes. I'm against Gary Kasparov, which is kind of a hard, hard guy to be against. So I'm going to just kind of go a little bit over our history, kind of how we got here and where I think we're going. And give you just a couple pointers on how to get the most out of the con. So I sort of act as the conductor. The con around DEF CON 3 got so large. I have no idea what's happening at my own con. Awesome stuff was happening at DEF CON 3. And I heard about it like on IRC a week later. And I felt, at first I felt really bummed like, I don't even know what's happening in my own home. Maybe I shouldn't let it, maybe we shouldn't grow anymore. I feel left out of my own thing. And then I realized, no, that's a good thing. We need this thing to be growing and things to be happening and side stories and secret stories and secret parties. And so then I just embraced that it was going to grow and I wasn't going to be able to control it. The best I could be was sort of like a conductor trying to steer traffic. And from that first year we had about 100 people. And now I think this year we're about 23,000. 24,000. And it is crazy. Like never in my wildest dreams I never thought we'd do a second DEF CON. And it just, you know, it's got this gravity and this kind of inertia. But it's also got all this energy. And every one of us that organized it asked a red shirt after CON, we are just exhausted. We are drained. And it's always like all these resignations come in at the end. Like, I quit. This sucks. And then about a month later they're like, I could do better next year. You know, we could do this again. And that's like this emotional roller coaster we all go on. And so we all hide and then we start planning on how to make it better. And so it's like this, I don't see that stopping. If anything it just seems to be getting, you know, bigger. And when we started small it was all word of mouth. And remember there was no real internet and no Amazon or Google or, you know, not even Alta Vista. So you couldn't find information on anything. It was all word of mouth or it was like text files, bulletin boards and the early days, you know, IRC. So we didn't advertise. It just wasn't a culture of advertising. And so we just cast a really wide net. Hackers, freakers, privacy advocates. And so we just sort of invited everybody who was interested in this tech. And I think that's why we ended up with such a broad section of people attending. I think that also turned out to be one of our strengths. I'd like to say it was by design and I was a mastermind. But it just sort of happened to be the right move. And then also when we started there were some other pre-existing hacking cons which were great. There was SummerCon in Atlanta held in the summer. There was Ho Ho Con held in the winter. And then there was PumpCon that was just starting held at Halloween. And so when I started DefCon and they were invite only. When I started DefCon it was like, fuck this invite only stuff. Like everybody's invited. Not realizing what road that takes you down. Because once you make that decision, that fork in the road of you're not limiting attendance, you know, certain avenues are closed off to you. But I thought that that was probably the better way to go. Because in Vegas, unlike New York or San Francisco, you actually have to want to get here. I mean, you're in the middle of the desert. There's no hacking community in Las Vegas. So you had to care enough to get on an airplane, fly to Las Vegas. And that acted as this natural like geographic filter. Only those who sort of cared enough came. And maybe that's changed as we've grown up and we've gotten more money. But still to this day, you know, there's a little bit of commitment. It's not like just getting on a train in New York and going downtown or, you know, in San Francisco hopping on Bart. So there is a little bit of effort involved. And that word of mouth, I still don't advertise. It's just, if people want to tell their friends, that's the best advertising in the world. And really, if I take a full page ad out in the newspaper, do I really want those people to show up? You know, it's just, so I'd like to say that was also a brilliant marketing move, but that's because really, I had no money. And then the big turning point I think for us as a culture is a community was the dot com, the first dot com crash. And this was really, for me, the inflection point. We went from hackers with a passion. This is our hobby. This is what we love to do. And then all of a sudden money came along. Jobs came along. Because if you needed to secure your shit online, who do you turn to? Well, we were the only game in town pretty much. So we all got jobs. And I remember there was one DEF CON where people were talking about their incentive stock options and what kind of, and it was like the conversation just changed. And really what happened there is we had to go from being creatively, independently creative on our own whim to being professionally creative. Now it's your job. Now it's your career. You don't get to tinker when you feel like it. You got to get up in the morning and do this professionally. And that was a big change. And I think that was sort of what happened during the counter cultural music revolution in say San Francisco. You know, imagine that you're jamming out in the audience, I mean in a warehouse with an audience that they just love you. And then all of a sudden these people flying with jets with all this money and they say Europe wants to hear you. You know, East Coast wants to hear you. You're a big star. Let's get your music out. And the musicians are like, hell yeah, I want to rock out London. I want to do Paris. And next thing you know, it changes, right? You're not in the warehouse in San Francisco. You're all over the world. And we went through that I think during the dot com revolution. And now we're in this sort of steady state. We've been around for a while. We've gotten through our teething period. And now here we are, 25 years, silver anniversary. And we've got a community now that we've built by word of mouth and by sort of an inclusive atmosphere. And now instead of people coming to us really with a lot of money and jobs trying to say we need your help, it's starting to be what we do really influences society. Like, we're actually becoming more important. Policy people are listening to us. Companies want our advice. People are embedding things in pacemakers and ATMs and automobiles and it's no longer kind of ha ha ha. It's, we collectively are the people that are going to be securing, you know, the next 50 years of technology for, if not the country, the world. So in the back of my mind it's like, well, it's just a party and we're just a fun community. And then the other part of my brain is saying, well, yeah, but what we're doing actually has consequence. And how cool is that? We get to have fun and be consequential. Who else gets to say that, right? We're in a really unique period in history where acknowledged, we don't, we have full employment for life unless we fix it. And every day there's a new challenge. And so I just want to say that, you know, we're going to be really close to these levers of power, levers of creating default permissions. Are we going to be secure by default or insecure by default? We're going to be in that room when those decisions are made. So just don't give yourself less credit than it's due. Like, you're going to be influential. And hopefully through DEF CON you're going to meet other people and we're going to kind of hopefully learn that nobody, no one person is going to solve these problems. No one person is going to hack everything, right? We've got to make friends and it's really a balance of social and technical. And in the early days I was all about the technical because that's where I came from. So it's like better talks, more people. And I really judged how the conference was going based on how many people were in a room, how many people showed up, what the killer talks were. And as time went on I realized that and I was really worried that video conferencing was going to kill the conference world. And I realized no, as video conferencing got better and bandwidth was increasing, more and more people were still coming to the conference because it was a human interaction. It was a social component that you couldn't transmit. That's what people were responding to. It actually was that the talks were the secondary thing and the social was a primary thing. So we really tried to balance out the two. And by doing that, as I said, it's conference is too big. We can't track it all. So instead I turned into sort of like a landlord. And my strategy was I'll give you enough rope to hang yourself with your contest or your event. You get one free try. If you convince us you've got an idea and if people respond to it, you can try again. But if you really screw up, we're taking your space away and we're giving it to someone else. And then it really became about seeing what the community comes up with, seeing what you guys are doing. And we've gotten the, you know, it started with the hardware hacking village and the lock pick village. Now we have a car hacking village where they're giving away a vehicle, biohacking where they're trying to go to a vet and inject themselves with things. You know, we have a, I'm wearing this shirt, our democracy has been hacked from the Mr. Robot shirt from the voting machine village hacking contest we're doing and this track we're doing this year. Well, that didn't exist until it was an idea of like four months ago. So we're going to be a platform for hacking anything we can get our hands on. And we don't have to hack it right and we don't have to hack it perfect. Let's just hack on it and figure it out and pass on what we learn. And so when you're walking around, remember you're going to get a lot out of this conference by just even just the social aspects. And so I don't feel hurt anymore when people say, oh, I'm not going to go to any talks. HollowayCon is where it's at. Like, that's cool. LionCon, BarCon, PoolCon, I don't care. It's just important that, you know, that we are here meeting our peers and having a beer, right? So some of the things we do every year is I'm a big believer in sharing the knowledge. And so that's also because I grew up kind of as a software pirate. So I try to carry that forward. So we release all of our talks, all of our materials, everything's for free in case you didn't know. We take a couple months. We did this English captioning. One year, somebody that was hearing impaired wanted to come. And because of the ADA, you're required by law to do that. But it also seems like a really good thing to do, just make it more accessible. And so we hired a sign language interpreter and the person didn't show up. So I've got the sign language. And you can't hire just one sign language interpreter. You need two because they have to take a rest in between. They get burned out. So then I thought, okay, why don't I just caption it for everybody? And then people can run this through translators and maybe they can translate it into different languages. And now all of a sudden I can share these talks to everybody because now there's this metadata. And then it turns out California passes a law saying that you can't use any talks or materials in the universities unless there's a second audio program or a transcription. So as more and more states go that way, what do you know? Our talks are going to be able to be used in universities. And so I'll always try to do things and spend money to try to make talks more accessible. So for example, this year, all the villages that are having talks were recording because, you know, you could argue, well, you don't have to come to DEF CON. We're streaming two tracks. We're going to give everything away. Why show up? I'm fine with that. I'm just trying to get the information out there because I want us, I just want more of us. So with that said, I want you to, you know, enjoy. We've got live music tonight. Silver anniversary. We've got some secrets. We've got some challenges. And I'm just really proud of how far we've come. And I just want to welcome you all. And if you have any questions, ask anybody. Win a red shirt. Give us feedback because we live on feedback. Feedback at DEF CON.org. And then afterwards, a lot of times people go to the forums, forum.deafcon.org. And we do this sort of after action report where everybody bitches about what went wrong and how we can make it better. And we actually have giant lists of everything that went wrong. And we come up with a plan on, like, can we fix it or can we not fix it, you know. And that's how we kind of just iterate year after year. So with that said, thank you very much. Thanks for listening to me. And have a great con.