Comments on: The Punch Line Goes at the End

By: Blake

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By: mordaxus

mordaxus — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 23:10:35 +0000

@SM: I have to disagree, because what I am advocating is a showmanship of hyperbolic understatement. If the largest hall in Caesar’s were booked for an hour and a half, and the session notes said that in this talk, Dan Kaminsky will read from the Las Vegas telephone book, then I would be sure to go. It wouldn’t take many of those for people to know what it meant. This talk is likely to offend someone in the establishment.
@PHB: History tells us that the amount of publicity to be gained is maximized when you quit your job to give a talk. The counter-balance of that is that if your talk is canceled and you just let it be canceled, then it’s quickly forgotten. There are several canceled talks of the last few years I barely remember.
The MIT kids were fortunate enough to have a weekend injunction. If they withdrew a month before, we’d not have noticed, especially since there was little truly new research there. It was interesting, but we’d seen Mifare breaks before.

By: Anon

Anon — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 22:16:23 +0000

There is an alternate lesson to be had here:
If you work for a big company who might be pressured into making you cancel your presentation, ask the Black Hat organizers to list you under a pseudonym.
I suppose the MBTA could have issued a Temporary Restraining Order against John Doe(s), but they would have had to force Defcon to reveal the true names of the students — which would have taken time, and would have likely not worked in time to halt the presentation.

By: PHB

PHB — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 19:06:00 +0000

Amateurs!
The real security professional knows that the amount of publicity to be gained from giving any talk at a conference is really quite small while the publicity to be gained from not being allowed to give a talk is huge.

By: Steven Murdoch

Steven Murdoch — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 05:12:37 +0000

All good points, but one thing that comes to mind is that showmanship is necessary before the talk. Firstly you need to get the talk accepted, and secondly you need people to come to your talk. A exciting title and promise of a dramatic demo go a long way in achieving both of these. You may also be interested in Juniper's take on things: http://forums.juniper.net/t5/The-Network-Ahead/Juniper-s-Decision-To-Postpone-Jackpotting-Automated-Teller/ba-p/21940 I wonder what sort of timescale they are really thinking of. The ATM industry moves at a glacial rate (e.g. they are still working on a decade old project to migrate single DES to 3DES, in some areas). There are some good reasons for the slow rate of fixing things, but they also do it because they can get away with it.