[tacostakohashi]

I went to HOPE a few weeks ago, after having been to such things before, but not for a few years.

I had exactly the same impression - mostly a lifestyle / social / political thing, pretty light on in the way of talks with actual technical detail. Kind of like TED talks - well presented, entertaining, but not really actionable.

In years gone by, I went to some excellent events, with talks on really specific, useful things (kernel internals, gdb use, ELF dynamic loading, ltrace / strace use, that kind of thing). Can't help but wonder if those sorts of conferences still exist, or the whole scene has changed into something less practical and more lifestyle.

[stephancoral]

What talks did you attend at HOPE? There were tons of hard technical presentations. The two guys who cracked the Iridium satellite network in particular were amazing, going into deep detail on the techniques and methods used to decode the frequencies. The talk on medical device hacking was also awesome - I mean they showed you how to get on a radiology machine and other exploits. And after I saw the talk on hacking your cars internal computer I was able to go home and start futsing around with that stuff on my garage (after buying some hardware).

Maybe they don't do a lot of talks on the intricacies of C anymore (which is a bummer) but there is still a lot of technical knowledge going down at these events. I had s great time and learned so much

[tacostakohashi]

Saw the Iridium guys, agree they were great. Also, this guy's talk was superb:

https://xi.hope.net/schedule.html#-coding-by-voice-with-open...

There was definitely some good stuff, just seemed to me that overall, the mix of practical/technical vs cultural/lifestyle/political at events like this has changed a lot over the years. Either that, or my perception has changed, it's hard to tell.

[icpmacdo]

Iridium satellite network Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvKaC4pNvck

[wcummings]

Get-drunk-in-shitty-hotel-con isn't really about the talks, it's about goofing off in NYC w/ friends from IRC.

[nxzero]

Events are just mainstream now; unless there's a chance the FBI is going do a raid, likely nothing you're not going to hear about a day later on the net.