Forwarded from: The LayerOne Staff @ layerone.info How Tom's Hardware Guide Got It All Wrong There's that well worn saying that declares "There's no such thing as bad press." After seeing all the traffic that Tom's Hardware Guide drove to the LayerOne site yesterday, we'd almost be ready to agree. We pulled in almost 6000 unique visitors yesterday. That's four times the amount of traffic we picked up from a mention on Slashdot the day before. To be honest, anyone should be satisfied with this sort of buzz. We know we are. But we're also disappointed with the reasons why people are flocking to the site. The article [1] on Tom's Hardware Guide, borders on sensationalist journalism. Despite having things clarified to the author in both public and private forums, the article still ran with a slew of half-truths and included events that were altogether unrelated to the conference. The first and perhaps most distressing portrayal that the article made is that LayerOne is yet another hacker conference. While it's nice to be listed amongst the ranks of Defcon and Toorcon, we've strived really hard to make LayerOne it's own beast. Sure the inspiration for LayerOne came from ToorCon, but we also pulled ideas and inspiration from events like CodeCon and O'Reilly's Emerging Tech. As Danny O'Brien said in the intro to NTK's NotCon the weekend prior to LayerOne, the whole idea of the conference was to "cross the streams". After hearing Justin Mason say that he picked up a few good ideas for Spamassassin while talking with some folks at the conference we knew we were on to something. In fact we think there's a new breed of conferences on the horizon. One where open source coders can mingle with the people who look for security vulnerabilities. One where spam fighters can mingle with biology majors to go off on the tangent of treating junk email as a virus. One where people who want to take a look at the amazing new stuff people are working on but can't justify paying $1000 a head to do so. That was the whole concept for LayerOne: Make it cool. Encourage growth and exploration. Keep it cheap. We think we're on our way to doing that - but being dismissed as a hacker con sort of takes the wind our of our sails. Now, before we lose focus on why we're here we have a few more reflections on the THG article that we found to be less than pleasing. To his merit, the author does a moderately decent job converting three talks into Reader's Digest style summaries. Only towards the end of Dan Kaminsky's talk does he overreach a bit by trying to draw a dotted line between the Akamai DNS outage on June 16th, 2004 to Dan's talk. Dan hasn't released any of the tools used in his talk yet, and if one actually sat in on his talk you'd know the last thing any of the tools could be used for would be to launch a Denial of Service attack. Even if the author didn't make that claim outright, he seemed to make an affront to something sinister. Finally, to clarify some things, the Irvine Underground party where there was apparently a wrestling match between attendees was not a sanctioned LayerOne event. We had no altercations between attendees at the actual conference, but we didn't really expect any either. Even though the author claims that we may never know why the hotel's fire alarm was tripped twice on Sunday the answer is actually simple; A piece of paper had fallen over on the exhaust vent on the hotel's sauna. It wasn't any malicious hackers or miscreant kids causing trouble as the author suggests. It was a piece of paper and some wind. This was also explained to the author but he seemed to not report it. I guess the truth is boring. Still, the saddest part of all of this is the author seems to have a thing for blowing things out of proportion. He said "The rumors will morph into something outrageous by next year." in a public forum [2] as if it were some sort of consolation. The author of the article seems to think that spreading rumors and disinformation will actually do us some sort of favor. If that was the type of event we were trying to put on, perhaps it would assist us in some way. But we're not looking for those types of favors, nor are we attempting to address the crowd he seems to think we are. We thank you for taking the time out of your busy day to give us a few minutes to set things straight. Your Servants, The LayerOne Staff [1] http://www.tomshardware.com/business/20040622/index.html [2] http://forum.defcon.org/showpost.php?p=46982&postcount=12 _________________________________________ ISN mailing list Sponsored by: OSVDB.org - For 15 cents a day, you could help feed an InfoSec junkie! (Broke? Spend 15 minutes a day on the project!)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Jun 25 2004 - 07:48:49 PDT