“We were promised a future steeped in 1970s psychedelic fever dreams,” a man once 
complained to me, “But all we have gotten is more impressive smart phones, and 
slightly faster internet.”

It is true that the world of Defcon 30 has not measured up to the worlds presented
in the novels of the 1970s that we still consider to be the paragons of science 
fiction. Disease still exists, and there are no flying cars. For all that we 
haven’t gotten, the world has certainly changed. I first started attending Defcon 
when I was fourteen years old at Defcon 9, and attended through Defcon 12. These 
were the golden years at the AP, the years of Defcon still whispered in reverence 
today. At that time, the con was much smaller, peaking at less than ten thousand 
people. The lock pick village was a small room off the side of the lounge. Wifi 
was a new thing, and people were just wising up to the idea that their passwords 
could be snatched out of thin air and pasted to the wall on paper plates.

I returned eight years later, at Defcon 20. I expected to return home, but instead 
found myself a stranger in a strange land. The lock pick village had expanded from 
a small room to a sub con in its own right. The Wall of Sheep not only projected 
sniffed passwords, but held contests, and had corporate sponsorship. The con was 
much larger, boasting over twenty thousand attendees. The parties had gone from 
catastrophic events in hotel rooms, to massive spectacles out of Hollywood movies. 
As I returned, I had to find my place in a world that I still fundamentally 
understood, but had changed tectonically.

It is through those eyes, that I look at the world of Defcon 30. Today the con is 
so damned big, we no longer fit in one hotel, and we take over a section of the 
Las Vegas Strip. I walk down the hall, past the line for the talk on AI systems for
monitoring phone lines entitled “Skynet is in my Phone!” The people in the line are
so young, I can barely remember what is was like to be one of them. The culture is 
different too. The custom wearable tech I am wearing, photographic glasses designed 
to resemble Spider Jerusalem’s glasses from “Transmetropolitain,” barely raised an 
eyebrow here. Even five years ago, blatant wearable tech would have gotten you 
kicked out of the con. Today attendees are building it for a contest in the hardware
hacking village. 

I turn the corner, and wander into the HHV to view the progress of the contest. The 
3D printers hum along, and the smell of burnt solder wafts through the air. In one 
area, a former machinist rubs his brow as he tries to explain to a noob why the 
aging delta bot he chose to work with cannot use the new silicon printing material 
that was released in the last year. A team walks by, whispering that a team 
affiliated with UCSC finally broke the last of the engineering barriers to print a 
heads up display in contact lenses, and that they should have the lenses done by the
end of con.

The save the world types are mostly gathered in the biohacking contest. The theme 
this year is “Pimp my GMO!” The idea is to create a genetically modified food on the
fly that can be grown quickly to rapidly address the famines that have become all 
too common with climate change. I don’t really understand any of what they are doing,
all I know is that it involves chemicals and stuff. The way that they talk about 
their work though, makes you think that they will be able to turn a dream of flying 
into a reality.

Defcon parties keep getting bigger too. The big one this year based on the talk seems
to be the Dr.Ink party, even if some people seem weirded out by the group’s constant 
dong related themes. The challenges to enter it are unusual to say the least, rumor 
is that for one part you need to build a robot out of scrap found around the con to 
fight one of the organizer’s robots. In some ways, I am surprised that robot 
fighting never became a thing at con. That said, I grew up in a different time than 
many of the attendees, many of today’s attendees would probably argue that a mass 
robot fighting competition would violate the robot’s rights. Some would make the 
argument for laughs, others would make it in all seriousness. It seems weird to think 
that making a robot who was built for, and literally knows nothing other than, 
fighting robots would have its rights violated by letting it fight. A more serious 
culprit for the lack of an appetite for robot fights would probably be US drone 
strike policy making the threat of killer robots hunting humans all too real.

We did try though. I walk through the main thoroughfare, and see the memorial poster
on the site of where the famous Mechagoon robot went down fighting to save several DC 
groups from the CIA’s dactylmen. Even today, every time the feds made inroads to 
stabilizing relations with the hacker community, they would inevitably foul it up. 
Nothing has changed since Keith Alexander blatantly lied at a keynote speech and the 
Snowden leaks. And sadly, that part will probably never change.

While everyone knows not to drink anything that did not come sealed, or that they 
saw served up themselves, the same lesson is being learned about vaping juice. Vaping 
became a big thing around 2012, to the point there had even been an infosec blowhards 
meet up at Defcon since Defcon 22. At Defcon 25, for the first time someone brought 
LSD laced vaping juice, and dosed a significant portion of the con. On a positive 
note, they all loved the Black and White Ball that year. It was a sad reminder that 
for all that we do not trust the feds, we should count on our own to make bad 
decisions too. 

Today CTF sits on the verge of becoming a professional sport. This year, there are no
less than three divisions for CTF, divided by skill and age breakdowns. CTF teams 
had always been sponsored by schools and agencies, that much was always known. At 
Defcon 27, we saw the first time a consortium of corporate interests hired a team to 
be full time professional CTFers. Now there are eight official professional CTF teams
around the world, ranging from the Western USA Developers, to the Japanese ATX ProCTF 
team. They compete in the professional tier, while the amateur tier consists of 
veteran pentesters and intel agents aiming for a shot at the pros, and everyone else
is relegated to OpenCTF.

The part of con that has probably changed the most is the lockpicking village. 
Entering the lock picking village, I see almost no picks out, or for sale. At least 
not what we would have recognized as picks ten years ago. 3D printing completely 
changed a sport that had not changed for hundreds of years. The biggest innovation 
for lock picking was the 3D printing pen. They first showed up in 2013 as a novelty,
but they continued to evolve over time, and with time improved in both extruded 
material quality and resolution detail. And now, I am standing in front of a kid who
is involved in the impressioning challenge who is quite literally sketching the key 
she needs to open a lock into reality. Imagine that, literally drawing in the air, 
and having the key you need appear before you. I’m watching it happen now, and can 
barely believe it. Not everyone is happening about it, the contest organizer is 
sitting in the judge’s chair muttering about “these kids running on easy mode, how 
will they ever become MFPs this way?”

Not all is sunshine and daisies. There are several talks about “The Trial.” Mention 
the trial to anyone at con and they will not have to ask which one you are talking 
about. A year and a half ago, there was a new product released via crowdfunding, the
Mlink. The Mlink was a convergence of man machine interface technology and good old
fashioned IRC. I myself funded it thinking that it would be hilarious to think dick 
and fart jokes at my friends directly from anywhere. Because of course hackers would
use technologically assisted telepathy for dick and fart jokes, they are funny, and 
we love them. There were the standard fears of course, that someone would be able to
tap into Mlink signals and use the technology to monitor our minds. What we did not 
see coming was what the Eastern USA ProCTF team, The Warlocks, would do with the 
Mlink.

In order to gain a competitive advantage over the other teams, The Warlocks, decided
to modify the Mlink. The idea was to make transmission faster, so that rather than 
just being able to use it to mentally send messages to each other, they would 
effectively know what everyone else on the team was thinking at all times. 
The Warlocks forgot the cardinal rule of QA, never put test code on a production 
server. They did not have time to test out the modifications to the Mlink before con, 
and did not realize that they had removed key safeties. The result was catastrophic. 
They merged over the Mlink into a hivemind. By the end of the week of competition, 
the individual members were no more, there was just one entity with 20 bodies. The 
new hivemind entity called itself The Warlock.

The Warlock was without a doubt the greatest hacker to ever hack, and was unstoppable. 
As always, the devil was in the details. It turned out that two of the team members 
had serious reservations about using the modified Mlink systems, and had been forced
to use them against their will by their fellow team members. Now the families of 
those two team members are suing to attempt to have those two team members separated
from The Warlock. The Warlock adamantly opposes these demands, arguing that it is 
effectively a demand for The Warlock’s murder, and threatening to destabilize global
systems in order to defend The Warlock’s right to exist. 

Reaction worldwide was swift and panicked. Government agencies had no clue how to 
handle this, no law on record even considered the possibility of a hivemind entity, 
much less forced integration into it, or if a hivemind had the right to exist. Other
agencies considered The Warlock a threat to national security that needed to be 
neutralized regardless. Rouge actors wanted to gain access to the modified Mlink 
technology in order to create weponized hiveminds to threaten their enemies. 
Transhumanist cults have begun to spread across the world, worshiping The Warlock as
some kind of messiah. Even The Warlock is afraid of the nutjobs that believe that 
joining The Warlock is their path to peace and salvation and desire to become one 
with The Warlock with or without The Warlock’s consent. 

For all the wonders at Defcon this year, it will be the debate over The Warlock that
defines Defcon 30. Sadly this is a symptom of graver issues within our community. We
focus so much on the negative, and neglect our wonders and accomplishments. The AP
was nearly two decades ago, I still have a friend who talks about his regrets about 
thinking he was “too baller” to stay there. I still mention the regrets I harbor 
over my eight year absence due to being too busy working, or being too drunk to 
attend con. We have accomplished wonders, and yes, The Warlock Trial matters, we 
shouldn’t focus on it above everything else. Look around. The world got weird, and we
were too busy focusing on our dramas to notice. We got the future promised by the 
psychedelic fever dreams of the Seventies, we were too busy making it seem normal. As
I end this dispatch from Defcon 30, I ask of you, my reader, one thing – Stop taking
things so damned seriously, revel in what we have accomplished, and keep breaking 
stuff so we can push the limits of what is possible.

-Heretek, Defcon 30, August 2022