“They say if you build a better mouse trap, people will come. But how will people come if they don't know if the better mouse trap exist?”
As a group who is part of hacker culture we constantly struggle with the concept of being public and respecting privacy. In order to let people know that they can meet up with amazing hackers and makers from New Jersey, we have to put ourselves out there and let it be known that we exist.
Therefore, it is our mission to reach out on the internet in both expected and unorthodox ways.
This post will be a highlight of our current footprint on the world wide web. We will be listing all the ways you can hear from us at DEFCON 201 and note that we are constantly looking into new ways to reach out to people using technology.
— DEFCON 201 WEBSITE —
This is the glue that connects all of our various internet shenanigans together. Our homepage has been coded to the best of our ability to be accessed by everyone, no matter if they are on a desktop or on a mobile device. Everything you need to know such as how to get to our meet ups, highlights from our own Members, links to our activities and more. (We even have a cool table to catch up onto various cryptocurrency!)
Not only are we constantly adding things to improve the usability of the current website (our Medium Blog will be integrated soon) but in the near future there will be a Terminal Version, a WEP version and a .onion mirror. And yes, we will always be SSL compliant!
— DEFCON 201 FORUMS —
As a official DEFCON group, we also have a subsection on the DEFCON Website Forums! We are slowly getting more people on there to interact with and a lot of planning for DEFCON 26 will be announced and worked on there.
— DEFCON 201 RIOT.IM —
Riot.IM is our main real-time communications platform outside of IRC. In short, Riot.IM is to DEFCON as Slack is to Black Hat USA. We love that it does all the stuff we need it to do PLUS open source and can run on various Linux Platforms, MacOS, Windows, Android, iOS, all web browsers and even on f-Droid! You may notice we have no link to our .matrix chat for Riot.IM; that is because the DEFCON 201 Riot is ONLY for those who sign up to our mailing list which is only available at our meet ups. We are not trying to be the next Masters of Deception or ClownSec, we are simply trying to make sure that our most talkative dedicated members are in our chat. We are constantly working on the code for it (see below) and when Riot.IM has its encryption sorted out we will turn that on too!
— DEFCON 201 TWITTER—
Our Twitter has a ton of up to date information second only to our Medium blog. We interact a lot with the Hacker, Maker and InfoSec community on this platform. Retweeting tons of news worthy posts, in humor jokes and up to the second information as our events unfold! Even if you do not have an account, you do not want to miss this!
— DEFCON 201 FACEBOOK —
Despite it being a big brother in of itself and is famous for selling our lives for advertisement dollars, there is no denying how big of a social platform Facebook is. Besides, as Lord Nikon said “Snoop on to them, as they snoop on to us!”
Every single DEFCON 201 event have Facebook Event Pages. Plus we chat, share major news articles and occasionally, get a preview of something that is coming up.
— DEFCON 201 GITHUB —
From the coding of our website, programs examined by our lightning talks and community projects we are working on, our GitHub repo stores it all. Similar to our Riot.IM, while you can fork our code to directly edit and modify the repo itself you must be part of the DEFCON 201 Mailing List which is only offered in person at our meetings. Again, it’s not because we are 1337, it ensures that only people we trust who have a huge passion for these projects are the ones working on it. Come to one of our meet ups one day and get on our list to start coding!
— DEFCON 201 QUITTER —
At DEFCON 201, we always try to practice what we preach. While some of our platforms might not have millions of users, they do align up with our core values of free speech, open source and privacy values that reach people we normally do not get on other platforms. Our GNUsocial platform of choice is the Norway instance of Quitter and highlights from our major announcements PLUS some exclusive content are posted on there.
— DEFCON 201 MASTODON —
If you like to get involved in an open source platform but with designed by GUI-heads, DEFCON 201 is also on Mastodon. Hosted on the Hostux instance for it’s off shore servers and pro-privacy background, similar content on Quitter is also mirrored on our Mastodon including unique re-tusks(?) from people on the platform.
— DEFCON 201 HACKADAY —
We have a great partnership with the fine folks at Hackaday so obviously we have a group page there! Think of it as similar to GitHub but instead of just code you can also list your Hardware projects too. There is also a dedicated community we reach out to with our own unique posts including some mirrored from our Medium blog. Keep up to date with all of our future community projects at the page above!
— DEFCON 201 MAKER SHARE —
Similar to Hackaday, Maker Share is a community made by Make Magazine to create a portfolio for one’s projects to be shown to the world. Until Maker Share allows for group creation, we have a page to show off our cool Community Projects mirrored from our Hackaday.
— DEFCON 201 MINDS.COM —
Minds.com is an interesting new open source platform where you get to create your own social media network! Not only that but you can donate to us in Bitcoin and other legal tenders to help us with our Community projects and our causes! Much of our content is mirrored from our Medium Blog but we also post exclusive content for members from time to time. Donate on our page and join our group! If you don’t have a Minds.com account, join up with the link below for FREE and for FREE Minds.com will reward us with some cold hard cash to get our open source, hacker ethos projects a kick start:
— — — — — —
Thank you for joining in! If you ever want to contact us directly NOT on Social Media you can either join us on FREENODE (SSL or on Tor) at our #DEFCON201 channel or rely on good old email (Sidepocket and/or GI Jack can exchange GPG keys by request) at:
INFO {at} DEFCON201 [dot] ORG
We are also researching other cool ways to interact with technology and let us know if there is something we should look into. (Except for Gab.ai, we did look into but…well…look at it…)
— Sidepocket, Co-Founder of DEFCON 201
