Hacker Conventions Ranked By Bandwidth-Per-Visitor

An Anonymous Coward writes "Ever wondered how much bandwidth you will get at a hacker con? This web page tells you how much. It shows the total bandwidth and bandwidth for each visitor for all the recent hacker cons." It looks like Defcon attendees get the short end of the stick, while those at metarheinmain chaosdays are practically swimming in bandwidth. There are a lot of other cons (a few examples listed here) which I'd like to see added to this list.

Comments

I don't get it.

[SoapBox17]

Color me stupid, but I don't understand why anyone would care how much bandwidth per atendee is available at a hacker convention. You don't got to *do* hacking, you go to learn about hacking from people in the same building (thus requiring little to no B/W). And from what I have heard about Defcon you are best to not bring any of your own devices at all, lest you end up hacked yourself and on the wall of shame.

Re:I don't get it.

[wik]

Put another way, the bisection bandwidth between participants at a decent conference should be high. The bandwidth external to the conference really shouldn't matter.

There are much better ways to get an internet connection which don't involve spending hundreds of dollars to get into a hotel.

Re:I don't get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't got to *do* hacking, you go to learn about hacking from people in the same building (thus requiring little to no B/W).

I don't really know about American hacker conferences, as I've never been to one, but from what I've heard about American hacker culture, it seems that you're projecting its integration into commerce onto the rest of the world.

Visit a European hacker conference, you'll see that there's a lot of hacking going on at the conference. Also, the ideology of free flow of information is considered very important, which includes lots of Internet for everyone. This probably is why conferences are planned in a way that there'll be gigabit Internet uplinks (or at least tens of megabits at camps).

SIGGRAPH

[morrison]

It'd be interesting to see the bandwidth statistics for the annual ACM SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference. With tens of thousands of visitors and thousands of full-conference attendees (a huge portion of which are on their laptops all week), I've yet to see a SIGGRAPH conference that didn't bring a convention center's networking to its knees (as well as most surrounding hotel networks). Of course, the per-person bandwidth is relatively low with so many users, but it would be interesting to see the statistics throughout the week regardless.

Especially for such a massive conference that is accustomed to the sustained high-tech audio/video load and with organizers that try to anticipate the high-usage (and have a corresponding budget to prepare), I suspect that there are considerably more bits transferred during SIGGRAPH than most any other conference through sheer size alone.

A thing about german conventions

[foalkn]

We dont pay for our bandwidth... We get it for free and even the largest german internet provider asks us if they could peer with us.

Re:How much does it matter anyhow?

[flosofl]

You'd have to be pretty crazy and/or desperate to risk using the provided bandwidth at DefCon (or any hacker con) for that matter. Regardless of how much faith you may have in the people running the network, you're surrounded on all sides by people who would like nothing more than to steal your information. While at DefCon, stay away from the ATMs and if at all possible stay away from the network entirely.

Dude, what? I was there and as long as you use OpenVPN back to your home box and proxy everything through your cable modem you're going to be OK. Or create a SOCKS proxy using a ssh tunnel back to your home connection.

Yeah, stay away from the ATMs because you will get raped by the fees. Or are you trying to say that someone will put a magstripe and PIN harvester on the machines. As if. Not only was security seriously stepped up compared to the last two years, the casinos have cameras that do nothing but monitor the ATMs precisely to stop this (I chatted up one of the security suits this year).

Breath easy and just be aware of what kind of traffic is leaving and entering your system.

Did you even go this year? If you did, I bet you were the one cowering in the corner removing the batteries from all your devices "just in case".