> edit: And now he's pulling the classic hacker move of (checks notes) enforcing strict software IP ownership rights? Guy's a class act all around. Hope everyone learned an important lesson about Dmitry and Entropic with this mess.

Doing it as counterplay to a lack of credit is a great hack.

He wasn’t employed by anyone, and didn’t get paid by anyone for his work. (Defcon is wrong about this in their statement, and admitted as such in the comment thread).

When I write code that nobody is paying for, you better believe I’ll write it how I damn well please. If you aren’t paying, you aren’t the customer. And you don’t get to control the output of my work.

The wallet address soliciting donations is for the hardware company, not on his own behalf. But even if it was on his own behalf, would you still be mad? Since when is it a crime to be proud of the code you’ve written, for free, to bring joy to an hacker conference? That deserves mad credit in my book.

I don't really care whether money changed hands. Secretly putting an ad into software that you know will be distributed to many people is the oldest scumbag move in the scumbag book. All sympathy ended there, and that was weeks before he trespassed.

Eh. When I was young, I played a demo of Doom that came with a magazine. When you finish the demo level, the game show an ad that said if I ponied up money, I could play the whole game.

I fail to see the problem.

And in this case it wasn’t an ad. It was a page saying you could donate to the hardware company if you want, who were out of pocket $100k for making the hardware. That’s an incredibly tame prank by Defcon standards.

Characterizing it as an "ad" feels a bit dishonest, as if it was an ad for some random product completely unrelated to the conference or the badges themselves. It was a shout-out to the company that made the badges! And that after DEFCON promised to give that company credit on the badge case, and then reneged on that promise.

Even if Entropic shat the bed so badly that DEFCON's takeover of badge production was actually warranted (I'm super skeptical of this claim), the badges still consisted nearly entirely of Entropic's & Dmitry's work. DEFCON's removal of credit from the badge case was deeply unethical.

> When I write code that nobody is paying for, you better believe I’ll write it how I damn well please.

You're under no obligation to write code. You are under an obligation not to sneak an advert into someone else's conference via essentially fraudulent means.

Just because nobody is paying you, doesn't mean you have carte blanche to do whatever you want.

I dont think this is a controversial opinion. If someone created a piece of open source software but hid a trojan or cryptominer in it people would find it objectionable. You could quibble about where the line is, but i think everyone agrees that just because something is free does not give you the absolute right to do whatever you want.

Its not an ad. It was a request for donations to a company that put themselves out to the tune of $100k to make the badges happen. And then had credit and publicity stripped from them during defcon - even though that was part of the deal! Apparently they aren't even mentioned in the program, and their company logo was taken off the cases for the badges.

We aren't talking about client work here. We're talking about defcon, where cheekily thumbing your nose at authority through code is the heart and soul of the conference. This single, hidden page asking for donations on behalf of the hardware company is a total nothingburger. Getting up in arms about it for being unprofessional is ridiculous.

> We're talking about defcon, where cheekily thumbing your nose at authority through code is the heart and soul of the conference. This single, hidden page asking for donations on behalf of the hardware company is a total nothingburger. Getting up in arms about it for being unprofessional is ridiculous.

People in this thread do seem to be very upset about a hacker doing hacker things. For a bit more irony, we're on Hacker News...

Wannabe corporate programmer news.

You can't hide something in open source code for those who audit what they use. You can for those who just install without reviewing.

And yet, things like liblzma kerfuffle still happen.

It’s not like it’s blocking the badge from functioning unless you pay. It doesn’t even pop up unless you specifically go looking for it. It seems perfectly in line with the ‘shareware’ and ‘buy me a cup of coffee’ spirit that characterized the early years.

Generally you dont make secret shareware out of software you make for other people.

Just imagine what would happen if you created a shareware scene in the software of some company you work for. You would get fired (and possibly sued) so fast it would make your head spin.

My understanding is that Dmitry was a volunteer. IMO that makes the "shareware" more reasonable than if he were an employee writing the code on the clock(and it doesn't seem like he was soliciting money for himself)