Well. It happened. There was a whole plan — flights, a monorail-adjacent hotel shortlist, a badge, a village hit list four bullet points deep. DEF CON 34 is cancelled.
Not a security incident. Not a budget thing. Just real life stacking up faster than a conference notebook: back in the office more than expected, and it’s the first week of school. Something had to give, and it wasn’t going to be either of those.
The Strip at night — staying home this year. Photo: Dietmar Rabich, CC BY-SA 4.0.
🗑️ What Got Cancelled
The plan had gotten pretty specific before it hit the shredder:
- Thu Aug 6 → Sun Aug 9, DEF CON 34 only, badge and all.
- A monorail-line hotel shortlist (Westgate or SAHARA, if the rates behaved).
- A tight village hit list: AI Village, Cloud Village, AppSec, K8s/platform security.
- A whole “fly vs. drive” writeup that, in hindsight, answered a question nobody needed answered anymore.
All of it — shelved. Not rescheduled, not “maybe if things clear up.” Cancelled.
🤷 Why
No drama here. Just the calendar not cooperating:
- The office is pulling more days than it was a month ago.
- The first week of school landed exactly where a Vegas trip would’ve needed to go, and that’s not a fair trade against a kid’s first week.
Something had to give, and a conference badge was always going to lose that fight.
Even Howard Langston knew when to call off the quest and stay home for the thing that actually mattered.