Cheap As Cheap Can Be, But

Lotso commented: Wow.. man.. changing venue to The Westin and the Pricing.. all I can say is.. Out of my price range. Waaayyy out man.. . This is one thing that I don't understand. At RM450 to attend just the conference only, this price is the cheapest in the region for a security conference. How much was last year's BlackHat briefings in Singapore? Also, compare that price to SyScAN '04, to be held in December this year in Singapore. For registration before 1st October, the fee is a whopping USD 1200 per person, and that is only the fee for the conference - no training whatsoever. Compare that with HITBSecConf2004 training plus conference fee, which is only roughly USD 500 per person, USD 100 shy of half of what SyScAN is charging. And yeah, they have Theo speaking as well.



We bring the best speakers to the conference - Theo, Captain Crunch, The Gugq, Adam Gowdiak (LSD), Ollie Whitehouse (@stake), Jose Nazario (deadly.org), and yet people are still complaining that the fees are too high.



And no, the speakers are not flying here with free airfare. If we could scp'ed them over it would be great, but unfortunately there's no technology to transfer people over UTP cables. There are costs to organized a big event like HITBSecConf2004: marketing costs, accomodation fees, hotel fees, airfares, logistics, tea breaks, etc etc. You know what would be cheap though? A security event with no international speakers. That would be well damn cheap.



And the venue change was not because we want to charge more, in fact the fee is the same as before. The reason for the venue change is because we add an additional track! 3 tracks instead of two - with no additional fee.



I hope people would appreciate what Dhillon and the HITB crew are doing to the security scene in Malaysia: bringing top-notch speakers and the cheapest price for a security conference in the region.



Listening to: Kraftwerk - La Forme