Our CFP has come and gone, and our schedule, art, and speaker list are finally out. It's time for a sneak preview of what we've been up to in the months leading up to DEF CON.

The space

A detailed map is here.

Nix Vegas and our main stage are on floor 1, space #1310 (pink), in a similar location to last year. Enter through the north entrance of the LVCC and go all the way down the exhibition hall until you see us.

We have a little more space than last year. Note that all communities have wireless headsets for listening to talks to avoid audio traveling in the LVCC halls. This means that we also have a dedicated spot for the talk audience now, instead of needing to share it with the rest of the space. Hooray!

Also note that Chris Connelly's Community Stage talk (Compiling the World: A Binary Dataset Built from nixpkgs) is on Saturday from 11:30-12:00 on Creator Stage 7 (lime green). You can check it out on Hacker Tracker or on our schedule.

The rule of thumb is that the LVCC looks like a lambda and we are toward the top, near the upper apex - see page 7 😉.

Nix Vegas NOC

The NOC team has been making an effort to upgrade our network this year. (Really, is any NixOS config ever truly done?)

Aside from our now self-hosted Pretalx, Immich, Owncast, website, and mail server on EDIS Global (our cloud provider), we continue to make no assumptions about internet connectivity during the world's largest hacker conference.

Here is what we're providing this year:

• We're running our first Nix CTF (it'll be at https://nixc.tf and accessible onsite). It's a jeopardy-style CTF that is both a gentle introduction to Nix and challenge to use Nix and NixOS tools in creative ways.
• Ethernet and wifi are available in the space and egress the LVCC via a Nebula VPN tunnel (wifi is WPA2/3 PSK, so bring an adapter to plug in if you're worried about being packet captured at DEF CON).
• Talks will be streamed live at https://live.nix.vegas.
• We have a Forgejo nixpkgs mirror that you can also use as a git server at https://git.nixos.lv. Also just accessible onsite.
• There's a Hydra builder building and substituting all of nixpkgs at https://hydra.nixos.lv.
• We're bringing a binary cache with multiple terabytes of nixpkgs evals from 25.11, 26.05, and unstable accessible via harmonia onsite at https://cache.nixos.lv.
• We have NixOS ISOs and PXE netboot, with powerline ethernet to reach weird corners of the LVCC, as always. Instructions will be at https://nixos.lv.
• We have a couple mesh networked Protectli VP2420 machines for alternate ways into the event network.
• We have a Tenstorrent AI accelerator QuietBox with llama-cpp.
• There will be coloring sheets for Kenz' amazing art, again.
• And plenty of fantastic talks by knowledgeable people.
• With potentially a few surprises, because it's DEF CON. (badge?)

We hope to see you there.

In closing

Thank you to https://nyx.net, one of the world's oldest ISPs that served the Computing and Information Resources (CAIR^*) BBS at the University of Denver, for inspiration for this year's theme. We hope to keep a lot of this infrastructure up year-round as we work to bring back the spirit of CAIR and Nyx for people working on creative Nix and NixOS-related projects (and, yes, we donated).

See you in Vegas <3,

Nix Vegas Organizers

^* An author of this blog post may have had a domain account on CAIR in elementary school. Our elementary school was lucky enough to have 802.11b access points installed by the University of Denver in the early 2000s, resulting in a lot of kids learning how to use Linux and getting good at strange networking things since we had full access to the campus network in middle school. (Another fun fact: CAIR had one of the first IRC servers).

We're hoping we're a small part of you discovering your own agency at DEF CON too. Escape your fate!