YSTS
lorehackingsecurityevents
Stands for: You Shot the Sheriff
You Shot the Sheriff: Brazil's curated, single-day security conference - invitation-flavored, bar-hosted, and famously well-connected.
Founded by Luiz Eduardo dos Santos, Nelson Murilo Rufino - the author of chkrootkit - and Willian Caprino, and it started as a podcast: ISTS, "i sh0t the sheriff", recording since 2006 and still going. The conference followed in 2007 and kept the podcast's register. Three refusals define it: invitation only through a sponsor, a venue disclosed only to confirmed attendees, and a headcount the founders cap on principle, having said at the tenth edition that they work to keep it the same size because growth would cost them the quality. Jeff Moss, who created DEF CON and Black Hat, and Cris Thomas of the L0pht have both spoken there, alongside the people who carry the Brazilian scene.
YSTS packs hand-picked national and international speakers into a single day in São Paulo, and its distinguishing choice is deliberate smallness with an unusual format: it has historically run in venues that feel nothing like conference halls, with an invitation-influenced audience.
The reasoning behind that is the same one behind ShmooCon's attendance cap, arrived at independently. A room where everyone can plausibly meet everyone produces different conversations than a hall of two thousand, and the value of a security event is often less the talks than who you end up standing next to. Curating the audience is unfashionable and does produce the thing it aims at.
The trade is the obvious one and worth naming. A curated event is by definition exclusionary, and who gets invited reflects who the organizers already know, which is how professional networks reproduce themselves and how newcomers stay outside. The healthy ecosystem needs both models: the open free event that lets anyone in, and the small dense one that produces depth, and a country with only one of them is missing something.
Also known as: ysts, you shot the sheriff