The Lazy Workshopper

Background: by workshop, I mean 1h lab sessions to 2-3 day , trainings with lots of hands-on labs, on technical topics, e.g “reverse android malware”. Some people call this Labs. In French universities, this would be called TP (Travaux Pratiques).

I have given quite a few workshops, free or non free. In free workshop, a few participants stand out, that I call the lazy workshoppers.

Those are participants who come at a technical lab session with no computer, have no intention of doing the exercices.

Lazy Workshopper. Definition. Comes to follow lab sessions with his hands in his pocket. No laptop. No intention of doing any exercise even sharing the screen of another attendee.

They come only to listen to what I say, to suck out the substance, and get some nail polish they can boast and include in their future discussions.

Yes. Because that’s really what it is.

The Lazy Workshopper: “So, to reverse with AI, you just connect an MCP and let the AI pilot your decompiler”.

This is the sort of knowledge they’ll share to their audience afterwards. The sentence is correct, because the “lazy workshopper” is smart and has good memory. More precisely, regarding that precise topic, I’d point out it’s better to first open the decompiler, work with it, and only use AI as a second step (but that’s inner knowledge the lazy workshopper might miss).

It’s difficult to spot an imposter.

People will be impressed, because in a (short) conversation, people will assume they have in front of them someone who’s installed a MCP several times, and reversed hundreds of binaries.

In a conversation, it’s going to be difficult to grasp there is nothing beyond words in the knowledge of that person. Those who have the vastest knowledge are not those who speak the most, sometimes they’re not very good at communication.

The lazy workshopper grasps the surface, but not the real essence

In my labs (and same for many other speakers), most of the time is spent over exercises. Completing the exercise actually isn’t the important point. What’s important is to try, to fail, to understand how to recover from that failure. For many minds, trying on your own is far more efficient than hearing it.

Want to see a speaker do something? hear advice? Those are talks. Talks are great too. It’s a different way of learning. In a conference, I love to have both: when I’ve listened for a couple of hours, I’m more than happy to take a break and use my own keyboards once again.

It takes lots of time to prepare a workshop

A 2-hour workshop takes easily two weeks to prepare, because you’ve got to design and select the best exercises. Let’s say you want to show an Android malware with specific string obfuscation. You’ve analyzed hundreds of malware in the month. How long will it take you to find again that particular sample you want to shape the exercise on? Ha.

Being a Lazy Workshopper is close to being rude to the Speaker

If I have spent 2 weeks of my time to teach you something, for free, if you come to my workshop, you can extend the courtesy of trying to do the labs.

If you’re not doing the labs, you’re basically telling the Speaker either “I’m above your exercises, I’m already so knowledgeable”, or “I really don’t care about it”.

Lazy Workshoppers are very rare in paid workshops

I have regularly lazy workshoppers in free workshops. I very very rarely have one in paid workshops. This is counter intuitive to me, but it’s the reality.

I’d kind of accept having a lazy workshopper in a paid workshop: they paid, if they really only want to get the 5% of the surface, it’s their choice. But, in a paid workshop, it seems that attendees want to get as much knowledge they can for the price.

Conclusion

I love free workshops, and I want conferences to continue to offer free workshops. I attended free workshops in awesome conferences like Hack.Lu, Hacktivity, Pass The Salt, GreHack, and more! Those workshops really helped me work in new areas or new tools I didn’t know.

Several years after, I still remember the first workshop I followed on Radare2, or Unicorn, or Exploits on ARM64, or HydraBus. They were awesome. Thanks again to the Speakers (and conference organizers) who made them possible.

Attending a free workshop? Please show respect to the speaker: come with your laptop prepared, and do your best on the labs. Your Speaker spent days/weeks preparing the workshop for you, you can give him/her in return 2 hours of your attention.

Conference organizers, can you do something about that? I don’t know. But, yes, perhaps, you can say a word about the expected attitude in workshops. Workshop seats are often limited, and people “run” to get their seat/ticket. A lazy workshopper who gets a seat on a workshop is “stealing” the seat to someone who would have done the labs.

– Cryptax

PS. Yes, I am currently at a conference, where I gave a free workshop, and there were a few lazy workshoppers in the audience. But I do not wish to name the conference, because this is a common issue, it’s not specific to this conference.