OP asked for a better option. He was offered one, which he disagreed with. Because he doesn't like it precisely means that (in his view at least) it is not what he asked for.
Your point was valid though. You can't let someone rock up to the stage uninvited. This would open the door to all kinds of issues.
And the original question of how the situation could have been handled better is the most interesting one. The rest is a game of he said/she said, which hn commenters tend to enjoy arguing about but is ultimately not very instructive.
With hindsight it is clear that the situation had been brewing for some time, and the conflict had been escalating slowly. Perhaps due to the pressure and stress (and time pressure) of organising an event like that nobody managed to have enough distance to deescalate it, which culminated in someone being escorted off stage by security, not a good experience for anyone.
Most likely once the invitation to talk had been rescinded the dice were thrown. It would have been hard for the speaker not to be offended, and unfair on him to expect him to take it quietly and move on without reacting. Someone should have been aware of that and worked with him to control the impact of this on his own reputation.
He was given a 30 minute notice that he was disinvited. That’s pretty egregious.
Especially since they were okay with him giving the talk as long as he apologized. And he offered to say “I didn’t mean to offend anyone”.
So for a misunderstanding and mistake to drag him off the stage is stupid and ridiculous.
> What should they have done better? They didn't have the option of doing better with Dmitry, right? He deliberately set up the confrontation with security.
Maybe I misunderstood, I previously read that as “what could they have done better about the situation”.
Did you mean “what could they have done better once he was at the stage?”
I got locked in a hotel room by an actual goon who demanded a line-item veto of my slides (clients! what you'll do to keep clients happy!), and ask Mike Lynn how he feels about the response to his talk. Being asked not to take a stage to take credit for the annual DEF CON badge toy seems pretty low on the scale of security conference dramas.
The "drag him off the stage" thing was his own arrangement.
People don’t get to dis-invite people from stages when that is quite literally the only compensation given either.
They made the software for the badge of your entire conference, for free, and then you won’t let them talk about it because what you got for free, wasn’t what you expected/wanted?
That’s just dumb on so many levels I don’t even know where to begin.
It’s like playing, no, selling someone elses mod and complaining it’s not up to the standards of a finished game.
I don't think GP meant "don't get to" as in it's not their legal right to do so (which of course it is). I think they meant that it's a profoundly shitty thing to do to someone, and DEFCON should rightly be criticized for disinviting him in the first place.
I think an easter egg that includes a monetary solicitation is (at best) in poor taste, regardless of the circumstances. But canceling his talk 30 minutes prior to its start time for that? Nope, not cool. DEFCON's behavior in disinviting him was much much worse than his action that triggered it.
> They made the software for the badge of your entire conference, for free, and then you won’t let them talk about it because what you got for free, wasn’t what you expected/wanted?
You are saying this like it is unreasonable, but it seems entirely reasonable to me.
Just because you do something for free does not entitile you to a conference talk about it. If you wanted to be paid for it (and make no mistake, a conference talk is a form of compensation. In many conferences companies pay huge sums of money to have a platform) then they should have got a contract.
Let him give his talk like they promised.
Given literally everyone in that room is using his work in that same moment and they are literally there to hear him speak.