I know they both exist, and that they're related but I thought Defcon was the more informal conference and the ad seemed to allude to a more informal target aud

I know they both exist, and that they're related but I thought Defcon was the more informal conference and the ad seemed to allude to a more informal target audience. That said, you are correct, most of the research gets published at Black Hat. And in the spirit of full disclosure, I have no first hand knowledge of either conference. My father is an Information Security Architect and we often talk shop. One year he went to Black Hat and mentioned the complimentary Defcon passes, and I perked up. I love playing with Nessus and decompiling C code to hex and editing ASM like any other self respecting geek, but I'm far from that league.