All right. I hope everyone can hear us online as well as in person. I'm Terry Green. I serve on the U.S. ETGA Board. And it is my pleasure today to introduce our breakout speaker, Valerie Burke. And Valerie is from the University of Nevada Las Vegas Graduate School. And she will be taking questions closer to the end of her presentation. So feel free to put them in the chat. And if anyone is here in person who wants to, you know, ask questions that can just come right up to the mic. And so with that, I will leave it to Valerie to share with us. Did you hear that? That's graduate students sharing their research. Take it away, Val. Thank you. Hello, everybody. I am on West Coast time. So it is about 1.13 here. And I don't know if it's a theme at most universities right now, but we are super short staff. So that's why I'm in a tie to my shirt today. I had to table an event. We were hosting a Hispanic Heritage Month celebration. And I did not have enough time to switch back in. Oh my gosh, it's 90 degrees here. So it is very hot. But I'm in the air condition now and I'm very excited to present to you today. I'm the assistant dean for the Graduate Student Services here at UNLV. And I've been with the Graduate College for about eight years now. We also housed the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs. So I oversee that. UNLV is an R1 high research activity institution. We were established in 1957. So it's a very young university. We have about 30,000 students of those 30,000, 5,000 are graduate students. We also hold the designations of an HSI, MSI and an APZ. If you want to talk about that later, usually a lot of questions come from that and having all three is a big deal. And hence why we have events like today. And then we also are tied for first for the most diverse university in the country. So we have a lot going on. One of the things that is in my Graduate Student Services office is our thesis and dissertation office. I have two part-time employees who help me. And basically I'll do a little overview because we get their research, right? So we have very strict deadlines on what thesis and dissertations are due. Their formatting is to the T. We have a checklist of all the formatting that has to be done before it's uploaded to ProQuest. So my team handles all of that. And I'm on my second slide. Can you guys see that? It says the Grad Academy. No, we're still seeing your first slide, Val. I don't know. Let me try to share the whole screen and see what happened. She started. Yes, she started. Okay, let me try. Now can you see the second slide? We're seeing the Grad Academy. Okay, so when I first got here in this position about eight years ago, I was the first executive director. And what I created was the Grad Academy. The Grad Academy is a central hub for evidence-based graduate student professional and career development programming, non-academic advising. This unit we host over 60 workshops a year in collaboration with a lot of our campus partners, of course. We host 11 signature events. We do the online academic advising, career support. In addition, we also offer four co-curricular certifications, and we have 10 programs. It is a lot. And all of these are free professional and career development opportunities for my grad and my professional students. And we also built this Grad Academy around six pillars, including personal professional career development and then you'll see here our motto, innovative leadership, professional and career development. So that's the big hub that the Grad Academy encompasses. And then within, I mentioned those 11 signature events, the very first one I ever did was I created the Rebel Grad Slam. So you might have heard about the 3MT thesis competition. It came out of the University of Queensland and it has now branched into over 100 different universities across the country. So we adopted their template and their styles of how to run the 3MT thesis competition. So this basically tells you what it is. The idea is to explain for the graduate student who they are, what they study, why they study it and what their research questions are and then how they're going to analyze it. And then of course we want to know why does it matter to folks outside your field. Everyone gets one PowerPoint slide and it's a template. They can't change the colors, they can't put animation, they can't dress up and so it's very standard and then everyone has less than three minutes. So we'll have people at two minutes and 59 seconds and they're fine. As soon as you hit that three minutes, it goes red. I would say though we've only had maybe like a handful of students who have gone over the three minutes. So it's definitely not something we worry about. In the event too we actually display a clock that does the countdown so they can see the clock and so can the judges. So why do we host this? So the Rebel Grad Slam 3 Minute Thesis Competition is an opportunity for our graduate and professional students to showcase their research and scholarship in an engaging way. Its fast-paced research rumble is what we've tag-lined it to highlight the innovative and impactful work being done by Rebel Graduates students. So they're coached too. We host a workshop a few months before the actual event that shows them this is what the PowerPoint template will look like. This is what you can expect. We have a panel of previous winners who kind of give their tips and tricks, their best practices and then we have some of previous judges also there giving their pointers. If you go to our website which you'll see at the end, I have a slide that gives you the website for this. You'll see that we have YouTube videos where we interview our top winners from the past and they share their experience with it. See here. So obviously you can tell like the big deal is we want them to share their thesis and dissertation research but honestly they can share any research they want. If they're in their first year, their last year or whatever program they're in, they're all everyone's invited to join. But it is a lot. So this is kind of our, this was our call last year. So if you want to register to participate, you had to fill out this form that said, you know, your name where you are in your program, the title of your presentation. And then we give them a specific deadline of when they have to submit that PowerPoint that we require. So we can pre-check it that they met all the parameters if they need to change anything like they went outside the line or changed the color we'll send it back to them or if they put any pictures that aren't annotated. So things like that we'll let them now. And then like I said, you can visit our Rebel Grassland website, check out all our resources here for past winners. So our goal is for everyone to be as much prepared and have all the resources at their fingertips so that when they get to their presentation, they're very comfortable. Because one of the big things is they have to remember to figure out when to use jargon and when to use layman's terms because their audience is going to be people not necessarily, you know, with the same background as them in the same department. We set up, let me show you the next slide. Oh, first I'll talk about judges. So we put out a call for judges through you and all the faculty, our staff, alumni and community members. They're all invited to judge. And then they're going to receive training prior to the session so that everyone's on the same playing field. Everyone knows exactly what's expected of them ahead of time. Also at the training, and the training is we just ask them to come like 15 minutes before their session just to review. But they're going to be scoring on comprehension, content, engagement, and communication. And then you'll see on the next slide we have a preliminary round. We have a semi-finals in the finals. For the finals, we rent out a huge auditorium. And we do pick those judges to be like the you and I'll be president, the provost. Sometimes we've had elected officials. We've had all-star alumni. So things like that. So those ones are hand-picked. Okay, just so you can kind of get a flow of how all this works. Our preliminary rounds, each student only participates in one round. So when they're filling out that original entry to participate and register for the event, we're going to ask them what is your preferred time slot on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday. And then you can see we do a noon. And then we do a five o'clock. So working with different schedules. So hopefully we can accommodate everybody. You can see this one was via WebEx because during COVID we didn't want to slow down. Somehow we turned all this virtual. And it did go really, really smooth. But there was a lot that went on behind the scenes. And then last year we did hybrid. And then this year we're going to, I think, be back in person. So just to give you all an idea. Semi-finals. So of all of these sessions you see here, there's two Monday, Tuesdays, and two Wednesdays. Everyone is randomly selected and do different slots. So it's not all STEM together or all liberal arts together, or anything like that. Everyone is mixed into different categories randomly. And then same with the judges. The judges don't have to have a background in whatever the presenters were studying because everyone's supposed to be talking as if nobody knows your background. That's kind of one of the fun parts about it. So you'll see under each one of these is going to have a winner. So on Monday, we'll all be in person at noon and probably have three rooms. And each room would have about seven participants in each one. And then we'd put a first, second, and third place from each one of those. You'll see here who advances then to the semi-finals. So again, each student will only participate in one round. This we do in a mini theater. So the first rounds are like a classroom setting or one of our conference rooms. In a mini theater for the semi-finals. And there's three rounds. You have three different times and students can pick which time that fits their schedule best. We'll have a first choice and a second choice. We can almost always accommodate that. And then our big winners from semi-finals go on to the final rounds. And we host that in our theater in the Student Union one year. One year we also hosted it in the theater over in our STEM building. So we kind of move because we have a lot of beautiful spaces. We want to make sure students know about. A lot of people will come to these events and say this is the first time I ever knew this space was here. It's the first time I've been in here. So it kind of helps with those things too. So in the finals they're on stage. There's a big screen with their PowerPoint. The timer is also amplified onto the wall screen. And then I'll go over the prizes in the next round. But we get these big huge checks kind of like you see on game shows and we give those. One thing we added I'd say maybe three years ago was audience choice. So each round also has like a ballot and anybody who's in the audience will check who their favorite was from that session. And then that person will also win some scholarship money. So you can see in the middle picture there we host a reception after the finals. So we have a pretty full heavy appetizer, hot and cold catered event and we have a bar a cash bar and then we invite faculty, staff, community members, the judges the participants. One of the big things we ask is for the participants to invite their family and friends and bring them on campus and everybody's invited to join this. We also hire a professional photographer which really helps catch all these moments and then we also hire the videographer because we have a YouTube channel and I can share that too but if you go to the graduate college YouTube and we have a channel just from all of the presentations from the finals and then you'll see different channels that are all our professional developments that we filmed we have another event called student showcase and we filmed those. So everybody is hearing all of our graduate students that participate all the research that they're working on and then what we notice too is a lot of during the mix and mingle faculty or family members will come up and say introduce themselves. I'm so intrigued by your research and really it's a great networking event as well. Ok prizes. So we have in the preliminary rounds, remember I said each cohort competes each room is going to have a first, second, and a third place and they move on to the semifinals and you can see that the each first place will get 200, second, 150, and third 100 and then the audience choice I believe is $100 we get there. For semifinal rounds we have those three rounds and each round is going to have a first, second, and third first place, 200, second place 150, third place $100 and then final is our third place gets $500 second place wins $750 and first place wins $1000 now this is all scholarship money that's been ear tagged through that funding source in the grad college because y'all there's a lot that goes on I guess in the back end how different money can be allocated so that money is from specifically for scholarship money and so some people right if you get all the way to the finals that means you made you want a scholarship from the first round the second round and the third round if you place in all three of them so that adds up really nicely and the money goes into their student account so if they owe any money or they want to use the money to pay for next semester the money will be there or they can have it a direct deposited into the bank account and use it however they wish so everybody is getting prizes too so even if you don't place every participant is getting a Rebel grad slam t-shirt and a gift bag all of our judges get the same a t-shirt and a gift bag sometimes a gift bag will be something different like one year we gave the judges calculators but they were like book calculators that also had post-its in it we'll give out mugs, travel mugs but everyone loves so you can see we're really big on our t-shirts I'm wearing the one from the event today so it's kind of one of those highlights everybody looks forward to and we try to change up the design and the color of the shirt in case some people are participating year after year and same for the judges we have some judges who have been with me since the very beginning when we created the event so the other prizes the college with the most grad Rebel participants they get a free lunch so we look and we see at the college how many students participated and we just put together a nice little it's mostly pizza and dessert and stuff like that but it always has a great turnout and we don't just invite the students that participated the whole college is invited so we put out an email to all the grad students in that college because it's a good way to plug the event because maybe they weren't ready to participate this year but they want to participate next year so now they're like oh okay I see what this is I want to get involved now and then the overall first place the college is awarded the Rebel gradsland trophy and they get to keep it and display it for the academic year so most of them keep it right in their dean's office or a high traffic area and then the first place winner will participate in the western association of graduate schools WAGs for short 3MT competition my boss at the time was on the WAGs board and said all of us are doing all these different great competitions at our schools why don't we bring the winners from all of our schools to our annual western association of grad schools conference and host the 3MT there so we now do that it's the exact same format with the PowerPoint with the you get three minutes and then everyone donates the scholarship money so that we have the top three winners getting some scholarship money and then all schools have agreed too to part to fund the travel for our participants everyone just brings one winner and we pay for the travel per dean no cost to the student whatsoever and then of course they could win more scholarship money so that is Rebel gradslam and I should say the Rebel comes from because that's our mascot we're the UNLD rebels so we play off of that word in case anybody was wondering where the Rebel came from okay so that was one way that we showcase highlight get students to talk about their research network and then this is the second way I mean we definitely have more than two but these are our two biggest events for students to share their research is Rebel gradslam and then the GPSA annual student research forum and this is a long tradition at UNLD for something to be at UNLD for 25 years straight with being such a young institution like this is huge I can't over express that so in 2023 next year we'll host the 25th one and this is mostly run by our graduate and professional student association which is essentially our student government for grad students and then we co-host co-sponsor the grad college with them so Rebel gradslam is always in the fall and Rebel gradslam is always in the spring and this spring event showcases the excellence in research conducted at the graduate student level and more than 160 students participate each year and from over 40 disciplines so I should have mentioned earlier too we have over now we have over 175 programs Masters, PhDs and so that we want and we get a great representation from across the board interdisciplinary for something like this so the annual student research forum is very conference style format so students either present their work through a poster like you can see in the photo or they're going to do a podium presentation kind of like what I'm doing right now and we have a photographer for this event so you can see these people in action the 10 minute podium presentation usually includes a slide deck they can use PowerPoint I know there's a lot of new ones totally up to them we don't force them to use any specific program but we do encourage the use of some sort of visual and then if somebody is choosing the poster presentation it's a five minute presentation in front of their poster like you see here in the photo and then both the podium and the poster sessions are evaluated by faculty judges and same thing they have a rubric and it is super strict easy to follow and you can also see both the rubrics for this judging event and for Rebel Grads name on our websites because we want students to see them we want them to know what they're being judged on so they can appropriately prepare okay so a lot of the prizes for this event I know the grad college help sponsor them and then we also help with the event so once everybody is done with their presentations and everything is tallying and scoring is going on there's a beautiful catered lunch usually the dean will do a welcome the provost usually comes and at the end of all of the speeches and welcomes and the bottom right you can see our current GPSA president she also does a welcome session winners are granted monetary awards to support their advance to advance their research the podium session winners it's like Rebel Grads name where there's different sessions and there's a winner from each session first place in each room gets a $500 scholarship and the second place in each podium room gets a $350 scholarship and then for the poster session same thing everybody's broken down into a time slot and for each time slot there's a first place winner for $400 and a second place winner for $250 and the scholarships work the same way that I mentioned earlier they go into their account and either it can be direct positive end to their bank account or it can be used to fund anything that they want to at UNLV their choice okay so our student government GPSA has a lot of funding opportunities for our graduate students that we are so thankful for and usually what we do since they have the committee set up their representatives from all the different colleges on campus all the different programs on campus we have an annual day of giving and we host competitions in the grad college so for students that um so anybody that donates that day they can donate to the research fund they can donate to our grad academy they can donate discretionary funds things like that so we always say that if the research award category hits $10,000 we're going to unlock $10,000 and give it to this committee that gives away the research money to the students so in addition GPSA has over $175,000 budgeted to support graduate and professional students annually so throughout the year the GPSA awards research and travel grants to students to support projects directly affect their degree program and make a contribution to their discipline in 2021 to 2022 like I said $175,000 was budgeted to support graduate and professional student research and conference travel the other scholarship fund the annual research forum is the opportunity for students to share their GPSA sponsored work with the UNLV community the forum like I mentioned is open to all graduate and professional students wishing to share their research practice their presentation skills or obtain constructive comments um on their work from faculty so um in both events they can request to have the judge um comments so we ask the judges like they don't have to put their name on it but to put the student's name on it and the students can see what they scored well in what they didn't score well in and then some comments that might be written in their side it's not required that they write comments but we encourage it because anything we can do to help the student get better of course is the goal and it's important to know that participation in the annual research forum is a requirement for students who received GPSA funding during the 2021-22 act of the year so every year if students are applying and getting research money out of that $175,000 budget they um it's a required that they participate in this forum so what's great is they have an amazing online application process that you could Google if you wanted to check it out um but basically it asks them what what are you requesting the money for what are you going to be used to if you're traveling to a conference are you attending are you presenting um and then they ask for you know um projected uh flights costs registration fees hotels per diem any like taxis things like that um and so they have students pointing together this whole budget which one is a great experience for them for whatever they're going to do next in their career but also what then the um representatives all the students come together that are in this committee and they review all these applications and either fully fund partially fund or deny and ask for more information um or deny and say try for the next cycle just depending on what the situation is um so that is one of the biggest ways that my grad students and um also for professional development so somebody says I need the certificate for my hotel degree and it would be great if I could do it in China they would put together that whole proposal that's required what they're but what they're requesting um and and they can ask um each year for um funding so you'd have to apply separately but separately each year so it's not like a one time and that's it um each year the students can go in and and reapply so I know I talked a lot and I talk really fast but um hopefully that all came together to show you um two of the most important ways that we encourage students to get out there and share their research um if you want more information these are the websites that I discussed and of course you can just email me or call me directly um and I'd love to chat with anybody I've uh had um I want to say I presented at the council of graduate schools on just um our professional development academy and rebel grad slam and um I get a lot of questions a lot of people want to meet with me after because they want to bring that to their school and you don't have to start from scratch um you know we have the templates we have the rules they're you know what I mean like nobody has to reinvent the wheel you can kind of take what we've already created and put your own spin on it if you wanted to um or a lot of people ask me about budgeting like where does the money come from so if you guys have any of those questions I can answer them now or um let me see here so anyone from the room wants to uh ask a question please come up to the mic and uh any virtual participants please put a question in the chat can you guys see that big picture yes okay so I just want to let you know we got to um we built a brand new graduate college about in 2019 we opened in 2019 um I would just say I'll work I'm just in one of those roles where you build it you build it and it just you put in the sometimes you don't have all the staff and you don't have all the money that you need but we start from somewhere we start at the foundation and build it we build it and now I mean but we're that whole second floor um above cookie crumble Roberto's Pete's coffee um that's the grad college floor um and we have a um graduate school in there where students can come in and it's computer lab and it's only for graduate and professional students um but I just I just want everyone to know like we literally started with nothing and we've come a very long way in eight years and trying to see how I stopped sharing so you can I can see you guys okay there we go that's wonderful Valerie that's just that looks like a really beautiful sight and uh you really really accomplished a lot you're right and now when you see the opposite post stock affairs that might make sense because now they want me to do that same thing with the opposite postdoc fairs there was not one on campus um and then they said oh let's give it to Valerie in the grad college and I have no budget I have um literally just starting it from the foundation and hope to build it to be as big as the grad academy sorry um so like how many postdocs do you have great question um we saw a dip um after during COVID um so I'd say right now we're at about 42 we need to be at like 142 okay cool I need to talk to you because I'm in the same position I have like 30 something postdocs and I work in the graduate school and there's no budget and what school are you at um UNC Charlotte oh my gosh let's let's definitely talk because I can show you how far we've already come I have a top tier um advisory board with faculty members I've created three budget proposals um I've created an award um that just got approved in March and right now we just just got approved we got funding from the provost office to have a doctoral to postdoc program so my docs right who are doing all this crazy research and they're like I don't want to graduate I want to finish my research and the faculty are like don't graduate I want you to finish with me well now they can apply for this program so they graduate which helps my graduation numbers and now they're starting this postdoc position guaranteed job with the salary and so yeah let's definitely talk oh my gosh that's more exciting stuff in the past five seconds than I've heard all week back just make sure when you email me you type my name right because it will auto correct oh gotcha that's amazing Valerie any other I want you to come to our university and do this after us and it was really hard because I'm just staring at like a power point screen I wish I could like see faces and do all that stuff um but maybe hopefully next time well it doesn't look like we have any more questions we want to thank Valerie Burke from the University of Nevada Las Vegas for her wonderful presentation and I think a lot of us will be in touch with you thank you so much I hope so


T F N N headline news update Good afternoon folks. Welcome to the 1 p.m. Update. I'm your host right now Steve Rhodes Will be coming live to you in just a few minutes right now. We've got the Dow course. I'm live right now But I mean for the full hour, but right now we've got the Dow trading down 12 points So a flat market out there S&Ps off for NASDAQ 100 down 67 points mostly not all but mostly a result of the move Lower in Google Google by the way is trading down a hundred and seven bucks But what Google's done is pulled all the way back to support, you know when you're ever I think the way that I got into this business Was because of all the individual holdings that I used to have Now it's mostly ETFs But in wanting to understand if something was going to fall apart Where would it pull back to and the idea was to be able to always identify support and in the case of Google if You're watching on Tiger TV what you can see here You'll see a green line at the bottom at 11 73 41 I want you to know that the low so far today has been 11 75 even Stephen out there But what price did was a pulled right back to support that is the bottom of its weekly profile now closed below 11 73 41 That would say there's a change in trend. I know you're saying hey come on Steve Oh, there's a hundred and seven dollar move to the downside. You mean that's not a change in trend Hello, that is exactly what I'm saying now if we take a look at the other markets out here You got the semis of seven tenths of a cent. That's ten points in New York Stock exchange of 27 points Now I could take you through each and every industry will do that when we come back to the Traders Ed show out there But in most of those indices the cash markets out there They have identified topping signals There's two that don't and that's got to make you say hmm Something to think about and one of those indices is the New York stock exchange if we take a look at the NYSE There is no topping signal in place as we speak right now And that's trading up 25 bucks. It has to make you say Something to think about however inside the New York stock exchange. It does have its diverging issues And what I mean by that is prices moving higher But what we've got is we still have its price oscillator below zero and we have had declining tops inside this pattern Here's the juggernaut The real key to the New York stock exchange is will the spot ball utility and stay below its 50 day EMA 1418 folks that's your number to watch throughout the day and the days that follow. Thanks so much for being here Stay tuned Steve Rhodes. That's me and the Traders Edge up next


Everybody forced here ripping a box of 2022 top Star Wars chrome black hobby for Kyler Kyler age. Good luck Star Wars chrome black. Let's see a see a super or red Hayden Christensen auto you know, Gregor. All right base mace a Refractor platoon It'll be to 199 and a blue Jar Jar Binks 7 to 75. There he is The plow is 191 of 199 nice Jar Jar and there is red on this auto Margrave Juro red auto one of five Andrew Cachino Nice parallel there pre-solid box for you Kyler blue Jar Jar and a Margrave Juro right auto to five And he's again for the order. We'll get those out to you


My favorite class's quarter is Chemistry 121 because the material is easy to learn. My favorite class's quarter is Pathophysiology because I'm super interested in learning about new respiratory diseases. My favorite class is Inter-design Resilient Shield, and it's a good experience to learn for an interior designer. My favorite class is Scyllysic, because it's a hybrid class. My favorite class is Inter-design Class, because I'm learning how to work in a diverse society. My favorite class in this quarter is Nutrition, the reason I say that is I learn about a healthy diet. My favorite class in this quarter is 230. It's a democratic classroom, because we can have a diversity in the classroom. That's what the kids need, diversity and inclusion in the classroom.


As I said, welcome to track one. This is the one o'clock talk as you well know. We have Colby Moore. He's going to talk about satcom hacking. He reportedly found some vulnerabilities and some satellites. So he's going to talk about that. This is a rerun of his talk that he gave at Black Hat. So please help me welcome Colby Moore. Thanks, guys. Good afternoon, DEF CON. Thanks for coming out. Today we're going to talk about spread spectrum signals and hacking the global star simplex data service. But first, who am I? I'm a mechanical engineer that loves computer security. I'm currently working at SINAC on the R&D team. I got interested in satellites and radios a long time ago when I got my ham radio license. And yes, ladies, that's my call sign. So radio me, I'm single. So what is this company SINAC that I work for? Basically we're a new spin on security for the enterprise. We have an army of vetted security researchers out there and they hack our clients on a bounty basis for pretty crazy payouts in my opinion. So if you have spare cycles and you want to make some money, come join our red team. If you guys are concerned about security in your enterprise, come talk to us as well. But anyway, a little introduction here. You know, why am I doing this? I wanted to try something new and I was pretty frustrated with kind of the lack of diversity in the talks lately. Satellites are kind of the ultimate hack and there seems to be one of satellite hacking talk just about every year. But often they're kind of theoretical. So I wanted to try to do something a little bit more concrete. So I've been doing a lot of location-based privacy research at SINAC and so location monitoring satellites seemed like a good fit. Bottom line I want to take a stab at something different and hopefully inspire some collaboration on future research in this unexplored area. And I'll be releasing some tools after the talk so hopefully we can collaborate a little bit. So what are we going to learn? We're going to talk a little bit about RF signals and modulation about what is spread spectrum. We're going to select a target and reverse engineer it and hopefully exploit it if everything goes well. And the goal of my research here is kind of do it for less than a thousand dollars. I started as kind of a side project. I wanted to do it on the cheap. So hopefully you guys will be able to do it too. There's quite a bit of material to cover as they mentioned but I'll zip through it. Slabs will be online if you guys need to look it later. You can email me or whatever. All right. So prerequisites. My intent is to keep it pretty high level at first but with enough detail to get you guys started. Really all you're doing is high school mathematical knowledge. So for you guys that came to Patrick and my talk last year, you know we like to define some key terms up front. So here we have the term, the Vegas interpretation and then it's hacker meaning. So here for a chip it's a pulse of a spread spectrum code, not a poker chip. Coverage, you know we're not referring to the size of your bikini. It's the area in which the satellite service is available. Recovery, I'm sure you guys are wondering this morning but we'll be recovering the unknown PN code or spreading code from the signals. A bent pipe. It's not a normal pipe. It refers to a type of satellite system that repeats the data when it's sent up. It comes right back down. And then sampling. I'm sure you guys did a lot of sampling last night. But we're just going to be recording a signal digitally. So targeting. How do we choose our target? And there's a lot of potential targets out there. This doesn't even cover them all. But picking the right one was key. Do we go commercial? Do we go military? Bottom line, the technology needed to be consumer accessible and cheap. We're just going to do this as a side project. But I wanted something that would be popular and have a really high impact. We want any vulnerabilities we find to be worthwhile. So as familiar with Global Star's spotlight on consumer products, I use them when I'm out backpacking and personally I think they're pretty great. They make asset trackers for tracking your car or yacht. And personal locator beacons to call for help when you're lost out in the wild. Or your ship sinking at sea or something like that. So I started looking deeper into the tech and it turns out that the commercial offerings use the same technology as the consumer tech. So basically you could buy a $50 dirt cheap consumer device for research and the research would translate directly to all the enterprise devices out there. Not to mention anything found is going to be high impact because it's pretty widely deployed. So where is this technology used? Really it's used everywhere. It's designed to be integrated anywhere you need low bandwidth off the grid communication. Most interestingly, it's heavily used in SCADA systems, big gas and oil operations, military, and predominantly asset tracking, things shipping containers, armored cars, expensive things. So all this tech operates on what's called the Simplex Data Service. And how does that work? In the case of asset trackers, devices can also send back arbitrary information as well. The tracker gets its location from GPS satellites and then it beams that data and some other metadata up to the global star satellites and that simply repeats the data back down into the global star ground station which interprets the data packets and forwards the data on over the internet to global stars back in infrastructure or to the customer infrastructure for processing. I kind of liken this to, think of it as SMS for the satellite world, just really small, concise messages. So the global star system is a series of low earth orbit bent pipe satellites. And the way a bent pipe satellite works is that whatever signal goes up, it simply repeats it, ships it to a different frequency and sends it right back down to be received by the ground stations. And this keeps the cost of the satellite low and future usability really flexible. But notice the data link is one direction, Simplex, the Simplex Data Network. So how the heck is that reliable? Well it turns out that each data packet is sent multiple times to ensure successful transmission. So what's the deal with these ground stations? Turns out there's hundreds of them all around the globe and they handle the reception of the satellite data. There's also two main control centers, one's in San Jose, California, I forget where the other one is, but they're in charge of operating the actual satellites and positioning them and such. So here's the coverage map from global stars website. And you can see that there's patches with no coverage out in the ocean, down in Antarctica. And that's because there's no ground station there to receive the data from the satellite. Each ground station provides up to a couple thousand mile window radius for reception. So you can see down in South Africa there's this nice blob down there. They actually just added this one maybe a couple months ago to get coverage down there. So before I start working I always like to do a little bit of ground work just to get the idea of a client's general security posture. So I had to look at their website and I was having issues signing up for an account and logging in. And I tried to log in and it looks to me like potential SQL injection. So I'm getting that warm fuzzy hacker feeling that this is going to be a fun target to hack on. And so as I'm digging a little deeper it turns out the data from the ground stations appears to be forward to clients over FTP and HTTP. Yeah, there's no S on there. So maybe it just be easier to sniff this data over the internet, but we're going to try to do it. Just for the hell of it. So things are looking pretty good in general, finding some sort of bug. So let's dig deeper into the actual satellite system itself. But where do we look for information on global stars hardware? Of course Google, you know, I think we all do it. But the FCC database turned out to be like the best wealth of information. If you have a RF transmitting device in the U.S. you need to register with the FCC to make sure you're not stepping on anyone's toes. There are a lot of academic papers on global star as well and I found a lot of integrator spec sheets, you know, company proprietary information that was just kind of left out there. So that helped a lot. But I wanted to make sure someone else hadn't already broke the system. So I looked for some prior research. It turns out Travis Goodspeed looked at the Bluetooth protocol of one of global stars devices a while back. Really cool research. And then Natrium42, some guy on the internet maybe is here, looked at the GPS to microcontroller interface on board an old spot personal locator beacon. But I wanted to dive deeper. This was all great research but it didn't really deal with the device to satellite communications. So again, looking at the FCC database, a chip called the STX3 kept coming up and being referenced. Turns out it's one of the transmitters used by the Simplex data network. And it was designed for integrators to put in their creations. It's low cost, low power and you can see it's wicked tiny. That's the chip itself that talks to the satellite. So there were some nice diagrams that came with this chip and on the diagrams I kept seeing this DSSS and BPSK coming up. We'll talk about that more in a minute. I really had no idea what it was at the time but it turns out to be pretty critical to what we're doing. So the FCC databases, they also came up with global stars various frequency ranges as well as the specific range for the global star Simplex data network which we need to know. In this case the devices were looking at operated around 1.6 gigahertz in frequency. So I kept digging and I found this leaked manufacturer spec sheet from a company called Axon. They used to make transmitter chips for the global star Simplex data network. And I referenced all these parameters that I couldn't help feel like were important but I had no idea what they were. So of note, let's see what it says here. We see that DSSS again and something called a 255 chip PN sequence at a rate of 1.25 megachips per second and then a reference to a data rate of 100.4 bits per second. After a little reading it turns out these are parameters for a certain type of spread spectrum modulation but we'll talk about that more in a minute. So before we talk about spread spectrum we need to have a basic review of waves and modulation for those that aren't familiar. So remember that radio signals are transmitted on radio waves and data is encoded on waves by modulating various parameters of that wave. Remember that waves have three main characteristics that we can modify. They have the wavelength essentially the frequency, how many cycles per second the wave moves and the phase, the position of the wave relative to its point. As well as the amplitude essentially the height of the wave. And we can look at waves in a few different ways. You guys are probably familiar with the time domain representation of a wave where time is on the x-axis and amplitude is on the y-axis. But often when we're working with signals we look at the frequency domain representation where frequency is on the x-axis and amplitude is on the y-axis. So essentially this shows us what frequency components make up a signal. The frequency domain representation of let's say 100 kilohertz sine wave on this representation it would show a sharp spike at 100 kilohertz on the frequency domain graph. But often times signals may contain other frequency components. So this graph may take on a very unique look for different types of signals we're looking at. So let's start and see kind of how analog modulation is done and we'll move on from there. But we're going to look at both AM and FM both of which you guys probably use to look at. So to send an analog AM signal essentially you have a carrier wave at the desired frequency you want to transmit on. And then you vary the amplitude of this frequency according to your data, the modulating signal. And the resulting signal is what gets sent out over the air and transmits whatever. Notice how we varied one parameter in this case the amplitude to send the data over the air. And instead of modulating the carrier analogly we could have simply varied it between the data signal instead. And then sending a digital data signal over AM is often called OOK for on off keying or ASK for amplitude shift keying. So we can do the same thing to frequency modulate data except we vary the carrier frequency according to the modulating signal instead of the amplitude. So again we could have shifted it between two distinct frequencies to encode digital data on this wave. And the method of encoding digital data on a frequency modulated wave is called FSK for frequency shift keying. So as we talked about digital AM is ASK or OOK and digital FM is called FSK. But we can also vary the third parameter the phase in a manner that's called phase shift keying. And so we can do this to encode digital data on a wave. So for this talk we're going to focus on BPSK. Remember we saw that earlier in that tech doc. It stands for binary phase shift keying. Basically it's alternating a wave 180 degrees in and out of phase in order to encode binary data on this wave. And 180 degree phase shift is simply achieved by flipping the wave upside down or just multiplying it by negative one. So here each cycle of the wave corresponds to one symbol a bit in this case. Okay so I know it's kind of brief but we have the necessary knowledge on how signals are modulated. So let's go one step ahead and talk about what is spread spectrum. Spread spectrum is basically a way to take a narrow band signal, one that doesn't take up too much bandwidth to transmit and it spreads it out over a much, much, much wider frequency range. And this gives it the ability to be much more jam resistant and it introduces a property called processing gain. And essentially this processing gain the more you spread the signal the more gain you get at the receiving end. Essentially you can transmit further. The processing gain actually allows for a spread spectrum signal to be received even if it's below the noise floor at the receiving point. Spreading the signal also allows for what's called CDMA properties. This stands for code division multiple access. You've probably heard about it in reference to your cell phones. What this means is that multiple devices can transmit on the same frequency at the same time and all the data can still get through. And this is achieved through the use of something earlier in the tech doc called a PN sequence or a PN code. This is the same thing. Now there's two types of spread spectrum. DSSS and FHSS. And the difference is that the D-TRIPLE-S operates around one frequency as shown there on the left. Whereas the FHSS hops between multiple frequencies so as you can see on the four peaks on the right. But for the sake of this talk we're just going to focus on D-TRIPLE-S as that was what was referenced in the doc. The signal in this case a relatively slow BPSK signal in the case of these transmitters 100 per second signal is mixed with a very very very fast pseudo-random signal the PN sequence. And the resulting signal contains all the original information but is spread out over a much larger bandwidth. So here you can see the data the data BPSK signal is then spread to 1.25 megahertz that's 12,500 times wider. Notice the shape of the waveforms are very similar in these two. It's going to be important later. So here's a more concrete example. Our data signal is just 0 and 1 modulated very slowly. Our pseudo-random sequence is a binary signal that changes much much faster. The higher frequency shown there in green. And we mix those two signals together to get a resulting signal with a much higher frequency components you see there in the red. But how do we recover the data? You simply mix the output signal one more time and the original data falls right back out. And so that's how this whole DSSS thing works. So now we talked about these PN sequences briefly. Basically all they are is that their periodic binary codes have strong auto-correlation properties. Meaning that they are a binary sequence that repeats over and over and over. And just as an interesting piece of information if you guys end up trying something at home they're commonly generated using linear signals. So for this research we're going to look at a specific type of PN sequence called an M sequence. Again we saw that in the original spec doc. And what's interesting about them is that they correlate strongly with themselves at a phase shift of zero very, very, very poorly at any other phase shift. So let's take a look. Up there on the left we're comparing a very short M sequence. 0, 0, 0, 1. And we're comparing it to itself. And at a phase shift of zero has a perfect correlation of 4. If we shift it once to the left it stays at zero until we bring it back into phase. This is nice because it makes searching for this PN sequence in any other signal very easy. We just look for it using correlation. So this spread spectrum stuff is simple in theory but it's really more difficult in practice. You know in theory you simply mix the signal being received with the appropriate PN sequence and the data signal will emerge. But in a perfect world our transmitter and our receiver are going to have, they're going to be tuned, not going to have a frequency. So we need to accommodate for this frequency differential somehow. Also remember that if the PN is not properly aligned with itself and incoming data it won't work.  So we need a way to phase align the PN sequences. So keep thinking how we might do that and it uses those auto correlation properties we talked about just a second ago. All right so we've kind of got a little rough idea of the theory but now to put it into practice we're going to do something. So to do this I use software software defined radio along with Python and GNU radio to write on my code and I also needed an appropriate antenna that I ended up getting off of ebay and so for those that wish to try this at home just know that global star antennas are left hand circular polarized so it's a specific type of antenna that you'll need to look up. But that's a little bit out of the scope of this talk and for those of you who are familiar with RTL-SDR you know the really cheap defined radio dongle unfortunately you won't be able to use it for this it doesn't cover enough bandwidth. So I use the USRP B200 great board to get it for about 600 bucks and I think a lot of the other SDRs in the market work just fine. So we also needed a low noise amplifier for receiving some weak signals and supporting cabling and voltage regulators to supply it. I got this LNA off of a company called Mini Circuits it was 150 bucks so not too bad. I packaged it all up into a box because these things are pretty fragile and hackers are clumsy or I'm clumsy and I didn't really want to break the hardware so anyway I mounted the antenna on the outside of the box so we can take this thing places and aim it at things. I had it up in my Black Hat hotel room was aiming it over at McCarran and sniffing up data from the airport so we'll get to try that out. So how does this hardware work? Essentially the software defined radio it listens for radio waves which are analog coming in to digital data that our computer can process and does this by taking samples of the wave. So this guy named Nyquist back in the day came up to the realization that while sampling you need to sample it at least twice as fast as a signal's highest frequency in order to accurately reproduce the signal while sampling. A real world example of this is that the human ear can't hear frequencies higher than 20 kilohertz and if you recall CD audio if you guys still use CDs is sampled at 44.1 kilohertz that's just over twice the human frequency hearing range. So you should also know that software defined radio hardware uses what's called IQ sampling or modulation to receive and send these signals. This topic's a little too much to get into for now but I know that for each sampled data taken two values are recorded the I the in phase value and the Q the quadrature value and using this IQ modulation has strong benefits for processing signals and software but if you're interested I suggest you check out this YouTube video it does a really really good job explaining much better than I'll be able to do but bottom line you don't need to understand this unless you're going to try this research at home. So the first step to decoding satellite transmissions is to figure out that PN sequence so we can extract the data from the waves. So let's put our hardware to work. So remember that we're looking for a signal the PN sequence that is 255 bits in length it repeats over and over and over again 1.25 million chips per second. Here I should mention that a chip is the same thing as a bit we just name it differently so we can distinguish it from actual data bits. So now interestingly enough we can treat a D triple S spread spectrum BPSK signal the same as we treat BPSK. So check out this graph it's kind of hard to show but we can see that the BPSK signal above shifts the wave at its transition but once every several wave cycles. The DSSS BPSK signal shifts the wave much, much, much faster but in the same way as the BPSK signal. So this means that we can use an ordinary BPSK demodulator to receive the spread data. Now the downside of doing this is that receiving the data this way is that we don't receive any of the processing gain benefit we talked about from spreading a signal. So this technique only works over really short distances but it's perfectly legitimate. So I was able to do this across the room maybe 100 feet away. We need to set our hardware to sample the data correctly and we have to meet a few different criteria. First the USRP, the Sysophorotify radio I use can only sample at multiples of 32 megahertz. We also need to sample twice as fast as the highest frequency component and in this case that's the PN sequence in the signal 1.25 megahertz due to what Nyquist had to say. We also need to sample at a rate that provides an even number of samples per symbol. In this case an even number of samples per chip. So we achieve all this by sampling at a rate of 4 megahertz and then re-sampling the signal essentially just interpolating data points along it to get an upset sample signal of 5 megahertz. And what's special about this 5 megahertz signal is that it has a sampling rate that corresponds to 4 samples per symbol which is an even number. But now how do we get the actual PN sequence out of this data we're going to see over there? Well we know from doing some calculations 29 times for each bit of data that's sent. And since the PN sequence doesn't cross any bit boundaries, we can simply XOR the PN sequence with a fixed bit of data, you know the first bit of data and the resultant is the actual PN code. So let's use GNU Radio to decode the signal as BPSK and appropriate and then it'll output the appropriate data to disk. So here you can see a GNU Radio flow graph. I used to do this and you can see that the PPSK demodulator has the setting of 4 samples per symbol from our calculations. So the PPSK demodulator outputs the decoded symbols to a binary file that we'll then examine in a hex editor. So if you look at the data in the hex editor we can clearly see that there's a repeating sequence of data, 255 bits long. It's starting to sound kind of familiar. Well it turns out that repeating sequence of data is the PN code. And it turns out this is pretty much the keys of the kingdom for intercepting all this data. This code is used by all simplex data network services to encode the data sent over the air. So now that we have the code let's try de-spreading some data. You may recall that we need to mix the PN code with the incoming signal to receive the information. And if all goes well we should expect our output signal to contain a very strong narrow band signal shown as a sharp peak down in that graph below. So above is what the normal simplex data network signal looks like kind of that lumpy thing. And the graphic below shows what we should see after we de-spread the data. Just that nice sharp spike in there. So now before we begin, it's important to know that working with these signals is a very computationally intense procedure. Receiving a signal at 4 megahertz with a software defined radio works out to a data rate of about 30.5 megabytes per second. So for the purposes of this work we're going to record the data and then post-process later. But eventually be possible to use more robust custom hardware, you know, think FPGAs to do this work in real time. So we're just going to record and do it later. So big thanks to some of my interns over there for helping me optimize this code. It used to take about a minute to run. Now it takes about like 40 seconds. But all right, so how do we de-spread the data? First we need to lock on to the mixed PN sequence in the signal. And we do this by correlating the received data signal against the recovered PN at every single point in time. So essentially we're sliding the PN against the received data signal and correlating. And if we plot the correlations over time specifically aligned, we'll see a sharp spike in the correlation. And that's what you're seeing up there. So this is how we know when to mix the two signals together to de-spread the data. So if we align the PN on the first correlation spike only due to some frequency mismatch, we'll fall out of correlation over time as shown there on the left. So we fix this by adjusting the PN forward or backward at each and every correlation peak to ensure it's alignment. At this point, once we're in alignment we simply mix the data together and the signal should fall out. So after compensating for the frequency differential there you can see on the left that the correlation over time stays pretty constant with a slight oscillation, but that's okay. And if we zoom in, or I guess zoom out really far we can see the correlations over a whole data packet. And you can see the negative and positive correlations representing actual data bits flying over the air. So if we look at the signal coming out of our software to spreader, sure enough we see that sharp spike in the center indicative of our signal in question. That's better data successfully, theoretically. So zooming way in on that sharp peak we can see that the waveform looks like a BPSK signal. It's operating at around 100 hertz and we know that that's the data rate in question that we're looking for. So things are looking pretty promising. So now that we're maybe receiving data let's try to decode it, like what's inside. So if you look at the time domain representation of the signal you can clearly see there's actual data bits coming over there. So that's satellite data. So now let's click up the signal and do something with it. Namely we just low pass filter it and pipe it into a PSK demodulator. So at that point the data pretty much just falls right out. You can see at the top I got this nice binary string out of that data. But we need to validate it. So I found a spec sheet online that references the data packet format which is shown right up there. And it starts with a preamble, essentially a constant unique binary sequence that tells the receiver when the packet is running, as well as a bunch more data. So if we convert that manufacturer ID set of bits to decimal, sure enough it lines up with the ESN written on the back of the device. So I'm pretty sure that means we're doing something right. So now the data packets also contain just about any information you want. And this is kind of up to the end integrator. But these devices predominantly are used to send location data in asset trackers. So everyone uses the same data format to do the same on the back end. So after extensive comparison, again with some help of the interns, we freed out the bits 8 to 32 are latitude and 32 to 56 are longitude. You simply convert those binary bits to decimal and multiply it by a degrees per count value. And that will give you the actual latitude and longitude. So I kind of got a snippet of the code there. It will be online later if you want to kind of craft your own packets. We'll talk more about that. So the data packets also contain long story short, we figured out how to calculate the checksum. But this means not only can we validate packets, we should be able to create our own. From what we saw in the comparison and the devices we looked at, there was no encryption, no signing, or no other protection. So theoretically we can inject our own data back into the satellite network. So now recall that we're doing all this interception here on the data uplink from the device to the satellite. But due to the bent pipe nature the data in the downlink is exactly the same as the data on the uplink. So except we just need to compensate for a few other things like Doppler shift and multi-path interference. So this is a kind of avenue for future research if you guys are interested in helping out. But essentially with a bigger dish, a little better hardware, we can start receiving a ton more data doing the same method. But all right, so now we figured out these data packets, can we inject it back into the network? Transmit on global stars frequencies. It's probably illegal where you live and it might interfere with critical emergency communications. Fortunately the simplex frequencies aren't used for satellite control per se, so it's not like you're going to make it fly sideways or anything. But if you wanted to transmit that's actually the easy part. So don't try this at home, wink, wink. So all you do is really you simply mix the data together with the PN sequence and the carrier, all of the appropriate rates which are listed here in this talk. I'm not going to be providing my code that I designed but if you're savvy enough you should be able to do it. But really all you need is about .2 watts of power and you can get an appropriate amplifier on the internet for 200 bucks and you can write the code and get new radio, it's pretty simple. But what if there was an easier way? Well, GlobalStar provides an OSX firmware update utility for one of their spot trace devices, their personal asset trackers. Inside the application package there's a tool, Spot3FirmwareTool.jar and it contains all sorts of interesting functionality that's never called by the actual consumer firmware updater app. So if you look in the jar there's a debug console class which references something in the spot device class called write an electronic serial number. So what if we wrote a Java app to call that debug console? Sure enough, hidden functionality right there in the software on their website. The debug console essentially lets us update the ESN of any of these spot trace devices out there. So we can change the serial number of any of these devices essentially cloning it. I mean think cloning cell phones, cloning whatever. So to prove this I cloned one of my spot trackers with that confirmed, yeah, we were able to clone the device. So for 50 bucks you can clone satellite network devices and maybe spoof some coordinates and shenanigans. But besides the obvious of using the network to transmit your own custom data or expanding capabilities at your service, maybe sending more packets than you're allowed to per hour, what can we do with the data transmission capability? Can we get in a little bit more trouble? These devices are used very commonly in emergency response. So one scenario I thought up is what if an attacker spoof thousands of false emergency is using these devices and jammed up the emergency response center, preventing aid from getting to an actual emergency? Or what about monitoring for help requests from these devices and then just cancelling the help requests? I mean it's kind of a dick move but someone might do it. So I talked to a really, really well known reporter a couple days ago and she said that many of the journalists out there use these spot devices to track their whereabouts in case they're kidnapped. So they're relying on these devices so people know where they are. So what if a foreign adversary was sniffing up this data and then like arresting our reporters or people are using these for their safety? That's not cool. So it turns out these chips are also used in access control systems by law enforcement and even for animal tracking. So I think it would be hilarious to say that a child grizzly had relocated itself into suburban California and see what all the moms say. But I also forgot to mention that they're used heavily in SCADA systems and I'm going to refrain from naming any specifics because I know you guys are a bunch of hooligans and will probably get in some trouble but they're commonly used in water quality sensors, pipeline monitoring and a lot of big oil and gas operations. So I was thinking what if there's a big rival oil company that wanted to figure out where its competitor was and just have a look for yourself? But wait, there's more. Lockheed Martin Flight Services, the contractor that handles flight planning for the FAA, allows these devices, these spot devices to be used to track any VFR flight. So what if an attacker made an airplane appear to deviate from its original flight plan into tightly controlled airspace? You know I obviously haven't tried this but it would be interesting to see what happened. So to demonstrate some of this I built a little vulnerability which I'm going to talk a little bit about and the way it works is that I sit with the device in the uplink path of the transmitter and listen. So this is what I was doing in my hotel room a couple nights ago and over time I'm able to pick up countless transmissions from access trackers and map their patterns of life. I did some research a year ago at Schmucon talking about mapping patterns of life from mobile vulnerability location tracking and you know we were able to use work just by where they are at different times of the day. So pattern of life is really key to tracking somebody. This makes it really easy to identify what a target is and where it goes. In this case we're going to monitor an armored car route. Now that I know where the armored car is I know where to hijack it and I can hijack the car, disable its beacon and begin spoofing their beacons ID with my transmitter and spoof GPS coordinates that the armored car routes and robbing the bank blind. So think fast and furious. So you might ask does this work? Short answer is yes but I needed a high vantage point. So clearly the only solution was to go out and start working on my private pilot license so I could intercept the data from the air. So I've been flying with this thing and we're going to see where it keeps going but the results are pretty promising so far. So I'm going to do a little demo. I'll show you how. But I've broken up the video step by step so we can talk about it a little bit. So bear with me here while I fire up the video. Is that up there full screen? I can't. Perfect. So we're going to wait for a data signal from an attacker or someone to transmit so the attacker is intercepting the data right there. So we've captured the data, it writes the data out to disk and we're going to throw that data in the program here. And I've kind of cropped the video because it takes about a minute to analyze the data packet. And, okay, so it locks on to the PN signal in the signal and starts de-spreading. And it'll finish up here. And then we can see that's a pretty constant correlation over time. That's what we're looking for so it means we locked on to the PN signal successfully. Then we're going to throw that back into some guinea radio code to kind of visualize what we got. We're going to zoom in up there and you'll be able to see the live data bits flying by. Meanwhile, this is writing those data bits out to disk for us to analyze. And then we're going to go ahead and analyze those data bits. We should get the binary packet data out if all goes well. So there's the binary of the packet. Now let's throw that into the packet decoder and verify it. We can successfully validate a packet and print out its parameters. We can actually use a specific data and translate that into a latitude and longitude. So let's go back to the presentation. All right. So a couple conclusions. A few parting thoughts for you guys. I disclosed to global stars senior engineering staff about 180 days ago. They were actually really friendly in the response and seemed very concerned. I get the impression they don't deal with a lot of these disclosures. It's not very typical. They have technical detail right up for them in the hopes of helping out and never really heard back. After the news broke recently, they issued a statement saying they take privacy very seriously and they have monitoring in place to detect these sort of attacks. Unfortunately, half this attack is passive and there's no way that can be detected. And the transmitting portion, if targeted, really has a low probability of being detected. So in some of the recent statements, some of the users get this way rather than addressing the actual issue at hand. In my experience, these vulnerabilities are always discovered one way or another. And it's better to get them addressed sooner than later. Last year, I disclosed a bug to Grindr about being able to track their users through their mobile dating app and they said it wasn't an issue and didn't patch it. Six months later, the Egyptian police got a hold of that bug through other channels and began using it to arrest gay men in Egypt. You know, we're able to make these systems a lot safer for the end users. So I sincerely hope the Global Star is serious about their statement addressing these issues and I hope other manufacturers are paying attention as well. But I'm really looking forward to seeing the solutions or seeing what solutions come out of the community. Bottom line, there's still a lot of work to be done. I'm releasing my code on GitHub later. Apologies, I don't have it up yet. It's been kind of crazy here at Google. I'd love to collaborate on improving this whole system, maybe intercepting data on the downlink. So if you guys are interested, let's work on this together. I have a feeling we're only at the tip of the iceberg of seeing where this thing is used. So we're going to start seeing a lot of interesting things fall out. So if you're interested, help out. You know, in conclusion, I still believe Global Star makes a good product. But there's a couple takeaways. Remember that the system is implemented, it's not really patchable or easily patchable. A lot of the devices don't support firmware upgrades or they're so far out in the boonies that it's not realistic. So the best thing to do going forward is to add a layer of encryption on top of this existing protocol. And remember that obscurity is not security. Spread spectrum alone won't protect your data. And if consumers just assume someone can snoop on your data and act accordingly, I think it's security. And if not, demand to know how your data is being transmitted and isn't encrypted. If not, how so? So big thanks to the interns over there for helping out with testing and code optimization. Yeah. Thanks, guys. And then to SINAC as well for funding this different crazy research. But, yeah, the code will be live later. Hit me up if it doesn't come up. Feel free to email me, tweet me. I'm always happy to talk. So thanks for coming out. Questions, comments? We got five minutes. Can we use the bent pipe to tunnel information or like, you know, from one location to another, sneak in some information? Are you saying, yeah, can we use the bent pipe to send other information? Yeah. That's a great question and you certainly can. I don't recommend it. But there's nothing, I mean someone probably is. You have to say, yeah, it really repeats anything it hears on that 1.6 gigahertz range and beams it back down on about 7 gigahertz so you can build your own receiver and use your own personal satellite network. So, like, does it need to be on a particular protocol or like a packet structure or like it transmits anything that it receives? I'm sorry, I missed that. Like, does it need to be encoded in a specific format? So the data is a repeater. So you could probably need to be some sort of spread spectrum in order to get it over that distance but you could use a model very similar to what they're doing here. Thank you. Anyone else? Feel free to come up after. Cool, thanks guys. Appreciate it. Thank you.


Hey everyone, this is Alan Socky and the host of Simulation. I'd like to give you an update. We are currently conducting interviews on the road in different cities around the United States with diverse leaders and it's really cutting edge of knowledge content and we're really excited to deliver it to you very soon. We'll be spending a lot of time when we get back in February putting it all together for you and hopefully you'll see a steady stream of continued day-to-day-to-day interviews being released really soon. We're really looking forward to dropping it for you. The only reason we're able to do things like this is with the support of awesome people like you. So if you can help contribute to what we're doing and help bring this content to more people around the world and help inspire the next generation of builders, creators, thinkers, doers, we would love that. So join us and thank you again for all the support and we're really excited to continue the growth of this project and building the future together. Much love and we'll see you soon.


get started here, constantly asking questions every day. How's it going? Have you used this jump before? Do you know where lunch is? Well, what if asking these questions makes us feel like an imposter, unworthy of the job they're paying us for, and unworthy of our friends? And what if that feeling of being unworthy keeps us from making new friends, from questioning our co-workers, from learning and improving ourselves? Well, this was me until about a year ago. Once I realized that I was avoiding asking questions out of fear that someone would find out that I didn't belong, I made a conscious effort to change that. And so I'm here today to give you a programmer's guide to asking questions. My name is Amanda Caranto, and my background is in manufacturing and process engineering. I've worked in both aerospace and electronics manufacturing. I taught myself to program, brought up on tutorials and books like Chris Pines Learn to Program and Code School. And as of March of this year, I am the customer support and happiness team lead at Travis CI. And Travis CI, for those of you who don't know, is a continuous integration platform. You provide your code and your tests via GitHub, and we provide the virtual machine, and we can also deploy your code for you. And as always, it's free for open source projects. And I do have tons of stickers, so please come and get some stickers. So I wouldn't be here today if it weren't for Travis, but I also wouldn't be here if it weren't for two exceptionally patient little boys who sacrificed a lot of mommy time for me to be able to come here and talk to you. They love fist bumps and stickers, so if you see them, please say hi to them. And of course, they are. They have the cutest builders in town. So before we dive in, Coraline and Peter, if you can help me out, we're going to do a quick writing activity. I have some exceptionally large index cards and some pens. It's not necessary that you have them, but we're going to start thinking critically about the questions that we're asking and not asking every day. So we're going to divide this into two parts. We're going to have side A and side B. Starting with side A, I'll give you a few minutes to get your no cards. Poor planning for a process engineer, let me tell you. All right, all the questions will be up on the slide so you can catch up as you get them. So like I said, side A is going to be about the questions that we're asking every day. So the first thing I'm going to have you write down is what was the last question that you asked someone? It's very possible that it happened right here in this very room. You turned to the person next to you and said, how's it going? What are you working on? Anything like that. It could have been something more complex, like how do I implement this gem or can you teach me how to do that? But whatever it was, go ahead and write it down. The next thing I'm going to have you write down and it's going to sound kind of silly at first. Did you care what the answer to your question was? And I know what you're thinking. Of course I cared.  Of course I wanted a response. But did you really? In the case of asking how are you or sup, we oftentimes throw that out as an ice breaker. And so you don't really necessarily care the answer to that question. So this is a simple yes or no. Did you care? The next thing is fairly easy as well. Did you learn anything? In the case of how are you, you probably learned. The person sitting next to me is fine. They had a terrible flight in. They had the Caranto babies sitting next to them. Anything like that. But what did you learn? The next thing, and we'll talk a little bit more about it, is was it a leading question? Did it start a conversation? Did it start an argument? A leading question is going to be anything that is more than just a yes or no question. Like this one, this is a yes or no. And the last thing I'm gonna have you write down for side A is what was the outcome? This is a little bit different than if you've learned anything. In the case again of how are you, maybe you're making a mental note to check back in with the person sitting next to you. Maybe they said fine and you don't really believe them and so you're gonna check back in with them in a few days to see if they are actually fine. Or maybe you have to go Google something later. Or whatever it is, let's write down the outcome. So let's flip over to side B. Side B is going to be about the questions that we're not asking. So the first thing to write down is what was the last question that you had in your head and you didn't ask? This one is going to be much more difficult. We think of questions all the time that would kind of dismiss immediately. It's very possible that the last question that you had that you didn't ask happened today. Maybe in a talk that you were in previously you didn't have time or for some other reason. And so that's the next question. Why didn't you ask it? Did you not have time? Did you not want the person you were asking to know you didn't know the answer? Number three is what were the consequences of that? Maybe you have to Google something later. But maybe you didn't learn the person's name and you didn't make a friend today. Whatever the consequences were, let's go ahead and write that down. Number four is who is the subject matter expert for the question that you have? Fairly easy if I'm asking how are you? The subject matter expert is the person I was talking to or didn't talk to. In the case of sitting in a talk earlier today, it was probably the person speaking. And the last thing, yes or no, do you intend on asking it? All right, just take a second, make sure your answers are all there. So let's get into the guide. I've broken this up into five easily actionable points. So if you're making some doodle notes, you can make room for five things. The first point is don't be content with not knowing. People always told me that I was a great listener and I always took that as a compliment. But there's more to just listening to people than sitting there and staring at them and hearing the words that they're saying. Plenty can be deduced from conversation whether it's spoken or unspoken. And usually when you listen to people talk long enough, you can figure out the answer to most questions. What does that acronym mean? What is that person's name? I don't really remember. But if you listen long enough, you can usually figure it out. And I would avoid asking questions because I didn't want people to know that I didn't know. And I didn't wanna be wrong. But sometimes you are wrong. And that's okay. This was a big one for me. It's really, really okay to not know. And the next slide is a really great quote from everyone's favorite astrophysicist. I love being wrong because it means in that instant, I learned something new that day. And if Neil deGrasse Tyson can be wrong, I suppose I can be too. The second point in our guide is ask one leading question per conversation. And we talked a little bit about leading questions and it's gonna be any question that furthers the conversation and engages the listener. And a leading question might be a follow-up to for the devs in the room, we can call a Boolean question, a yes or no question. So the point of asking leading questions is to further the conversation and to be engaging. Because by being engaging, we can ask more and more questions and get at the answer that we're actually looking for. And we want to keep them engaged as well because we learn more faster when we're asking questions. The process of actually thinking of a question is going to make the answer stick in our brain a little bit better. So number three in our guide is find a subject matter expert. And there I go using acronyms, but subject matter expert. You are not a subject matter expert in everything, even though some people pretend to be. And that's okay. This is another thing that I've had to get over. But you can become a subject matter expert in anything that you want just by asking questions. So in big bold letters on side B, I want you to write down what you are the subject matter expert of. It's very possible that the thing that you're the subject matter expert of is Ruby, maybe some other language, maybe some other software, some other hardware. It could be something that's completely unrelated to tech. For me, it's crafting. I've been a knitter and crocheter for well over 12 years. And I can confidently say that I am a subject matter expert when it comes to crafting. So you can find me on Ravelry if you want to learn more. If you want to learn about yarn crafts or how I make crazy quilts or how I make these awesome vinyl decals. I'm the person to talk to you. And I would love to help you and answer your questions. Number four in our guide is care about the answer. So like I mentioned before, it might seem silly, but it's not. We should be asking the questions that we want or need the answer to. Questions like how are you? Sup, how's it going? How did you sleep last night? These are questions that we ask all of the time without expecting an answer or thinking that a person will actually respond to us. And for some of us, mostly consultants, our time is measured in actual dollars. And the point that I'm trying to make with this is give people your time that we should give it like it's free, like it doesn't, like I'm not on the clock and like it isn't a chore. And we've heard of rhetorical questions, questions that we're asking without expecting an answer that have an obvious answer like do pigs fly or who cares. But what about sarcastic questions? Questions that we ask to prove a point or to make someone look bad. I have a fairly well-known example on the next slide and I left the person's name or the poster's name off of it because we shouldn't be grabbing our pitchforks, we should be learning something from this. So this was written on an issue for the Basecamp POW project. It's open source, this was just an issue. You'll send me some GM status now so when can I just do a simple merging of a pull request? Sheesh. This is the infamous Sheesh conversation. And this was Sam Stevenson's of Basecamp's response. It's hard to read. It starts with, here's a rough list of what into this release and he goes on and on and at the end, Sheesh indeed. So the next part is threefold. Be concise, use as few words as possible when you're asking your questions. Be precise, be unambiguous, leave nothing open for interpretation and be deliberate, be planned, calculated and researched when you're asking your questions. And this is especially important in technical and professional situations.  But there is such thing as a bad question, question that's poorly worded, poorly formed. And I think a really great example of a poorly worded question is from our favorite manager from Office Base, Bill Lumberg. He loves asking convoluted and indirect questions. So you think you could be here tomorrow because we kind of need somebody that would be great. Well, did he actually ask a question here? I mean, there's no question mark. So kind of, he was muddling his words out of the necessity of he didn't want to be direct and he wanted to avoid confrontation. But there is a question here. Another thing to remember is to do your research. And this is kind of obvious. I mean, everyone I talked to about this talk was make sure you put something in about doing research, but we all know to go to Google. But we should also expand our research to our peers, our other coworkers. And if any of you were in Gary Bernhardt's talk yesterday, he talked about known unknowns and unknown unknowns. And while doing your research, you should try to make as many of those unknowns known and know what you don't know. So let's review those very quickly. Don't be content with not knowing. Ask one leading question per conversation. Find the subject matter expert. Care about the answer. Be concise, be precise, and be deliberate. And I know what you're thinking. Yeah, okay, Amanda. I hear you, but why would I want to do this? First off, great job for asking questions. You've all been paying attention, but you can construct the most eloquent question on the planet. You can figure out who to talk to, but why would you want to do this? Especially as someone who feels like an imposter. First off, I mentioned before, you can learn more faster by asking questions. And we're far more likely to remember things, like I mentioned, if we form a question about it. Similar to when you meet someone for the first time, you repeat their name and it kind of goes into a different part of your memory bank. So this is both true personally and professionally. And one of my favorite questions to ask people is what are you working on these days? And this is an awesome leading question. Because not only does it let someone open up to you and it kind of opens a conversation, but it also gives you something to talk about the next time you see this person. You don't have to break the ice again. You don't have to search for something to come up with. And this talk has been incredibly lacking in buzzwords. So the next benefit is FaceTime. And not this kind of FaceTime, but I suppose you could use this kind of FaceTime to get FaceTime. I'm talking about this kind of FaceTime. Oops. I work remotely and sometimes that means the only interaction that I get with my coworkers is asking questions. Whether it's the latest build release info or something in their personal lives, there it's gonna build again. There we go. All right, yeah. Another benefit is we can expand our knowledge outside of tech. I'm sure most of you don't have only friends that are Ruby programmers or only people that are programmers in general. You can learn anything. If you wanna come talk to me about crafting stuff, I will teach you and it's possible to learn anything just by asking questions. This next one has been one of the hardest things for me by far and it's asking questions when we're in a meeting as coworkers to think critically about business and technical decisions. So we'll be sitting or in front of a computer or at a table, wherever we are, and somebody would be talking about the latest build release and I would be sitting at my desk, quietly thinking they probably made that decision for a reason. And whatever that reason was, it's probably good enough. That's not okay. It's really, really not okay. Asking why encourages everyone on the team to think critically about their decisions and it gives you a little more insight as to why people are making these decisions. Right or wrong, but we need to ask questions in these situations. And that's why we have the process of the five why's. If you haven't heard of it, you can determine the root cause of any problem by answering the question why five times. And this actually brings back memories of my process engineering days because this originated as part of the Toyota production system. The final benefit that I'm gonna talk about is actually more of a perk of asking questions, but it definitely takes a lot of practice. Negotiation, not just in your professional life, but maybe going out to buy a car. You're gonna have to ask some questions. And I had originally titled this talk, Programmers Don't Ask. After a book that I read several years ago called Women Don't Ask. And the premise of this book, which was published in 2003, is that women and underrepresented minorities don't feel empowered to ask or negotiate a better salary or better benefits. And they can actually miss out on over a half a million dollars of compensation over their career. And since reading this book, this is actually one of the questions that I don't have problems answering. I are asking, I always ask, whether it's a salary or benefits increase, it's worth asking the question. So we've talked about asking questions, we've talked about the benefits of doing so. Let's talk about answering questions because I'm sure you all wrote down that in big bold letters what you're the subject matter expert of, you're gonna have to answer some questions. So the first thing is remember, you weren't always a subject matter expert. You had to ask questions to get where you are. So you should be answering questions to the questioner's skill level. So if you're talking to someone who's a little bit more junior using acronyms, probably isn't the best idea because while you're talking, they're thinking back in their head, oh my gosh, I don't know what that acronym means. I'm gonna have to look that up later, I should write that down and they're thinking and thinking and thinking instead of paying attention to you, answering their question. When answering questions, we should always assume the best. Most people don't have ulterior motives when they're asking you questions. They aren't trying to make you look bad in the case of asking questions in a business meeting and they're not trying to take your job, trying to extract that last bit of knowledge from you so they can take over for you. And something that people answering questions often think is people didn't do their research. Well, point them in the right direction. Give them a place to start. If you think they didn't Google it first, maybe point them at Stack Overflow or somewhere where they can find the best information. And just like when asking questions, when answering them, you need to be precise, be precise and be deliberate. So another thing that people asked me about when I was coming up with the concept for this talk is dealing with people who are bad at answering questions. And so I see people falling into kind of two categories that people that are bad at answering questions.  But these people are often the single point of information. These are the people that you have to talk to to get that information. So you go up to them and you say, hey, can I ask you a question? And they're grumpy cat, no, get away from me, all right. So the next archetype is equally frustrating to work with but maybe a little bit easier to deal with. You may encounter coworkers who just don't know how to answer questions. Now the first thing to do would be send them a link to this presentation. Maybe I can help them out a little bit. But you can also sit down with them, build a working relationship with them. These aren't bad people. You can explain how they can best help you. And in the immortal words of Jerry McGuire, help me, help you. All right, so I asked the Twitterverse how to handle coworkers and at JoshVC had this to say, I can't visualize solutions well enough to help out. So maybe the subject matter expert that you're talking to that maybe seems like they're bad at answering questions.  And maybe they need help to do that. And for these people, you should assume the best. These people aren't out to get you. They aren't sitting in the corner laughing maniacally, hoping that you'll fail. And there's your Spanish Inquisition. And if you liked that bit about buzzwords, FaceTime, you're going to love this. If your coworker is that grumpy cat or they're unresponsive to your, when you express your need for more clarification, you might have to start looking somewhere else. In your research to be concise, precise, and deliberate, you may have found a helpful person outside of your coworkers, outside of your normal group of friends. Find them, include them, ask them your question. That was the most businessy thing I've ever put in a PowerPoint. And finally, one of my coworkers had dealt with some grumpy cats in her previous job and she decided to collect them and put them in an IRC channel, so they could all help each other. So what's next? Well, imposter syndrome is still something I deal with every day. And you can ask Nick, I had imposter syndrome about my imposter syndrome talk. I'm surprised there's people in here. The big thing that I'm working on next is showing people things that aren't perfect. I'm pretty sure I could sit and add 100 more slides. The backgrounds on these slides are my first attempt at drawing things. And so you're seeing my imperfect drawings. And this is really important because some things are less than perfect. And that's okay, thank you. How do you tell people that they are bad at asking questions? That's really good. I would start by talking them through the things that I talked about, sitting them down, just like if you were to sit down the person who is bad at answering questions. Right, so he asked how to be concise and also prove that you've done your research. And it's difficult. So for me, because I work remotely, I can kind of throw a blurb at Slack and kind of show people what I've looked at. I think that can come out of conversation. Start with your question, your concise question, and then follow up with here all the places that I've looked. Yeah, so he asked about getting quality face time when we're working remotely. And this is actually, I just got back from our Travis team offsite and we spent a lot of time talking about interacting with our coworkers, especially when there's a six or sometimes nine hour time difference. And it comes through showing people what you're working on all the time. We have team emails that go out frequently, people post what they're working on, just even if it isn't like a, if it's an asynchronous interaction that's still, hey, I'm here, I'm working, here's what I'm working on. If you wanna talk more about that, I would be happy to. We did talk quite a bit about working remotely. Well, thank you all very, very much.