Hey, how's everybody doing? So just a quick survey. Who here likes hacking? Who thinks hacking is interesting? Yeah? Two people? All right. How about who thinks like guns are kind of interesting? Oh, yeah. Anvil? All right. How about hacking guns? Any interest in that? Can I hack some guns? Good. That's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about popping a smart gun. So what is a smart gun?  I think that a lot of the mentality around smart guns has been shaped by Hollywood. In particular, the movie Skyfall. This is a Bond film a couple years ago. In the film, Q gives Bond a modified Walther and is somehow associated with Bond's grip. Some sort of biometrics. And in the movie, Bond can shoot the weapon but when the assailant gets the weapon, tries to shoot Bond, doesn't work. And then the assailant gets killed by a Komodo dragon or something. But anyhow, we're a little ways away from that for now. But we do have several smart gun models in development that are biometric based. So these would be things like fingerprints or palm prints. We also see ones that use things like magnetic rings and then things like RFID and RFID rift spans, that sort of thing. Now there's a lot of controversy around smart guns. And this is largely due to a New Jersey law that was passed in the early aughts. And this law said that after three years, three years after the first smart gun becomes available at retail, only smart guns can be sold in New Jersey. And so gun people were a little upset about this, thinking that they would no longer be able to buy non-smart firearms. And as a result, they started to kind of protest when gun stores discussed even carrying smart guns, up to the point of people getting death threats and that sort of thing. Now I'm not quite, I'm not really that extreme. I think that if you want a smart gun, you should be able to have a smart gun. I like guns. I like shooting guns, rifles, pistols, shotguns. I think that if you've never shot claves with a shotgun, you should give it a try. It's fun. I do think that if you are going to buy a smart gun, you should be able to get what you're paying for. You should be able to match what's on the label. And also, yeah, if you should be able to buy a smart gun, but not limited to only smart guns. All right. So if you do care to buy a smart gun, the only one you can buy in the states right now is the Armatics IP-1. And this is a fully, from the ground up, smart gun design. It's not like a modification of some other model. And it's made by a German company called Armatics. It's a 22 caliber semi-automatic, straight blowback action, hammer fired, holds 10 rounds, takes two AAA batteries. So, you know, have batteries for your gun. You don't want to have that run out. Um, it has two components, the pistol and the watch. And the way that it authenticates its users to see if they're authorized is by communicating with the watch. So, give you an idea of how that's supposed to work. Uh, what you would do, the user would put the watch on the wrist and then enter a pin on the watch and then select a period of time between about one and eight hours. And during that period of time, the watch will allow the gun to be fired.  You squeeze the back strap on the pistol. And when that happens, the pistol will signal the watch and the watch will check to see if it's authorized. And if it is, it will send a token to the pistol. The pistol will say, yep, I'm here. And the pistol will, uh, allow itself to be fired with that, that token from the watch. That only works if it's within about a foot. So it needs to be within about 25 centimeters or a foot, um, to work out like that. So, uh, let's see how this works with the, uh, the caveat that this is not my computer. So, we'll see, we'll see. So the first thing I'm going to show two videos. The first one is if you don't have a watch on and, oh, hold on a second. Yep, nope, hold on. Hold on. There we go.  Um, alright, so here's what happens if you try to fire the, the, the RMAX FP1 without a watch on. Uh, what you'll see is that when you pull the trigger, the hammer will fall and the gun will just go click. Nothing will happen. Alright. So, that's without the watch. Now, the normal operation with the watch is, you pull the trigger and it goes bang. Alright. So, pretty standard. That's, uh, that's how it's supposed to work. Alright. So, last year I spoke at DefCon about side channel attacks on high security electronic safe locks. And so, you know, that, that happened and it went well and I cracked some safe locks and that was great. And so, then I was looking for what to do next. And I, I kind of thought back to this thread. This was a, a thread on a, a very pro gun forum, um, about a review of the RMAX FP1 back when it was released around 2015. And the, the people in there were, were kind of, uh, you know, maybe mocking it. Like one person in particular, this guy named, uh, Skyhawk said, yeah, could you imagine what the guys at DefCon could do to the, uh, IP1? And so I thought, well, I'm a guy at DefCon, I guess. And so, you know, let's, let's see what happens here. So, um, I got one and I thought, ah, you know, I wonder how hard it will be to hack a big, big, big, good challenge. And so, then I, I hacked it three ways. So, um, we are going to show all three of these today. So, the three hacks were to defeat the proximity restrictions. So, instead of being within a foot, you're now able to, uh, extend that range significantly. Secondly, to be able to prevent the weapon from being fired even when it is otherwise authorized. And third, to fire the weapon without authorization. So, the first of these, the proximity restriction is, uh, normally 25 centimeters. Uh, again, about a foot. And to understand what this is, we have to look at how the weapon, how the pistol communicates with the watch. And it does this on two different bands. One is in the 900 megahertz ISM band. And then the other is down in the 5.35 kilohertz using inductively coupled communications. So, you have two coils essentially. One is in the pistol and one is in the watch. And, uh, when the pistol wants to signal the watch, it will generate, uh, signal a carrier at 5.35 kilohertz that will be coupled through from its coil to the watch's coil. And that looks like this. If you hook up a coil, another coil to an oscilloscope and place it near the pistol while it's attempting to signal the watch, you'll see something like this. It's a 5.35 kilohertz burst for about one and a half milliseconds. Uh, carries no information on its own. It's just a pure carrier. And so, all this does is signal the watch that it wants to communicate on the higher 900 megahertz band. Now critically, this is how it knows that it's close to the watch because the coupling, you know, only happens within about a foot. Um, it, it falls off much quicker. It's not, it's not a propagating wave or anything. So, I thought, well, you know, that sounds like we could just make a, you know, classic relay attack. So, I, you know, whip that up. Um, this is a block diagram of the device I made for that. So, to kind of walk you through it, on the one, there are two parts to this device. So, there are two devices rather. One goes near the pistol and the other goes near the watch. On the pistol side, you have a tuned coil, tuned to 5.35 kilohertz. And the coil there listens for the signal from the pistol. When the pistol has its backstrap squeeze, it will, uh, generate a 5.35 kilohertz tone which will be coupled into the coil, which will go into a band, pass filter, amplifier, go to the microcontroller, and eventually be, uh, make its way into an NRF-24, which is a, a nice little 2.4 gigahertz transceiver. Really easy to use, cheap, all that. That signal, that trigger is in, uh, transmitter over the 2.4 gigahertz backhaul to another 2.4 gigahertz device, another NRF-24, which goes to another microcontroller, and this time goes to a coil driver. So, essentially, it's going to transmit at 5.35 kilohertz into another tuned coil, tuned to LC circuit, LC tank. And from there, that couples into the coil in the watch. The watch receives that signal, thinks, hey, I'm, I'm talking right to the pistol, and generates the token meant for the pistol to authorize it for firing. And, um, that gets transmitted back in the 900 megahertz band. Now, the 900 megahertz band is a, a true propagating, uh, has a true propagating wave, so it gets, uh, much further than the 5.35 kilohertz wood, so it can go directly from the watch to the pistol, um, at least about 3 meters. So you've extended the range from about 25 centimeters to about 3 meters. Alright, so, um, the hardware itself, uh, pretty simple, kind of, uh, it's the, I built the, the red boards down there, uh, you know, whipped up on an afternoon. Uh, not, not too hard. I, uh, the way I designed it is to have the hardware be reusable for both the pistol side and the wash side, and just populate different components to, uh, to, to enact to the different functionality. Um, those NRF 24 little receiver boards, those are, are great, and they're super cheap.  So if you're looking for like something like that, that's great. Um, use a little PIC 16F 18, uh, 324 microcontroller, you know, it's like less than a dollar, super capable, love that too. And, uh, circuit boards also, man circuit boards are cheap these days, like, you can get those from China for nothing. Like, uh, I just, you ripped up a design, some of the Gerbers and, uh, a week later they're in my hands and it's super cheap. It's amazing. So 20 bucks for the relay for the, the custom hardware and wrote some firmware for it and all that. Alright, so, um, let's take a look then at what the relay attack looks like. Okay, so a little bit of context here. Um, what I'm doing right now is I'm picking up the pistol and I don't have the watch on. You'll notice the watch is down in the bottom on the table. Make sure you can see, yeah, on the table. And, uh, it's well out of range, normal range. So it's about 3 feet away when I go to shoot it and as a result when I pull the trigger, it's just gonna go click. So we'll see that happen. Alright, so just click. Now what I'm doing is I'm taking the one half of the relay, the part that goes near the pistol and I'm gonna hold it up to the pistol and you'll see right next to the watch on the table there already is the other half of the relay and that's going to communicate that, that trigger signal to the watch then. So when we hold it up to the, the pistol and pull the trigger, this time it goes bang. So there we go. Defeated the, uh, range, uh, restriction with a, with a relay attack, classic. Um, yeah. So let's see here. Thanks. Now part of the reason why this works is because it has a, a very lax timing requirements. Um, with the system I built it, it actually tolerates at least 630 microseconds of delay and, um, that's kind of surprising. I was expecting a much more, a much tighter, uh, timing requirement. But like here, this, this also, uh, screenshot, you can see the blue trace, which is when the pistol is transmitting its, you know, normal 5.35 kilohertz tone and then you have the, uh, the relay generated tone down below and that is separated by about 630 microseconds and it seems to handle that no problem. So one of the things I could do to kind of improve on this is really enforce tighter timing requirements. Um, you might not, the, the distances involved here like a foot. I'm so sure that you're talking about like sub nanosecond times for the speed of light, but you could at least tighten things up in terms of tolerance. Um, if we, if, if say if it had tolerated a microsecond of delay, that would have been much harder to, to mount an attack on. So, uh, even better approach would be to not rely on RF at all. Uh, if you need a proximity, um, if you need to sense proximity, you might want to use something that has physical contact. It ends up being a, a tricky problem. Actually applicable to a lot of industries. You'll find this a lot with cars, for example. Uh, and you'll see other talks, including here at Defcon this year, where they talk about relay attacks in, in other contexts. So a classic relay attack, it's kind of a hard problem to, to defend against, but you know, it still requires you to have access to the watch and that can be kind of tricky and you have to kind of like have contrived scenarios where that would be relevant. But I got to, you know, build some hardware and write some firmware. So I was like, you know, yeah, I got, I was pretty happy about that. Um, so, the next attack is denial of service.  So you can kind of imagine a couple different scenarios here where this might happen. Perhaps an adversary wants to prevent you from firing your gun, or perhaps there's somebody who say doesn't want any guns fired within a, an area, or perhaps there's not intentional at all. Maybe it's just somebody's grandmother blabbing on the, the, the cordless phone and nobody knows why she still has a landline, but you know, it's there. Or maybe a BNB monitor. There are actually a lot of devices that operate on this 900 megahertz ISM band. Um, and a lot of them have, uh, modulation schemes that will potentially interfere with what the IP1 uses. And so to, uh, to test against this, what they should be doing during development prior to releasing this product, they should be doing what's called EMC testing. This is electromagnetic compatibility. And this tests for two things. Uh, especially for part 15 devices like this. One, you want to make sure that this device doesn't interfere with another device. And two, you want to make sure that other devices don't interfere with your device, to the extent possible anyway. And so, uh, one of the great things about this testing in FCC certification is that you can go look up all this information online. It's all, it's all public record. So on all these devices that have, uh, FCC IDs, you can go to the web and enter in that FCC ID and pull up all sorts of useful information about the bands that the devices operate on and things like internal photos, sometimes schematics. And, uh, fortunately for this one it was, it had just a, a wealth of data in the FCC's certification database. Including, uh, some great photos from the, uh, of inside the pistol and the watch, which is useful because it's otherwise a pot of an epoxy and it would have had to kind of destroy the, the gun to extract it. That showed the transceiver that they use. They, they use a transceiver from a company called Marata, now, uh, part of RFM. It's the TR-1000. And so this transceiver operates at 916.5 megahertz. Uh, it's a fully, uh, kind of integrated transceiver, but, um, it's not too advanced. It supports like on-off keying and amplitude modulator, which is an amplitude shift keying. Um, when you want to transmit data, you would feed it a bit stream, kind of a, a baseband signal. And when you're trying to have received data from it, you'd receive essentially a, a simple bit stream. Um, but it isn't like decoding it down into, probably like, at the, like the packet layer or anything like that. So, uh, to kind of understand this, what it gives you back on the receiver side, which is then to understand why we can attack it. I'd like to understand a little bit about how, how the IP 1 encodes data. And, um, this is about, this is Manchester coding. Manchester coding is all about the edges, about the transitions from like low to high, that'd be a 1, and from high to low it would be a 0. Uh, it has some great aspects. One is that it is, it has a 0 DC value, so that simplifies a lot of design. Um, one thing, though, is that you have to have a good slicer level to decide what is high and what is low. And if you have the slicer level set incorrectly, you might miss a transition and then you lose a bit and then of course your data is corrupted. So here's kind of an example of that. In the top we have a slicer level that's set sufficiently, even though our second little rise there is a bit of a runt pulse. It still gets high enough above the slicer level that we can see that edge and decode the bit stream into a 1, 0, 1, 1. Uh, in contrast in the bottom, the slicer level is too high and we miss that, that transition on that runt pulse. It goes high but not high enough and we, we totally miss that bit. So we are not able to decode that bit stream successfully in that case. So with that background of mine, here is what a, an actual authentication token from the watch to the pistol looks like. It's 19 bytes long and you can see each of the individual bytes kind of grouped in these, these little bursts, uh, these little jagged bursts. And most of this data is, uh, combination of constant and static data. About half of it is constant, half of it is dynamic. And the dynamic data contains a, uh, a time dependent token and that will allow the, the weapon to be fired. They have to have synchronized clocks. And then also importantly it has a checksum. There's a checksum not a CRC and it, notably it's not a error correcting code. All it can do is detect errors, it can't correct them. And if it detects a, a error it will retry about 400 milliseconds later. Or rather if the pistol doesn't act the watch, the watch will retry 400 milliseconds later. Um, but if you, if both of those are corrupted then you're, you're kind of up a creek. So I looked at that for a while and I came up with a, what signal it would be most susceptible to. And this looks, this is a pulse data. And it is, this is a view of it on a spectrum analyzer set to a, a zero hertz span. This is kind of a way to make a spectrum analyzer behave in the time domain instead of how it normally operates, which is in the frequency domain. Uh, can be pretty useful. And so the, uh, the signal, the baseband signal I found to be useful what has a 33 microsecond period of carrier followed by a 300 microsecond, uh, period of no carrier. And so the full period then would be 333 microseconds. And if you're saying, well, you know, where that, where those numbers come from that seems oddly specific, the answer is the 33 microseconds is about one bit width in the, uh, in the, the token being sent from the watch, the pistol. And 333 microseconds is a little bit shorter than one byte width. And so, or one byte period. And so if you overlay those two, you can see that the, the, the very steady repeating pattern is the, the test signal and the kind of smaller pattern is the, the token from the watch. And if you overlay those, you can see that the, the test signal happens to hit at least once in every byte. Um, and so that's important because of the different ways that this test signal can interfere with the signal from the watch, the, the, the desired signal. Um, couple different scenarios. So we have three different scenarios, uh, regarding relative signal strengths. So, first scenario, interference is much greater than the signal, much, uh, much stronger. What will happen in this case is the TR-1000 will set the slicer level to a point 6 dB down from the, the peak of a recent signal. Uh, so does it automatically. Um, and one of the things that even the TR-1000 datasheet notes is that it will do that incorrectly in the face of pulse interference. So we're making some pulse interference and setting that slicer level incorrectly. Uh, what will happen then is we have our slicer level way too high and it's well above all of the desired signal. And so we totally miss all the transitions in the desired signal. So we totally miss all of the bits in that signal and so we don't get the token. The second scenario is when the interference is roughly the same as your desired signal. In that case, the interference would fill the gaps to the signal because again, we have this pulse happening about once per byte. And what will happen then is you're filling in gaps. So you are causing again missed transitions. You're still seeing some of the transitions because the slicer level is set correctly this time. But whereas, uh, since Manchester encoding relies on those transitions, you're filling in the gaps. It sees no transitions and so you lose those bits again. As before, you lose even one bit. You lose the entire byte. You lose the byte. You lose the, the packet and the token is no good. And the gun does not fire. So this third scenario is when the interference is somewhat less than the signal, uh, one kind of strange aspect of the, of the byte stream that you could see in the, uh, some of the previous slides is there were kind of gaps between each of the bytes. You can see that it's like bursts and it kind of looked, uh, oddly separated. And what will happen if this interfering signal is low and happens in between those bytes is you'll interfere with the synchronization of the bytes. And so the tier 1000 be tricked into setting the session level a little bit too low and think that the byte is starting and you'll get this, uh, corruption again in the bits because your timing synchronization is off.  So, so I built, uh, I had an experiment with all this with using some, some lab equipment using a signal generator and an arbitrary waveform generator to kind of hone in on, on what was the right waveform. And from that built a test transmitter. It's very simple. I didn't bother with a circuit board this time. Just built it on some strip board. So what I used here was actually the, the same module that they used in the pistol and the watch. Uh, it's a Marata tier 1000 again. And driving that with another little, uh, PIC 16F, um, for the baseband signal. So that drives the transmitter and the transmitter drives the antenna and we get a portable little test transmitter to kind of simulate what would happen if you had, um, some, either an adversary or just an unintentional interference. Again, like a baby monitor or, or this one potentially. So, that works actually really well. I'll do at least, up to from at least three meters onto about 10 meters. Three meters rock solid. And this is just that, uh, you know, part 15 sort of output levels. It works kind of reliably at up to about 10 meters. It depends on the relative orientation of the, the, the watch and the, the pistol and the, the transmitter and so forth. But the bottom line at least three meters of, of rock solid, um, interference. So this is, it was kind of surprising that it worked because they should have caught this sort of thing again during the EMC testing when they were testing for susceptibility to external devices, external fields and so forth. So let's look at the denial service attack. So, okay. So what's going to happen here? I'm going to fire it normally. All right. So the gun fires normally.  This is the same transmitter that I was just showing. I'm going to try firing it again. And it doesn't fire. So, so, um, so that, that was kind of interesting. I, what, what could they have done to defend against that? Well, one thing would have been to use more transmitter power from the EMC report about the pistol. And my own direct measurements found that they were transmitting at about minus 20 dBm, which is in round numbers about 20 dB below the part 15 limit. So holding all a sequel, they could have used a lot more power, but they, they chose not to for some reason. Um, the, an easy software fix, well, I mean easy, but a possible software fix would be to use error correcting codes. So right now you have a single bit error and you lose the entire token.  So if you had error correcting codes, you might be able to tolerate more bit errors. And as a result, be able to get the token that authorizes firing through without, uh, without failing. And then of course, uh, using more robust modulation might be another approach. Instead of on off king and amplitude modulation, maybe consider something like spread spectrum. Something that is inherently more immune to, to, uh, to interference. Plus with spread spectrum, you can use more power at 900, 900 megahertz band. All right. So, I, so I, I had thought about, um, the third attack. So this would be how to make the gun fire without authorization. And so I was considering all sorts of interesting angles on it and I was thinking like, oh, how can I decode the tokens from the watch and how can I, maybe it's like a replay attack or maybe it can just sort of generate my own tokens or maybe there's some sort of side channel attack or, or something really sexy. I mean, I was, I was going for like really technical and sexy and I, I was really, really gung-ho about that and yeah, making a little bit of progress, but not, not as much as I was hoping for. So I took a step back and pulled up, um, some patents that Armatics had filed and it turns out that they had done a pretty good job of explaining how the gun works in their patents and, uh, you know, kudos to them for filing a patent that they actually used. But, um, in any case, it provided some insight into how the mechanism would be weak and how it could be compromised. So, I'll just kind of go into how, how the gun works internally to give me an idea about maybe where I'm going with this. So internally, if you imagine that you're looking down the slide of the gun, so this is the top part of the gun that slides back and forth. It's the part that has the barrel on it. So imagine you're looking kind of in line with the barrel from behind the hammer. So from the back of the gun. You're kind of looking longitudinally down that and you're looking at the firing pin. Now, ordinarily, the firing pin is blocked. It has some, you can imagine having some lugs on the side and those not matching up with sort of a holes in this, in the slide. And so you might have this mismatch in the lugs to the wards and if you were to strike the firing pin with the hammer, it wouldn't move and the gun wouldn't fire. So, that's kind of what you want ordinarily when you're not pulling the trigger, for example. What happens is, when you partially pull the trigger, you move that mechanism a little bit. Particularly, you rotate the firing pin slightly and those wards or those lugs become closer to lining up with the wards, closer to matching and allowing you to slide, but not quite far enough.  And that's kind of just the scenario you have if you're not authorized to fire. Like, let's say you pull the trigger the full way, nothing happens because you have that mismatch. However, if you do have, if you are authorized to fire, then an electromagnet is turned on by the microcontroller in the pistol and that electromagnet will pull on another piece that's connected to the firing pin. This is a little bit of a ferrous metal, which means that it can be attracted by a magnet. And when the electromagnet pulls on that ferrous material, it will align the lugs with the wards in the slide. And at that point, then the firing pin can slide longitudinally. So when the hammer strikes the firing pin, the firing pin will move, strike the primer in the cartridge, and the gun will fire. So, this is actually a shot of the patent, which was great. It's, you know, patent 8966803. Good tip. If you're looking for patents that companies have filed, they don't always file them in a way that is easily searchable. So what you want to look for, I found, is to search on the company name and then pull the patents they have filed under their name and then pull up other patents that are associated with the inventors on those patents. And sometimes you can get a much greater breadth of information than you otherwise would, even if it doesn't mention the company by name those other patents. In real life, this is what it looks like. This is a view into the gun from the top. This is, I imagine, you've taken the slide off of the pistol and you're looking from the top down into the gun. And so this is, you have the barrel on the left and you have the hammer on the right and kind of in between them, where the arrow is pointing, you have this little circle and that little circle is an electromagnetic. It's the electromagnetic from the diagram. Now that lines up with the components in the slide. So this is the slide and you have two views of it here. The profile view and the bottom view are from the bottom up. You can see there is a little piece that the cam would press on when you pull the trigger part way. When you pull that trigger part way, it will lift up on a linkage and move that piece of ferrous material down a little bit further into range of the electromagnet and then, you know, operate as before. If the electromagnet is on, it will be pulled further, unlock the firing pin and if not, it will just not fire. So one thing you can see easily on this paired view of the profile view and the bottom view of the slide is where the ferrous material is relative to kind of markings on the side of the slide. You can see it's kind of near this detent on the right side. So keep that in mind for a little bit later. You know, I thought, gosh, you know, electromagnetic, I could just put a big-ass magnet next to it, right? They make those and they pull the same way. So I went on Amazon and I'm like, you know, big-ass magnet in there. It's like this huge hockey puck size neodymium magnet. And so I was like, you know, overnight that or two day it. And I got it and I slapped that on the side of the gun and it did not work at all. I mean, it was dead. That was way too much magnet. I think it was, that was just, I could kind of just imagine, like kind of a sucking sound, kind of, of all the components in the pistol being kind of pulled to that side. It was, yeah, nothing, you couldn't pull the trigger at all. You couldn't, like, it was just way too much magnet. So never thought I'd say that, yeah, too much magnet. Yeah. So I went back to Amazon and found some smaller magnets. These are some, again, neodymium magnets about an inch and a quarter by about a quarter inch. And you need about three of them. They come in four packs, but you need about three of them. So you have about $15 with the magnets. I got those together and I picked up some some scrap wood dowel and stainless steel screw, stainless steel so that it wouldn't be attracted by the magnet, depending on the alloy. And this is the magnet tool. This is the $15 tool to defeat the $1500 smart gun. You can see a piece of wood with a screw in it and some magnets stuck on the end. It's kind of good that it needed exactly three magnets because there's no way I'm ever getting those apart again. Like, they are really stuck together. Okay, so the way you use this tool, pretty simple, you just align the magnet right there. If you remember from the earlier slide, you have the ferrous material. It was aligned basically where that arrow is. And so again what you're doing, you're just pulling from the outside, standing in for the electromagnet. And that is most easily done actually at a slight angle. I found that if you had kind of a the magnet just right on the edge, it would kind of pull it too hard. But a little bit of an angle works a lot better. So you slap the magnets up there. Oh, one other thing to note about this, you'll see this in the video too. There's a red light kind of near my wrist, sort of on this picture, near the back of the gun. When the gun is authorized for firing, it'd be green, but in this photo and in the video we're going to see in a moment, it'll always be red. It'll always be unauthorized to fire, not authorized to fire. All right, so let's look at the demo of the magnet attack, firing without authorization. Okay, again, a little bit of context.  So right now I don't have the tone of the watch nearby or anything like that. No relay attack or anything like that in place. And so you'll know it's kind of hard to see, but there the red light is on the back, indicating it's not authorized to fire. So pulling the trigger a couple times, not working. So then we'll take the magnets, put them next to the gun on the right spot and it fires. Thanks. So then you know a couple other instances of this, I've fired it again or I clicked it again showing it wouldn't work, put the magnets up and fires again. You know, how about a first person view? All right, so we're going to go and take that and oh no, it doesn't fire, oh no, oh no. Actually this time it didn't work the first time, but that's okay, we'll just put the magnets back on again and oh there we go, yeah, no problem, no problem.  Pretty easy. I actually showed, so I showed a couple people how to do this and they thought I'm pretty fast.  So the, yeah, so you know, I know what you're thinking, you know, if I can magnets, how do they work? It's a miracle, it's a miracle, yeah.  I had to google that one, I'm sorry, I'm getting old. The magnet defense, however, how do you defend against this sort of thing? So basically don't do this, don't rely on solenoids, don't rely on DC magnetic fields, and we see this thing, this sort of problem repeated again and again, like there was a classic case a couple years ago about century safes. So a particular model of century fire safe was susceptible to a magnet attack. You basically would just put a magnet up on the door and it would move a solenoid inside the safe and the safe would open. So I'm pretty pathetic and they they kind of made the same mistake here, so I would guess that they're probably not the last to make that mistake either, but basically don't use anything that relies on DC magnetic fields. Instead, consider something like a motor drive. So in better safe locks, if the ones I talked about last year, you'll find a motor and it will move like a bolt on an acne screw, for example, and this is much harder to induce from outside of the safe or outside of the gun or externally anyway. And that's one approach. Another option would be to design a system that would detect an attack, so that would have some sort of relocker. Like it would say, oh, there is an external magnetic field and as a result we're going to activate a secondary lock and there are a variety of clever implementations for this sort of thing, but again the the idea is that any external magnetic field would induce some sort of secondary relocking, ideally without any sort of electronic intervention so that it would still work with the power off. So, you know, a few thoughts finally. Again, I'm not against smart guns. I think that if you want a smart gun, you should be able to have a smart gun, but you should get what's on the label. You should have one that actually provides meaningful extra security and I think this fell short. I think the the IP one fell short and it was kind of a little bit of a disappointment. I was expecting a greater challenge. Actually, when the magnet thing happened, I was really hoping for like a deaf contact and I was like, oh no magnets, like that's not going to fly. Like that's too simple. So I was like, I don't know magnets and then, but it's turned to be kind of interesting anyway, I thought. There was also kind of an ethical dilemma and I went back and forth with the media actually about this because they were worried about teaching kids how to do something dangerous. In this case how to fire maybe their parents' gun and you know it's always kind of tricky and you see this a lot with with hacking in so in many contexts because it's better to kind of sit on the information or is it better to share it with the world and I take the opinion that yeah you might be sharing this information teaching a kid how to fire their parents' gun but on the other hand you're telling the parents that this exists, you're getting the word out that these things exist and that we can fix them and then we can make future products better. You know it's probably, I was talking to somebody else about this and he pointed out that it's good that this sort of problem was found now before anybody's died because of it then in the future when somebody might discover it because of some unfortunate accident with the kid. So anyhow if you have any questions I'll be out in the hallway and thanks for your attention and have a good evening.


Hi everyone, my name is Kai and thank you for joining us today for the presentation on accessing complex images for readers who are blind or visually impaired. I'll be discussing several methods in addition to image descriptions that readers can use to intuitively access charts, graphs, maps, and diagrams. Many of you are probably familiar with image descriptions. If not, that's totally fine. We have several presentations and resources on what they are and how to do them well. Simply, image descriptions are text descriptions that are used to convey the same or equivalent information that a sighted reader would get when they look at a picture to someone with a print disability such as those who are blind or visually impaired. Image descriptions can be included in digital content in two ways, alt text, short descriptions, and long desks, long descriptions. Depending on the type of image, photos, graphs, cartoons, to name a few, some will require lengthier descriptions while others can be described with a short phrase. I think many of you would agree that language is versatile and can communicate concepts and ideas quickly but may not be very intuitive when communicating precise spatial elements and relationships that are vital to the reader's understanding when accessing things like art, cell structures, DNA, the shape of graph, and diagrams for assembly. This is where alternative methods can be more precise like sonification, tactile graphics, and 3D models. These approaches can be more intuitive for some readers and can convey spatial information much more efficiently. Before I discuss each of these methods in greater detail, I would like to talk a bit about markup in the context of images. I've seen some publishers provide tables and math equations as pictures. Some have added image descriptions while others have not. But even with image descriptions included, this is problematic. This is because the description will be imprecise and lengthy which can overwhelm the reader. So instead of providing image descriptions for tables and equations, I recommend marking tables up with semantic information using HTML tags and MathML if you're dealing with equations. Let's now look at an example of table navigation. Right now I've shared my screen and you can see that there is a long table with several columns and rows. If I were to access a text description and have this entire table laid out, this would be incredibly lengthy and difficult to read. But because it's marked up, I can now move from cell to cell, row to row, and be able to get individual pieces of information that's much easier to process. I'm going to slow down my speech and now I'm just going to move around. I've moved up. And you can hear it read one, which is trial one of this table that shows the reaction times between visual and auditory stimulus. And when I move around, you can hear each individual piece of information. And spatially I can move down and to the left and be able to understand how each cell relates to each other. Let's now turn to equations. Here we have a document that shows a typical quadratic equation. But if this were written as an image, the language may be incorrect or there would be some inconsistencies with MathML. Since everything is standardized, the equation can sound like this. And again, I can individually look through each element in the equation. And as I continue to drill in, I can get each piece of information. Next, let's talk about sonification. Sonification refers to the use of sound other than speech to convey information such as the height of a bar or the curve of a line. For example, the pitch of a musical note can indicate the height of a bar on a bar graph or a sine wave can indicate the shape of a line on a line graph. For my examples for sonification, I'm going to be demonstrating two tools, SAS accelerator and the Desmos graphing calculator, which utilize the sound to convey shapes of graphs. This is the epidemic curve for COVID-19 in chart form. This is a bar graph. So when I play this, you'll be able to hear different pitch of musical notes to convey the height of the different bars. Let's take a listen. So that is a sonification of the epidemic curve. We can, of course, navigate to individual bars and hear the different values by just using our arrow keys. Let's now turn to Desmos. Desmos, as I mentioned, is a graphing calculator, and it can convey line graphs using sine waves. This is the flattening the curve graph also for COVID-19, and here we have a nice description that describes what this is and how to use this graph. But we also have auditory sonification features where we can look at the three lines that are on the screen and be able to hear the shape of them. You'll hear a little popping sound. That indicates that the lines intersect. Let's take a listen. This is the flat line. This is the second line. And finally, let's take a look at the third line. You can hear that the second line hit the flat line and then went down, but the third line went up beyond the flat line. Let's now turn our attention to tactile graphics. Tactile graphics are images that can be felt with your fingers. They are made up of raised lines and textures. Some people call this 2.5D. It is vital to understand that taking a print image and directly translating it from a visual form to a tactile form doesn't make it accessible. Because our hands have different properties than our eyes, such as a difference in resolution, we need to optimize images so that they can be interpreted tactually. When we don't do this, images can be difficult or impossible to interpret. So what do we need to do to make them accessible? Depending on the image, we may need to enlarge or clean it up like text descriptions where borders or decorative aspects can be omitted. If there are labels, they may need to be converted into braille. Tactile graphics can be made up with different materials and methods, but a popular way is to use a printer that can produce braille and tactile graphics. This is an image of a volcano that is optimized for tactile readability. As you can see, there are braille labels, clearly defined shapes, and each component is fairly large. The line connecting the label to each component is called a guideline. You may have noticed that the image uses different colors. This is because some embossers like the ViewPlus can use different colors to represent different dot heights. However, each dot height is not mapped to a specific color, but on the relative light and dark areas of an image. For example, when the image is tactually produced, darker areas have higher dot heights while light areas have lower dot heights. Braille labels are great, but depending on the complexity of the image, it can make the image much larger, thereby taking up a lot more space. To address this, you can use abbreviations or numbers and a legend, but an emerging practice is to add audio labels. This means that readers can identify what they are exploring as they touch specific parts of an image, and because there is no physical space limitation, we can even include other information besides labels such as facts and commentary making this image multimodal. Next, let's look at how 3D models can help convey complex information. 3D models can be another wonderful approach because it can easily convey depth, size, shape, and the relation of objects in relation to each other with a high degree of detail. Tactical graphics can do some of this, but when we are trying to show height and orthogonal projections, it can be challenging for a reader to interpret. This is because the reader can't see the optical illusion, so when they read this type of image, they will have to map out each line and how it fits in 3D space. It is not the easiest thing to do cognitively. It requires a high degree of patience and training. Even expert readers with this skill would agree that 3D models would be a much better approach to conveying this type of information. If we use this model of a boat as an example, it is much more efficient to show a 3D model when you can wrap your hands around it to get the whole shape rather than having to interpret a tactile graphic with imaginary lines or have it split into multiple perspectives. There are many ways to create 3D models. Models can be made up of wood, metal, or plastic and shaped with additive and subtractive processes by using 3D printers or CNC machines. I would like to focus on 3D printing, specifically fused filament fabrication printers as it has grown in popularity and has become much more affordable. In the last few years, teachers working with blind and visually impaired students have used 3D printers to create models to assist them in teaching concepts. For example, as a child is learning how a 3D image can translate into 2D, a 3D model like this frog can facilitate and their understanding when paired with a tactile graphic. So what is 3D printing? 3D printing is typically used for prototyping and is commonly found in makerspaces and in some homes. It involves building objects and parts using a 3D printer that additively builds the components layer by layer. These printers have nozzles that extrude malleable materials such as plastic from a filament spool onto a bed. Depending on the printer, the nozzle and bed can move on the X, Y, and Z axes to allow layers to be added. Are there some constraints and if so, how do we overcome them? Well, it is not as easy to add braille labels due to the topography like tactile graphics. We can enhance it by attaching audio labels via embedded sensors or a description using an NFC tag. Some museums have worked with organizations to create tactile models for their exhibits where users can touch different parts of it and hear information about what they are looking at. As a result, this makes it easy to convey detailed information and promotes independent exploration. In conclusion, text descriptions are helpful but cannot convey precise spatial info. Methods such as sonification, tactile graphics, and 3D models, along with image descriptions, can fill this gap. By providing alternative ways of consuming complex images, it speaks to designs that can be universally accessible and engaging for all readers. My hope is that no matter what methods are used, these will be included in books with plenty of images.


The men and women of U.S. Transcom have never let this nation down. These missions must execute seamlessly and without fail. I can say confidently that your United States Transportation Command stands ready to deliver our nation's objectives anywhere and anytime.


Over the years I've gotten to know someone who's been quite instrumental in SVG as a standard And he's now working at Adobe. One of his more recent contributions was writing the SVG export from, or for Illustrator So since I know him and since I love SVG, I thought I'd share Let's try to get that mirrored. There we go How this actually works, how to optimize so I've taken the This is not the editable editable version because I don't really care about that What I've got over here is a whole lot of paths so every single letter is a separate path Chiang did mention that you should link those together because every single attribute in SVG is a separate path and then the Like the coordinates after that so if you merge all of those together you save every single path You basically link them. The best way of doing it is to actually grab everything of the same color let me just So I've grabbed a whole lot of black there for example and I'll merge those together So that's now one path And the result in SVG will be a lot smaller So basically every single black element on this in this SVG you'd merge into one This is obviously destructive So you only do this as you're exporting and you'd merge all the red all the green all the what that that's pink or something Merge all those together Unfortunately, there's no non Illustrator way of doing this Are you still use SVG go? Well, yeah, you still use that but the illustrator way is That it can reduce the file sizes compared to I think at least from my tinkering Yeah, it'll work it out. Yeah Now the main thing that I'm gonna pay any attention to so I'm just gonna save I'll call that export This is the key dialogue. I know this is quite small on the screen We use in presentation attributes not internal styles or CSS That gives you the easiest thing to override if you've got black you don't need to set a color at all because by default any path in SVG without a color is set to black We're embedding images, but we don't usually want any anyway ID set to minimal because you don't want any of those scattered through SVG I will take a lot of that stuff out anyway, but this one at the end is probably the most important setting the decimals to one NASA managed to get to Pluto using four decimal points. You don't need that many to render an SVG But this is one of those things that you need to do really careful carefully because if you Export too few decimal points by default you try it on one But then you need to actually inspect your final SVG because sometimes if the SVG is really complex It will be not fine enough. So maybe you'll need two decimal points But that's basically a big difference if you think for every single coordinate Shaving three or four characters off depends on how many points you're out originally that reduces your file size down significantly I'm also going to minify because I want it to I'm not going to do responsive that takes off the coordinates So let's have a look So I've gone from seven ninety three K to a hundred and sixteen This is a bit unfair because the seven ninety three is not being optimized.  Yeah, I'm curious to see like without having gone any further what the best one is Which one sorry this one Will it tell me three nineteen? Yeah, so just by going through illustrator I've dropped it by about a third and most of that is down to the decimal points It's probably possible to do this through SVG O But the illustrator way is really fast So if you've got the designer whoever's actually come up with it or if you are happy with illustrator yourself I'm also designed to do it for you show them what to do or Work it out yourself and then run it through SVG out the end or any kind of optimizer from there But it makes a huge huge difference on the size of the SVG's Good any questions on SVG optimization? Thank you. What's next? What kind of hack have we got up next I Need to actually do this with my notes because I'm really badly prepared. So I'm just gonna copy that and Hang on I've really really badly repaired prepared for this. I can't really emphasize that enough All right, my notes Let's try that. Hey Now this is not CSS related, but it's Like wider scope of world related One thing that I'm painfully aware of in my own office and looking around the room at the The makeup here is there aren't very many women in software development There are a lot of reasons for this But there are things that we can actually do about it basically breaking down the barriers to make things more friendly In my current role, I'm an engineering manager. I Have no women reporting to me in my software team Which is terrible basically I'll go into what? balance actually means so What I've started doing is Researching what I can do about it because I'm not just gonna sit there and say oh well We didn't get any women applying. So, you know too hard didn't try There's a lot that you can actually do and I'm determined to try to improve the gender balance in my company I should say the company I work for is like predominantly women my CEO I think seven out of ten executives are women Like it's fantastic. It's a really great company to work for except in our software development section where I Think we've got two women now out of how many are we Fred 20 something? Yeah, and climbing and it's yeah, it's not good enough So instead of sitting on my hands and complaining about it.  This is one of the worst companies out there at the moment This just came out today actually this is over's attempt to say hey, we're a nice place to work for Percentage wise this is about like less than 10% of their workforce And right now every single one of these people is probably brushing up this CV to get out of there So that there's when you talk about gender diversity or just diversity in general I'm not really interested in uber per se because I would hope that the culture like that is not one that pervades in the company I work for you're always at risk of things like that happening If anyone's not aware ubers basically done one stupid chauvinistic and racist thing after another recently in the last couple of weeks So this is exactly why they put this thing out to show that they're not like that at all Even though they're having a great deal of difficulty retaining their stuff But the problem is that Really starting in the 80s when personal computers came about the marketing at the time was towards boys and men I mean PCs at the time were you know toys basically didn't really do all that much in the early history of computing I mean Ada Lovelace in the 1800s a Woman came up with the concept of programming originally Like basically the pioneers of computing were women without doubt you look through NASA's history You look through the US military grace hopper Who invented the compiler? There's Hedy Lamar the actress who's instead of parting at night basically sat in her bedroom and invented Wi-Fi and Bluetooth All these pioneers up to a certain point and then everything dropped off and Around that time was the introduction of personal computers The theory that I've best seen is that it's really down to that marketing at the time that computers are for boys and for men And we've got an early generation where it's just not something that girls do So we had this really fantastic situation where But the gender balance was like pretty even Through to the point where everything just went really bad and has continued going that way And we again we can sit here and say like oh well too bad But I'm not the kind of person who does that I'd rather actually do something about it One of the problems that we often have and especially through our hiring methods is we we think we're hiring from it You know meritocracy so we look at how well someone does We judge them we'll ask them technical questions in interviews and we'll assess whether they're good or even in their jobs Based on that in practice.  I only promote the people who do really well I'm not really, you know Consciously preventing women from going up through my hierarchy. You actually are unless you're addressing it properly If you're really thinking about what you're doing We heard before where's Alex gone? Has Alex gone I've been reading about the cultures and the like one of the things you mentioned is like Yeah, we have beers and things like that. How many women generally join in on beers like culturally It's not as common as men like looking at the demographics and I've researched into this if you advertise that for your company I hate to call them out because I'm sure they're a great company to work for But these are the kinds of things that we think yeah, this is great like we have a great culture This is what we do. Yet the women hearing this are just like oh, that's not my thing you're not going to get people applying for you and With all the best intentions in the world unless you're actually thinking about this really carefully Then you're going to be putting up barriers to stop people Applying for your jobs in the first place because this for me is where I'm at. I need to think about From the application process from our job ads to the hiring process How we're preventing minorities from joining in I know within my own company. We've got a really good ethnic diversity. We've just got a really serious gender imbalance one thing that's common is there's the confidence gap which is linked to imposter syndrome and Essentially, it reduces a number of applicants from those minor groups and Then we have Confirmation bias which reinforces the negative experiences So to give you an example if if I was a minority apply for a job. I get rejected It's like well, I probably shouldn't have applied for the thing in the first place basically confidence levels are lower when you're in minority and There's been a study on this Male applicants will apply for a job when they meet 30% of requirements Female applicants will apply when they meet 80% of requirements, but that is ridiculous You think your job ads are even and equal, but it's not the case at all One of the things we can do about that is by changing the wording And as soon as you have more than five requirements listed on the job ad You're dropping off your minority application rates right there because you're making those barriers too high and What one the thing that does get down to is instead of listing we need three years experience in this particular thing Something like that. You need to target the skills rather than the technology Especially based on the concept of the 30 you know 80% requirements versus 30 for women for men, sorry So changing your job ads around where you're looking for me. What skills do I really need for someone to work in my company? And key things that I mean for me when I'm looking for a good job. I want something that's got flexible work hours I want good collaboration Given generally with gender roles that women if they have kids will need more flexible work hours and men If you don't have something like that baked into your company If you're expecting people to work late every day or work on weekends or never take a day off because their child is sick Then you're not going to attract the right kind of candidates But it's not just a matter of having a policy for it. You need to live and breathe it. Otherwise, you just won't sustain The applicants in the drop-off rates for men in the first 10 years in tech 17% of men will change to another industry. I think I can't remember the exact number It's about 67% of women will drop out in the industry Usually that means they'll start into computer science or something along those lines And then they'll go into a parallel industry where they're still using their tech skills, but the culture is more In line with a happy place for them to work So it's like the bro culture basically needs to go away and we need to be that friendly collaborative workplace I'm kind of going beyond my initial job stuff here to an extent Something else that makes a difference is imagery. I'd be happy to work for this company if I didn't know what the name was So when you have images if they're on your website if they're on your job ads or anything else like that You need to use those minorities. I mean Uber's doing this really well in this Apart from the fact that they're Uber and don't mean it Did you read it if you pretty loud people did you read about the South Korean thing? I mean I don't know how much they made it There are some technical tools as well as one called Textio That will do a text analysis with machine like based on machine learning on your job ads to to weed out anything that has any kind of gender bias or Any other kind of bias towards minorities? I'm still going based on my preliminary research here because I haven't really done all that much Automated co-tests work for really well. There's also I think it's called headless Applications basically you take the names off CVs and universities as well But I don't know if that really means much to anyone. It doesn't to me if you take a name off I saw for a There's a truck fest which is film festival in Australia From last year. They had one female finalist out of fifth out of 16 this year They took the names off the applications. It was 50% women and there's I mean you can talk about differences in maybe the women Had a whole lot more successful movies that particular year, but it just seems unlikely And this is the hidden biases where we're not even thinking about it But we see a minority and it's like well, maybe they're just not going to be as good or something Having automated co-tests as part of the hiring process can help with that So I mean the whole idea of an automated test is you have a set test that's given to someone It's graded based on how well they do or don't and there's no human interaction into that So you've got as level a question as possible There are still potential flaws in that you might be going for something that's too technical In the in the co-test that you're providing which may skew you towards certain people But it's still something to think about the next section for interviewing is in structured behavioral interviewing And the concept behind that is that if I'm interviewing two separate people for the same role with the same skill set I will ask the same questions and I'll note down my results So I've got a fair comparison if you allow it to go Based on what you feel or what you think then your biases are kicking in Whether you're aware of it or not. We're all like, you know, I think there's something like a Success rate for hiring is like way below 20% for the number of successful hires for an interview And what people actually think in how someone actually performs Generally speaking humans are terrible at hiring other people and because we're so bad at that it makes hiring minorities even worse Further on interviewing Asking multifaceted questions where there's not just one answer Also opens it up to different approaches because when we're hiring someone we don't want everyone in our team to be exactly the same We really want someone to come in and challenge what we're doing Because otherwise we're just going to turn out the same thing that tomorrow is we're doing today And that's not a good way to actually change your company The reason we don't like this as humans and the reason we fight against it and interview against it and hire against it Is we're scared of change It's just part of human nature. It's the way we're evolved. We'd like tomorrow to be the same as today So when a candidate comes along and challenges your way of thinking Then you're automatically going to be against them And when someone is from a minority and then it's all the more so that that's going to be the way Um This is pretty much the end of what I've gotten up to so far My next step from here is going to be analyzing our job ads and like going through a text analysis and see what I can do from there Um changing our interview process so Next month or maybe the month after I'll continue from here Um and see where I can go Um anyone got any questions or Does anyone want to work for this lovely company If it would be a happiness picture So you bias you drop the company name off there and say hey, this looks all right I'm sorry to have any more pictures in this but you know Good good. Thank you


Welcome everyone. Welcome to WordCamp. I'm Vivia. I will be introducing your speakers this afternoon. First, I would like to give an acknowledge that we are on the unceded and ancestral territories of the Musqueam, the Squamish, and the Slewathon Nation. Our first speaker this afternoon is Aaron Day, and he will be talking to us about harnessing the power of chat GPT-4 for WordPress publishing. So please give a hand to Aaron Day. Greetings in the name of John Rastafari. Welcome to WordCamp and blessings to our Indigenous brothers and sisters for letting us use this land for this purpose today. Thank you. I am an AI whisperer. That means I'm a prompt engineer, and it's my great honor and privilege to introduce and explain more about the most preeminent artificial-intelligent language model known today, and that is chat GPT. So, I'm going to show you how we're going to harness the power of this new technology. But first, I want to set the stage a little bit and provide some background, some way background. In the beginning was the word. We all know that, right? Our world is made up by words and ideas, and everyone here today is because of shared ideas and words, and that's why we're here. So, WordPress publishing software is an open source evolution of a printing press. Anyone can have their own press nowadays, and pretty much every minute somebody starts a new blog. Good, bad, or ugly. But everyone has a big market, and they can get started. Johannes Gutenberg, he was the inventor of the press, as we know, he would be in awe of what we have done with his idea. Five hundred and seventy years later, we're celebrating twenty years of WordPress. So, to honor the invention of movable type and Gutenberg, we even named some of the components inside WordPress Gutenberg blocks. And it's sort of like movable type where we're able to move the blocks around instead of the type. Amazingly, Gutenberg, he needed a way to make money from his invention. And he got the idea, in case you didn't know this, by creating playing cards. So, just imagine a 52 card deck. They created templates and stamped each one to make, and he thought, why don't we do that with a language? So, he created the movable type with the letters. But still, it cost a lot of money for this invention, they didn't have them, you couldn't order it. There wasn't paper, no one knew that they needed anything printed. So, what did he do? He found a language model, and that's called the Gutenberg Bible. It's 142 lines of Latin. So, again, there wasn't paper widely available. And it was very difficult to get this invention going. So, he started printing this Bible. And then the other thing that he did, and I find this quite ironic, was he printed indulgences. Which, if you know the history of Protestant movement, et cetera, it was Martin Luther that created the uproar and the protest against all these indulgences. So, it might be said that Gutenberg created the first spam with all these indulgences, the first fraud, because they must have been everywhere. And by the time Martin Luther was born a hundred years later, after Gutenberg, and they had to get rid of this indulgence model. Anyway, and then King James got his printing presses and improved the language model by adding the numbers, the verses, the chapters. And he put in the middle a study area that connected these ideas to help the reader connect the ideas. So, that's the first language model. We've got the perfect marriage of a printing press and a language model. So, once again, we've got this really good marriage. So, I'm going to try to move through the slides quite quickly so we can do an actual demonstration. But what WordPress is, I wanted to just give it a little bit more background because I love it. I've been using it for years. There's nothing like it in my opinion. There's all kinds of comparative tools, but it's because it's open source. And open sources, it's just so fundamental to our moving forward in this world if we keep things that everyone can add to it. So, it has right now, without themes or without any plug-ins, it's about 170,000 lines of code. So, I asked Bing AI how many words in a line of code. And it told me that it would be about 1.25 million words make up the WordPress software. And anyone can open it up and read it and look at it, change it, break it, which I did lots in the early days. I learned actually not to get in under the hood, trust the programmers and leave it alone as it is. But so, it's just anyone can use it. It's got 40% of the world's websites are created with it. And there's thousands of ways to customize it. But this is a really big breakthrough to add this chat GPT to it. Next slide you can see. So, here's what we're going to go through very quickly in these following slides just to understand it, how to integrate it, what the features are, how to generate content, and some of the other uses that we have. So, in our introduction of it, it's really just an advanced language model. And that's what I wanted people to be more confident with is that it's not some kind of a robot or people have from the Terminator movie that it's created some kind of evil robot. Oh, sorry, sure. Thanks for saying it. Everyone else hear me okay? So, it can be used in all sorts of ways in WordPress. But we're going to look at the three primary ways that we're using it now. It's first a language model. And I think that's the most important thing. And that's why I used the Bible as a comparison because really it's just a massive database of ideas that are connected together. When 3.5, which was the initial free model and it's still the free model, it had read two billion web pages. So, it basically taken those two billion web pages and more or less connected them through databases. And the natural language processing NLP mentioned, that's the really exciting part of this because as you're using it, it's learning with you and actually learning from you with the prompts. And the prompts is the most important part of using the language model. Everyone's heard this expression in the computer or programming field. Garbage in, garbage out. Nowhere does it apply better to these chat models. If you put in lousy prompts, you're going to get out really dry, boring material. So, the natural language processing is incredible. And the GPT architecture is explaining basically how it works. It's a little bit deeper, but again it's code, very similar to WordPress. So, the installation process to integrate and chat GPT, I'm going to show you a little more at the end because we have them now in plug-ins. So, the plug-ins can very, very quickly be added to anybody's WordPress blog and we'll show you some plug-in options when we get towards the end here. So, what the engines are, the three main engines that I talked about, advanced context understanding really relates to the improving of your ideas. And by the way, what I often do is I'll open another tab beside my chat GPT and I'll use Google because Google has an AI built-in. If you were searching for this, other people were asking this. And by the way, all of us have been using AI for a really long time. On your phone, when you're filling in a name and it puts it there, that's AI. So, AI has been around quite a long time and we all use it, but not such powerful language model as we're looking at here. Multilingual support is incredible because we used to use Google Translate and it just made so many mistakes that you had to have someone from the language to proofread it and they would find all kinds of contextual mistakes and grammatical errors. Chat GPT, I don't know why or how, but it's really superior to any translation software I've seen. I work with people from Vancouver of Chinese origin and I can switch things to either Mandarin or Cantonese quite easily. Or any other language. The developer API is quite technical. And there are a lot of APIs I'm going to show you in a minute in the plug-ins, but it's a different level of understanding is needed to develop APIs and we're just not going to go there today, we don't have the time. But that's the third aspect of what can be done with Chat GPT to enrich your WordPress site. So the most fun part is creating content and I'm going to get to that in a minute. Website copy and generating ideas, it's incredible because as you prompt it for one topic, it'll generally provide you some clues for further topics. And again, if you open another tab, you can search, sometimes you have to even find out what it had just told you, search and then go deeper. So again, it's about the prompts and about finding a way to communicate with the language model to make it give you deeper meaning to what it is you're trying to explore. And to me, this is the most fun part, is creating the content. I'll get to that in a minute. So the other ways that it's being used an awful lot is human review. But on this slide, the big fault that people are finding with it is what is called hallucinations. And where I have found it to make hallucinations is with numbers. When you try and do like a corporate statement, it'll pull a number from somewhere else and you have to proofread everything. But the only time where I have seen these as they call hallucinations is when it comes to giving us corporate details of numbers, dollar earnings, things like that. You have to be very careful whenever you ask it to do anything to do with numbers. And I've got a prompt that has some numbers in it so we'll see if it's going to hallucinate for us in a minute. So this is the other place where it's finding a lot of use is in the streamlining of systems online. A lot of websites are adding it in to help with product sales or with customer service. There's so many different uses for it in the streamlining of the business systems. And of course it does a lot of review for mistakes and it just helps to make everything tighter. I find that it writes very succinctly without flowery words unless you ask it to write in a flowery way. For example, in a prompt, sometimes I say, write me a Hemingway-style story about whatever the topic might be. And it's quite surprising how, well, I'll use the word flowery, how interesting it'll write instead of just dry and boring, it can write some very creative, very imaginative articles for you. So the other thing is people are starting to actually chat, like develop a relationship with it and I had talked to someone last night that told me they heard of a person putting 10 years of their journal entries into chat GPT and asking, what happened to my relationship? I told her, thank you for that. And I thought that was so interesting and it could potentially predict the future based on what you've been doing the last 10 years. But people are finding these really creative, interesting ways to communicate with this language model and I really think we're only beginning to understand what we can do with it and hopefully mostly good and that's why I'm here. I'm here as towards using it for good and I'll get to that. And this is huge. Data privacy and security, probably one of the biggest issues we all face and part of it is because of AI, part of it is because of the malicious sort of intent of some of the people using the internet anonymously. So as we move forward, we're going to see AI used more and more for determining if a person is who they say they are and if the data is theirs and if it's real. So this is a really promising area for the future and something I'm quite excited about. So basically the best practice is for optimizing content, collaborating and continuous improvement. You can basically improve anything you're working on by having it either write an overview of it or add to it, addendums. There are just a really incredible number of ways we can use chat GPT. So this is the part where we go to my own, if I can give examples. So I have, well first I'll show you the plugins. There we are. So this is a list of some of the AI plugins available for WordPress. And again I can click on any of these and add it directly into my website. And this website we're looking at is, I developed this website starting in 1994 so it's coming on 30 years old. And it provided the perfect sandbox or testing ground to learn chat GPT. And the reason is I have these categories right here. Asset protection collectibles. And each one of those I can get into a deeper story. And I just couldn't believe how powerful it was and how it just kept giving me more and more ideas. So that is one case scenario that I've had enormous success with invest offshore. And writes about cryptocurrency really well. And anything else. So what I've done is I've created a prompt. Write an article with population estimates and trends about expats living in Vancouver. And this is for anyone who's never watched it live before this might be your first demonstration. So here we go and hope it works. Interesting. There it goes. I can't type that fast. I wish. And then it wants us to review it. And what you'll notice is that I've saved all of my past posts. And that's part of the reason for going to 4.0. The paid version. Is because by saving all of your past, you can go back and when you want to dig deeper into a particular story. I've done a lot of study on Mexico. I'm very interested in the cross-border. By the way, investing offshore, if you didn't realize, if anyone has a home in Arizona, you're offshore if you're a Canadian.  That's how we define an expat. So I continue going deeper into these particular topics and it gets richer and richer as I go. So now, so I'm going to add an image. I got earlier today, so we wouldn't have to go through this. Boom, just published an article. So the entire world can see, there it is, a brand new story. And with RSS, real simple syndication, it blasts out across all of the social networks and all around the world. So people are reading this already and we just created it in that length of time. I had the picture ready already, naturally, but there's the story. That is a good question. And so far I haven't been. And normally I edit a little bit to give it my own, especially the titles, and make a few little changes. The site itself, I'm making it clear to the reader that it's AI generated. But in Europe, they're already talking about putting in laws in the GDPR for separating AI generated content, human content. Eventually, human content is going to be on the rise because people are already aware of what... It suits my particular website and topic because people want the facts and they don't come here to read stories. They're coming here to get factual content. But as I'm close to running out of time, I want to leave you with the conclusion and the key takeaways. The ability to generate high quality content, that's the key takeaway. And to enhance your experience, so I have used up my time, but open for Q&A. If anyone else has any questions. Hi, my name is Imran. My question is that I've heard sometimes if the content is not available or the information is not available, chat GPT kind of fakes it. The first question is, is that true? And if it is, how reliable is chat GPT when requesting for content? Well, yeah, this hallucination thing was a bigger problem in 3.5 than it has been in 4.0. You have to proofread and you have to proofread diligently because some topics it will stretch and especially I'd noticed it with numbers, you know, with corporate earnings and things like that. It'll pull a number and if you go and look on the actual company's documents, it's way off. So that's one concern. Thanks for the presentation. Is there any way you can tell whether it's the chat GPT is the article is AI generated versus human input? Well, that is a good question. Last night there was a group of us at a private event for the speakers and we were discussing just that that it seems to be getting dumber that a lot of people are saying and a lot of us can tell right away when it's AI generated. So that's why it's important to have really good prompts but also if you get in there yourself and change it and improve it and add a quote, add some other people's observations and you can enrich it but this is something that... And also it goes to the search engines themselves eventually are going to mark this as content is AI generated so that's what the future looks like. Thank you for talking. Thank you. I too have been using this chat GPT or AI engines for a couple years and we're looking for efficiencies. Have you noticed if any of the plugins that you talked about are better than others? Oh, the plugins. The first thing that I didn't like about plugins is that you have to have an API account and you have to have a key and if you don't have tokens in your account it won't work at all. So you have to load up your API account with tokens if you want to add but the one that I showed one that is much better it's got 50,000 downloads this AI engine, the cat has 40,000 active subscribers and I found that one to be the best and that's why WordPress has put it right up in the top left corner so that'll integrate straight into your site but you need to have the tokens in your account for people to be able to use it and learning it though because it's very cool to watch it inside the site. One follow-up question. Have you tried Image Generation? That's usually one of the slowest parts of creating content for us you want the images to help tell the story. Yeah, I'm learning a lot about it and I'm trying to master it and I learned last night that Dali has integrated with ChatGPT so soon as you're preparing an article you'll be able to use Dali to provide you the image for it but what I don't like about Dali is the perspective I wished it was landscape perspective instead of a square it's fun again it works on credits and you only can have 30 cracks at it a month which you can use that up I don't know in an hour but there's a lot of other image generating AI that Firefly was one that I just heard about that's superior even to Dali so we're going to see more and more of that it seems to be more popular than the language the language has taken almost students and it's just a tool people grabbed it right away whereas the image one is more fun and it's really amazing what people are generating so we're seeing more and more of it My last question You touched a little bit on the nefarious use of this Chat AI depending on the people's intent do you see any regulations that are coming forward that will restrict some of that behavior? Absolutely and there was just recently Elon Musk has put forward with lawmakers to create a department of AI it'll be necessary but I realized when I learned about Gutenberg and the indulgences that that was completely unpredicted like no one could have predicted what would happen if you started printing out all these indulgences but imagine people would be scalping them, selling them and that's what caused the Protestant movement was all of these fake things so the reason I say that is we're going to learn about nefarious problems that we never even imagined but they're going to come so we need to be on guard Just curious if you used any plug-ins within the Chat GPT-4 interface like I played around with some photorealistic plug-ins within Jet GPT that creates an image prompt for mid-journey or like scraper tools or anything within Chat GPT-4 itself I've only tried the two that I showed you Well, the cat? Oh no, I noticed there's a lot of plug-ins though so you're ahead of me on that I need to... Okay, mid-journey is another one that I've heard of a lot Cool, well thanks for that Hello, I'm wondering how many people in the room here could see themselves doing what you've just done use Chat GPT, copy and paste things into an article if I could see a show of hands of how many people find themselves inclined to go that way I guess my concern here is... what would you call it? Writer's honesty or something? It's almost like you're creating a snowball effect of repetitive information that has been taken from original works to begin with that have been scoured off the net and then you've got an engine that has been developed that is repeating this information and then people are reusing that and putting it out there so it's original information and it just seems to me like we're going down a slippery slope here of not really using human creativity but just regurgitation That is the biggest risk, really but what I believe it's going to do is make real writers more popular again because we had reached a point of saturation of call it keyword rich, Google written dull boring content so hopefully if we get the right regulations in place to prohibit completely AI generated or maybe not prohibit but to identify what's human written and what's AI driven but again the thing I didn't mention about the Bible is that it is actually the cornerstone of literature in any language it's the cornerstone of our society and most everything after 1611 has been reused in one way or another so the original word has been used again and again differently at the end of the day it's all about the value that the end user gets and it's not as important who's creating fake content but we're definitely going to need to have a discernment like I say I think good writers are going to rise again because there will be an interest in human written but I appreciate what you're saying I want to leave you with one thing too that I've done and I forgot to mention this was I created a company called Lionsgate Digital and I really went outside the box using AI because I took the concept of a 33 degree secret society and I said emulate that but make it open and transparent which is the opposite of secret and I've created a 33 level Dow a Dow decentralized autonomous organization and it can be found right here the Dow model on Lionsgate.io and the manifesto is also written using chat GPT and the members oath and a defense policy and what Lionsgate is about is protecting people's identity self-sovereign ID and I don't want to get too deep into that and that's not why I'm here but it's an example of what can be done by harnessing the power of chat GPT in WordPress publishing so I wish you'd take a look when you get home LionsgateDigital.io or Lionsgate.io thanks I'll leave you with that the expats in Vancouver well thank you very much everyone