Alright, um, my name is Mike Rago. I work for a company called 802 Secure and the title of this presentation is Spy vs Spy Who's Watching Who. The research behind this particular presentation is something we've been working on for a few years and it's kind of a mashup of new organic research that we've released as well as previous organic research that we released last year at DEF CON during Skytalks and the Wallachie. So we appreciate the IoT Village having us out to speak for the first time. This is the first time we've presented in the IoT Village and also appreciate the opportunity to sponsor the IoT Village too, so thanks guys. In terms of the overall research it's largely targeted at various types of surveillance, spy cameras, video cameras, etc. We do a lot of broad research across a variety of IoT devices and networks and one of the things we started to discover was beyond the supply chain being completely fragmented in terms of where all these devices are or more importantly their chipsets is that as a result of that software and the fact that the stuff's coming from all over the world it's largely insecure as you might expect and what we're going to do is talk a lot about more about how we've done a lot of live testing around these devices and a lot of the vulnerabilities we've uncovered. One of the areas that we focus on particular is on the wireless side. We have a long history in wireless ranging from Wi-Fi to Bluetooth to ZigBee to cellular to P25 and beyond and being able to look at devices autonomously and how they're communicating has allowed us to uncover some unique vulnerabilities and then furthermore how you think about that physically as well. I don't usually like to talk much about myself so I'll tell you a quick history about how I got into security instead. Um, I uh, back in the early 90s I worked for a company called Nasdaq and while working at the Nasdaq stock market I was always one of those guys that was diddling around while I was a unixus admin in Oracle DBA and I came across this guy known as Dan Farmer and he had a tool called Satan which one of the, one of the first vulnerability scanners long before there were things like Nessus, Qualis, uh, Encircle or other things. Just a, a quick check. Anybody here ever heard of Dan Farmer before? Alright cool. So there's some old folks like myself. So anyways I downloaded this tool. I saw Dan on the cover of Information Week. This guy had kind of long hair, kind of looked like Dave Mustaine sitting on top of a silicon graphics computer and I said this guy looks pretty cool. I gotta try out this tool. So I downloaded it and let it rip on the network and take, take down the trading floor in the middle of the day. Normally it was a fireable offense, uh, but I got called into the VP of security, um, in his office, um, and expecting to be fired and my biggest concern was what I was gonna tell my wife.  You're either fired or you take over security here at NASDAQ. So obviously I took over security at NASDAQ which was a great way to throw me in the deep end of the pool and really get into security. So true story. Alright, so just a little background. How we think about IT, network security, right? Very much focused on the corporate network and the extension of that. Whether it be wireless in your wireless LAN, whether it be your OT networks, your industrial IoT, ICS, everything that comprises your environment. But as CIOs, as other folks that are, uh, responsible for those networks in those environments as well as the data, have to think about this in a whole new way with the explosion of IoT. Meaning that now building automation, 50% of new buildings going up have some type of IoT and wireless enabled functionality. Whether it be for the thermostats and the HVAC, whether it be for power, whether it be for lighting, blinds and all other types of things. If you're responsible for that building or your facilities are housed in it because of the data center, how do you look beyond the network to find a lot of those risks? 80% of IoT is wirelessly enabled. So thinking about that from a wireless standpoint can allow you to get better visibility into that. It's a kind of a new space that NIST is really, uh, endorsing and calling cyber physical. Cyber being your traditional IT and information security team and networks. Physical being the physical side of unmanaged devices, shadow IoT and all these nefarious devices as well. Well, although we tend to think about the network traditionally from, hey, do I have an IoT rogue on my network? Now that organizations are deploying smart TVs in the conference rooms. Printers for many years now have been wirelessly enabled, yet many times misconfigured. Now that there's wireless thumb drives, wireless SD cards, wireless storage devices. Well although these things may connect to your laptop, they don't touch the network at all, right? And so as a result, a lot of these things popping up in environments do represent a data risk to the environment. Also, in taking a look at the increased amount of drone activity, the ready availability of, uh, spy cameras and surveillance cameras. And now how easy it is to set up a rogue cell tower, we need to start thinking about our environments in a whole new way. And that was sort of the premise behind the research we've done in a lot of these areas in this particular case, a focus on surveillance and spy cameras. As we know within Amazon and other places, you can buy everything from surveillance cameras for your home, as well as a plethora of different types of surveillance or spy cameras. They come in all shapes or forms. We've tested many of them. Some of them operate on a battery. Some of them plug into the wall. Some of them are a wall charger for a cell phone, but built into it is a hidden camera. And how you connect to these devices is commonly over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. You download an app and it allows you to leverage that video camera to record audio, video, take pictures and things like that. It's a lot of interesting protocols that comprise these devices, both at layer two and layer three and above. One of them being stupid service discovery protocol or actually called simple service discovery protocol or SSDP, which is an extension of UPMP. This allows IoT devices once you plop them on the network, either wired or wirelessly, to discover one another and potentially communicate to one another, machine to machine. Some of the packets and how these protocols are configured allow them to do automatic discovery, for example using M-search or allowing a device to notify another device of its presence on the network using notifies. In addition, your traditional and even current day surveillance cameras use a protocol known as RTSP or real time streaming protocol. And this is very much related to the video streams. And then lastly, as we all know, a lot of these devices, ideally via the app or the device itself, want to store the video, audio and pictures in the cloud, random cloud locations that you know nothing about. Some of the surveillance cameras that we've acquired and tested reveal a lot of really interesting information. First and foremost, they use HTTP like protocols. And in addition, they're typically wide open, no authentication and clear text. As we let this device record videos that it was storing either locally to a DVR or in the cloud, that a lot of this was being sent clear text. And if you're just simply sniffing the network and monitoring it using Wireshark or something else, you can actually see where these URLs are and where you can access the videos completely unauthenticated. We've done pen testing for a variety of companies, never ever have we seen this secured. In addition, we'll talk a little bit more about some research we released at RSA about how we exploited these protocols to actually do command and control and other interesting things. Spy cameras typically have a mobile app. So one of the first ones I tested came in a tiny small box. I bought it on Amazon for $20. Has a teeny little sensor or video camera built into it, a little sticky thing so you could stick it under a table or on a wall or hide it behind a book. And upon unboxing it, there was some paperwork in it and it was all in Chinese. But I saw a URL and I saw something that referenced a mobile app and I was like cool, I'm going to download this random map from a random location, an IP address that doesn't resolve to anything. So obviously I do this on a separate test network with test credentials and proceeded to go ahead and download that app. And then in doing so, paired to the actual device, a lot of these devices out of the box do support Wi-Fi and initially run an ad hoc mode device to device. You can enable it as an AP, you can put it on the network, things like that. Ideally if you're going to be using it as a spy camera though, you don't necessarily want to go plugging it into the network or the environment that you're doing surveillance on, right? So, but it's good to know the different functionality that's available there. Upon doing a lot of the testing and sniffing the network both on the wireless and the wired side and observing behaviors started to see a lot of communications to the cloud, to Alibaba, both in Canada and in China. In addition, it was starting to transmit the U-UID, uh, the MAC address and a variety of other things. Then I saw my username and password passed over the network too, in clear text out to the internet to some random cloud at Alibaba. So, definitely interesting, definitely suspicious, definitely freaked me out. Some of this research we released last year at Defcon 26, uh, both in the Wall of Sheep and, uh, further details in SkyTalks since that's a closed session. And interestingly enough, one week later, the U.S. put a ban on the exact same cameras that we covered in the talk. I can't say the two were related, but it was one heck of a coincidence. Some of the other vulnerability research started, starts to kind of touch on the physical aspects of IOT. Even for your own surveillance cameras perhaps at home, a lot of these things are enabled through a hub that may speak to the cameras via Wi-Fi, occasionally via Bluetooth, also commonly via ZigBee or Z-Wave as well. And we started to take a look at these hubs and their relevant functionality. Turning the hub around, I found two USB ports on it. We'd already been doing research and exposed some vulnerabilities and had submitted the vulnerabilities to Bug Crowd related to some different manufacturers of wireless thumb drives. We find these commonly in a lot of customer environments, especially in healthcare, interestingly enough. It seems, and what we find and have kind of determined is that a lot of people out there are obviously still buying, you know, small storage devices, but not necessarily realizing that there's wireless built into them. So they're using them just like a standard thumb drive or an SD card, but we, in our pen testing and analysis for them are discovering these devices via the fact that they're wirelessly enabled and they're wide open because nobody's configured them. Furthermore, a lot of them have a built-in battery. So even after you unplug it from the laptop and have stored data on it, that device is still on.  So back to the IoT hub. So since I had all these devices hanging around and there were two available ports available on the IoT hub for the surveillance cameras, I decided to go ahead and plug one in and then connect to it wirelessly via the thumb drive. What I started to realize is, as the videos were being recorded, they were not only being recorded locally to the device and being sent to the cloud, they were being stored to my thumb drive. No authentication, no encryption. The only thing I did was I plugged in a thumb drive into the IoT hub. And by the way, with it being wirelessly enabled, it kind of freaked me out to check my own hub in my own house because I have a lot of people over all the time for parties. And I was kind of wondering, wow, anybody at the party could just walk by, turn my hub around when there's nobody in the room and plug in a thumb drive with wireless capability and be sitting outside the house viewing the videos being recorded by my surveillance cameras. And it's as simple as that. We did disclose the vulnerabilities to bug crowd. They did go ahead and notify the vendor and this has been patched. But these different types of surveillance cameras and the relevant hubs are coming out all the time. So if you have one in your house, make sure you're not vulnerable to this. If you want more information about this, some of these things we did live demonstrations of, both at the RSA conference and at DEF CON last year and the year before. Drones. So why am I talking about drones? Well, as we all know, drones can also be used for video surveillance and taking pictures and things like that. A lot of these drones have various types of wireless and RF capabilities. Detecting them sometimes can be done over RF, but in other cases, it requires radar. Specific to RF and specific to Wi-Fi, typically hobbyist drones like you might buy on Amazon. Even a drone such as that can be used for adversarial activity. Not only for recording audio and video, but as we know, dropping a small pathogen, flying over a security fence at an ICS facility, and even having tethered onto them additional battery backed up spy cameras as well. Typically when you unbox this thing, and I'm sure many of us here have played around with drones, right? They have a Wi-Fi capability built into them and you can download a mobile app and that mobile app will allow you to record video and take pictures as you're flying the thing around. It might even allow you to control the drone as you're flying it around. Many of the organizations we work with that are customers have this activity once or twice a day or roughly a few times a week. It's really difficult though to determine if it's a hobbyist or if it's adversarial.  Especially Wi-Fi. In this case here, I went ahead and I was analyzing and sniffing and taking a look at how the drone, you know, was communicating, how it was configured from a Wi-Fi perspective and how my mobile device was paired to it. And it really uncovered a lot of interesting intelligence and information. In working with lots of customers, you know, they're trying to figure out how to solve the drone problem. We work with the casinos, we work with airports, we work with ICS and power facilities. And how a lot of customers initially think about this problem is, hey, we want to identify it and knock it out of the sky, right? And obviously if you do that, it's going to fall and probably hit something or hit somebody, right? So thinking about this from a more practical standpoint, could you perhaps look at this from a wireless standpoint and get enough intelligence here to still capture the adversary? So just like an access point, I'll see the BSSID, right? I can see that MAC address. As we all know, that part of that is comprised of an OUI that maps to a manufacturer. Interestingly enough though, if you take a look at the ESSID, more commonly known as the SSID, you'll actually see typically, unless it's hidden, the SSID. But interestingly enough, it's actually difficult on a lot of drones, at least based on when you take it out of the box, to actually change the SSID. So most people don't. And as a result, that SSID from the factory actually exposes two things. One, FLD, what type of drone is that? Well, we've done a lot of mapping and there's some public maps out there too and some tools on GitHub that actually map these out and this maps actually back to a specific type of drone, a specific manufacturer. Furthermore, the rest of the SSID exposes the last three octets of the MAC address, uniquely identifying the drone. So if I'm monitoring this over the course of a week, I can potentially identify a repeat offender, right? Because purely just seeing the SSID, I can see if it's the same drone or a different one. So additionally, I can also see the station or the mobile device paired to it that's being used to fly it around. So now I actually have two pieces of forensic information. Not only intelligence on the drone itself, but the mobile device paired to it or essentially the guy flying the drone, who's probably in a different location than where the drone actually is. So that's exactly what happened when we were doing some analysis. We're working with a critical infrastructure facility customer and they contacted us because they said, you know, we see, you know, drone alerts or some drone activity and furthermore, we saw the mobile device paired to the drone. The two devices were in two different locations. The mobile device was along the edge of the perimeter fence and inside the fence area, of course, was the drone because he flew it over the fence and was flying it around the power facility, especially by the power distribution units. Furthermore, just before that, we saw the mobile device paired to the guy's truck and determined that truck was a brand new Ford F-150 with smart technology. So he's probably listening to Pandora or Spotify or something like that, right? Parked the truck along the edge of the fence, unpaired, paired his mobile device to the drone and then flew it over the fence. So now we had three pieces of forensic data and providing that to the customer and that relevant forensics information allowed them to actually go back to their surveillance cameras because we're able to identify the location of the truck and the mobile device. They got the guy's license plate and they actually caught the guy. So when you think about drone activity, you think about video surveillance, you think about countermeasures related to this, all of this was done with just completely free tools built into Cali, right? And there's just some really powerful information there that you can use in your own way. Okay, so IoT protocol exfiltration and exploitation. There's so many different protocols that comprise IoT. And as we mentioned, the supply chain is just so messed up. You thought that Android fragmentation was bad. This is that on steroids, right? As I mentioned earlier, in looking at how a lot of these devices communicate and using SSDP or simple service discovery protocol, there are some discovery packets and things built into the protocol such as M-search to discover other devices to allow them to then potentially communicate machine to machine as well as notify packets, thus announcing their presence on the network. A lot of these protocols are clear text and unauthenticated and lack any integrity mechanisms as well. And in doing so, although they may be site-routable or essentially on the localized network, if I'm monitoring what's going on, I can actually inject packets and leverage some of the free form fields to inject things such as URLs, command and control options and other features. For example, in this case, there's an optional field sometimes used by the manufacturer, sometimes not, or the OPT field. And in doing so, we are able to actually modify the URL pointing to a separate URL or command and control location to allow this protocol to actually be exploited. So we went ahead and did that and communicated it and allowed this to be consumed by another IoT device. And interestingly enough, we observed that it consumed this information and wanted to ideally every once in a while communicate to this fake command and control URL or IP address, which we also tried, to see how it was consuming and using this information. So if you think about this for a moment, you plop all of these onto your network and you trust them. But you have one of these maybe from a manufacturer overseas of which you know nothing about. They communicate to other IoT devices on your same network. It includes something embedded like this and allows a very easy way across your network for all the devices to infect one another, either directly, indirectly or point them to various command and control centers to download additional software. So in our scenario, we did exactly that. We leveraged one of the video cameras I mentioned earlier for a lot of the vulnerabilities and testing that we had done already, went ahead and modified the device itself. So it was communicating this additional optional field with a malicious URL embedded in it and allowed it to be retrieved or received by other devices on the network. In doing so, we had a smart TV, a cheap one that I had gotten at Oli's and it went ahead and took this and we observed it trying to communicate following that to the IP address we had embedded in the OPT field. So as we think about a lot of these vulnerabilities, right, and how we interact with customers and do pen testing for them, it's really like a big lack of visibility beyond the network today, right? That physical space of unmanaged shadow IoT devices passing by, people passing by, right? But there's a wealth of information in there. We had a customer just last week that had a break in into the building. And by monitoring everything wirelessly, we actually found that that Sunday night during that one-hour timeframe of which they said there's never ever anybody in the building, we saw the guy's MAC address for his mobile device. And while although for iOS and for Android, those cycle through randomization, he must have been somebody that was there previously because it accidentally connected to the guest Wi-Fi and we got his legit MAC address from it. Just by listening, just by monitoring, just looking at that timeframe. In addition, in thinking about this, how can you leverage your own wireless LAN environment, whether it's Cisco, Aruba, Arrow Hive or something else, right? And really leverage that to identify what's going on beyond the network. If you have a device that disconnects an employee that disconnects from the network, do you have the ability to see if they're connecting to a spy camera or a drone or anything like a Wi-Fi pineapple? The physical space is becoming littered now with these IoT devices. And understanding the context and the characteristics of how these devices are connecting has a big impact on your network now and especially for the future. So I'll lead you with some lasting thoughts and things to think about in terms of overall hygiene for your environment, your network. We talked about a lot of the anomalous behaviors and vulnerabilities that we had found across a lot of spy cameras, surveillance cameras, drones, etc. Strange outbound connections connecting to the cloud, clear text, going to Alibaba, Canada and China, right, just to begin with. Seeing my username and password being transmitted from one of these random IoT devices, clear text out to the internet to some cloud provider. Furthermore, leveraging that intelligence to go to the cloud provider and by diddling with some of the URLs, actually discovering other people's videos, sending in that same repository. In addition, thinking about wireless security postures not only from misconfigurations but state change. We talked about how simply transmitting the OPT field with URLs, IP addresses, command and control or fake command and control centers and doing that via those specific packets such as Msearch and Notify and exploiting the OPT field or optional field for doing that allows other IoT devices to receive that information, potentially consume it and themselves try to communicate with that URL. That unto itself is a state change. Why did that IoT device that is a sensor or an actuator and sends a packet once an hour with an update or just a small group of packets once an hour with an update is now transmitting or communicating to an IP address outbound or further more even on a closed network attempting to. Following this session, a good friend of mine, Chet Hosmer and I have done a lot of research around this in which Chet has really created this Raspberry Pi that sits on the wired network and we've programmed it to baseline on the existing environment and identifying anomalous behaviors from that point moving forward. If you're interested in that, Chet will be presenting that here right at five o'clock over in the packet hacking village and if you miss that you can go to pythonforensics.org to get more information about that Raspberry Pi. So I appreciate the time today. I hope you got a few gold nuggets out of that and I'll hang out in case anybody's got any questions or comments but thank you for your time today.


So, hi everyone, welcome to the last ethereum.org community call in 2022 Thanks for being here. Thanks for being with us throughout the year It's definitely been eventful and we want to spend today's call looking back on some of the key things that we've done new pages that we've shipped and the Community-led initiatives that have had a significant impact on the site as always This is a community call for the ethereum.org website not for the ethereum foundation or the ethereum protocol With that out of the way, let's take a look at what we'll be chatting about today so first of all Paul is gonna start us off by By talking about the run a node and staking pages that we've added to the website this year Next up Joseph is gonna talk about the energy consumption page and our work in preparation for the merge Very on topic with the major events of this year Next up Corwin is gonna walk us through the new layer 2 page The scaling pages that we've updated in the developer docs and the find wallet revamp Joshua is gonna talk about the learning quizzes and the learn hub revamp as well as highlighting some of the pages that Some awesome community members have contributed to the website Nuna will give an update on the design system Pablo will cover the code base migration to type script and chakra I Will give an overview of the translation program this year and what's been going on Niko is gonna talk about our work on some of the other EF websites like the EF blog ESP cryptography and geth sites and Finally Sam is gonna give us a sneak peek into what we'll be working on next year At the end as always some miscellaneous announcements and call outs And that should be it so given that we have a bunch to cover I'd say let's get started and hand it off to Paul Take us away Paul I'm so yeah, I think I'm back. It's been a long year if you run a note page I had to look back myself realize was launched back in January That was an exciting update in my opinion to the page trying to encourage everyone to learn more about What's involved in running a note why it's important why why our network depends on it? So obviously you can get to that at ethereum.org slash run dash a dash note There's some tips on there for folks who haven't checked it out to try to learn more About why this is important to have you potentially get involved and get started for your own note and participate It's not necessarily as hard as a lot of people think it is so if you haven't checked it out I'd encourage folks to take a look at it The other set of pages that we worked on this is we launched it's about back in April time frame earlier in the year the Staking revamp we took a look at the staking pages that were there, which were pretty simple At first and we tried to expand on those enough for more information about different tools that were available Different staking as a service provider's different pool staking options To help kind of inform the community of all the different aspects of staking that are involved with certain parts of it can sound pretty intimidating while others are much simpler easier for the new folks to get onboarded and Learn more about it get involved So if you haven't checked that out as well definitely encourage same same thing ethereum.org slash staking That's going to be the main pages and there you can take a look at all the different ways You can get mistaking a little more learn more about the risks learn about the benefits of my it's important And yeah, I definitely have a lot of folks up today. I'm gonna leave it at that That's a back to look at Yeah, awesome. Thanks Paul was just chatting with people in the chat Next up Joseph is gonna talk about the energy consumption page and some of the work that we did in preparation for and after the Ethereum merge Yeah, thanks Luca Well, yeah, the merge It was such a Fundamental change to Ethereum that it really touched a large amount of our content in some way or another It was also a very hyped event that the community needed to be ready for Which required one type of content, but then also the moment that the merge happened We had to switch talking about it in the past tense and start talking about the low-carbon high-security proof-of-stake model being the current protocol design rather than an upcoming upgrade So our approach was to update the site in advance of the merge So that all the content was appropriate for helping people prepare all about what to expect and how to act and what to do and what not to do and You know to explain the merge is an upcoming event that's still in the theorems future But then we also wanted to be able to update the site on merge day So that as soon as we saw a successful transition, we could pretty much in one click update all of our content for for the post merge world and That means discussing it in the past tense showcasing the the scale of the improvements that enabled Celebrating with with Easter eggs on the site like the merge panda on the on the Atheum commons background and etc So to do this we maintained a separate copy of the website developed in the months of even leading up to the merge So that was just ready to make live as soon as the moment arrived And we also went through the site seeking out all of the gaps in our merge and proof of stake content So that we were as well positioned as possible for for helping the community understand how a theory works in proof of stake mode That meant writing some new pages on some of the more technical aspects of the protocol Specifically we added pages on the the architecture of an Ethereum node after proof of stake How blocks are proposed in proof of stake proof of stake attack and defense and we added FAQs page and a page about proof of stake versus proof of work and Coming on to the energy consumption page Now one of the most significant things that the merge brought to a theme was was a dramatic really dramatic drop in the amount of energy that it consumes The energy consumption drop by ninety nine point nine eight percent We used to require a country's worth of energy and now the energy expenditure is negligible And we also got more security and regular block times as well at the same time So it was it was just such a pleasure to write up the energy consumption page It's just really satisfying to change all this into facts from Ethereum will move to proof of stake and reduce its energy expenditure to know actually if you did move to proof of stake and obliterate his energy consumption and That page got shared a lot the bar chart on the page with the values that I collated got shared a lot all over Twitter and various reports, you know, I saw it a lot in September October time and Just after the merge a bunch of third-party reports started to be published as well that confirmed what what we'd said What we already knew about the drop-off in energy consumption So it was just brilliant to be able to add those citations and back up the claims with Increasingly robust sources over time And I don't know about you guys, but for me on the bleak days in crypto that page in particular is a real pick-me-up So that's all I got to say back to you Lika. Thank you Great. Thanks, Joseph Yeah, the merge was definitely the highlight of this year for Ethereum in general and As it makes sense. It was also a bunch of work for To get the theorem dot org live and ready for all of that. So thanks to everyone who was involved in getting that ready Next up, we're gonna have Corwin who's gonna chat about a couple of different things mostly around the scaling section and the layer 2 page that we Shipped this year and the fine wallet revamp. Take us away Corwin Thanks, everyone So coming into 2022 we saw that layer 2 solutions were coming online and we need to get some information on the website There's also a meme coming into this year of L2 22. I'm not sure if it's still alive But it's definitely strong at the start of the year That being said when We started the year we were looking at building out a layer 2 page for kind of Newer people coming into Ethereum to learn about it just a more approachable page That we put into the use Ethereum section of the website. You can also find it on ethereum.org slash layer 2 This page is very like approachable for someone looking to learn Like early in their journey learning about Ethereum and looking to learn about scaling solutions on Ethereum and So basically takes you from The start of like what is a layer one? Why do we need layer 2? What are the benefits of this? How do layer 2s work going into the different kinds of roll-ups a little bit? How to use them and on board onto the layer 2 products and kind of the difference between Layer 2 and of Lydium slash sidechain and some handy tools to use layer 2s In addition to this page, we had a community member a manual who did a lot of work to revamp our developer docs content on scaling solutions So started off with updating just our general scaling page and Then moving on into this different subsections of scaling being optimistic roll-ups So this page also got updated talking about the differences between optimistic roll-ups Zero-knowledge roll-ups how they differ from sidechain plasma chain and Volidium's As well similar these comparisons to the different kinds of scaling solutions You'll also see that content and how they compare with the zero-knowledge roll-ups page the sidechains page plasma chains and Volidium's and this was all spearheaded by Immanuel a community member So thank you to Immanuel for helping update all this content around scaling for us Last thing wanted to highlight that we were yeah that we were working on this year Was updating our find wallets page. So initially I went to the way back machine here to look at what our page looked like before We had some filters, but when you use them it would it was all at the top of the page is a little bit like Confusing of the user experience since this is way back. We're not going to see any wallet data, but The flow is kind of awkward for users So we revamped our find wallets page to make it much more streamlined and a better user experience for Users to find a wallet and how we did that was looking at okay. What are some of the main user profiles that? People would have coming into this ecosystem. So you might be brand new Just looking for a wallet to hold some funds or you may be really into NFTs or you're holding Your crypto for the long term. So trying to find a wallet that fit what a user may be looking for and Having easy options as well to just come into all the features that we keep track of and Let you toggle those to find like a wallet that fits your criteria and this was done a lot by our team and The community is at large by submitting wallets for us to have on this website as well Yeah, with that I will pass it back to you Luca Thank You Corwin Moving on we've got Joshua to tell us a bit about the learning quizzes and the learn hub revamp and some of the Community-led initiatives and pages that we've shipped this year over to you Josh Yeah, thanks Luca Yeah learning stuff I'll start with the learn hub A big part of 2022 was making a medium org more accessible to everyone And we found that one of the best ways to do that was by creating simpler More curated learning experiences So what I mean is like is instead of complicated technical developer docs. We wanted to grow our content With more easy to understand if he didn't explanations about like the fundamentals and basic concepts So to the end we created firstly this learning hub that you see on my screen just now the goal was to explain about the essentials of a medium and straightforward language while Still communicating the finer details that freedom has to offer that is sometimes quite complex And so this page in particular it starts off as if you have absolutely zero knowledge about anything crypto related And it walks you through the very basics of a medium of ether of buying Moving through to different building blocks around like smart contracts web-free wallet security And also into quite a few of the many use cases that if he has built on top of it Now I won't go through and speak to everything that's on this page But if you haven't checked out I'd highly recommend it To anyone that's familiar with a lot of these concepts. It seems pretty obvious The positive response that we've had from our user research Has made it quite clear that these types of curated learning experiences where highly useful to almost all users but especially beginners By pretty much every metric the learn hub is one of the most satisfactory pages on the website according to users So you can see that we've got from everyone who's replied It's got a score of four point seventy eight out of five it's very easy to understand four point seven one out of five and People think the overall layout and design of the pages four point six six out of five and that really Was quite eye-opening for us about the type of content that we want to prioritize moving forward So all that being said if you know someone who's at the beginning of the rafferium journey then consider sending them here to get started and Yeah, thanks Sam for sharing that in the chat Building on top of those ideas and the learnings from the learn hub. We decided also to create these learning quizzes So the problem we're trying to solve was No matter how interested you are in a medium reading documentation can be pretty dry. You can get quite boring Yes, so the learning quizzes were our first effort into trying to make our content a bit more fun a bit more engaging The idea here is pretty simple People like to play games and people like to do well at the games that we play So we thought that if we could gamify our content in a way that force people to comprehend this Wall of text that you can see a little bit more fully Then it would make them a more impactful user of medium and allow them to do more stuff So the quizzes themselves They're very basic questions Based on the content that lives on the page so I believe we've got quizzes currently on eight different pages on the website and Every question is about the content that came prior to it on the page The quizzes will tell you if you get something right So if we say that a medium transactions aren't reversible It will say okay. Good job, and I will explain to you why that is But also probably more importantly, it will tell you why if you get something wrong like why it's wrong the idea you're being that it can correct misunderstandings or broken mental models and Yeah, lastly, you can also share your results on Twitter to let everyone know how smart you are or If you're Skyler, maybe how smart that you are So far, I believe there's over 50,000 quiz questions that have been answered so far The reception to them has been overwhelmingly very positive So next year we'll be expanding out the amount of questions that we have on the website as well as adding more functionality to this feature So if you'd like to try those out I'm sure someone will be tired enough to throw it in the chat for me Last thing I want to chat through before I pass you back over to Luca is just to take a minute to thank all of our amazing content contributors a medium to org is Successful thanks to literally thousands of contributors and we value each and every person who is helping to build out this fantastic resource there are a few pages that I Really like from 2022 that I would like to call it specifically But we don't have time to go through everything So just as a caveat to this that there's a lot more to this and if I haven't mentioned something here It doesn't mean that it wasn't massively appreciated First one was the blockchain bridges that we collaborated with Argin on very early on in the year this was just as L2 2022 as Corwin mentioned was just starting to kick off and Everyone was a little bit confused at that point about how they take my beef and get it from me net on to something else So pages like this and a couple of other supplementary pages were quite pivotal to helping people understand that We also have a d-site page decentralized science thanks to Vincent Yeah, this isn't something that I'd hair of until maybe Close to halfway through the year and there was a lot of hype and a lot of interest around it It seems to solve a lot of problems that there are and the scientific community at the moment So we really appreciated Vincent coming forward and building out this awesome resource for us It definitely helped me and a lot of people on the team to understand this a little bit better But again, we've got overwhelming positive feedback from the community that this is a worthwhile resource And for the last two pages, we've got decentralized social networks I'm sure everyone who's been on Twitter knows that it's Potentially imploding at the moment and a lot of people are looking for alternatives So having a page like this has been great just to point people to What is a decentralized social network and what does it do and what are some options? And this was include as well as the decentralized identity page. This was written by Immanuel to Corwin mentioned earlier on and has been one of our most prolific Contributors in terms of content. Yeah, so we really appreciate that yeah, and lastly just to decentralize identity and explaining what identity is and how you can Use various things on a medium to build up your decentralized identity or perhaps many different identities using things like attestations and Explaining some of the more difficult technical Concepts around this and how those work So yeah, thanks again to everyone Lastly, I would like to call out if you like writing and you would like to get Involved with building out a ferium dogs content resources Then we have some very big ideas for scaling up this effort in 2023 So we'd love to hear from you Please do get in touch and you can ping us directly or we do have our content channel and discord as well And yeah, so that's all I've got. I'll pass it back over to with Nice. Thanks Josh Next up we have Nuno Give us an update on the open design system Hello everyone So you all know that we have been working on the design system for the past few months. We are at the points that We will start coding some of them some of the parts already have laid out some of the design system For the next quarter. So that's super excited to have something Some catching up in the browser for this update. I was focused on the on the December update Which was all more focus on the markdown pages and we've been taking a lot of details on those and we read to To use storybook On our tech stack to bridge the design into the components on code. Thank you Tyler for the help and pushing forward this This idea of incorporating storybook in our tech stack We're looking forward that will help bridge the design and the coding and everything will work smoothly So some of the highlights that I wanted just to point out It's like small examples that design system will help Like we came up with the idea of expanding a little bit the hero This will be something that will be working on on code For the next quarter or something new that will open up a little bit the design on the on the on the big screens It's just an example of how important week this work has been to a plated design Step by step without disrupting the normal flow of new content of the off the website Some of the components that we have been working on for the markdown pages as I mentioned so small details and crafting the small The small design details using chakra has a base as you all know We have been migrating to chakra probably will talk a little bit more about that And just to finish a quick example that this is a normal Page that we have now and we will transition to something close to this Which is a lot more cleaner a lot more open the read easy to read, but we're enjoyable to Read to go about and we will update all those small details This is just one small example of the design system and how it will be applied to the pages and the work we have been done for this month we We closed this page all the small details For and we are really looking forward to see this on the browser And this was my update for the design system. Thank you so much look Thanks, Nuno. Yeah, exciting shout out to Nuno and Yaka bar to designers who have really been thinking a lot about how to make contributing as a designer easier and getting more designers involved with Ethereum and Just to drive that point home right now We have 36 people with the design role on the server So people who are interested in contributing as a designer versus a year ago when it was literally zero so amazing growth Next up We're gonna have Pablo Cover the code-based migration to type script and chakra Yeah, hello So, yeah on the technical side of the website So in the course of this year We did two big migrations that were Driven by community essentially With the main goal of making our code base more robust That that will help us Sorry You're sharing this course today perfect. We can hear you. Yeah, yeah, sorry Change windows Oh No, you still see my this Yeah, yeah, this is good Yes, sorry for my new skills on this court. Sorry. So Yeah, we will we want to to make our code more robust and Basically to to scale better in the future and then adding New features on top of that. So The first TypeScript the first migration that we did was adding type script to the code and So as you may see on on our repo We are we have a pretty big repo we have over 25,000 comments and we have a bunch of Contributors adding code constantly day by day on the repo on the project and this is really hard to To keep the code organized and what a structure. So that's was basically the main reason why we decided to implement type script on the code We did this With the help of you guys with the community you can see here almost 10 parties participants 10 contributors help us in the process and I think we did a pretty Good job on this we basically migrated 150 files to type script and Yeah, this is of course not the This is clearly a An ever-living epic or effort This was just the first iteration where we just Migrate all the files, but in the future we we expect to To keep improving the touch script. I'm sure that there are tons of things to improve and to fix They're rated to touch script So the next big migration that we did on the code base was Related with UI You can see the implement this epic the implementation of the UA library so a year ago on December 2021 we were trying to improve the accessibility of of the website and in that moment we were also thinking about creating this design system that you know just talk about and and We we realized soon that we were reinventing the wheel in a lot of custom components that we have So in that moment we decided to implement a UI library That set the the foundations of of our UI components where we can build on top of them These components are more robust have follow the modern standards of web are well tested So we started analyzing and exploring different libraries different options and We decided to go with chakra UI that is an open source library That has a pretty big community around a Super good documentation and the API for for the these UI components is pretty easy to use So we started Implementing the UI library with you guys This was a great success. This is a great success because we are still working on this and We have around 30 contributors And migrating all the UI components that we have Recently we started the second wave of migration. So we divided all the components that we have in two You can see the second part here That is in progress. We are super close to finish We have a lot of PRs open that needs review, but soon it's going to to be merged and Another thing to highlight on this is that in the In the process of this migration you the community have not only added a Incredible value on this migration itself, but also you have proposed Some great ideas that are kind of related with this for example the the storybook Proposal don't bite tired that you know just just said as well That is a great example of People giving us great ideas to to improve our code So I will invite Everyone who has ideas or improvements or something that we haven't considered yet on the code to create a PR Issue sorry and propose those changes. We are always open to to hear that and and discuss them So as I said we are close to finish it I think early Q1 we are going to to finish migrating all the all the components and And this will serve as the foundations for the upcoming goals for 2023 where we are going to basically try to implement the design system from From the designers that that they are creating from Nuno and Jacob And improve the accessibility That's the those are the goals So yeah, that's that's all I have to say Thanks everyone again who has collaborated and participated in in these efforts Yeah, I have a happy holiday Awesome. Thanks Pablo Yeah, and thanks to all of the contributors who have been involved with all of these initiatives couple of pretty pretty massive Migrations and it's always exciting to see so many people getting involved Alright next up I'm gonna briefly cover the translation program and Some of the highlights from this year Just share my screen real quick This is a very basic way of Just highlighting some numbers so that there's a visual representation there as well So it's been a pretty impressive year for translations on a theme.org with over 2000 individual contributors Translating a total of almost three million words Both are though both of those numbers are up from last year Because of all of this activity, we were able to update over 650 content buckets across all languages on the site massively up from last year The number of languages available on a theme.org has also grown from 39 in last December to 51 currently live My favorite stat though and one that I mention often is the ratio of non-English versus English page views Last December non-English page views accounted for 14.3% of all visits to the website Since then the number of visits in languages other than English has gone up in comparison with English page views Every single month with non-English page views currently representing a record high 27.6% of all traffic to the site So over a quarter of all traffic to the site is now in at languages other than English in addition to these brief stats We've also worked on a couple of different translation related initiatives this year in the first quarter We published a translation style guide translation program playbook cleaned up The crowd and glossary so focusing a lot on resources for translators Later on in the year. We also completely revamped the translation program pages and resources available on the website We also had a couple of epics Focusing on translation quality where we ran several quality analysis checks created lists of inconsistent translations that will be addressing soon and Collected a bunch of feedback on the quality of translations Recently we've been focusing more on the translator experience running some heart analysis and Identifying concrete next steps to improving the translator experience that we're currently working through and The final translation related initiative that I'll briefly mention was adding internationalization support to the EF blog which is now available in 15 languages Niko will go will go through this in some more detail So We can give the floor to Niko who will walk us through some of the other EF websites that we've been involved in This year and just a quick shout out if you are interested and want to help translate a theorem org Let us know reach out to us. We have a translation channel DMs are also always open always happy to chat and meet new contributors and Listen to feedback and ideas. So that would be it on my end and now Let's Hand it over to Niko. Thanks. Look up. Hi everyone. So I will give you all a summary of different projects We have been working on different side projects along this year The first one is the site from the ESP team Which was the first project that I work on since since I joined the team last year Basically, this project was an opportunity to test a new a new stack On a smaller scale And to validate this stack So then start applying this progressively on a team that are as I mentioned the track my relation adding ties script was Possible to because we we first test this new stack on these smaller projects So in the case of this site we completely redesigned the site we redesigned the application forms we also The theorem software that the ESP team uses so this allows us to improve the application flow to scale the application funnel And to make the application process easier for the applicants The other side was this was a master much more simple and small project is is the site for the cryptography research team in this case the idea was to have a site to centralize the content the members the different members of this team have The personal sites and blocks An idea was to have like a half for this content. So for example now that they have a block for the team and they can post Different posts here so so share The different research projects and publications they have been working on The same for the bounties this was dispersed around different pages and now we have all the content on the same page So it's easier to to navigate The other project was the blog and as Luca mentioned the main goal here was to provide support for internationalization This site was also revealed from scratch Using the the same stock we use on the SP and the other sites So Basically now for example if you go to The blog site we have this new page. That wasn't a by-level on the previous version Where you can for example filter post by language And when you enter to a post you can Navigate through the different translated versions So I think this was a a massive improvement to the experience of the site We have also worked on some UI and UX improvements the performance has also improved a lot And we still have some ideas in in the roadmap for some Future improvements. I share the post on this code if you want to read Eat more in detail and the last one is more like a sneak peek because the site is not live yet But in this last queue we have been working on Rebamping of the get play inside In this case we also revealed and we design the slide from scratch The documentation pages are Now have I think that a much better UI and UX and when you start to use it you I think you're going to notice the the difference The search feature for example, I think it's quite cool And so we have revealed The logic in the down this page to improve the performance the filtering Etc So I think that's all I have to say Oh Thanks, and I'll see you back to you. Thank you Niko Yeah, a bunch of Pretty cool looking websites that we've just walked through So we've all been looking Behind Giving you an overview of Some of the main things we've been working on this year and I guess Sam is gonna wrap this up by sharing Some of what we'll be focusing on next year Sam thanks, Luca. Hey everybody Happy to be here. Yeah. What a year was awesome to see the updates. I mean Over 2,000 translators involved Seeing github contributors across a thousand people this year. I think Yeah, easily the most productive year for a theorem dot org As a project and like major shout out to the community here for for helping out. It's really inspiring to see and to be a part of I mean looking ahead to 2023. Hopefully you guys are are looking forward to the new year I think Ultimately, this story is just a lot of the same right like a theorem as as a protocol as a project in open source as a community and ecosystem continues to evolve and There's constant need for a theorem dot org as an educational resource to to continue to evolve To keep up with just the community that we have As with other projects, you know supported by the Ethereum Foundation You know a major value and like guiding philosophy We have is just the concept of subtraction If you're curious to learn more about that encourage you to yeah Google that search it on YouTube. You'll find presentations from many people within the ethereum foundation talking about it And I think each project tries to Exemplify that in different ways But I think the major kind of ethos of this philosophy looking into the new year is You know, we have a core team on a theorem org. You've heard from many of those folks today who have presented and That core team will continue to to build out features and contribute to the website But more and more our focus is not so much like what are we gonna do as a team? It's more about like what can the community do to solve a certain problem or to seize a certain Opportunity and like how can we help in that effort? So If you folks are, you know looking for ways to get involved like that is basically our job is to like support you In terms of like what you want to build what you want to write what you want to design or translate And for us to help facilitate that for the benefit of the community. So Whether that's applying for grants through the ethereum foundation, whether that's working with us just to like, you know Build up a resume or learn new skills. Definitely encourage you to get involved In terms of like a couple teasers just to give a sense of where we're looking for like the next few months of the coming year and I can say two big focuses are One is just withdrawals For first acres. So if you've been following the ethereum protocol much You've probably seen a lot of chatter how Planned into this next upcoming Shanghai upgrade Will be facilitating withdrawals for first acres Our team helps maintain launch pad dot ethereum org And that's kind of like a go-to resource to to get up and running as as a solo staker So we'll be working on building educational resources on a theorem org to explaining How do you withdrawals work from a technical standpoint? ways to learn about just like Considerations to take in mind Continuing to build out documentation for stakers to help them, you know To stake successfully at the end of the day and Latest indications are you know that might be as soon as you know March April this coming year so building out functionality and resources around withdrawals Is going to be a huge focus for our team, which is super exciting. I Think the second one that you know, you heard Nuno and Pablo and maybe even others touch upon but just like Implementing the design system. We've been working on for the past six months Actually rolling that out into code We think this is going to be huge unlock in terms of just like improving accessibility of the website Making it just easier to design and build new pages and new features So like that any developer any designer can come into the project and have like the building blocks They need to to be productive and be successful And I think a cool part of that which others also mentioned but like rolling out Storybook which is a really nice kind of developer sandbox if you will for us to You know build components in isolation test them in this isolated sandbox Take image snapshots to make sure there's no bugs or regressions or accessibility pitfalls Should really help us kind of just improve productivity across the code base For really any contributor looking to help out And I guess last one to just say is yeah like Translation improvements is always an area. We're looking at as Luca mentioned, you know over 2,000 people Contributed to translations on the project this year like we're thinking about you guys and how we can make your job easier and just more efficient Whether that's like QA tools building out our glossary and translation memory Empowering you folks with tools to just be more productive and enjoy doing it more You know exploring the machine translations to help you be more productive Super excited about potential stuff in the pipeline there And I guess I just end is like you know like what else we work on as a team and as a community like Very much up to you. So Let us know whether it's in Discord calls like these github Twitter. Let us know what you think we should work on and let us know what you want to work on and We'll do our best to try to empower you To get out there and make a difference. So thanks a lot and yeah looking forward to seeing you on in 2023 Thank you, Sam with that we're basically through with All of the things we wanted to chat about I'm gonna give it over to Josh my Time I get to be the hero in common The poor from sharing my screen We'd have a couple of other things that look is about to go through So I just thought that I'd start this just now and we can leave up for the rest of the call while we chat Yeah, so sharing my screen just now if you get some sort of QR scanner You can scan the pull-up code and that will allow you to claim your pop open address or your E&S And I guess lastly just what we're giving shouts Want to give a shout out to Scott one up who I did see on this call. I'm not sure if he's still here But he has helped us a lot with creating pull-ups across the year All of the ones for the community calls, but also a bunch of others that I'm sure a lot of you have already claimed Yes, so shout out to Scott and I'll pass it back over to look at just to finish this up. We'll use claim your pop Thank You Josh All right, so moving on to the very very final part We have a couple of announcements and miscellaneous things we'd like to mention First of all events so the a theorem that our team has attended a couple this year Where we've been learning attending talks meeting new people meeting up with our contributors We ran a booth. We also gave a couple of talks I'm gonna be sharing the links to Sam's and my talks at Defconn and Bogatai in the chat right now With Sam talking about education as a public good and the history of a theorem org While my topic was growing the global theorem community through localization Feel free to check them out if you're interested and with that being said I'm sure other people on the team would like to share a word or two about in real life events and the value of attending them So let's open up the floor and hear from some of them as well, Joshua nominates Corwin Corwin you want to Yeah, some of the highlights that have come from attending these events Comes from one meeting the community members it was really awesome at Devconn to have that booth and have a space for people to come up and Meet us in person and to talk about all the work we're doing on a theorem org as a community Other highlights that have come from being able to go to these events is connecting with people who are able to help us build out These resources and our experts in the domain that we're trying to build out content for so an example That comes to mind would be like the bridges page. We talked about we met The guys that work at li-fi at a conference and they helped to contribute to our website or the layer to website we met a bunch of L2 companies in If Denver who helped us like verify the information we were putting out make sure we were making a good resource for Everyone to look at so like a lot of the value comes from being able to meet people who are either experts in the domain or interested in This project as a whole and just like really awesome to meet the community members through all of this Yeah, exactly a lot of different benefits. Also, I would say as Really applicable to anyone who wants to get more involved in Ethereum in the space in the community in general is to go to an in real life event or two It's a great opportunity to learn and to connect with people and to share ideas and to pick up ideas So, yeah, that's That's one thing we wanted to call out Also if Porto's happening next year seeing you know, just mentioning that so a new event If you want to check that out if you like Sunny weather probably good place to be I Just want to chime into a second all of the things I did and said and it comes to these IRL experiences So like any any event that folks are going to if they're trying to get more involved would argue would be valuable and beneficial We don't have to be the biggest events out there like each then Ethan was coming up in a couple months. That's a very large event Hopefully we'll see some folks there and I encourage folks to apply if you can make it But if you can't make it something like that Or any type of larger conference definitely consider meet-ups as well. Look for your local community to find other folks who are also Turning with a terium playing around building things try to see what they're working on any folks that you can get in touch with Locally you can really have a kind of premise during your knowledge and education and access in the space So just want to put that out there as well. I hopefully we'll see some folks at some different events this year Yeah, exactly Sorry I don't think I heard anyone really touch on But yeah, if you want to get involved and you don't work in this space But you want to go to one of these events one of the best ways to do that is to offer your time and volunteer Almost all of the time that means that you'll get tickets to the event for free in exchange for you helping out with the event But I've had loads of conversations with a lot of great people who are the volunteer these events and just by being there and Volunteering you get to have amazing conversation with a lot of really interesting people And there's also the added benefit that if you're interested you can spend a bit of your time going to the talks Which I would highly recommend as well So if there's something near you that you want to go to or even not Check out in advance look at the events coming up and see if you can get on the list as a volunteer Yeah, exactly 2023's coming up. There's gonna be a bunch of events going on If you can if in if you have time attending At least one is usually a rewarding and beneficial experience Be given that we're already on time. I want to quickly run through two other miscellaneous announcements First of all we Published a survey for translators a couple of days ago so we can collect some feedback and evaluate how translators feel about Contributing and the translation process and hopefully use these takeaways to improve certain aspects of the contributor experience I am sharing a link to the Survey in the chat please note that this channel and Message are only accessible to server members with the translator role since we want to make sure that only Translators are filling out this survey But if you are a translator and haven't filled this out yet, please do please share your thoughts Feedback it means a lot to us and the more we can learn about how contributors feel the more we can work on improving their experience and finally You might have noticed that we've just announced an NFT for active community members and contributors Sharing the message link with all the details and instructions for claiming the NFT in the chat as well Basically, this is just a simple way of us saying thank you to our most active and engaged community members And maybe also the start of us doing more things like this So in short, this is a regular NFT on optimism that you can claim if you have any of the following Roles on the theorem daughter or discord so you can find the exact roles in this message The mint is free. You do need to pay a gas vitamin, which is usually around 10 cents on optimism In case you don't have funds on optimism This seems like a good time to bridge some over and start exploring Ethereum's layer-to-eco system which is growing rapidly and it has exploded with activity this year And if you're not eligible to claim this NFT at the moment, don't have one of the roles Don't worry. They'll there will be more opportunities in the future I would say just try to contribute to the website in some way be active in our community Collect a role if possible and you're good As always a huge thanks to everyone on this call as well as all other members of the a theorem.org community We've come a long way to the point where we now have a vibrant community and thousands of contributors to the website So all of these great stats and metrics that we've shared here today are very much the result of all of these Contributions and your efforts. So thank you Have a nice break everyone and hopefully see you all again soon


Good morning, Jay. How are you? Good morning? I got us a little background music this morning. Oh, hopefully it's DMA or Absolutely The platform that we work with stream yard just added some cool background music Which I think it was really really neat. They put all this like love royalty-free stuff in here. So you can have a little Little mood Yeah, right in mornings exactly So good morning, everybody. Hey, well, welcome back to AZ update. Always good to see all of you dirt Yeah, this season Jared Andrew the rest of y'all that are in the chat. Thank you so much. We always appreciate it So Pierre what a another big week around here There's been so many goings on whether it's you know in our team specifically or You know even what's going on at Microsoft. So we we've had a really good week. I think and We've got some new Azure stuff to talk about. We've got some new stories plenty to talk about today Yeah, and you just mentioned those new new things coming on in our team. We are I think Rick Announced it on Twitter, but let's go through it here. We now have two new team members Amy Coilyer and Vinicius I Always mispronounced his last name Apollonario It's your multi-lingual tongue that makes it a little bit easier to do that than my Mangle mouth Brooklyn Staten Island sounding voice. So well, I'm I'm it's my French tongue. I always end up mispronunciating Names that are of a different Ethnicity than mine. I don't even know if it's called ethnicity or nationality or anyway, like and I always had problems with German names and Like Spanish slash Portuguese name. Oh lucky. I can say my own so you're you're already got a leg up on me Well, I I don't even do my own because I have a very French name and I work with a lot of Anglo Saxon or Anglophone. Sorry the People and my name doesn't nobody very few can actually pronounce it properly in English So I've just anglicized the whole thing and just kind of It's now Roman and we other got we got some other big news aside from some new people part of our team Microsoft cloud Really really big earnings report The big stuff that I took from it We'll scroll down a little bit was Definitely the the business the windows OEM revenue increasing and then you know The amount that came from Azure revenue, I thought was pretty incredible. We've got such a diverse list of products The revenue increased by 29% driven by Azure and other cloud services grew by 46% So there is a want need and love for Azure out there. Yeah But before we get to the news There was a bit of a like Announcements this week and I think you wanted to cover that's about your friend of ours Yeah, one of our our dear friends that was part of the cloud advocacy Organization that was a huge proponent of dev ops able Wang You may not know you may know but he did pass away last summer from Tragically from cancer and we all miss him very very much and as you can see he was There's a series of awards from a group called the dev ops dozens That went out and they picked all these different categories, you know best podcast best transformation But they also had this year the top dev ops evangelist and posthumously they have awarded able who had to be elected by a peers essentially who you know, we're given an opportunity and he He won and if you didn't know, you know, he was a principal program manager He and Donna then did a lot of work together. I know he and Jessica did a lot of work together just spectacular person overall and any accolades that he can get Since we've lost him is is just tremendous. So Just wanted to put it out there for everybody to know our buddy able is still in everyone's thoughts Absolutely, absolutely All right, so we have a Full show this week We how much you get us started what what are you getting talking about today? Sure so Azure dev ops has had a few new releases of updates to the program the software and one of the new Releases is put out there the ability to copy a dashboard to a different team the same team or a different team project and Team and query configuration is updated in that new dashboard This minimizes work to build similar dashboards from scratch for multiple teams which save time save effort There's been some updates to pipelines YAML pipelines Setting a deny access to all pipelines is the default protected for default that for as the default Let's try that one more time setting deny access to pipelines as the default for protected resources Azure pipelines will also post a neutral status back to GitHub when it decides not to run validation because of a path exclusion rule so Pipelines has automatic retries consume inputs From another task in a decorator improvements to service connections usage history Important if you're doing some auditing default agent specification Which is now Windows 2019 for the classic pipelines Access to all pipelines like I said off by default and protected resources Deprecation is going to happen for Windows 2016 hosted images. So if you need to still test Your your Windows 2016 based builds you've got to use a a Provided agent you can't use one of good sorry for the the hosted images Isn't that just the image of the worker be that's basically executes? Yeah, yeah, yeah So it really has very little impact on the operation is mostly that like the machine So if you unless you were using something that was specific to 2016 You may have to retest some of your pipelines You'll have to potentially either change the version if you need to or if it's something that's specific To your software build and you have to do it on 2016 which I'll be honest with you I can't imagine now, but if that is the case you can set up a self-hosted pipeline with in Azure DevOps and Bring your own agent and essentially say all right builds are gonna go here. However, you know, the the Microsoft hosted agents tends to be one of the things that people really love about the service reducing the amount of work that you have to go into actually maintaining patching a build image and and like I said, there's some small Things like copy dashboard improvements and filter on null values in a burned-down chart widget so as your DevOps your place to organize deploy and Connect your work. I Know able would appreciate hearing all that and I know how hard that he and the rest of team worked on That product when it first got released Yeah, I'm especially Excited about the the new integration or the new way we're integrating with admin accounts because for from an operations 10 point, there's a couple things is Granting somebody access and To be an admin of a of a DevOps organization It becomes a little cumbersome when you when you have a lot of people or a large company But now I have been able to just put them into an AD group and having that AD group with all of the permission set already in GitHub Simplifies things really well plus it simplifies when somebody leaves where you remove them from AD and it automatically removes them from All of their github and and all of the other access. So I'm especially excited about that part Very very cool. So Improving your Azure DevOps experience always That team has always got something new to share You can check out the Azure DevOps blog on dev blogs if you want to keep up to date with all the new features that are Released. Yeah, and and it's DevOps. I've been working more and more with it I'm I'm seeing ops Like operations based in IT Usage with Azure DevOps more and more like Azure boards is as fantastic for keeping track of anything that needs to be done as your repo for anything that scripts or or Automation files or anything like that like And I'm started to kind of play around a little bit with pipeline to just kind of like Execute not deployments of things but execute like just code whether it's PowerShell or Azure CLI to affect my my endpoint but based on triggers based on web hooks based on a whole kinds of other things. So I've been looking at that and so I'm Optimistic that more and more Operations folks are gonna start looking at that because there's definitely a lot of value in there Yeah, absolutely, and we always need to find ways to automate make things easier and also be able to Keep track of our work, and I think that that's one of the the benefits of Azure DevOps. It's a pretty all in one type of situation that it's it's got a lot of things for a lot of different people who are either deploying software writing software auditing software securing you name it that there's all sorts of different Extensions plug-ins features that you can use to be able to maximize What Azure DevOps able to do? Yeah Okay, so next item on our list considering we're at almost a halfway mark is the Landing zone accelerators for Microsoft's Azure Arc enabled server This is not really a New or an announcement on the technical side, so there's no We're not announcing new functionality here, but we've were constantly being asked like What is the documentation for this scenario? What is the best approach or best that? best practice for for this scenario, so the landing zone is or accelerator is an area where you're actually Going to be able to go and look at all of the different Scenarios that they are so whether or not it's a hybrid first customer or Azure first customer or multi-cloud customer and look at all the documentation and all of the guidance on how you can organize and Configure Azure Arc enabled servers in that particular scenario to get the outcome that you're looking for so We are looking at Across multiple so I've seen some for Azure backup and I've seen some for Azure monitor and I've seen some like landing zone Where we're collecting all of that documentation in all of this like reference architectures and putting them into one single location That's easy to find because let's face it our documentation in the past has not always been the most straightforward Thing to navigate so let's go here and go here and refer to here and but now This is with this accelerator landing zone. This is getting much much better And this is all part of that cloud adoption framework for Azure the the ability to look at these types of pieces of documentation and Making determinations on what your best road for cloud adoption is. There's a lot of different scenarios use cases Strategic moves Tactical moves like the actual migrate so there's all and then of course Managing governing all your different deployments all super important and I just thought Any more information we give people on why they should move to Azure or how they should make their Their servers that are maybe in a data center Some sort of other cloud to make them available so that you can have them all within your Azure view Super super useful a great great product and in great bed We've tried to get documentation in one place for everybody. Yeah documentation is always very important and for the audience out there if you find something in a document on docs or anywhere else for From Microsoft on the upper right corner There's always a little button that says edit or feedback. Please press it and tell us what it is Considering that the way the documentation is all organized now on github What used to take six months to run a change through our documentation can now be turned turned on in a matter of days, so if you see something that That you're Not concerned about but you see something that's wrong a tie even if it's a typo Just hit that button and let us know and we try and very very hard to make that documentation better Absolutely, so we got another news item here for a new service or service improvement with in Azure which is general availability for Azure Key Vault increased service limits to all its customers so One of the things that you needed to be concerned with for your secrets and your software keys Was a limitation on how many you can do per 10 seconds It used to be 2,000 but now there are 4,000 get transactions per 10 seconds Allowed which changes the service quota just a little bit If you want to take a look at all your different service limits, there's the documentation on the Azure page And you can learn more about these Key Vault insights and so what you can Get out of this that that's huge is that the look into your Key Vault insights so you're able to see Utilization latency availability how many authentication Sessions have happened and which are successful which have failed and to be honest with you It's really really super useful because you want to be able to keep an eye for your auditing purposes how often certain secrets and keys are being used and then The monitoring overview page in the portal shows you total requests average latency success ratio metrics for API live latency Vault availability vault saturation API hits and API results all all really useful so make it your make it your Challenge to be able to use this service and Improve what your security posture is within your applications or your server deployments I think it's real important and you should always consider How to protect the secrets that you use in the best way possible Yeah, because if any of our audience right now is hard-coded Admin credentials in any of their automation scripts or deployment scripts Stop it. Stop it now It's not it's not a good idea It's it really isn't and Key Vault is a really great tool to allow you to basically save everything in one location and then when you're done with When you need that credentials you just retrieve it you use it and then it evaporates, so it's gone. Oh Yeah, yeah Christos Christos Mastakas he does some really great things with his 425 show on Twitch so He's got his Identity hackathon going on. Yep. I know that We we've got some people that have moved over into that part of the the organization and have really started enjoying What there is? To offer about look showing people how identity is best Or I say managed identities are best used within Azure. So take a look at the 45 show I think it's really really useful and Christos is just a really nice guy yep, and Shannon used to be on our team moved over to start working with Christos and just just wonderful person very knowledgeable and A DJ which I can appreciate All right last news bit of news for the week There's a new public preview for and I if you watch this show before you know, I'm a huge fan of Azure monitor I'm a huge fan of anything where I can collect as much information about my environment and build a way to be able to monitor it Display the status of the health and and react to it through alerts and so much For all of my machines regardless where they may be now as your monitor the new agent which uses data collection rules to Send the data to the log analytics workspace Can send it to multiple workspace if you have multiple rules for that particular agent that covers that scope One of the things that our customers have told us is when that machine is running Let's say on an arc server that's on-prem or in somebody else's cloud the The agent had to send the data over open Internet It was still encrypted With the long long key and and and very secure But some of the requirements that some of these customers have customers had in in terms of using that in Environment that requires isolation has prompted us to Enable the agent to connect to Azure private links So another way of improving that security posture keeping things off the public Internet as much as you can exactly so now with the agent you can connect to an Azure private link and if Essentially create a site-to-side VPN in which that encrypted information is going to go through so And it's going to connect to because it's a private link It connects to the closest endpoints to Azure and then uses the Azure backbone to get to your workspace, so again bypassing the the internet if you want to bypass the internet completely then we have to look at Express route Yeah, so like you said just more and more ways to Secure your platform and your environment and make sure that the data that you that is so critical to you remains yours Absolutely, absolutely So we've got some things that are going to be going on around the community that we probably like you to check out and see if It's something that you want to learn more about these different subjects one of them is something I'll be taking part in which is a Session with Maddie Stratten and Kat Osgrove of Pulumi You can go to this link aka ms slash reactor pi Pulumi We're going to talk about using Azure to Deploy Python resources with Pulumi So is it deploying Python resources or deploying resources with my Deploying Azure resources with Python and Pulumi so that means using your Using the Python language to actually write your infrastructure is code Solutions so that's one of the benefits of using Pulumi is there's not a specific DSL That you're using or domain specific language. You're using the language as you already know so if you want to write your infrastructure as code and deployment code in TypeScript you can do that Python you do that. There's all sorts of different ways they've got a an Azure first kind of mentality where they're going against what API is a release and then allowing you to just basically connect to those API so and and Create the infrastructure that you need. It's a great tool their state management there is ease of deployment because like I said You're able to connect Azure directly with the software and write the language that you want to write to actually deploy your code And so you don't have to learn Something new like you do say with ARM or with bicep while they're great products That you could be in a multi-cloud situation where you need to do the deployments to more than one particular cloud And if that's the case having an agnostic tool that that still Takes a look at all the different APIs that you have and you don't have to necessarily wait Like one of the downsides of Terraform while it's a great product. You have to wait for them to create Different connectors and make updates to the ones they have in order to utilize certain services No, that's great. I'm actually I was this was one of the things that were in my calendar Hopefully the my calendar doesn't get too overloaded by a February 16th, so I can still so watch it Watch you and cheer you on also what we have Patch and switches on today the noon Eastern 9 Pacific and I can't do the math to say what it is across the pond But that's about it for our Community events hey and by the way if you have community events that you are participating in or that you Are interested in and that are coming and that are coming up in your neck of the woods Just drop us a line and we'll add them to this list because we don't have visibility into every community event and We want to make sure that this show Fits in with you and thank you Jared For 17 ETC is that what he said yep UTC All right the to end the show Our module learn module of the week is we should have like some dramatic music to like Module of the week How about All right, so the module of the week this week is introduction to Azure Arc and the reason we picked that is because of the announcement of the landing zone for Azure Arc, but also because It ties in with a lot of different Announcement that we've had such as the private links because if you're deploying your agents on Azure Arc You have to know how to configure it so that it reports its information to the right location So I highly recommend Everyone to go through the introduction to Azure Arc learning path on Microsoft learn It's not very long It'll take you probably less than half an hour But it does give you a great overview of Azure Arc and what it can do for you so become a on Microsoft learn wizard by using this you can turn gain your experience points and Compete with your friends if you you find that to be what you want some people are a little bit more competitive than others I know we've got some people within our team that have done like every single module I think like Warren and Warren and son, I believe yeah done all of the modules. Yeah, I'm not there. I'm no I'm no where there I try to pick up at least one or two a week Always great, especially like if I'm doing fun bites and I have a new subject. I want to cover I always think it's important. They're like, hey, let's just run to the learn module. Yeah, that's right Well, we're all coming up to the half hour Thank you very much Jay for another great episode of Azure update Have a great weekend buddy Thanks a lot you too I know you'll be back next week with Another host that'll be your guest to help people learn a little bit more about what's new in Azure But until then you know what you all have a wonderful weekend. Enjoy that Friday We'll see you soon. Take care everybody. Bye


This video will show you how you can add a chat widget to your webpage, typically done by your webmaster. We will use a Wix website in this example to show you how to add the chat widget to your site. To get started, log into Super Office and open the administrator client by clicking on Settings and Maintenance in the Settings menu. Click on the chat icon in the navigation menu on the left hand side. Here, you can see all the chat channels that are set up for your company. If you haven't set up any channels yet, you will only see the default chat channel which is there to help you get started. If this is the case, we advise you to watch the video how to configure your chat channel before adding the chat widget to your website. Otherwise, you will have to go through these next steps again. Assuming you have configured your chat channels, select the chat channel you want to add to your website and you will see the summary details of the channel, including the language, the number of chat sessions in the last 30 days, and how many agents are assigned to this channel. This is also where you view the JavaScript, which is what you need to add to your website for the chat widget to appear. Click View to see the JavaScript. Now copy the chat widget JavaScript. Log into the editor page of your website. In this video, we will use a Wix website as an example, but the steps are the same for any other content management system like FrontPage, Joomla, or similar. On your webpage, go to the section where you can edit or add HTML code. Paste the JavaScript for your chat widget into the code of your webpage. Next, click Save, Upgrade, or Publish, depending on what webpage you use. Now open your webpage or refresh your website if you already have it open. The Super Office chat widget is now available in the bottom right of your screen and is ready to be used.


It was a confusing time to be a fledgling gamer back in the late 80s and early 90s. You could be talking to someone and then they'd ask you, Hey man, have you played Willow? Oh, you mean that sweet-ass arcade platformer where you hop around zapping stuff left and right and then you play as Mad Mart again and slice everything to shreds and it follows the movie and everything? Nah man, I mean the other Willow.  Nah man, the other other Willow. Oh, the NES game. Yeah, even though all three of these games were simply called Willow, they're all totally different. I've talked about the Capcom arcade game in a separate video, so let's tackle the Capcom NES game, which is in fact completely different as you can see. It's a top-down screen-to-screen action RPG complete with a leveling system and equipable swords, armor, magic and all that good stuff. I know at first glance the easy comparison right away is to the original Legend of Zelda and yeah, the combat's a bit similar and you follow set paths to move across a huge map one screen at a time. But Zelda is a bit more dungeon-heavy with a fair share of puzzles and riddles and all that and Willow does have a few dungeons, but it's a lot closer to Crystallis, with a lot of combat happening on the world map, complete with an experience and leveling system. You use the B button to attack with your sword, hold down a direction on the D-pad while pressing B and you'll do a jab. Otherwise, just pressing B by itself will do a big, slow swing, which would make sense since Willow is, you know, a little guy, and this sword, it looks pretty huge. But as you level up, his swing speeds up and it becomes a pretty effective attack, so that's a nice touch. You do this with each new sword that you find as well, so there's always an incentive to fight enemies instead of just skipping past them. I will say the slow sword makes the hit detection a little clumsy at first, but it's definitely not game-breaking or anything. The A button uses magic, which is allotted by MP that you can see in the upper left. You can obtain fire, lightning, acorns that turn enemies to stone, and other fun stuff. The way combat works is through random battles that appear as you move to a new screen, just take out whatever's in your way and move on. But what's convenient here is that if you don't like the hand that you're dealt, you can just nope out of the screen, back out, and come back, and roll the dice again, so to speak. I also appreciate the user interface. It's very clean-looking and easy to use, and you can easily see how much experience you need to get to the next level just by pressing Start. And you can see how easy it is to equip all your swords, shield, and magic and all that, and yeah, as far as that kind of stuff goes, Willow is just the bare essentials. But hey, if the game executes the basics well, then that's totally fine. Better that than over-complicating things with slow, cumbersome menus like you might find in other 8-bit RPGs. Willow for NES does have its share of drawbacks, however. Like, when you die, you continue at the last level you reached. I mean, ultimately, that's fine.  But it's one of those things that people might not be used to from older games like this, so I gotta at least point it out. The biggest drawback for me personally is that there's not really any healing items, at least not really. There's nothing you can carry with you or use in between combat. There are some dungeons that have chests that'll give you some HP, but there's maybe one per dungeon. Otherwise, you can only heal and replenish magic in villages, at least until toward the end of the game when you do get a healing spell. I should also mention that this game has a password system instead of a battery save, and it's 18 characters long. Ugh. I should also mention that the story here does not follow the movie. It's just kind of like, hey, here's the characters from Willow doing Willow things in a Willow-ish environment with Willow-y music and all that. Ultimately, it has to do with turning the messenger from the spirit earth back into a human being, and I guess Willow has to try and change her back himself. And Willow's also kind of a badass in this game, a sword-slinging sorcerer that's actually competent and stuff. And that's totally fine, but it makes me wonder if Capcom was in the middle of developing this game anyway and just decided to attach Willow to it out of nowhere. Still, they really did a fantastic job working in the characters and making the presentation here look really sharp, not just with all the different familiar people showing up, but with the settings themselves showing wind blowing through the grass, a bridge swaying, the earth shaking. I mean, it's clear that a lot of effort went into this game. That's also made clear through the soundtrack, and I've said it for years. One major thing that makes heavy exploration games and long playthroughs more than the some other parts is a good soundtrack, and that's one big part of why it kept coming back to this game. I kept getting the music from this game stuck in my head. So yeah, Willow for NES is easily one of the very best licensed games on the system, and it's a pretty dang good action RPG too. Nah, it's not going to touch stuff like Crystallis or FaZanadu. Those games have a little more depth to them, plus Willow doesn't really offer that much of a challenge, but still, this game is a surprise to me. It's funny when you think of licensed stuff that has more than one good game attached to it, you'll usually think of cartoony stuff like Ninja Turtles or science fiction craziness like Terminator 2 or Aliens or X-Men or whatever. I wouldn't have guessed that Willow, of all things, spawned two completely different, yet very good games. You really can't go wrong with either game. Alright, I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.