What's up? Welcome back to the podcast in today's episode. We feature coached Gerbie and Gerbie is on a Haitian national team. He is a swimmer. He shares a lot of insight into how he got into coaching, his philosophy of coaching, what it takes to get to the highest levels of the sport and sit back and enjoy today's episode. Let's dig in. Individual sports like swimming, golf, tennis. I've never been a good swimmer. But I've always been drawn to individual sports because I know it's so mental.  But I know you're constantly in your head. Tell us what sort of discipline did you have when you were younger that obviously it's carried over until now because you're on the national team. You're in the top 1% or I would say less than 1% of athletes in the world who can achieve to that level. Where did that discipline come from when you're younger? And how has that helped you now? So that's a great question. When I was younger and when I we got our club program in my hometown when I was I'd say 15 to 16 years old. And when I enrolled into club, the way my dad put it because you know, every every sport has a club, right? But the way my dad put it, he was just like, this is USA club. This is the way you want to get to the Olympics.  He was just like, Hey, this program is the way that you get to the Olympics. You don't do it through middle school or high school. You if you want to get to the Olympics and get to the top, you got to do this. I was the moment he worded it like that. I don't know why I was just like, I was all in. So I took it very seriously because I was just like in my mind I was like, I'm trying to get to the Olympics. I wouldn't be like a national swimmer. I used to always see like videos of a national swimmer from USA and all they all stuff they got to do and travel. So that was like my goal. So from a very young age, I took that very seriously. So I did things like, I, you know, made my parents only make chicken or rice for dinner almost every meal. I ate lots of veggies and food. I had like, I wrote down lots of stuff on a piece of paper. I had this, this piece of paper on my Bolton board as a 16 year old. And I would write today, you need to work on this in practice. If I didn't achieve that to my standards, I didn't cross it out. I left it there. So every single day, I would look at it and be like, okay, today, I got to be sure I do to my standards. And then if I weren't done enough to my standards, I would cross it out right the next thing. But it was just a little thing. It was a little thing like that. I never another one keeps his PG, but I never drank or anything growing up. I never did anything. I never went to like parties or anything like that.  I went to, if I would have a girl would ask me to school dance on Friday or Saturday, I'd go to the swimming in the morning, come right back and get ready for the dance. I just knew that what I had to do. And I knew that it was going to be sacrifices. But I think what's interesting about that is that in my mind, I already made the sacrifice. I'm not being able to swim with my friends in high school, middle school. So it was all of nothing, you know, so it's like, I've already gone this far. It's already a lonely journey. No one's doing it with me. You know, why not go all in and see what happens? Right. Yeah, that's, that's awesome. And that's kind of what I've seen is like, I've done a lot of these interviews with coaches over the last couple months. And the ones who just have like set priorities, what they want, and they're so clear about that. It's it's very easy for them to say no to all of the normal things that everyone else does. And it kind of goes back to, I've read about this a lot recently, where normally, like high achievers are really good at spending time by themselves, and working on the thing that they want to do, and not needing to have others who are like cheerleading them on on a daily basis. The biggest thing is that you don't want to ask anything from your athletes that you wouldn't do, or you don't do. So when I got into coaching, even when I started out coaching, I coached just eight numbers. But it was the same, like, I'm not gonna come in and say, Hey, you guys need to work hard in the pool.  Right.   They just like, Oh, he does it. So obviously, it's he knows what we're going through. And that's, that's the biggest thing is just said, you know, preach, do what you preach.   And it makes we know what to expect. So it makes it a lot easier. And so I just think when you're consistent on not just your attitude, but what you preach and the way you just go about life, it makes it so much easier to buy in. And those are the two things that I have really used as escalated my coaching and my athletes' results through the years. Right. That's awesome. And how long have you been coaching? Since I was 24, so I started starting coaching was 1716. So yeah, quite a bit. But those first couple of years, I, they were eight nuns years and 11 12 year old kids at Summer League. So it was just like twice, like two months a year out of the year, I didn't really get into full time coaching. Until this actual a year ago, I started was head coach for my that one club, Tri West swim club. But yeah, this is my second major head coaching job. But yeah, that's cool. What do you feel like is the biggest challenge is as being a coach to kids? I think it's just honestly, I think the biggest challenge is understanding them because I think we like to I always tell people that kids are smart, right? Kids are very smart. I think we underestimate how intelligent kids can be. I think we just like to put kids in the category of there's just kids. And I think the biggest challenge sometimes with coaches is just understanding that kids can understand what you're doing. They're not numb. And so they can sometimes milk things a lot and kind of, you know, act traumatic and get to try to trick you about whether they're feeling about a certain way, or sometimes they can just they understand if you're you're messing with them, they understand if you're trying to lie or to them. So I always tell people because like, don't treat kids like kids in sports, you got to treat them like intelligent and athletic adults because, you know, most athletes are intelligent, right? They're there for a reason they know they're sport. That's the biggest thing they're intelligent. They're sport. So I think that's the biggest challenge is coming every day and remembering, Oh, these kids are like, they're with it, like they understand they're they're smarter, they're intelligent, I can have intelligent conversations with them. And I can resonate with them because they understand what's going on. And not just being like, Oh, 11 and 12 year olds are just 1112s are dumb. They just want to go play.  Right. Yeah, I know I know on my end, the thing that I think this took me time just to experience coaching to fully get this. But like, once I started to realize like, wow, like I can, I can actually have a huge impact on these kids. Then I started to take everything what I said, just I took it way more serious how I handled myself around kids. Because I know at the beginning, when I started training kids, I was just very, I don't know, it was almost like, you know, they're going to show up to my session, I'm going to put them through a good workout, and then that's it. And it was zero sort of like, personal relationship going on between myself and the clients I was working with. And over time, it made me realize, you know what, like, these kids are very intelligent, they're smart, they're going to listen to everything. So you have to be very careful with what you say, because like what you say can completely ruin their confidence, work and build their confidence to a to an you know, an unshakable level. I feel like coaches have the the power to be able to have that sort of influence. Yeah, exactly. And also, honestly, with that, man, like the biggest challenge with that that I've come across is that children don't buy in like they used to, right? They like so many kids when they you ask them why are you here, they just say I'm here because I want to have fun or be my friends. So like, I know because you run a professional elite program, right? So like how frustrating frustrating is that when you're like, I'm trying to help you be like a successful athlete, I want to win, I want you to be a winner, a successor and also in like, so have somebody just be like, I don't really care, I'm just here to do this.  So when we let's say we're trying to win a shop conference championship at the end of the year, how do we get these five kids who are just here to have fun and don't really care to buy in? And that's the biggest thing I don't know if it used to be like that, like a long time ago kids, but man, I'm seeing it everywhere. Every kid and so many kids are just like, I don't want to go to practice. I don't want to be here. I'm just here because mom made me. So just making those kids buy in trying to figure out how to make their place be a good place on the team. That's positive. Yeah, and I'm definitely with you on that. I feel like the commitment level of a lot of kids out there has dropped over the last 10 years. And I don't know what I've what I've kind of traced it back to, in my opinion, it's the parenting. There's a lot of parents who they're all over, like they want to have private training, group training, they want to invest into that sort of thing, but their kid is not at that level. Yeah. And so they're kind of being forced to do stuff. And I've never seen over the last 12 years of coaching kids, I've never seen one time where the kid doesn't want to be there, the parents want them to be there and the kid gets better, like the kid never gets better. Yeah, parents are just dragging them to the session. Yeah. And it's it's one of those things, though, like, it's it's very common. And I found it's it's really hard to motivate kids, unless they want to be there. And I feel like I don't really I never need to motivate any of my clients at this point, because they want to be there just as bad as me. And, you know, it makes it easy to work with kids who have that mindset. But that mindset's very it's the it's the minority of kids. Yes, stuff. It's one of those tough things. All right, cool, man. So you've been coaching for a while. You started when you were a teenager. What's if you just kind of have to think back like what's been like the most like fulfilling story you have of a kid that you've worked with that's either made it to a high level or just like your favorite coaching moment. Oh, man, there's so many. But I have to say so there's two. What was the last summer when I was head coaching for my summer league? First year ever head coaching for a summer league. And, you know, they had the idea that just summer league, right, that just supposed to be fun, not take it seriously, show up whenever you want. And then here this kid come fresh out college, comes by, takes up the head coaching job, and I put all these rules in place and like this is how we're doing it. This is how it's going to be done. If you don't like it, there's a door. While for people to really buy into that, a lot of parents got mad. But that year we broke 19 records. So and I always say like people will just look at the 19 19 records. But there was an every single day. There was something amazing happening inside that pool facility that made that happen. So yeah, it was really special. But the actual story there the year before I became the head coach. I was the 11 12 head coach for our team. And our girl, we had three to four girls who were like state level good. There are three girls who are state level good. They were super fast. And they we saw them break a relay at that conference meet the year before. And I was looking at this relay. And I was just I was thinking about it. I was just like, wow, these girls broke this relay record. But if they want to break it next year, they need a back shoker. And for those who don't understand swimming, the relays go back to a brush of butterfly freestyle. And back to a Gleed off, right? I was thinking about these three girls who just broke this record. I'm not even caring about the record. I'm thinking next year when they move up to my group to 13 14th, they're going to need a back shoker. They want to break any breaking out the relay record. And they don't have one that's fast enough. So I'm sitting here at the conference meet trying to think of how can we get this through these three girls, a fourth girl fast enough to make this possible. So there was one girl in my mind, one girl and even close to with this in perspective, her split for the 50 back going down and back in a pool had to be a 32 at the slowest or 33 32 33 at the slowest. Coming into the season, she was a 39. So I was just like, I'll do that. Yeah. So I was just like, how can we make this girl go a 33 to just give them a chance? That's all she has to but that's a big drop at 39 33 to 39.  And you guys need to go these splits because this girl, as the slowest, she can go to 33. She has to go 33 at the slowest for you guys to have a chance. So let's say girls are okay. Yeah, we got it. We got it.  Then the fourth girl, I bring her side like, Hey, you need to be we at the end of season, we need you at a 33 at the slowest. She's like, Okay, so let's do it. So we worked really hard with this girl. She came in extra. We worked on her starts. She I kept moving closer to the faster girls. I kept screaming at her anytime she would slow down. And I did it gives me chills to this day at the conference meet that year, when she left for the relay and she split 33. And then the other girls did their thing. They broke that record by like, I think one 10th or something like that. And it was it was so special just because every girl did their part. And that girl, she she went in like on paper. It was impossible, right? But she knew what she had to do. We gave her enough time to understand it and mentally grasp it and understand what she needs to do. And she did it. And she did she did a 33 from a 39 and like Tuesday, when they break that one, just thinking about that record, just super emotional, but it was really cool. Dude, that is that is awesome. Because they go is it down and back? Is that right?  Right. All four. Yeah. Yeah, man, that is awesome. That's really cool. That's really, really cool. But I was gonna say, but that just I mean, anytime swimmer needs to do something, I just that's how I coach, right? I just I look at the long term. And I say let's not let's not make our goal. We need to go this because for example, you know, in soccer terms, if you start your season, hey, our goals to win the conference championship, there's so many things that have to happen along the way to achieve that. So let's make our goal to be the very best that we can be every single day. And then we'll just gradually go in the right direction. If we win, we win, we don't at least we can say we did our best. Yeah, now that's true. And it's funny before we got on this cause looking back at our message on Instagram. And you said something. I'm going to try to pull it up right now. I don't know if you remember this. This was back in. It was back in July. Let's see if I can pull this up. Yeah, you left me these two voice notes. Actually, I'm just going to read it if it's cool. So you said, yeah, you go, you go, I think it's interesting that people who watch your stuff may assume that your program is meant to bring hundreds of clients at once. When really it's a slow but steady process, because one client can be a big deal. It's a slow building block to the top. So if you get one client a week or even one client every two weeks, that's still bringing in an extra six to $800 a month. So if you continue bringing in just that one client every now and then it will add up very quickly. And then you left these two voice notes under that. And you went on to say like, you know, so many people are focused on just getting so many different clients at one time. And the reality is like, if you just chisel away and just go like one client at a time, they're going to have a much better experience. So tell me more about kind of what you meant by that, like, how has that helped you grow coaching programs? So I've always, you know, been, you know, whether just be God's plan or what, I've always been found finding myself coaching with the little person under the person who's underestimated or whatever. So, you know, I like to win. And I always want the I want that story and history to be the person who saw coming to come out of nowhere and win or whatever, make all the money or something. But like, that's not realistic. If you just start out by saying riding on the wall, hey, today our goal is going to be to be the best ever. Right? Michael Phelps is coaching right on the board. Hey, today we're going to be the very dark goals going to be the greatest Olympian of all time when a gold medals. No, like everything is a process. Right? Your soccer business, bringing in income or bringing in athletes is a process. I think what I was saying that is like people look at Oh, you only bring one or two athletes in every couple weeks or an athlete in a month. That's not a hole. That's not really big. But like those people, that's the problem. The people who think that way and people look at things that way, missed the point. Because the point is the process and winning six major success or whatever reward you get at the end of the day. That's just icing on the cake. That's not even the point. The point is the process, the bit by bit steps, stepping stones to get to getting to the top. And so with my coaching, you know, it's the same way. We just think we take it step by step. But today, our goal is to be the very best we can be tomorrow. Our goals also to be the very best we can be. And then if we have a conference me at the end of the year, okay, well, let's make our next goal to be let's try to win as many as we can. Alright, now let's make our goal to be the very best thing we can be in the area. Okay, and now let's make our goal to be let's try to be just seem to beat us last year. And the process is the fun part of people understand that making if you have a soccer business, if you have a client a week, that's a lot that's successful. That's crazy. That's making so much money as making and then and you're taking finances out of it. That's making a kids' life like improving kids' life. One kid a week. And that's incredible to the next thing you know, every week, you're impacting someone's life for the better. So like, that's just all I mean, my people think that the end product is the point. In my point, in my opinion, the end product is it's another cake. The process is what makes sports fun. Mm hmm. Right. Yeah, I totally agree. And it's one of I think it's one of the biggest reasons why people who think long term, they I mean, they always succeed. I've never met someone who thinks long term that has failed, especially with business. Because they know it's not it's not what's the end result today. It's their building on top of what they did yesterday. And it's just one consistent brick at a time. And I can trace back like I look at coaches that we've been able to help over the past five years, like the ones who I would say on paper that are the most successful. They're the ones who just have stayed the most patient and persistent over a longer period of time than someone else who doesn't. And it's the same thing, man. It's it goes hand in hand. Just if you look at your career as a swimmer, it's like you're not going to you're not going to be on the national team when you're eight years old. It's going to take you years to figure it out years to get better. And one of the questions I like to ask people because no one has the same answer here. But like what's your definition of success? Oh, I love that you asked me that because we literally went over I went over this with my athletes like two weeks ago. So everyone always said is that, you know, you need to be successful, you know, coaches tell you need to be successful parents. Sorry, don't mean to call parents out, but always tell their kids you need to be successful. And then so what happens is that we as a society think that success is a standard that we need to meet. But in reality, success is a standard and something values that you make for yourself. Because the problem is people are getting expectations mixed up with like standards. What they say you need to be successful and they say that that's just expectations. That's not success. When they say you need to win this game to be successful. That's not that's not what success is. That's their expectations that standards are setting for you. What success is that the end of the day is you saying I need to accomplish this and I want to do it. And I need me putting every single thing I can into that thing. And if I do that, then that's successful. So like, for example, when I was in college, I'm not I'm afraid about it. I was terrible at math. I barely passed math to graduate. But in some people were to look at that and say, Hey, Gary, if you Gary, you need to get a B to be successful. So you can have successful grades. Well, my opinion, I need to be I just need to pass a class to graduate. And that my opinion that's success, because I'm trying every single thing I can. I'm putting an hours of studying to do this. And at the end of the day, I'm only getting these. But if I'm trying the very best I can, my goal is just to graduate and get past this class. And how can you define that that's my success? How can you look at how can you tell me that that's not successful enough? Because at the end of the day, if you're putting out everything in, and that's your goal, and you achieve it, then that's success. Standard and expectations are not mixed with success. That's just people mix those two together all the time. I think that just it's upsetting because so many kids now are not loving sports, and they're not loving school, they're not loving what they're doing. And same with people, people too, because people are saying, hey, you need to do this to be successful. But that's not it. That's just you need to do this. Because that's what I think you should do or that I think you need to do, you know, it's expectations. Yeah. And I think it's the quickest way to be miserable is to try to meet other people's expectations. Yeah. Because because at that point, like, I mean, especially if you just had to break down money, let's say, let's just use money as an example, like, you're always going to find someone who's going to make more money than you. Yeah, is the higher up you go, like, you're going to keep finding people that are doing better. And then, you know, whatever you're doing, you might feel like that's not good enough because that's what they're doing. And then yeah, everybody has has this thing in their brain where they're like, Oh, I want to do what that person's doing. And then, you know, they don't they either don't know what it takes to get there. Or it's going to be a very rough go for them to get there because, you know, it's not something that they want. It's something that they see that someone else has. And and I know with kids, it's it's very slippery slope.  They're they're not going to be willing to work as hard. They just, you know, get envious and so many adults are like that too. Like, I see it all the time. With coaches that financially they want to do better. But they want to do better just because of other people's expectations, has nothing to do with what they want. Yeah. I think I like, I like your channel.  And that's where you're like, that's okay. But you make it very clear that you're doing what you're doing because it's what you want to do, what you're saying what you're saying because it's what you want to say, you're not basing it off of what people want to hear what to say or want to do.  So like, that's exactly the perfect perfect example to follow. And that's I think that's why I enjoy watching your stuff because you're just like, you know, this is me. If you don't like it, that's okay because this is me. This is what I said for myself. Right. Yeah. Yeah. One thing I one thing I've realized is like, if a hunt, if I take 100% of people who watch my stuff, I'm so cool if 99.9% of them don't like me. Like, yeah, because because it's so easy to not like someone online. Like, it could be for any reason. And I know for me, like, the only thing I care about is if I say something that I feel like can help. Like, if it can help one person that day, I've done my job.  And again, it kind of goes back to the expectations that we talked about. It's like, it's like who are you trying to be? Are you doing this to actually help people?  And I don't know for me, like, I'm married. I have probably two friends outside of my marriage. Like, I live a very simple life. I don't need to have any anybody's. That's just kind of how I've been. Cool, man. Now, I appreciate that. And the biggest lesson that you've learned since COVID the biggest lesson that I've learned is that there are no excuses.  But like, in reality, we live in society where everything is possible some way, virtually, electronically, whatever, you know, you don't look working out. Like, so like, for example, I'm an athlete. Like all the gyms and all the pools are closed.  Like there there really isn't any excuse when it comes to my athlete to my team. For a while, we weren't doing anything because, like I said, the pools were shut down. And I was just like, no, let's let's like, let's just let's go meet up at the park and let's just do morning two hour workouts. So I started doing that. Obviously, businesses are finding a way around it. Everyone's finding a way to do some. There's a way to do anything you want to do during COVID. It just it just takes time to realize it. So that was definitely my biggest thing. Because there were definitely there's definitely a month or a half to two months where I was kind of just not doing working out as much. I just kind of like thought that because everything is closed down that I couldn't do anything. And I would just realize that there's no excuses, no excuses to accomplish your goals. There are no excuses not to get things done. You know, I'm still alive. I'm still breathing. I still have connections. I still have people that look up to me and need to hear from me.   Right. And it stems perfectly with what you said at the beginning about, you know, being that kind of like that role model to kids. Like if you're going to ask them to go run a mile, you should be able to run a mile. Right. And I know that's that's kind of the thing that I've noticed as far as like what's happened last four or five months is kids really need leaders. And when they can look up to a coach like yourself and be like, you know what, I want to be like him. Those coaches who kind of stepped up during this time, they became resourceful with, you know, what was available.  And I know a lot of coaches during this time kind of just went into a shell. And so if you're a coach watching this right now and you're listening to this, like you should use this as an opportunity to step up and actually make a difference versus just hide. And yeah, I feel like kids right now, they need more leadership, I think, than ever. We waited for things to get a little bit better before I went to the park workouts. But that month before we're doing dry land over Zoom.  So don't don't hide and don't just wait for things to blow over, because like you said when your videos, you know, we don't know when this is going away. It might never go away. So right, right. Yeah, I have it in my head. Sounds terrible, but I have it. I am pretending that it's never going away. Like that, it's just going to be this ongoing thing. And if it gets better, awesome. If it doesn't, I'm going to operate the exact same way I am and not let it you're always ready. Just not let it affect me mentally, because it's it's very easy to fall on the trap of like, well, you know, all these restaurants have closed, blah, blah, blah.  And you know, you can you can absolutely be resourceful during this time. The thing that fulfills me is just making all those two things. One is seeing just the look on kids' face when they do something special. But the biggest thing, the all around thing, man, is just making good people, you know, making, taking a kid who's maybe been troubled and just bringing them in and just seeing them at the end of, you know, end of the season, just happy, just smiling all the time. Because like I coach because yeah, I'm pretty good at sweat coaching, swimming and teaching people how to swim. I get that. But a lot of coaches are good at that. Right. What coaches lack is the connection with making athletes, you know, making athletes to people, making athletes like you and all that. So so just just seeing people just change, just seeing them enjoy their lives with people, seeing them understand, understanding right from wrongs.  And it's always something not related to swimming. It's always about being a good person, being a good role model, being a good son or daughter, making sure you think people, think your parents, making just all the little stuff so that when they come to practice, they're not just learning how to be good swimmers. We want to make good athletes and we want to make good people. So just being able at the end of the year for to see a kid just being like, hey, I just thank you for teaching me how to be a good person. That means more to me than people saying, hey, thank you for helping me swim fast. Right. That's really cool, man. Yeah. And I shared this on a on a video a long time ago. But I think the most one of the most impactful people I ever had in my life was when I was around 12 or 13. And he was he was the best soccer trainer I ever had. But it wasn't about how good of a coach he was. Like he knew how to connect with me on a level that like I never had beyond that. Like, I mean, it was it was amazing how much how much confidence that coach gave me at that age when I really desperately needed it. And, you know, that's I can look back at it and be like, man, like it would have been very difficult for me to start a business or go play college soccer or do the things that I did. If I didn't have a coach who was like that. So you're you're in an awesome position, man, to be helping these kids not only just develop and be awesome swimmers, but to to really help them become incredible humans, which I feel like is one of the things that's going to make you different over the next 10 to 20 years as you progress with your career in swimming. And just want to say, man, keep up the great work. It's really cool to connect with someone like you who genuinely cares about kids. I've thought about this a lot because I know on YouTube that the videos I put out a lot. A lot of the content is for coaches that haven't started a business. And I'm going away from from that model in the future where it's for people who already have a business that already have clients that they're working with. But like, do you think everyone's cut out to start a business? Um, no, I don't think so. And the reason I think that is because, um, I don't think people realize is how hard managing a business is. It's a full time job. You know, people think that with coaching, for example, think people think that, oh, they always say, oh, you get paid just to go to the pool for a couple hours. I'm like, no, man, like I'm up at like six or seven. And I am doing coaching, like it might not be physically coaching, but I'm doing coaching stuff, always on practice. Then I'm coaching, I practice for like four or six hours. Then I'm coming home and analyzing results and stuff. And even on Sundays, I'm doing work. So if you like that's people just think that it's just, it's just, oh, super easy.  Right. That goes back to what I said earlier, that that's why it's worth it because it's your baby and you love it. And it's something that's you and you started in something you're passionate about. Like for example, I started, I'm starting a small little side business.   And it's super, super hard. It is tiring, emotionally, physically, mentally, it's super hard. So people need to understand that. And I think that's why it's smart to kind of maybe get a mentor or kind of just job shadow and just get an idea of it first before you just wake up one day and be like, I'm going to do this. Some people are successful at it. Some people aren't, but just to get an idea, because I think the demands, there's a lot more demands and people that don't get advertised and that people realize I'm sure you can attest to that. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, it's funny, like the perception, I think there's a mixed perception of, of coaches who have a business or they're, they have a coaching career, like from the outside looking in, it's like, oh, that's pretty easy. Like they probably sleep in and they just show up to practice.  And the reality is people can do that. Probably won't be successful doing that. But, but I see, like, you have to, you have to treat it like, like you're on a mission. That's kind of, that's when I wake up, I know that, you know, no one's going to tell me to come into the office to be in this room, you know, making videos or talking to coaches, do whatever the tasks I have to do during the day. And, you know, I've always looked at people who make rash decisions. Like you've probably seen this.  And then they throw it out on the, the saying they, they pay two dollars for it, whatever it is. And a lot of people treat business that way. They're like, they'll be like, oh, I want to do that. And then they have no idea. No clue about what it takes. And I would say for anyone who's very committed, like they are, they're a very committed type of person. That's the type of person that generally succeeds. But people who jump from shiny object syndrome to the next shiny object, like those people, I feel like are destined to fail just because they, they don't have the type of sacrifice and discipline. Even you just said it too, you're looking to start something on the side and I'm sure it's grueling, doing that plus what you're currently doing. I mean, it's a lot, man.  And eventually people come off of that high. When you come off of that high, you become unmotivated. So in the very beginning, like, oh, this is a really good idea. I'm going to do this and this. You start doing all the stuff, you're really busy. And then when things slow down, when things start getting less productive, when you get less invested, suddenly nothing's happening and you're getting you're off that high, that excitement's gone. So that's why I go back to my original thing, saying you have to be emotionally, spiritually invested and love it. So when you're off that high and things aren't kicking off the ground and going crazy, businesses and booming anymore, maybe you're you start an ice cream business and now December, you have to have, you have to still want to be motivated to find ways to be successful or your business would fail. Yeah. Yeah. And one of my mentors, he commonly, he always says the winter is coming. He always says that. And all he means is like, you have to constantly put yourself in the state of mind where it's like, you know what, like, it doesn't matter how good things are right now. And it doesn't matter how bad things are right now. It's like, you have to operate with the same level of intensity and you have to be so like just incredibly disciplined to do things that you don't want to do because it's like there's so many times and I have zero problem sharing this, but there's so many times where I don't want to shoot videos. Just like, that's the last thing I want to do today. And I actually hate shooting videos, even though I've at this point have uploaded over 700 something videos to YouTube on two different channels. And it's like, you know, but it comes down to well, why do I want to do it? And that goes back to what you said. It's like, when you are clear on why in the world, you want to do something, then you're going to do it. Like you're not going to make excuses and you're just going to step up when, when you need to do it and, you know, nothing will get in your way. Cool. Yeah. Well, I really appreciate you staying on a little bit longer than, than I know we planned. But is there anything else you want to add? Like any sort of tip or, or advice you would give coaches who are looking to start? It goes back to the process, you know, the process is what matters. So just have all those steps in line. And if you ever have a day or a moment where you don't have a step, you need to stop and just take the time to think of it. Don't move before without it because you're going to look back and be like, dang, I really wish I would have thought about this more clearly before I moved on. Right. Yeah. Great advice. That's awesome. Cool. Man. Well, yeah, I appreciate you jumping on here and sharing your wisdom. And I'd love to have you come back on here maybe six to 12 months from now.


Hello, Defconn! How is it going? Good. So, I'm Andrea Barizani. He's Daniele Bianco. We got weird names because we're Italian, so... We mispronounced our names even when we're talking in English, so don't worry. You don't have to know how to spell them. So, we're going to talk about sniffing keystrokes with lasers and volmeters, which is, we think it's a very fun topic. How many of you have seen our talk from two years ago about GPS navigation? Raise your hand. Okay, so do you remember the video that was in there? Okay, so there's going to be a second episode of that. For everyone else, we do a cheesy Italian drama movie every time we do a presentation to announce it. So, at some point in this presentation, we ruin our reputation by showing you that video. So, it will be fun, I promise. So, if you get bored, don't worry. There's going to be that video in the middle. So, yeah, we're new, you know, this is what we did two years ago, putting stuff like that on GPS, you know, terrorist incident, bullfight, which was a favorite for most people. We don't know why, we think it's perfectly normal, you know. So, first of all, disclaimer, we play with electronic stuff, circuits. We are two idiots, so don't really do that at home. You can get electrocuted, which is not fun, okay? So, safety first. Now, having said that, we're going to show you two unconventional attacks. Attack number one, power line leakage detection against wire PS2 keyboards. And attack number two, optical sampling of mechanical energy against laptop keyboards. So, fancy titles for really cool things. So, why bother? So, I have a project called the open source computer emergency response team. So, we deal with software every day, and we're bored by software.  If you haven't done hardware hacking in your life, you should really do it. Because if we can do it, everyone can do it. Trust me on that. We're going to show some unconventional side-channel attacks. Side-channel attacks are good. We use relatively cheap hardware, so we're not going to show you something that, you know, takes $10,000 for doing it. Freaking laser beams! Come on, guys! Laser beams are the best. Next thing, you know, next robots. We'll work on that for next year, and then we can have robots with lasers, and we'll be great. And as always, more important, girls will melt when you show this. This is a very important message. Every time we do our research, we want to demonstrate that you can get laid by using our techniques. You know? If you have that, you know, remote exploit, whatever, what does it matter if you cannot get laid?  Hackers are good socially wise. So, you know, this is very important, and we will prove that with the video, okay? Keep that in mind. Okay, so we're going to talk about Tempest. So what is Tempest? Tempest is not an acronym, but, you know, you can use it as such. Transmitted electromagnetic poles, energy standards are testing. Or tiny electromagnetic particles, emitting secret things. Or the emissions might produce extremely sweet talks, like this one. It concerns the investigation and studies of compromising emanations or fortuitous leakage. Okay? The term was coined by the FEDs in the 60s and 70s as a code name for the NSA operation for secure electronic communications. So the FEDs in the room probably know everything about that. Now, there's lots of public research relevant to attack number one. Tempest has been previously covered in research concerning LCD and CRT displays mostly. So reading your monitor from a distance, okay? There's also a research about compromising radiation emanations of wired keyboards from some Swiss guys, which are great. I think we all think they're doing a great paper. It is yet to be released, but it is related to our talk. We work independently at the same time on it. So the theory of the first attack. The keyboard PS2 cable has the following wires. The data wire, the ground wire, the voltage, and the clock. And pin two asyncs are unused. So what do we think is going to happen? The wires are very close to each other, and they're poorly shielded. There is a fortuitous leak of information going from the data wire to the ground wire. The ground wire is routed to the main power cable, which is connected to the power socket and then the electric grid. So in your PC, the ground wire is shared. If you have a ground wire anywhere in any component, it is shared with the main power adapter, and that goes directly into the power socket and then into the electric grid. So we think that the information about the keystroke slicks to the electric grid. It can be detected on the power outlet, including nearby ones, sharing the same electric line. And the clock frequency of PS2 signal is lower than any other component or signal emulator from the PC, because we're talking about the kilohertz. And everything else is above the megahertz. So that's a very important factor, and you will see why. We want to isolate the leakage by filtering out the signal from the noise, and this leads to profit, right? Which is all we want. Now, so again, there is some documentation which suggests the possibility of doing some kind of attacks using the ground wire, but no definite paper or very good explanation. And again, as I said, the Swiss guys, they say that the sharing ground may act as an antenna and significantly improve the range of their attack, which is done over the air. So at the same time, both groups are working on the same thing, which is good, because that's a confirmation that what we're doing is not completely crazy. So this is PS2 signal. So data is transmitted one bit at a time, and each part is sending a frame consisting of 11 or 12 bits. In our case, it's 11 bits. So it's very simple, and it has a clock frequency range, which is between 10 and 16.7 kilohertz. So we want to see this very nice square wave here with the 1 and 0s and the bits, okay? That's a letter B. So this is what we do, and now maybe you can make yourself useful, okay? Thanks. Yeah, this is our sniffing diagram. It's pretty simple. The only thing that could appear a little bit weird here is that the fact that we have two different grounds, but yeah, it makes sense because since we want to measure the current leakage on the ground line, we need a clean reference ground. And, yeah, Andrea, we will show you how it's possible to get a clean reference ground in a building. So I just want to say this, that when you show this kind of diagram to an electrician, shut up, fucking.  Why do we have two grounds? But what I like to say is that it's like going to a locksmith and asking for bump keys. They would say, hey, why do we want that for it, okay? When you do hacking, you will make things that look very, very weird for people in the business, okay? But the evilness that comes out is very good for us. So yeah, the thing that we have to do is to put a probe resistor. This diagram is 150 ohms, but yeah. And we put the ends of the probe resistors into an ADC or something that is able to convert the analog signal in, something that you can parse, store and whatever. So yeah, in our test, we used a digital oscilloscope as an ADC. And as I said, we wrote the ground of an NERB power socket to our ADC. And we measured the differential of potential in order to get a measure of dispersed current into the ground life. Yeah, what's about the clean reference ground? That's enough talking for you. Yeah. Get back there. So we need a reference ground, okay? Something which is very clean. So what is clean? Wait, wait a second. So this is the evil power cable, okay? Which is not evil because it's a European power plug, which I can understand you might think as evil, okay? But it's evil because, as you can see, we're opening the ground wire and we're attaching our probe, okay? So if you do this, don't touch the blue wire, okay? Don't do it, okay? Because you will end up like him, which is not nice, right? Even the brown guy. Yeah, even the brown. Yeah, okay. So show the evil cable. So this is the evil cable, okay? Yeah, you're touching many times already, right? And this is the clean ground, which is a toilet, okay? So toilet sinks are perfect because you have the tubes there, which are not to be confused with the tubes that runs the internets, okay? And so again, this is very, very classy. And hints for spies, hotel rooms, they all have those, okay? So you can be in your room and you can use that as a clean ground, okay? So the theory is that the tubes there goes down into the earth, okay? So that makes it a good ground, which is not the ground of your electric system, which is the one you need to measure, right? And you need that because otherwise there won't be any voltage potential difference, okay? So this is our, the testing lab we use was actually a nuclear physics laboratory with lots of particle detectors, which means that the ground was extremely noisy. Like, you would expect that, you know, when you do physics, you need precise measurement and everything needs to be very clean, no noise, no emanations.  Like, there was almost a volt of noise on the ground wire. It was, you know, it was so bad. And so substantially more than a normal scenario. So if you do this in an apartment or an office, you're going to get a much, much cleaner signal, okay? So this is like worst case scenario, okay? So if it works there, you know, it might work everywhere, everywhere else.  So what we're going to do, we want to filter the noise and unfortunately for that, we need to pass the mic to Daniela Bianco again. Okay, so yeah, in order to filter the noise, we have to use some kind of filter, of course. Yeah, it was a great concert. Did you prepare that last night? Yeah, it was. Okay, so you can use a finite input response filter. It acts at a band pass filter. And of course we want to select all the frequencies between 1 to 20 kilohertz, because that's the frequency of PS2 clock. So that's the frequency we are looking for. Just, yeah, in our test we noticed that a good sampling rate in order to get good results are between 1 mega-sample per second to 100 kilo-sample per second. And of course you can use whatever you want to perform the filtering stuff, but one possible choice is to use SyLab. It's a scientific software and it's very easy to use. And here you have an example in order to make a finite response, input response filter in that band of frequencies, 1 to 20 kilohertz. Okay, so get back there. So this is an original data taken directly from the keyboard. So just to get an idea on how the filter works. So we can see this is the original data and this is the filter data. You can see some artifacts which are made up by the filter. That's perfectly normal because the filter cannot do miracles. So we want to see something similar to that in our actual results. So again, this is the original signal. Here's what happens. You can see that there's something here. We filter it and we see this nice fella here which kind of looks like what I showed you before. Looks similar to that one on the bottom. And if we analyze that, we see that it's actually a letter A. And now you should all go, oh yeah, it works! You can get results from the ground wire and this was actually snipped on a power socket which was 15 meters from the actual target. Okay, scary, huh? So you can see it's letter A. Different example. So depending on the time of the day, the noise on the ground wire in the laboratory was kind of different because for some reason some time or some machine was going up or whatever. And so this is a different kind of noise that you can see. But again, this is still a letter A and you can make that out. Again, different time of the day, different keyboard actually. And this is letter B. So I could show you letter C, D, E, F, G. But you know, I think you get the point and we want to have slides for the entire alphabet. So it works. And the thing is the nice thing about working with such a low frequency is that considering a typical copper cable coefficient of 0.1 dB of attenuation, it means that after 60 meters, 50% of the signal survives. And the equipment we use isn't really the highest hand you can really get.  And we're basically two idiots.  And so think about what a government agency can do with dedication for these kind of projects. And we didn't notice any significant difference between the signal at 1.5 meter and 15 meter. There was no relevant difference between them. And keep in mind that a typical signal has an output power of one nanowatt. That's the typical output that you would get. So it's tiny. It's very weak, but it's good enough to be detected. For a comparison, it is not a fair comparison because there are other factors involved. But if you think about it, the GPS signal that you get is the order of, it's less than a picawatt. So this is free order of magnitude stronger than the signal you get from a GPS. But of course, the current as a factor in there, but just to give you an idea. So what we want to do, we had our oscilloscope and stuff. The oscilloscope costs a lot, but of course you can use them for this kind of research. But we want to do continuous sniffing which is very, very simple than that. So what we use, we use a microcontroller with an ADC, a built-in ADC in it. So we said that one mega-sample per second is a sufficient rate for the analysis. So what we use, we use the ATX mega from AVR microcontroller, which has an ADC, which has a 12-bit resolution and has actually two mega-sample per second. So we just need one, but it has two mega-sample per second. So what we want to do, we want to get the data coming down the microcontroller. Then the microcontroller has an SPI interface. And then we want to convert that to Ethernet. And for $149.99, we can get our own device. So actually the chip costs like $1 if you get a thousand of them. But hey, you can just email them and ask them, can you give me a free sample? Yeah, sure, we'll give you a free sample. We have no idea what you're going to do. And here we are at Defconn, which is awesome. So again, talk about this slide. Yeah, the microcontroller is pretty easy to use. Of course, we have to connect our ADC of the microcontroller to SRAM buffer in order to bufferize our data. It's better if we use a DMA channel for that because we allow the CPU to perform some other task while it's copying the data from the ADC. Finally, we put our data to the SPI interface in order to be able to use an SPI to Ethernet converter. Very useful in order to put data to the final PC. Ethernet, not Ethernet.  Sorry about that. So you can see that the converter is as big as the actual RJ45 socket, which is awesome. The chip is very tiny. This is a European coin, so that's an evil coin for you. I think with the current exchange rate, that's like $1,000. That's not coin. Sorry, sorry. I love the states. I didn't want to. Sorry for that. Just thought it was fun. So if you're really evil, you can build this in a very nice and lean form factor and then you can hide the device whatever you want. You can use it also as you have Ethernet. You can also attach a small wireless thing and then you can have your data stream to you, which is very nice. So the SPI to Ethernet converter, there's lots of them. There are crappy ones and better ones. Basically what you can do, you can program them if you want, but there are some of them which opens a port for you so you can connect with Ethernet on it and it will stream back the SPI data to you, which I think is kind of handy. Or if you want, the converter can be the client and you are the server, so it will stream the data. It will try to connect to you and it will stream the data back to you, which is really great. This is the programming board. So it's not for the real deployment. It's something that you use for programming the chip and testing it. We got the evil power cable there again and this is the actual converter. So this is actually the full setup and as you can see the power adapter is bigger than the whole thing but you can fix that. So let me show you. So what we do, we stream the data back to a PC and then there are many programs you can do but basically this is like a crappy Java application that allows you to see a text file in real time. So basically what you build by doing this thing is a very cheap oscilloscope which is a very tiny form factor. You can connect it to Ethernet. It costs nothing and it is good for our purposes. Sorry for the silence. So depending on the sensitivity of the equipment, Kistros can be probed from the nearby room or even far or even in the basement. Of course you can always tamper the power outlet itself. You will get a very, very good signal there but if you can do that you can also hide a webcam in the floor so it doesn't really matter. So appealing alternate targets rather than your PC or ATM machines because we know that at least in Italy some ATM machines, they use a PS2 keypad. So what you can do, you are in your shop nearby and use the device and you can get all the pins which is also nice because the pin you can know it's only going to be digits. So the amount of matching and processing that you need to do for getting the Kistros, it doesn't cover the entire ASCII table so it's going to be lower than that. So we analyze PS2 of course but any kind of serial protocol that uses a low frequency is going to be affected by this kind of autography. In a virtual we cannot be certain for every protocol but the theory is there and it's sound and we are confident that the more expensive equipment can lead to much more precise measurements. The important point to understand is that the data is there. It leaks out. So it's a good playground for all of you hackers. This shouldn't work against USB keyboards because USB uses differential signaling which theoretically doesn't do any useful noise but there are still possibilities because the actual microcontroller on the USB keyboard it does much more work than a normal PS2 keyboard. So there are some chances for power draining and stuff so we want to test that and we will do that in the near future. There might be other factors responsible in minor part for the interference so it might be some other factors but it's difficult to pinpoint them. But we think that the big factor is the fact that the grounds are very close to each other as we said before and we look forward to see the toss from the Swiss guys, the paper from them because we think it would be awesome. What? The Swiss are great except you Rafiq. So, workarounds. Of course you can look like a dork but who would want to use Teamful for... Oh man, dude! Is this Prada? New collection? But anyway, as there's no electric activity in your brain what do you Teamful it for? You know?  Anyway, so... So yeah, you would look like a dork. Sorry for that guy. Maybe he's here. But see the power cable here is not shielded so that's an epic fail. Anyway, so attack number two and the video is coming right now so don't leave. Attack number two. So the thing is this doesn't work with laptops which is a shame so we need something else. So we know that previous research addressed keystroke acoustic so by listening to the sound of your keystrokes and by evaluating the timing you do a statistical attack and you can understand what's going on. So we know that laser microphones can be used for monitoring sounds at a great distance but here's the idea. Why not point in the laser microphone at the laptop itself instead of the window and sample the mechanical vibrations from the laptop? Profit! Again, profit. It all leads to profit which leads to girls.  So we got to do a summary for the people that didn't see the talk. Oh god, I forgot to change that slide.  Only one slide I had to change. Sorry for that. Anyway, so the evil hacker and the failed porn star. Guess who's who, right? Sorry, this is an ongoing battle for the viewers.  We don't know why. At some point the hacker sent a fake traffic message information and we deterred the porn star. He was amazed by what happened and the evil hacker turned out with the portable device. That's very portable. The porn star realized that his skills in navigation and driving failed so it was desperate. That's the face of epic fail. And we will totally upload that to Wikipedia. The girl was amused, of course. She is the return of investment profit. So let's see what happens in episode number 2. Be very, very, very afraid. I think that now she loves me. Yes. She really loves me. I need to perform. I need to satisfy her. What do you think, dear diary? Is Viagra the answer? Yes. I better reply to one of those many mails I get every day about it. Tonight. Yes. Everything is so lame. So doomed. Who is it? Viagra. So soon? You again? Yes. I'm the evil hacker and I know that you need Viagra. I know your diary. That's impossible. I was even connected to the internet but I used laser beams. Laser beams to sniff your key strokes remotely. I posted it on a group on Facebook and everyone's secret. My secret. My secret is out. Tony here. He needs Viagra for satisfying you. You were using Viagra? Yes. But while he took the blue pill, I took the red pill along. How did you hack into his computer? Using laser beams. One, two, three. It works! Disclaimer, your experience may differ. So if it doesn't work for you, don't email me. Email him. Anyway. Now you have the proof that it works. I'm not sure what we're going to do next year. It's tough to beat this one. Maybe a clickhanger would do. Laser microphone assembly. One laser. One photoresist or photo dial. Sorry, one freaking laser! A battery and universal power. Adapter, a jack cable, a laptop with sound card, a tripod and a focusing lens. $79.99 excluding the laptop. Okay? An optional and amplifier optical band pass filter and some duct tape. Okay? So we use a class 3R laser which is a crappy one. It costs $20, $30. It's slightly better than your average laser pointer. The only advantage is that you actually hook it to the battery and it's always on. So you don't need to press the laser because when you're sampling vibration you know pressing the laser is going to be bad. Okay? So that works better. The more money you throw at a laser the better it's going to be the range. Okay? Do you want to talk? No?  Okay. So you can use different photo diodes as for the detector part. Do photo diodes work better than photo resistors? Okay. So these are some models that you can look up. They're very cheap. They cost like $0.50 so it's really nothing. So this is a diagram of what happens. This is not different from a normal laser microphone. Okay? The one that you see in spy movies. The only difference is that we're pointing at a laptop and not at a window. Okay? So what happens is you have the transmission part which is this fellow here. So we're pointing to a reflective surface on the laptop. You get the reflection back on the detector here. Okay? Which is powered by a battery. Okay? You use a resistor for actually tuning the thing. I'll explain that later. Okay?  Okay? So you use your sound car as a small ADC and it's good enough. So this is the actual device. The talk is done. You can show you all the hardware if you want. We'll be happy to do it. Okay? I don't know. That's very dark. So what happens when you get the reflection back you can get two free four dots. You won't get just one red dot. Okay? Because depending on the surface you're projecting the beam to and depending if you have glass in the way you might have a dispersion pattern. So you just need to chase the one which is the strongest one not even that one. Some cases you need to find the weakest one and it all works. So in order to test the device you can first try it with audio. If it's a good audio laser microphone then it will be good enough for sniffing the keystrokes. And keep in mind that without any hard core tuning we have good results within 30 meters with our crappy laser. And longer distances requires precise calibration and filtering. Okay? Because what happens is basically depending on your setup it is very easy to saturate the detector. Okay? Which is a good thing because it means that if you put some filters or if it's daylight you can actually distinguish the laser from the ambient noise. Okay? From the ambient light noise. Okay? But the longer you know the range the better the tuning needs to be. The parallel is just when you put microphone and you want to hear something you need to do some tuning but the data is there and you can do it. Of course if you buy a very expensive laser which is like a $400 laser then it will be powerful enough and it will be good for you. Just to give you an idea of how the audio from a laser microphone works this is a non-equise example which was taken just by connecting the things together pointing to the windows having someone said something. Okay? Nothing special. So I just said this is a test with our laser microphone. Were you able to make that out? No? Fail. Let me tune the volume up. Okay? That's without any tuning at all. Okay? So it's good enough for distinguishing the words and without any amplification at all. Okay? So, where do we aim this thing? So we aim directly at the laptop case generally display lead. Okay? Aiming at the top of the lead. Can you make yourself useful? We got to show this thing, man. Okay? So aiming here produces more resonant waves. Okay? So if you aim at the center or the bottom it's going to be better. Okay? So these are some simple keystrokes. Okay? This thing here which is stronger than anything else it's the spacebar because luckily for us the spacebar is a very different key on your keyboard and we can distinguish that. Which means we can distinguish the different words which is very, very important for this statistical attack. And of course there are the letters here, okay? So one first thing that you can immediately tell is that you can assess the timing of the keystrokes. Which means that all the previous research that has been done on the timing of the keystrokes applies here. It's just that we extend the range. Which is kind of a cool thing. This is sample from a different keyboard. Of course, different keyboards they will produce totally different results from a graphical point of view. But the concept is always the same. As you can see the spacebar here is even much more detectable. And of course we have the different keys there. Just to, you know, this is not really helpful, but just to give you an idea of what happens if you convert those to sound. But remember, those are not sounds. It's not a normal laser microphone. It's not any kind of vibration which are now turning to sound just for your benefit. This is slowed down by the way. You see the thumbs? Those are the different keys being pressed. So those are the signals we need to distinguish. But it's not audio. It was audio because I decided to play it on the speakers, but it's really not. So we can play with a fortune, okay? So we have different keys here. And we can say, oh well, it looks like this guy which kind of looks like this guy and so on. So you can assign different groups to the keys, okay? But as we don't want to do it visually, because it might take some time, we can use a technique which is called dynamic time warping for doing this kind of analysis. So it's an old-fashioned technique actually which is used in speech recognition. It's used for detecting if you're saying a word fast it is able to tell you, okay, those words are going to be the same. There are more modern techniques like hidden Markov models that should work even better. So what happens here, this is an example. There's a straight line here. This is a comparison between two signals that are exactly the same. So this is the shortest path from A to B. So what happens with the other signals, you can see that the line is not straight. So the longer the line, it should be the score for that specific signal. The shorter the line, the best results you're going to get. So it means that the two characters are actually, you know, more similar. So what we do, we did some testing. We said, okay, you have characters number one compared to number two, then to number three, to number four, and so on, and so on.  And whatever ends up here, it means that it's more likely, these pairs are more likely to be the same. So here we're comparing pairs of keystrokes, okay? And this obviously, they do not match at all. So what happens is that eventually, you will end with a pattern like this one. So like one, okay, the first key is just like the last one on the first war, which is the same as the first one as the last one of the second word. The second key, I have no idea. The third and the fourth key are completely different from anything else. And then we have, again, recurring groups, okay? And we can tell that they're separate words because remember the space bar can be easily detected. So what you can do with this pattern, you can put a pattern into a sample application, a small application that does, you know, matching against the dictionary and analysis against that. So what happens if we put this kind of data? So we get the first entry is hogwash hash, which have no idea what it means. So, you know, it doesn't matter. Ceremon sense, I don't know. It's not likely to me. Secret sets, maybe, maybe. Ceremon sense, I don't know. Sockets, sets, meh, meh. Soviet sets, Cold War. We're sniffing a spy. That's great. Statue sues, well, everything sues in America, but a statue suing, that's not very likely. Straight sits, not really. Subway says, they don't generally talk that much. Tempest test, oh my God, maybe Tempest test. So here you can see the importance of the context. If you know the context of your victim, if you know that it's a diplomat, rather than your ex-wife, rather than a sports player, rather than, you know, whatever, then it helps you a lot in narrowing down the results. Then we have tidiest test, maybe in tidiest test, and try to intend your right. So we got 12 results, and there's one very important thing to say here. When you're done with just two words being typed, there's no previous knowledge about the typing. So if you add just an article in front of Tempest test, if you add the Tempest test, then you narrow down to two options, one which doesn't make sense, and one which makes sense. If you have a page of data, you can narrow it down just to one possibility. And the cool thing about this is that if you type a page and then you type a password, and then you type a page, it doesn't make any difference because you can reuse the results. The order of things doesn't matter. I can reuse knowledge, you know, and then apply it to the password. And we might be that we don't get your entire password, of course, but all of you know the importance of narrowing down the options when cracking a password, okay? If you can just know 304 digits out of it, then, you know, it's going to help a lot. Of course, one very important thing, you need to know the language that it has been typed, because if it's in English or Italian or Japanese, it's going to be, you know, completely different, okay? And non-word, yeah, again, yeah, it's good for passwords as well. So attack scenarios, we try different laptops. This is an ASUS EEPC, which has a very, very nice reflective plastic case so you can point wherever you want, and this laptop is pwned, basically. IBM Lenovo Thinkpad, so what you can do on the Lenovo, you can either, let me show you that, put your hand for the reflection. You see the reflection on his finger? Yeah? Okay, so the logo is good, and this here, the antenna, the wireless antenna, is all reflective case, so that works too, and it works pretty well. And now, we always thought that glossy was evil. So Apple, when you decided to do the glossy screen, yeah, you're owned, okay? So, you can be behind your target, and the screen is perfect, in front of the target, the case is not good, but the actual shiny Apple, the white shiny Apple is very reflective, so okay, way to go. So obviously, a line of sight is needed, either in front or above the target, but the cool thing is that the transmission and the receiver can be a completely different location, okay?  So you point your laser, you know, maybe straight at the same floor on a nearby building, and the reflection will go back down on the ground, and your receiver can be on the ground, okay? The more money you throw at the equipment, the longer the range, okay, especially at the laser. But, and also the cool thing, so we tried this only with one laser microphone, but you can point four of them at different locations, and you can combine the results and it's going to work. You can also use different kind of laser microphones, like one that uses interferometry. So this laser microphone here uses the actual movement of the laser, okay, for something, the evaporation, but you can also use something that detects the actual shift in the frequency, okay? So you can combine all of them, you can actually really combine the data, and as long as you don't have disruptive interference, which is not very likely if they're all of the same type, interferometry in it, it might be, but, you know, there's a good chance that it's never going to happen. So you can combine the data, and you can have even more refined results, because what you need, so you're not making an absolute comparison, you need a relative comparison between the different patterns that you have, because you want to say letter A, sorry, that letter is different from that one, okay? You don't say that is letter A directly. Stop pointing laser at me. I'm not a keyboard. Okay, so I was saying, so yeah, it's a relative match, so you can combine the signals. So, okay, so an attack is possible even with a possibly double glass, because if you have a window in the way, a glass in the way, you lose only 4% at every pass, okay? And of course now, you can say, hey, if I see a red dot on my face or on my laptop, then now that I've seen this stock, I don't know what's going on, but you can use an infrared laser. So unless you're wearing infrared goggles at work, you know, you're not going to detect that, and I don't think it's very classy to work on a laptop with infrared goggles. So, you know, you can use that. Of course, you can change your position, your typing position very radically, but again, it's not very comfortable. Miss typing can be compensated with the way that every spell checker does. And again, you can use previous research against acoustic emanations. You know, it can be applied here.  You know, hey, go on the balcony, whatever, and then you can do this kind of attack. So thank you very much for listening. We hope you enjoy the talk, and we can take... Thank you! Can we get one or two questions? Do we have time for questions? Do we have time for two questions? Yes. With some awesome targeting skills. If it's a foggy day, then it's good, but otherwise, yeah, you need to be very precise, but if you use very stable tripods, it's actually easy to do. We did it, and it worked. Yes. With the ground, yeah. So the PS2 frequency is actually a range, which means that you're not going to find very easily two keyboards, which means at exactly the same frequency. So you can distinguish the two. Any other questions? So we're going to the QA room. If you want to see the stuff and you want to ask more questions, thank you very much. See you next year.


McLaren USA is voluntarily recalling about one million strollers because of fingertip lacerations and amputations. This recall involves all McLaren's single and double umbrella strollers. The strollers hinge mechanism poses a fingertip amputation and laceration hazard to the child when the consumer is unfolding or opening the stroller. The firm has received 15 reports of children placing their finger in the strollers hinge mechanism, resulting in 12 reports of fingertip amputations in the United States. The word McLaren is printed on the stroller. The affected models in this recall are Volo, Triumph, Quest Sport, Quest Mod, Techno XT, Techno XLR, Twin Triumph, Twin Techno, and Easy Traveler. They were sold at Babies R Us, targeted in other juvenile product and mass merchandise retailers nationwide from 1999 through November 2009. Consumers should immediately stop using these recall strollers and contact McLaren USA to receive a free repair kit. For additional information, contact McLaren USA toll-free at<PHONE_NUMBER> or visit the firm's website at McLaren.us. CPSC is still interested in receiving incident or injury reports that are either directly related to this product recall or involved in a different hazard with the same product. Please tell us about it at CPSC.gov.


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So I have several children four to be specific. We've got three. We've got eight We've got almost eight and we've got 13 and 14 a couple of days and we've got 16 17 in a few weeks All right, so we got all this one's this one's female. This one's female right this one's Kaylee This one's Avery not that you're gonna remember all this But anyway the point being that the 13 year old she was has an issue sometimes of slamming doors So in this particular example, we're of positive practice overcorrection.  This is like, I don't know, probably like a week ago So she slammed the house door really hard, right?  I don't know if she won or I won, but it was an example I was attempting to do positive practice overcorrection