During these two days of workshop we were delivering training on services, tools and databases for the migration officers. They are doing a great professional job creating systematically screening against our databases in Interpol. So what we are doing here is trying to improve their skills, giving them the opportunity to review their standard operational procedures with our support to improve and enhance their border security. After the officers have a hit in their systems, they are automatically passing the passenger to a secondary screening and these supervisors that are running the secondary screening have the possibility to check directly in our databases and also with the support of the National Central Bureau they can contact the country's owner of the information to start an international investigation that can improve their border security and their endeavors against the transnational crime.


Severin, we're back on stage together. We've become stage buddies over the past years. Somehow it's a duo in finale, you and me, sitting at tech conferences and speaking about Duolingo Europe and what's next. You said there was a special way you wanted to start today's talk, so over to you. Yes, actually I have a question. So question for the audience. If you are a Duolingo user, show me with your hands how long is your streak. So one means 10 days or longer, two means 20 days or longer, 10 means 100 days or longer. Wow, that's a lot of long streaks. Anyone above 1,000? Yeah, there, awesome. Nice, nice, nice. I have a surprise for you in that context, Severin. So the last time we were on stage together, we were at another European tech conference. And I asked Severin, how did you build a brand that everyone in the world knows? And he said, it's the owl. And I was, maybe I was nervous. I froze and I really just didn't remember that the owl is the icon, is the mascot of Duolingo. And so I blacked out and I said, which owl? And Severin was a bit stunned on stage. I think he was a bit cross with me at the time.  And I posted the largest order ever for stuffed animal Duolingo owls. And I knew that he would start the talk by asking for the streak. And so right now in the audience, those with a 1,000-day streak, raise your hand because you're going to get a Duolingo owl because we had a box coming into Helsinki. And here's one for you. You get to give it to anyone. Or maybe, actually, I have someone that should get it. And you might want to give it back when you hear that story. Because this morning at the hotel reception where I'm staying here in Helsinki, I asked for that package. And the receptionist handed over the package. And she said, I have to ask. There's little Duolingo owls on that package. What is this? And I told her the story. And I told her that I was going to be here. Of course, she knew about slush. She's from Finland. She works here in a hotel. And she said, how cool. You're on stage with the founder of Duolingo. You know what? I have a streak of 1,483 days. And that was for me once again a reminder of how remarkable it is what you've built, Severin. And I quickly introduced myself. My name is Alex. And the reason I'm here is because I run a venture capital firm that invests only in Switzerland. And Severin happens to be from Switzerland. And when we started out, we asked all Swiss entrepreneurs to support us in boosting the small ecosystem. Severin was so kind to do that from the first day on. And what you've built in the meantime is incredible, Severin. You are the CTO co-founder, member of the board, of a stock listed company that is the largest language learning application in the world, most used, most loved. And what I find amazing about it is that with a lot of tech things, we tend to have love-hate relationships. Social media, we're worried about our mental health, Google, too many ads. There's always some negative to it. But everyone loves Duolingo. Do you pinch yourself sometimes that this is your reality? Sometimes, yeah. It is truly remarkable. I mean, I obviously did not expect it to be ever-dissuccessful. And what's remarkable is, truly, everyone loves Duolingo. And it's a good company for the world. I truly believe that. And that's why I'm still with the company after IPO and all that. And your IPOed, I think your IPOed at US $6 billion at NASDAQ. And there was a bit of skepticism, if I may say that so bluntly. Obviously, everyone was wondering, monetization, is this going to be a real business, or is it just an app, a productivity app? And I checked the market cap this morning, and we're beyond US $9 billion. And your IPO was a year and a half or two years ago. So in the roughest of times where most tech stock was punished severely, you managed to increase your market cap by 50%. That is insane. Like, what's going on? What's happening? Why is the world so, so keen on Duolingo today? Yeah, it's a good question. And by the way, we don't look at our stock price every day. And it's not a KPI that we try to optimize. What we try to do is achieve our mission, which is to provide the best education and make it universally accessible. And going back to why we're a public company, but we have an operating principle that is take the long view. So we want to build a long-lasting, hopefully 100-year-lasting company. And today's stock price is irrelevant if you take the long view. But why it probably went up is because the market rewards execution and the profitability and all of that. So that is good. But yeah, we've been just executing really well since the beginning, I would say. Well, congratulations. And thank you that you're here with me today. We're in an audience of students, founders, young entrepreneurs at the beginning of their journey. There's also some tech decision makers and investors here. So I thought we'd speak about three things in the next 20 minutes. And I would love to go a bit back into your journey, starting the company. How was that building Duolingo? I want to speak a bit about where does Duolingo stand today? And what are you working on? What are the product roadmap topics that you're discussing, business model changes, a bit out of the boardroom? What's going on at Duolingo? And then the last third of our talk, we need to talk about something that in 2023 you cannot ignore, which is AI and how that relates to what you're doing at Duolingo. So let's get started with the look back. You studied in Switzerland at the Technical University in Zurich, and then you moved to the US and you started your business there. Why did you choose to go to the US and understand you co-founded with your professor? How did that come to happen? Can you tell us the founding story, your path from Switzerland to incorporating Duolingo and also maybe a time stamp? When was that? Yes, so I've always wanted to study in the US. So I grew up in Switzerland, small town, close to Zurich. I've always wanted to study in the US for a little bit. But I went to ETH in Zurich, which is a very good technical school there. And it was good. And they didn't have an exchange program with the university I wanted to go to in the US. But the sister university of ETH had that exchange program. And I managed to get myself into that exchange program. And that exchange program is really what led to everything else down the road. So it was an opportunity of a lifetime. Obviously, I didn't know that at the time, but I've always wanted to study there, study in the US. And that exchange program was between EPFL and Carnegie Mellon University. And at Carnegie Mellon University, I met my eventual co-founder, Luis. He was one of the youngest professors at the time at Carnegie Mellon. And when I met him, I introduced myself as I'm Severin Hacker, and he still remembers that. And that's how I met him. And he was the smartest person I had ever met up until then. And I was like, if I can ever work with this guy, I'll try. I will do that. And he convinced me to stay at Carnegie Mellon for grad school. So he was a professor. I was his grad student. And two years into my PhD, we started working on what eventually turned into a dual and go. Nice.  And my understanding is he's been at that time already a serial entrepreneur that had a very successful exit to Google. So this is someone that has a really high standing within the startup community in the US, probably made it easy to raise first funding and get some attention to dual and go at that time. But how was the dynamic between the two of you as co-founders? Because it's not the typical story of three students that as equal co-founders start something. But there's been a bit of a hierarchy difference between the two of you. And how has that been at the beginning? And how has that evolved until today? Because your two co-founders and both of you are still in the board, even though the company is now publicly listed, which is not often the case. Yeah, great question. And by the way, most of the time this doesn't work. So usually when there's a professor and a grad student starting a company, the professor owns 99% and the grad student owns 1%. And the grad student does all the work. And it never works. It never works. But in our partnership, it was equal from day one. And we had a little contract, actually, that I still have at home, where we wrote down how we make decisions at dual and go, how do we do it? Who is responsible for fundraising? Who is responsible for this and that? And we wrote this down. We signed it. It's not a legal contract. You would see from a lawyer. But it worked. And it's magical. It probably prevented tons of arguments and just having a clear division of labor and role and ownership. That's, I think, the secret to this relationship. This is interesting. And actually, in fact, I didn't know that. We never spoke about this before. But when we invest as a venture firm, one of the things that is extremely important to us is an equal share split between co-founders. Because the moment it is not equal, any discussion turns very emotional, because there's some sort of power dynamic that is not necessarily healthy. So that's cool to hear the confirmation of that, even in a setup like this. Now, Duolingo IPO today, you raised some funding in between. If you look back at the journey, and you're speaking in front of entrepreneurs here, what are the big milestones, the ups and downs, the memorable moments that you think were key to becoming the success story that you became today? So I only remember the ups. Yeah. No. So obviously, first one was funding of Duolingo. When was that? 2012. 2012. OK, nice. So 2012. And we started as a website. And it was growing slowly. It was nothing magical. But it was a pretty good product, I would say. But it was a website. So next milestone was mobile. And I remember the day before we launched our first iOS app, Luis and I said, oh, what do you expect from this launch? How many users would we get? And Luis and I agreed on maybe 5% of our user base will be on mobile, 95% will be on web. And within, I think, a week or two weeks, it was all mobile. Crazy. And in that year, we grew 14x in one year. So mobile was a huge milestone for us. And fundraising must have been a piece of cake that year. Yes. Because we raised on $0 revenue, which is, by the way, better than a little bit of revenue, at least at a time. Things have changed. But at a time, no revenue was better than a little bit of revenue. And then we raised on the user growth. Next milestone was subscriptions. So figuring out monetization. When was that, roughly? I think that was 2016. 16, yeah. So four years into the business, you started to generate revenue, or you took the decision we would try to generate revenue from that user base. Yes, yes. And it was a very hard decision internally. Because as I said before, we were a mission-based company. And we hire all of these people that are motivated by the mission. And when we said we're going to have ads, they were like, wait, we can't show ads. That's not the mission, right? We shouldn't make money, you know? And so how did you motivate internally? Did you tell people that it's a means to an end, that you need the revenue, that you need the business model behind it in order to be able to reap growing and executing on that mission? Or how did you sell that? Yes, so we said the mission is to provide the best education, make it universal accessible. That doesn't mean that there are no payers. What it means, it means that we don't put content behind a paywall. So that anyone who wants or needs to learn a language can do so with Duolingo, whether they have a bank account or credit card or not. So, and this is still true today. So we obviously monetize, and we're, you know, monetization is doing super well at Duolingo. But you don't have to pay for content. So the way we monetize is by a feature-based subscription. Yeah. So subscription was the big... That was the big game changer. It was a big, yeah. And did that work immediately? Because I guess a lot of entrepreneurs would be really scared. You've been showing a track record of having users, of getting people excited to use your product.  Is that a moment where you have a few sleepless nights and a bit of nervosity today? Or it worked pretty quickly, actually. So, and we weren't the first subscriptions. So they were already, you know, yes, body-fied, et cetera. Things were, people were already used to subscriptions to a degree. But for us, it was mostly an internal challenge. Once we built it, it was, you know, it took off very quickly. And did you use that traction to then raise funds again? Yes. So it's inflection points. First, you went to mobile, massive growth. You raised funding. Then you launched subscription revenue from nothing too relevant. You raised funding.  Is that more or less the funding story? Yeah. And what's funny is, because for the first five years, we made no revenue. People just assumed this is going to be, this is a research project by two academics. And they're going to sell it to Google, because my friend herself thought the past two companies to Google. So I was like, I think there was even a tech-run story at some point. You know, they're going to sell to Google or whatever. But the moment we made significant revenue, we realized we don't actually have to sell. And we can stay independent and go to the IPO right. And follow that mission that you had defined when you started, Luis and you. And that's interesting, because we've gotten to know each other better and better over the past years. And we've had some conversations where I was just out of curiosity asked some of the VC questions you would ask someone like yourself. It's like, did you have funds that passed on you? And now in retrospect, you're like, ha, ha. Look at what we've done. And the list of those funds, there was a lot of big brand names that they just didn't believe that you guys are going to turn this into a business. If you were a founder, and you're sitting in the audience right now, and maybe you're raising your seat round, or you say, would you tell founders, don't worry too much about which VC is backing you. Get the money, stick to your mission, and keep executing. Or is it really important to convince those top tier funds that what you're doing deserves their attention and money? Later. So we are, I don't like to wear strong believers that you should hire the best people. Only work with the best people. Not just for employees, but investor. Work with the best investors. Work with the best law firms. Only work with the best, always. Interesting. And so that was then, was that discouraging? But obviously, stay true to the mission. Yeah, exactly. And sometimes it's tough, right?  And your mission is to not focus on revenue, but focus on the impact you can create with people trying to learn language. OK, Duolingo today, last time we were in stage together, it was roughly six months ago, and your PR department told me I'm not allowed to ask anything outside of language. And I was a good boy, and I stuck to it. But I understand now we're allowed to talk about it. And there's math and music available to learn via Duolingo. How did that happen? Yes, so as before, our mission is not just about language learning. It's all of education. And for the first 10 years, we focused on language learning. But we always wanted to expand to other subjects. And finally, this last year, we got to a stage where we felt comfortable adding new subjects. And the way we did it is the Duolingo way. So we added those subjects to the main learning app. So you don't need to download another app or install it, whatever. It's the main learning app. And you just, instead of learning Spanish, you go into the core switcher and say, I want to learn math, or I want to learn music. And all the game mechanics we've built for Duolingo, they're there too. So your streak transfers, your gems and XP, all of that transfers, the leaderboards, et cetera. So you have all of these engagement features that have been so powerful for Duolingo available for these new subjects as well. And is there a bit of a hybrid to that, if I may ask critically, in the sense that language learning is one thing. It's a lot about, I think, memorizing, hearing how someone says it. Now you could argue math. There's also an aspect of memorizing. But there's also a deeper understanding of the rule set, maybe similar to grammar. But still it feels different. Music feels different.  Now we're Duolingo. We're going to teach everything now. It's easy as pie. Have you tested this for a long time? How have you built that product?  Now I understand it's within the same app, but internally, suddenly you're not a language company anymore. Suddenly you're a learning company. And that is a change of focus. How do you look at those questions? Yeah, so we start with, by the way, right now it's just math and music. And we start with those two because we believe the Duolingo method of how we teach languages can be applied to those two other subjects. So the Duolingo method is very much based on implicit learning. So learning from examples, learning by doing. And this works well for math, for example. This is not all of math, but it works for the arithmetic, fractions, multiplications, et cetera, et cetera. So it's a basic math we believe can be learned efficiently with an adapted version of the Duolingo method. But this way you drift off a little bit into children as focus users. Is that a correct assumption? Because obviously during school time, I don't know if anyone here raised your hand if you're really into learning math. It's probably a lot less than those that want to learn Spanish. So is that also a conscious choice to go into guiding students during school years through learning process and helping them? Yeah, it's a good question. And math has a bad brand, has a brand problem. So a lot of people have bad memories from math and school, et cetera. And that's the one thing they definitely don't want to do or learn. But people, if it's one of those fundamental skills that anyone on the planet at some point needs to learn. So yes, we're still trying to figure out, what is the math product for adults and what is the math product for children? There could be a math product for VCs, because every year we have some crazy hype where a lot of VCs forget about math. It's my understanding. And in the past years, we had last mile delivery and metaverse. And I'm really glad NFT trading. I'm glad we're out of this bubble. But this year, it's AI. And everyone is talking about it. Everyone wants to invest in it. Everyone is also worried about it. And the first headline we had for this talk here was Duolingo disrupted by AI, question mark. And then Severance PR departments said we cannot do this. Has to be more positive. And we said we're still going to openly speak about this. Is it something that you're worried about? And we see chat GPT going and translating better than Google Translate does. We see them scripting whole episodes of The Simpsons with generative AI. So are you worried that language learning is going to be changed? Hopefully it will be changed. And I mean, I'm looking forward to this world actually. I think it's a great opportunity for Duolingo. AI is a huge opportunity for Duolingo. And let me talk to two points about this. One is we want to teach with technology. So if you want to achieve our mission, we have to rely on technology. The best way, by the way, to learn almost anything is with a one-on-one tutor. And it's very expensive. This is how the kings in the early days, in the 19th century, this is how they taught their kids. They hired the best teacher. And it was one-on-one tutoring. And to this day, this is still the best way to learn almost anything. In the world. Prom, it's very expensive. So what we want to do with Duolingo is use technology and AI to replicate that efficacy of a one-on-one tutor inside Duolingo. So basically, not going to disrupt you. Not going to replace you. It's just one more tool in the toolkit of the Duolingo engineers and product team to think about how they can create that personal tutor for every single user of Duolingo. And then the other part of AI is, do you still need to learn a language? And is that why you're going to math and music? Are you worried that people are going to stop learning languages? When I was young, people said you need to learn French in order to work in France. I think nowadays, English to work anywhere in Europe is going to be sufficient. Do you see a trend there? Or is the interest, the hunger of people to learn other languages to fit into other cultures? Is that something that you think will not be broken by good automated translation? So that was not the motivation. And there's two things, and it was a previous point as well, is one thing that's interesting about Duolingo, our users, especially in the United States, is if you ask them, what would you do if Duolingo went away? That went away. Which other app would you use? Guess what they say? Oof. Bubble? No. No, none of them. None of the competitors. They say I would spend more time on Instagram, TikTok, social media. So we're competing. We're not competing with the other language learning apps. We compete with people's attention, for people's attention. And yeah, so we compete with social media. And so why do they learn a language? Because they have fun learning a language. They have fun learning a language. And that is remarkable. And I see the timer blinking, because that means we're out of time. But I think it's a beautiful finish, because what you've achieved deserves so much gratitude. You've turned something that is really, really hard. I mean, all of us here in the audience, I don't know about you, but learning vocabulary for our French test, it was painful. And Duolingo turns this into fun.  Like I said earlier, everyone loves Duolingo. And it's become a competitor not to other learning apps. It's become a competitor to watching videos, playing games, or being on social media. And that's amazing. Congratulations, everyone. Thank you for being here on stage with me today. And thank you all for listening to us. Thank you.


What if I told you that there is a dead end in the back rooms? A place where you can't go any further because there's nothing to go to. Oh, and it's also pretty horrifying. And you should absolutely never follow the stop signs or any signs that you see here. Without any more blabbering though, let's get into the explanation, shall we? Level 91 is the 92nd level inside the back rooms catalog. It's been given a class two difficulty for the level being pretty hard to exit and for its environmental risks, which are definitely more prevalent.  The good news is there's only a one-fifth rating for a phenomena happening to you, which on the scale of back room stuff, that's pretty good odds. There's a sentence at the front of the document that says, quote, in the midst of the wretched back rooms, you are greeted with the West End The level takes the appearance of a giant desert that looks to be a mix of the Mojave, the Sonoran, the Chihuahuan and other deserts from the front rooms. If you're new here or just aren't aware, oftentimes back rooms, levels and locations tend to look like places from real life just in a different way, almost like it's a different font of that same thing. It looks familiar, but something is off. That's what I'm trying to say. And that's the case with this giant desert here. Because this level looks like these real life locations, some people are actually tricked into believing that this is the front rooms. But trust me, it's not.  You're not in reality, I promise. The actual desert here consists of different flora and land formations, like mesas and buttes and plateaus and cannons and meteor craters, as well as trails and roads and mountain ranges. All of these are over top of a desert landscape that goes on for as far as the eyes can see. Some of these formations are grossly exaggerated in size. For example, some of the mountains are like 3,000 meters tall and some of the canyons are way deeper than you'd think they would be. The majority of the ground here is made out of sand and a little bit of it is made out of dirt and a little less of it is made out of clay and it's all depending on where you walk. If you dig in the ground on this level and if you're moving a bunch of sand, you're likely going to find skeletons and bones and shells deep inside of the actual ground. I'll touch on a little bit later, but we don't really know what these skeletons are from considering there's no entities or life on this level. While walking around the desert, you might run into various bodies of saline, salty water. These come in the forms of small rivers and small ponds. Now there are also freshwater bodies that you might be able to run into as well. They're rarer and act kind of like an oasis where if you see one, you really need to take advantage of it and get a drink because you don't know when the next time you're gonna see freshwater is. As I mentioned earlier, there is a highway system that sprawls out over the majority of this desert and that makes traveling over the level quite easy. The levels roads themselves are unmarked and they typically have very few signs and in general, the directions these highways go are arbitrary because they lead to nothing. They seem to randomly be placed and their stops and ends often make no sense. The only signs that you might see on these roads are stop signs and other ones that point towards towns that exist, which I'm gonna get into in a second. Also along the roads, you might be able to see these weirdly placed billboards, which seem to advertise things like almond water and cashew water and even other levels themselves. It's like this level is literally advertising other ones. Pretty interesting. For some reason, the most commonly advertised levels here are the promised land and the pool room sub-levels, which is ironic because those levels are the exact opposite of this one. You know, those are safe and watery and this is a desert dry level. The billboards also often include reviews from wanderers who have been to them. It's almost like a hotel billboard from real life with a five-star review on it. Moving down the road even further, you will run across a few abandoned cars. Inside of the cars, you may be able to find rare necessities for survival. You can also rest and relax inside the cars if you're tired or if you're hot, but the only danger you might face while walking on these roads is actually a randomly appearing car. Now this car is very anomalous and it seems to drive up and down the roads randomly at a high rate of speed. Kind of just zoom in back and forth, flooring it. The car has no one in it. It's unknown where it comes from or how it gets around, but it literally just flies from end to end and road to road without stopping.  Signs of old and abandoned settlements are very noticeable here. These settlements often include things that every other town has, like gas stations, oil wells, houses, general stores, all that stuff. All of these places are empty and long abandoned, actually. These towns almost give off the vibe of an old movie set because it just seems like no one ever lived here. It's been that long. Inside these old buildings, you might find some old food or sourd water, but other than that, it's really just non-descript and empty. All of these different settlements have been described by wanderers as eerie, simply because of just how empty they are. It seems like these towns were created for tourism at one point because the majority of them have gift shops and travel centers, but no evidence of current life is attainable, so we're not sure how that works. But the settlements, like everything else in this level, are randomly placed with no real sense of design put in them. Why would you put a town this far in the desert? It makes no sense. The weather inside this level can change, but it's usually partly cloudy or sunny, depending on the time of day. The sun in the sky seems to be some type of star, and it's not exactly like the Earth's sun, but it does lead to temperatures not being scorching hot. 33 Celsius, which is like 91 Fahrenheit, is the average, which is hot itself, yes, but it's not unbearable. And there is a 24-hour day-night cycle, just like Earth has, so it's pretty easy to sleep here as well. Essentially, this level is a desert with randomly splotched subdivisions, towns, and roads that cut through the whole thing. All of the areas are fully explorable, and they're fully abandoned. And the hardest thing you're gonna have to deal with is the environment here. As I mentioned briefly at the beginning, there is a small chance that phenomenon might occur to you as a wanderer while being on this level. The main two are called Phenomenon X and Phenomenon Y. These are the names that have been given to them, and I'll explain them both right now. Phenomenon X, or the blurriness, as it's been nicknamed, is a vision-imperiment event that occurs on this level. When one experiences it, a balloon from the real-life vision tests will appear in a person's field of view, far off in the distance, just out of where you can clearly see it. The balloon will be a strange feeling to the person experienced in it, and this strangeness will soon move into terror right after you see it, because after staring at the balloon, the sufferer will get tinnitus in their ear, and your field of view will get really blurry and your eyes will water, and you'll kind of just feel like all your senses are getting worse and worse and weaker. At this point, most people start to panic and get overwhelmed, because their other senses, like their touch, their smell, their taste, get really weak, and you kind of feel like your arms and legs have pins and needles, and you'll really feel like you want to pass out. Now, the Phenomenon will clear up by itself. You don't need to take medicine or anything like that, but you do need to find a dark and shaded, enclosed, preferably indoor place to calm the effect down. If it happens when you're in the middle of the wild or on a trail in the desert somewhere, you're probably done for. Sorry about it. But the next Phenomenon, Phenomenon Y, is called carbon copying, and essentially this occurs randomly again when wanderers get too deep in the level. What happens is the scene in your field of view, so whatever is right in front of you will duplicate itself into two identical sections. This can make you really delirious or delusional if you don't recognize what happened, and eventually it could lead you down the wrong path in a completely opposite direction. For instance, if you're following a road and the level of carbon copies itself, and one road leads really deeper to the desert, and the one you were originally following leads to the town, what if you picked the wrong one?  So watch out for that. There are no entities here, but the fossils that are in the sand indicate that there used to be some kind of life that roamed the sands. But the only report of creatures lies in weird tales that wanderers have said of shadow entities lurking around the abandoned towns. These shadow entities are often accompanied by footsteps or whispers, and it's completely unknown if these are real, or if they were just like the former inhabitants of the towns, like their spirits or something, or if they're just hallucinations. We don't know. I hope they're hallucinations because shadows are scary. But it seems as if the entire level is the embodiment of abandonment and loneliness. The aura is so mysterious, and each wanderer feels strange exploring these roads and these towns. It feels like you're not supposed to be here. To enter the level, you're gonna have to no-clip into the ceiling of level 338.1, or you can find a lone stop sign on level 35 and then just interact with it, whatever that means, and you'll be sent here to a stop sign on this level. And to exit, this is when the level gets particularly difficult because you have to wander through a random sand dune field, which might maybe transition you to level 671. You might be able to also follow highway signs to different levels. We aren't for sure if these even work, but there are signs that lead to different levels. So good luck finding an exit. This level is full of classic liminal space images that I'm sure millions of people have seen, and it's really just a great embodiment of how the back rooms feels to be in. You know, when you think of the back rooms, you think of yourself alone in a harsh environment where nothing ends and nothing begins. And that's literally all this level is. Make sure you keep your bearings with you.  Thank you for watching and have a good day.


Hey guys, it's Nate, AKA the Foot Accountant. Welcome back to the channel. Today, we are taking another look at some price predictions and where I think some FIFA 23 players' prices will be in the first week or so of this game, with the web app dropping in a couple of days and of course, people creating a lot of starter squad since we have the top 1,000 database. We're gonna look at a lot of those cheaper guys today, maybe not guys that are in your starter squad per se, but some of the under 100K type cards, we've already looked at all these big boys like Mbappe and Messi and Ronaldo. We've looked at their prices in the first episode of this video, so if you wanna take a look at that, I'll link that right above. But again, what I wanna do today is look through some of the lower tier, middle tier cards because these are gonna be the guys that we upgrade to in our teams earlier. And it's gonna be interesting to see how there's so many factors that could impact these prices this year. We're talking about maybe a guy like Anthony whose gold card might go out of packs because getting a once to watch card, that's the sort of stuff we're gonna be factoring in in this video. So if you're excited for the video today, hit the thumbs up and of course, subscribe if you're new. We're gonna start by looking at that exact card, Anthony. I wanna talk about this guy for a second because he's not confirmed to get a once to watch as I'm recording this video, but I think that he will end up getting an OTW card. 82 rated with the five star skills, the three star weak foot, the real life hype because he's playing well for Manchester United.   His base cards and FIFA in the years past weren't always that great to use, but with this upgrade that he got and the potential once to watch card, I think this card's actually gonna be pretty expensive this year. I mean, think about the best right-sided Brazil, kind of like right wing, right mid players. You've got Anthony and Raphinha. And you know, I think that this card's price this year is gonna be inflated because of the fact that he has a once to watch. So I was thinking about like 50 to 60K. Now you have to remember that the early game has changed so much from the older years in FIFA. FIFA 22, everything was so much cheaper than we had known in years past. He is 82 rated. He is gonna get packed a decent amount. Here's an example I wanna show to you of how this gold card might react if he gets a once to watch. And that's why I'm gonna put a price on him here in a second. But 82 Anthony, I'm looking at this Hakimi once to watch from last year. Of course, Hakimi was the go-to right back in the league on and with PSG links. I have to use FootWiz right now because FootBind's prices are not loading to me. I don't know what's going on with FootBind but they just updated for FIFA 23 so there must be an issue there. So back last year at the beginning of the year, Hakimi was 110K, exploded out of packs when his once to watch went into packs, went all the way up to like 180,000 coins. I think that this Anthony card in the first couple of days is probably gonna be around that 50K range. I do think though that he will end up going to 75K, 80K, maybe even 100,000 coins with his card being out of packs, hopefully getting a once to watch. So if he doesn't get a once to watch, 50 to 60K, if he does 75 to 100,000 coins, again, it's all about the hype guys with a card like this, brand new menu player. And his price will drop off very fast. Like you see here with Hakimi, all these card prices are gonna drop off because he will get maybe an inform or there'll be other cards added that are prem right-sided players that will go ahead of him and be better in game. But to start off with, people are really gonna want to use this card. I think that 75K price tag is pretty realistic. Now let's move on and talk about another right-sided player, Usman Dembele. And this is kind of where I was also figuring the price of Anthony. You look at Usman Dembele, his card looks really good and also really similar to Anthony. He's five star, five star though. Anthony is five star, three star. Now last year, Usman Dembele was about 50 to 70,000 coins. That's kind of where he trended in that first week, right? This year, I just think with the new chemistry system with Usman's card being five star, five star and around the same, I think this card is probably gonna end up being, again, similar to Anthony. I know he's a really, really hype FIFA card. You might be like, Nate, his card looks the same as Anthony and he has a five star weak foot and you're saying he's also gonna be 75 to 100,000 coins? Yes, I am because, again, that Manchester United hype is just so big. That wants to watch hype is so big that I think these two guys are gonna be around the same price. Usman with the French links could be a little bit more hype. There's also a lot of great Barcelona links but that's what I would be expecting to pay for Usman Dembele, 75 to 100K at the start of the game. Now, he has competition this year. Last year, Rafinha was in the Premier League, kind of like the best Prem Starter right mid. Now he's in La Liga. He's got the Barcelona links. He does have four star skills and a four star weak foot. I think this card is gonna be a little bit cheaper than Anthony and Usman Dembele both but he still does provide very, very good links, especially with La Liga and Brazil links, links to Vinny, links to Militao, plenty of other players. I think this Rafinha card is gonna end up being around 40, 50,000 coins, just the shade below where Anthony and Usman Dembele will be. Let me know down in the comments what you think about some of these cards. Again, you might be like, hey, really, that's all these guys, my cost at the beginning is like 40 or 50K.  The price changes between FIFA 20, FIFA 21 to 22 and probably what it's gonna be in 23, incredibly, incredibly different. So we've been talking about some La Liga and some right-sided winger players. Let's talk about some Prem guys, right? Marcus Rashford, and I have a really interesting point to make here with this Rashford card. This guy in FIFA 21 was in everybody's team and he started off last year in FIFA 22 in everybody's team as well. He was 150 to 175,000 coins and people realized last year that he was just not it in FIFA 22. He was also 85 rated, had the 90 pace, going down to 81 rated, only dropping three pace, still maintaining the five star skills but definitely does not look as good of a card this year. I think it's gonna impact Rashford's price a lot but he is still Manchester United. A lot of people, here's the key with this Rashford card. The alternate position, he can play striker. Now again, these alternate positions are not 100% guaranteed or confirmed yet but they are showing on some of these websites like Footbin, FootWiz, Foot.gg. So take them with a grain of salt kind of like we do with the leaks since they're not actually posted on the EA website. We don't see secondary positions in here but I do think that some of these could be accurate. So if Rashford is able to be played as striker so many people I believe will play Rashford and Anthony in the strike force of their team. I still think that means this Rashford card is gonna have some hype. I'm saying 60 to 75,000 coins for him as well but if you're gonna use them on the left here's my advice to you. Just use Alan St. Maximon because St. Maximon's card doesn't look that much different than his. He's got the five star skills. He's got a little bit less shooting and stuff but if you're looking for a wing player I think St. Maximon's gonna be still around 25 with 35,000 coins and I think this Rashford will be a little bit more expensive but around the same stat. So that'd be my advice to you especially if you wanted to use this guy on the wing. Now this brings up a really interesting point and we're gonna look at some Premier League strikers because with these alternate positions in years past you were never able to move Rashford from left wing to striker but now with alternate positions you can and there's plenty of other cards in FIFA 23 that you can move around. That's gonna make the Premier League striker position I think a lot more competitive this year and maybe strikers from comparing them to years past might be a little bit cheaper. Now let's look at Obamian, right? Back at Chelsea, four star, four star he is just paced. That's what this Obamian card is for sure. Alternate position center forward so not moving him anywhere else across the pitch. Last year with his Arsenal card 89 paced and 85 rated he was around 40 to 50 K. I think that this year with how many strikers I'm gonna actually keep that Obamian price point around the same 40 to 50 K because as I'm about to show you what I just did here on footpin was I sorted by Premier League and by center forward and striker. If you scroll down this list, look at Daniel James. Dan James can be played as a striker with 95 paced. Zaha, Dhaka, Rashford, Obamian, Cornet, Goncalo Guedes will look at his card in a second. Gabriel Jesus. So you have a mixture here of all of these guys that are usually strikers and center forwards but then you have these other guys in the mix that you can now position change to central when their base card is a left wing or left mid like Zaha, like Dan James or on the right side for Dan James case and Rashford. So that's why I think that some of your prem strikers this year like Obamian might end up being cheaper just because there's more competition in there with those position changes. So that's one thing to kind of watch out for and look for all across all the leagues in this game are those position changes and how that might affect some aspects of the market because primarily strikers are always in demand, right? Especially for starter teams which I think this guy is gonna be very, very popular for starter teams, Goncalo Guedes, four star, four star, really good looking stats for an 82 rated card. But again, with what we just looked at and also knowing how usable this guy is gonna be in the game for how long, this is a really a starter team card for real. I think he's gonna be around 10 to 15,000 coins in that first week or so. Gonna be pretty easy to get in your team. Decent links, people are probably gonna link Adama to him on the right side. I think that's a W link up play there with a lot of pace up top. Good finisher, pretty solid stats. What's his finishing stat? 82, 87 shot power and 88 long shots. That's not bad. His attack positioning is a little bit low but this is gonna be a nice, cheap starter primarily striker for a lot of you guys out there wanting to start your prem sides. Now, one more primarily player to look at here. Phil Foden, alternate positions again. Very, very interesting on this card. Center forward, Cam, left mid. And I think last year I overvalued him a lot on my price prediction. I think that a lot of people are gonna play him as a center attacking mid but still, this card to me is no more than 30, 40,000 coins just because he doesn't have a lot of pace. He does have a three star weak foot and it's really his best stat is his dribbling stat. So not a terrible card but also not an amazing one. 30 to 40k Manchester City links. Let's move on to some Lee Gunn and some PSG cards. We're gonna look at two of them. I have not looked at Campembe yet. I think Campembe this year, we're gonna look at this. There are so many insane center backs. It's crazy the competition on center backs this year with some of the upgrades that they have been given. But first of all with Campembe, last year he burst onto the scene of course, right? You can see his price. He was down here at 30,000 coins and by basically the end of October. So a month after the game came out he had his max price at 70,000 coins on the PlayStation. I think though this year with the new chemistry system with PSG and French links, they're gonna be so valued as we've been talking about. I think that's gonna make Campembe week one 75k this year. Again, just because of the hype, the overpowered aspect of his card last year, I think he's gonna just insert himself right up there in that probably like top 10 center back conversation in the game, especially with all of the high rated guys that are in the game still. I think he'll be about 75,000 coins. And then this guy last year was really cheap. I think he was less than 10k. Actually, I think I know he was less than 10k. He's gonna be more expensive this year because of the PSG links in my opinion, especially for starter teams. Nuno Mendez, I've got a price tag on him at about 15,000 coins. He did get an upgrade, but he's still 80 rated. So he's gonna be in that cheaper echelon. I think 15k is gonna be where he's gonna be at this year. Now let's move on to a couple more cards. Syriah Lynx are always cheaper in FIFA at the beginning of the year. But I think that for a few of these cards, if you're using Syriah, like Lynx in your team to get chemistry, these guys are still gonna maintain some decent prices, but they will be good looks in the first couple of weeks because they'll be maybe just a little bit cheaper. Like I'm comparing this Tamori to a Militao. You compare those two cards, they look very, very similar. This guy looks insane, four star weak foot. You've seen his stats already. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that Tamori this year is gonna be about 100 to 150k because of the English Lynx. People could put him in prem teams very easily with only needing two nations to get one 10 point, two players in the same nation to get one 10 point. I'm saying 150k, 100 to 150k for Tamori. Moving on to another Syriah player, Rafael Leao. This guy's really hype. A lot of people like to look at this card for a starter team player, maybe like a second or third week player. I think that he's gonna be about 35k though. I really do. I mean, he's not an elite attacker. He doesn't have five star skills. He can't be position change centrally. So maybe I'm low balling him here a little bit but I feel like it's gonna be 35 to 40k for this Rafael Leao. Same thing with Chiesa. I mean, UVA Lynx, Italian Lynx, still four star, four star, does have 90 pace. But again, as I said, the Syriah is always cheaper. I have to kind of remember that with building out these teams and thinking about some prices. I'm feeling about 30, 40 at max 50,000 coins for a Chiesa card as well. If you're gonna tell me that Rashford is like 60 to 75,000 coins and then this guy is gonna be as expensive or more than him, I just think that's unrealistic. That's why I really feel like Chiesa is gonna be and Leao will be around that 30, 40,000 coin range on the market. I mean, I was kind of comparing them to Insigné last year as well. Insigné was like 20k and this was the best left-sided wing player in the Syriah. Like how are those guys gonna be more than 40 or 50k? I don't find any reasons that they will. Now, a Syriah card that will be more expensive is gonna be the best or second best left-back in the game. Gold card that is Teo Hernandez. Last year, his card was still overpowered. He got a plus one. He was like 60 to 70,000 coins in the first week. I think this year he's going to be more just because of how insane he was, especially with the Tamori link. And that's the huge part for this Hernandez card. French links, Tamori links. I think this Teo Hernandez is gonna be above 100,000 coins this year. It's between him and Ferland Mendy as the best left-backs in the game at the start, especially since they're both French. I think both those guys will be over 100,000 coins. That's just my opinion. Let me know what you think down below. I think it's gonna be 100k. Now, Sondro Tonali, last guy we're gonna look at from the Syriah. He is gonna be a budget midfield option, still a little bit more expensive, but I'm saying 20, 25k. So if you guys are looking to get Tonali in your team and then maybe upgrade to get other links at center back, like Tamori, like Teo Hernandez, maybe Rafael Leal. I think it's only gonna set you back 20 to 25k at the start of the game. That's a very, very nice card indeed. Now we're flying through some of these ratings. Let's go to La Liga. A lot of you guys were really excited for some La Liga cards. Antonio Ruttiger, and like I said, there's so many great La Liga cards and so many great center backs as well. You've got Militao, you've got Kunde. You've got even like Davide Alaba as a center back card that is gonna be pretty hyped from the beginning of the game. The thing with Ruttiger is he is a 87 rated card. Last year's an 83 in the prem. He was only 16, 15 to 16,000 coins at his max and then he dropped off a lot. This card in the beta, people said was very, very good, but with the Madrid hype in the new chemistry system, he's gonna be more rare with his higher rating. I'm saying 75k for this Ruttiger card. Really, I'm gonna say 75k. He's gonna be less expensive than I think than Militao because he doesn't have as good of links, but he still has very great links. People will wanna use him. He's gonna be great in game, 75k. Now, another Madrid center back, Davide Alaba. Some of you guys in the comments of the last video were asking about him. I think Alaba this year is still gonna be pretty cheap. Last year, he was about 12,000 coins. This year, again, I think Madrid links are a little bit more hype. I'm gonna raise his price estimate to about 20k. Nothing super crazy. He's definitely more of a starter option with having less than 80 pace, needs a shadow or an anchor for sure on a card like that. Let's keep it with Real Madrid. The most hyped midfielder, I think, at least the top three most hyped midfielder to start the year this year. So many people are gonna want this guy in their team for links and there's another midfielder we're gonna talk about here in a second, but Valverde looks insane and he's been playing insane IRL and I think that adds to the hype of this card. Last year, his 83 rated item looked pretty similar and it was about 40k, but I think there's more hype this year. Again, Real Madrid links, I'm gonna raise his price estimate this year, 50 to 70,000 coins. Again, a bigger range here because I'm not genuinely sure where he's gonna be at. 84 rated card, he is gonna get packed in okay amount, but Real Madrid links, new chem system, people are gonna be looking to go with a lot of club links. That is an insane card, arguably one of the best mids in the La Liga. Now, speaking of another midfielder in La Liga, let's go straight there. Frankie DeYoung, these two guys are the top two in my opinion, especially for a box-to-box type of player. His card last year held its price so well. If you remember this guy, I remember trading with him from 80k, he spiked to like 120, and then he was consistently around 100k until the market died for like the end of October when we had a bunch of crazy SBCs and gold card supply really dropped off, but this is kind of like more of an elite tier midfielder being 100,000 coins, so people are consistently upgrading to a card like this over the first month of the game cycle. I think this year, again, you've got some Barcelona players with really good links like Usman Dembele, Rafinha, you've got Lemondoski there now. Even, Kai, we're gonna talk about in a second, Jules Kunde, so I think this Frankie DeYoung card might even be a little more expensive, but around the same price, I'm saying 125 to 150k. I just feel like there's maybe a few more gaps in the midfield this year with the way the cards look and still having 80 pace when guys like Conte got dropped from 78 to 72. I know Conte and DeYoung are not interchangeable, but as players in FIFA, but I still think there, I think that 125 to 150k price range is really accurate for his card, Jules Kunde, again, another center back, Barcelona and France links, I think that's gonna keep his price up a little bit, but it's gonna be less than it could be because there's so many center backs out there. 40k, 40 to 50k for this Kunde card is where I think he's gonna end up being, I know a ton of people are gonna love that because he's just such a really, really great card in the game. So there's so much LaLiga cards, right? So many with insane stats. Let's move on to the last few. We have a couple of Bundesliga cards to look at here. Some of you guys in the last video were asking for Diabi. I think that the French links here are nice. He does look again, kind of similar to like the Antony, you know, a little bit like Usman, but he's four star, three star. This card to me is gonna be about 20k in the first week and then he's gonna drop off because he just has pace. That's kind of all that he is. Doesn't have a central position change or anything like that. It might be nice in the early game to have like Diabi, Kingsley, Koman. This will give you links to Nkunku as well, but I think if you're gonna have that many coins to have Nkunku and your team, you're gonna be able to get some better French players as well. And that's why I think this Diabi is not gonna be that expensive. Klostermann, this is like one of the most OP Bundesliga starter cards that everybody loves to use. German links, Leipzig links as well, which could be really interesting. Technically like a perfect link if you think about it to Timo Werner, which I think some people will use. He'll be like a 20, 25k striker as well. But this Klostermann for me, same as last year, 35 to 40k, 80 rated, still low rated. He's gonna get packed a lot. He might be extinct early on. That's something we always watch for is this is a perfect candidate again of a card that EA might set a price range at like 15k. And we're like, okay, that's too cheap, right? They update it pretty fast. He goes like 30, 40k. And then that's his max in like the first week. So that's what I'm feeling for Klostermann, basically the same as last year. Alternate position though, right wing back. I don't know if you guys remember this, but Klostermann used to play right back. That was his position. You look back FIFA 18, all of his first FIFA cards, they were all right backs. All the way back to FIFA 15, his first center back card was an informant 20. And then that was kind of the position that he played after that. But kind of interesting that he's got that alternate position of right wing back, but not right back. So if you were gonna start Klostermann in a five back you could on the right side, just interesting how the new position changes this year are gonna affect the game and everything. But thought that was interesting. Everybody's favorite Bundesliga center back. I don't know if this guy's a rare or a non-rare. I've seen both, but I think it's gonna be the same story as last year. Even though we have so many other great center backs, this guy being the staple of early game FIFA and probably still gonna be pretty OP. I'm saying 30 to 40k, 77 rated. He lost to one pace from last year. Still a great overpowered early game center back card. So 30 to 40k for him. Last player we're gonna look at today, Leroy Sane, 84 rated, moving from the right to the left. Now has competition with guys like Kingsley Coman. He does not have five star skills. He has a two star weak foot. And because of that, I think this guy is gonna be like 20k. He's gonna be super cheap. Last year on the right side, I mean he was super cheap as well. Like less than 20k. This guy might even be 15,000 coins. So you're not gonna have to shell out too much cash if you're wanting to get a card like that early on. So that's gonna do it for all the predictions today. Again, I know there's a lot of cards still that we haven't covered like Gakpo with a potential team of the week, one card coming. How expensive will this guy be? Martina is not looking too bad. Zakaria, how did I not talk about this guy, man? I mean, to me, this is a starter center defensive mid for sure. If I'm throwing a price out there for Zakaria, I'm gonna say probably early game, he's gonna mimic Renato Sanchez and be around like 30 to, maybe 30k, 35,000 coins. But then without having really insane links and definitely gonna get replaced pretty soon after the first couple of weeks, his price will drop off. So I'm saying a 30k for Zakaria, but a great starter card there for him. There's so many more. We're gonna talk about a lot of them on stream. So if you wanna check us out there, twitch.tv slash the 40 count, link is down below in the description. But again, voice your thoughts in the comments. What do you think about some of these prices? Again, FIFA 23 market, probably gonna be a lot like FIFA 22. That's why these prices seem low, but I think they're gonna be pretty close to accurate. So let me know again what you think down in the comments, but if you enjoyed today's video, hit the thumbs up and subscribe if you're new. It's been Nate the Foot Account and I'll catch you guys later. Peace.


write down the summary of the observations, summary of the observations. I mean these are obvious things just write down that the photoelectric current is directly proportional to the intensity of the incident light, directly proportional to the intensity of the incident light, okay. Second saturation current is found to be proportional to intensity, saturation current it is found to be proportional to intensity, does it make sense? This what is the second graph, okay. Saturation current is found to be proportional to intensity but it is independent of what? Frequency, third point for a given metal there exists a threshold frequency, for a given metal there exists a threshold frequency above which, above which sorry below which no photoelectric emission happens. And if frequency is above that threshold frequency then stopping potential varies linearly with that frequency, is it not? We got a linear graph between stopping potential and frequency, the last conclusion this is very important. Photoelectric emission is instantaneous process, photoelectric emission is an instantaneous process without any apparent time lag, it will not wait, it will not wait for it to acquire energy, if it has to happen it will happen instantaneously, fine. Even if the intensity is very very less, even if intensity is very very less, getting it, fine. If you understand this 90 percent chapter is done now, if you have any doubts let me know, no doubt. So this observation actually Helvet and Lenard have made this observation concluded but never gave any equation or any theory behind it, why it is happening, it is instantaneous process but why, it is independent of intensity but why, current is directly proportional to intensity why, so the reasoning was not given, it was just observation, right. So Einstein came up with particle theory and gave few postulate or gave few some structure to based on which we can understand what is happening here, okay. So write down the concept of photoelectric emission, the first point is this, when there is interaction between matter and wave, wave behaves as particle, wave will behave like a particle, fine. And since it is photoelectric emission, we are not talking about any wave, we are talking about EM wave, okay. Interaction between matter and electromagnetic wave or EM radiation, actually this is not proper to say interaction between matter and wave, we can say EM radiation, electromagnetic radiation, the radiation behaves like this, fine. And these particles are called, these particles are photons, fine, named as photons, each photon, momentum of H by lambda, where lambda is a wavelength of the radiation, although you are treating it as a particle but still you are saying wavelength and frequency, ultimately it has a dual nature, it will have a frequency or wavelength but while interacting it behaves like a particle, fine. It is like you having two natures, while interacting with your parents, you behave something else, while interacting with your friends you behave in some other manner, fine. Similarly here also, so momentum is this and energy is H into mu, where mu is the frequency of the radiation, mu is also equal to C by lambda, C is speed of light, okay. Intensity is directly proportional to number of photons, photons are charged less, they do not have any charge, they will not get deflected by electromagnetic, they do not have any charge. In collisions between photons and matter, when an energy gets conserved but what does not get conserved, number of photons may change, fine. So this is the framework based on which Einstein has put forward his photoelectric effect theory, can you doubt on this? So once you understand this and there is one more core which is not clearly within the book is that one electron can absorb only one photon, it can not absorb more than one photon due to some quantum physics phenomena which is beyond our scope right now but what is clear is that one electron cannot absorb more than one photon. If you assume this, now it is very clear, if your frequency is less than threshold frequency, the electron will not wait to absorb more and more photons, it cannot, it can absorb only one photon, no matter what is your radiation, fine. So if you behave, I mean if you treat photons or if you treat the light to be made up of photons or particles, then only you will be able to understand what is going on in photoelectric emission, fine, right. So enough of theory, let us get down to the equations and numerical part of it.


Hi, I'm James Bevor. I'm a PhD student at Oxford University where I research satellite cyber security and Today I'll be talking about some research that we've done looking at satellite broadband signals And this is a bit of an update to a talk. I gave earlier last year at DEF CON 28 So I'll talk a little bit about things that have changed since that presentation new things We've been working on but it doesn't assume that you've seen it So even if you don't have any familiarity with the original presentation This will give some background and the sort of vulnerabilities and the cool things we found The basic premise of this research is is pretty straightforward Essentially, we conducted a series of experiments looking at maritime aviation and terrestrial customers of satellite internet services in particular from 18 satellites in Geostationary orbit that means they're about 30,000 kilometers away from the Earth's surface in Total these satellites provide the internet service to an area that looks something like this About a hundred million square kilometers of coverage area reaching from parts of the United States all the way to parts of China We essentially set up some satellite dishes Listen to these radio waves and try to see if we could find any sensitive information and We ended up finding quite a lot of sensitive information We saw sensitive data belonging to at least nine members of the fortune global 500 To six of the ten largest airlines in the world by passenger count from their in-flight Wi-Fi services Information belonging to cargo vessels that are owned by companies who together share almost half of the world's global cargo capacity a variety of governmental agencies ranging from a Postal service belonging to an Eastern European nation all the way to an Air Force jet belonging to a North African country and We even saw traffic from kind of regular people like you or me people who might be browsing the internet while they're at a coffee shop or Updating their social media while on a cruise Before I delve too deep into how we got at this information It's important to have a basic understanding of how satellite internet works So we're gonna run through a very simple kind of crash course scenario We have our customer in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and they want to use this satellite here in geostationary orbits Like I said, it's 30,000 kilometers in the sky So this customer wants to use that satellite to reach a website hosted in Ireland will say Google To do this what they're going to do is try to communicate via this ground station run by the satellite internet service provider in Madrid Now we also have someone who wants to intercept this communication down here in Ghana They want to intercept the radio traffic that's coming off that satellite even though they're quite far away So how does this all play out? Well, first the customer on the cargo vessel will send a request to the satellite They'll point their dish to the right spot and say something like get me google.com The satellite is more or less just a bent pipe. It sends exactly what it got back down to earth And they'll say okay Get me google.com to that ground station in Madrid and it does us on a really narrow kind of focused beam The ground station in Madrid converts the weird satellite protocols to normal internet traffic and routes it to Ireland Just like if you were visiting a website somewhere it gets the response sends it back up to the satellite Which when I say sends back up to the satellite It's important to remember that this is very far away and the speed of light is not as fast as we would like So we're talking about 700 milliseconds of round trip time to finish this kind of communication Which is really slow compared to terrestrial internet Once we finally make it to space the last stage is to send that information back down to the customer But this time because we don't know exactly where the customer is We're gonna use a really broad beam to try to cover as much of the earth as possible And so the radio waves carrying that response from Google will hit our customers dish in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean At the same time as a hitter attackers dish in Ghana And this is the crux of satellite eavesdropping You have the ability to intercept signals from people who may be Thousands of miles away from the attacker and so there's really high stakes for ensuring that this kind of traffic is encrypted Now in terms of actually getting at this data as an attacker We need to think a little bit about our threat model What kind of equipment we need and how we convert those radio waves into meaningful information so we can understand What's happening in these signals if you're a government this is quite easy There are companies that sell specialized modems that are designed for doing intelligence collection and listening to you satellite radio signals I think most major players in cyberspace probably operate installations like this one that cost millions of dollars Unfortunately as a PhD student or a random hacker you don't necessarily have access to this kind of equipment So what we wanted to do is see how far we could get using some very inexpensive home television equipment We bought this nice little flat panel satellite dish here, which is very very small And then we also got a PCI e-tuner card to allow us to interpret the signals coming off of it on our computer These are widely available for customers to buy on the internet if they want to watch like satellite television on their home computer But we're going to try to adapt it to listen to satellite internet Now in attempting to doing so we ended up running into a pretty big problem Which is that our cheap equipment Struggled to deal with the corrupted recordings that they were getting we were dropping packets We were losing information So we built a custom tool called GSE extract which tries to kind of piece together these satellite recordings by looking for low-hanging fruit It parses a protocol called GSE or generic stream encapsulation With the goal of kind of finding the easiest packets to extract from that by looking for like the headers of IP packets Or the starts of different frames. There's an academic paper that goes much more in-depth into how this tool works It's also now available on github You can install it with PIP if you want to play around with it It's publicly available and it works fairly well So this kind of is how we used it in the lab I'll kind of run through the process to get it in your head The first thing we do is scan the radio spectrum to try to look for satellite signals And you can tell which signals are interesting by these kind of distinct radio humps in the spectrum If we tell our card to tune to one of these signals We can get some information about which frequency it's on and what kind of data is coming through with this like television tool that's designed to find TV services Next we offer we try to kick off a recording with this tool here that comes with our PCIe card So we can kind of look at the data that's inside that radio signal according to a specific protocol DVBS or digital video broadcasting for satellite So we go ahead and lock to that satellite signal that we found by scanning the radio spectrum And I'll kick off a very quick demo recording so we can walk through the process Now the size of this file can vary wildly depending on the specifics of the modulation You're listening to you or the specific service provider You might get a terabyte in a week. You might get a gigabyte in a week It really depends on the specifics of the network I'm just going to capture a couple thousand kilobytes here so we can get a feel for what's happening and kind of look around So once we have our data the next thing to do is to use that tool that I built called GSE extract You can go ahead and just take that recording file that's been saved to the desktop here and We'll go ahead and run GSE extract and see if we get anything out of it It converts these binary files into pcaps which can then be simply opened in Wireshark Now I've hidden the source and destination IP addresses here for privacy reasons But you can see that we've already caught several thousand different packets of other people's internet traffic Even though we're thousands of miles away and have no business listening to this information So this is the crux of satellite eavesdropping, but what's inside here? Well, because we all don't have perfect recordings. We're often dealing with kind of lossy chunks and bits You don't necessarily get everything So this is an example of an image that we intercepted from an engineer aboard a maritime vessel communicating with colleagues about maintenance issues and you can see that we were able to Reconstruct with GSE extract a good portion of that JPEG file, but we weren't able to get everything But as an hacker even a little bit can be quite a lot Because you don't necessarily need everything to find interesting and sensitive information And so using cheap hardware and kind of taking shortcuts like we do with GSE extract Allows us to punch above our weight in terms of our ability to get access to interesting and important information Without having expensive equipment or insider knowledge What we ended up finding in a nutshell was that the satellite internet service providers We were listening to didn't employ encryption by default that is to say that customers could encrypt their traffic by like using TLS or a VPN But the internet service provider simply sent the data that hit someone's Wi-Fi hotspot across the satellite feed in the same format that they received it This means that as an attacker We got to see what an internet service provider would be able to see every packet coming out of a customer's modem every file They download we could piece this together based on their IP address and kind of get a internet level vantage point on other people's traffic But it gets even worse when we think about corporations and big companies who are using this data Because over the satellite network they often operated what was essentially just a local area network like a windows LAN Environment across these satellite hops so think about like a bunch of windows desktops on different cruise ships You could see the internal LDAP traffic from one windows host to another Stuff that would normally be behind a lot of firewalls and quite hard to get at as a passive eaves dropper When we think about terrestrial customers so think like home internet users people on land who use satellite services Especially in rural areas you might think home customers are largely safe from this information, right? Because we know that you have that like locklight icon on your browser You might be using TLS to encrypt your traffic that means it should be secure against eaves dropping Well, we ended up finding though is that of course TLS is not perfect security The way TLS is often used today leaks quite a lot of information about what people are doing Whether that's from the DNS queries they send which tell you which websites someone is visiting or the actual Certificates that they're using to encrypt their traffic. It allows us to kind of piece together The nature of someone traffic and since we have an internet service provider level perspective on this We can get a lot more information than you might get as a man in the middle on any one Connection because we can actually see all of the websites someone visits and build a pretty robust fingerprint Unfortunately, the reality is often worse than this and that there are a lot of services that people use that are still unencrypted a great example is this email that we intercepted to a lawyer in Spain from one of his clients discussing an upcoming court case and Obviously, this is deeply sensitive information. You shouldn't be able to have the conversations You're having with your lawyer broadcast and clear text across an entire continent But it's unclear whose job it is to protect this Should the lawyer know that he shouldn't be downloading his emails over pop or should the internet service provider have some duty of care to Protect this information in transit We also saw traffic from a lot of internet of things and infrastructure devices This image on the left is from a Cisco router by a major electricity provider in Europe and you can see here Not only is the password in clear text. It's just basic Authentication so it's a base 64 encoded but nothing else But also the router itself is publicly accessible over the open internet if you look at that host address Which means that anyone with the rest of this information from this image could potentially start messing with this electricity provider's infrastructure Likewise, we saw a lot of wind turbines that were accessible over the open internet and the passwords for these turbines were sent in clear text There could be another layer of protection behind this We didn't actually try to log in and mess with any wind turbines But it's at least intuitively concerning that this information is out there and so easy to get at We also saw in the maritime domain very similar so a lot of ships at sea we'll use satellite internet to remain connected to offices on land and One challenge we had was we wanted to see if we could identify some vessels So we looked through our terabytes and terabytes of traffic We picked a random sampling and we were able to identify about 10% of the ships Some of those were very big like this container ship here Which is one of the larger ship types in the world belonging to one of the larger fleets in the world Whereas others were quite small like this subsea repair ship belonging to a petroleum company down here that from its traffic We were able to tell it was running a vulnerable version of Windows Server 2003 that had a bunch of CVEs against it that could be used in a targeted attack against this petroleum company or Against this specific vessel and if you kind of skim this chart You'll see that there's a broad range of different use cases in industry. This is not one company's problem This is the entire industry that's potentially exposed to this kind of stuff One particularly interesting thing we encountered was the process for updating navigational charts that tell Maritime operators where it's safe to go in the ocean and how they can get there legally And we found that a lot were updated either via insecure FTP file shares which we had the passwords for over the satellite link or via simple emails to inbox That's on the vessel and one of the crew members would copy everything That's in that inbox over onto a flash drive and plug it into the vessel to update the charts Now depending on how those charts are actually authenticated on the little navigation terminal on the ship It might be possible to use this information to manipulate an article chart and say conceal a sandbar from an oil tanker with Potentially devastating environmental consequences So it's important to recognize that when you use an insecure or unencrypted update mechanism in an environment where Ease dropping is so possible Someone could mess with the contents of your traffic even if they aren't directly transmitting radio waves at you just by using kind of the information You're leaking to them Much like in the terrestrial domain We also saw some interesting privacy things One of the most fun things we found was a bunch of communications from this Greek billionaires super yacht In particular one day his captain forgot to log in to or forgot the password for his Microsoft account And the password reset email was sent over clear text from there It would be a pretty simple step to hijack this account and potentially use it as a targeted social engineering operation against a very high net worth individual Likewise, we saw a lot of personal information from crew members when ships pull into ports They often have to communicate Immigration information like passport documents and visas and these were often sent in clear text over insecure HTTP web forms And so for example from this Indian cargo vessel We were able to get a list of all of the crew members on board their date of birth their nationality and their passport numbers And we were thousands of miles away from the ship when we got this information Finally the aviation use case is really interesting because in-flight Wi-Fi services are really kind of changing the way that flights happen And the way passengers stay connected in the air and it's not just passengers It's also the crew members and the pilots who are increasingly using data services to make flights more efficient or more reliable or safer and A lot of that information if transmitted and securely could have serious consequences This image here is an excerpt from some traffic We captured from a misconfigured electronic flight bag aboard a Chinese airline For some reason someone had gotten the password wrong and so every time the flight bag tried to log in It would reroute accidentally to this 302 page and leak information about the internal APIs of this airline Now an electronic flight bag is essentially a navigational terminal for aircraft For aircraft pilots it gives information about say weather updates or delays or other kind of general routing information It's not necessarily flight critical, but it has information that can impact the decisions a pilot makes for example This particular product maintained a lot of maintenance information whether there were maintenance issues with the aircraft That needed to be alerted and so forth and an attacker could potentially mess with this information or use it to reveal information about aircraft That's otherwise sensitive We likewise saw some interesting traffic from something that we call a femtosell Which is essentially a miniature cell tower that they put onto airplanes these days to allow you to communicate On the plane using your phone as if you were on the ground so to send like SMS text messages from the air and The front end of this is secure. It's an encrypted GSM or LTE signal just like you would expect anywhere But the back end is routed over these insecure satellite feeds And so the data that customers were sending specifically the text messages that passengers are receiving We're being broadcasting clear text across the entire continent of Europe A great example is this image here Which includes traffic that we intercepted from an individual on a transatlantic flight learning that his corona virus test result was negative That's a huge relief of course for anyone sitting next to him on the airplane But for other people who are concerned about medical information privacy this information really should not have been visible to us We also talk a little bit about active attacks We wanted to see if there was any way to mess with this information And the DEF CON talk goes more in-depth about this because it's a little bit longer But I'll kind of summarize the two active attacks that we were able to demonstrate The first is really straightforward It's based off of this idea that if you're an attacker and you know the IP address of a satellite customer And you know that they're using an insecure satellite signal What you can do is expel trait data by sending that information to the customer and then eavesdropping on that signal What this means is that you essentially have an untraceable link over that massive satellite signal footprint To send data from a compromised PC to your own command and control servers without revealing where those servers are And this attack has actually been used in practice in particular a Russian advanced persistent threat group called Tula group Has been found to use this exact strategy to exaltrate data from some sensitive customers without being caught Another type of attack that's pretty interesting to execute in these eavesdropping environments is the classic TCP session hijacking attack The basic idea here is that if you know TCP sequence numbers, you can use that information to impersonate an endpoint in a conversation And hijack information so you could pretend to be a ship at sea and send back to the home office Information that's not true about like where your vessel is going or whether or not it's oil levels are good Or what its maintenance state is and potentially wreaks in real havoc What's interesting about this is that it doesn't require any wireless communications equipment which can be either expensive or easily traced Everything happens just over normal internet communications So it's an active attack in these networks that is passive with respect to the radio signal And what makes that so powerful is that it allows an attacker with essentially no equipment or hobbyist equipment To actually mess with the data that someone thinks they're receiving from a satellite connection Now this doesn't work in all satellite networks, it actually requires some very specific design decisions in terms of how the IP addresses are set up And how TCP connections are handled, but we were able to demonstrate it in an actual satellite network And we think that it could work in quite a few of them So obviously this research has some ethical and legal implications We were very careful to adhere to the laws in the country where we did the data collection And we also, you notice I haven't neamed any companies This is a very conscious choice and one that I've received a little bit of flack about in the media on occasion But it's very important I think to keep the focus on the big picture here Which is that this is a systemic issue that affects a lot of companies And so rather than make this about like, you know, X-Cruise company is leaking people's data I think it's important to say there's something wrong with the way satellite internet is being used today We need to figure out why it's wrong and how we can help companies find a way to secure that data Of course we did talk to companies, we engaged in responsible disclosure as early as November of 2019 So it's been well over a year at this point, although the vulnerability still exists in many networks We also talked to customers of satellite internet, individual companies like those cruise companies or airline type companies In order to let them know about some of these issues And most companies were very happy about it, we were somewhat surprised at how interested companies were to learn about the vulnerabilities And how happy they were to cooperate with security researchers We only had one company threaten legal action if we publish, they haven't engaged in any legal action to my knowledge Which is a really good sign because we think we've been able to kind of make the case for them about why security research is important And I think that as a security researcher it's really important to reach out to companies in a productive way And try to make sure that they know that we're on the same side here, we're not trying to help hackers find information We're trying to protect that information And that's been a lot of what I've been working on since DEF CON, most of what my research has been since then Because it turns out that these issues that we found aren't simply because companies are lazy or incompetent or don't know that encryption is important It has a lot to do with the physical realities of space Remember when I said that space is really far away and the speed of light is only so fast? Well it turns out that to deal with that, satellite internet service providers have to optimize the TCP connection protocol Because you have this really slow three-way handshake whenever you start a TCP connection to a website And if each of those hops is over that long-distance satellite link, your connections get incredibly incredibly slow And the internet feels sluggish or almost unusable So what internet service providers do is they operate these things called performance enhancing proxies And essentially split your TCP handshake into two chunks, one locally at your home internet router And one on the satellite ground station to the main internet And this allows them to complete the TCP three-way handshake without sending all of those acknowledgement messages and so forth across the satellite link Making satellite connections feel really fast The problem with this is that if you put your connections into a VPN or some other end-to-end encryption solution Your internet service provider can no longer do this because they need to actually see the contents of your traffic In order to optimize how it's moved across their satellite networks So what I've been working on since DEF CON is seeing if we can combine this And kind of come up with a hybrid mix of a traditional VPN and a traditional performance enhancing proxy The basic idea is that we build a tool that spoofs a upstream internet connection So say it pretends to be Google.com, local to the customer, just like a performance enhancing proxy To make the acknowledgments really fast And then over the satellite hop we convert all of the TCP traffic we're getting to a protocol called QUICK Which is UDP based and encrypted by default And has some nice properties for congestion control and multiplexing That makes it really surprisingly fast and robust across the satellite link While having encryption built-ins that no one can eavesdrop Once we get back to land on the other side, somewhere up the internet on like a cloud server owned by the customer We then can convert those QUICK packets back to the TCP packets that were originally sent Pretend to be the customer and send it over the internet So this means all of the TCP three-way handshakes happen over the local connections without any of the satellite latency But the satellite hop is still encrypted using a widely trusted and kind of commonplace security standard Instead of some weird bespoke or proprietary implementation, we simply use a QUICK protocol Now there's some reasons this isn't trivial to implement in practice There are a lot of challenges we ran into in trying to design the system One thing is that starting a QUICK session isn't free, you have to actually exchange some key information There's at least one or two round trips in setting up a handshake And so what we do is we have these really long live sessions where you essentially connect to the upstream QUICK server And you can stay connected for a long period of time and send multiple different TCP connections through it And that bundling approach allows us to get a lot of efficiency over say a traditional VPN Another challenge is dealing with errors If you lose a packet in TCP, you have to be sure that you propagate that error back over the satellite link And back over the TCP link, or you end up in these weird unhandled states where one connection thinks it's active And the other two connections think they're dead Finally, it's important to map the TCP traffic that you're extracting to the correct QUICK session and back again So we have to keep track of state using basically an internal data structure Just a little dictionary mapping TCP connections to QUICK connections and back And ensure that's the same about the client side and the server side So that if an error happens, we can correct it on each side There's a lot more information in a paper that's going to be published pretty soon about this at NDSS Which is a system security conference in a month or so Which I'd encourage you to check out if you're kind of interested in the under the hood stuff But also QUICK, the proxy that we built is called QPEP And you can actually play around with it It's open source on GitHub, it's not a commercial product It's just kind of a fun thing I built to kind of play around with these ideas And what I'd really like people to do if you're curious about this stuff is to play around with it yourself QPEP is written in Go and it has a kind of Python Docker based testbed So you can play around with it, you can experiment with it, you can change different parameters Or even design your own proxy in the same environment that we built QPEP And the goal here is to try to think of solutions that allow us to encrypt satellite internet traffic Without requiring any trust in the internet service provider So QPEP's design is made so that an individual can install a client on their home computer And a server somewhere in the cloud and use it just like any other VPN to encrypt their traffic Without waiting for their satellite internet service provider to invest the money Or the time in providing that service offering So this is kind of a quick summary of what it looks like in practice On the right is our tool QPEP Which is kind of that optimized proxy I've been describing And on the left is a traditional VPN, open VPN, which is very secure and it's an excellent product But it doesn't take into account the physical realities of space And you can see the significant performance difference here and why that might matter to a satellite customer And so when we think why is this internet traffic unencrypted, why aren't people taking security seriously It's important to remember that security isn't the only thing that matters to people And finding a way to get rid of choices between security and performance Is perhaps one of the most productive things we can do in bringing encryption and best practices to domains that don't traditionally prioritize those issues If you get rid of the trade-offs, you dramatically increase the incentives to add security to an insecure system So to summarize, a couple of key lessons from this presentation The first is that satellite broadband traffic today is vulnerable to long-range eavesdropping attacks Someone in a different country or a different continent from you can be listening to your satellite internet traffic And you might not even know that they're doing this If you're someone who happens to forget to put your phone into airplane mode When you board a flight and it connects to a femtocell and then you get a text message You may never know that a satellite is involved in sending your traffic But someone else somewhere could and probably is listening to it Additionally, we see that lots and lots of people don't know that satellite broadband traffic is vulnerable Or at least they don't act like it Whether that's a Fortune 500 company, a major airline, an infrastructure provider, or even just a random lawyer in Spain People don't realize that when they send a packet across a satellite link or really across any internet connection There's no guarantee who's listening You might hope it's a government you trust or nobody at all But there's no guarantees anyone could be listening to any data because the internet is kind of this complex web of trust and handoffs In the satellite context specifically, we know that these security vulnerabilities have largely emerged from a false dichotomy A belief that there is a trade-off between performance in satellite networks and privacy A specifically end-to-end encryption And we find that if you take the time to actually engineer a system that considers the physical needs of space as kind of a unique aspect of the problem It becomes very possible to provide encryption and protect against these attacks without harming performance The real problem is when you're not willing to invest the time or the engineering efforts into considering the specifics of space And you just want to slap a VPN on it or require everyone to use TLS even though they'll often forget And in those contexts I think it's important for the security community to step up and try to make it easier to have security However, if there's one lesson that I think is most important from this research And one thing that I think extends way beyond satellite internet specifically It's a very simple statement, which is that the next hop your traffic takes is unknown When you send a packet, it could be handed off through dozens of countries It could pass over a satellite feed, it could be sent via radio antenna The internet is this weird web of kind of trust relationships and half promises And so having the right and the ability and the knowledge to encrypt your traffic is essential to protecting against these kinds of attacks In whatever domain they might happen Thank you so much for listening to this presentation Hopefully you enjoyed it And of course I'm happy to answer any questions during the Q&A session or also via email anytime