Did the United States' unilateral withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal have the sort of domestic as well as external political impact that Donald Trump, when he was leader of the free world, envisaged? Five months after the right-wing elite in Peru, ousted the democratically elected leader Pedro Castillo, are those in power willing to hear the voice of the people? And Hollywood's writers around strike rightfully demanding that they see some of the benefits of the massive profits being made by big studios. But why are the suits in charge in no mood to share? Salams, as always, you're watching The Daily Debrief. We will attempt to answer all of these questions on the show today, so let's get straight into it. On a day like yesterday, five years ago, the Donald Trump administration decided to unilaterally withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, also known as the Iran nuclear deal. This deal, of course, was instrumental in ensuring that Iran is allowed to have a peaceful nuclear program, while also controlling weaponization. Unfortunately, that deal no longer exists. Five years on, we talked to Newspick Editor-in-Chief, Praveer Purkayasa, about whether the U.S. is withdrawal, of course, unilateral, has had the kind of impact that its leadership expected then, both in terms of domestic politics as well as international ramifications. Praveer, welcome back to The Daily Debrief Studios. Like I was saying in the intro, five years have passed since the U.S. unilaterally withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal. It's had all kinds of impacts, but most significantly, as the dynamics in the region change, perhaps as Trump construed it five years ago, it hasn't quite worked out from an American perspective from that angle. We're drawing from the nuclear deal. Yes, US unilateral withdrawal from the nuclear deal has backfired on the United States. One part of it is the sheer fact that today Iran has started the centrifuges again. They were under no bar to do so after Trump withdrew from the deal and the deal was effectively dead because the condition for the deal was that Iran's financial sanctions, the sanctions would be withdrawn. Once that didn't happen, those sanctions actually went back because the West also said, okay, you've started again centrifuging, centrifuges, et cetera, et cetera. So the sanctions were not withdrawn. So effectively, Iran therefore had no bar of purifying uranium to the level that they wanted. Let's face it, they have reached a level of purification of fissile material from which to the centrifuges, they are just a few steps away from getting it to the nuclear grade, weapons grade, already in fact it can be construed to be weapons grade. So just a couple of more steps, it happens. That's also because the nature of the centrifuging process is such that the first concentration of the 20% really requires most of the effort and the most of the energy. After that, successively, it becomes much easier. That's the nature of the physical process itself. So what they have done is they have allowed, therefore, Iran to do what would be called a breakout that if they want to make the bomb, they can do so and they can do so relatively quickly. That is one. Second, it has forced Iran to be self-sufficient in a whole number of different ways. It has spurred the domestic industry therefore to meet a lot of the supplies that they need and also the trade relationship with other countries. Today, Russia being under sanctions, therefore, earlier it's also Russia had actually not put Iran under sanctions, China had trade relations with Iran. So with this kind of scenario emerging, these things have become much more natural for the countries like Russia and China to work more closely with Iran. So given that, the Iran's breakout from sanctions has happened, breakout from the purification embargo that they had themselves accepted has happened. So I think that at the moment Iran has very little to gain further by complying with the demands that are being made on them, going back to again to what Trump withdrew from and Trump's what Trump did in Iran has completely backfired on the United States. We will of course separately at another time look at the domestic political ramifications of this entire process. But essentially what the 12-point agenda that Trump laid out meant was complete political capitulation on the part of Iran. And I suppose that is also similar to the United States' agenda with anyone it considers to be any kind of opposition to its, whether ideologically or militarily or otherwise. In all of that context, how do you look at conversations about Iran joining the S.C.O., Syria getting back into the Arab League and all of these other dynamics that have kind of changed and accelerated after the breakout of the war in Ukraine? You know, it's interesting that you raise the issue of what Trump thought would happen once he broke the Iran agreement, thinking that Iran would capitulate as you said. And proving therefore domestic to his domestic audience that Obama had reached a very bad deal, a much better deal was available. You see, if you see what has happened unfolded in the region after that. As you said, Syria has come back into the Arab fold and also that Iran has now developed relations with Saudi Arabia. So there is a regional correlation of forces which is very different to what Trump had thought he would achieve through the Abraham Accords in which he had managed to get some of the Arab states, countries like Sudan, Morocco also into the fold and tried to build up an Israel, Islamic countries in his books, Arab countries in his books relationship, which if Saudi Arabia had joined the Abraham Accords might have led to a very different correlation for forces. That did not happen and historically that seems to be now dead. So if that is so, then what would really make sense is for the regional parties to try and sort out the differences between themselves and Syria's readmission to the Arab brotherhood shall be say over the steps that is taken is also very, it's very, very important because let's not forget a section of the Arab countries were behind the Islamist forces which had led to the civil war in Syria and the fact that they are now re-admitting Syria means that their support to the Islamic forces, now Islamist forces, I would not really call them Islamic forces, they are really those which would be outliers completely in Islamic society as well, so extreme right wing forces, which the United States had also backed. So all that with some of the Gulf monarchies backing them, Saudis backing them, they had a great amount of disruptive power in Syria, which now has almost folded up. But you know the problem is spoiler in the region still is in the United States because they hold 30% of Syria's re-resourced area and that is their oil resources, of course they hold it in the name of the courts but really it's Americans who are there. So all this realignment that is taking place I think you'll see weakening of United States influence in the region and Israel being more and more isolated in the region, which is what seems to be happening. And lastly if we can a quick word on the US's other allies who entered into this deal alongside them and who have the European Union for example, their diplomatic chief was right till the end, hopeful that the deal can be renegotiated, re-entered into, because it does have an impact on global energy security as well in terms of how these countries can operate. In that sense have they been left in the lurch by the leader of the gang as it were? Let's face facts the United States has left them in the lurch a number of times, but unfortunately given the correlation of forces globally they don't seem to have any autonomy left now. So these of you know the goal is long over and you don't see that even the kind of social democratic political power that Willy Brandt had and the kind of position the Germany could take even that doesn't seem to be at the moment in the picture. So you have a European Union very much toothless against the senior partner the United States even when they disagree with them they don't seem to have any leverage over the policies. And we can think about the Iran deal, the Trump's withdrawal from it and Biden's inability to reinstate the Obama deal as something which is being held hostage by the domestic politics that United States domestic politics decides this foreign policy. Well I guess any country's foreign policy is also deflection of the domestic politics. In the case of European Union what or both correctly Germany and France which are the two big countries what is their importance what is their internal politics what is their external politics at the moment is not clear to any of us because what we see is confused politics whether it was the issue of Iran or whether it's the issue of Ukraine from minks accords to you know backing Ukraine whole hint saying we were really buying time for Ukraine so whether they have an independent politics to can they assert it that's a question still to be determined and it will I guess depend large part on what the European people of these countries the European countries what do they feel are the urgent issues if they are completely shall we say held hostage by their media which has a very different view of the world then what rest of the world seems to feel then I think we have the European countries are going to become really what shall we say camp followers camp followers of the United States and it doesn't augur well for them we've seen in fact people come out and say what is important to them across Europe whether it's the healthcare workers striking in the United Kingdom protests against the pension reforms in France etc etc and of course the inflation situation that is all across the continent so clearly there are issues that are domestically important to the people but yeah like you pointed out governments and the media seem to be on a different track thanks very much for me for joining us as always it's been five months since Pedro Castillo was dramatically removed in what has been called an institutional coup against his legally democratically elected government he has been in detention ever since there have been mass protests in the country which were responded to with massive oppression by state security forces including massacres in several parts of the country particularly of Peru's indigenous peoples Zoe Alexander has been covering of course covers Latin America for people's dispatch and has been reporting from Peru during this period as well as before it and joins us now via video conference for updates on the situation Zoe first up bring us up to speed please on what's been happening over this period yes well it has been exactly just over five months since Pedro Castillo was overthrown in a coup d'etat and Dina Valuarte was sworn in as a de facto president and since then Peru has been undergoing a very very deep institutional political and social crisis largely due to the massive protests that took place against the coup and so this happened again on December 7th 2022 and immediately after Pedro Castillo was you know taken out of power arrested and sent to prison people began to flood the streets in rejection of what they saw as the undermining of their political vote and undermining of the political sovereignty of the political system and really just in a rejection to all of the moves by the right wing elites in the country to prevent really the voice of the people from being in power and since then there were weeks and weeks months of protests against this coup regime against all of the actions that it was taking and these massive protests in all parts of the country were met with heavy heavy heavy repression the the military was deployed in several cities especially in the rural areas in the south where communities of peasants of people who are engaged in mining activities of different sectors of rural society a lot of teachers engaged as well youth were on the highways were on the roads were on in the plazas and many of them also actually went to the airports and blocked the airports to intensify their protests and in several instances and specifically in the example of Ayacucho their protests at the airport was met again with extremely violent repression live bullets fired on protesters several massacres occurred during this time period during this mass mobilization massacres which have been meticulously documented by independent media by international human rights organizations there's an estimated at least 60 people were killed in this period since December 7th till today 60 protesters people who just went to the streets trying to participate trying to raise their voices against what happened and were met with this face so again since December 7th there was this mass mass mass uprising in the last couple of months maybe six weeks in in April and you know some of March these these protests has really quieted down the tactic of kind of just forcing people to withstand all of this repression and having to go onto the streets day after day after day and really giving no signs of any victories of course more people out and so there is kind of a dip in the protests now there were also efforts made in the legislative body to advance some of the demands that were raised by the protesters on the street which are very diverse and demand the disillusion of the congress the immediate renunciation of the new constitution amongst other demands and these were also brought into the legislative body as I mentioned but again a lot of these were not successful so that's essentially what's been happening in these five months since Pedro Castillo was overthrown a very difficult situation for the people of Peru right now there have been legitimate challenges to Dina Boloate's continuity how is the demand for change playing out after what we were mentioning the brutal repression of popular protests that emerged after Castillo was ousted so as I said one of the key demands of protesters on the streets was that Dina Boloate resigned they say that she's not constitutionally legal as she took office following an illegal coup and furthermore many people alleged that she completely has betrayed of course the ticket she was elected on she was elected to serve with Pedro Castillo and of course she is completely turned against him and and the progressive values that they ran on so many say that her position and that her role as president is completely legitimate and this again has been a demand raised on the streets but also as I mentioned before it has been raised in in the parliament and so there were many attempts by the block of progressive legislators to try to push forward the elections again the elections in Peru will be held normally in 2026 and so during this first month of the institutional crisis there are many many attempts to try to get elections held in 2024 progressives were demanding that they be held in 2023 and now as of now neither of these two options have actually been successful and so recently Dina Boloate was quoted saying that the elections will happen in 2026 as it should be according to the constitution so while this does remain a principal demand of people on the streets and has only increased in relevance especially given the brutal repression that has been unleashed against protesters during her time in office you know essentially she is now de facto in power and doesn't look like she's going to be leaving anytime soon she has support of course not of progressives but of major center and right wing parties they're completely happy with her being in office as she's sort of implementing their their desires and has not gone against the right wing since being sworn in so as of now despite the very very strong battle that was waged on the street calling for her to be to resign the battle in parliament it seems that as of now elections will likely be held only in 2026 thanks very much for that Zoe and finally Natalia Marquez our North America correspondent has been looking at the writer's guild of America which is on strike it's been on strike for a while now demanding that the wages and work conditions of the writers who write big television shows big studio productions movies as well share some of the massive profits that these big studios have made over the course of the past few years particularly with the introduction of new technology they're talking about regulation of or at least proper use of artificial intelligence when it comes to the writing of shows and other kinds of media television productions and of course demanding a greater share in the profits that rightly they contribute massively to Natalia has been covering the protest has also written for people's dispatch on the subject and joins us now via video conference Natalia the impoverished writer is a trope that Hollywood seems to have internalized in this case where does the strike stand as of now so right now over 11,000 tv and film writers have completed over a week of striking on May 1st the writer's guild of America announced that they would strike because writers in studios were unable to reach an agreement on key proposals but the central reason and the larger context of the issue is really that um you know studios big studios like netflix like NBC universal have made enormous profits over the past years from streaming but writers have really yet to see any of those profits go to their wages and be properly compensated for the work that they do so the writer's guild of America which is organizing these 11,500 writers writes that in 2000 the combined entertainment profits of disney fox paramount NBC universal and time Warner amounted to approximately five billion but just 19 years later um adding in netflix the profits of big studios were um uh about 30 billion out of more than 50 billion in total company profits um and entertainment profits were estimated to be more than 20 billion in 2021 so essentially the profits of large studios have skyrocketed but writers um want to see that reflected in their wages and the compensation that they get um but you know so far that has not happened um so writers in the writer's guild of America are demanding um more job security um you know protections and regulations of the artificial intelligence technology that some studios are starting to use um and higher wages of course big Hollywood studios are in no mood to share any of those profits that you know they are raking in the growth and revenue perhaps they are not attributing it enough to the writers or whatever the other reasons are uh negotiations between the two sides have broken down and Natalia what what what is sort of the reasoning that studios have given for this breakdown in talks and for being unwilling to listen to what the writers are asking for so you know according to the studios um their writers simply have too many demands right they're referencing this magnitude of proposals um essentially saying that they cannot afford to give writers um the demands that they need um but writers have pointed out some of the hypocrisy in this argument because you know um they're spending 19 billion dollars a year on making new shows they're buying other companies they're leveraging debt um you know they're making a lot of money and so these demands which the writers have um calculated will add up to about 429 million per year um which is nowhere near the sort of profits that these studios are making um writers are arguing that that's a reasonable demand um but the studio only you know rejected many proposals um including you know minimum staff guarantees you know requiring studios to employ like a minimum amount of um writers on a show and really low bald the writers on things like demands for minimum pay increases um and so the wga has calculated that the studios counter offers um will only amount to 86 million per year far cry from the 429 million that writers are demanding um but they you know there's a lot of solidarity on the picket line actors are are picketing in solidarity teamsters are picketing in solidarity um other unions so essentially from every level of production workers are in solidarity with the writers in the entertainment industry um celebrities have come out in support so essentially um that's where the strike is now um and we'll have to wait and see where it right that's a wrap on this episode of the daily debrief you have of course been watching people's dispatch uh as always we invite you to head to our website peoplesdispatch.org for more details on these stories and the rest of the work we do don't also forget to follow us on social media platforms we're on facebook twitter instagram etc follow us for updates as well as to get in touch with us for your feedback and comments on the work we do we'll be back with another episode tomorrow same time same place until then thank you for watching goodbye


Wow, you okay with that?   Yep, you're good at can do. Today, we'll be reacting to a film called Air Lift. Yes. What do you think Air Lift is about? Well, it's either about people who get rescued from accidents by helicopters or a new kind of procedure for your face. It just lifts you up. Yes, it's an air lift. With the air? They stick a thing in and go... This is very requested. Like I said, we try to get to them all as soon as possible. Yes, we do. So, give us time! Take a chill pill! Here we go. Hello, Ministry of External Affairs. I'm Ranjeet Katyal from Kuwait. Yes? I wanted to talk about the situation in Kuwait. We need help. And we need it right now.  In front of my eyes, my driver was shot in the face of a 16-year-old Iraqi soldier. He took me to the hospital and took me away. I don't get it. I don't get it. Is the Iraqi Major doing friendship with me or was he threatening me? Okay, hey. When you take this and leave, if you get involved in social work, you'll get stuck, Mr. Ranjeet. I'm not going to get stuck. Let's just leave. Just get us out of here. I have to get out of here too. But after the agreement, I just want to say that we're not Indians. If we're together, then there's something. We're talking about the reports. We're talking about the reports. We're talking about the reports. It's not possible. I know. Mr. Koli, do what you have to do. Because we're doing it too. So, what do you want to ask Delhi? There are many people here who didn't have Delhi for 10 days. How did you understand your country? My country is like Abraham. When I was young, my mother used to yell at me. I know. I couldn't find him anywhere. Right. So, do not be mad at me in the comment section. Right. I'm going to say, where are the sound daddies? You guys wanted me to watch this, and there were none. There were none. But even still, I was very interested. Very. And I'm thankful that it is. And thank you for all the comments for those of you who have explained how there's this blend of languages and clearly this one has that as well, where there's a blend of English and other languages. And yeah, it synopsis, because obviously this is based on true events that took place when Iraq invaded Kuwait, which obviously is a big deal from an American standpoint. I can tell you right now we don't know the story. No, obviously we clearly do not know about what happened here from the Indian vantage point. Because we're so American focused. We don't pay attention to the rest of the world a lot of the time. An Indian businessman leads a happy and successful life in Kuwait with his family. However, when Iraq invades Kuwait, he decides to risk his life to save a stranded countryman. And I guess the air lift is he's going to get the Indians who are there with him and have been living in Kuwait, he's going to get them out. This was obviously before America went in and they got to get out because the Iraqis are in there killing everybody. I'm guessing it's a true story as well. Yeah, it's said based on true events. You know what it kind of reminds me of? What? When I was watching it, it kind of reminded me it's a totally different era, but it's a very similar kind of thing of Schindler's List. Where you have a guy who is just not interested in anything but himself, and then it becomes personal, and then he realizes that people are important. Are we pretty accurate in that? It looks quite interesting though. I mean, with no subtitles, I was engaged the whole thing. The acting seemed to be a little bit different. The acting seemed top-notch. Very much. In fact, this is one of the first ones we've seen where it spurred some thoughts on me about the way that they approach acting, which is a whole other subject. But I'd really like to know in America we have very specific things that actors talk about. Stanislavski, Strasberg, Meisner, Udohagen, Stella Adler. Is that familiar to Indian actors as well? Method acting, process, whatever is done. Because that acting in there, like most of the things we've seen, but that one in particular, I would assume so. I would assume so, as well. Hollywood was like the first ones, wasn't it? Well, to create method, it came from us. Yeah. So, I would assume so. Yeah! Yeah! America! America!


Hi there everybody, that's quite an introduction to Liverpool too, but what I'm going to do today is talk a bit about data security but not in the traditional way. So I'll come to that a bit more in a minute but it takes, it can take about five minutes to get a WordPress site up and running these days. Very simple, very quick but it's easy when we're doing things out quickly to lose sight that we've got anywhere between one and thousands of users that are using that site that we've just created. And we have a responsibility to ensure that the data we capture within that site is looked after. GDPR has sort of brought that into legislation but some of the things I'm going to talk about today, although GDPR implies some of it, it doesn't actually explicitly talk about it, but it's also stuff that we need to look after. So the way I'm going to do this, I'm going to follow how our data flows through the system from the point of the user onwards. So, why me? Well, I've been in IT since 1977. During that time, I've done pretty much every role within IT, technical support, add them at the bottom, I'm now a project manager, I've done DBA work, development work, wherever, and just to put that data into perspective, that's six years before the internet, that's eight years before mobile phones, that's 11 years before laptops, that's 17 years before the web and 26 years before WordPress. In other words, I'm old. But it doesn't mean to say, I've seen a fair bit. The things we need to think about, why shouldn't we really care about user's data? Well, it's the right thing to do, and now that's been put into legislation with GDPR, sort of bolster that feeling up. It's important that we remember that we subcontract responsibility sometimes to the parties. We'll look at that in a minute. But when we do that, we're not subcontracting our accountability. We're still accountable for our websites. We need to ask questions of those people that we subcontracted to make sure that they are going to protect our user's data in the way we need them to and the way our customers would expect us to do on our own. So, I'm not going to go into the GDPR side of things. Heather was on earlier before me. We've got this great new feature within WordPress as of the latest release, which gives us the privacy policy. It's absolutely brilliant. And there are loads of thoughts on WordPress TV from Heather all about GDPR. Pick one. Any one of them is great. And I'm not going to talk about the traditional stuff about security. It's these viruses, hacking, security plugins and all that sort of stuff. If you want to know about that, I really recommend you go to WordPress TV again and look at a talk from Tim Nash. He does a great talk on all of that stuff. So, let's start our journey. First of all, we start with our users and their devices. We have no control over this at all. We have no way of knowing what the users will get up to and, believe me, they can get up to pretty much anything. So, we'll leave that bit alone because we can't control it. First stop on our user's data when we get our visitors coming into our website is the data centre. Now, these days, data centres are either one of two things. They're either a very large data centre that's sitting as a cloud service, AKA Amazon, Microsoft. But it could be a bespoke data centre that's being used. People like Rackspace, UK Fast, Telehouse or Blade Room. The important thing about this is or the important information we need to be conscious of is where that data centre is because where that data centre is is likely to impact what the legal jurisdiction is that governs that data centre. For instance, if that data centre is in the US and the people who earn it are part of the privacy shield, more about that later, that's probably okay. However, if that data centre is somewhere in the Far East, then what level of security and privacy and care are they obliged to look to use for our data? The other thing is, who owns the infrastructure within that data centre? Because that again decides who may have access to that information. So for instance, if somebody in government nefariously decided that they wanted to collect data about voters who voted against them in a recent election, so that would take action against them in some way or target them in some way, would where the data centre infrastructure, who own the data centre infrastructure, mean that that owner would have to give up that data to whoever it is asking for it. Now, it's not going to happen right, it's very unlikely to hold that thought. When it comes to, I'll just mention privacy shield, but there's also something in EU legislation called ADICUSA. And the EU has listed a series of countries that are deemed to have privacy legislation that meets EU requirements. So there's the list as it stands at the moment. You'll notice that the US is in there, but it's limited to something called the privacy shield framework. I'll have a look at that in just a minute. What we'll see is that that means it's not the whole of the US, it's a subset thereof. So privacy shield, who remembers something called safe harbour? Safe harbour was an agreement that the EU had with the US, where the US says, yeah, Europe, we understand that you've got all these privacy requirements. We will actually set some income called safe harbour, which says we will adhere to your privacy level of legislation if we're going to do business with you guys. Well, basically the US troddle over it, the EU, through the ties that the promise says.  So it's all over. You know, we're not going to allow data to be exported out to you anymore. So the US says, well, hold on, we'll get something in place. Let us carry on for a little bit with us while we get out of some order. And what came out of that was privacy shield. Now, there's a few things to remember about privacy shield. A, it only employs to the US. B, it only employs to specific companies in the US that sign up to the privacy shield. And those companies self certify themselves. Nobody comes along and says, right, give me your documentation, let's see whether you comply or not. Now, they basically add themselves to the list and say, yeah, we'll comply, but be fine. The only way that they will be reviewed is if somebody makes a complaint against them, or if something happens to actually bring them to the attention of the US government in terms of breaking the privacy shield improvements. As of today, I believe this was, as of a few weeks ago, there was 2,739 companies certified by the US. It's a department of commerce within the US that looks after them. And you can go and look at those, that list of companies at any time, just by going to the privacy shield site and going to the list. They're easy to find. It's not completely bought into by everybody in the EU. There's a group called the WP29 committee. It looks at this and they are not completely happy with the whole thing. They feel that the way the privacy shield requires people to look after particularly human resource data is too lax and needs beefing up. There will be ongoing discussions around this, but right now it's the best we've got in terms of dealing with companies in the US. Just to put that in context, those of you that's got data sitting out there with Dropbox, with Mailchip, with Microsoft, with Apple, so they fit into the privacy shield requirements. And you'll find that pretty much all in there. It's interesting to see who's in there. It's interesting to see who's not in there. If he's out, check the list. This business about some political party wanting to find out about their voters and insisting that a data centre gives up the information, what happened? The US department told Facebook they wanted details of everybody one day. They told them they wanted full details of a Facebook site where the owners were putting out anti-Trump messages during the election. They felt that there might have been some election ringing going on in some way, shape or form. They weren't exactly clear about how that might have come about or whatever. And so if you can sort of see it, somebody's got a site that's basically trying to influence a voting or an election, it wasn't just the owners of that Facebook site that the Trump administration was demanding. It was everybody who liked that site. So if somebody might have posted up a humorous comment on that site and you found it funny and, ah, I like that, that might have been your details that Facebook was giving up as being connected with that website. The next one I just want to talk about is that the Department of Justice says that it can demand every email from any US-based provider regardless of where the data centre is. It's a pertinent one for this meeting because it was all about information about a particular person that was of interest regarding drugs and their data was sitting on the Microsoft Irish data centre. And the Department of Justice says, no, your HQ is in the US, therefore you'll fall under US legislation. Therefore we demand you give up that data. Microsoft fought against it. It went to court in 2014. The FBI used the law data from 1986 to still communication apps to ask for the emails. Microsoft said no. But hundreds if not thousands of investigations in terrorism and child pornography will be hampered by the government's inability to obtain electronic evidence if you go down this route. Which means they basically sort of lost, Microsoft sort of lost. However, they didn't let it go. They are appealing and the Supreme Court issued a rixing kind of judicial review in October 2017 and the case will be heard again later this year or it shouldn't be heard again later this year. But you just have to show, right? You've got a company that's in the privacy shield. You've got a data centre that's sitting in Europe and you've got a political regime or a legislative organisation that's insisting that none of the EU legislation applies in this instance. So this is why we need to be careful about where our data centres are, which jurisdiction they fall into and who owns that infrastructure within the data centre because all of those things can cause ad users data to be insisted upon by somebody that you weren't expecting. It's not about whether it's right or not, it's about what our customers expect. It's the expectations we need to satisfy. So that's the data centre. The next place on our journey is the host. Because generally what will happen is, if we come back at it from the other way, we will ask a host to host our website. The host will then have a data centre where they put the data. Once again, the location of that host and the jurisdiction it falls into is just as important as where the data centre is because they have control over our data within that data centre. We generally don't have direct access into the data centre. We get through our host or our host systems one by shape or another. So, what is it we should be looking at when we look for a host? The things I look for are, do they provide SSL certificates on RA3? I've recently moved from a website provider simply because they wanted a 60-pound certificate for an SSL certificate. It's ridiculous. These days, you've got an open source organisation called Let's Encrypt. They offer SSL certificates to anybody who wants them free of charge or any hosting company free of charge and lots of hosting companies will provide that onto their customers free of charge. There's no reason we should be paying for SSL certificates these days. Does everybody know what an SSL certificate is and what it does? Hands up if you don't. SSL certificate, when you go to a website, you see a little padlock that turns up and it starts HTTPS instead of HTTPS. That means your data is encrypted over the network. To do that, you need a certificate to initiate that and that's what the SSL certificate is. First, the host provides SFTP and SSH access. When we want to load up changes to our WordPress code, the way we want to do that is through the file transfer mechanism. SFTP is the secure version of a file transfer mechanism. SSH gives the same secure access to the command line within the operating system that's running our WordPress. Why on earth will we need access to the command line? Well, if we want to use this little guy down here, WPCLI, the CLI stands for command line interface. So you need to be able to get to the command line in order to use WPCLI. Why would you want to use WPCLI? All sorts of things. One of the talks earlier on was talking about being able to disable plug-ins when you've got a white screen, if that's what's caused it. Do all sorts of things on a command line interface when your UI is completely dead in the water? Plus, it's a great way of automating stuff. You can run scripts from the command line interface, which means you can automate things. Brilliant. So do they give you SSH access into that? What backups facilities are provided by the host? Do you want to use them? If you do, where are they stored? An interesting thing, I had a quick look at the terminal conditions of mine, hosting provider. When it came to backups, I found this little statement in the terminal conditions. Hosting provider shall not be responsible, nor liable for any loss of damage, cost or expenses or other claims house, river arising for compensation for any data, file or other material being damaged, corrupted or otherwise affected.  Did you know there might be something in you? There's a condition that says that if we lose all your backup data, nothing to do with us, pal. Can't hold us responsible. Now, I'm not worried. I don't keep any of my backups with my host. Because if my host goes down, how do I get to my backups? What does that mean for me? If my host goes to another host, if again you look into the terminal conditions of this host, it talks about it being reasonable that they get 30 days to get your system back up and going in extreme cases. Am I waiting to wait 30 days to get my websites back up and running? No, I'll go to another host even if it's only temporarily. I can't do that if I can't get to my backups to restore them somewhere else. When I went looking for a new hosting company, the way I did it was I made a list of the questions I wanted to ask. I went to WordCamp London and I was a learned host there and I went round and asked them every question I wanted to ask. It was brilliant. By the end of the WordCamp, I not only found a host that I liked that gave me all the answers I wanted to the questions I was asking, but that helped me migrate my first three sites over to them before I left the conference. WordCamp is fantastic. Yes? Are you going to tell us who that host is? Thank you? No, not in the room, be cool. 34 SP. I use those guys anyway. That's why you didn't know what he said. No, I didn't know what he said. I'm sure, actually, if push came to shove, they wouldn't hang off that because that's such great guys. I want to just give you a quick story. I'm going to speed this up a bit because I'm starting to get some rewind-type things. I found this little notice in a host. Now, if you sell, the story behind this was an illustration of something that happened to me. I was being, one of my sites being hosted by a friend who used a third party host for multiple hosting facilities, and that host decided there was unusual traffic coming from my website. So, they closed my website then because they didn't want to take up all their bandwidth, because, for a host, that's their most expensive commodity, the bandwidth. So, anybody who gets unusual traffic, they close them down until they figure out what's going on, and then they protect everybody else from that problem. The problem was, I didn't just shut my site down. I didn't just shut my account. The VM that I got all my sites on, was a whole server down. So, my friend that was hosting something like a dozen different clients on that server lost everybody on that server. And, it all turned out after a weekend of badgering because they wouldn't give us, give him access to look at the logs to try and find out what was wrong, because the server was closed off to it, and they couldn't find out who had actually the unusual activity, or where the problem had been logged in their fault logging system, I actually found out that there wasn't any unusual activities at all. Somebody had just been a bit overzealous, pulled a plug on us, and it was out for a weekend. The moral of this story is, it's not whether or not they pulled a plug on you, because they will. You're not going to get away from that. It's how they handle that. We were informed. The first thing we knew about it was that when I tried to get to my site, it wasn't there, I found out my friend says, where's my site gone? Then he phoned them on and said, oh yeah, we took it down three hours ago. So, they didn't tell us, they took the whole server out, they wouldn't let us look at the logs to fix it, so we didn't know what was going on, so we could fix that. It's not whether you have a problem, it's how they deal with the problem. So, finally, the last step in our data journey is the cloud. Right. Hands up anybody in this room that doesn't use the cloud to hold data. Yeah, that's where I thought. So, once again, it's a bit like the hosting side of things, but there's a couple of extra things to think about here. When you use your cloud service to store your data, is it encrypted? If it is encrypted, is it just encrypted on their server or is it encrypted from your client? Right. Dropbox, I don't know whether they still do it or whether they've closed it off now, but certainly a year ago, it was encrypted on their server side, but everything went in plain from your client through to Dropbox. So, all that thinking that goes on in Dropbox, all done in the clear, over the network, and only gets encrypted when they get the other end. Oh, by the way, their staff at the other end have access to the encryption keys. So, if they're asked to give up data by their government, they can't say they can't do it because they have access to the encryption keys. It's not true of all cloud services. There is a particular one called treasurit, which is based out of Switzerland that encrypts at the client end as well, and they basically just put their hands on. If anybody asks them for access to the data, don't ask us. If we haven't got the keys, we can't give it you. The problem is, if you go to a service like that, you're responsible for the encryption key. You lose that encryption key, you've lost all your data, because they don't know it. You're the only person who does. What back officers isn't provided by your cloud storage provider? Dropbox? Well, it's in versioning. So, you go back a number of versions with Dropbox. Let's get one thing straight. That's not a backup. Right?  If you need to go back further, you've had it. The other thing is, that I had it just a few minutes ago, is that they provided a data protection agreement. Conversations I was having a couple of months ago, and looking at the forums with Dropbox, it will suggest that if you haven't got a business account with Dropbox, that doesn't include plus. It doesn't include standard. They will not give you a data processing agreement, which you need if you are storing data on their cloud services and the GDPR. Of course, the thing about a cloud is you never quite sure where it is, where that data is. On the backup side of things, some other questions to ask yourself is what format are your backups in? Is it standard, like R-Sync, Zip, SQL, or is it in a proprietary format? If it's in a proprietary format, if your host or your backup software has a problem, go south, can you still get to your backups? Have you got some sort of software that I've given you to be able to get to it? If you've got to move your data somewhere else, does the receiving system support the format that you've got it in? Have you tested your backups? As an old saying in IT is if you've got a backup, it's not tested in any backup. So, have you got some where you can test it? An old PC where you can put a local copy of WordPress, try restoring it to that virtual machine? There's lots of ways you can do it. Some hosts, like the one that I'm with, provides actually a staging area for in charge where you can actually do that sort of restore. Almost finally, make a plan. So, if something does go wrong, make a plan of what you're going to do about it. When you make that plan, consider a number of things. Passwords. Right? Does whoever's going to restore your system or you or somebody else know the passwords. Emails. Will you lose your emails at the same time as you'll lose your WordPress site? Can you get messages out to your customers? Can they get messages to you? Is your domain name service with the host that's just gone bank? Which means you're going to have all sorts of grief moving that service to somebody else. Like possible, which is a pain. Will you be available or will you as a WordPress person who earns an absolute fortune sitting on a beach in Mauritius for three weeks as part of you four holidays a year when it all goes bank and you can't get back or don't even know time. Have you got a communication plan? What happens to the data that's between you losing that system and your last backup? If you've got an e-commerce site and you're taking thousands of transactions a day or even a week if it's been a week since you took your last backup what are you going to do about those transactions you've just lost? What's your plan to keep your customers happy? You can't plan for every event so you need some sort of backstop plan to deal with your unexpected. But that's all heavy stuff and you know that's some dead time is it? It's not because once you've got a plan you can market it share your plan with customers and visitors. If you've got a privacy policy you can stick it in there you can tell everybody just how great you are looking after their data it also means you can set service levels with customers and get them to pay a premium for those service levels because you're offering to me and peddwchers may not So just to recap we've got three real places we should be looking at taking care of our customers' data there's the data centre and that's where we should be looking at where that is and what jurisdiction it comes into the host do they have access to your data do they provide SSH do they provide SFTP and SSH do they provide WPCLI what jurisdiction do they fall under and then your own data have you got encryption sorted out do you know what version recovery you've got and what restrictions are around that and have you plans to sort it out Finally I'm going to read you a poem If you know where about your backups are when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on the host If you can trust your recovery plan when all that what to do but make allowance for unexpected issues too If you can be calm and communicate while recovering or being shouted at have all the answers or be hassled don't give ways of panicking and yet don't look too good nor blame it on others If you can talk with support and keep your pride or walk with techies and touch If neither data loss nor recovery format can hurt you if all customers can't with you but none too much If you can fill the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds worth of data recovered yours is the website and everything that's in it and which is more you'll still be in business my son Apologies to reject completely So that's me If it needs any one of those places I hope you enjoy it Thank you