My name is Aaron. I work on the Containers Team at Microsoft Azure. I'm also a lead on the Service Catalog Special Interest Group. So let's get into it. First of all, why are we all here? So first of all, obviously, we're at this conference because we're interested in Kubernetes or Cloud-native technologies in general. But also specific to Kubernetes, we know that Kubernetes is moving blazingly fast, in a bunch of different dimensions. Its usage is growing day-by-day like gangbusters. If you follow Kubernetes development, both in the core and adjacent projects, that's moving incredibly fast and increasing. The number of projects both in and out of Kubernetes are exploding as well. So basically, this speed of development, this speed of features is outpacing the knowledge that we've built in order to figure out how to use this stuff. That's why we're here today at this talk. So put a little Wild West reference in there. So Clint Eastwood, you imagine, he's got like a Kubernetes cluster in the saloon behind him. He's trying to figure out how to build an app for that. So what does that really look like? If you were at Brandon Burns' keynote at the end of the day yesterday, you probably saw something a little bit like this. He said what I'm about to say. You got to figure out all this stuff, all the first two rows in order to just get your app into let's just say staging, not even production. You got a new development test cycle. You got to figure out what is a container, how do I containerize my app, what does that even mean? You got to figure out what a registry is and how do I push to it. You got to figure out how to change your CI CD or build a brand new CI CD so that you can test this stuff on the target platform, which is Kubernetes. Then you've got to figure out what is your staging, prod, pre-prod, whatever the stuff you do before you get to prod, what does that look like. Then you might want to take a breath, but your app's in prod and you've got to figure out all the stuff in the bottom row. How do you do monitoring in this new world? How do you trace requests in this new world? How do you do logging, observability, resilience, so on and so forth, auto-scaling is another big one. These are all new things in the cloud native and Kubernetes world that you have to figure out. So it's no wonder that a lot of times I see people coming into Kubernetes that are super excited about it as they should be, but this is a real turnoff. It's really difficult to get started because there's this massive wall in front of you. Needless to say, there's a lot to figure out, but we've got another layer to this issue, to this problem, this challenge that we need to solve, which is that everybody's different.  Can't say, this is how you do X, this is how you do Dev, this is how you do test, this is what every deployment should look like, and you're done because every organization has different needs, and these are wildly different needs. I've gone and I've talked to quite a few different organizations and seen how different the needs are. There's things like security and topology, there's failover, there's disaster recovery, the list goes on. So this is why if you read the abstract, I called this talk and what I want to get out of this talk, the North Star. So this is an aspirational goal. This is what we want to tell people our best practices for building a CloudNative app. So this is what I see is the North Star. What should we get after we say we have a North Star for Kubernetes? So we want some kind of a document that helps app operators and app developers, those could be the same person or the same group. We want to help those people decide what to do. Should they adopt a new technology? Should they use that new beta API in Kubernetes? How should they scale their app and so on? We know already that the technology is moving blazingly fast. So we want this North Star to stand up to that speed. So in a month when features X, Y, and Z are out and stable, we don't want this document to be obsolete. And then finally one that's near and dear to my heart as a SIG lead is I want this thing and I think we all probably want this thing to guide the SIGs so that they build the right stuff for us, for us being app developers, app operators. And again I want to stress that I don't think these things should be rules. I think they should be best practices so that organizations can pick and choose what they want to bring into their app, what kind of practices they want to bring into their app and massage them a little bit to fit their use case. So let's look at what we have now so far. There's a lot of strong opinions inside of the Kubernetes development community and outside and that's a great thing. We've got a ton of evidence because people are actually using this stuff. We see how people are using, we see the best practices that they have inside their organization. And also, as I said, since everybody's doing something a little bit different, we've got fragmentation. And that's actually a good thing. I'll touch on that at the end. But in general, we might see this word fragmentation and it might be, we associate it with doing garbage collection on our disk or something like that. In this case, that's not a bad thing. So why am I the person to say what these best practices are? Well, I'm not. I'm not the definitive guide. But I have seen deployments here and there all over the place. I've seen good deployments. I've seen bad deployments. I've seen good deployments that have some bad practices in their app. I've seen vice versa, right? So this is kind of the, I've seen some things style slide. And I am here to propose some ideas. We're gonna get into the ideas right after the slide, I believe. So I'm here to propose some ideas for these best practices based on what I've seen. So here's the first idea. This is all about observability. So did anyone go so far in this conference to service mesh talk, Envoy, Istio, something like that? Cool. That's kind of the so hot right now deal, right? Service meshes, this is the year or at least half a year of the service mesh. We've got Envoy. I forgot the name, but that new thing that starts with a C. We've got Istio, Linkerdee, so on. The list goes on. That is a big part of the observability puzzle, but there's more, right? So first of all, some obvious things on the top two little stars there. We know that Kubernetes is this always on system that always is looking at your container, your pods and scheduling them, right? And in order to do that, it has to figure out what's going on with them. Are they crashing? Are they using too much memory? Are they swapping, so on, right? And that's what it needs to do is job. But in order for you to do your job, you need to observe those containers in production as well, right? So time and time again, I've seen apps and specifically a few pods in the app just kind of limp along, right? They keep restarting, they keep using too much memory, they keep pegging CPU, right? You don't really know why. You can't really attach a debugger to a pod, okay? You don't really know why. So you need to be proactive in what kinds of information are coming out of that pod, right? Okay, so let's cover the first half. Kubernetes observing your app, right? Here are some concrete things that you can do, fairly simple things that you can do to tell Kubernetes what your app needs so that it can observe your pods more effectively and therefore schedule your pods more effectively, okay? So you can give resource limits in your manifests. That one is a super easy win because if you tell Kubernetes, I need this much CPU, I need this much memory, it has a lot more insight into where it can put your pod in the cluster, right? Even better, you can give Kubernetes readiness and liveness checks. There's a little bit of implementation in your app but that allows Kubernetes to introspect your app way more deeply and that's way more powerful than just telling Kubernetes statically, this is what I need, right? And those things kind of enable horizontal pod autoscaling, right? So if Kubernetes knows exactly what's happening with your pods and it knows exactly the criteria you want to automatically scale horizontally those pods, then you just flip a switch and Kubernetes now takes over your app and now all of a sudden your app can tolerate like the massive spike during Black Friday, let's say something like that, okay? Now this is the other side of the coin. Once Kubernetes is taking action on your pods, how do you know what the hell's going on, right? Okay, now the reason that we have this rich ecosystem, NCNCF with all these awesome projects that do great observability things is because we've got this new paradigm of bunches of pods running and you don't really know what's going on inside those pods. Sometimes you don't even know how many there are, right? So we've got tools for logging, we've got tools, service mesh tools, we all know about that, right? We've got tools for tracing. Did anybody go to a tracing workshop? Only a few? It would be sort of the year of tracing. But lean to say these are all sort of tools that you should proactively, at least it's the best practice to proactively put into your deployments so that at any time during your pod or your app's existence you can introspect exactly what's going on, okay? So you can see are there network calls that are too slow? You can see is there a circuit breaker open? Is there a service that's down? Is data getting corrupted? Are crazy logs coming out of one of your pods, okay? And by the way, there are NCNCF projects to cover each one of these things, logging, service mesh and tracing. Okay, next idea. When all else fails, crash. So has anybody heard of or written Erlang before? The programming language? Cool, that's a lot more than I thought. Awesome. So Erlang has this principle called crash only, right? Crash only means that if you crash your software, something goes wrong and something else will restart it. So in Erlang there's this thing called a supervisor that runs above your software and it always is watching, right? This might sound familiar because Kubernetes kinda does the same thing. So the supervisor's always watching and the best practice in Erlang is if something goes wrong, just crash. And the supervisor will give you another chance because it'll restart you, okay? Now in a distributed system that runs in Kubernetes, things happen, right? You'll probably deploy a bug at some point in your app's life cycle. What I've learned in running apps on the cloud is that the network is always out. The network is always down. Murphy's Law will take effect and the minute you've run your app for maybe a month, the network will go down. Same thing with disk. You will effectively swap after about a month, at least on one of your pods, okay? Every deployment I've seen after a month, on average that happens at least six times. I actually did the math, okay? Kubernetes is that supervisor, right? It is the thing that's always on, always watching and I have written probably 10, maybe 15 times, a retry loop, right? I've tried to retry a connection pool to the database. I've tried retrying connections to microservices, retrying connections to cloud services. I'm just done, right? Writing those loops is extra logic in your app that you have to test, right?  So instead of that, I've given up, right? I've passed the work off to someone else, which is a best practice in software development, right? Don't do the work, don't write the code, right? Instead, if you're writing a program, just exit one, right, and Kubernetes will know, okay, that's not a zero status code, restart, okay? That is a best practice. So fairly simple example here, but I've put in some pieces of observability as well, okay? App connects to a database, tries to connect to a database, it can't because the network's down because all clouds don't have a network. Kubernetes sees that and it restarts it, right? But in the middle here, we've got tracing that sees that connection failure, okay? We've got monitoring and log aggregation that capture those logs that say there was a connection failure and that capture that network traffic that tried to egress, right? And if you've got an alerting system, it's watching how many of those restarts happen in a given time window, and it might alert you if you've got over some watermark, right? It might be super sophisticated, it might have sliding windows and moving averages and so on, right? Okay, next idea. Unordered is better than ordered, right? So has anybody done any investigation into what ordering means in a distributed system? One, okay. Yeah, he said it's impossible. Sort of, yeah, it's pretty close to impossible. There's been so much research that's gone into ordering and distributed systems that there are several kind of sub-definitions for ordering and distributed systems. So if your app needs to rely on some kind of ordering in Kubernetes in your app, you have to first decide which kind of sub-definition you want, then you have to implement it, which is no small feat, then you have to test it to make sure that you adhere to that definition of ordering, right? That's hard. Ordering is hard in distributed systems. I made that point bold on purpose, right? So again, don't do it. If you can, try not to do it, okay? Now, that's not realistic for all apps, of course. Especially data store apps. You might not be able to just say, I'm not gonna do ordering. But if you do, Kubernetes has built-in primitives that are really well tested to do that ordering for you, right? So again, Brendan's talk yesterday, he talked about using a sidecar to do distributed locking and distributed leader election, okay? And I'll provide links to that afterwards, right? Use that. If you need to do ordering, if you need to lock, do mutual exclusion, you need to have a leader be elected, right? Those are ordering problems. Use the sidecar, right? You don't have to write any code that way. Another one that I've used pretty extensively for preventing race conditions is using resource versions on the Kubernetes resources themselves, right? Has anyone seen that field on all the resources in the object metadata? It's a resource version. Okay, well, I'm here to tell you that it's wonderful, okay? If you've got 10 pods running and you need to manage some data, all the pods pull down that resource. They all have resource version zero, let's say, right? And then one of them does the put, the upload of the new data. And now the resource version globally is one. Now all nine other pods try to do the put with resource version zero and they all fail, right? So they all race and that's not always the best thing but there's no data corruption because the first one just wins and the second ones are left out in the cold, right? So that can be very useful depending on your app. That's a tool in your tool belt that you don't have to implement, okay? And then the last one is init containers, okay? So init containers, if you don't know, they basically run before your pod and they do some initialization logic but they can be used to make sure that something else is running before your thing, right? So for example, anybody know that there's an open-source Microsoft SQL Server, by the way? There is, it's in Docker Hub, right? It's SQL Server Community Edition and on a seven node Azure Container Service cluster, I work for Microsoft, we get free ones. So on a seven node Azure Container Service cluster, it takes about six minutes to start up in the common case with no other pods in the cluster, right? Six minutes. So by that time, if you have an app that is relying on that database, it's already in crash loop back off and then you have to wait like another six minutes or 10 minutes or something to have it start up. So the solution is having an init container in your app that keeps pinging the database and just trying to see are you up, are you up, are you up? It's like your kid poking you on the shoulder at six in the morning to see if you're awake, right? Eventually the database is awake and then your app starts right up, okay? So that's ordering, right? You are depending on something to be available before you can be available. Now it's important to note that init containers can be abused horribly. If you find yourself writing a huge script or writing some big program that executes in an init container, that might be a recipe for disaster, but it's really up to your use case, right? Again, this is a best practice, not a rule. The next concept here and the next idea is that loose coupling is better than tight coupling. Now this is taken right out of like a CS102 book, right? Software development, tight coupled code is hard to evolve, hard to refactor, hard to test, right? This means something similar in Kubernetes, okay? Now that first bullet point I've said before and I will probably, I think I'll say it two more times. Kubernetes is always on and it's always watching. It's a dynamic system that has basically undefined behavior over a large period of time and that's a good thing for you because then you don't have to wake up at 3 a.m. and then you'll have undefined behavior because you're gonna be tired and not have had your coffee, okay? But the other side of that is that your app has to tolerate that dynamic environment, okay? What does that really mean on the ground, right? Here's the first best practice and if you take nothing away from this talk, nothing else away from this talk, take this away. Please do not talk from one pod directly to another pod, right, because eventually Murphy's Law, again in action here, the other pod, the target pod is gonna go down over a month, two months, whatever it is. So instead, communicate between pods using a Kubernetes service or a service mesh or something similar, right, a proxy of some kind, right? Now going back to crash only, sometimes your other service, your target microservice is gonna be down or unavailable or like I said, the network's gonna be down, right? Crash and just have Kubernetes and do it retry, right? So I have seen in one of the apps that I used to administer at a previous job on Kubernetes, it had a 700 line retry loop. There was a bunch of logic in the loop to do things like exponential backoff and custom logging, custom stats and metrics and stuff. One instead that could have been erased and replaced by os.exit one, right? So back to crash only, I'm a huge proponent of that, okay? Now finally, I've seen a couple of apps that use the Kubernetes API to look up resources, right? That's not an uncommon thing to do. This particular one looked up pods, right? Tried to get a list of pods and then iterate the list and then talk to each one. So that's already violating point number one because it was talking directly to pods but there's another issue there, right? If I loop through a bunch of pods and then do something with them, the loop is probably already expired, right? Eventually over another month or so of writing your app, you're gonna get the list and before you can do anything to that list, one of the pods is gone, okay? So instead of operating on individual resources, a better practice would be to operate on labels, right? So get all of the pods, all of these services, all the whatever that have a specific label and that way the list will always be up to date because Kubernetes will aggregate all those things together that conform to that label and give you it back. Okay, counterpoint. The next idea is that type coupling isn't always wrong. There is a specific way for you to do type coupling in Kubernetes, right? And that is with the pod abstraction itself, right? The pod, not the container, but the pod is the atomic smallest unit of deployment in Kubernetes and it has more than one container in it or it can have one or more containers in it on purpose, okay? And that is because when Google originally designed this concept, they recognized that apps or at least individual pieces of an app might need to have multiple things sitting together, right? And this can be the case for a legacy or a big monolithic app, but it can also be the case for a very, very modern app, right? And we've seen some of those things at this conference already. Envoy is one, service meshes, right? The proxy generally runs on local host, which means you've got your app container and you've got your proxy container and your app container talks to the proxy on local host, right? Those two things would run in the same pod. Fluent D, another CNCF project. There is a Fluent D logging driver that also runs on local host. You send your logs to it and then it aggregates them before it forwards them down the chain, right? And most metric systems as well. Most metric systems will aggregate metrics, sample them and then send them on. Same thing, your app would talk to that metric system via local host and you'd have the metric system be a sidecar, right? And that's what this pattern is called for all three of these cases and more. It's called a sidecar. Anybody heard that term before? Sidecar, yeah, sweet. You guys are great. All right, next and most near and dear to my heart. This idea called record your configuration is very important. It's probably one of the most important best practices that I can convey today, okay? So here's I think my last question of the crowd. I'm doing this to keep you guys awake. Who has heard of a declarative API? Okay, for those who haven't, who has used SQL? Come on, I know everybody has used SQL. Who's talked to a database before? Okay, you guys can raise your hands, it's okay. Okay, so SQL basically, you tell the database what data you want back, you tell it how to group it, you tell it how to sort it, or you give it some data and you say put it in this row in this database, or you say update it this way or delete it, right? You do crowd operations, but the important bit there is that you don't tell the database what exactly it should do. You don't tell it how to do that, right? And that abstraction is super powerful because SQL has scaled from an in-memory SQLite database to massive databases in the cloud that have hundreds of nodes, thousands or hundreds of thousands of nodes, right? And the Kubernetes API is the same. You tell it what the end state should be and then Kubernetes figures out how to do it behind the scenes and that has scaled from mini-cube up to 5,000 plus node clusters, right? So why did I tell you all that stuff? The bottom line is that you should just keep your manifests in your VCS, in GitHub, in whatever else, right? Just keep them there and make those represent the latest working configuration of your app. And that means that at any time you can submit those to Kubernetes and it'll take the current state of the cluster and make it into your app's working state, right, and that action is called reconciliation. How do you do that? Well, I'm a huge proponent of Helm. People heard of Helm before? Cool. Yeah. So Helm is basically it does this, right? You have this thing called a chart. It's a group of the manifests that describe your app. And then with one command, doing a Helm install, it'll send those things up to the cluster and it'll make the cluster reconcile from the current state all the way up to the state that you want your app to be in, right? OK, second to last, I believe. Ask for the least. I'm going to go through this one a little bit more quickly. This is very similar to the principle of least privilege, OK? So what we're talking about here in Kubernetes is that you can ask Kubernetes for a ton of stuff. You can ask it for permissions. You can ask it for storage, disk, memory, CPU, compute, et cetera, right? The point here is that you should leave as much of that for Kubernetes to manage as possible, right? Because the more you leave to Kubernetes, the less you take for your app, the more Kubernetes has inflexibility to schedule your app later, right? And that translates to fewer wake-up calls and three in the morning and so forth, OK? So here's some examples of what that might look like. I'm not going to go through them here. But the point is that you should basically take your app or components of your app and reduce its resource usage or permissions as much as possible a little bit more so that your app can't run, and then increase them a little bit so that you basically have the least amount of resources dedicated to your app at one time, OK? Last point. Now, this one is basically don't repeat yourself, OK? Again, back to this theme of don't do more work than you have to, right? Build on the shoulders of giants means that there is a ton of code. There are a ton of man hours. There's a ton of research that has gone into building Kubernetes, right? There's a ton of infrastructure, too, that tests Kubernetes. And the API of Kubernetes is publicly accessible, of course, at least when you're inside your cluster. And it abstracts away tons of functionality, of distributed systems functionality, that is super hard to get right, including ordering, OK? So whenever possible, call the API. If you find yourself building some complicated distributed system inside of Kubernetes, try to just call the API instead to do what you need. In the case that it doesn't do what you need, maybe the community has something. Maybe cncf.io has a project, or somewhere else in the community has a project. And in the case where you don't see something that fits your exact needs, maybe try to build something on top, OK? And it's as simple as that, right? Here's some examples. I'm a big fan of Helm, of course. But if you can't use Helm directly, maybe use the Helm API. I'm a huge fan of traffic, right? It's a great ingress controller. But maybe if you can't use traffic directly, maybe put a service mesh or a proxy in between traffic and your app, right? And then Fluent D, right? We talked about Fluent D already. So I have used Fluent D to send 1 million log messages in a second, right? And I did that over a period of an hour. I did that before Microsoft. It was on a GKE cluster, and it crashed the cluster. It was a 300 node cluster, crashed it, right? So Fluent D is pretty good, right? Probably better than something that you can write in a weekend. And you probably don't want to write it in a weekend because you've got an app to build, right? And the same goes for the others, too. And plenty of the other projects that are in the CNCF. So some parting thoughts. Where should we go from here, right? I gave some ideas. I threw some things out here to start a conversation, right? But as I said at the beginning, we've got that fragmentation, right? And what that really means is that we all have a wealth of experience and a wealth of ideas on what a good app should look like, a cloud-native, good Kubernetes app should look like. So we need to share that. And this is a call to action, OK? I've put a description of all these ideas into that GitHub repository. So I would encourage you to go into that repository, submit a pull request, submit an issue, do whatever it is that you want to contribute up to that repository to add your ideas. And it might look like a new best practice. It might look like fixing a typo. Either way, totally cool. But I want to solicit your ideas to begin compiling this list of best practices for a cloud-native app, OK? So with that, I want to say thank you very much. I really appreciate you coming. There's my contact information up there. And I think we've got about five or so minutes for questions. So thank you very much. Yeah, so the question was the crash-only kind of architecture. If we've got too many pods crashing at once, is that going to overload Kubernetes? So the answer to that, well, that's a very good question. The answer to that is probably not. You might have a million pods running. And of course, that's a corner case. That's an edge case if your cluster is too small. But if your cluster is big and you've got a million pods running on it, that's OK. Because the Kubernetes API isn't going to get overloaded by that, because the kubelets are going to try the restarts first. So that restart logic is distributed across all the nodes and not all in a single point of failure. Does that answer? Cool, yeah. So I missed the very last part. I know that you were asking basically about thundering herd. No, actually I don't, because the supervisor processes kind of know about ordering and dependencies. Kubernetes, of course, doesn't. So I think your question was kind of about how you avoid that thundering herd. When a downstream dependency goes down, then all the upstream dependencies also go down. Is that about right? Yeah, yep, yep. Yeah, and that's a very tough problem, of course. So what I would say is the current state of the art in Kubernetes is primitive. If you crash, if your database crashes, then everything above it is going to crash. Of course, that's right. However, when you bring it back up, then that might be a manual process to bring it back up.  And that would mean that not everybody is going to go and talk to the database and thundering herd basically DOS your database. If you do bring it up in another namespace, you can use that service mesh or you can manually route just a trickle of application traffic over to the new deployment and thereby at least avoid that thundering herd problem or the DOS problem later. So you still have that cascading crash. But when it comes back up, you don't necessarily have the, I call it the DOS problem, right? You don't necessarily have that. So half of the problem is solved with possibly some manual steps. But you could also automate that too. We just don't have a good mechanism for doing that yet. Maybe you can put one up on GitHub. Yeah, yeah, well, you're absolutely right. If the comment slash question was about, is Kubernetes going to have some sort of ordering primitive in deployments or pause in the future? I've probably only seen the same issue, the GitHub issue that you've seen. I don't know the status of that. But I do know that it's not going to be in 1.9. That's all I can tell you. Is it alpha right now? OK, scheduling priority. Thank you. Any other questions? Yeah. Well, yes and no. Exactly. So if any container had some kind of an exponential back off, that might work.  So it still might be better for you to have some outside automated tool or take some manual steps to kind of manually bring your app up. Because it may happen faster. It may get back online faster than if you just tried to let Kubernetes do its thing. Other questions? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so the question was, how do you configure your app at the app layer to do things like connect to databases, connect to your queue, whatever else? Is that about? Yeah. So right now we've got this thing that one of my colleagues has called the Post-it Note Flow. That's where your operator provisions a database by clicking a button on the cloud console and then gives you the credentials on a Post-it. And then that's it. That's what you have. And you have to figure out how to get it into your app. This is a little bit of a shameless plug for the SIG that I work in. It's called Service Catalog. And the point of Service Catalog, the reason it exists, is to solve that exact problem. So what you would do is, instead of embedding credentials into your app, you would embed a new Kubernetes resource called an instance into your app. The instance would be the instance resource would be in charge of going out, hitting a cloud resource, for example, creating the database, and then dumping the database credentials into a secret. And then instead of having your credentials baked into your app config, you bake in the binding of the secret to your app config. Does that make some sense? Yeah. So if you Google Service Catalog Kubernetes, it'll pop up. You can kind of see how it works in way more detail, of course. Cool. I think we are at time. So I'm going to be around. Feel free to ask me questions offline. So thanks again, everybody. Cool. Thank you. You


So, we're discontinuing our life of two Australian shepherds weekly vlog series here on NJRoot22.com. Filming and editing simple and cute puppy videos seems harmless, right? But we won't get into the specific reasons today. As I believe George Lucas once said there are two kinds of people in the world, creators and destroyers. I'd rather be a creator. Here are a couple pics of them when they were just 8 weeks old. Anyway, we enjoyed having this regular video task to complete each week, but so be it. We'll find another one soon enough. Maybe we can find one that's more rewarding. Additionally, because of the otherwise hectic and complicated life we live here, I wasn't able to dedicate more time to the actual breed. I'm sure many people searching for Aussies or Australian shepherds on YouTube probably wanted some breed-specific tidbits of information. Not just growth progress and what did they destroy this week type videos. You know, like training tips or health concerns or other aspects specifically related to the Australian Shepherd breed. This wasn't going to happen anytime soon here. If we were single and these dogs were the sole focus point of our lives or if we specialized in breeding or something like that, this could have been much better. But we were struggling to get meaningful views anyway, despite trying everything we knew how. I like making videos and will continue something else here regardless. I haven't run out of ideas yet. I must find something that's easy enough and sustainable long term. But that's life. And this is no big deal in the big picture perspective. In fact, it'll be a forgotten memory soon enough. Have a great weekend ahead.


tion to make sure these documents are written and uploaded by the quarterly deadline each file is date and time stamped so if a station is late or fails to upload these documents they risk tens of thousands of dollars and fines and possible non-renewal of their license this standard exists whether you have staff of four or 40 and is very time consuming broadcasters are held to a very high standard by the FCC and they are very serious repercussions if we don't comply with the system they have in place that ensures that the public has free access to our records so today I heard the Department of Public Safety Deputy Commissioner say that most of the 4,500 records requests his department received came across his desk and last week I heard the Attorney General's Chief of Staff say that she personally handled the review and redactions for the 157 public records requests that they got last year and that made me think why does the Chief of Staff and the Deputy Commissioner have to spend their time redacting documents it just seems like they have a lot more better things to do than that is there no one else that is qualified or capable of doing this and why is that is it because the 270 plus exemptions are so subjective and open to interpretation that it's impossible for anyone except a highly trained professional to work with them and if so to me anyway there lies the burden on the custodians of public records Senator Clarkson you mentioned you used the word inconsistent and that's the perfect word to describe what's happening on a real level out in the field what our journalists are reporting that they are experiencing and that is a big problem if we are all confused imagine what's happening in the small municipalities that are not even privy to things that are happening in here it means everybody's confused and even though there is a structure it seems like there's a lot of confusion with that structure and that's very apparent with the fact that I do agree with John's testimony our news departments have been quoted thousands of dollars to obtain the records that they're requesting and it's not broad it's very specific and to them those thousands of dollars is really just a brick wall for the people to say no you can't have them and we're going to do it through a financial brick wall so they tell me that fees are all over the place and it just varies depending on who you're talking to so they can't ever determine in advance how much something is going to cost and it's just when you're trying to get to the truth and that's a brick wall that just shouldn't be there so in closing Vermont Association of Broadcasters urge you to join us in supporting the Vermont Supreme Court's decision which supports freedom of information and transparent government and I really appreciate this committee giving me the opportunity to speak on behalf of Vermont's hard working broadcast journalists today my hope is that you will see Vermont Association of Broadcasters as a resource and I offer to be of service to this committee in whatever capacity you need me to be as we continue this very important conversation thank you can you give us a copy of that thank you I'd just like to say we haven't messed but your analogy of elections was very helpful actually for me it is just part of the cost of doing business and I think a lot of us have been thinking of the cost of the time of all these people getting this all together in places that aren't all perfectly set up like Tanya's operation but your that analogy was very helpful so thank you I that was good and I want to thank you for smiling at my feeble attempts at humor nobody everybody else had these stony faces you would be smile well we're all here to have fun right and just also on a personal note having served with Jim Condon for so many years together in Washington means it is sad but also lovely that you're here but heartbreaking for me we miss him every day it's very starting to thank you thank you I believe we have PJ now on the phone last one on our clean up clean up so I'm going to dial cherry everybody here you know Brian from and I'm Jeanette we've talked yeah Ray is my name you know if you want to go ahead with Jay's testimony I haven't dialed one of these before so I'm going to get some help okay we're this is a different phone that is in our committee room so it's used differently so Gail's going to go get somebody to do it so Jay do you want to do you want to come now and then we'll hear from TJ afterwards or do you want to wait I'm happy to I don't want to turn it down so it's not what we're well why don't we why don't we get Chris's vote on those two and then turn them in and then by that time we'll have TJ dialed up and and then we'll just keep going in order unless there's some reason I you're yes me yes okay great I think you knew what they were on right the act relating to pointing 10 agents and the button do you want to take them up I don't know that I have I think I think I think we need I don't think I have that here I don't have that stuff here you're doing the bond is official that's you and Anthony yes man that you're doing the town agents and here is what you need to take up I believe to go I can take them up you just need to have you sign them I'll run them up to see well this is the one on town agents so this won't help me oh dear yeah I think so he's doing bond and people and he'll take my folder just take the sheet that's why I found people built really don't want to have these are my documents right now charger that's bonded that was it sorry I didn't mean to I have bonded I've bonded here baby and that says the reporter is called yes I know but I don't have this sheet for that and I don't either is my point I don't have that's the sheet that Anthony has okay Anthony you have that and this is right here and here is 5-0-0 if you sign that for me I will take that up to see it and you're doing town agents no you're doing bonded oh shoot Allison come on I can tell you he's not being able to see us we're here Allison's he's doing bond he's doing bond he said town agents to him give it to him and this is Anthony okay oh I guess we are this is S186 oh they're both each 140 there's our town I don't have there is the answer I don't have well because there wasn't an amendment on the other one why isn't that coming on yes I think you can 99% sure that's it yeah that's exactly what I get okay do I fill over I don't know well we won't get up up today yeah we'll turn them in tomorrow plus I need Betsy's notes well you don't need her notes before you turn them in no no no these are different than all the other phones did it work no she came in so she's getting shoddy that doesn't mean she's getting shoddy sh-o-d-d-y but shoddy just hold it to the microphone yeah let's just call him on somebody's cell phone can you call him on your cell phone and just hold it up to the microphone yeah we have a temp like you all right we're going to we're going to continue here what's your recommendation on how close I should hold my phone to the microphone thank you I just thought it is, I think that's good shoddy to the rescue hi you're just in case he has a question or wants to know was it on clutch was it on clutch no it's still not working out oh shoddy's here already shoddy's here and discovered unblocked the green light's on the green light's on but hello well we need to dial yes I'm going to give it a dial to him first say that again shoddy we need to take over there we go from any of these phones in the state house you have to just yes very hello attorney donovan yes hi this is the senate government operations committee we're in room 11 and we're ready for your testimony great well good afternoon everybody thanks for having me and thanks for accommodating my schedule I had a personal appointment up in Burlington telling you from from Burlington okay thank you sitting at the witness table here in case you run into any difficulty she'll help us out hey boss I feel much better after hearing that senator white so thank you for letting me know charities and expert on this I'll be relatively brief and to the point first again let me thank the committee for taking this issue up I know people feel strongly about this issue and you know my view is that I think the law is clear and I think that the decision is clear but anytime we can have more clarity that's a good thing so thank you thank you for addressing this issue you know we get public records request from the attorney general's office I think we kind of have a unique responsibility as attorneys you know one of our first obligations our ethical obligations is attorney client privilege and so we're always looking obviously to fulfill our professional responsibility to our clients and when we're looking to respond to a public records request the legislature has said you know ballpark there's about 290 exemptions to the public records act and when you talk about well can you charge for public records I think the Doyle decision is really clear no you can't charge to inspect records I think that's clear yes you can and I think on page 4 paragraph 8 that sums it up and then I do have a disagreement with secretary condos we get into the debate about what a copy is you know the court who has the final say in our state about what the law is said that this and I quote from the decision on page 4 the legislature the legislature meant a requestor to keep and review wherever and whenever the requestor chooses a photo from a cell phone fits that definition as a copy a record that the requestor to keep and review wherever and whenever the requestor chooses that is a copy under the law in my opinion I respect that people have a different opinion than that but I think it's very clear I also disagree with secretary condos if I understood his testimony clear last week I think in the house that a copy has to be a paper record we're living in a digital world our phones are computers technology is outpacing the law the idea that we're going to define a copy as a paper record when we're operating a digital world is outdated


Hi guys, welcome to a new vlog. Today's vlog is going to start out with celebrating Valerie's birthday. Today is her 64th birthday. It is Monday the 22nd of February. I thought I would just start the vlog. Here's Sherry. You want to tell them we filmed some videos? We did, we did. Stay tuned. Happy birthday Valerie! Hello, happy birthday to me. How does it feel to be 64? Just just about like it did to be 63. Okay Valerie's opening her card for me. You picked this out with your own little hands, didn't you? I think so. So I can pay for it tonight. Oh, so I can pay for it tonight. We're having Hooters guys, so I got her gift card. Well, isn't this a sweet and I think it's an appropriate card. I think it is too. Oh, I love this card. This card seems so right. I know. Okay, Valerie, happy birthday like normal. We're having some Hooters here and tell us like what's going on. Well, we don't have internet right now. You should have heard Valerie on the phone. We don't have internet. Okay. Yeah, it was a it was a whole thing. But it's a little stressed. It's just a little stressed, but everything's good now. Everything's good now. I'm gonna open the wings. So I can show my birthday. Birthday meal, she wanted Hooters, so that's what the princess gets. We're watching what movie we're watching, Valerie? We're watching Nomad Land, I guess it's rated R. Viewer discretion advised. Yeah, Valerie's birthday was a little stressful. Oh, my bad. Valerie's birthday was a little stressful. We're trying to get the internet. We have a technician coming out tomorrow. Sherry looking better than ever. Oh my god. Okay, so Valerie, review of the movie. Nomad Land was extremely good. It was so good. It was, it was very, very good. It was also the longest one hour and 47 minutes I've ever had of a cinematic experience. Sure. It was very good, but it was very long. Yeah. Okay, so I think the movie was very powerful, impactful. I think it was the saddest movie I've ever seen, but some people would say it's like very freeing and amazing. But it would give me so much anxiety living that life.  I really appreciated it from that standpoint. Mothers over here could not stop making comments. Hey, Valerie started. I was good till the very end. Yeah. But we learned a lot, but we learned a lot about that kind of lifestyle. We learned we never want to do it. Okay, who's ready for cake and ice cream? Me! Oh, you guys are so cute. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, dear Valerie. Happy birthday to you. I didn't want to buy this big old number, so you have six on one side and four on the other. That's what I figured. Yeah, see how you could figure it out. Happy birthday, Valerie. A perfect way of doing it. Okay, Valerie, make a wish. Okay. I've got a lot of stuff you can wish for right now. And I'll try not to spit on it. Good. Here's Valerie's cake and ice cream. Here's my ice, well, no, this is actually cake. I'm having cake and then I'm having probably like a coke float just because. This is a smaller piece though. Just a little taste of cake. This part of the vlog, we kind of decided to do this at the last minute, sort of kind of, but we are going to season 52 for a late lunch, I guess, to celebrate Valerie's birthday. Say hi, Valerie. Hi. I guess I'll just see you in the next clip when we get there. Okay, so we made it to the restaurant. It's a beautiful day out. Look how curious! My outfit, I'm wearing this cute dress that I got from Amanda and then these shoes. I was telling Sherry, I only get to dress up, like go out like once a quarter. This is what the menu looks like. I know you can't really read it as well. It's so crazy. We're eating out, Valerie. If this is perfect, there's no one out here. I know. It's such a nice day out. It's like 75 here. Beautiful. Got my little glass of rosé here. It's rare that we go out anywhere. So I just decided to get one. Sherry's complimenting me on my looks. Yeah, we're just waiting for our first course. Yes. Okay, so Valerie got her plate. Everything is on a separate plate like she asked for. Here's mine. And it's so pretty. And then Sherry got some appetizers over there. Oh, yeah, and also I did forget to vlog our lobster bisque. But I'll put a picture here of Valerie and her lobster bisque so you guys can see it. Belgian chocolate s'mores. This is a turtle cheesecake with salted caramel, peanut butter chocolate toy, double-layered key lime pie with toast to meringue, Oreo cookies in green, espresso panna cotta with dulce de leche topping, chocolate chip raspberry cannoli, and my personal favorite is pecan pie with cannoli mousse. So our desserts. Okay, so Valerie got key lime pie and I think that's pecan, right? And then I got peanut butter and cookies and cream and Sherry got s'mores and key lime. Okay, so this part of the vlog I am in celebration for my teeth cleaning because my dentist is still here. So, yeah, we're gonna get these pearly whites all polished.  I think I say this every time I come here and I film about it. Hopefully I'll get some footage. I always say that too because it's always awkward. Like I never know who I'm gonna have and like some people are just like they vibe with it. It's cool. And then other times it's like kind of awkward. So I'm gonna see what I can get in here like footage wise. After that, I'm gonna go to Starbucks. I always treat myself after the dentist for going at least. So, yeah. I think last time I went to the dentist, I was like interested in a Vizelon and stuff. Yeah, that is like really expensive. So I don't think I'm gonna be doing that. They'll probably say you need to get your teeth straightened and I'm gonna be like, okay, I'll do it later. That's just how it's gonna go. So yeah, I guess I will see you guys whenever I film next. There's a lot of people out walking their dogs right now. Made it in! Those are my teeth! Just like that, I'm done and I had no cavities. Everything looks good. So I'm in taking care of my teeth really well. I'm happy and now it's time for some Starbucks. Made it to Starbucks. Cute cups there. Oh, this is cute. I wonder if my aunt has that one. Look at how cute this little collage is of people's pets. Oh my gosh. Okay, so I've secured the goods. I have my frappuccino right here. I almost forgot what that was called when I was ordering it. I did want to show you guys what an actual Neve looks like. I kind of did a bad job explaining in one of my other videos, but I put a picture, but this is one in like, I don't know, better format. That is actually like a more advanced one. They didn't really used to look like that, but that is what a Neve is. It looks kind of weird now. Anyway, I'm gonna sit around the lake here or whatever and just enjoy this I think. Hopefully I'll find some place in the shade. Got my birthday cake pop. My drink is down there. My little frappuccino here and this view. So nice out here. Okay, so before I end this vlog, I saw this TikTok of this girl doing like a messy bun, but it always like turns out cute. So I want to see if I can recreate that look. So I'm going to just try real quick and see if I can do it.  Yeah, I don't know if that worked or not. I think I need a different hair scrunchie. She like twisted like that and then like looped it over. But I think this hair ties like too tight for that. Oh, there we go. One. Oh, whoops. I lost the grip of the hair. Well, anyway, she kind of does this and she loops it around and then does that. Oh, it actually kind of does work.   I don't know. I just want to try that see if it would work. Okay, so I didn't pull it through all the way. Like I still have like this little piece, but I think I got it okay with the technique. It's really weird. I don't know. I probably wouldn't do messy buns like this, but I just thought I would show you. This is the best. This is the best I could do. But anyway, that is going to be it for this video. I hope you guys enjoyed. Don't forget to subscribe and I'll see you guys in my next video. Bye.


Hey guys, welcome to another video, I was gonna say repair but it's not, it's preparation video for a car if you live in the rust belt, which I'm in the beautiful state of Illinois. Now if you've seen the last episode, drove the car back from Texas and it is nice. You can see the frame once again, I think, did some preparations back in my place. Took off a few more things today, I'm gonna go over the other things and we're gonna pressure wash this. First we're gonna spray it with the greaser, then we're gonna pressure wash everything. Then I'm gonna wait overnight, let it dry, I'm actually gonna air dry it or air pressure dry it, air gun dry it, you know what I mean. Then we're gonna let it sit overnight, come back tomorrow morning and give it a paint job. I'm still debating if I'm gonna paint the frame only and the different suspension components, the black stuff. Or if I should paint the frame obviously and the floor underneath with the chassis saver paint. We're gonna see that tomorrow because I forgot to grab it, I'm keeping it warm. And then after, which I also forgot, I'm gonna show you the wax like spray can by Amsoil. And that stuff is going everywhere, over the chassis saver paint and the floor and suspensions. Everywhere, starting from here, down, inside the doors, inside the hood, inside the rear hatch, inside the rockers. Okay, I mean, I'm saying not the exhaust, we're gonna leave the exhaust alone. Inside the frame, okay, I mean everywhere, okay guys, when I say when I mean everywhere, I mean everywhere, the obvious stuff. Now, let's take a look, let's see what I took off to prepare this for the paint. Mudflaps, although the, well, not all, but most of the brackets for the brake lines just so I can have access to the frame. Here is more, all the brackets on the parking brake line. Here is all this stuff, the spare obviously, the hitch. Now you can see, I don't know if you're gonna see that or not, but I did scuff up the frame. I did get lazy on the scuffing because it's a lot of work. I'm gonna probably go over it once more once I pressure wash it. Here you can see, I don't know if you actually see this or not, but I mean, first of all, look at this frame. We're in the Chicago area, guys. I did apologize to the car that I brought here, took off some of the heat shields. Like that one I want because it's kind of easy access going over it. But there was one right above here and right here. Not worry about this one because it's close to the catalytic converter, so not sure that's gonna dry up quickly. Yeah, but this did some scuffing basically, well almost everywhere. There's a little bit of rust in this area, in here. But most of it, this is the worst part of the whole frame. This part here, the very front. But this is gonna get the chassis saver and we're gonna spray the MZO stuff inside every hole we find. We're also gonna take a look inside the frame. I got a new toy. Took out these funny covers over here. This one just disintegrated. Very brittle. They didn't take these off because I did try to take two of those off and they kind of broke on me, so I'm gonna just kind of lift it. Whatever I can't get with, because I'm gonna be brushing on the paint.  And I did take this apart, the fender, and there was, I mean, I think I showed it to you. There was a lot, I mean a lot of leaves, vegetation and stuff like that. I took off these clips for these plastic rocker covers and we're gonna just kind of bend this back and spray some stuff in there. I did took off the, oh yeah, I should mention the fuel tank cover, which is right there, and the step tubes. I'm gonna show you something. Check this out. I know it's not a big deal, but look at this. This is just some dirt sitting right above the step tube bracket. You know, that stays there long enough, it's gonna rust. I'm gonna spray stuff inside there. Obviously inside, just everywhere guys. All the holes in the frame. Look at the sneak peek at the frame inside. I don't know if you see this or not, but this thing is clean. But it's got some issues. I did mention, I think, I did mention a few mechanical issues.  For now, in the future I will to paint the, you know, I guess the other side of the frame. So, whatever I can reach, I will. Not taking this off, because that includes taking the bumper off. Because I gotta take these bolts off. I'm gonna paint all of the rear diff suspension parts. Probably the backing plates of the, backing plates. And like I said, whatever I can reach, or like stuff like this, I'm not gonna paint with chassis saver. Just spray the wax over, all over this. And the only way part I can get to the frame with chassis saver is this. Just not enough space, even after taking off the cover. But I'm not dropping the fuel tank now. Look, this was, I mean this is plastic, this is not rust. But good thing I took the cover off. Check this out. This is gonna get painted separately. What else we can see over here? I'm gonna do a transmission service. Drain plug, very thoughtful. Actually, no, this is probably the drain plug. This is the fill plug, I'm guessing. What does it say? Check. Okay, so this is the check plug. This is the drain plug. I don't know if the transmission flow was changed or not, but we're gonna do it anyways. I don't see a dipstick here. Anywhere. I mean, this is just amazing. You know, if you don't live in the rust belt, then you just don't understand this. I am so excited about this frame, like a little kid. It's crazy. Yeah, I do not see a dipstick anywhere. Do I see rust over there? Something's red. Oh, never mind. That's the back of the cover. Well, this is rusty. The block is getting rusty. Can't paint the block. Actually, I may paint the oil pan a little bit. See how the paint, the chassis saver, takes on heat. Look, this is not, this is just dirt. Coolant leak. I'm gonna be replacing that. All right, guys. It's late. I've been here all day. I'm gonna eat. Gotta get this done. You know, I'm probably going overboard. But, you know, salt is salt. Just eat this thing away. Especially when they have these, still do, rusting issues. And the forerunners, the sequoias, the tendras, the Tacomas. Crazy. So, yeah. Let's get to spraying and washing. Just everywhere. All right, guys. I'm gonna continue this. And I guess after I'm done pressure washing it, I'm gonna... We'll see. See you later. All right, guys. So, as you can see, the frame is soaking. Well, everything is... You can see how dirty it is. Grimy and all. I mean, this is nothing compared to cars here. Now, I'm gonna give you an example. This is what you get. And that's a German car. Anyways, this is drying up quickly. All right, I'm gonna get pressure washing. Just run out of fuel. Literally, I just did the front for like two minutes, and I ran out of fuel. I'm a bit wet. Okay. Well, I'm thinking, since we're doing this, might as well do the engine bay from the top. Let's do that. Yes, you can wash your engine bay. Done it many times, BMWs, whatever. Never had an issue. You may want to cover your alternator, but mine's somewhere down there. I didn't even... As long as you don't spray at it, it'll be fine. So now, I'm gonna dry it up. Why do I keep saying we? I'm doing all the work. Basically, a lot of this everywhere. See you later. Guys, I'm blind. I'm deaf.  Try blowing air for like an hour. I had to switch hands quite a bit. All right, this is what she looks like now. Pretty much the same. Just wet here and there.  I'm gonna worry about this grease on the shocks. Look what I found. A missing bolt on the transmission pan. I'm gonna have to address that. So that tells me that they did replace on the filter an oil, but no idea what mileage. I'm still gonna do that service. This is, I mean, this is so easy on this car. It's unbelievable. The pan is right there. Same thing with the oil pan on the engine. If you ever need to replace that, very easy access. All right. Now, you know, the, the, the blowing part. That's why I'll do in it. I figured it's a very important part you want to do. So not only you're, you know, you're blowing the dry, but you're also cleaning it from stuff that's stuck, has been stuck to it for years and years. So the paint cold is going to last much, much longer. Now when blowing, I've noticed when I blew air into like, say this hole, a lot of water came out this, this hole and so on. So you want to blow air inside the frame, inside these, I guess floor rails, I'm guessing these are cold. Okay. All these, you know, those right there. I mean, whatever you can find, especially these look, there's still water coming down. I'm going to give the rest today. It's late. I got to eat and still do other work. Crazy. But it's worth it. It's all worth it. Cause I know it's going to last much longer than it would if I didn't do anything, basically. All right, guys. So this is it. Let it dry overnight. That's probably going to be like 14 hours or so by the time I'm back here. Hopefully that's going to be enough. I'm still going to go over blowing it in the holes and stuff, you know, inside the frame just to make sure it's super dry. If I have time tomorrow, I'm going to address this, clean this up. Actually, maybe I should clean it today still. Hmm. No, don't feel like it. Here are those heat shields I was talking about. All right, guys. It's going to be a few hours for me, a split second for you.


Your surgery can be revised if it's failed in the past. Failure of bariatric surgery could be for many reasons. I've done a lot of revisionary surgeries where patients didn't have the proper surgery for them before. Surgeries can be translated. You can have a sleeve gastrectomy converted to a gastric bypass. Gastric bypasses can also be reversed. You can have a band removed and converted to a sleeve gastrectomy. So the answer to that question is absolutely. You can have revisionary bariatric surgery or you can have conversion surgeries.


The non-conformity of an action or a mission with an international obligation is the objective element of any internationally wrongful act. In addition to such non-conformity, the wrongful act must be attributable to a state or to an international organisation for the international responsibility of any of those legal subjects to exist. Attribution is the subjective element of the internationally wrongful act. Attribution is a legal operation. Attribution is the operation by which the behaviour of human beings in the real world is legally deemed to be the conduct of a subject of international law, that is, a state or an international organisation. States and international organisations are indeed abstract legal entities, like corporations in domestic law. States and organisations do not physically act by themselves, but they act through human beings whose behaviour is then legally attributed, imputed to the abstract legal entity. Of course, when the internationally wrongful act is an omission, the absence of any action instead of a positive act, it will be sufficient to identify the international subject who was under the obligation to take a specific action and failed to do so. In such a case, attribution as a legal operation will not really take place and will be reduced to taking note of a wrongful failure to act by the subject owing the obligation. International responsibility will be established by identifying the character of the obligation as an obligation to do something, to act, and the failure to act by the subject owing the obligation without really addressing the attribution of such wrongful failure. Attribution will be somehow implied and automatic. Let us turn now to the rules on attribution, knowing that they are really at play when actual conducts, rather than omissions, occurred. The rules on attribution are customary rules of international law that are part of the secondary rules on responsibility codified by the International Law Commission. A careful study of the rules on attribution is not only needed in order to understand what attribution is about, but it also helps us to understand more concretely what states or international organizations are. Let us concentrate on attribution to states, knowing that the rules on attribution to international organizations are not very much different. The basic rule on attribution is very easy to understand. The state is responsible for the conduct of any of its organs. Article IV of the Articles on State Responsibility for International Wrongful Act recalls that I quote, an organ includes any person or entity which has that status in accordance with the internal law of the state, end of quote. And that it does not matter, I quote again, whether the organ exercises legislative, executive, judicial or any other functions, end of quote. In other words, states are internationally responsible for the conduct of their governments, but also for the conduct of their legislature or of their courts and tribunals, despite the constitutional independence of the latter. For instance, in 2012, in a case between Germany and Italy that we will address later in the course, the International Court of Justice found the Italian Republic internationally responsible for judgments of the Court di Cattazione. Moreover, under Article IV of the Articles on State Responsibility, it does not matter whether the organ of the state is a high-ranking official, a minister, for instance, or a law-ranking civil servant, or whether it is part of the central government of the state or of a decentralized entity or even a municipality. The state can be held responsible for the conduct of any of its organs, instrumentalities or officials, which form part of its organization, whether or not they have a separate legal personality under internal law. The basic rule on attribution of the conduct of state organs helps us to understand that as a subject of international law, the state is one single entity and it presents itself as a unity for the purpose of international responsibility. It is important to stress that when the state organ is a physical person, the state is responsible for his or her conduct, provided that he or she acted in his or her capacity as organ in the particular instance. The condition is not expressed by Article IV, but it is subsumed in the notion of organ and it must be kept in mind. A civil servant is not organ of the state 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The civil servant is of duty or on holidays. It does not act then as an organ of the state, but as an individual and his or her action is therefore not attributable to the state. States are also responsible for the conduct of persons or entities which are not their organs but which are empowered under domestic law to exercise elements of governmental authority, provided again that such persons or entities act in such a capacity in the particular instance. This rule of attribution is provided for under Article V of the Articles on State Responsibility and it is intended to cover the situation of parastatal entities or of private companies and trusted with governmental tasks. For instance, private security firms contracted to act as prison guards or as immigration officials. Also, when one state lends some of its organs to another state, the conduct of the foreign organs is attributed to the state at whose disposal they have been placed, provided they effectively acted in the exercise of the elements of the governmental authority of the latter states. This is Article VI of Arsiois. Before addressing the international responsibility of states for private acts, let me conclude this video by taking stock of the rules recalled in Article VII of the Articles on State Responsibility. I quote, The conduct of an organ of a state or of a person or entity empowered to exercise elements of the governmental authority shall be considered an act of the state under international law if the organ, person or entity acts in that capacity, even if it exceeds its authority or contravenes to instructions. End of quote. In other words, the state may not escape its responsibility by claiming that its organ or the persons or entity empowered to exercise some of its authority has acted ultra-virese, that is, in excess of its authority or in violation of specific instructions. For instance, if a police officer tortures a foreign inmate despite clear instruction to the contrary, such wrongful act remains legally attributed to the state, unauthorized acts and misconducts by state officials are and remain act of the state, even if higher organs have disowned the wrongful conduct. Any other solution would contradict the basic principle recalled in Article III, according to which a state may not rely on its internal law in order to avoid being found responsible. But again, even if acting in an unauthorized way, it remains of paramount importance that the organ, person or entity acted in an official capacity with apparent authority rather than in a purely private capacity. There is however one exception to the requirement that the organ of the state acts in such capacity in the particular instance of the wrongful act. And that exception is not to be found in the ILC articles on state responsibility. It relates to the members of the armed forces of a state when the state is engaged in an international armed conflict. In such a situation, the state is of course responsible for any misconduct of its soldiers acting as soldiers, even when they have contravened to their instructions. But the state is also responsible for any wrongful conduct of the members of its armed forces irrespective of the fact that those members acted in their capacity as organs of the state or not. In time of war, in other words, the state is thus responsible for private acts of its soldiers when they are of duty enjoying a military leave. For instance, in time of war, the state is responsible for the conduct of off-duty soldiers dressed as civilians who go to bars, have too many drinks and end up killing the local bartender in a fight. This specific rule is provided for under Article 3 of the Hague Rules of 1907 and it is repeated in Article 91 of the first protocol of 1977, additional to the 1949 Geneva Conventions on the Laws of War. This specific rule has been established in order for states to keep the discipline within their armed forces and to protect foreign citizens.


Yeah, yeah, something like that. All right So hi I'm Roland I've been playing with radio since I was about 14 years old It's been a very long break when I was traveling to go to Yale But a few years ago After becoming a permanent resident of Singapore I decided to resume doing stuff with radio One of the basic problems when traveling is you end up accumulating masts and antennas and test gear and Radios that I have with me. So that was sort of the reason for the pause but This particular mountain may in fact be Very familiar to people seeing some of my other talks. I'll give that in just a moment The title refers to operating a radio station. You're actually seeing the station The antennas have been a wire This is 2200 meters above sea level. I was using it to communicate with a range of stations The largest range was 3000 kilometers. So this is near the east coast of Australia I was talking to a station on the west coast And this is not with fancy new Near sort of noise level digital modes. This is just voice The previous photo, sorry, if you know that of the mountain because it's in a wilderness area The park service decided not to repair the trig station when it was destroyed. So that sort of broken down high pod Also serves to identify the mountain Here is a 20 year old photo taken on the same mountain So notice the trig station was in the background and a very long head first in the front Here with a Rig doing something different 20 years ago and so it sort of begs the question why go up to the same mountain again with gear And the answer is it was a different experiment What I was doing 20 years ago was on the HF The range involved was only 160 kilometers, which is less than the distance to the horizon So it's very much a line of sight activity We're using 25 watts of power, which our batteries is quite difficult It's quite a substantial battery and required four day packs with a gear and therefore three assistance To get the stuff up to the top of the mountain by the time it was taken one of these things had walked back down What I did in January was on a much lower frequency Almost 20 times the range and In one occasion a tenth of the power all the gear fitted comfortably into one day back in addition to a liter of water So there's there's differences in what these two frequencies can achieve There's also part of my own interest in radio and indeed in electronics Which is working on the electronics for these lower frequencies is a whole lot simpler Then working on the electronics for VHF and UHF have wires big enough to see and it's a bit relaxed about Rooting the moment you're working in the high frequencies things like the length and shapes of circuit board tracks start to matter So if you want to start playing with the electronics of radio HF is a much much easier place to start and so that was really the other half of the reason for getting myself back into HF Not on propagation so the there are similarities in tenets Although it's not very obvious the antenna on the left is an array of elements about a meter long The symmetrical that standing vertical The antenna on the right. It's actually two antennas is a V-shaped piece of wire 10 meters long for one frequency that is to say 10 times the size and 20 meters long for the other frequency Or 20 times the size the sizes of the elements are in the inverse ratio to the to the frequency But the propagation mode is completely different for the VHF its line of sight it was Talking to another radio station repeat it basically on another mountain 160 kilometers away For the HF case. It's using the earth's ionosphere We're at the bottom of 60 kilometers of gas We're totally atmosphere above that is a little over 900 kilometers of ionized gas or plasma called the ionosphere Parts of the ionosphere have increased density of electrons or ions Particularly the DE and F layers that are dense enough to refract radio waves But only reflect or reflect refract but only in certain frequency ranges So the three to 30 megahertz or HF range happens to be about the sweet spot for using the ionosphere for this purpose When you're all about 145 megahertz of doing 20 years ago, it would just pass straight through the layers and go out to space So it happens that for this range of frequencies. It is possible to use the ionosphere To conduct your communication far beyond the line of sight You get to a 3,000 kilometer line of sight you'd have to be in space So to get to 3,000 kilometers from 2,200 meters above sea level requires somehow that your signal is dead And so it's some way one of these layers my signal was being reflected and or refracted To get a sense of where There are actually three mountains involved But just because I did a couple of trial runs in mountains of Victoria that you can drive up to before trying on the mountain which requires a four-hour walk to your heart So the 3,000-kilometer contact was from Banyong to Perth And for context, we are here. That's about 600 kilometers, I think, so it's only a little bit further That's why there is almost 600 kilometers further east and I was not able to communicate quite so far But certainly so there the first tests I did on New Year's Eve were to drive up two peaks in Victoria With a couple of friends and operate. This is my first time ever operating on HS Terrible begin with this stuff And so it was helpful to have friends around me who were themselves experienced amateurs to learn a couple things very quickly And I was thinking maybe a couple of contacts in in Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory probably New South Wales Maybe you know Amelie and then astonishingly Didn't realize I got a VK6, which is at the Perth Station until after I was reviewing my log. I said wait a minute. I've got call signs in every Australian state And also half of the process, I was somebody getting ZL calls like that And I believe quite a lot, so I was getting Calls at quite a range and so the operational amount Banyong was all two and a half watts Equipment problem that I'll get to in a moment That's so that we've got that very long operation was on the unintended lower power Happier being about hardware. We'll talk briefly about radios. I didn't make much in the way electronics for this particular experiment Although I did a little bit for power What I wanted was an HF radio that would do Sort of all of the frequencies and modes that amateurs care about in a portable form So not a sort of bulky base station radio And I wanted to be a widespread use but not want to be using some sort of weird odd radio that no one has an experience with So the two serious contenders The the ISO 817 which is a 2001 design still manufactured, but the design hasn't changed. It's probably the last Major work anyone will ever do in end-to-end analog radio with the range of capabilities that required for now radio The early craft is much more recent design With a largely digital simple path and therefore it's half the weight, 30% smaller And has various conveniences that the old radio doesn't have Nonetheless, I bought the older radio because I want to do a bunch of experiments that require Modifying a radio and having access to the signal path. You can do that with a radio that's analog from end-to-end You cannot do that with a radio. That's mostly digital and software One of the problems is that matching a radio to an antenna requires or often requires a separate device In the other class case, there's a space inside for it and the other space is not required by another device So it gets a bit bulky from now on top use, but it's okay. I was able to carry it comfortably one pack So with all the other stuff so it worked The other big selection issue was Antenna and mast and really looked primarily at soda beams, which is a UK group and back tenna Which is a basically one guy doing sort of crowdfunded batch work in California. I think He his stuff is just more refined. He's thought through the stuff He clearly does and works with people who do a lot of backpack operation. It's called back tenna It's for backpack use and they're I after weighing it up costs were similar, but his stuff is more refined most importantly, the mast was selected it's a Extendable fishing pole, but it's 10 meters long, three steps high, but coaxed it will fit into a suitcase This matters if you are flying to the place from which you're going to walk Which is exactly my situation. I live in Singapore, but I was flying to Sydney driving to Cosiasko and then walking several hours on the mountain So yeah, that fact that fit into a suitcase was a deciding factor for the pole For the physical accessories the one they handled is the same. The wire is similar, but you're cheap soft aluminum pegs versus some sort of hardened alloy with a sharpest spike they won't bend because of the three from shape The S-clips which make it much much easier to assemble stuff fast and you and again this matters amount of operation You don't typically have a lot of time on the top And also male business, so getting two wires to one bit of coax. You need a doctor, basically This one works, but like really What were you thinking is again the fact that a guy's thought through his stuff again. So that was what ended up buying I Made a few extra cables and and other patching bits that was they were able to sell me parts to do so But the kit itself is actually pretty good The next big challenge is operating is preparing to operate in Singapore the noise for here is unbelievable And so the units I've yet to have a successful communication other than a few kilometers in Singapore But I still needed somewhere to set this gear up to begs It was not going to have a lot of time on the ground in Australia before going into the National Park I was in Australia for three weeks, but we're in the National Park on like the fourth day or something. So Nearly time to do set up an operation here That's always a problem whole other talk on the use of Singapore Land Authority fields. I've done on other occasions I'll put out today that it was helpful to have first done a bunch of antennas at Maker Faire last year This is a sort of aerial photo of the science center and all the antennas that we we call for Maker Faire Which at least some people in the room came and saw and at least one came not read But but importantly in order to do that I had prepared a risk assessment And so when the Singapore Land Authority when I finally found the right person who could actually have a concrete discussion about antennas with me One of his first questions was have you performed a risk assessment? Why yes, yes, I have He's one that got through the science center in like less than 24 hours. That was it. There were no further questions So The Singapore Land Authority has fields about 1700 fields spread across Singapore They had rollers to look after a land that can be used for development, but it's not currently developed as the same from national parks whose Land is isolated permanently for recreation They mean they tore that all the downtown fields that I'm used to get mowed regularly That's why we have these nice clear fields or every single book doesn't happen by itself I asked them to use all four the crudely marked fields here in particular a good hacker space about here So I had in mind this one This one was the walking range unfortunately this is before the one that did not allow it to be caused It's part of the growing real estate park because a lot of public use that they create all through the LSA night So in fact most of my stuff was done near the middle of this field big open space no India light And generally out of everyone's way cricketers notwithstanding So that was set up one night on that field The mass is tall enough that the top of it is not in the frame It's quite a serious difficulty photographing thing because again, it's more than 100 meters from the street light So I'm dealing with a little flash in my in my camera Right so far so good. So that was all sort of November December December 31st as said I went up two mountains in Victoria with drive-up access to the site So they're like picnic tables and stuff on top Didn't photograph the whole setup. I wanted to point out something in particular So you've got the radio tuner my phone Because we're going to go up three mountains that day when I was going to see the battery life of the internal battery in the Again, it's Hey Unfortunately, there is a inappropriate feature which is sale, but infirmly the radio But there are four options Half a what one what two and five months and so what they've done classic. It's hard to change Hardware particularly layouts of LCDs, but you can make software do stuff So it's one bar two bars three bars or three bars flashing that gives you the full power options And that's what the manual says turns out that that's only true using the internal battery if you the external battery It's mostly true For those three months, but if you're operating long distance from mountain top you will start at the highest power wall and It turns out that I could not get it to flash Cycling through the power settings that it wasn't flashing so I stopped at three bucks the three that's the two and a half watts Which is why the operation? Well, I'm expected to go three thousand meters. It doesn't kill me this Impression happened at two and a half watts. It was not Virtue was like I couldn't work out how to get into five watts. It turns out that on an external source The power meter goes blank at five watts This was mentioned at least once just once and forms and we're so many to work this out But most people use this with its internal battery Then headed into the Cosiastal Park, which is usually snowy and never vestilized It's our little moment. There's three kilometers from there's road. It's away from great power gas a few things on this picture one is The intended to set up People do die this Disturbing the regal levels so there's actually a side door here to cool it if you're stuck out here in a In the snow Your life is in immediate danger So there's a door that can up at any time and sort of wooden box and get into it as blankets and water But and dry fruit Also, the power source is solar That has consequences I'm there for a week. I'd like you to recharge the batteries in my radio There's a clear review of it So the difference power is The old part of the building is everything up to about this wall is essentially all your part is 60 years old the club is a little bit conservative about such things and The deal has been no power for member use There's electric power to run lighting To run a couple of safety alarms and to control the water Where it burns gas but it uses electric electronic control to efficiently burn gas and the deal has been that's the only thing The power can be useful so there was no house on it the power point you can see only went in 18 months ago and It's not enabled at this time of year. It's doing these to work putty. It's connected There's a general available. There you go. And generally it's only used for battery charges for causes pills Rest of the risk disconnected because the fear is people will turn up the headlights Most people have no idea that headlight draws 5,000 or 100 times or battery charging force and certain more than Modges electric systems can deliver not a huge threat, but if you trip circuit breakers in the lights go out At the same time, however, this way what's in this black box is in fact a Dual USB socket that goes into a cigarette lighter socket in the car two amps each and so The observation there is again because of safety concerns mobile phones are now viewed as incredibly useful things Do not have the ability to charge a phone if you're there for a weekend in the winter is now something that has safety consequences So the club has finally agreed to make available USB sockets for charging phones So design is all that's a lot of final input. It's 12-bit input, but I did this arms Work it would do figure that with a This is a converter That it would draw about 800 milliamps just like well into answers About what I calculated that means I could charge the battery that means for four or five days We sat there before walking up the mountain. I could operate So This is the lab room. It's the antenna distance The radio is sitting here. Oh there because the girls in the swing That's the map The weather is variable as is always the case in mountains, but it happened about the fourth day We're looking at the predictions. Yes, 70 20 up to every day probably rain someone This indicates a gigantic No rain very low wind perfect conditions Managed to get my hands on the wind, but otherwise perfect conditions That said I didn't think to photograph it the first morning, but even after the summit reason That's what it looked like the cloud was still rising And now later. It's just a little bit left That's the entire station It all fits into a single day back, which is nice This is about two hours of the walk I'm gonna put it here with the trees These are last trees Another three kilometers from here from here to the summit and about 300 meter rise That friends out the day before when we had to cowardly to refuse to go outside. There was a hail storm There's nothing there's nothing to hide under at all out there in a hail storm You have nothing we get back back with like quite a lot of hail storms The next photo is taken up on that ridge Yeah, so we should have zip forward three hours or two and a half I've rarely seen this or never seen it this way That was the path as it was and just stayed there all day. So again, this is consistent with the high pressure system just sitting there Do that I've never seen it in 30 years of walking up this mountain in particular I have never seen that far west so it was just astonishingly clear Which meant I can set this thing up It's not just that still there was essentially no wind up there. We were sitting and still there which meant that the Relatively flimsy pole wasn't being challenged So operate or sorry That's what it's like. So there is about a five minute video of me operating I won't do it now for time reasons, but the both the video and the slides are there I must want to view them or That's all for now because I over at my time I think I should not take any questions but it means come out later. We'll put a false agent on there So as I mentioned, hopefully now we'll have in your hands a Grocer or flyer for false Asia. This is Asia's largest open tech conference. It's one of the largest open tech conferences in the world


Hello, thank you for joining me. I'm at Bolton Abbey station. I've been on the MSN Bolton Abbey Railway. I've had a great time riding up and down the railway. We've also been on the Hamilton Valley Miniature Railway but now we're going to go to Bolton Abbey itself. So I'm going to leave the station and we're going to walk about one and a half miles up to Bolton Abbey. I'm just walking down the path from Bolton Abbey station. The railway line would have once carried on along there towards Oakley. Now there's an interesting structure there. At the start I was thinking, oh is that a road? But then I realised it's an aqueduct or it's carrying a pipe. There's quite a few pipelines from various reservoirs that head down the valleys supplying water to Bradford. Now some of them have been, you know, stopped them spoiling the landscape, rather than just have a pipe crossing the landscape. They've built around them to make them look, you know, just a bit more pleasing to the eye. So what we're going to do, we're going to go down there. I've already seen a little ruined Abbey sign on the other side of the road. But first, let's just go and have a look at this. Actually, I've now seen the sign that says Bolton Abbey so I'm thinking it could go that way, but we're going to do this road. Anyway, here is this aqueduct. So this can't go on at the gate's padlock. But this is carrying a pipe through the landscape. And it just makes it look a bit more pleasing to look out rather than just a pipe. So you've kind of, well, it looks like a bridge, a little river down there, and then it goes under the ground again. The rail line would have been up there. I'm going to carry on walking down here in the direction of Bolton Abbey. I've just come across the fields and now I'm coming to the village of Bolton Abbey. That's the Devonshire Arms, and it's on this side of the water. I was going to show you the kitchen garden, which is really quite pleasant. Always enjoy seeing gardens. Still a bit of a way from the Abbey. I've got to carry on walking up the road, but I just wanted to show this little bit here to you, the kitchen gardens. And as I said, that's Devonshire Arms. So that's the hotel and it's the pub. Might go in there for a pint later. That's the kitchen gardens. And then we've crossed the road now. We'll carry on up here. So soon we should be at Bolton Abbey. I've just come down into the Bolton Abbey estate. I believe this is the Abbey house behind me here. If we pan around, you can see the river off, which runs along there. So the Abbey is famous for being in the valley of the river off. It's actually not an Abbey though. It's actually Bolton Priory, but it's commonly known as Bolton Abbey. It's an Augustian Priory. Most of it, you know, followed the usual story, was dissolved. Most of it is a ruin, but as we'll see in a moment, a section of it does survive as the local parish church. They used part of the church to become the parish church, which, you know, makes sense. And there's quite a lot of Abbeys and priors around where the part of the church, usually the church itself is the parish church. As we come along here, there we have in front of us the surviving section of the Abbey is the parish church. And then you've got the north and south transept and the chancell in ruins. So what we'll do, we'll go and have a look in what there is of the church. And then we'll go and have a look around the ruins. And then we'll go down to the river because there's the very famous stepping stones of Bolton Abbey. That's the image most people think of when they hear Bolton Abbey. There's a helical. So we're getting our view over there of the beautiful house. So there's some landing on these tables. It's interesting. Just in front of the Abbey. Here we have a slot to be on here, but one or two through there. It's a bit like a church in Hungary. Quite often in Hungary, you can get this one to a church. You can put the camera through, you can see. There you go. That's inside the church. Turn the camera around. Looks a bit bright. There is a beautiful window up there, but the sun's shining so brightly through it. You can't see it. So what we'll do, we'll go back out the way we came and we'll go and have a look around the ruins of the Abbey. So we've come to here. We've got some quite low-walled ruins here. What you see in front of us where those two ladies are there, that would have been the other side of the cloister. So it's a very small cloister here. You know, some Abbeys have a much larger cloister. It's probably one of the smallest cloisters I've ever seen for what would have once been a very big grand church. So I'm just walking around here to the cloister now. I'm going to take you through that arch. That's where the chapter house would have been. Well, what I'll do, I'll show you from here first. That area there, that was the original chapter house. And then, you know, as they have money, they developed and built a second chapter house just through here. So we come from here, there's the castle. This area here would have been the chapter house. It would have been a round building. You can see one of the Ligema buildings. See where the piers would have gone up. Go and see inside the church itself. The section that's used for the local parish church. Walking around here to the cloister now. I'm going to go up here. And here we are in the south transept. So there's probably been another big ground window there. Not so much down here because there were buildings here. And that's where the chapter house would have been. There's probably been a couple of little chapels here. And then this is the crossing. So remember, that wall there wouldn't have been there because it would have been one through church all the way through. That's looking down the church. And that is the north transept. So we'll go through now into the north transept. As we come round here, we come towards the graveyard of the Abbey. I'll just get my first glimpse of the famous stepping stones. I was thinking about making a video walking across. I'm not going to do that because there's a big queue of people wanting to use the stepping stones. They're a very popular part of the Bolton Abbey estate. So I think what I'll do, I'll show you the stepping stones but I'm not actually going to walk across them whilst making a video. Down here we have more of the Abbey's graveyard. So what I'll do, let's go round here. And right round the end of the church now. There you go. Big and grand that window would have been, I don't know what if it's the biggest but certainly one of the biggest I've ever seen. Coming back round to here for the chapter house again. What we'll do, we'll go down towards the river and I'll take you over the river on the bridge adjacent to the stepping stones. So we can go down here. Now we're looking rather spectacular behind us. And there's the graveyard. So what I might do when I finish looking at the Abbey, I might walk further on up the valley. There's some really nice walks to be had in the area. So there's a section of woodland known as the Strid. I'm not sure what there is to see there but I believe it's a very deep valley. So I might head up there. I haven't quite decided yet. I might just when I finish filming get an ice cream. I'm not sure. But here we are. Here is the river off. I hope I'm pronouncing that right. Apologies if I'm not. There's the very famous stepping stones. There's a lot of people on them. So I'm not going to attempt to do them whilst on film. What I'm going to do is across the bridge here and let you see the views from the bridge. So there's a bit of a weir here. There's the stepping stones down there. There's the loud weir of the river. Shall we get into the other side? So again, there's the stepping stones. So my plan had been I was thinking I'd walk across there doing the video but like I said it's not really going to work with all those people there but it's nice to see they're all having such a nice time. And here is that very famous image of the stepping stones with the ruins of Bolton Abbey in the background. So I hope you enjoyed this video. If you're in the area, do do the same in Bolton Abbey. Walk down like I did from the car park. It's a lovely pace. Thank you very much for watching. Please do feel free to like, subscribe, comment from by the stepping stones at Bolton Abbey. Goodbye.