I came in from Australia on Thursday, so that's why I'm not very jet lagged still so I got to enjoy the weekend here So I'm Jason O'Connell. I come from Australia from Macquarie Bank. I presented at OpenShift Commons gathering in Boston two years ago, and at that time we were just migrating our first applications Into production so our whole focus of that time was getting into production and making sure we had everything stable and running After that we wanted to move to scaling out OpenShift to offering it for every team in the organization To make sure that any team could use it to migrate to the cloud So OpenShift became a core part of our cloud migration strategy So I just want to talk to you today about how we industrialize OpenShift and scaled it out as an offering for everyone And so just a bit about Macquarie Bank So there's Macquarie Group, which is a large global financial organization Macquarie Bank is a retail bank in Australia We're like a digital first bank. That means we've got no branches Our customer engagement is via our digital channels So digital is very important for us. I just got a few screenshots. This is our personal banking site We also have business banking and wealth. We've got a lot of nice features I won't have time to go through them all And this is like a mobile app. You can see it recognized when I came to Spain There's a lot of little personalization and things like that. We also have nice transaction search We stamped the location of all your transactions so you can search for transactions based on where you did spend So yeah, there's a lot of cool features but Let me just talk about OpenShift here So for our cluster right now at the moment for OpenShift, we've got four clusters We've got 42 teams on boarded and 300 applications So in the last year, it's grown a lot usage We're optimized I say for stateless applications. So generally we on board micro services We've got a lot of legacy as well We focus on a particular use case, which is these stateless applications Everything runs on AWS and we rebuild our clusters every 90 days This means we build a new cluster from scratch where we can patch and upgrade and then we install Reinstall all the applications on cross We have two clusters running and then we cut traffic across So it's mandated. We have to do that every 90 days It means that our automation is quite good because we're practicing it all the time So in terms of scaling the platform Now I've just got a graph here around The cost per application now This isn't the cost of running the infrastructure but the cost of supporting the application migrating the application For the application for the platform team that I run Versus the number of applications When we first went live in production, we were getting quite good at onboarding new applications So our cost was coming down. We had some good automation which we could replicate But things started slowing down They slowed down when we onboarded more and more teams Initially, we were working together with product teams to onboard their applications Later as we expanded out to the organization. We're dealing teams That aren't even in the same building Let alone the same country Teams that are less let's say mature with understanding of Docker And everything was new for them And so what it means is we slowed down a lot We had to support in production applications. We had to support onboarding new teams And we had to refine our scripts So naturally this could happen things can slow down. This is a diseconomy of scale What we want really is an economy of scale here We want to make it that we can onboard 10 teams 20 teams go from 300 applications of 500 applications seamlessly With no friction It should need the platform team no extra resources in order to onboard more and more applications That's what we're aiming for So just looking at this, how do we achieve that? Naturally we need to automate But automation we had from the start Automation wasn't the answer necessarily Because initially we used to automate everything per application automate the deployment scripts We'd onboard a new application would need to get new automation scripts A lot of teams would copy and paste And then eventually there's people that don't even know how those scripts work and they get a lot of problems And they get a lot of problems. We need to support them. So what we really want is reuse So we don't just want to automate we want to automate it once for everyone And have teams reuse those scripts In order to do that we have to standardize So rather than everyone doing things differently we started to say you have to do things the same way Although all teams think that they're doing things differently. We actually realized that 90% of the applications we run a spring boot microservices And they're actually very very very similar So we had to force teams to standardize Also, you need a clear scope for your cluster So we focus on stateless microservices That means we give no persistent volumes for any teams This is just our scope of our cluster and makes managing the cluster very simple For your own platforms, you might have a different scope that you're offering Crafts we narrow it and that allows us to scale and naturally we need a lot of self-service for teams So I think it's very important to have a clear line of responsibility between what the platform teams do and what the product teams do So the product teams naturally they're responsible for creating amazing products And the platform team has to run a stable platform Another way of looking at it is that the product teams focus on customer experience and the platform team focuses on a developer experience Now Governance is a big part being in a bank governance is very important. We need to have controls preventative controls detective controls manage resources On boarding there's a lot of work we do in governance Naturally, that's a platform responsibility Now these services I call capability services. These are things like secrets management, which we're migrating to vault chatbots CICD with Jenkins Knative these are core capabilities And you know in OpenShift, it's very easy to install some of these tools in five minutes and development teams and product teams want to do this But that'll break those principles before It means we'll lose standardization and lose control and things can become messy So we say that any capability service our team runs We build it properly. We make it multi-tenanted. We address security controls risk And we build it for everyone to use and our deployment and release automation So like I said before the teams used to run their own deployments deployment scripts and things got very very messy So we said there's going to be one way that you do deployments and we're going to write those scripts And what that meant is that early on when we upgraded from OpenShift 3.5 to 3.7 there was some breaking API changes and We needed 20 teams update their scripts And that was holding up our entire upgrade if one team can't upgrade then we have to hold up the entire upgrade By moving it back into our team to manage it meant that we're in full control Upgrades happen seamlessly for teams We we can change our scripts and give new offerings and they don't even realize it's happening So now I'm going to show a demo. I wanted to do a live demo but I was playing around last night and our VPN going into Australia was quite slow So hold on a second. So I pre-recorded it last night at 1 a.m Now what I've got here is just a demo application that we created Sorry, sorry, that's the end of the demo. Give me one second. All right, so we've got a demo application We have to create a demo application. I sorry. I can't show you any of our real applications Now this demo application It's broken You can see the spending overseas is not showing anything So this application what I want to do now is fix this application. So let's just see how we fix it. I Go into our OpenShift portal This is our self-service portal that we built you can see it looks a lot like OpenShift because we use pattern fly Which is the same framework as OpenShift use itself So this is what all developers use to interact and do deployments and self-service functions You can see the sort of self-service functions We've got user access management deployments application onboarding vulnerability scanning Pulse is synthetic testing capacity management that that so everything self-service goes through the single portal So what I want to do here is Look at that broken Application so it's deployed here and we just called it broken and to make a change What I want to do is branch it Now you can see it's not just one application usually microservices work together to form what we call a product So we never deal with an application individually. We group everything together So that application you saw before or the product is three microservices and five sets of config What I can do here is take that whole environment that's broken and branch it So if you were to do this in production You would you could branch up at a current production environment and bring it into tests So I've just called the new branch environment feature Jason Vicks And what's happening now is we're getting an exact copy of that environment if we did a copy of a production environment, it would be exactly the same Except the config would be pointing to non-production So it's just running through and running the deployment I noticed everyone before when they said put up your hands if you like Jenkins or not We had a lot of trouble with Jenkins. So we got rid of it. We do do all the deployments with this Our own custom tool all of these have API so end-to-end pipelines developer teams can integrate with this They don't need to use this UI You'll just see it deploying an open shift here Now the cool part is that an entire environment is defined in git YAML files So we've created a branch automatically in git What we want to do is update this These files to do the fix You can see you got a file per application And if you look at one of them, they're quite simple a production application isn't much more complicated than this We try to default everything so teams don't explicitly define anything or override unless they need to So this is just a spring boot application that needs high CPU. There's not much more to it Everything that goes into an environment for non-prod to prod is in this repository. So you've got one repository per product You can see I've got my config map variables here What usually you'd have dev test prod Just in the demo. We didn't create it but you have all of your configuration for every environment in there So we're just going to edit this file and make the change So we're going to go from broken connection to valid connection commit the change So again, if you were changing application code, you could update the version of the application you want to the tag in in the repository So now I go back to the deployments after making that change and and Wish what we should see pop up here is The original deployment I did when I branched earlier and then a new one has been kicked off. It got kicked off from a webhook So what's happened here is as soon as I made the change It's syncing up and applying that that change and that change alone into that environment We don't use this in production of course because you got some more controls to adhere to but non-prod It's very powerful. It tells you the change that we made as you can see It says I'm going to redeploy that application and I'm going to apply that config Because of that change that we made So it means that everything's kept in sync Between what's in your definitions in the YAML files and what's actually in the environment And we can go into open shifts here and we can see the new pod is just come up So that's all great. We made a fix but now we need to apply the fix To the actual customer traffic You can see it's not applied here yet Because I've created a whole new environment and so for that we do canary releases with a tool we built on top of Apigee Hold on this a bit quick. So in this tool here We can say we want to move from one back end to another back end. We can move by probability For a canary release which I'll talk more about later We're just going to flick all the traffic across here In the future all this ability to canary release. We're just moving into Istio away from Apigee It's much cleaner using operators and using Istio for this But we've been using this ability for two years with Apigee and it's allowed us to release much faster So let's see if the change worked And there it worked so you can see the URL at the top is the same URL that'll be a customer-facing URL if it was prod, but we've moved everything in the back end behind So let me just go back to the presentation Our beautiful So you see when we do releases We have a whole version of an entire environment a product a product When we do a deployment even changing one or two things we build a new environment Then we bleed traffic across we do a canary release This is great because Macquarie has a lot of channels and a lot of partners connecting through to these banking APIs We don't want to make a release and affect every single partner at the same time Which is what happened like five years ago when you couldn't do releases often Because you had to line up your partners and get them to agree to a date now. We can release anytime So I could bleed across our mobile channel We also have open APIs open banking APIs And so they might want to do a change they could do that change on the same day if they wanted They've done their testing they go straight in they know they're only impacting themselves Then we could remove the old namespace and bleed the other traffic across We've got full capability to bleed traffic This allows us to do targeted releases to release frequently And importantly the fact that the entire product is Deployed together and all of those microservices and all those dependencies Means we can effectively promote environments through from tests through to our lab and beta and production environments So our lab environments are production Except they're cut down in terms of the users that can use it Only the digital team can use these environments, but it's still real money a payment is still a payment But allows it a lot of experimentation in those environments teams can spin up as many lab environments as they want for different features Beta environments are opened up to staff and some public beta testers We get a lot of feedback from our internal staff on new beta features or if there's any issues that have regressed So you actually promote through from test lab beta into production the full set Um You'll probably hear about GitOps. I think this is getting really popular Everything we do is GitOps based so I wanted to demo, but I'm not gonna have time Our user access management is a pull request, but via that portal Resource management application on boarding everything is done with pull requests And the nice thing about that is every team can then attach Approvals onto that by approving the pull request and we get full auditability of everything Now I just want to talk quickly about controls If you looked at a pod there's a lot of things that surround a pod We've got a pod as part of an application which rolls up into a product We've got teams that own that pod or own the application You've got user access management. You got resource management For us being a bank we need controls on all of these things and the controls you need at different levels You need different types of controls at each stage So I can't go into all the controls Except that if you want a scalable platform Any control you put in you need to focus on developer experience You need your control to be frictionless and automated and self-managed if you blocked a deployment on a release day for a team And they don't know why they're gonna come to the platform team to my team and cause a big noise And then there'll be a lot of work to get them on blocked right But there's a lot of work to to manage just one control So I've just got an example here of controlling resources. This is where a team wants to request CPU and memory So they all get allocated We need incentives for them or disincentives in this case We say if you're over your capacity, we're gonna prevent your deployments for locking you down until you bring it under That's a disincentive to force them to adhere to the control To ensure that they optimize we need charge back. So if they ask for more CPU and memory, they get charged If you don't put in charge back, they just ask for more and more and more We need them to be able to self-manage So we give them the ability to auto clean up in non-prod so they can say these developer Environments are gonna be cleaned up nightly and these environments last longer, etc And if they do want more resources, it should be self-approved. So they don't need to involve our team They also need visibility of their current usage on a dashboard And we also have email and we're just building out the chatbot alerting so that when they do approach their limits We're alerting them so that they know that they're not going to be blocked in production They're given enough warning before then So you can see just for this one control to make it seamless and frictionless We need to actually build out six different things six different components and applications Just to manage the control of resource usage So just to wrap up. I saw this quote from aging Cockroft about a month ago and Our principle is that the product teams should be focusing on everything that's inside the container They should focus on the business logic and the business value So that eventually all the code they have a right is business logic And then the platform team is focused on actually the developer experience Really what we're there for is improving developer productivity So yeah, I think that's it. Thank you


An abominable state governor Babagana Zulun has allocated 447 housing estates provide food palliatives, among others, to the space persons in Daluri community under Konduga local government. The new returnees were given foodstuffs, mats, blankets, including materials. More than 2,500 households benefited from the housing scheme which comprises school, hospitals and water facilities. I want to get back here at the Port Union on the situation in Konduga, Sandhya, and then work in partnership with the Ministry of Public Health. Another community that we want to resettle is the Aulari community. And I believe all these three communities will be resettled


This and the town's also working with the Stanton Foundation It's a they provided also design money and the Stanton Foundation will also provide up to $250,000 for construction so Specifically for dog parks. They do many things for canine health, but one is dog parks So we're relying on that that source of funding for design and construction We're flying in the summer for that you know construction money So right now it's a site plan review application as Greg noted it is a special permit application as well because the shed in the fence will be in the front setback and We do have a survey plan now and the dog park won't change much But it the the front setback the fence the sidewalk We'll all be within the front setback. So a five foot high fence, you know will be You know within the 20 feet in the shed will be You know pushed back so it's not in the right of way, but it will be within the 20 feet There's two sections to the park it's been determined there's a large dog section and a small dog section So the large dog section is for dogs over 30 pounds and then the small dog You know there's a looped walkway that'll be accessible in both sections a shade sale for both to provide shade benches Dog watering station a trash receptacle and then a dog doggy bag wastes receptacle as well Because this is over the cat part of the landfill there can't be any tree plantings So, you know, there is the shade sale and there's adjacent trees to the south that could provide afternoon shade The large dog section and some perimeter trees existing premier trees To the north for the small dog section You know, there's also planned irrigation if possible the irrigation lines would be brought in in the fill so nothing can penetrate the existing cap So, you know, even the fence nothing is gonna go beyond the cap So there'll be fill brought up. There's you know, we requested 6,700 cubic yards, right? Total so that'll be the maximum amount We're hoping to use less, but you know there will be anywhere from a foot to almost five feet of fill in certain sections of The park to make the pathway accessible and to build up enough fills so there isn't any any risk of having the cap Penetrated by the fencing the footings or the shade structure footings or dogs digging The plans over here. I think it's in your packet As you enter, you know, there's 22 parking spaces to handicapped spaces 20 spaces To bike loops, there'll be an entry kiosk with rules and regulations contact information so the dog park task forces may transition into a friends of the dog park and they'll have You know daily maintenance and weekly maintenance as will public works and conservation Staff, but they're hoping to have you know contact information in terms of who to contact if there's an emergency You know, if it's after hours what happens just to make sure it's very clear to the users You know what they can do You know, they're working on the rules and regulations now to keep both dogs and people safe You know within the loop walkways, there's a piece stone area So there's grass and then there's piece stone and so the Stanton Foundation really likes the idea of using piece stone in a dog park So it's not angular. It's it's washed or you know rounded You know, it's good for drainage if the dog goes a bathroom in there So if we you know, there's a hose big it with the watering station so it could be you know Washed down periodically and it could also be swept off the pathways but you know in terms of Maintenance is supposed to be a nice material So, you know, it doesn't need to be seeded or anything and if you know periodically may need to add some more The grassed areas, you know, there could be some irrigation as we said us along the fence so perimeter irrigation line and Keeping the grass growing is a concern So there is the ability to cordon off areas if need be or to try to keep up seeding in the spring and fall So there is the awareness that dogs can trample grass and it's something that you know, we'll be maintained I don't know Mike loose here. He has anything else you'd like to Yeah, I guess I missed the beginning sorry If there's some I have some information if you wanted about Traffic if you'd like me to present that I also have a little handout that I can submit the staff But basically one of the questions came was, you know, kind of like how much traffic is this going to generate and it's very hard to say Because it's a very small part when we look at the ITE trip generation Data there's root and the closest use is a regional part and with that use in the manual There's only one study So it's not a lot of data, but if you take that data And try to apply it to a part of this size the regional part is usually something in 40 plus acres So we're only talking about less than an acre and a half So our engineer prepared this summary which summarizes weekday average daily traffic weekday AM peak traffic. That's over the course of the peak hour one hour PM peak Saturday average daily trips and then Saturday peak hour and during those peak times there's According to if we use the figures from ITE, there's literally zero trips In that hour stretch peak for weekday and Saturday on the weekday Total average daily traffic the trip for the park come out to be six Three entering three exiting On the Saturday Total average daily traffic the total number of trips comes out to eight So we we have to use caution Obviously when we're looking at these figures because there was only one study, but you can get a sense of the Level or the amount of traffic this type of use might generate. It's not much for a small park such as this I So my engineer basically said well based on you know what we have here with this data You can safely say that You know won't have an impact on the level of surface service of surrounding roads We know there's a subdivision close by so people are going to be commuting in and out of there But again those we have the peak peak hours when that traffic is that it's heaviest But at the same time these numbers say that at those peak times there's zero trips to the park So it's it's you know, it's kind of offset So take it as you will but this is what we're you know our engineers are trained to You know analyze these numbers from ITE And again, we're applying the closest use that we can find in the manual to this particular Use some day they will probably actually have dog parks in the manual right now. They don't so I will There was a I guess we had a sidewalk through the day on that I think Nate seem to have covered most of the issues The amount of fill again, we might adjust that but it's not going to change the accessibility of the walkways I think we're just trying to hopefully trying to lower The finished rate a little bit in the lower It's just to reduce the the amount of money that's going to be needed For a contractor to bring the bill and or if the town was to be able to donate bill But again, we're pretty confident that it won't change the general character of the park as you saw it was a bold shape And again, the fill is up to about You know in that lowest stretch of the bowl if we can get even the three and a half or four feet Nate mentioned the property line we've been trying to get that we finally got a plot of it Um, I do have a copy, but it's digital If you wanted to see it, but um in the existing conditions that sidewalk the existing sidewalk Basically straddles the street line the property line when you get down to Where the shed is the property that actually swings around over here and then it kind of takes this weird bend and continue the shed is actually Uh, I think it was within the street right away. So we can push the shed back so it's you know on the parcel of the dog park and also just angle off that corner of the fence Right to the right of way, I mean, I don't know if it's like 60 feet wide at widen so very it's very right Chris I just wanted to point out that you do have maps on your table that show the property line and the The way the existing Plan and the proposed plan interact with that property line So that gives you the information that mr. Lou was just talking about Thank you. Thanks. I would say that, you know Staff also brought this to the conservation commission designer review board and the disability access advisory committee And so the conservation commission has approved it, you know, they recommended having A vegetated swale kind of a step swale with weirs on the south Southeast side to capture any run-offs that's something that's been incorporated That is on review board You know Didn't have too many comments They liked some of the the precedent images of what may be used in terms of the furniture and shade sales There were some questions about what exactly the entry kiosk would look like it right now The idea that it may be like a an x kind of you know, multi-sided kiosk that could have you know a few displaced faces on it And the disability access advisory committee, you know ask that the gates be Self-closing and you know that the latches be accessible. So that's something that you know will happen just to make sure we We can accommodate different users In the conservation commission, yeah, they didn't have any other questions You know the the town is working with natural heritage because there is the endangered grasshopper sparrow that nests Further up on the landfill. So that's something that will still be worked out as the dog park is developed and The town is also working with DEP and state agencies and tie in bond to do any methane and co2 monitoring Both on the landfill and on this part of the dog park. So that's something that would continue After construction and so, you know, there any needed to be anything addressed it would be but at this time, there's no no concern or any You know, they've been notified of this project as well All right, is that everything? I think so Have any questions? Yeah, we'll get to the questions in just a minute. Uh, so we did have a site visit yesterday and all of us were there So I think we're all acquainted with that and I can't think of any information that was shared that hasn't been discussed But if anyone presence can feel free All right So now it's time for board questions. I suppose one question I did have about the traffic You mentioned that the closest category to this was a regional park. Is there a category? This is a question for the applicant as well as perhaps for anyone our board that may be familiar with these things A category perhaps playground anything smaller than a regional park that might be relevant here I think there's other types of park that specifically list Elements that are included in a park such as playgrounds or splash pads and that type of thing and obviously you can Use this or or equate this with that type of park with Those kind of activity centers So I suppose for instance, um, and I don't know if you worked on the graph park project But what category was that put under for the purposes of traffic calculations? Actually, I don't think we did any traffic generation for that specific project You know, we consider graph park was already pretty widely used So we didn't consider that as you know, the addition of a spray pad would increase the traffic enough to have a Change It wasn't a change of use Yeah, and I think for you know for the dog park, you know, we're planning on 20 spaces You know, some of it is just anecdotal Looking at how many cars go to Amethyst Brook and Wentworth and other areas and how many you know, could be dog walker So I think the design is conservative in the respect that it, you know Has bike loops enough parking and you know, it has sidewalks so it can accommodate the neighborhood the idea is that I don't you know, I'm not sure how accurate the The trip generation modeling is I think there could be you know a lot more users than they're estimating I mean, there could be certainly times when you know, there is zero a number of people I mean, I mean based on You know based on what the rate is in the ITE manual It comes out to zero based on this size of the park or basically point one or point two You can't count a fraction of a trip. It's either a trip or not a trip So that's why it's zero because it came out so low under one What's there going to say Well, yeah, I mean I'm sure there might be times when you know This park is heavily used and there might be times when nobody is visiting the park for hours at a time. So Given, you know, it kind of balances out and given that we're on a very well-maintained and How to travel the road, the route nine that can easily handle you know traffic getting on road and getting on We can't anticipate that All right, thank you other comments questions Maria We got an email about the shed being in the property line and you said it was going to slide Southeast and then is also going to slide outside of the 100 foot wetland buffer. So that yeah, so That buffer actually applies to there's a a pond across the street And so we're actually going to be pulling it Further away from that wetland, you know, so that we're already within the 100 feet We're going to be pulling it closer to the you know 100 foot So I spoken with the town's wetland administrator and she didn't see a problem with that You know because it's actually we bring it further away from the wetland by moving it out of the right of way And there are some questions at the site visit about maintenance. So the dpw is going to maintain This could you speak a little bit about the maintenance plan? Sure. Yeah, there's one that was submitted So, you know the dog park task force, you know, probably transition to a friends group And they'll you know try to take over some of the daily routine maintenance You know, whether it's emptying waste baskets Make sure the park's clean The hope is that it also be self-policing so that the you know owners will be responsible And then public works will also you know help with weekly trash removal mowing And you know any larger kind of maintenance tasks But you know the the Friends group would have you know key to the shed for manual tools to sweep up You know the piece down back onto the area if it need be or keep the walkways surfaces clean And then you know in the winter the town would flush the irrigation system and The park is open, you know during daylight hours. It wouldn't be open during the winter So the town would close it down remove the shade sails and do that seasonal type of of maintenance Great. I think some of it is also dependent on the use so right now You know we're anticipating that the friends group can do some things and dpw and if it's You know if we you know if we need need be the conservation staff The land manager could also help out if it you know if there's really busy times in the animal control office there as well Does the organization I think the stanton group that you mentioned provide kind of best practices for sanitation and facilities like these They well their recommendations are incorporated into the design of the water and having water available to rinse down the gravel Even rinsed on you know spot water grass areas But we're hoping that we can obviously get the irrigation system included in this design. They have other uh This site design specific Guidelines, you know for instance like they want the gravel to be a little bit lower than the walkway So you know it doesn't it's a little harder to have it kicked up onto the walkway But you know we realize that's going to happen and and with with uh, you know dog owners. We know that You know people really care about their dogs and they're going to care about the facility So it's it's not probably not going to be an issue to have Uh friends of the dog park, you know Do uh routine meetings like sweep gravel off the Walks that happen, right? I think the proposed rules and regulations also address, you know stanton foundation has You know recommendations in terms of how many dogs per owner and You know they want them to be unleashed once they're in the dog park area.  Well, the idea would be that it would just be self policing and so, you know, like I said on the entry kiosk there The idea is that there'd be a you know series of phone numbers or contacts So it could be the animal control officer. It could be you know staff Could be someone who is going to volunteer if they have the availability to come and you know monitor But really it would just be a Self-policing and if need be there'd be numbers who could be people to be contacted Christine So you said daylight hours, which I assume is like sunrise to sunset And it would have signs posting that is it I don't want to say self-policing because no one should be there, but is it locked up or is the police department gonna Like like any other park we have it's usually those hours Yeah, I'm assuming it will be locked. So there'll be you know Key or something that could be used to control the access And that could be both town staff or the friends group could come in open and lock it There's only one entry gate You know The meetings there's also meetings Would you like me to repeat Give a follow-up question One short one on um So you said seasonally it would be closed and will that be determined by the organization that's running it or the town on When it like would close for the season and does it reopen and then doesn't reclose because of snow Like how does that work? Right? I think it'd be a conversation with both organizations You know the idea would be during heavy snow. It's not going to be um cloud or snow is not going to be cleared so You know it may be that if you know in some winters We don't have snow until january and it's mild weather then maybe it would stay open later It's kind of dependent on the weather But you know, we're not going to go out there and shovel the pathways or anything So once there's winter is established it will be closed Last one because it's sunrise to sunset whether summer or winter So there's no lighting at this place or on the kiosks Nothing solar. There's no lighting Right. There's no lighting provided in the plan. Um, I can't remember if there's any street lights there But obviously they're they're not going to light the park, you know, so um, it would be unlikely that somebody would be Wandering around in the middle of the night out here Or at dark All right. Thank you further questions from the board Turn to Questions comments from the public We have no public with us tonight So turn back applicant's response anything you'd like to add No, I mean, I think the town, you know, I said a lot of people are excited for this and the idea might be that there could be You know more in the future, but this is the first one and we're excited to get it going Chris I wonder if mr. Malloy would talk about the trees that are along the Roadway and what's going to happen to them and about the new trees that are going to be planted or maybe mr Luke could talk about that. Sure. There's I think about five existing trees planted along the roadway ones in decline the the rest aren't pretty good health the town tree warden alan snow thought maybe Two or three could be transplanted. So that is, you know, part of the plan is to move those trees and relocate them And then possibly plant, you know, two new trees next to the parking area So on either end of the parking You know the pole in parking there'll be trees planted within the right of way You know, they're outside the property and outside the cap And that would be the only plantings as part of this project All right, thanks again So at this point we would normally hear final comments and questions from the public the applicant and the board As I mentioned earlier, we don't have a quorum sufficient to vote on this site plan review Application or a special permit at the moment, but we hope to Next Wednesday. So unless there's any further discussion from yes, chris I wondered if you would like to talk about conditions possible conditions so that you'd have them In hand for next wednesday if you continue this meeting and one of them would be the kiosk There aren't any details about the kiosk and it would probably be a good idea for you to have a condition That says that the kiosk is going to come back to you for Review and approval at a future date since there isn't any information now I'm just concerned that the building commissioner may View that as a separate item for some reason and cause a new site plan review Application to come to you and I think it makes more sense to handle it as a condition Yes, I absolutely agree with that the two conditions that I had in mind And we can certainly address those now would be the one that was just mentioned to Have the kiosk plan subject to Future approval by the planning board and also that the shed is to be relocated as discussed to be contained entirely within the parcel Any other conditions that board members would like to include David Yeah, so we can address that there is a 10 foot wide gate near the maintenance shed and then there's also A 10 foot wide gate in the fence separating the two dog areas So they're you know, I guess that during the fire department review They didn't notice that but there are 10 foot wide gates to allow access into the park in both sections So they'll be able to get 30 for 30 pound dog out I hope so Christine just to add on to your um shed also that the fence is put back in the property line All right any other conditions board members would like to see Okay, so We have discussed continuing this public hearing to next Wednesday the 26th and I'd entertain a motion To do so chris would 705 p.m. Be all right That would be fine. I'll make a motion to um I guess the do we continue the public hearing yeah till um next wednesday the 26th said 705 Second all right moved and seconded any further discussion If not all in favor That's unanimous. All right. Thanks. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you All right, so moving on down the agenda the next item is item 4a zoning subcommittee report and Most of us were at the zoning subcommittee. So uh, I just want to give a brief update Christine, I think you were the one that wasn't there. Oh jack also was not there jack. You're gonna rejoin us Yeah So the zoning subcommittee met this afternoon and it was a joint meeting Between the zoning subcommittee and the town council's community resource committee and we discussed with them and staff member dave zomek how Planning board and zoning subcommittee town council might look at zoning going forward and we had a productive conversation And I think we agreed for the immediate future that will continue to hold Joint hearings between the zoning subcommittee and the community resources committee We also looked to some members of the community resource committee that joined us to give us feedback both on The three zoning articles that the zoning subcommittee has recommended The planning board recommended town council and we also Looking for some feedback from that group on the larger zoning priorities list that the zoning subcommittee has put together So we look forward to continuing that conversation. We also received some Correspondence from students at I'm failing to recall the school. Was it fort river fort river students have recommended that We consider adopting a zoning ordinance that in essence would require the developers Of any non-agricultural parcels of one and a half acres or more in size Must conserve at least 30 of the tree canopy So this was a Different kind of proposal not something we had really considered before and The zoning subcommittee is looking for input from the public shade tree committee and from the tree warden We certainly appreciate the students initiative and reaching out to us and we're going to See if something along those lines might be feasible This is opportunities for public comments about the zoning subcommittee report again We don't have any public with us tonight. Are there any other planning and zoning issues? All right, moving on to 5a old business planning board rules and regulations final version So this is a Copy that we have in our packet of the rules and regulations after the changes that we voted in at our last meeting chris So this new rules and regulations has been filed with the town clerk and has been posted on the town website So it's official Great. Thank you I just wanted to make sure that you all had seen that there is a revised agenda. Yes. Thank you All right next item is 5b report to town council on zoning bylaw amendments to bring the bylaw into conformance with anrist home rule charter Deliver to town council on june 13th. This is another item that we voted on at our last meeting And staff prepared a report which has been delivered to town council about our recommendation The staff did prepare the report and it has been delivered to town council. Thank you Thank you for that Is there any additional topic not reasonably anticipated 48 hours old business? Yes, david. Do we know when the town council is going to vote on those The revised Chris Bob ritchie a former town council and I met with the town council the other night when I meant the first town council On the second cil. Anyway, we met with them on Monday night, I guess it was and explained to them what this was all about and they are they asked a lot of questions and Most of their most of their questions were about the process of them adopting a zoning amendment So the town clerk and I are working on that with the president of town council to try to smooth out that process but The plan is that town council will hold a public hearing and Hopefully vote on the changes to the bylaw on july 1st All right, the next item is 6a new business pioneer value planning commission representative and alternate nomination and election So currently that's christine and jack jack primarily and christine is the alternate Um, it's christ if I understand this is the time of year when pvpc is looking for this action to be taken on our part No That is correct. Usually you do it um after july 1st But in this case, um, there's some urgency because there's an election coming up of the Or a choice to be made about the executive director of the pvpc and um town council has requested that The planning board have the vote to nominate and elect pvpc representatives during this meeting so that they These representatives can vote in the election, which is on the 27. Is that right 27? Yes, which so that's next week. So um and what we've Kind of um, what should I say come to understand? is that The planning board nominates and elects its Representative and then the planning board has the ability to nominate an alternative representative, but that representative is appointed by um Believe it's the town town manager, so That's the information that I have So we're to elect a Representative and nominate a alternate And our current representatives happy to continue serving in those capacities I will Anyone like to make a motion I move that I'll move that our current representatives remain All right moved and seconded for the discussion. Yes, chris. Can you do this? Uh separately just so it's completely clear to town council and the town manager what's happening here So, um, I would suggest that you nominate and elect mr Gemsick and then that you nominate Miss gray mullen and I will pass that information along to the town manager and miss gray mullen may be able to elaborate on that So jack is the commissioner And then I am the alternate commissioner if you want to commissioners the term Yes I moved to nominate mr. Gemsick as the commissioner to the pvpc from the amherst planning board Moved and seconded further discussion if not all in favor All right, that's unanimous I moved to nominate miss gray mullen as the alternate commissioner Moved and seconded any further discussion if not all in favor Also unanimous Thank you both for your continuing service I understand that um one of our colleagues in north hampton has been nominated for The head role at the pvpc way in feiden That's correct. And I think um if you wanted to Find out more information about that. I believe that I could forward to you Information about the other candidate as well as mr. Feiden. Would you like that information? As long as our representatives have the information I'm satisfied Thank you All right anything else on pvpc We will have the report later This was specifically on the election uh item 6b summer meeting schedule Chris I had reached out to you about some alternative date dates and I think those dates were the 10th of july The 24th of july the 14th of august And I think and maybe the 31st of july and I do not have my sheet here to Tell me who said they could attend on those dates So I don't know if you remember what you said about those dates, but I can send out another email As necessary we have two Upcoming public hearings that we have to take care of actually three one is emmerced media that is continuing And I need to find out from town from our town attorney about mr. Stutzman status with regard to that public hearing that's currently scheduled to go ahead on july 17th But we don't have a quorum for that for july 17th um So we have to work on that and The other couple of well I'll get to the others as when we get to that part of the Agenda but in any event I will send out another Email tomorrow about the schedule and you'll have a chance to look at your schedules and get back to me about these alternative dates Okay Christine Could it be a doodle poll? It could be a doodle poll. Um, yes, it could be a doodle poll And for the next two weeks, we've just decided we will hold a meeting next wednesday the 26th and I believe we will not hold a meeting on july 3rd because there are no public hearings. That's correct All right. Thank you. Um, there's the question of where the zoning subcommittee should meet next week and before we Make a determination on that it was mentioned at the zoning subcommittee that there are Several planning board meetings or planning board related meetings next week starting with on monday at the bang center the Open hearing of the residents related to the affordable housing proposal on north hampton road. That's at 6 30 p.m And on tuesday at 6 30 or 7 chris 7 p.m 7 p.m on tuesday is the flood mapping flood mapping joint hearing with the conservation commission We have our meetings just discussed on wednesday and then on thursday I'm forgetting the final one. This is kendrick park playground So knowing that all those meetings are there should the zoning subcommittee meet on wednesday No, zoning subcommittee will not meet next wednesday. All right. Uh, are there any new business topics not reasonably anticipated? Jack clarification. What's the thursday meeting? The thursday meeting is uh, I believe an informational meeting about a proposed playground at Kendrick park the town's applied for some funds for that project chris Um, we're applying for a park grant for a playground on kendrick park There is a playground already designated in the plan of kendrick park and there's an opportunity to Get up to I think it's up to four hundred thousand dollars from the state to help us with that endeavor and the idea is that we're going to Follow the plan that we already have for kendrick park and fit the playground into the designated area This particular meeting is an effort to do outreach to the community because that's part of the Park grant application process. We have to show that we have reached out to the community. So it's really you know people who might actually use the Playground who we're hoping will come you all are certainly welcome to come if you like to or if you have an interest in this project But don't feel obligated to come Thank you Are there any other yes christine? Jack and I will be at pvpc David go back to the um Are there plans or or a project description of the uh for the housing project that's proposed on north hampton road The subject of the meeting is coming monday. I haven't been able to find it on the town website. Do you know So there's a lot of information available valley cdc I believe has some on their website and one of the issues here is that the hearings topic Is the cpa funding for this proposal? So the plans do have a fair amount of detail to them, but they're not the level of detail that we would see If the project proceeds to a zba 40b permit hearing Thank you. All right. Any other new business topics non-anticipated Any form a a and r subdivision applications no form ace upcoming zba applications um Let's see We have one upcoming zba application. It is by a company called tip up llc and it's a request for a special permit to allow a non-owner occupied duplex on at 119 north whitney street I think they're going to be adding a unit there. So there's an existing single family home That's what I understand. Yes All right, is that the only upcoming zba application? I believe that is the only upcoming zba application. All right Upcoming spp sprs ub applications chris So we we do have um amir's project has been submitted and so that will be put on an an upcoming agenda You'll remember amir mcchi came to you and described a project on southeast street that he's proposing Right behind the florins savings bank and it's going to be 66 apartments and I believe 68 parking spaces with some retail space down below and So that will be coming to you another one is a kind of a smaller project. It's the bank of america Across the street from the florins savings bank in that same village center and they're putting in some more lighting because they feel that There's a need for more security there and so that will be coming to you as well And of course amir's media will be coming back to you at some point I'm not exactly sure if they're going to be ready for the 17th and Anyway, we can't hold them hearing that night because there are only four of you available. So We have to work on a different night for the amir's media Has there been any update on the status of the tree hearing related to that southeast street project you mentioned? chris I've been Trying to get some information from the town manager about how he wants to go on that, but he's been Otherwise occupied with a lot of things having to do with town council. So i'm hoping that we will get an answer for that before Before you have to delve into this project But if if we don't you know you can just put a condition on that says The removal of the trees has to be approved by the appropriate entity Great, thank you Sorry jack did you have a comment? Great, okay Planning board committee and liaison reports pvpc Yeah, so we had the annual meeting last Was it thursday? yeah, so and Kimmel presented Quite a bit on energy Yeah, and You know green energy and where we're going and with that Very informative. I can't really get into that too much, but uh, and then they elected the executive committee for the piner valley planning commission amongst the current commissioners and I just I just wanted to note that There there is a lot of ongoing commissioners there that have been there a long time and and and so the incumbency is is a Is a Recurring theme there it seems to me within the piner valley planning commission if I just want to note that there was one person I think had five years On the committee, but the rest of them were basically 10 to 20 years serving on their respective planning boards and The planning piner valley planning commission. They've been with the piner valley planning commission for 10 to 20 years the folks on the executive Committee and that numbered like seven people So experience matters. I just wanted to uh to note that and and then Tim Brennan, you know phenomenal run as the executive director and he had a quite a send-off and his staff stepped up And you don't realize, you know the quality of people that are working there and that's I think Makes You know, it's just a very well-run organization so uh, but it was Very good thing to attend Great, thank you CPAC our representative is not here same with ag commission design review board The affordable housing trust met and we discussed a number of things still working on revising the town's housing Policy which the trust is going to be sending out to the planning board Into the town council for its adoption for their adoption And so we should be seeing that shortly and then we also spent a large amount of time discussing that affordable housing project on North Hampton road which we discussed in which planning board members would be welcome to attend the meeting On monday concerning it the trust did vote to send a letter to town council expressing some concerns about the way the process has been conducted so as I mentioned The current hearing and the status of the project is that they're awaiting approval from town council for the cpa money That was recommended by cpa by the trust That's five hundred thousand dollars, which is to be bonded and so essentially it's the funding that's a question now And the conversation has really extended out into the minutiae of the project And so there's a lot of questions being asked which are good questions You know about exactly how the project is going to be run Whether there's going to be onsite staff and makeup of the residents But these are questions that would come up during the cpa Comprehensive permit process so the concern that the trust expressed and that I share is that You know town council is determining its process is how it goes about things and if we set a precedent where CPA funding is scrutinized to this level with every cpa project It could be a huge impediment for affordable housing projects and anything that cpa funds So I would encourage any planning board members that are interested to learn more or that have an opinion to attend It's likely going to be a very well attended hearing on monday chris I believe there will be a fair amount of information on the town council's website They're going to receive a packet about this project including a memo from the planning department a timeline for the project information about how Tenants are selected and a general overview of the project So, um, I believe that's going to be included in the town council packet and you would have access to that And most of this information is also available on the embers What do they call it embers housing? Affordable housing trust website. They didn't put municipal in there. I would think that it is what I'm just looking to nate to confirm That is that information there most of it is our staff person Okay All right, um zoning subcommittee. We already spoke of downtown parking working group Just want to report that the consultant can nelson-neigard continues to work on the draft report for parking The second parking forum was scheduled for next wednesday But due to some scheduling conflicts on the town side, it's going it's been canceled and it will be It's postponed to an To be determined date, but it will be happening And I'll update you later What is the scope of the second hearing? So the first one, um Was more talking about areas of issue that will be looked at and then this time when they come back They're actually going to make suggestions of how they're working on in the report how they're going to suggest to make the key issues Better All right, thanks Okay, next item report of the chair. I have no report other than that It's Not even eight o'clock yet. So did pretty well tonight report of staff I would say there's a lot going on Perhaps an understatement. All right, thanks everyone. We're adjourned


Dear Michael ladies and gentlemen, I feel very honored to speak to you today the double IEA is a very important form for the exchange of thoughts and ideas between continental Europe and Ireland and I am very happy and grateful for the good relations between Ireland and Germany of course one more reason To be here with this in mind. I would like to offer you some insights into the German perspective on the future of European defense and The year 2020 is especially exciting for us in Germany with regard to the future of the European Union as It is our turn to take over the EU Council presidency from July 2020 onwards in our ministry. We have been and continue to be busy preparing and We look very much forward to the opportunities that the presidency of us to work together with the other EU member states. I will come back to that later. Of course We are all aware that the international security situation has become more fragile than before As you can see nowadays in the Middle East Since 2014 we have experienced disruptions such as Syria the annexation of Crimea and the migration crisis furthermore The international community is under enormous pressure and our liberal world order is constantly under attack by both international and external powers today We are confronted with a new security situation and one of the most prominent features of this new environment is What I would call the return of great power competition Instead of the end of history. We are experiencing a call for unilateralism and nationalism all over the world and The polarities in international relations are changing as well and new threats are on the horizon for each member state of the European Union and Of course the European Union is influenced by the British decision to leave the European Union In this respect, I'm very happy that we the as EU member states were able to demonstrate unity with Ireland during the Brexit negotiations so What can we do about these challenges and what role could or should be assumed by the European Union? All these developments have led to the realization that the EU needs to change and adapt To the new found threats and challenges the overarching goal is To increase the European Union's ability to act to contribute to security The EU must be able to stabilize neighboring regions and address security concerns We have to work together to respond adequately to the challenges we face and no member state Can deal with them on its own For that reason we Europeans started together to further enhance European Union's common security and defense policy one of the first achievements in order to increase the ability to act was the Initiation of Pascal the permanent and structured cooperation 25 member state agreed on binding commitments a closer cooperation in defense matters and Shared projects for capability development and more operational output We are very grateful for Ireland's contribution to the success of Pascal in various projects such as a project focusing on maritime surveillance Violence for Germany the integration of Pesco has always been of utmost importance and the Irish Participation in Pesco illustrates this in particular as we are well aware of the challenges this potential potentially poses to Ireland with a few to neutrality Pesco aims at deepening defense corporations by jointly Developing capabilities using synergies and overcoming closely fragmentation From the German perspective This was also a milestone Signaling the move to a more coherent and efficient future for European defense page Pesco is much more than cooperation in armament and Procurement due to its strong operational focus With regard to German coordinated projects first tangible results are becoming visible a good example is the European medical command in Summer 2019. We took an important step forward to generate direct operational output by having the first real capabilities ready We all benefit from this as we harmonize different national medical standards and ensure a better flow of information to give you an idea what the medical command is about in 2014 and 15 we had the Ebola crisis in Africa various European member states or countries reacted upon the request from the different African countries Today in a situation like this The medical command could share information for situational awareness and could also act as a Coordinating element for all European efforts Let me mention another project That vividly illustrates Significant progress the network of logistic hubs in Europe and support to operations The main aim of this project is the development of a European logistic network by the common Utilization of logistic hubs and subsequently the extensions of logistic or cooperation amongst participating member states again an Example to explain the idea of the project several EU countries are engaged in European missions and operating Operations abroad in Mali for example by Ireland also provide soldiers and by using one Dedicated logistic hub like the German installation in Funk start close to Frankfurt Logistical chains in support of our soldiers can be simplified and can be made more cost-effective via one lock up all soldiers on a specific mission or operation can be provided Efficiently and in a coordinated manner with the needed goods and material The majority of the project members has already announced logistic contributions and plans to Utilize Services and infrastructures provided by the partners as I have just described but we are also But we also are looking at them making at making Pesco better in 2020 Strategic review of all Pesco Projects will be conducted by all participating member states Although Pesco was a great achievement. It still can be improved This review will show where there's the need to do so. We have to be aware that Pesco does not lead to quick wins We need strategic patience and honest assessment If there are Pesco projects that are not producing the desired outcomes One should also take into account ending these projects Let me underline that we consider Pesco a success story from our perspective Pesco The nucleus and the heart of our vision for the long-term goal of establishing a European defense Union On our way to this European defense union We want to use our upcoming council presidency in 2020 to move the common security and defense policy short CDSP Forward together with the other EU member states Let me give you two examples of issues that we consider important for the next year for this year First of all, Germany has been pushing for a coherent process of further connecting the different initiatives in the CSDP The CSDP does however not only need to be more coherent, but it is also in need of more direction There's consensus that the European Union should be able to act in crisis management and that it should be able to protect its own interests That is why we need a definition of what we want to be able to do and what we want to prioritize We aim at creating new guidance, a so-called strategic compass From this document, we then can derive more concrete goals Which then will lead to the definition of operational requirements and subsequently operational outputs Concrete goals and outputs are necessary To convincingly show that the European Union has the ability to act In the regions of crisis management and to protect its interests Showing that we Europeans are a credible actor can also help to illustrate the benefits of a more developed and elaborate Defense cooperation for our partners in NATO I know you are not a member of NATO, but I know we share the interest to enhance the cooperation between European Union and NATO Highlighting and improving European Union's partnership with NATO is an additional topic of our Council Presidency next year, this year If the European Member States capabilities are increased and cooperation in the European Union becomes more efficient and practical This is also beneficial for NATO and of interest to non-NATO countries So overall, I can assure you that our Council Presidency will be used in close cooperation with all of the European Member States To further develop the CDSP to take more steps towards our ambition to create a more capable European Union Allow me now to broaden the scope a bit as I have been asked to also address European Union-United States-China relations, not an easy topic And of course not primarily defense related In this respect the emerging great power conflict between the United States and China is of concern to us We often are told that the European Union has no role in this unfolding competition. I disagree with this The European Union has a role to play in several areas From economic and trade affairs to the fields of diplomacy and security In 2018 the European Union was China's largest trading partner While the United States currently still is the largest trading partner of the European Union This interdependence is important to keep in mind as the European Union will continue to protect rules-based free trade Concretely, I think we Europeans need to propose a credible and attractive alternative to the Belt and Road Initiative As we are more than skeptical regarding standards for transparency and sustainable economic development The European Union's connectivity strategy launched in September 2018 provides such an alternative to connect the European Union with Asia better Coming back to security and its role in this great power competition. We often think of the South China Sea The European Union can exert influence in this area too It is in the European Union's interest to support negotiations of China and ASEAN member states With the respect to a code of conduct for the South China Sea And to put pressure on the negotiation parties to find an agreement Neighbor presence and defense diplomacy are further measures that can have a positive effect on the region's maritime security In the past Chinese security policy was characterized mainly by internal needs Today China seems to follow a path that aims at establishing more regional hegemony Chinese policy has reinforced its character of a more active self-confident enforcement of own interests and respective views of the international order This often opposes Western liberal values, ideas and interests However these liberal values are the cornerstone of the international rule-based order Therefore the West must stand together in a world where natural trust in multilateralism Rules-based order and our way of life are under more pressure than ever In all this we have to deal with a certain dilemma That is the risk of a widening conflict between our most important and irreplaceable guarantor of security The United States and our most important trading partner China In this respect I see us Europeans as an important partner to the S when addressing China We bring with us significant potential to shape The debate in Europe on this issue as I mentioned China will also be a focus of our upcoming German European Union Council presidency with the aim of finding a common European Union position on China To achieve this aim And Germany will for example host the European Union China leaders meeting in September 2020 in Leipzig Especially with our council presidency in mind We hope to improve both the relations with China With the scheduled EU China meeting As well as the relations with our transatlantic partners With a strong focus on European Union NATO cooperation So to sum up I am convinced that the European Union has an important role to play In promoting stability and security and in protecting the international order And not only in the area of trade and economy And this is in close coordination And synergy with efforts of NATO in the area of security and defense This is why we in the federal ministry of defense are so Determined to bring forward a CDSP And we are looking forward to closely work together with Ireland in this endeavor in our forthcoming European Union Council presidency presidency. Thank you for your attention


Place up those cleats and strap on the helmet because football is back for BSU. The Beavers open spring practices afternoon at the Chet. Even though there was snow stacked on the sidelines, it didn't stop them from taking the turf. They want a spring ball in the energy. Excitement was in the air as BSU looks to build off an 8-3 campaign and officially flip the script to 2018. It feels really good. I know the last two weeks, the guys have been really excited about just coming off last season. We got a lot of big goals ahead of us. So this first day, guys are excited. Looking out at the field, though you'll notice new faces as the Beavers must replace 14 starters total and are looking at the young guys to answer the call. We have a lot of good players that left the program. So to see who's going to step up, I think that's where we're trying to see which wretches are fresh, which transfer or which guy that was a 3, now is going to be a starter. Just the young guys stepping up into their roles that they need to step up into and contribute on all levels. We're going to have a little younger group this year, but the talent's high and we're excited about that. And the most intriguing position battle to watch this spring, the quarterbacks, because gone is Jordan Hine and it's up for grabs. I think one of the three could be the starters. I think heading probably has the inside track. Brett in all this really, really talented. So we'll see those guys. And then M&N right has a strong arm. We're going to see if he can get it done too. So those are the guys that right now at quarterback are kind of competing. All in all though, there's one big focus for this spring. Leadership, I think that's where it starts right away. It's like, if you're going to be a good football player for us, you need to be a leader in the classroom. You need to be leader off the field, do things the right way. So all of these guys to go out and compete and every day is in every rep is to compete and try to be the best they can and make the guys around better. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland news, please consider making a tax deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.


Welcome back to the Cyber Underground. I've missed you, everybody. I've been away for a while. I had some business to attend to. Now I'm back. We're going to start this episode real nice and easy. We're going to cover a lot of ground. And it's just me. I know. If you don't like that, come back on the next episode. We'll have a guest for you. It's okay. I understand. I'm feeling a little bit meh. Like everybody else these days, we don't know what's going on. We've had two years of this last Trump presidency. We have no idea where we're going. That's okay. For a little while, kick back, relax.  We're going to split this episode up into a couple parts. The first part of this episode will be everything I just mentioned. The second part, we're going to go into some news about some surveys that have been conducted for cybersecurity and some shocking results. So stay around for that. We'll have a one minute break in the middle of the episode after we cover some ground. We're going to divide this up into local news, national news, and some tips and tricks. We're going to start out for local. As you all know, I teach for the University of Hawaii, a Capulani Community College, about nine-tenths of a mile from the beautiful sands of Waikiki Beach.  That's just my job. I teach networking security and ethical hacking. That's what I do for a living, and I absolutely love it. So I try to keep everybody safe, and let me keep you informed of some local stuff. If you're a local watchin' out here, you're in Hawaii, especially on the island of Oahu, which is where I teach. This news is going to be important to you. If it's not important to you, and you just want to deal with the national stuff, fast forward a couple of minutes, and you can catch up there. So let's talk about the Capulani Community College. We out here call it KCC or CAPCC. We have at our community college level a certificate of competence and a certificate of achievement in cybersecurity, and it corresponds with our associate's degree courses in IT. And I teach the upper two-year division classes for those topics. We just need to make a couple announcements on what's going on in cybersecurity. We have some new online classes coming up for fall. We'll be teaching a lot more stuff online, not everything, but we're getting there. So if you're not on this island, you're one of our neighbor islands, you can't really get here on campus, you can take a lot of our courses online, including mine. I'm doing mine online. We're also teaching a third-year program called the Advanced Professional Certification. That's all the 300 level courses. You take six of them, that's 18 credits, and you get an Advanced Professional Certificate. And that now transfers to UH Maui for the rest of their online program for the applied business and information technology degree. So you get a block transfer grant of your associate's degree, plus the 18 units of your APC, a Capricorn Line at Community College, and the rest of the bachelor's degree, the last three semesters, you can do completely online. Of course, you can also go to Maui. That's not a bad place. I kind of like the campus, and they'd love to see you out there. But if you want to do online, you can. That's one of the big problems out here in the islands is driving to and from in the islands is kind of a pain in the butt. If you have to transfer to another campus, and it just happens to be, say, on the other side of Oahu, that commute can take you up to two hours in traffic. I know. Traffic is terrible on this island. So here's another option for all your students out there. Also, if you're going for one of the CompTIA professional industry certifications like Net Plus A Plus or Security Plus, we now teach not only the course, the 16 week course that gets you prepared for that material and teaches the material of the test, we also now teach you one credit, kind of a boot camp crash course to prepare you. It's called a cert prep course to get you ready to actually take the examination. We teach the Security Plus and Net Plus test this fall. They're coming up starting the 23rd of February and we'll run that the first one Net Plus for four weeks, four Saturdays, four hours. And then we'll skip a week and go right into March 30th. For the next four weeks, we'll teach the Security Plus cert prep course. And for those of you KCC students out there taking these courses for one year only, this first year we're starting the program. We're reimbursing you for the cost of the certification exam. So save a couple hundred bucks there. We'll pay you back for successfully passing that exam if you've taken the class with us first. All right, we'll also be teaching those same three courses in one week increments over the summer starting July 8th. We'll do one week A Plus, one week Net Plus, one week Security Plus. Tuition in summer is a little bit higher. However, it's still less than taking these Conktya bootcamps in the civilian sector. So consider that. We have some highly qualified professionals teaching these courses. You can knock it out in one week, prepare for the test and take it.  So we'd love to see you think about that. We'll also teach these courses coming up in the fall. Schedules pending. I'll announce it at one of our later shows. Now we also have the Collegian Cyber Defense Competition coming up. We have a qualifying round at our school on February 23rd.  We're putting together a team of eight professional students that will defend a network and lock down some servers for four hours to qualify for the next round, which is a defensive posture competition where students will defend a network while an active red team attacks. This is a great competition. It's a real life scenario where you're protecting a business and someone's trying to compromise your computers. And don't get disappointed if you do the test or the competition and you fail because everybody in this competition eventually succumbs to the red team because they're fantastic. They're professionals. They do this for a living and they're going to get in. So it's just a matter of time, but it's a fun exercise. It's a great competition. It's free. I was always bringing in pizza for the day. So anyway, February 23rd, give me a contact shout out there. I'm at David.Stevens at Hawaii.edu. And I will respond and put you on the team if you're a KCC student. If you're not, I will forward you on to one of the other local campuses where you might be taking classes and you can participate there as well. Oahu has several college campuses that you can participate in. Also, we're going to move now into the more national stuff. There's a Women in Cybersecurity Conference coming up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the March 28th through the 30th as a gen cyber competition in the first day of presentations, workshops, panels, and a career village of women we need you in the cybersecurity field. If you didn't know this, there's not a lot of you in the cybersecurity field or IT in general. And we've come to realize, all of us as Earthlings, that diversity actually increases efficiency.  We need your perspective too. So please join the workforce. We need you. This is a reflect in some of my classes. When I first started teaching cybersecurity just a few years ago at KCC, we only had one or two girls in the program. They're proud graduates now of UH West Oahu and the information and assurance degree for the bachelor level. But now my classes are up to 40% young women. And I'm quite proud to say they're doing very well. So please come join us. Participate in this fantastic career and cybersecurity right now has a 0% unemployment rate. So join the workforce. We need you. That's just one of the events coming up. And women in cybersecurity is a big thing out here. Let's talk about upgrades in the first half of the show. And I personally promote upgrades to your system, patches fixes and security upgrades. They take care of what I believe are about 90% of the problems you're going to experience and here's why. There's a couple of different types of hackers.   And find their offensive security database and look at all the vulnerabilities and hacks. They will download those hacks that are already figured out by somebody else. They'll apply a scripting tool, which is freely available, open source, or they'll make a small purchase. And they'll run this script against dozens, if not thousands of computers to try to hack into a system. But that's not really not a hacker. We call them script kitties. And if you're constantly upgrading your system to the latest version of the OS and the most efficient and most recent security fixes, these scripts will not work. The only thing that will work if you keep your system completely up to date is something called a zero day. Which of course it's a vulnerability that hasn't actually been tried or has been tried but never published. So you don't know it's out there. So zero days are still about 10% of what's going on out there. And the professional hackers, the serious security researchers can get into your system with these. And we'll talk about those in a second. However, let's talk about patches and upgrades, fixes, and what you can do to stay safe with your system. If you're a Mac user, let's talk about the Mac OS right now. Mac OS, if you're running a Mac OS and your computer is within 2015 or above, you should be able to upgrade to Mac OS 10.14.3. You should be there. That's Mac OS Mojave. Even if you don't like it, it's the most secure Mac OS out there. There's still a couple of vulnerabilities. However, we'll talk about those in a few minutes. However, it's still the most secure system out there. If you're running an iOS device, that's an Apple TV, that's an Apple Watch, or you're running an iPhone or an iPad, you have one of the iOS operating systems on there. iOS, you should be up at 12.4.1. That's the major, minor, and revision number of the latest OS out there. And you should upgrade that because there's a lot of security challenges to these devices and mobile is one of the targeting mechanisms for or vectors for some of these advanced hackers. So upgrade your phones and your other systems as well. Now, out there on Firefox and Chrome, your latest browser, there's a couple of different versions of Firefox out there. Firefox uses Firefox Chrome, sorry, Firefox Quantum. And you should be up to version 65. But Firefox has another version out there, this Mozilla browser called the extended service release or ESR. So Firefox ESR, bring yourself up to 60.5. That's the version you should be on. Chrome, now when you see the major, minor, revision and build number of Chrome's software release, it's fairly long. So I'm just going to tell you go up to version 72. Another easiest way to upgrade these things on a Mac, you can go to about in the upper menus of these browsers and look for about, click on that and it'll upgrade you automatically to whatever the latest version is. Then on Windows 10, all you need to do is remember patch Tuesdays. No Microsoft releases, all their software patches, usually on the first or second Tuesday of the month, I forget which one it is. But that Tuesday, they'll release a package which covers the OS, Microsoft Office and a number of other Microsoft applications included in that release and it covers all the security features and all the tweaks and patches and fixes that you need to keep Windows safe. And you should be on Windows 10, not Windows 8, not Windows 7 and certainly not Windows XP. That was a workhorse OS, but it was the downfall of the British national health system just a little while ago when WannaCry took over using SMB server message block 1.0. And it was because the management of that organization decided to save a little money by not upgrading their systems. Kiss it, dad.  Let's talk about the latest OS hack for Mac OS. A security researcher has published a way to get your key chain information on a Mac computer. That's all the information that has all your passwords all tucked away and supposedly encrypted and safe. But he found a way to do it even without admin permissions. Now he published screenshots only and he won't publish the actual hack because there is no bug bounty program at Apple. Apple, shame on you, you should be paying for this.  They're actually working for you. Don't be afraid, don't have them arrested. They're actually making things safer in the world and you need them. So Apple, wake up. All right, with our last 30 seconds here, we'll talk really quick about the default passwords on devices now. Information goes all over the place, all over your home all the time.  We have the Apple TV. We have web cams. We have pet cams, horrible things. Change at the very least, change the default passwords that come with those devices. We're gonna talk about that a little bit more right after the break. Until then, let's take a minute, pay some bills, and we'll come right back. Aloha, this is Winston Welch. I am your host of Out and About, where every other week, Mondays at 3, we explore a variety of topics in our city, state, nation and world. And events, organizations, the people that fuel them. It's a really interesting show. We welcome you to tune in and we welcome your suggestions for shows. You got a lot of them out there. And we have an awesome studio here where we can get your ideas out as well. So I look forward to you tuning in every other week where we've got some great guests and great topics. You're gonna learn a lot. You're gonna come away inspired like I do. So I'll see you every other week here at 3 o'clock on Monday afternoon. Aloha. Aloha and welcome to At the Crossroads. I'm your host, Keisha King. You can catch me every Wednesday. Alive at 5. I'll see you there. Welcome back at the Cyber Underground for the second half of our show. We did not get to everything I wanted to talk about in the first half of the show. Guess I talked too slow. Oh well. We're talking about default passwords on IoT or Internet of Things devices, those devices that don't actually do computer work in your house, but they have a solid function. You could have an Internet-enabled toaster or microwave oven or refrigerators. Those are proper to now. You may not know it, but there's a computer inside the DVR. You use that the cable company gave you those pet cubes with a camera on them. So you can keep track of your pets while you're at work. Those are horrible. Don't use those. But if you do, change the default passwords to come with that system. One of the pet cubes I tried, the webcam, didn't even ask for a password. Just used my Wi-Fi, which I was really upset about. So those default passwords are monitored on a website called Shodan. And if you look up Shodan in Google, they'll show you where Shodan is.  They're using default passwords for things like your links router, your Belkin router, your other IoT devices, your webcams that you forgot to change the password on them. Change that password. Make it a tough password. Don't use a password. Use a passphrase. The longer the better. If you can memorize, Mary had a little lamb and change out some of the words for another language. Great. Works for me. A lot of special characters don't really meet a lot. The length of the password is actually what makes it stronger these days. So think about that passphrase, that password. And if you've got passwords out there that are old, that are, say, older than three or six months, change them. Don't depend on those passwords. And for God's sakes, don't use the same password for everything. Please. You'll be calling people like me to fix your problems. Or you'll be a victim of identity theft. They'll let that happen. OK. Let's look at the next item on the list. We have some conferences here in the islands that you should always attend. If you want an excuse to come out and attend conferences in the islands, there's always one at the beginning of the year, right around the second week of January, first week of January. We do the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. There's always a cybersecurity track in there. I'm usually there participating in the cybersecurity track.  It tours the islands, actually, two years at each island. We've done two years at Kauai and the Big Island. And now we're on the second year of Maui at the Grand Wailea. Next year, it'll be starting on January 7th in 2020. And it's a great little conference and bring the family and enjoy Maui, as well as getting to meet some of the people that do cybersecurity out here in the islands as well. There's another conference that started up here just a little while ago, a few years back called the Pacific Rim Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity Conference, hosted by energisec.org. You can look it up on their website. We're going to be doing this on February 12th and 13th, right down the street in Waikiki. And yeah, I'll be speaking on one of those at 10.30 in the morning on February 12th. I'll be there. I'd love to meet you. Come on out. It's not that expensive. You just got to get to Hawaii. And what's wrong with that? Right. Come on out and see me. Let's talk about more IoT threats and the weaponizing of these information systems. These are the Internet of Things devices that you may not suspect can do a lot more damage to not just your home network, but many government networks as well, because we're installing these devices all over the place. And I'm going to give you examples of some research that prove that this could be detrimental on a grand level. And if any of you are working for the DoD out there, please listen, because this was actually a demonstrable model. And it's written in a paper, and I'm going to tell you where to find it. Some researchers went out and they did a simulation of a network in Poland. And yeah, in Poland, in Europe, they said, okay, we have a lot of these IoT devices that just happened to control the flow of electricity on the power grid. And what they found, these statistics that I'm going to read you here, they found that if they increased the power by only 1%, they caused an 86% power blackout on the grid. That's not a lot to adjust a power output in a very small system, but they had enough of these systems, these little IoT devices all over the network, that a 1% power increase across all those IoT devices caused an 86% blackout across the grid. This happened in Poland, imagine if it happened in America. That kind of a blackout could cause some serious trouble, especially when you talk about the security of the nation. This was done at the USENIX security symposium, and it's a paper, if you look up USENIX, US-E-N-I-X security symposium this last year, look up that paper on the Polish power grid, and you'll see those statistics. And they're a little scary that IoT can take down in the entire grid. Now if you leave up a webcam, you're on your own. Those are easy to hack, they're easy to knock off the network, and when they re-authenticate to the network, you can use a monitoring tool to grab the username and password, especially because most of them don't use encryption, and then they're easy to get onto your network. Now once someone gets on to that webcam on your network, they can use that as what they call a pivot point and get to the rest of the systems on your network. So IoT, you take in your chances by using some of these limited function systems, at least change the default password and give yourself a little bit of safety there. Take it up a little bit. And remember, security is a layered approach. We use defense and depth. So change the default password and do that for all your systems. And then you can add other security features as well, but we're not going to get into that in this episode. Well, let's go into some shocking business statistics for security that I just find at the same time hilarious and saddening at the same time. CreditCards.com did a survey. And here's some of the results from the respondents who apparently were painfully honest when they responded. 82% of the respondents, ladies and gentlemen, let that sink in. We're talking about 82% of the people surveyed reuse passwords for different accounts. You just give that a second. Again, let it sink in. Why would you use the same password for multiple counts? I know you're lazy. Stop it. Don't be lazy. That leads to people hacking one account and then saying, hey, I got this password. Let me try it on all the other accounts this person might have. And guess what? If you've used it also on Amazon and Netflix and your bank account, well, now they have access to all those things. And once they're in, they can change the password and all the other default information. So it's no longer your account. It's their account. So change your passwords and keep different passwords. All right. 22% of those users do use the same password across multiple accounts all the time. And that's their only password. 48% of the respondents use public Wi-Fi networks. Now go ahead and use these networks, but don't do your banking. Don't do your personal business. Don't even send email over a public Wi-Fi network because that's all unencrypted traffic. And anybody can get it with a tool as easy to operate as Wireshark. And that's, of course, an open source system.  VPNs are cheap. Some of them are free. Use at least a VPN and give yourself a little bit of a protection layer there. But as soon as you're on a public Wi-Fi network, you have to employ more security methods because someone's always watching. Especially at Starbucks, hate to say it, but that's one of the main places hackers go. 45% of the respondents to the survey store passwords on their computer or smartphone. Don't do that. Please don't do that. If there's a file anywhere in your smartphone or any computer, you'll probably call it passwords or access or my file or something easy to recognize. So when someone gets into your computer somehow, they know that's the file they should rip off because it has the kings to the kingdom. So don't do that. Keep it somewhere else. Now, some of the smarter people I know actually handwrite their passwords and usernames and websites in a little book. And if they need their passwords, they can use it and find their password. And when they're done with that book, they put it in drawer and they physically lock the drawer. Lots of layers of security there. It's physically separated from the network. We call that an air gap. And it's not even digital information. So again, a lot of layers of security. That's a good system. You should try that out. Props to my brother-in-law for telling me he does that. I'd bring that to the show. All right, 35% do the same with payment information. They keep it on the computer. Again, don't do that. If you have to print it out, keep it in a file cabinet somewhere, but if it's digitized, if it's digitally accessible, you're increasing the risk to yourself. So just stop doing that. I know it's a little bit more work, but in the end, no identity theft. It's worth the effort, right? Let's look at some more business email compromise or what they call BEC. Those scams, this is incredible now. In the last year, those scams are up 476%. 476% more prevalent in the attacking scheme of hackers. Business email. People get busy with their days and they don't think about what they're clicking. They just click on that link, and it can be an avenue for malware to be downloaded on the computer. Once somebody is on your computer at work, it doesn't matter if you're an administrator or not, they will use your system as a pivot point. The first thing to do is change the process ID so you can't recognize it for virus control. They'll change the name of their program to match something in your task manager like iExplore or Notepad that's completely innocuous and then they elevate privileges to an administrator level and they'll start scanning the network so they can pivot to another system that's more important and has more important data. You're the key to that. Don't get compromised. One weak link in the chain can break the whole thing. And of course, firewalls don't matter if somebody gets in that way. There's been a 442% increase of phishing attacks. Now those are the business compromised emails that we're talking about. In the enterprise or business, if you get in in any way to that person's email account and drop some malware on the computer, like I said, you can pivot. And there's been a 442% increase in phishing attacks. That's when they use a piece of personal information that resonates with you to make you click on a link and they're using social media support accounts. So if you see a support account from Facebook or from Bank of America, be highly suspicious. Check out those links. Make sure it's from that organization. And if you're at all suspicious, don't call the number in the email. Go look up their number and call that organization directly and see if they actually sent you that email. Happened to somebody I talked to this morning. She called that organization. It just happened to the U.S. Postal Service. And they said, nope, that's not our email. Proving she'd been a victim of a phishing attack. Comparatek, this is great. Just did a survey of which countries have the best and worst cybersecurity. Now, I don't think we have enough time to go into all the factors that made the best and the worst cybersecurity, but I'd like to read you some best and worst countries. First of all, the best countries to live in for cybersecurity. And guess what? North America, Canada, and the United States. Top two. Third, Australia. Good job, Aussies. I like it. Way to go. Worst. And I don't know why, but Algeria? I don't know. I'm not hacking Algeria. I don't know who wants Algeria, but Algeria is the worst. Followed by Indonesia, pretty country, not very good cybersecurity, and then Vietnam, which is right now synonymous with chaos, unfortunately. I'm not going to go into what made this survey happen, but I will read you some shocking statistics at the highest percentage of computer malware infections in the world right now. Algeria, 32% of the people that use computers in that country, that's a third of the people, almost, have malware on their computers. The highest percentage of Telnet attacks. China, almost 30%, it's 27.15. And the highest percentage of crypto miners, which we've discussed on this show before, Uzbekistan, almost 15% of the people. Well, that's the news and events, tips, tricks, patches, and fixes to keep you safe in today's cybersecurity space. And I hope you join us next week, and I'll give you some more tips and tricks, local and national news and cybersecurity. Until then, stay safe.