Thanks for checking this video out. Your mountaintop news video is coming up in just a minute.  Why isn't your ad here? Call me. As the Easter holiday approaches, the city of Pikeville will be holding a variety of events including a downtown Easter icon and pictures with the Easter Bunny. Friday we spoke with director of special events, Kevin Roberts, about what they have in store. We've tried to have some fun things going on for Easter. Next Friday, which will be the 15th from five to seven over in City Park, we've made some calls, took us a long time to get his phone number, but we got his phone number. The Easter Bunny will be here to see us. The Easter Bunny is going to be there. Mom and Dad can take out their phone, get some pictures with him. Easter Bunny will have a little something for the kids. So that'll be a nice, fun, family friendly event on Friday. And then on Saturday, we're actually having a block party with the Main Street program over on Second Street, what they're going to be able to do again. The Easter Bunny is nice enough to come visit us. He's going to be there at some of the local businesses. Local businesses are also going to have some Easter eggs. And the way this is going to work, starting at 12 o'clock, you'll go into these businesses, you'll collect an egg. The first 10 people that collect at least 10 eggs and take those over to the shops at 225 will also get a ticket to the movies. So it's a great family friendly event for everybody. Again, pictures with the Easter Bunny is Friday, April 15th, from 5 to 7 p.m. The Easter Egg Hunt is Saturday, April 16th, from noon to 5 p.m. on Second Street. To learn more, you can visit the Pifal Tourism Facebook page. For Mountain Top News, I'm Joel Korgel.


It's no secret that oak trees provide acorns, and acorns provide valuable nutrition for whitetail during colder months. Many deer hunters focus hunting efforts around white oaks, and rightfully so, as deer often prefer their acorns over red oaks. White oak acorns have a lower taining content than those from red oaks, thus making them less bitter and more palatable. In regards to mass production, red oak acorns are produced over two growing season, whereas white oak acorns are produced in one growing season. Because of this, late spring freezes can negatively impact white oak production, while red oaks may still provide valuable mass production in that same year. Biologists suggest managing for a diversity of oak species on one property, as opposed to the thought of managing for one species in particular.


In part one of the accounting we spend a lot of time on financial accounting which dealt with the preparation of three financial statements namely the balance sheet, the income statement and cash flow statement. And as I explained these financial statements are mainly for the use of shareholders, creditors, bankers, more external end users and obviously also useful for the management which is more internal. But over and above these statements the management or the managers in an organization will be more interested in knowing certain information which cannot be captured or which cannot be extracted from these three financial statements. In normal course of events if you look at an entity a manager would be not interested in knowing how much a particular customer owes to the organization or how much of cash was deposited yesterday in bank or what is the new loan that the entity acquired in the last one month. These are of course important records in these financial statements but these facts in these records are in normal course not that relevant to from an operational perspective for a manager inside an entity. So a manager is more interested in understanding the summary behind these records. So if I am able to draw some summary from these records as a manager I would be interested in knowing the summary of these records. So management accounting is more a summary information. Now I just would like to make sure that when we actually make this transition from financial accounting to management accounting there is easy understanding and the transition is smooth and to facilitate this transition from financial accounting to management accounting I would like to give you some major differences between these two forms of accounting management accounting versus financial accounting. And this you will be able to appreciate better the need for management accounting and I will give you different dimensions that actually provide this difference between management accounting and financial accounting. One is from the necessity point of view if a question is asked whether you need to prepare a financial statement whether you need to prepare balance sheet and income statement the answer is a clear yes there is no option otherwise. So definitely from a necessity perspective it is required it is mandated that an entity has a balance sheet an income statement and a cash flow statement. As against in the management accounting it is optional for an entity to prepare a statement that provides information that provides summary information of all these accounting records that you have created. So there is no mandate there is no statutory requirement that every entity has to have a management account information system so from a necessity point of view it is optional whereas in financial accounting it is definitely required. From a purpose point of view and I have been repeatedly telling you that financial statement is used for outside users not that those inside the organization are not using it but the extent of use lies more outside the entity than inside when it comes to financial accounting statements financial statements for that matter. Whereas in management accounting it is more internal from a control perspective it is only a means to a particular end it is means to an end the end being the planning implementing and controlling functions of management and it is for that purpose management accounting is important for those internal to the organization to improve certain process efficiencies and for being able to properly plan implement and control some management functions. The third is the users again these are outside users and the purpose here for financial accounting the purpose of financial accounting is only to create a balance sheet income statement and cash flow statement if you ask somebody what is the purpose of financial accounting is to create income statement balance sheet and a cash flow statement. If you ask who the user for a financial statement is it will be more outside users whereas in this case it is a small group of internal users these are interlink though it might appear to be actually purpose and users more or more interlink and intertwined if you look at the underlying structure the financial accounting is built on the fundamental equation assets is equal to liabilities plus owners equity this is the underlying structure on which financial accounting is built in management accounting it varies according to the use of this information I since it is a summary of information it depends on what type of information is in use varies according to use of information and that is why when we spend more time on different types of management accounting you would find that there are three types full cost differential cost and responsibility cost management accounting full differential and responsibility will be spending little time on that later if you look at the source of principles in financial accounting you have the generally accepted accounting principles whereas in management accounting an organization can employ whatever accounting rule it finds most useful for its own purpose which is more internal. So whatever is useful becomes the principle on which the summary information is recorded and interpreted so there is not a broad set of justice we have generally accepted accounting principles in financial accounting there is not a broad set of principles that form the underlying basis from a time orientation if you look at the financial accounting records it reports the financial history of an organization of an entity what has happened gets recorded so it is more historical whereas in management accounting it also use historical information but to make an estimate of the future historical and estimates of the future though financial statements are used to make some projections the information itself in the financial statement is historical the objective for financial accounting is like to tell information as what it was and not what it would be whereas in management accounting you use historical information to also make an estimated for example I can say that this is the budgeted cost for a particular activity in the future and how do I do that some principles of management accounting that we will be discussing based on historical data I can make an estimate of the future the information content is monetary the fundamental concept in financial accounting is the monetary concept so if you look at the information in a financial statement it has to be monetary whereas in management accounting it is both monetary plus non-monetary it means that I am interested in knowing the total sales even in management accounting but I am also interested in knowing the total number of units being sold I am interested in knowing the cost of goods sold I am also interested in knowing the conception pattern how many units how many kgs of this raw material was consumed I am interested in knowing the wage expense but the same time I am also interested in knowing how many people work how many hours did they work so all these sorts of non-monetary information is also an integral requirement for a management accounting. Information precision is another differentiating factor management accounting is more since I told you this is more internal the management would be requiring a lot of information more frequently than financial accounting statement end users demand so as a result of which there might be some approximations that management accountants make making management accounting less precise because of its many approximations whereas financial accounting will have only fewer approximations because it needs to be very precise report frequency here I have already told you that this one is more quarterly and annual this can be as frequent as you think is required it depends on the management's requirement it varies with purpose I can need a I need a fortnightly summary or a monthly or a quarterly so it depends on the purpose for which management needs the information the report from a report timeliness point of view if you look at a financial statement though the year ending is March 31 of a given year you would find a lot of entities announcing their results announcing their annual income statement balance sheet even probably two months after the year closure so it is there is a considerable delay delay in weeks or months and since we are not that precisely capturing information for management accounting you would find that management accounting reports are immediate very promptly it gets delivered at the end of the period in which it actually captures this information from a report entity point of view you would find that for financial accounting it is the entire organization it is the overall organizations balance sheet and an income statement that gets reported for a management accounting that is not the case because in management accounting I can split the organization into various functional units and for the purpose of control understand each of the functional units as individual entities so from that perspective management accounting need not be overall organization driven but can be towards certain responsibility centers and lastly if you look at it from a liability potential there is virtually none I will explain why in here you have some lawsuits also if you look at the financial accounting if you find that the annual reports filed before the SEBI or any of the statutory authorities and if you find that there is information that is wrong there is a likelihood of shareholders or whoever is the concern stakeholder to even file a lawsuit against the firm for filing wrong information you know what happened the classic case of Satyam now as against a management accounting where since the end user is also within the organization there is no potential for a lawsuit the worst that can happen is an action can be taken against the manager for inappropriately summarizing the information and taking decisions based on such information that is the worst that can happen not a lawsuit by a shareholder for fixing wrong prices very unlikely such things will happen so from these dimensions you can understand that there is a difference between management accounting and financial accounting now if you look at the way in which businesses are being conducted managers have to take irrevocable decisions with inadequate information and the biggest decision that confronts managers especially in profit making entities and assuming that management accounting though it can be applicable to not for profit entities that more relevant for profit making entity because it is about implementation and control and trying to increase efficiency the biggest one of the major decisions that managers take is on pricing and once I announce that this is the price of a commodity a good or a service I cannot go back of course price change because of certain promotional activity but such irrevocable decisions are taken based on some information which by and large is inadequate because management accounting is about taking these decisions with whatever information that is inadequately available based on some approximations because we do not have we cannot afford the time to have accurate information just as financial accounting has and we take decisions based on certain approximations and when we take such decisions we need to understand the behavior of cost in an entity so that brings the issue of how cost behaves with a level of activity in an organization now if an entity significantly increases the amount of goods or services that it sells or delivers then in some measure the amount of economic resources that the entity consumes also increases suppose you sell more goods you also consume more inventory but the question is what is the extent to which such economic resources get used with increases in the sale or delivery of such goods and services is there a relationship between these two and everyone can understand that if more units are sold more inventories gets consume and the cost of the economic resources also changes with more volumes being sold however the percentage increase in the cost of these economic resources does it increase with the same proportion with which the goods or services are being sold and delivered now that question can be answered only if you begin to understand how cost behave with increase in the level of economic activity in an entity for which you need to understand the behavior of cost that is the fundamental to management accounting to understand how the cost versus level level of economic activity cost of economic resources consume and invariably what will be this cost of economic resources it could be main material overhead these are all economic resources that gets consumed because of the level of economic activity and once you are able to understand this fundamental behavior of cost then you will begin to appreciate the nuances of management accounting of this behavior of cost is hence very fundamental to management accounting now to understand this we need to understand the different types of cost see cost is a very tricky terminology that is used people just use cost just like that drop of an hat they say the cost of this is expensive many of them do not really understand what they mean by cost some people mistake expenses to be cost so there is something more to this very word cost it is not as simple as people think it is we need to understand that there is something some building blocks that aggregated together actually represents the total cost one such is a variable cost what are variable cost now variable cost means that items within a cost structure that varies proportionately with volume that directly varies with volume and I will give you some examples and graphically also represent for you to understand so if volume increases by 10% the total amount of variable cost also increases by 10% examples suppose you an entity manufactures computers and that the cost of a monitor is 5000 rupees then if you manufacture 100 computers you need 100 monitors so the total variable cost is 5000 times 100 please note that the unit variable cost that is 5000 per monitor does not change it changes in volume of computers being manufactured so variable cost means the total cost gets changed with volume directly as a proportion to volume so the more computers you manufacture the more cost that you will incur by way of fitting monitors so each monitor cost 5000 rupees postage the more letters envelopes that you send by mail the more you will have to add stamps so if you have 100 envelopes to be sent and each of them requiring 5 rupees stamp 500 is your total variable cost if you have to send 500 letters 500 into 5 becomes your total variable cost so variable cost is one that changes with volume now if there is something called variable cost then definitely there is something called fixed cost and directly you can say that it does not vary with volume classic example suppose you are manufacturing a computer again the electricity the rent the wages that you spend for administrative staff the cost of transportation assuming that you know a truck can take 1000 computers and whether you transport 500 computers or 600 computers or 1000 computers in the truck the cost of transportation does not change that is a fixed cost so there are certain costs of an entity that does not change with volume and it is fixed whether there is an economic activity or not that cost will be incurred by the entity and please have this in mind because we are going to revisit the concept of fixed cost and variable cost sometime later there is also something called a semi variable cost which is both variable plus fixed cost component in it so it has something that is variable and also has something that is fixed for example if you take the cost of operating an automobile with respect to the number of miles it covers that semi variable because the cost of petrol or diesel the cost of replacing your tires the servicing cost these all keep changing with the miles or the kilometers that the automobile travels while the registration fee or the insurance that you pay for the automobile is fixed so from the overall cost of operating this automobile vehicle you would find that this cost of operating this automobile vehicle is semi variable so you can understand that if you are interested in analyzing the cost structure then there are three important elements to it the variable cost the fixed cost and the semi variable cost and for the purpose of convenience we actually deal with variable and fixed cost alone because since a semi variable cost includes variable as well as fixed the relevant portion gets extracted and accommodated in the fixed cost and the relevant variable cost in the semi variable cost is also captured in the variable cost so for the purpose of our discussion we will assume that we are going to take only two types of cost variable and fixed cost after having accommodated the variable and fixed cost components in semi variable cost accordingly now we need to understand the relationship between the variable cost the fixed cost with volume now I told you that the very definition of variable cost is that it keeps changing with volume let us say 50 units 100 units 150 units keeps on changing as against fixed cost which remains unchanged with volume so if volume keeps on increasing my fixed cost let us say 200 400 and then a semi variable cost in this case this is a fixed cost semi variable cost has both a fixed cost component as well as a variable cost component now if you look at the cost volume relationship and you can imagine that this all these are straight lines and suppose I want to find the total cost then I have to merge all these three relationship because each cost structure will have a fixed cost component a variable cost component a semi variable cost component and suppose you look at the first equation and I am graphically trying to represent this I am trying to represent this graph through an equation then you will find that the total cost from a variable cost perspective is 4 times the volume let us say x is the volume and the total cost this is from a variable cost variable total cost this is from a fixed cost it is 300 it is just a line parallel to the x axis and from semi variable cost perspective the total cost is 100 plus 2 times x now suppose I want to find the total cost of the total cost behavior which includes the variable cost the fixed cost the semi variable cost and we know that this follows a straight line equation and x I told you is the volume that is involved in this so that actually is getting that is the critical requirement and the total cost is y the rate at which they change with volume is the slope and there is a constant fixed cost which is your vertical intercept so if you can just imagine that this again represents a straight line and then your total cost hence becomes your total fixed cost plus your unit variable cost times your volume in this case is x this is your total cost total fixed cost unit variable cost x is the volume and what sits here is I just mathematically represented the graph that is there which means the unit variable cost is 4 and there is a 2 rupee variable cost component in the semi variable cost so the total unit variable cost hence becomes 6 and fixed cost is 300 likewise there is a 100 fixed cost component in the semi variable cost so the total fixed cost is 400 so if I decide to merge all the 3 graphs and represent one graph that captures this relationship very simple relationship to understand but then it is better to capture it graphically for easy understanding so the x axis is the volume in the total cost behavior with volume this keeps on increasing this way this is your fixed cost line so if you look at the total cost you will have a fixed cost component of 400 and then a unit variable cost that keeps on increasing with volume so now if you reconstruct this equation just for easy understanding then you will know that the total cost is your fixed cost of 400 plus the unit variable cost times your volume so which means if you are going to manufacture 200 units then 200 times 6200, 1600 will be your total cost so as the number of units that gets manufactured increases the cost keeps increasing with the number of units. Now if you just need to find the average cost per unit you just have to divide it by the total volume to find the average cost per unit but there is a small behavior in this that I want you to understand the total fixed cost is a fixed cost component sorry total cost is the fixed cost component plus a variable cost component the fixed cost component does not change with volume very easy to understand a unit fixed cost changes with volume why because it represents the average so the more number of units that gets manufactured the fixed cost gets distributed across more number of units. Now contrast this with the behavior of variable cost the total variable cost keeps changing with volume the more and more you manufacture the more and more you incur as variable cost but the unit variable cost does not change with volume because it remains the same it is a unit variable cost this you need to understand because always in capital intensive entities it is always a challenge to ensure that there is substantial volume across which fixed cost are spread and that is why when you when somebody says that I the total cost to produce this is 100 rupees and the next question that you will have to ask is at what volume is this total cost 100 because volume plays a very critical role in the behavior of cost and you will understand if I just in the same illustration that I gave you if this is cost per unit and this is volume 100, 200, 400, 1000, 2000 units I have just break this scaling here 1, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 and let us say we need to calculate the unit cost. What is unit cost? The total cost divided by the volume now suppose the volume is 100 the total cost is 100 times 6 plus 400 it is 1000. So, unit cost is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 and let us say we need to calculate the unit cost. What is unit cost? The total cost divided by the volume now suppose the volume is 100 the total cost is 100 times 6 plus 400 it is 1000. So, unit cost is total cost divided by volume, volume is 100 total cost is 1000 unit cost is 10. Suppose the volume was 200 total cost is 1600 unit cost is 8 suppose the volume becomes 400 total cost is 2800 becomes 7 suppose it is 1000 total cost is 6400 6.4 it is 2000 total cost is 12400 unit cost is 6.2. So, you will you will notice that as volume keeps on increasing at 100 it was 10, at 200 it was 8, at 400 it was 7, 1000 somewhere 6.4, 2000 sorry. The average fixed cost per unit will start to approach to 0 as volume keeps on increasing limitlessly. In fact you will find that it even goes beyond the unit variable cost. This is an interesting behavior of cost especially fixed cost because as volume keeps increasing the fixed cost gets spread over that relevant volume and the unit cost gets reduced as volume keeps increasing. And when you have a selling price that is fixed and that you are able to generate enough volumes that drives down the unit cost what happens is your gross margin increases. And from a management accounting perspective I would like to see how effectively I am able to spread the fixed cost. And that is why I said the fundamental to this understanding is the behavior of cost vis-a-vis the volume. And how do I use this relationship? I know that for every activity that ends up producing some good or service that ultimately gets sold there is a cost that is built in and has to be recovered by a reasonable selling price. But I need to know how much number of units that I have to sell so that I recover this cost both fixed as well as variable cost and the total cost as a result of that. Now how can I use this cost volume relationship to take decisions concerning fixing price or setting a target as to how many units I have to sell so that my cost is recovered. Now all these are questions that managers take for which they have to answer when they take these decisions what could be the selling price. How many number of units I have to sell so that I make sure that this is a profitable sale so that my total cost is recovered. This is what will form the next part of our class where I will be explaining to you how to calculate break even sales. What is unit contribution margin? Now whether at this cost structure can I afford to sell 1000 units at times you would find that people get excited because they have 1000 units of order 2000 units of order. But then you have to ensure that the volume of order that is been serviced is substantive enough to cover the cost that is incurred in actually producing this volume and this I will know only if I understand the behavior of cost and how it changes with volume. So a break even sale or a unit contribution margin these are important management accounting terminologies that you need to know how to calculate quantify these terminologies and how this is been used in decision making by managers. So next class we will be talking about how break even sales is been calculated what is the significance of a contribution margin and then we will spend a little time on variance analysis that actually since management accounting is about also control and efficiency we will know what is the standard or budgeted cost estimate and what actually the entity expense and what is the difference between the budget and the actual why this variance whether this variance is favorable or unfavorable and how do we re alter our decisions based on this variance analysis. So our classes for management accounting will predominantly cover these two concepts variance analysis and how to use the cost volume relationship in calculating the break even volume and fixing the prices for the goods or services and these are the two main concepts that I would be covering of course this by a subject is very vast there is activity based costing there are other different types of management accounting mechanisms that are available but I am not going to spend a lot of time on that because I thought it would be better if you have more inputs on financial accounting and relevant inputs on management accounting so that you can make good sense both an income statement balance sheet and also some management account information that you have in hand when you understand the behavior of cost with volume. So next class we will try to understand this cost volume behavior thank you.


So we started out a few weeks ago starting biomolecular structure and in particular the amino acids. Why they have their properties, they have what amino acids, how we classify them and how they give rise to the diversity and also the chirality that I thought upon today with D and L amino acids. From there we went on to looking at the molecular structure and in particular all the interactions, lenoargyls, electrostatics, torsions, everything. We then went back to physics because based on those interactions we needed tools that enabled to say what states are probable, what states are less probable. That then led to the hydrophobic effect where we particularly introduced entropy right and that I was able to go from there to talk about free energy instead of just enthalpy which is an exceptionally important concept that kept coming back through the class. We went on to instead of just studying pairs of states, studying the entire partition function, all possible states and from that we could start to talk about things in terms of stability of different states. Sure, I used water as the primary example here but this is equally through for protein folding as I showed you a few lectures ago and even things like ligand binding you can think of as a very small local phase transition for that ligand. We used that to interpret protein structures in particular small parts of the structure in terms of free energy rather than just entropy that enabled us to explain roughly how fast they form and everything which is so in hand in task 2 that we can make surprisingly good predictions based just on paper and pen. Although if we combine that with a computer we're able to study much larger systems where we can have a realistic environment, water, tens of thousands of atoms and make actual predictions about actual systems that we can compare to experiments. Not only that we could use so-called free energy calculation methods to make specific predictions about how good should it be for a molecule to bind in a specific place in the molecule or in your case what should the probability of the binding energy for Xenon B in a particular site. We looked quite a lot about protein structure, first the fibrous and the water soluble proteins then the membrane proteins and also the lipids that surround the membrane proteins. We focused even more than on what are these structures, what do we have them, we grouped them in folds. We started to reason why the folds we see are structurally stable and why evolution has selected for those folds. We're going to come back to the evolution in a few lines here. We then went on to study not just the states, the folds we have but how they form that is the kinetics where we're moving from one state to another. Now we primarily used folding as the simple universal examples here but as I showed you today this was equally true for the ligand binding to some of those binding sites so don't think that this is a narrow example limited to research on protein folding, it's not. What you learned about the kinetics is universally true. Based on the importance of the evolution here though in lecture 11 we focused on bioinformatics which on the one hand it's a completely different approach just focusing on sequence and data instead of structure but the reason why that works so well is that four billion years of evolution has encoded all the physical interactions here in the protein structures we see and that means that I can compare their sequence to effectively compare the structures. It's really cool that it works and the only reason why that does work is evolution. Last lecture we then combined both the physical knowledge, the protein structure, the bioinformatics and a bit of the simulation to come up with drug discovery in particularly using docking effectively as poor man's way of doing a simulation or studying the partition function. It is a remarkably powerful tool that is used throughout both academia and pharmaceutical companies today. And the last hour we have now finished up by trying to combine that with simulations and in particular how we can use protein design where we now even more explicitly try to include the amino acid properties and the Boltzmann distribution to go to the places of the map where evolution has not yet been. It's been a great pleasure for me to take you through this class. Lots of work preparing these recordings but it's very fun so let me thank you for watching it this far and in particular if you're in Stockholm I hope to get the chance to see in the future. Thanks!


Everyone, so I think we should get started. For the two of you who are already here, Ashwin and Nikhil, hello. And for everyone else who's not here yet, I hope you'll be here soon. If you missed part of this, you can catch up on YouTube. There is a copy of the livestream. And we, as usual, have our guest appearance. Say bye. So today, we have my colleague from the Intercept. And we have a great direct from the people we see in conversation on Zoom's security versus business interests. Vivek can say an agenda better than I can. So I'll let him do that. But I'll just introduce our two panelists for tonight. Michael Lee, for the Intercept, the security. He's also the founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, I believe, trustee or founder. I don't know what the term you use out there. And Michael has been pointing out several serious issues with Zoom that have been reported in various places. And thanks to that, I think we now have a larger understanding of what risks that we have taken up when we use Zoom for our conversations. Vivek comes to it from a business perspective. Vivek is a lawyer by training, a programmer by hobby, and an entrepreneur by profession at this point. Vivek's paper we see provides information on what's going on with signal intelligence on businesses in India. Vivek, again, can do a better job of introducing this as an icon. And between the two of them, I've heard some fairly fascinating takes on how to interpret Zoom's security. Do you say Zoom is insecure? Therefore, don't use it. Or do you say it's all fine? Just use it. And I think between these two extremes, there's a fair bit of territory to be covered, which I will let our panelists take on for today. So Vivek, do you want to take off for a minute? Sure. Thanks, Kiran. Micah, it was good chatting today morning. In fact, Micah and I connected earlier today to go over some of the things, the standpoint and perspectives that we have and some that we share. I think the easiest way to get started with this is to understand how the intercept developed this story. And then we can discuss a range of topics, including the repropession of the impact and the worldwide response to Zoom's vulnerability. Micah, do you want to tell us how this started? How did you get start with the story about Zoom at a time when this was a fairly popular tool already? Yeah. So I've written a couple of stories about Zoom. But the first one that I wrote was about how, like if you went to Zoom's website and you looked at the security information and you read their security white paper, they claimed that Zoom was end-to-end encrypted. But we figured out that it actually wasn't end-to-end encrypted. I worked on it with Yawel Gower, who is another journalist. And she was the one who was actually talking to Zoom. But basically, she was talking to Zoom. She was talking to Slack and a bunch of other companies that have kind of been exploded in use ever since the pandemic started, trying to understand more information about how their privacy stuff worked. So she was asking Zoom a bunch of questions and including questions about how it was encrypted. And specifically with Zoom, the fact that they were saying that it was end-to-end encrypted was kind of a really big deal. Because with most stuff on the internet is not end-to-end encrypted. It's kind of very rare for things to be encrypted in this way. And what this means is that if you send someone a message and using a service that's not encrypted, like Facebook, like if you're just sending someone a Facebook message, Facebook has access to the content of the entire conversation. And then also Facebook, so employees maybe have access to it. But Facebook could also be compelled by governments to hand this over. So if you are an activist, if you're a journalist talking to sources, or any number of other reasons why you might have some very real privacy needs, Facebook could be compelled to help spy on you. And so if Zoom says that they're end-to-end encrypted, then that means that Zoom could not be compelled to help spy on you. So if you're having a Zoom meeting and it says that it's end-to-end encrypted and you trust this, then if it's like maybe you have a sensitive business meeting, you're talking about trade secrets or whatever, you might feel very confident to use Zoom for this meeting. But it turned out that that wasn't true. And we basically figured this out because Yael was asking them specific detailed questions about how their encryption works. And here, let me see, they finally told her. And this was a Zoom spokesperson, like one of their public relations people. They said, currently, it's not possible to enable end-to-end encryption for Zoom video meetings. Zoom video meetings use a combination of TCP and UDP. TCP connections are made using TLS, and UDP connections are encrypted with AES using a key negotiated over TLS. So there's a lot of technical stuff in there. How fast was this back and forth? So was there a long email fail, conversations? So this was the time you started? So I wasn't actually part of this communication. The other Yael was. But it was email. And basically the way that it worked with their PR people was she would write them an email with a bunch of questions and then wait for them to come up with the response that they were happy with being quoted. And then they'd send her a response. And then she'd email them with a bunch of follow-up questions and then wait for a response. So it was slow getting information out of them. But I think that our reporting and also a lot of the other reporting about the privacy and security issues that Zoom has kind of made them do a complete flip on how they've been dealing with this stuff. And instead of being very. Sure. Yeah. I think I wanted to get to that a little bit later. A little more curious about how you get started with the story like this. And so I have a couple of theories and you can help me out on which of those are more accurate. Is it because you specialize in an area that requires you to look at the security of the tools that you use, that you evaluate at Zoom, you and the colleagues that you mentioned? Was that the reason you started looking at Zoom and asking them specific questions over there? Already indications that there might be vulnerability. Anything to give it away? Apart from the claim that it's end to end and therefore suspect in your eyes? Yeah. I mean, really it was just that we were evaluating Zoom. Like since January and February, I personally have been using Zoom a lot more often for a lot more meetings. And there's definitely. So I am the director of information security for the Intercept. So I have to have meetings with a lot of people related to sensitive topics. So we have a need for having secure communication. And especially where everyone is working from home right now, this all has to be remote. It all has to be over the internet. And so basically Zoom, even with all of these privacy issues, Zoom is fine for a lot of use cases. I think that Zoom is fine for, regardless of its encryption, for having a yoga class. Or whatever, for a lot of things like that. But if your threat model says that you need to have a private conversation, then Zoom, according to their marketing, seemed like you needed to have it, but in reality it wasn't. But yeah, really, I think that me and Yael were looking into services specifically like the technical claims of services, and specifically security and privacy, because that's largely what that's the work that I do, and that's what I focus on. And if it's true that Zoom is really very secure for all sorts of use cases, that would be great news. And so we started looking into it, and the fact that they published a white paper, a security white paper, and their white paper said a bunch of stuff but didn't really explain it very much, it just was very hand-wavy. And we're like, but how does this work? Is this true? Is this real? So we were just asking you about it. The white paper came out a while after you started engaging with them, or there was an existing white paper that they threw at you, or you just don't know. There was an existing white paper. Sure. So when did this all start? This is Fed early March. When did it happen? That's a good question. I think early March, I believe, we published the story in late March, and so I think that Yael was starting to talk to them and other companies too in early March. And but yeah, their white paper was actually published like a year or two ago, and so it's been around for a while. And I actually noticed that they have updated their white paper since our story was published, and the only thing they changed was they removed end-to-end encryption. Everything else is within. Is everything else accurate in your estimate? Yeah, I think so. I think that it's accurate. I think that it still has the issue where it just doesn't go into as much detail as I would hope it would go into with a security white paper. Apple also publishes security white papers on how iOS works and how it locks down iPhones and things, and they go into a lot of detail about how the encryption works and how everything works. And I still think that Zoom's white paper is still kind of hand wavy about the details. It's just sort of like, we're secure. Trust us. So yeah, and actually one of the other big things was in the user interface. Right now, if you like, well, I guess you're using mobile. You're using a phone. But on a computer, if you mouse over the little green lock in the corner, it says your client connection is encrypted. But in certain circumstances, if you use Zoom in such a way that you were expecting it to be end-to-end encrypted, so if you didn't have anyone calling in on the phone, if you end things like that, then when you mouse over it, it used to say your connection is end-to-end encrypted, which was just not true, because they basically were redefining the term end-to-end encrypted to mean something that it didn't normally mean. It normally means that participants are the only ones with the keys, but some of the endpoints were like in Zoom's cloud services, and that's not really how it works. So let's call this, you did two stories on Zoom, right? Or did you do more? I've only, I've done two stories, yeah. Let's call them story one and story two. Story one took them how long to respond? So they actually responded right away. I think the next day, I think they published a blog post, basically apologizing for being misleading about end-to-end encryption, and then really, for both stories, their response was immediate, which was, and this is, I think, where Zoom turned around and started to be way more transparent about things and way more upfront in commit and starting to make commitments to focus on privacy and security. But yeah, their response was really fast, and it was actually a pretty good response. That's interesting. So story one was all about, this was all about end-to-end encryption. And the story two was something that snowballed into something else with the whole Chinese angle. I mean, it was an interesting catch. It was an awesome catch. But they came back with something, with a response that seemed credible. Did you believe them? The fact that they added those Chinese data centers because they had to deal with increased demand in China. Yeah, I think so. I mean, okay, so the second story was about citizen labs research, which is these computer security researchers that do kind of public interest research out of Toronto, Canada. And they basically found a bunch of issues with Zoom. And one of the big issues was that in their test call, where one of the researchers was in Canada, the other one was in the United States, they noticed that some of the infrastructure for the Zoom servers they were using were coming from China. And they were like, why would this be the case? And in fact, it was actually the way that Zoom calls work. There's a, the participants join the meeting. There's a server that Zoom controls that generates an encryption key for the meeting and then sends it to the participants and so this server that was generating encryption keys was in China and it sent a key to at least one of the participants and then they use that key to encrypt the meeting. And so yeah, what Zoom's explanation for this was is that when COVID-19 was starting to spread rapidly, it started in China and so they had a lot of demand for working from home and working remotely in China and so they really had to scale up in China fast so they added a whole lot of new servers in China and they were, and normally they say you're outside of China then you don't use Chinese servers but they didn't actually have that setting on a bunch of the new servers that they added. And so by mistake, this was happening and sometimes you would be using Chinese servers but then they said that they fixed this and now you should never be using Chinese servers unless you were actually in China and the reason why using Chinese servers is an issue at all. It would be much less of an issue actually if Zoom were actually intending to encrypt it because even if your traffic were going through China, even if the Chinese authorities were able to compel Zoom to handover copies of your meetings, all they would be able to do is handover encrypted copies of your meetings so they couldn't spy on you without basically hacking your devices or somehow stealing the encryption key for the meeting. But the fact that they actually generated the keys in China was a big deal. But yeah, I think that they were, I mean their explanation made sense to me and they promised that this is not happening anymore. So how long did it take you to, or rather should I say, from the time you published that story, at any point did you stop using Zoom? I have not stopped using Zoom. So actually my company, we first look at media, we have this tech blog and the security team, we published this blog post that's all about developing a threat model for video conferencing. And really what it means is when you're thinking about what communication tool you want to use, it's always, it's not like don't use Zoom, it's not secure, use something else that's secure. It's always depends on the threats that a specific meeting faces. So if you, so like maybe certain types of meetings that you have are not very sensitive all, other types are very sensitive, you basically make a decision on a meeting per meeting basis. And so a lot of the meetings that I have, Zoom is fine. And it's actually, I think one of the things about Zoom that is great is that it works really well. It's very smooth and frictionless. People don't need, it's like really easy for people to use.  And it's like so much less work than so many other things. You don't need to have, you don't even need to have software installed. It works on all sorts of devices and all sorts of stuff. So for a lot of situations, Zoom is like great for that. It's just that, but yeah, like basically, like as soon as we figured out that Zoom's claim for end-end encryption actually wasn't real and that there was other like significant security issues, we basically decided to stop using Zoom for anything sensitive. And we're still not using Zoom for sensitive meetings until it seems like they actually start implementing end-end encryption. How far away do you think that is? Well, they, okay, so Zoom, their response has been very positive and they have been very quickly fixing a lot of security issues. The problem with just enabling end-end encryption is it's not so simple. It requires kind of like completely changing the architecture of how things work. And so, but I mean, but like they're actually in a pretty decent place to do it. The way that Zoom meetings currently work, they're already encrypted using a key that all of the participants in the meetings share and that's kind of like a prerequisite to getting end-end encryption working. Now they just need to make sure that they never have access to the key, that only the participants generate the key for the meeting. I don't know how long it's going to be, but they have definitely been like they announced they're going to freeze all of the features that aren't security and privacy. They've already fixed a bunch of issues. They've improved the encryption. There was a kind of big encryption problem that the citizen lab researchers found. They've just released like Zoom 5 that like yesterday I think or the day before that fixes this. Every time I reached out to Zoom, there were a whole bunch of new updates. All of them right now are all security and privacy issues. That's it because they're saying like they're not adding any new features. They're just making improving the security and the privacy. So it's going to go on better. I have no idea how long it's going to be before there's end-end encryption. And once they actually do support it, I'm probably going to have some healthy skepticism. I'm going to look into it in detail and try and figure out if it works. And also it would be great if they really wanted to do a good job of it would be great if they made it verifiable, which means making it so that I don't know, like so Signal is an encrypted messaging app. Signal lets you do something called verifying safety numbers. I don't know. Have you ever verified safety numbers on Signal? So most people don't do it, but basically what it means is that you're able to compare QR codes on your phones. And if the QR codes are the same, then you could be completely sure that there's not a man in the middle attack. If you don't do this, then you have no way of knowing that like if you're sending me a signal message, maybe you're actually sending some attacker signal message and they're just forwarding it to me. But if we compare the keys that we actually have on our devices, then we can be sure that it's actually encrypted and no one's buying on us. And it would be great if Zooms and Den Encrypton supported something like this too. And so we'll see how that goes. But I don't know. I would hope that within months, oh yeah, WhatsApp has that too. WhatsApp also supports comparing fingerprints and verifying that your encryption works. So I would hope that Zoom supports that. And I would hope that maybe their Enten Encrypted feature will be available within months. And also I would hope that it's available for free, that it's not just like business customers. That it becomes a separate price and fee of kind of thing. Yeah. And like the thing about Enten Encryption is if you're having an Enten Encrypted meeting, it's not going to have as many features as the other ones. Like you can't call in on a phone, for example. Like right now you can call into a Zoom meeting on a phone. But if you're in an Enten Encrypted meeting, the phone calls will be completely disabled because you need to actually use a special Zoom client to connect that supports Enten Encryption and just like calling in from a phone, it's impossible to do that. And so there's, and also like streaming on YouTube or cloud recording, like all these things won't work in an Enten Encrypted meeting. So Zoom will have to make it so that when you start, when you host a meeting in Enten Encrypted mode, it works a bit differently.  But I think that there's a real need for secure communications, especially when all of these communication that used to happen in person now just happens over the internet. And so there used to be, things used to be a lot more secure. And now that everybody has to work from home, everybody has to go over the internet.  And so it's, so, you know, we need to use encryption to solve this problem. And I hope that it's available to everybody and not just paying customers. Yeah. The only challenge that I see is that video is much harder.  The reason that I'm probably on this call is because of something I wrote on my newsletter with respect to Zoom, which is, as a founder and a product developer, you empathize with the challenge that someone something that scales, something that does really well from a product market fit perspective, which is that it solves the users problem, get on a video called fast, make it really easy to join a call, make it really easy to invite someone, etc., etc. And these were unsolved problems from, from WebEx days, right? And Zoom made it spend 36, 36 to months or more solving these problems and maybe, maybe simply do that. The problem that they didn't solve, which, which they focus on right now is security. But, but, but that's the trade-off that every founder or every product developer or manager faces, right? In terms of being able to decide what to prioritize and product development. Now it's fairly clear that these guys just have to solve security, but, and it's very clearly now a security issue. But, but before it became a security issue, if I could split it up, it was a marketing and communications problem on one, on the one hand, right? And, and the technical challenge on the other hand, and on the other, and on the third side, it was an optimization issue. How do you optimize the speed? How do you optimize for concurrency for thousands of video participants? That was the problem that none of the other products were solving for. So you actually had three different things going on at the same time. How much of that you see changing at organizations that are doing spectacularly well, which is Zoom, which is more coherence in terms of customer-facing products? Yeah. I mean, I think that one thing that Zoom did differently than some of its competitors. So like Google Hangouts is, you know, a competitor of Zoom. And I think that something that's very different is Google Hangouts. They also don't publish a lot of details about exactly how everything is secured. But they never made the claim that it's end-end encrypted. We can't spy on you. And I feel like that's the big, that's the big thing. It's like, if you read Google's privacy policy, they're like, you know, we only will share your information if we're compelled to by law and things like that. But they never, they never were like, this is totally secure. It's end-end encrypted. And Zoom was like that. And so I think that that's the biggest issue is that I think that the marketing of it sort of just jumped the gun and was just like, oh, this sounds really good. Let's just put it all over our material. And it was very like buzzword-heavy without actually, you know, being accurate. And so I think that that's- The possible that they could have just gone ahead without making it more secure if they just said upfront, you know, when some people started using it, that it is what it is. Yeah. Which I mean, which is what, like, this is how Slack works, right? Everybody uses Slack all over the place. Slack is an end-end encrypted, but they don't claim to be end-end encrypted and everyone like understands the trade-off. So if you're like, okay, I have a business. I have to, you know, have different teams communicating. I need to have some sort of like chat with different channels and stuff. Slack has all these features that I want. Yes, Slack can spy on the messages. They can hand the messages over to the government. But maybe it's worth the trade-off. And so I think that that's kind of, that like people that use Slack were, despite the fact that it's not very secure. And there's all other alternatives that are more secure. There's like Keybase is an example of something that's kind of like Slack. You could have teams, you can chat. And you could have signal groups and WhatsApp groups. These are much more secure than Slack, but they don't have the same features that Slack has and people might decide that they want to use Slack anyway. So yeah, I think that that was like the big issue was really just being accurate and honest in the marketing. And like if Slack was just like, we're so encrypted, no one can spy on anything you say in Slack. Then maybe a lot of people would use Slack because of that, even if it's a lie, you know. How much in the word broadband are you using? What are you using? What am I using? Oh, I'm using cable internet in California. Xfinity, Comcast. It's the town that I live in doesn't have that many good options. But I mean, I have pretty decent internet. Yeah, in the United States, the ISPs are monopolies. I have all full internet. I have ACV that doesn't take the work, which is why I'm on a GO4G line right now. Someone else asked if you are encouraged by the security changes the Zoom has made, especially post 30th March regarding encryption, I think we pretty much banged that question to death. Do you think there's a Chinese angle to this at all? Do you think what does this do for Zoom in terms of positioning? What does this do for China as the big bad guy in the corner? Yeah, I mean, I do think that there's a Chinese angle to this because Zoom has a lot of, I don't remember the details, but Zoom has, there's like some contractor companies that do a lot of the development for Zoom that are based in China. So a lot of the engineers are Chinese engineers and then their infrastructure, some of it is in China. And the reason why I think that this is important is just because China is a very authoritarian government and they have no qualms on spying for political reasons. But also to be fair, the US doesn't really have qualms for spying for political reasons either. And that's where the rest of the servers are. To be fair, most countries today don't have qualms. Yeah. But I could definitely see being concerned for a number of reasons, including the fact that the Chinese government helps steal intellectual property. There's Chinese people all over the world who are students studying abroad or people who have a lot of family in China, who might be doing some sort of pro-democracy activism and they really don't want the Chinese government to be monitoring them. So there's a lot of legitimate reasons to be concerned about the Chinese angle. But I do think that if most of, if it's actually true, if Zoom has fixed this problem, if you're outside of China, you're having Zoom calls, and none of the traffic is going through Chinese servers anymore. And I think that it's always possible that Zoom has some sort of deal with the Chinese government where they help them spy on meetings. But I haven't actually seen evidence of that. So yeah, I think that it's a problem. But I think that the best answer to this problem is a technical answer. It's securing meetings in such a way that Zoom, the company itself, can't spy on them. And if they can do that, if they could actually implement antenna encryption, then if Zoom can't spy on them, then Zoom can't help any government spy on them, including China. What do you think of the future of a lot of technology products? I mean, right now, the spotlight is on Zoom, because everyone has to use Zoom, pretty much, except for the holdouts who use Meet in Microsoft Teams or who use Microsoft Teams. But I'm guessing there are at least 100 odd products out there that are extremely critical in the lockdown mode, probably going to be important going forward, everything from health test software to the entire gamut of SaaS collaboration, you name it. That's secure. Video is obviously far more challenging to secure. But I'm guessing there are privacy issues, a lot of things where the spotlight is going to turn on a ton of these companies that, in terms of context, founders talk about good problems to have and bad problems to have, bad problems to have, or you don't have customers, good problems to have, you have a lot of things, and you can't set the same or you screw up in so many different ways that you get the spotlight turned on for awful things that you've done or that the Facebook friends do problem, so to speak. How do you think this is going to pan out when the spotlight suddenly turns away from Zoom, to many of these companies? Is it going to be a great time for you to be writing? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think that nothing is perfect. All of these things have various problems, and I think that the privacy and security issues, we're just scratching the surface right now. I feel like we're moving into this world where people are really just moving their entire lives onto the internet so much more than has happened since the internet has existed. And when the pandemic is over, I think a lot of it's going to stay there. I think that it's really hard to predict exactly what this really means in terms of privacy and security, but if suddenly a couple of big services start getting hundreds of millions or billions of people on Market Share, that's a lot of power and also a lot of power for the governments that have the jurisdiction of those services. The US government is able to basically spy on anything that happens on Facebook, and Facebook has a lot of customers all over the world. And so I think that this problem is going to it's not going away, and I think it's just a really challenging problem. How do we protect privacy and security when it's so easy to spy on everything online? Are you tilted away from the idea that that entrepreneurs can provide solutions to many of these problems? I mean, do incidents like that reinforce the perception that the best solutions should be open source or collaborative from the ground up, grassroot kind of stuff without either government or agglomerations of capital called companies? Yeah, I mean, I think it's difficult. I think that most of the open source decentralized stuff is like there's a lot of really good advantages, but also a lot of times it doesn't like just work like a lot of other technology. So a good example is Jetsy Meet. Jetsy Meet is an open source video conferencing system. It's not end-to-end encrypted, although they're working on an end-to-end encrypted version, but it's open source so you could host your own server. So basically you have to trust the server. So if you wanted to, you could run your own Jetsy Meet server and then use it for your internal communication and that's actually very good. That's more secure than Zoom in a lot of ways, but also Jetsy Meet as a product, if you have a meeting and there's more than 15 or 20 people in it, it just starts to break down. It doesn't work very well. There's a feature to blur your background and if everybody starts blurring their background, then it just like crashes your web browser. And I think that this is one of the things that companies like Zoom and also other startups, they have like a team of engineers that they pay a lot of money to fix these problems, whereas the more grassroots open source stuff that might be good and in a lot of ways secure don't have and then it also takes a lot of resources to run your own server. It's so much easier. I guess it's also a function of momentum, right? So you have two examples with I mean when you have, when Facebook at its moment, when they had embarrassment after embarrassment in terms of privacy issues, I think it was 2014, 2015, I don't remember when, but and those responses were pretty delayed.  On the other hand, you have, I still use Mastodon. I still use Mastodon. I mean, I'm not going to ask what you do there. I mean, I don't do that much. I use Twitter a lot more, but still on principle, I'm guessing. But the point is you have, you have examples like that, which is developed a little too late and then can't gain momentum. You have examples like, you know, Linux, which was developed many years after people saw that, you know, the OS wars had been won.  But you have cases where open collaborative work has worked as long as it won the platform battle, which is good engineering, obviously, but the ability to get into to widespread use. I think that that's the key challenge, which is that if you have software, if you have a felt need to have open, for instance, video services, that can create the momentum for widespread development. I haven't yet put together a hosted version of that video server. I've actually been meaning to do that. But the problem again, there is interoperability. You have to have something that's interrupted with either other services or in a way that can rapidly, that has inbuilt network effects, and that's graphically pulling people into that service. I mean, Zoom started somewhere. So the question really is, are you going to have a whole bunch of folks getting building? I mean, can you use paranoia for good is my question. Yeah, I mean, I think so. I think that I think that there is a big demand for privacy right now. And I think that that with with Zoom, I think that they just didn't really have a big demand for privacy until now. And so I think that that's why yeah. And so I think that that's why they've never focused on it. I mean, I don't know. It's always like, I'm a pretty big privacy nerd. And so I'm always like looking into doing stuff that is more private online on my computers and phones. But I'm not sure if there's really enough demand for privacy to really fuel a lot of technology that like like, for example, I've I've I've used special Android distributions that are way more private that don't have Google apps on them that and things. But it's like, I don't know, it's very cumbersome. It's very hard. I think it would be very hard for most people like you can't just like install like the Lyft app, for example, which is, you know, something that a lot of people kind of need. And so, but I do think that there is there's enough demand and I think that the demand is growing for privacy as everything is moving online that, you know, it I think that even with video with video conferencing, if there was some service that was like private that was competing with Zoom and that like worked well, that you could have meetings with like dozens of people. But it had like much better privacy. I can see that taking off as well. You know, like right now, if they if they did a faster job than Zoom did. So yeah, I do think that there's definitely an opening for companies to try and like do a really good job with privacy and security and sell that right now. What do you think about the point of view that quite often when new technologies emerge into widespread adoption? At some point, governments intervene to claim their, you know, their foot in the door, so to speak, to make sure that they can survey them, that they can spy and they do it in ways that the general population remain unaware of, obviously. Do you see that likely to happen in a situation where working from home, remote work becomes pervasive, governments will find a way one way or another to gain access to this infrastructure, you know, to protocols to figure out a way to access these platforms no matter how secure they are. I mean, yeah, I think that it's definitely there's a lot of value for governments to do this. And I do think that I mean, I think that that a lot of governments, definitely the United States and the Five Eyes and lots of other governments are are going to try.  Yeah. So, but then this is actually one of the places where, you know, open source technologies that become widespread and successful really help because it's a lot harder to you know, secretly have like a secret deal between an open source project and like the NSA to insert some code that is going to have a backup. It's not that it's it's definitely possible. But I do think that like open collaborative projects are much harder to break in this way. And this is also like, like, why, you know, if Zoom does make end-to-end encryption, I would love it if it's verifiable if you can verify the fingerprints because it's because like if companies really, really care about this, if it's not just they don't just want to have marketing about, hey, look, we're secure, but they actually care about being secure. They need to design their products in such a way that they are potential attackers. So they need to be like, okay, let's say we have a malicious employee that has access to all of our servers. Can they still not spy on our customers? Like that's what they have to do. And that's a very hard problem to solve, but it's a possible problem. It's possible to solve. And I think that like, Signal has done an excellent job of solving this problem of making it so that like, as a company, they don't have access to they have access to as little as possible. And everything is encrypted and things like that. So I think that that's an important thing. How effective do you think it's going to be to protect against the surveilling of metadata with respect to video and other work that scales now in this kind of environment? Yeah, that's a much harder problem. Like the production of metadata, like there are potential, like, so I keep talking about Signal. Signal has done some pretty interesting stuff to protect metadata, where basically like, it's called field sender. So if we have already started having a signal conversation, if I want, if I send you a message, what I'll do is I'll send an encrypted blob to Signal servers and Signal servers will be able to see who it's to but not who it's from. So they'll just say, Oh, this is the recipient. I have no idea about anything else.  And so that's that's an example of protecting metadata. But like nobody else does that. This is the only example of actually protecting metadata on a service that I'm aware of. But because it's a very hard problem. But it's but it's definitely a problem that people can solve, you know, like cryptography can do a lot of stuff. But I think that for a lot of for a lot of businesses and a lot of people, it's more important to just be able to have a meeting that works than than that. But I mean, that's, I don't know, it's an important thing. Governments are interested in the metadata too. I mean, obviously, it's a question of how many people care enough about about about their privacy. In India, we have huge debates about about unique ideas. But I think at the end of the day, it's also a function of a culture of building products. How I mean, as as as a writer and as you are at the intersection of tech and entrepreneurship, what do you take on on everyone from Elon Musk to Mark Andreev and Navarad Khan, and at least Silicon Valley, talking about building is an ethic. I mean, the reason I asked you, I think it ties in to many of these issues, including where everything can be solved by just building. So, let's see, I mean, I think that I am very skeptical of a lot of Silicon Valley solutions to a lot of problems because a lot of the time, I don't know, it kind of reminds me of people thinking that like blockchain can just solve everything. I think that like, you know, so for like the pandemic, it seems like there's a lot of companies that are interested in starting to do like surveillance or like, like I saw something, who was it? I forgot which company, but but they're like, I know we can do contact tracing by facial recognition, so that we just, you know, record everyone's faces to figure out who they are and use cameras to figure out who was in the room with who and have giant databases of everyone's faces. And so, so I feel like tech companies are really good at building specific products, but they're not necessarily good at doing the right thing. Like, I'm not quite sure if I think that Facebook as a company is like is like an overall positive thing for society. And so yeah, so it's like, so I feel like definitely like they're needed, like we definitely need companies that can build good products that work, that can make it so that we can all communicate and and it solves real problems. But I think that we need more than that, too. I think that we need we need to make sure that that, you know, it's not just tech companies getting to make all the decisions. By the way, we were discussing secure drop in the morning. Has the number of tips gone up since you wrote the story? Have you had more interesting leads? Um, I haven't, I haven't gotten many more Zoom tips, but I mean, well, we have gotten some tips about like, you know, specific instances of Zoom bombing and things like that. But yeah, I know, like there's, I don't know, there's a lot of really bad Zoom bombing stories out there. But, but yeah, in terms of like, I think that the number of tips just in general have has gone up since the pandemic started. There's a lot of interesting stuff going on right now. And a lot of people are talking about it. Are you ever going to write a third Zoom story? Oh, a what? Zoom story? A third one? Oh, quite possibly. I mean, it just depends on if there's a good story to tell. Like, I think, uh, yeah, I mean, I'm, I'm very interested in what they're doing right now on, on how they're improving things. And, you know, if they, if they do a really good job, or if they like do a really bad job, if they like mess up in a really bad way or something, like, yeah, I definitely think that that is in the public interest.  I don't have another Zoom story that I'm working on right now. So I don't really have like a lead to follow, but, but, but yeah. There's a question that I actually wanted to ask you earlier, which I remember now, which is, has it always been engagement with PR? Do you appreciate actually engaging with PR? Have folks beyond PR ever reached out to you, same Zoom or other products in other companies where you've done investigative pieces? Yeah. So with Zoom, we've only talked to their PR people, but I really like talking to engineers. There's definitely, the PR side of companies are always, you know, they don't always necessarily give you information that's like super useful, right? They give you something that, but the engineers are like, you know, the people who understand how the technology works, a lot of times will just be a lot more straightforward and just be like, oh yeah, it works like this. I guess that thing is possible. You know, we have these various issues. And so, yeah, there's definitely like, it's definitely nice to talk to people who aren't just on the like public marketing side of things. Do you reach out to investors or venture firms when you do a story about a tech company? I haven't done that. But I mean, I think that's not a bad idea. Most of the ways that I end up like writing about something like this is I get a lead somehow and I start following it. So really like we weren't actually planning on writing this story about Zoom and then encryption. And yeah, all the other journalists that I wrote this story with, she was working on basically like a different unrelated story about just about a bunch of these collaboration tools that people are starting to use now. And she was, and I was talking to her about Zoom and about like what questions to ask them. And she like told me this quote that they gave her where they're like, Zoom doesn't support end-end encryption for video calls.  And so then that's dig into this a lot more because that was kind of a big deal, especially like then we go to like zoom.us slash security and it's like end-to-end encryption. So by the way, I'm putting this piece on Twitter because this is definitely tweetable. Okay, I have some random questions. Someone probably wants to know your take on the new Google Hangout feature. On the what Google Hangout feature? On the new Google Hangout features. Oh, what are the new features? I actually don't know. Oh, I mean, Google Hangout, so just and I'm not sure what the new features are. I mean, I think that there's a Google Meet is like the G Suite. Yeah, it's like the company, the business version of Google Hangouts. And I think that they're because of the pandemic, they're giving like wider access to Google Meet. I mean, I think that it's it's a pretty good service. It works really well. There's definitely been times where I've tried to have calls on like Jitsi Meet, the open source, self-hosted thing that just like didn't work and we kept having to try refreshing our browsers and there was problems. So we switched over to Google Meet. But yeah, like it's also not private. It's similar. It's like who do you want to be able to spy on your meetings? Do you prefer Zoom spying on your meetings? Do you prefer Google spying on your meetings? You just make a choice. Do you have a view on government procurement for products like this? I mean, before this started, we had the whole $10 billion contract. Sorry. Do you think that there's a risk that governments will be forced to buy specific products, especially for video calls and whatever? Yeah, I mean, I do think that there is a risk. I think that one thing that Zoom has promised to do because of pressure from this human rights group called Access Now is to publish a transparency policy which a handful of big companies publish. And so Google publishes a transparency policy where they basically regularly, I think every quarter, they update it and they say how many requests for user data they've gotten and how many of those requests they've complied with and they break it down by country. So I think that Zoom, so we right now at the moment, we have no idea how much governments around the world are putting pressure on Zoom to like spy on their users. We just don't know. We do know about Google. We do know about Facebook because they publish these transparency reports. And so for example, with Google, like, you know, the US government requests data from, I don't know the numbers off the top of my head, but like tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of Google accounts, you know, every quarter, and Google complies with those. But then, you know, the Venezuelan government doesn't get any data from Google. And so I think that this is a good thing to keep in mind. And this is one of the reasons why transparency reports are good, because if you are Venezuelan and you're trying to decide like, what's the most secure video conferencing system, maybe Google Meet or Google Hangouts is a great choice for you because you know that your government isn't isn't that Google isn't cooperating with your government, right? And so, so I'm definitely looking forward to Zoom publishing transparency reports, because I would be very interested to know like, how much does Zoom cooperate with requests from the Indian government? We just don't know. But we do know with Google. And actually I should look that up. I'm not really sure. Alec Aldrin Loughra is asking how difficult is it to use end-to-end encryption in Zoom to allow end-to-end encryption, which is something that we discussed earlier, but yeah. Yeah. So at the moment, it doesn't support it. So this is like a, you know, this is how difficult would it be, will it be for Zoom to develop this feature? I think that Zoom is actually in a really good starting place to make end-to-end encryption like the way that the way that Zoom meetings currently work. They're in a good place to add end-to-end encryption onto how their system already works. But basically the way that Zoom meetings currently work is there is a type of server that's hosted in the Zoom cloud that's like a key management server. Every time you start a meeting, the key management server creates an encryption key and then sends a copy of that key to all the participants in the meeting. And then the whole meeting is encrypted with that key. And so for end-to-end encryption to work, you need to get rid of the key management server. Instead you need to make it so that like the meeting host generates the key and sends a copy of it to the rest of the participants in the meeting. And in order to do this well, I think it might be like, there's a lot of things that can go wrong, but they're hiring, they've been doing these webinars, weekly webinars about security and privacy updates that they're adding.  So I definitely think that it's possible and it looks like it's in the works. Often, I think we've been through an excruciatingly long one hour at current stage. I've pretty much killed everybody's request to us about Zoom. I think thank you so much, Micah, for being on this call. There are actually a dozen other random questions that I did not ask you. And you thank me for that when you hear about this question. Yeah, I don't think we have any other questions from folks watching. Thank you so much again. Kiran, are you there? Yep, still here. And that's my kid discovering that the meeting is coming to an end. So everyone who's been watching, thank you for being here. I think this has been a great one hour. And thank you again, Micah and Vivek. So if you want to follow more on this, I should just go into haskeek.com and signing up. We do not send notifications on the website right now, but we will do that soon. Yeah, and signing up is a great way to ask for updates when these things happen. This video has also been on YouTube and Facebook and Twitter, although I think it's a bit late. So I don't know how many views we have had. I don't think it's been a great but we have recordings. So that means we will make sure people watch this stuff because I think this has been an incredible amount of knowledge that has come out of this hour and it deserves to be in more years. So everyone who's been here, thank you. I think we shall end this here. Goodbye and good night. Bye.