Hello, everyone. Welcome to this our third lecture of the spring lecture series. I want to welcome you again. Hope you had a happy Thanksgiving. A Thanksgiving. Happy Valentine's Day. Goodness. And now I'd like to ask Beth, please, Beth Wood to introduce today's speaker. Beth. Hello, everyone. On this snowy icy day. It's a great pleasure to welcome back Dave Devin Coleman. Devin earned his bachelor's in art history from Colby College in Maine. And his bastards in historic preservation from the University of Vermont. Since 2006 he has served as the state architectural historian at the Vermont division for historic preservation. And you may, some of you may remember some of the past lectures that he's given there's some, we have several of his past excellent presentations online and if you go to the emails that Glenn sends each week where it tells you how to access past lectures. So if you'll be able to see his past talks on art and architecture of the New Deal in Vermont, modernist architecture in Vermont, and the historic architecture of South Burlington. So if you saw them and would like to see them again, or if you missed any of those they are available to you there as this one will be probably by next week. So it's with great pleasure I welcome back Devin Coleman to give us a talk on yet another feature of Vermont architecture today. Take it away, Devin. Great. Thank you very much. Nice to be with you all sorry that we're not in person, but this is better than nothing so I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. So, let's get going here there's a lot to cover in this topic. And as with any of these talks, I'm just hitting the high points. So there's, there's a lot of more research and information that you can seek out and I'll include a couple of references if you want to learn more. But it's a really fun topic. And the question that I like to start out with is, what is it about a kit house that makes it so interesting to us, not just people like me scholars for the built government, but to the general public as well. Even today in our modern 21st century world there's something kind of magical about the concept of being able to just order a house from a catalog, and have all the parts delivered to the building site, ready to be assembled. It wasn't just a concept pipe dream, it was a reality. And there were both small regional firms and large national corporations in the early decades of the 20th century that figured out how to do this. So, in that framework, it's also important to to understand that as much as we love to talk about kit houses and how neat they are. They were a very tiny, tiny fraction of the actual number of housing units built in the early 20th century. It was estimated that kit houses account for less than 0.3% of the total number of housing units built between 1900 and 1930. So that comes out to maybe 400,000 houses. As a producer of kit houses, Sears and Roebuck, they only built an estimated 75,000 houses nationwide. So this, this was not a massive building industry, but it was still important. And it still, you know, continues to fascinate us today. So, let's start talking about them and I look forward to sharing their history. I just want to point out that this presentation was initially developed for Historic New England, which is a New England regional history and preservation group, and they actually have a special project underway right now over the next. It's been going for about a year has another year or two. Until it's done, focusing on kit houses of Burlington, Vermont. So this lecture was one piece of that larger project and if you want to know more about that, and certainly encourage you to visit historic new england.org and learn what other events and programs they have related to this project. So to get us started. Let's take a step back from the early 20th century, and look at a few key events in the 19th century that paved the way for the development of kit houses. In the early to mid 19th century, there's a major shift in how houses are built in the United States. And that's a transition from heavy timber framing, post and beam mortise and tenon joinery to lightweight balloon framing. This construction technique was developed in the 1830s in Chicago, and balloon framing makes use of many lightweight consistently sized wooden framing members joined with wire nails. This system eliminated the need for the skilled expertise of a timber framer, so that a small crew like the one shown here could assemble a house with relative ease and little skilled labor. Balloon framing also allowed for greater variety of floor plans and building forms. And thus we see the great range of wood framed house styles that appear in the mid 19th century, with any combination of towers bay windows porches dormers decorative details. These were all easily executed when working with standard pieces of milled lumber. Balloon framing was superseded by platform framing, which usually utilized shorter members and stacked the decks of the building one on top of the other. And most kit houses utilized platform framing. The next important development was the creation of the portable house, as it was known in 1861 the Boston firm of skillings and Flint received a patent for an improved portable house and published a catalog of their simple house kits in 1862 The skillings and Flint was a subsidiary of Lawrence Barnes and Company, that name may be familiar to people in Burlington, because they were the major lumber company based in Burlington. And at this time Burlington was the third largest lumber port in the nation. After Chicago and Albany, Canadian timber was delivered to Burlington by a late Champlain where Barnes and Company would mill it into consistently sized pieces. The adjacent railroad lines enabled Barnes and Company to transport its milled lumber to Boston for fabrication into portable houses. And then those house kits could be shipped anywhere in the world. What's shown on the right is a view of the Burlington waterfront believe it or not looks quite different today. Filled with piles of lumber stacked between the railroad tracks in the foreground and Lake Champlain in the background. In an 1862 news article about the Barnes operation in the Burlington Free Press proclaims that, quote, the newest invention of the Yankee brain is a sexual portable house furnished neatly packed in boxes. In less time than it takes to tell it, a tree is put into a mill and sliced up into a dwelling house, a church, a barn, a railroad depot or a military hospital. Now the actual process was slightly more complicated but you get the idea. In addition to producing physical buildings companies like this were also laying the groundwork, almost psychologically if you will to get the general public to think about and embrace the notion of a house being prefabricated. And that maybe it would be okay to order your parts from a company and have them pre cut and shipped to the building site instead of hiring a contractor to cut everything to length on the job and put it together. It was this this was a really stark contrast to the traditional building method where a house is wholly built on site by a contractor. Now moving into the 1880s and 1890s. We see American cities beginning to change how they grow and develop, expanding streetcar networks, open new areas of land for development outside of the urban core, and these resulting sub urban neighborhoods, the suburbs become home to what is the practical suburban house. And this is a structure with modern conveniences such as indoor plumbing, central heating and electricity presented in a compact, well designed, single family home. And two of the most popular house types were the bungalow and the four square, shown here, both of which were very popular kit house designs as well. Finally, the last piece of the puzzle was an act of Congress in 1893. When they passed legislation to establish a network of rural mail routes and mail carriers who delivered and picked up mail and personalized roadside mailboxes. You're probably wondering what on earth, this has to do with kit houses, but think about it. Suddenly companies like Sears and Robach had the means of delivering merchandise catalogs and goods directly to the mailbox of anyone anywhere in the country. By 1908, for example, one fifth of all Americans received the Sears catalog at their house. The mail order era had arrived. And once consumers were accustomed to purchasing everything from clothing and medical supplies to lighting fixtures and fireplace mantles from their mail order catalog. It really wasn't that great of a leap to start offering complete kits of parts to build a house. Our topic today is kit houses and think of these like a Lego kit. You get a box of parts with an assembly manual for each piece telling you where it goes within the overall design of the building. Now Legos come in a cardboard box, whereas kit houses came in a boxcar. As you can see on the right here. Everything was included in the shipment from floor joists and siding to roof flashing nails and paint. It was literally the whole house. Now kit houses are not to be confused with panelized houses. Think of a gingerbread house with directions on how to join the building components together. For example, the Hodgson unit system utilized a series of six foot by 12 foot wall panel units assembled in the factory, which could then be combined in various configurations and bolted together on site. But because these are largely assembled and built in a factory and then joined together on site. They're not considered true kit houses. Nor should kit houses be confused with prefabricated houses. A prefab house is like the dollhouse you buy fully assembled at the store, or as this great photo on the right, delivered on a truck and dropped into place. Finally, we have other buildings that are built from plans only with all the materials and labor provided by the developer or the builder or the owner. And once the builder had that set of plans, the house could be replicated over and over, leading to some mistakenly assume that they are kit houses because they see multiples of the same design. But it was simply a builder using the same set of architectural plans. A very style house in Burlington, for example, was built from plans purchased from the National Builder magazine in 1917, and it was built by a local contractor. So to be clear, for the purposes of this talk, the term kit house refers to buildings that were advertised in and ordered from a catalog that were manufactured at a central plant sawmill of some sort. And delivered in unassembled pieces to the building site, and then constructed. Due to the popular name brand name brand recognition of Sears and Roebuck, the tier term Sears kit house has become essentially a catchall for any small early 20th century house that has the characteristics of a bungalow or a four square. Sears was just one of several principal producers of kit houses. These companies came into the field in slightly different ways, and there's still debate about who was the first. But we do know that Aladdin homes of Bay City, Michigan, and Sears Roebuck and company of Chicago, both published catalogs featuring complete kit houses in 1908. The award in company followed suit in 1909 with their, their own catalog. As did the Chicago house reckon company later rebranded as Harris brothers. In 1916, the Gordon band time company entered the field of ready cut houses. And let's use this 1916 Gordon band time catalog to go through the process of selecting and ordering your new kid house. The first step, of course, is the fun part, looking through all the different designs reading the description studying the floor plans and pondering the glowing testimonials of previous customers that are printed on almost every page of the catalog. Is it the big handsome bungalow, or do you prefer the practical for room cottage at a very modest price, or maybe you really prefer the square house of striking design. The descriptions and names of these properties are wonderful. I imagine having to be the copywriter coming up with ways to explain the amazing virtues of these houses that ultimately are all pretty much the same. But they did a great job. In addition to the house plans and descriptions the catalog also contains a few pages explaining the process of fabricating the houses. In this case illustrated with a series of photos that show the lumber being cut milled and packed. And it was part of getting the public comfortable with the notion of of ordering a house as a kid of parts from a catalog. They're showing you. This is how we do it, you know there's this is just very practical and logical. And what's great about this. This page from the Gordon band time catalog if we look closer. You can see that this photo in the lower right actually shows a central Vermont railroad car with all the parts for Gordon band time house, perhaps somewhere in Vermont. This house is still standing. Also in the catalog is a simple two page order form. And that's all it took to start the process. Just fill in the blanks with the house model number. The catalog every house had its own code. You fill that in and specify the materials that you need. Indicate how you're going to pay. That's very important. You could send cash with your order, or you can have a bank guarantee your payment upon delivery of the goods. And specify your paint colors and the stains for the woodwork, and you were good to go. These pages are from a series and robot catalog, and they show the building process at all of the building components for the house were manufactured and packed at a centralized facility, and then shipped by a rail to the nearest railroad station. So your builder would load the pieces onto a truck, transport everything to the building site, and get to work putting the house up. This, as these photos show the construction process is not unlike standard site built house construction. You have all the pieces they get nailed together. The roofing, the cheating, roofing, doors and windows are put in. The primary difference being that all of the framing materials are already cut to length. And this is something that the kid house companies really emphasized was how practical and efficient their products were. The design, for example, calculated that the construction of an average five bedroom house required 2,940 individual cuts with a hand saw by the builder on site with a kit. However, all of that cutting is done by machinery in the factory. So you're not paying your builder to do that work on site. There's no very little waste, as we see in the catalog comparison of a kid house on the left and a house of standard construction on the right. You can see the kid house job site is neat and tidy. The other house site built with the quote older hand saw method as a messy building site and two truckloads of cut off lumber scraps that will have to be hauled away. Now that we know a little bit about the origins and history of kid houses, let's talk about how to research and identify them because that's part of why these houses are so fascinating is that it's really fun to look around your neighborhood and try to pick out like which which houses have the characteristics of a kid house and can they actually be identified. So the first step is to educate yourself about the variety of kid houses that are out there, and their specific characteristics. Fortunately, a lot of research has been done on this topic in recent years, and the there are some excellent books available about the leading manufacturers of kid houses. Some are shown here, and there are many others. The book about Montgomery Ward, the history and field guide to Wardway homes is especially useful, because in addition to information about Wardway homes, it includes brief summaries about many of the other kid house companies that were in operation at the time. And if you really want to dive into the history of pattern books and kid houses, going all the way back to the founding of the nation. Then I highly recommend Richard cheeks 2013 book, selling the dwelling, the books that built America's houses 1775 to 2000. And I believe this book which has been out of print is being reprinted in paperback version soon so you should be able to find that online. And of course, there are numerous websites and Facebook groups dedicated to kid houses, far too many to list here, but easily found online. One of the best resources for original copies of old kick house catalogs is the building technology heritage library, which is housed on the Internet archive and maintained by the Association for preservation technology. And the website, www.archive.org is shown on the screen here. This is the best source for free online access to dozens of kid house catalogs scanned in their entirety. Looking through these old catalogs also reveals that the companies were not only producing cute little bungalows and four square houses. Some of their designs were quite grand, as shown on this page, this compilation of images of completed projects in the 1911 seers catalog. Many of these are quite substantial and grand houses. And you will also find that the companies are not limiting themselves to kit houses. There were entire catalogs devoted to farm buildings, including barns and houses poultry houses silos. Because these catalogs of farm buildings are often overlooked. Most of the discussion about kit houses is about residential buildings. But these farm buildings, especially in a state like Vermont. These were very important in the rural parts of the of the state. Most of the companies also produce smaller simpler buildings as well. This 1915 Aladdin catalog includes, in addition to houses, garages, and summer cottages. So you could get your, you could order your main house from Aladdin with a garage, and then you could order your nice little getaway cabin for your camp on the lake. And even has a few pages devoted to furniture and fixtures. So you could order your house and furnish it all at once. So, before you strike out to find kit houses in your community. It's useful to think about where you might find them, because they're definite areas that you can identify pretty easily. And speaking, they will show up in neighborhoods that were developed in the first decades of the 20th century, usually adjacent to older 19th century downtown core areas. For example, this 1890 map of Burlington shows the city's development. Just at the start of suburban expansion. The yellow area shows the core of Burlington that was largely developed by the end of the 19th century. The blue on the left is Lake Champlain, and downtown is. The industrial waterfront between the two. And then in the early 20th century developments were built adjacent to that urban core, still close enough to major roadways and trolley lines, but on previously undeveloped land that had been used for farming or been part of large estates. These areas are shown in green, generally southeast and north of Burlington. These areas that, you know, even in 1890 were still large, undeveloped tracks of land, but then quickly is that suburban development grew, got filled up with new subdivisions within these neighborhoods. You'll find a lot of houses that look like these. These are all examples just from around Burlington actually on the same street, almost straight same neighborhood. These are all examples of that practical suburban house compact, well designed, well organized, simple houses. Most of these are probably built by a contractor from a set of plans but some of them could be kid houses. Some of the features that are common to kid houses are shown here. There are distinctive brackets on the porch and roof eaves, such as the five piece bracket shown here on the left on a Sears Winona house, and you can see it has a horizontal piece, a vertical piece, two diagonal pieces. The fifth and final little connector piece. So that five piece bracket is a real hallmark of a Sears kid house. And on the right is the Pomona model house from Aladdin with its distinctive horizontal brackets shown in close up here. Another common feature of kid houses is the grouping of porch or entryway columns in sets of two or three. The first might be a Sears Crescent model and note the two sets of three round columns supporting the projecting portico. And on the right is a close up view of the very heavily kind of bloated, if you will, square columns on a Montgomery Ward house. It's an oversized, very distinctive, say taper upward dramatically at the top. You can also look for small bump outs on the sides of kid houses, which were often included as an economical means of increasing floor space on the main level without building a larger foundation. You can see this feature clearly on this side elevation. Where the bump out projects beyond the concrete block foundation wall. Gordon van Tyn ready cut home number 538, as shown in the 1916 catalog on the right includes a sizable bump out on the side elevation. Without this feature, the dining room highlighted here would only measure 138 square feet. But with that one little bump out, it measures 161 square feet, an increase of 23 square feet. And in a house of this size. That's an important addition of space and an otherwise compact and efficient building footprint. So all of these features that you frackets columns bump outs are clues to identifying a kid house, but there's certainly not definitive indicators. There are kid house models that don't include any of these features. But there are features to keep an eye out for that may help identify a kid house, along with other information. So, once you've scoped out your neighborhood, you kind of know where to look, and you know some features to look for it's time to hit the streets and start exploring visual identification involves matching an existing house with a similar house in a catalog. But this is only the starting point and does not result in definitive documentation of a kid house. So shown here is a page from the 1919 Aladdin homes catalog showing the shadow lawn model. And here is a house on Flynn Avenue in Burlington that looks suspiciously similar. As does this house on Charlotte Street, also in Burlington. If we look at the catalog, and these two extant examples. They have a lot of things in common. Does this mean that we have two examples of the Aladdin shadow lawn house here in Burlington. Based on this visual information. The answer is a definitive maybe matching a rendering and a catalog to an extant house is not definitive proof that it's actually a kit house. Perhaps one of these on Flynn or Charlotte Street was built from a kit. And then the builder just use that plan set to build another one using his own materials, or maybe neither one came from a kit maybe they were mail order plans, or maybe they both did. The only way to know for sure is to conduct a physical inspection of the building itself. Another way to identify kid houses is to conduct research using historical records and the catalogs themselves. For example, I mentioned earlier that all the catalogs made extensive use of these wonderful customer testimonials where they write in and say how fantastic and easy it was to build their kid house. The 1953 Aladdin homes catalog includes the Greystone model shown here. It also includes two testimonials from owners who purchased and built the Greystone. And most importantly, these testimonials include their hometown. So we know that someone with the initials are CW in Chester deep over month, built Greystone model number one. As did someone with the initials MAC and White River Junction. Using the 1953 city directories for these towns. It may be possible to identify who are CW and MAC were, and where they built these houses, then field verification would be the final step in the identification process. The building catalogs would even list specific places where a mod a certain model had been built, such as this page for the Maytown in the 1921 Sears catalog. Right down in the very corner it says this house has been built at Lyndonville Vermont, Brisbane, Pennsylvania and you know New York New Jersey Maryland Ohio. According to the catalog we know that there's one of these houses in Lyndonville Vermont. Fortunately it has that very distinctive corner tower. So it really only took a few minutes with Google and Street View. To find this house on Raymond Street in Lyndonville. They're very similar, although you will note that they are reversed mirror images if we flip the photo. They are pretty spot on, although even here you notice the second story in the catalog has two windows. Here there's only one window. Was that a choice made during construction. There's a window filled in later on. So again, this isn't definitive proof, but it's, we're getting closer. This is the fact that the catalog says this model was built in Lyndonville, and there's an example that is really close to that catalog image. This would be one to check out and do a physical inspection. Another tactic is to search old newspapers for references to kit houses. However, if you search kit house, you really won't find much. This is actually a more recent term. And in the early 20th century, these houses were more often referred to as ready cut houses. For example, this notice in the Vermont Journal in 1916 notes that quote, a ready cut house is the first of its kind being erected in Windsor Vermont on halls terrace. Fortunately for us, Hall Street, as it is known today, only has four houses on it. And it's shown here looks like it has all the right elements of a kid house. It's a simple form, a two story box with a front porch. Clabbered on the first story shingle on the second story that was a very common treatment for exterior sighting, some decorative treatments on the eaves, and so on, but is it a kid house. And this collection can provide definitive proof. Sometimes you get really lucky and find an article such as this one, which identifies the owner, the street, and the manufacturer of the house. And here we have not just one but two, a Montgomery Ward house and a sterling house. And sterling homes was another manufacturer of kit houses based in Bay City, Michigan. And this further emphasizes the fact that kit houses are being produced by many more companies than just the well known Sears and Roebuck Company. City directory research should easily identify where Joseph Durkey and Leland Wood lived. And then a site visit to the property could help confirm whether or not a kid house exists. How does one go about inspecting a potential kid house for clues as to his origin. I keep saying physical inspection is what you have to do. So there's several things to look for and they vary according to manufacturer. Some are easier to spot than others. And oftentimes, these telltale clues are concealed by later alterations and interior improvements. One of the first things to look for is stamped framing members, which may be exposed in the attic or the basement of the house. Sometimes these numbers are revealed when a wall is opened up during renovations. These are examples from a Sears kit house. The lumber on the left is stamped. It's an ink stamp V29T, it looks like, with an alphanumeric code. And that code corresponds to the set of building plans that came with the kit. In other cases, the alphanumeric code is stamped on the end of each board, which means the code is completely hidden once the board is put into place. These images from Gordon Bantine catalogs show how their lumber was stamped, which sometimes included written labels, such as we see on the left, porch step stringer. You can see something like that stamped on your stair stringers. That's a pretty good indication that it came from a kit. And on the right is a diagram of how all these pieces labeled and bundled together would be mapped out within your set of plans to correspond with their specific use and location on the building as it was being built. Sometimes the lumber is not stamped and instead has numbers written in grease pencil as we can see here. Sometimes there's no marked lumber. Bottom line, if you can find stamped or marked lumber and can correlate the markings to a manufacturer, then that's a really good chance that it's an authentic kit house. Another clue to look for is paper labels that may remain attached to the back of trim inside the house. For example, these mailing labels were found on the back of pieces of trim, baseboard and door framing pieces. But you'll see that nowhere do they say Sears and Roebuck. However, the return address, 925 Homan Avenue, Chicago, gives us a clue because that's the address of the headquarters of Sears and Roebuck. A word of caution, however, these labels simply indicate that the lumber for these specific parts came from Sears and Roebuck, but not necessarily that the entire house is a kit house. Because you could build your own house and then just order all your trim from Sears. So these trim pieces could have been purchased by the builder from Sears and Roebuck and just used to finish up an otherwise standard built house. You can also look for physical components of the house such as plumbing fixtures and hardware that may provide clues about the origins. For example, the hinges on this built-in bookcase are the same hinges as those shown in the 1920s Sears modern catalog. But again, these are clues, not definitive proof, since Sears also sold hardware like this separately in its catalogs and stores. Sometimes the name of the kit house manufacturer would be included on the hardware itself, such as this wonderful doorknob from an Aladdin house. It's a really clear indication that it's an Aladdin kit house because Aladdin did not sell parts like the way that Sears and Montgomery Ward did. And if you're really lucky, the owner of the property may still have documents related to the ordering and delivery of the house, such as order forms, shipping inventories, receipts, and so on. And some construction manuals may be present. On the left here we have the manual on how to put together your Wardway ready cut home. Or my favorite, which we see on the right, is the official certificate of deposit on building materials for a kit house. This one is from Sears and Roebuck and clearly says it is for the Osborn model in 1928. This is about as definitive as you can get. In summary, positive identification of verified kit houses is really difficult to do. And it's usually achieved through a combination of visual comparison to known designs, archival and documentary research, and physical inspection. So that brings us today to today. And the question. What happened. Why aren't we still able to order houses by mail? Most of the major firms selling kit houses fell on hard times during the Great Depression, followed by the moratorium on new construction during World War Two. Despite a slight increase in sales following the end of the war by the mid 1970s, almost all of these firms, the ones listed here, had gone out of business or stopped marketing kit houses. Some of them ran into trouble with the financing packages that had been offered to homeowners to build their houses. Sears, for example, underwrote thousands of mortgages for their kit houses in the 1920s. And then they were faced with the unenviable task of foreclosing on their own customers and repossessing their homes in the 1930s, when the homeowner couldn't could no longer make the mortgage payments. As previously noted, kit houses accounted for a ministerial fraction of the total number of housing units built in the early 20th century. So why are we still talking about them today 100 years later. Yes, the houses that remain are very nice buildings, they are very well built their quality homes, and they're fun to research and identify. I argue that actually the real importance of these early 20th century kit houses and programs to sell them lies not in the buildings themselves, but rather in the mail order catalog network, through which the ideals of what a middle class single family American house could or should be was disseminated nationwide. These catalogs served a dual purpose of both reflecting existing ideals and influencing new housing designs. They made different architectural styles accessible to anyone anywhere in the country. For example, you could get the Magnolia model shown here from Sears, which based its design on long fellows home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And you could build it in North Carolina, or Ohio, or anywhere you wanted. Here's the North Carolina model. So it opened up these styles to a much broader reach beyond their typical geographic region, or perhaps you're really taken by the mission style Alhambra, but you live in Burlington. No problem, even if you didn't order the actual kit house from Sears and Roebuck, the catalog images and floor plans were often enough for a homeowner to communicate to a builder. What they wanted is the house shown here, which is in Burlington, an actual example of a Sears Alhambra. And there are some notable differences in the designs, but there are also a lot of similarities. And I think we can all admit that the mission style is not of wide renown in Vermont. So there's a good chance that this house in Burlington was at least influenced by the Sears catalog descriptions. The floor plans of the Alhambra, even if it's not an actual example of the Alhambra kit house. So while the actual number of kit houses built was nominal, the influence of the kit house catalogs was enormous, and guided the development of communities across the country. And that to me is the real value of studying kit houses today. One of the most important examples that we can positively identify are physical reminders of this important period in American architectural history. And I thank you very much, and I'd be happy to take any questions. Thank you, Devin that was fascinating and we do have some questions for you. As kid houses grew in popularity, was there a backlash from traditional home building companies in view of the kid houses lower cost and that they were produced by out of town firms. Absolutely. How could there not be. It's really interesting even looking in old copies of the Burlington Free Press. There are advertisements from local builders. There are architects saying, you know, be careful. You don't know who's really designing your house with one of those kid houses, you don't know the quality, you don't know if they're trained.  You know us, you can trust us. So that that was definitely a concern in the field of ready cut manufactured prefab housing.  If this timing all assembled and doesn't need any work, then they're out of the job. So, there was definitely some push back from local trade groups. For some kid houses affordable enough to allow renters to buy their first homes. Did this have an impact on the housing scene in general. Yes, I would certainly think so.  And an entry level house could certainly be within in reach of people wanting to move out of rental units. And also, interestingly, Aladdin homes. I think had either a complete catalog or a section of their catalog focused on marketing their product directly to women and teachers and young professional women. And saying, Hey, you know, you're in the workforce now. Wouldn't you like to have your own home. And here's how maybe you can afford your own house. So very interesting marketing. And the fact that they also offered mortgages. That was another piece where borrowers who maybe typically couldn't get a mortgage from a big bank. They could do racial restrictions or gender, you know, usually the man would be the one getting the mortgage, but these companies would give mortgages to anyone. So that was another really important way that people who had been shut out of the housing market could maybe get their foot in the door. Interesting. How insurable were these houses in general, and please comment on insurance or liability issues related to get houses that Sears Robach and other vendors offer insurance policies that controversies arise over who was responsible for damages Sears the owner of the local builder. That is a good question I don't know. Don't know about the insurance piece. I mean, the difference of the quality of the houses. They were great houses. They were.  If they even have any stores left. I mean, we kind of think of Sears today as where you get your washer and dryer or your lawn mower discount, you know, lower end goods. At this point, early 20th century Sears was the king of retail, and they were quality. They were top of the line. And these houses were built with excellent materials, really good quality lumber. They were very solidly built, and you see when you find one today, they're typically in great shape because they are very well built houses they were not in any way, you know, discount or, you know, lower grade housing options. Are there any particular regions or places in the United States that have a very high number of kid houses. Definitely the Midwest would I think would have the highest concentration because that's frankly where a lot of these businesses were based Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois, because that's where all the lumber was. You know that's that's where the sawmills and the factories were producing these houses and yes they could put them on a real car and shipped them anywhere in the country. But you'll definitely find large concentrations in those Midwestern states, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan would certainly be the largest concentrations. Is there a connection between kid houses and Frank Lloyd Wright. There is the not not directly right did have. He did develop his own kid house. I forget what they were called they were concrete block kid houses. I think maybe only three were built. But he, you know right was very interested in this low cost affordable quality housing as well. But certainly writes ideals of wanting to design buildings with built in furniture. A lot of these kid houses would come with built in cabinets shelving so that the, the new owner could move into a house and not have to that you know they've just bought a house. Then you have to buy everything to furnish it. And if the house can actually come with some of those things built in so much the better. So that was certainly a connection to right. And then the, I'd say some of the simplified designs of some of the kid houses and there were actually prairie style kid houses. The, some of the more craftsman style kid houses definitely pick on pick up on rights aesthetic very clean horizontal kind of long and low building forms. Are there any particular neighborhoods in Burlington or Winooski where we might see a number of kid houses. Yes, around Burlington. The areas that I'm most familiar with are on the south side of downtown in the neighborhood known as the five sisters neighborhood, which is Caroline Street, Charlotte Street, Marion and Margaret Catherine. That neighborhood in then south of Flynn Avenue in a neighborhood called the addition is another several several blocks of houses in there that, you know, I drive through there and just like that that's one I bet that's one. But again, we never know for sure. On the east side of downtown, probably some neighborhoods in there around like Robinson Terrace around the university. These were great houses for like faculty and people working at the nearby university. That's another good place to look for these houses. Winooski? Yeah, Winooski, I'm sure there would be there are some amazing bungalows in Winooski. I want to say kind of in the northeast quadrant of the city. Basically, if you can find a map that kind of shows development patterns of the area and find out where things were being built in the 20s and 30s and that's, that's where you want to look. Right. So, you know, for broader in the state, we find concentrations, basically any town that was had really good access to a railroad line. You know, Lindenville, St. Aldens, Rutland, White River Junction, you know, because these were all shipped by boxcar, so it made sense.  You're going to keep it pretty local, so. Is the concept of kid houses being applied to the townie tiny house movement nowadays. It is, I do get a laugh sometimes out of the tiny house projects that I see and we fit all of this, you know, living space for two people into 700 square feet. It's like, well, yeah, they did that in 1910 in a Sears house. They're reinventing the wheel. Yeah, it definitely has come around to these are practical houses. You know, they suited the needs one of the houses that I looked at in the five sisters neighborhood. One of the bigger models two stories but still maybe a thousand square feet. And I talked to a man who grew up there with his like seven siblings, you know, they had 10 people in that house. And it's a house today that we would think oh that's good for like in a couple with no kids, you know, so that the perspectives has changed so radically. Yes, I think actually the small house movement could learn a lot by looking at these old catalogs and seeing how these floor plans were laid out and how they worked in storage and living units and built in to make these really compact efficient living spaces. Great. I think that's all the time we have Devon but thank you so much and driving around some of these neighborhoods. Take a look around and you start seeing them. Oh yes Devon this has been so interesting thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks everyone see you next week.


Hi, everyone, and welcome to track one, the 3 p.m. talk. Tonight we have our speaker is Amin Ra and he is going to be speaking about how to hack your way out of home detention. Ladies and gentlemen, Amin Ra. Hey, can you guys all hear me? Yeah? Louder. Louder? Can you hear me now? Cool. Okay. So you all know where you are. You know what this talk is. Introduction slides. I am Amin Ra. Some of you know me. Most of you don't. I work for a consultancy company doing pen testing.  What you do is your own responsibility. I legitimately own the system and don't just hack it, blah, blah, blah, academic use only. Don't be evil. On a more serious note, authorities are very upset when people tamper with home detention systems. If you do try and use this in the wild, you might be sent to jail for it, so I recommend only doing it in a lab. I'm sure we've all heard of home detention tracking systems. They're in the news. People are sentenced to this reasonably regularly. A couple of examples of sentences and crimes that have been sentenced to home detention are someone last year in LA was sentenced to home detention for an immigration scam. More recently, someone hacked someone's email and got some home detention. So they tend to be nonviolent, sort of relatively low-risk crimes.  How do these systems actually work? It was all very well to talk about them, but how do they operate? The goal is to restrict movement of a person who's being sentenced. So instead of being sent to jail, they'll be given some amount of time where they're not allowed to leave their home. And this is quite attractive for enforcement agencies because it's much cheaper. They have to pay for their own accommodation and food. It's a lot cheaper for the taxpayers. There's sort of two general categories of tracking systems. The older generation would have a bracelet or anklets that would transmit a signal to a physical unit in the home that was not movable. And that would communicate with a monitoring station over a standard wired telephone network. Most of these systems are now considered legacy. All the new systems don't work like this. But because they're legacy systems, they're obviously still widely used. But all of them modern ones are phasing to a new type of system. That system uses GPS so that it can track you anywhere in the world. It doesn't have to be near your home. It uses a cell network, so it's not restricted to wired telephone lines. But it still may use a local beacon, which we'll look at later in the talk. Is this relevant here? The simple answer is yes. I haven't been able to find recent statistics, but an article I found from 2012 suggests that there are hundreds of thousands of people at any time on home detention. And we can see why that is because it costs a lot of money to keep someone in prison. It's a lot cheaper for the government if they can monitor you within your own home. So obviously I have a device. Now, how would you get one? I guess somewhat reasonably, the people who build and operate these systems are very reluctant to release any information. They're quite sensitive about it. So it's quite difficult to find information about them. If you Google for this, you're not likely to find much information. There is a simple way to get hold of one. Can you guess? Yeah. You could commit a minor crime, but I decided to go the more legitimate route. And so I found a company that builds these units in Taiwan. I managed to talk them into giving me a sample unit under the pretense that I was going to evaluate it for my company. I don't really care. I had to pay quite a bit of money, which if you have done business in South Asia, you will know that there's a fine line between cost of products and bribery, but I have the system. It's all I care about. Because I bought it from a manufacturer, they're obviously not going to tell me who their customer base is. And like I said, enforcement agencies are quite secretive about what technology they use. So I don't actually know where this unit is used. It could be, you know, right here, it may not be anywhere in the States. Someone somewhere is using this vulnerable system because there's a market for it. I don't know who. Some of the vulnerabilities I'll be talking about are quite specific to the implementation of this system, and so they probably won't be relevant to other systems. Some of them are reasonably general issues, and so they'll probably be relevant to other systems as well. Even once I got my hands on it, because it was a sample unit, it didn't come with documentation, so I wasn't able to operate it properly. I did a bunch of Googling and was quite lucky to find another system that used the same code. It's used for tracking cars, and I got a manual for that, so I know how to use it. Obviously, because it's the same system, it's also vulnerable to the same flaws. How does this particular system operate? It uses GPS as one of the new systems. It also has a base unit which transmits a low frequency or lower frequency beacon, and it has a large amount of tamper detection features, which we will look at once we open the case. Battery life is around a week, but you can recharge it while it's on your ankle, so you don't have to have someone come and change the battery. Base unit also has a battery. It communicates in two different modes, both SMS and GPRS, so you can either communicate with the text messages or to a server on the internet through a socket. You can remotely reconfigure the device. So you can set it commands, change the settings, for example, change the position where the person has to remain remotely. You don't have to go and physically update the settings. So here I have the base unit. We won't spend a lot of time looking at this, because there's not very much in it, really. It's a pretty simple system. There's some tamper detection so that if you try and open up the case, it will send a message, which will be relayed by the antlet to the authorities. But there's not a great deal of technology in there. Most of the interesting stuff is in the antlet itself. This is like a close-up picture of what it is, but it's not that much of interest. The antlet, the bit that goes on your leg, is far more interesting. So this is what it looks like if we take off the strap. This is what the inside of it is. Some features that are interesting, we've got a read switch. So there's a magnet in the strap. If you remove it, it can detect that and will send a warning, a tamper warning to the people monitoring it. Same thing with the push pin. Remove the strap. There's a warning. There's an infrared LED and an infrared sensor. So this is also for tamper detection. How this works is there's a piece of fiber optic cable that runs around the band, around the strap. If you take bolt cutters and try and cut through it, that'll disrupt the infrared signal and the system will again send an alert. Other features is obviously where the battery is plugged in. There's a SIM card and some kind of programming header. I don't really know whether to have tried reprogramming it. So when we actually open up the circuitry so we can see exactly what's in it, we have an off-the-shelf GSM cell network module that is taste-care of all of the network communications. We have a standard NAND flash memory chip which is used for storing settings and storing locations when logging is turned on. There's a vibration motor so you can automatically trigger alerts so that if someone moves into an area where they're not supposed to be or leaves an area, you can make the antlet vibrate so that the person is immediately warned that somewhere they're not supposed to be. If we flip over the circuit board, we've got a standard Texas Instruments microprocessor. It's just off-the-shelf. That'll take care of all of the sort of processing on the system. I'm not sure if you noticed, but you will have seen this module on the base unit as well. There's no identifying information on it, so I don't know if it's custom built or if it's off-the-shelf. But it's obviously used for the local low-frequency radio transmissions. I don't know anything more about it than that. Obviously, we have a GPS module that's pretty standard. So when this device is operating, there's a large range of different features and settings and stuff you can change. These are the most interesting ones, but it's not an exhaustive list. I won't go over them in detail, but you can change like the user and their password or the coordinates where the user must remain and what happens when they tamper with it on all these sorts of features. Right. So that's enough for now about the security of this system. As we know, it communicates over the cell network. So in this case, GSM. GSM security has been investigated a lot by other people in the past. It's encrypted, so you can't just view traffic that's sent over the air. There's a secret key that's embedded in the SIM card that's used to authenticate the SIM card on a network. But it's a well-known feature that's reversed is not true. A SIM card or a cell phone does not usually verify the authentication of the network. So this means it's possible to spoof a cell phone network. There's a temporary key which is used to encrypt traffic on the fly that's generated once the SIM card is authenticated. The SIM card does not know its own cell phone number. It has a unique ID which is then mapped within the telco to a number. This is relevant to the SIM card. This is relevant to what we'll be talking about. I have a Blade RF. This is software-defined radio. I'm not going to go into details about it. Suffice to say that it allows me to receive and transmit within the cell network frequencies. YetiBTS is an open-source GSM stack. It allows high-level scripting and JavaScript so you can easily change how the network operates. If you know these are publicly available information, the network number and country number of a cell phone network, you can spoof that network. It's obviously illegal to do this, but from a technical point of view it's not hard. I have a DIY Faraday cage here. Two reasons for that. One is that I need to block some of the signal because my transmitter is not very powerful. So if I block some of the legitimate cell phone signals, it means the device is more likely to switch to my fake network. Another reason is that it's illegal to transmit in the cell phone network without a license. And so I don't want to go to jail. As I said, there's two different modes this ANK that operates in. If it's in TCP mode it uses a socket. It's not encrypted so you can interfere with that. You can temple with it. I haven't been able to do this because I haven't been able to get GPRS working on my Blade RF, but there's nothing to stop you doing that. If it's in SMS mode, it's a lot more difficult, but as we'll see it's still possible. So let's assume that we have a fake network and the device is now authenticated to it. When it sends a status update about where the person is, we can now see that message. So let's have a look at what the content of the status updates are. The username. So that's obviously what is sent when we're authenticating messages. So when you change settings, you send it a username and a pin. When it sends an update, it sends back the username. This is a major issue because now we can just capture the username and replay it. So we only need to get the pin before we have full control of the system. The next part of the message is a standard GPS coordinate. That's quite easy. The last part of that is a check sum, but it's not a signature, so we can recalculate the check sum. We don't need a key for that. The message is... Oh, it appears to be custom. I haven't found any documentation about what it is. I can guess some of it or derive some of it. But we don't have to. So there's the message relayed from the base station. There's the charging status. Those things are pretty certainly there. Things that it might include, but I'm not 100% sure on, how much battery is left, how many local cell towers are. It's possible to spoof the sender information from a text message. Normally when you receive a text, it obviously has a sender number, but I'm sure you've all received messages from a company name. That's because the sender information is just a string. It's not forced to be a cell phone number. That's just enforced by the local network. But people have set up restrictions without much regulation. When they send a message to a local cell phone, they pass the message to the local carrier who has to trust the sender information. They have no way of verifying that. So they can send anything you want. You can use it to fake the sender number. They cost a small amount of money, but it's quite easy to do. I'm using a serious game, but there's a range of different providers. If you want to spoof a number, you have to know what number you want to spoof, because as I said, the SIM card only has a unique identifier, not the cell phone number. But it's possible to get the cell phone number. We can pull out the SIM card, place it in our phone we control, and send ourselves a text message. That would obviously get the information, but if we open it, it's going to send a warning, right? So we can't do that. Well, a naive solution to that would be to wrap it into an aluminum foil and block out the signal so it can't send that tamper detection. That doesn't work because the designer's thought of this, and if it can't send a message, it writes it to memory and retransmits it as soon as it can. The trouble is that it only checks that it's been sent from the network. The network acknowledges, yes, message delivered. It doesn't do an end-to-end check. So if it's connected to a fake network, we can just say, your message delivered fine. You don't need to worry about it, and then it doesn't retransmit it. And we have it connected to a fake network. So we can do that.  We could replace the SIM card and forward messages to our own phone, but if the authorities come and check the device, they're going to know that it's been tampered with. So maybe not a good idea. Option number two. As I mentioned, because it transmits the username, we only have to get the pin number before we can control the device. So we could possibly brute force it, maybe. The default pin is just four zeros. If it's set by a human, it's probably not random. We might be able to dictionary attack that. The problem is that because it's going to be on a fake network, any status updates that are sent will not be delivered. So we need to stop the fake network, tell it that the message was not delivered, stop the network, and then have it retransmit on the legitimate network, and then start up our fake network again. That's an option. If it's configured to transmit very frequently, this won't work because it's going to spend most of its time switching networks and very little time brute forcing the pin. But if it's transmitting reasonably infrequently, say once every second, brute forcing the pin, the advantage of this way is we're not just faking the messages. Once we have the pin number, we can take and pre-control the device. Is it possible? So the pin must be four characters. It cannot be longer or shorter. It is only letters and numbers, no special characters. With these constraints, we have a bit over a million and a half possible pins. I've got not great hardware, so I haven't been able to get these speeds, on the internet, so it's possible to get around 30 messages a minute. That's just about 40 days, so that's a really long time. But you're sitting at home on home detention, so what else are you going to do? Okay, option number three. So there's a tool called Crackin and some rainbow tables for attacking GSM communication. A guy much smarter than me has done research on this and he released this tool. Basically it allows you to capture GSM traffic off the air and in certain circumstances decrypt that to get the plain text. You can potentially forge messages and the cell network will believe it came from the device because it has the same key. You could forge a message to a phone you control and it will appear to come from that SIM so you can get the number that way. A downside to this is you can't intercept and block legitimate status updates which you can with the other two methods because it's not on your network. I haven't done this because I only have one SDR but I think it's probably possible to place the device with one SDR in a Faraday cage and have another SDR outside the cage and then decrypt the traffic on the fly as it flows through a laptop and therefore filter out messages although the key changes quite often like every 10 minutes so you need to sit there with the laptop you won't be able to go elsewhere. If you can snoop an incoming message so a message that is changing a setting then you can get the pin number and have control of the device but you're probably going to have to wait a long time because it won't be updated frequently. Okay so you and the judge may have different definitions of alcoholics anonymous but let's say he sent a message to go to them. Alright so we're going to do a demo what we're going to be doing is we're going to assume we already have the number because that takes some time to get so we don't have time for that in the demo we're going to assume we got it from one of those methods we have a Faraday cage and an SDR we're going to spoof a cell network we're then going to get the messages the status messages that the device is sending replace the location information recap the checksum re-encode the message send it to a SMS spoofing service and then we'll see that the message has been changed because it's encoded it's a little difficult to obviously see that it's changed so I've put together a Google map which will show us which points were received by my cell phone in this case it's pretending to be the monitoring station the authorities and which points were captured on the spoof network here's the map so if we look at I have the phone here here are the messages it has three messages that I sent earlier today so I have a script which will check for messages on the phone and display them on a map so these green points are messages that were delivered to the end system the monitoring station in this case we're going to start running so this is the cell phone network basically and we have a script which will search through all the messages that it sees and then also display them on the map they're going to be displayed in red so because I've got this case open it's going to beep because it thinks I'm tampering with it so now we're going to place this in the farada cage with the transmitter and we'll run our network so this may take a minute or so to start but we should start seeing network information so that's bringing up the radio radio ready so the network is all up and running now we just have to wait for the device to authenticate to it instead of the real network so it can take a few minutes but it's configured to send a status update around three times a minute so we shouldn't have to wait too long as you can see it's just information about the low level network event so it's authenticated to the network it's talking to the network we should see here soon the content of one of the status updates yep so oops well I don't know if you saw that but let's see if we can scroll up just here this is the content of one of the messages it sent so let's look at the map so as you can see we've got some red points so the green points are what's showing up on the phone the red points are faked now we should see more of these let's see if we've got more points yep we've got another point there let's just kill this green thanks okay so as we can see basically we're faking points now normally what you'd want to do is fake points that showed you being at home while really you were at the pub or somewhere but in this case we are not doing that we're just going to fake them that we're next door because I can't leave and fake me being here alright okay so sorry I'd rather not drink alright so the base unit yes I do you gonna force me to drink what's wrong with hacker cons it's water it's a death car okay so the base unit why would it have this unit when it has a GPS locator the reason is that GPS is quite expensive in terms of battery power and it's not particularly accurate indoors so most of the time you're going to be at home near a base unit so it can save a lot of power transmitting a local signal when it detects a signal it doesn't need to get a GPS fix this transmits at around 434 megahertz it's using FSK so you can see on the right hand side of the screen that's an actual sample that I captured from this device it transmits every 10 seconds is this interesting it transmits a static message it doesn't change well it does change if you power on and off the device but it doesn't change during operation so you can just retransmit it I don't know if it's unique to the device but yeah record it retransmit it um yeah so this has been kind of cool from an academic point of view but let's look at how it works in the real world often like I mentioned earlier if you tamper with a system in operation by the police they will probably be very upset and try and send to jail if you tamper with a system that's not yours someone else may go to jail they might come and get you in retaliation so don't use it so what you can do is as I mentioned it transmits a signal no one signal we can look for that it's obviously not a very powerful signal it's meant to only cover the range of someone's house so you're going to need special equipment to find it and it might be easier to just find out where someone lives by figuring out who's on home detention if you do find them you can easily jam all of the signals from this device it's quite cheap to buy this equipment from China but it's obviously legal so you wouldn't do that you could maybe like this is very maybe quite hard but not necessarily impossible to perform the attacks we did remotely so if you sat outside their house in a van you might be able to do them but I think it's going to be pretty difficult can we make money from the system that's the obvious question to our advantage if someone tampers with their system or breaks the terms of their home condition they usually sent to jail because the sentence of home detention is usually an alternative to a short time in jail could we blackmail the user maybe we can make it look like they're tampering with their system and get them sent to jail maybe but I think it would be kind of difficult a more viable option would be to build a device or a service which you just strap your leg alongside the tracker and that performs these attacks automatically and lets them leave their home now that's actually sort of feasible I haven't done this obviously because that would be really illegal our final option is maybe you'll be able to find someone who hates the person on home detention and get them to give you money to tamper with the system and get that person sent to jail so finally there are issues with these systems like we like to think they're secure because they're part of the justice system but they are not perfect by a long shot some of the things that I found with the system can be easily fixed there's no reason not to fix these issues like mutual authentication so authenticate the tracker and the monitoring station not just one way into an encryption people rely on the encryption of the cell network but it's been well known for a long time that it's not very safe so people shouldn't rely on that they shouldn't retransmit the user name they should use better pins to get an excuse for that some stuff is very hard to fix with this design and that's jamming of the system and finding out where the users are it's basically impossible to fix them are there things in the future we could do with this? yes given how poor the rest of the system is it might be possible to get code exec or DOS or something through sending it I don't know, I haven't tried that but it will be cool to look at the flash memory is a standard chip there are tools out there that let you dump the code from that you can potentially write reverse engineer it and look for bugs or backdoors in the system it will be not difficult to write an android simulator that you can pull out the SIM card put on your phone and that will pretend to be the anklet you can also spoof the GPS location and that will cause it to think it's in a different location actually someone is talking about that right now in a different room why are you here? there's a better talk happening questions I don't know how much time we have to someone do you have any questions? yes so this particular unit or home detention systems in general it was just a friend of mine said hey I wonder how secure these systems are and I was like hey that would be a cool project so I brought one anything else? sorry no it's all of my work he just said it in passing and I spent a thousand dollars on hardware to get it I don't know for sure when I was searching for manufacturers I found a half dozen different manufacturers each with a few different models of trackers so I'd estimate it on the order of a few dozen but I don't think there's that many anybody else? yeah no like I said people are very cagey about information with these systems no one will tell me who their customers are or jurisdictions won't tell me which system they use so I really have not been able to find out where things are used so the question is if we can replay the signal from the base station why don't we do that? it's a lot easier than trying to attack the sound network communications the reason is that it's only sometimes useful so the device can be configured to always check the GPS location or it can be configured to only check when it's not in the home and you don't really know whether it's in one of those two modes so if it is then it's definitely the easier attack but you don't really know that you got anybody else? no? oh yes so you're asking is anyone interested in building better systems? oh no as far as I mean no none of the manufacturers of anyone have talked to me about it so I don't really care so the IR tamper detection device sorry? yeah so it's just an infrared LED as far as I know and it transmits a signal of some kind is it emitter and a detector that is fed through a piece of fiber optic that runs around the band if you cut the fiber optic the light is going to be disrupted it won't reach the receiver and so then it will send an alert so that's how the IR tamper detection works yeah so possibly that's beyond MySQL level I couldn't do that but there are definitely people who are able to tamper with and tap into fiber optic cables and so yeah I think that's plausible yep is that everybody? I did read about that I know 4GS is used in a number of countries this is not one of their devices but yeah I wanted to try and get their device but I couldn't get them to give me one yeah is that everybody? cool well thanks for coming


What a science done! It has gone too far! Hello everybody and welcome to a long overdue episode of Jurassic World Battle Arena! Yes, it has changed. We have had updates new dinosaurs. Well, you know, mod dinosaurs. Of course we haven't got a new dinosaur because the game is basically dead at this point. But I have changed the battle arena also. So, we have, like, what I did not too long ago is I accidentally, oh well, I had to delete steam. Oh, sorry, reinstall steam.  So I had to spend probably about an hour just downloading, redoing it all again to make sure we were kind of dead. So, we have a different kind of terrain pack, I think. Basically, I just took everything that we already had and then I downloaded even more and got a complete hodgepodge here. Let's see the contestants, shall we? So this is the most exciting part. I'm gonna skip forward because I can. Oh, you're going to see some surprises, trust me. So while they're all, you know, being released and not killing each other, how about we going down in here because one of the best mods ever was released. J-Pog Paths, baby. Yeah. Oh, I love it. Soon we will have all of J-Pog back into Jurassic World Evolution with balloon tours and all that. This is all 67 different types of dinosaurs. They've all got different light modifications and all that jazz and they shouldn't kill each other straight away either because I've had that turned off so we should be able to just have a look at all. Oh, my God. That's a lot of feedies. Go on one goat. Actually, no, you'll be killed, won't you? You will be.  There is a mod actually that does change the goat to the one in Jurassic Park.  Isn't it pretty? No. Here is one of the biggest changes, the ultimosaurus, which is technically an Indominus Rex, but look at it. From the chaos line of the Lost World, I think it was, oh, was it Jurassic Park? I'm going to say Lost World never released the rarest toy in existence. I think there is some prototypes of it existing out there somewhere. Oh, we've got the classic back like the Colombian mammoth. Oh, mammoth, I don't really know what it was called. A rareasaurus. Oh, normal baryonix is here, but if we look over here, what's this? It's the seratosaurus. Oh, we look so cool. I like that one. We've got different triceratopses, although are you the 1983 triceratops? I think you might be. Dammit, I didn't mean to pick you. Oh, my God, we got an albino woolly mammoth. That's interesting. This, although it's not the right skin color, is kind of the same dermatodon as was in Walking With Monsters. Oh, and this is a new one. This is a guanlon, oh, completely taken out. It's just running head first into a blooming baryonix, flora. But this guy is pro seratosaurus, but feathered now. Now, there should be a wrapped. In fact, I actually tell you what, what I will do, change some of them because I do want to see their skins. So we've got a chunking of sauce. You know me. Chunkingosaurus is not going to win. It never wins. It has terrible genes. It's awful. But I will also put in the normal velociraptor because I think I've got it switched to the 1993 velociraptor. Yeah, 1993, there we go. But I want to check out this new one. This battle arena relies on the middle as a sanctuary for the herbivores to sort of hide in some trees if they so wished. But as you can see, giant carnivores can also go in here and there is enough space to fight as well. So it's not a complete sanctuary. Now, depending on how this goes, now normally a dinosaur can run off and fight something else, but the wave, we look from the sky. You can't really do that. So I'm assuming in these four different quadrants, we're going to see battles. Of course, there is a way through. They could run through the middle, but this is kind of like a divider sort of. It's like warhammer. This is the middle of the map. Oh, what we got here? We got a Venatosaurus. Oh my God, looking gorgeous there. Some weird and wonderful skins coming out of these mods. I don't think we're supposed to be in them. We'll change those. Now, Brachiosaurus might, well, will definitely not affect the battle in any sort of way. But a triceratops might. And saying that, that's a push because I really don't think it will. I've got to be honest. So let's check out this guy. This looks awesome. Are you ready? Oh, look at it. Oh, it's beautiful. I think this was made by Digital Duck. I could be wrong. But there it is. The classic skin from the BBC series. Oh, it's gorgeous. It's got like kind of very enhanced UV maps. So we can definitely see all of the scales. It just looks so good. Look at it. Oh, it's beautiful. Now, let's check out this raptor, shall we? Does it look like the way I hope it should? Oh, it does. Yes. Oh, super scary raptor. It looks like a... Oh, it's definitely got veneers in. It's got super bleached white teeth. I don't know who made this. I downloaded a bunch of different mods. But you know who you are. This looks beautiful. You can find them all on the Nexus website. Oh, I think what I love about it is not only does it have the correct sort of facing claws where they're going inwards. It has feathers running along the back and has feathers on the underarm. Oh, it looks so good. Oh, we've already got broken. Ah, we've already got broken our vehicles. Fantastic. Right. Triceratops. Now, can you tell me where this Triceratops is from? You get a million points if you can. Oh, look at it. You got five seconds. Oh, my God, his eyes. He's like, oh, I see everything. Did you guess correctly? This is from Prehistoric Park. One of Nigel Marvin's little adventures. Different take on the walking with dinosaurs. Allosaurus there. Still looks gorgeous. Parasaurolophus. God knows how long we're going to see that thing survival. Okay, we rebooted the tool. The cars are going again. Okay. Are you ready to see the majesty that is? Can we not release the O's? Oh, is it because something's in the way? Oh. Caritas, would you please bugger off? There it is. Da, da, da, da. What a science done. It has gone too far. Yes, that is right. Garfield itself, which is the regular Prakasaurus. I don't know why. And I now know why Frontier didn't want mods in the game. Looks great. Oh, it's just beautiful. This is what Jurassic World Evolution should be, really. Now, who do you think is going to survive and come out on top? Are you ready? Here we go.  Who's going to be the first fatality? Oh, look. There we go. We've got the Lovaraptor there, too. Oh, he's so cute. Oh, this is it. And I've also put that they can attack the, what do you call it, the vehicles? So I kind of want to see where this comp is because I lose it instantly. Oh, God. There we go. I first attack and it's from Allure Titan. Oh, well, a Troodon. Oh, I forgot about the Troodon. Hello. Let's look at you, little precious. Oh, eyeballs. Oh, God. We've got the first two deaths. Majungosaurus takes down the turkey. And then the Pachycephalosaurus taken down by the T-Rex. Oh, there we go. This is, I can't remember what this is. It's basically the Albertosaur, but it's one of the T-Rex. I can't remember what it did. It begins with a D, Displatosaurus. I think that's it. Displatosaurus. Okay. We've got Neguanodon fighting again. Oh, never mind. No. It completely died to the Allosaurus. Who will be next? Oh, Malo said no. The little Pistino, the little taco. No, taken down by the Troodon. Oh, my God. Chunkingosaurus against Giga or Demetrodon against Giga. But I'm assuming that he's going to definitely win. Whoa, the colors on this guy. The mutaburrasaurus looks gorgeous there. We've got the V-Rex covered in algae over there. Oh, God, the Paradide. Paradide. I do not know what to. Oh, Majungosaurus against the cool, bulky, new Seratosaurus. Oh, that's cool. A Brachiosaurus is drinking, I think. Garfield's going for it. Unfortunately, the Demetrodon did not even stand a chance. Oh, the goat. Oh, the goat wasn't the first to be killed. I'm impressed. Wow, that's amazing. That is... These guys. Oh, Seratosaurus absolutely laying the beat down on Majungosaurus there. He will win. Caretosaurus is down and out for the count. The Stigimoloch, of course, is gone. We've got a Guanlong sort of trying to intimidate the Crichtonosaurus. You can't intimidate him. He made some amazing books. What else have we got here? Oh, Carnotaurus killed by Spino. Wow. Okay. We've got the chuggest of the chug. That's a big boy. The dreadnought is there. Still bleeding, poisoned, the Allura Titan. I guess you would call it something. Oh, Indorapt against T-Rex. And it looks like he's going... Oh, that's right, because Spino-Ractor was originally concavenator. Right. T-Rex is not looking too hard, but it's turned a bite back. 29 and 27 percent against 49 percent. Will it be a kill or will they call it off? It looks like T-Rex might die unless he gets another bite. It's going to be hard to say, but if Indorapt... Ah, T-Rex is out of it. Wow. There you go. T-Rex is not going to be in it for the finale. And we're also... Oh, there you go. Down it goes. Taken out. So what else has died? Did Myosaurus die? Well, nobody cared about it anyway. Oh, where you're going on died quite early on. Archeonithomimus. No, the Overraptor died. Wow. Okay. Pretty much everything is dead. Oh, the Giga, I think killed the other one. Oh, where's the Flippin? Whatchamacallit? Where's that dude? The Indoraptor. Oh, we got Krytonosaurus glitching out. Sorry, not Krytonosaurus. Giga Spikosaurus glitching out the... No, no, no. The Barry, that's the one. So we're going to have to sedate the... No, not you. No, not you. That one. Okay, here we go. We got triceratops against... Oh, I'm getting a hit in on Allosaurus. What is this? This is crazy. Oh, the Purinmonosaurus. Oh, it looks so cute, though. All duck-billed and lovely. Right. Okay, where is... So T-Rex is dead. Where is Indominus Rex? That's all we got Stegosaur against. Oh, don't we need to go with the Captain Vogue? Oh, that looks so cool. Oh, goes for a second hit. Yeah, I don't even think the Stegosaur really stood a chance there, did it? Oh, takes it out. Oh, it's gorgeous. I love this. This is a way better model.  Apart from those, this is a way better model than the Albertosaur. I've got to give it credit. Whoever made that, you did a brilliant job. Oh, I think I see it. Oh, Spinosaurus. Oh, no! The mammoth! Take it out. Oh, Indominus Rex. Or the Ultimosaurus doing well here. We've got a dead Alluratitan killed by Metricanthosaurus. But Metricanthosaurus might be killed by the Spino. Oh, they're calling it off. Never mind. Interrupted almost fully healed now. Ankyloticus trying to get away from flipping Ultimosaurus here. Oh, you're destroying a car. Oh, okay. Are you looking inside? Why would you beep at it? Yep, it died. Killed by Barry. The Brachiosaurus Garfield hiding in the trees. A tactical endeavor. Velociraptor taking over the mini-cup. Trudon against Velociraptor. And Trudon is on 25%. And Raptor is on 29%. And is dying. There you go. Oh, the tail span around and everything. God, there's too many trees in this place. Too many shadows. The Ultimosaurus still looking at the car. How many dinosaurs do we have? 60 odd. We have probably had about 70 dinosaurs. We are just about halfway. We have a lot of dinosaurs. Triceratops has died. Ararosaurus died to Velociraptor. Ooh, how many kills did Velociraptor get? It's going to die. But it got only two kills. Trudon. Where is Trudon? Is Trudon going to survive?  Sukumimus, how many kills do you have? You have four kills. Oh, we got the Dysplanosaurus taking on. Spino-Raptor, are you kidding me? Spino-Raptor has probably got loads of attack. Oh my God, he killed him. What are you doing? He's only got two kills. Spino-Raptor got one and... Oh, there you go. Slap to the side. Whoa. Gouges. Aid him up. Oh, Spino-Raptor is roaring. It's something over there. Oh, Ultimosaurus is...  Oh, will he ever be stopped? He's only killed three and one of them was the mammoth and one of them was the big Chunky boy. So I don't know what else he's killed. Oh, Sukumimus has now killed Nodosaurus. Still taking no damage. Wow. Taurusaurus is, of course, this dude who I don't think has killed anything. Has any herbivore killed anything? I really don't think so. Oh, there you go. There you go. Stay in there, Dippy. You need to hide. You need to make the carnivores kill each other or at least something kill. Oh, wait. Oh, that's right. Yeah, we got another Raptor. Oh, is he going to get revenge? Look at Tord. I'm just hiding in the grass there. Oh, it's out. It's out. We need to see this in close-up way. Oh, thank you, Nozuto. Oh, no.  Bless it. I kind of want to see Ultimosaurus take on this thing. Just see what it's like animations are. Giga going for Sino. Are they calling it off? Giga is not showing any signs of damage, though. So I think Giga is probably going to win that one. Oh, we've got like a looking very sad sorrow. Oh, God. Sino, yeah. Completely taken out. Bless it. Yeah, herbivores really don't stand any chance in this at all. Do they? Yeah. Nozuto will be next. It looks like Raptor has won the mini-cup. I don't know what happened to the Guanlong. Is he still knocking about? He must have been killed super early. The Delufosaurus as well. I didn't even see that either. Oh, so come I was taking on a Styrocosaurus? Ah, again, unfortunately.  I need to make one where I just deliberately put all of the attack up I can on the herbivores and then randomize the carnivores. Leave a like if you'd like to see that one. Oh, here we go. This guy might stand a chance. Again, this Albinosaurus no damage, and it's killed like five things now. And by the looks of it, it might even kill the Stegoceratops. Wow, there you go. Oh, 60 again. 40% again, 60%. Oh, my God. Okay, 28% against 39%. This is brutal. Oh, are they calling it off? They are. Oh, he won. Jesus. Okay. There's something else. Something else happened. Acrocanthosaurus. Oh, Spinosaurus killed by the Acrocanthosaurus. There you go. That's not taking care of what else is happening around here. Oh, no, the woolly rhino. Oh, wait, 45%. Is that low enough to? Yeah. No. Woolly rhino. Oh, take it out. No. Oh, look at Ultimosaurus there. Oh, oh, Indorapt. Indorapt might be the only thing. Whoa, okay. Peniceratops getting a hit in. Peniceratops and Stegoceratops being the only ones that could fight back. These outs. Wee. There you go. Look at them there biting their crest. How strategical. Okay. Oh, God. Oh, Mementosaurus. I'm getting out of here. Noodle neck. Run away. Oh, wait, never mind. This guy's going to the cafe. He wants some more food. Killed enough. Oh, wait, what's this? V-rex. Taken out by what? No, that's not Eupocephalus, is it? No. EPC. Is that Eupocephalus? Medricanosaurus taken out by Nozudo. That's Nozudo, right? Indoraptor was killed Barry. Nozoo. Where are you, Nozudo? Nozudo, did you? Did you? No, not you. I think he did. Did he kill him? What? Nozudo killed him with? Where is Eupocephalus? Hold on. I need to, I'm probably going to miss these. Are you kidding me? There he is. Oh, wait. Is Eupocephalus dead now? I can't see it. Oh, no, there it is. Did it get a kill? It did! The Jungosaurus and the V-rex killed by herbivores. We've got the Allosaurus taking on. Oh, hold on. The Dimetrodon taking on the Allosaurus. I don't think, because it's a chunkingosaurus, right? So a chunkingosaurus can never do very well. Especially against an Allosaurus with the amount of modifications it has. Yeah, that's the end of that one. Thought so. What kind of Allosaurus I think it is? Oh, 45% that's an instant kill. Giga has killed again. We've got some, I mean, what's Nozudo's source's attack? I think he just got lucky. 76 and 56. I don't think that's enough. I don't think that's enough to make the difference. Interrupted again, killed by the Splatosaurus. Oh, interrupted against Velociraptor. Oh, no. Oh, this isn't going to go well. At least they're knocking their cars about. Yeah. Oh, I want to see the death animation of these guys with the cars. This is going to look great. Hold on. Whee! Is it going to throw him into the car? Oh, no! Right in front of the car. The car went flying. Damn it. Velociraptor. Oh, not even a mini cup was won. But he did get the interrupted down to 58% though. Oh, no. Encolonicas couldn't get away and is taken out. No. Oh, bless it. Now you have killed too many, too many sauropods. Is that a fifth? Yep. That's a fifth. Hey, what happened to the psoratosaurus? No! Wait. Oh, he's sleeping. Can't feel sleeping. I love how they just saw that we're just going to T-pose him. We're going to T-pose him but rig his legs and that's it. Oh, no. No. He's like, yes. I love neck. No, noodle neck. Taking out. There you have it. Ooh, what a... Super Mimus against Allosaurus. Oh, two carnivores. Super Mimus never makes it that far into the finals. But it does appear this time. He's made it into the top 20. But will he get any higher is the question Allosaurus I think is when it once before. And Super Mimus does not make it, unfortunately. Oh, and uh, the psoratosaurus against... What's that? Oh, triceratops. Oh, oh, he just hit him. 58%. Come on. Do it for him. What's his face? Nitromarthen. Dammit. Oh, the sputosaurus. You were doing some good work. Acrocanosaurus killed by... Polacanthus. When did that happen? Oh my God. Why am I missing all of these? Candrosaurus... No, Candrosaurus can't take on Indoraptor. Nah, I didn't think so.  Wait, what? Did he... Did he kill them in his scoffield? No! Scoffield! What did that happen? Why am I missing all of these amazing matchups? Dammit. Oh, God, just everything's dead over here. Oh, no. The elasmus or the pento. The... The Angleodocus, the Velociraptor. And he's left a little bit of a pile up there, too. So, unfortunately, there's only a pathosaurus, the elacosaurus, or there isn't a source here that is surviving. But the ultimosaurus might go for him. You never know. Oh, Polacanthus. Did he get a kill? Did this guy get a kill? He flipped in well, did as well. You killed Acrocanthus. I don't believe it. Oh, my God. That model looks gorgeous. Oh, look at him. He's got, like, goopy face. Ha-ha-ha! I think... I think ultimosaurus is there, got stuck on Garfield. Because Garfield is a weird model. There he goes. There he goes. Bye, Garfield! Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. It looks like a blow-up doll. Bye! Now, who went where? Where did ultimosaurus go? Oh, no! The pheronin standard. Okay, so there's, like, one sauropod left. And it's, oh, no, there's two! Dippy and the other brachiosaurus is still over here. See, the ultimosaurus is making a beeline for all of them. Look at him. He's coming over this way now. He doesn't want to start a fight with any carnivore. It's only sauropods that he wants to kill. I will be the biggest. So now we are down to 12 dinosaurs. Ultimosaurus, brachiosaurus, Gigae, Dysplatosaurus, Deplodocus, Ankylosaurus, Stegoceratops, Sauropelta, Polacanthus, and Nozuto Ceratops. My money is either on Indoraptor or Indominus Rex. I mean, it has to, right. Oh, Dysplatosaurus! Oh, did not heal all the ways on 97% fighting against something like Indoraptor is not going to be a good matchup. Get away, trees. Oh no, 26% already! Come on, come on, Dysplatto. He's already got two bites in. You can do this. Right, I'm keeping the camera here because ultimosaurus is... Yeah, look, there he is. He has fight by British. Oh, oh no. Oh no, Dysplatosaurus taken out. Oh, dammit. He was like the underdog. I wanted him to win. Damn. Take some out. That's right. Face the shadow way, yes. But we still have these guys. Is ultimosaurus coming out? Is he just waiting? Hi. Oh my God. Oh, there is a giga though. There is a giga. A giga in Indoraptor and a flippin ultimosaurus. He's playing sneaky buggers. Oh, that's it. I think he's going to come out. Here he comes. He's looking straight through all that brightness or lying itself up here.  Oh, bless it. There you go. Little nibble on the leg. A slash to the... Oh my God. He's like a suffagus whacked the floor there. Good Lord. He's dead anyway. So there we go. Now it's Dippy's turn to die. All I wanted was to play. Actually, you look quite nice there. Unlike the Jurassic Park 3 version, which looks like a nightmare. I mean, how can you fault it? It's got spikes. It's got a protective crest. It's got a beak. It's got teeth. And it's got a killer instinct for sauropods. And the final one, if you'd bet it on any of the sauropods, well, Dippy made it to the end, but definitely did not survive. Ultimisaurus made short work of all of them and made sure of that. Okay, this takes our dinosaur count to the top 10. Dippy was number 10. Who will be number 9? Oh no. Induruptor, of course. Being on full health here. Oh, it's gonna... Induruptor's gonna jump at it. Oh, he's hoping for a little bit more. Is it dead? Oh, hold on. Oh! Well, that's your fault. Oh, God. Induruptor killed Yupo, and then we've... Oh, look. Look at all of them coming back into service. Wait, where'd he go? Oh, no! The Akylosaurus, of course. It didn't start a chance. Look at this. They deliberately choose the most perfectly shaded spot. Gonna borrow the cars. Coming into that. I would not feel safe. Are you kidding me? This thing. An arm and a huge tank can be killed by this.  Ultramasaurus choosing a nice easy prey there. Saurapelta. Never gonna kill. Just wanted to exist. That was it. Just wanted to live. It's like, wait a minute. I'm coming. I'm coming. Oh, my God. Why do you always win? Well, all of the carnivores are in 100% health. And, really, it's only Stegoceratops that might stand a chance of taking it out. Oh, then let's have a look. Stegoceratops, what are your stats? 117 and 126? That's not too bad. That's really good. But, comparing it to 216 and 105. Yeah, there's more defense, but it has like 100 less attack. That's not gonna make the difference. Oh, Polycanthus, no. You have gotta kill. 115 and 109, but even that. Oh, it does get a hit off, though. Bless it. That might help. That might swing the battle. It's gonna be Ultimisores against Indoraptor, and it depends who regenerates faster. Look at his face. How could you do that? It's so cute. He's got a little Noot Noot face. No, not the Noot Noot. Well, I think we're officially... Yep, there you go. Top five. Variety, apparently. Oh, my God, getting wrecked. He uses horns and everything. That's what the frontier were thinking. I know. We'll put another Seratopsian in, and I know what we can also do.   Look at that. A light breeze could kill this thing.  So there you go. That's the last of the herbivores. And Stegoceratops, even with the best, probably best stats of all the herbivores, did zero damage. Zero, zero damage to the Interruptor.  No, he's 1% off that could be make or break. 60 should be on 61%, but that 1% might make the difference. 72.  Oh, well, tell you what, it comes down to 45%. Oh, maybe not. Really depends what this next bite does, and it's probably going to be more. How much? 30? 22. Oh. And there you see Interruptor stalking its future prey, the already injured Giga. Oh, this is it. This is the end. I think it's going to be one last bite onto the Giga, and that'll be it. Look, its color is returning already. You, however, not so much. There it is. Last bite, I think that is. Oh, it's not? Oh, there it is. I was going to say, is he going to get another one in? Nope. Wasn't going to happen. And down it goes. Right on the head. Well, there's one dinosaur that's made the most kills. It's definitely Ultimasaurus. Ultimasaurus on 80%. Oh, it needs all of the extra percentage it can have, because even at 10%, it's basically a win for Interruptor. And he's made a break for it. He's always looking for water. There you go. That's the excuse. Get some glamour shots of you. Gorgeous. You know, no game gave us Ultimasaurus, not even the toy line, Kenner, or Mattel, or Hasbro. Nobody could give us Ultimasaurus. But mods? Oh, they can give us... Oh, God, he's waiting. He's waiting. Oh, no. Oh, no. How much health did he get? A 92%. All right, let's let the final battle commence at all, and Interruptor's going in for it. Oh. Oh. 8% difference. Will it make it? But it looks quite even. One bite from each. Oh, that's a good bite. Oh, the low level of health alert there. From the Interruptor. Wow, is it going to win with 8%? I think there's one more bite to come through for Interruptor. Ooh. I think Interruptor's going to get another bite in. I don't know if that's what's going to happen, and then it really depends. We're probably going to get a low health warning from the Ultimasaurus. But is Interruptor going to win? Yep, there's low health. Is Interruptor going to go for another one, or is that it?  Is Ultimasaurus out? He's out! Interruptor won. He killed the unstoppable, perfect hybrid. Oh, my God. He killed him. And there you have it. The winner was Interruptor with a maximum of 9 kills. How much did Ultimasaurus have? 13. I have to admit, I think Ultimasaurus deserved that. But it is what it is. 53% only up to 2 bites. 2 bites! He did no damage. What was his 216 on 105? Ultimasaurus 191 and 107. So it had 2 more defence than Interruptor. But Interruptor had... Oh, like, what's that? 16. 16. Oh, wow. It's 27. No, 25. It had 25 extra attack, but 2 less defence. And in the end, even the health difference of what? 8 was it? Because he was on 92 health? Made no difference. The Interruptor, if they were both on 100%, would have won. But, there you have it. If you enjoyed this video, guys, leave a like. If you want to see more. And any ideas, as well, for just a little evolution. Because, good God, we're not getting any updates. But, until next time, I'll see you later. Bye-bye, cuties!