Hi everyone, I guess it's three, so I guess I should say something. So hi, I'm not going to be projecting anything. The, thank you all for coming, golly. I didn't expect so many people. So please have a seat. In my, so my thinking of this event was that we have 45 minutes or so where people, where I want people who want something new to work on in the project to talk just a little bit about themselves and what they are interested in in the project and I'll explain that in a second. So there will be the like, I'll call them mentees introductions. And my thinking is that once the people who want something new to work on have spoken, other people who have projects that those people could work on should just go talk to them and yeah, say hi and talk about some aspect of your project that they would find interesting. So to do sort of a rehearsal of this, if I was one of the mentees and I said, hi, my name is Ashish. One thing I know about Debian is that it's an all free software operating system. One thing I like about Debian is that I've heard there's so many ways to contribute. One thing I want to learn more about is I want to have more experience running web services. And if that was what the mentee had said, then I with my mentor hat on as a different person might have been taking a, Ashish, that person. Wow, good luck, good. That person, I should talk to them about working on mentors.debian.net since I want help from somebody maintaining that web service. And so then I would go talk to them after the intro has happened. Is that like clear? Which this does mean that the mentors, the people who have tasks to offer people should really be taking notes? Because if you're not, then you're going to forget by the end of this which person it was who seemed like they could help you. So hopefully you all believe that. Okay, great. Yeah, can I get a quick show of hands? A lot of things. A lot of stuff. Okay, great, wow, yeah, that definitely works. Okay, yeah, yeah, okay, so with that distinction in mind where there's people who want new things to work on and there's people who have tasks to offer, or people, or yeah, I guess tasks to offer. I'll call those mentees and mentors. Can I get a show of hands for who here is a mentee who wants something new to work on in the project? But raise your hand for longer, good, okay. And can I have all the mentee people switch to one side of the room? Which one has the most, I guess? Sorry? Yeah, that's true. But then there'll be more, okay, right, so it puts hands. Yeah, there's more face here. So all the mentee people please come to this side. And I know I'm disrupting you. Thank you for participating in my game. Yeah, so I'll wait for you all to move. Yeah, yeah, this is the bop by Finding Minions. And my vision of success for this bop will be people on this side of the room will find something interesting to work on and then go work on it. And so like, if half an hour into this talk, everyone has left the room, that could be a success. It's not just that you hated it. So great, and then is it true that everyone here, except for the people who are still moving, then raise your hand if you're somebody who has a task to offer to other people? Okay, so you all should go to that side. I don't know how you didn't figure that out before. But I'm glad that we've had this talk. I'm also shocked at the relative balance of these two groups. This is amazing. While people are moving, how many people here are first time attendees? First time attendees to debconf? Okay, cool, yeah, great. A lot of people. That's lovely. And I also wasn't able to attend the intro sessions over the weekend. So if any of this repeats with that, you should let me know, I guess, or complain or something. Great, okay. Yeah, so the way I'm imagining structuring this is that people here will say, I should write this on the chalkboard because I'm not going to project. Is there chalk? Okay, great, thanks. Yeah, maybe we won't need it, we'll see. But you'll state your name and then I want to keep this brief as useful.  It could be, another valid answer to this is, one thing I know about the Debian project is that it has a lot of pearl code. One thing I like about Debian is that we're switching to system D. And then one thing I want to learn more about is how to give good, how to communicate well to lots of people at once. And so then obviously some system D maintainer will be like, great, we're going to give a talk about system D to some local Linux user group. And so the kinds of things that you might end up doing, I hope, I hope for this is your advice for you all, the kinds of things that you recommend people do should be related to all three of the questions, what they know about Debian, what they like about it, and what they want to learn more about in general in their lives or specifically within Debian. Wow, I'm shocked, this is great. Sorry? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm working on it. I guess this is illegible because of that board. Yeah, and I should also say this is modeled after an activity that my friend Sean Lip did at an Open Hatch event about two years ago. So if he ever watches this video, thanks to Sean. So yeah, and maybe I'll like pause after the first, I'll pause after people in blocks of four in case the ravenous task offers want to absorb you. Yeah, okay, so why don't you start and tell us your name, one thing you know about Debian, one thing you like about Debian, one thing you want to learn more about or improve at. Oh, wow, I guess, okay, sure. One, two, okay, that works. I'm Tomasz Buchert, I'm Debian developer. I know something about Debian now.  Staff, I don't know. Yes, one thing. Okay, I have my, I have Stellarium, for example, as a package. Okay, what is that, that's the second thing? Ah, sorry, yeah, one thing you'd like about Debian. No, I mean the second, not the first. One thing you know about Debian, one thing. No, that's the first. Name, one thing. No, it's first, it says first. No, that's zero. Okay, the one thing. Okay, let me try this directly. What is your name? Tomasz Buchert. And what is one thing you know about Debian? It's awesome. Great, what is one specific thing you like about Debian? That is the best operating system. And what is one thing you want to get better at, either in general in your life or specifically within Debian? I guess I would like to improve the performance of the infrastructure. However, I didn't work on this yet. Yes. Cool, great, next person. Hello, I'm Mike Turo, I am not a Debian developer. I just had the opportunity to come here with some DDs, and I'm interested in getting more involved in Debian. Wait, what's one thing you know about Debian? Oh, great, what's one thing I know about Debian? It's got a lot of packages. What's one thing you like about Debian? That I can get the source whenever I want, because it makes my job way easier. And what's one thing you want to learn more about or improve in yourself or in your Debian related activities? I guess I want to learn more how Debian works, really. Cool. And remind me your name, I forgot to write that down. Mike Jurell. Mike Jurell, thanks. Hi, yeah, what's your name? Is it on? Okay. I'm Tomas Rebak, I'm Debian maintainer. I know that Debian has many, many architectures. I like about Debian that we have many policies and most of the stuff is described, so I can go to documentation. I would like to improve a little bit coordination of my packaging with other packages which are using my packages or which my packages are using. Out of curiosity, what packages are those? Particularly by Kuda, by OpenCL. So they both coordinate with Python, with NVIDIA drivers, and other drivers with OpenCL providers. So releasing it's getting a little bit more complicated, especially as now there are changes in architectures. Cool, thanks. Thanks. Hi, my name is Dominik, I'm from Poland, and I've been using Debian for, I don't know, since 1999, I guess. But I'm just a user. What's one thing you know about Debian? Do I have to answer a lot of questions? Yes. I have experiment work, I have to do it. I know that it's free and open, and yeah, I like the idea, I like the community and everything. Yeah, and what's one thing you want to get better at?  Cool. Yeah, at first, to see how it works. So anything. Great. I promised I would pause after the first four people, in case the ravenous task offers found anyone that they wanted to latch on to. So, if I'm lucky, the four of you will disappear from the room quickly, and if not, then we'll figure you out with the end of everyone else. Anyone want to go grab anyone? Sure, yeah, but... I would need a week for that, of course. Okay. So, actually, my name is Andy Bart. For those who had been to this room a bit earlier before lunch, we have a very large spectrum in the policy, for the policy package, which really means there are some more difficult tasks, there are some tasks that are just necessary to implement the policy documentation we already have. That means we have mostly patches, which are approved, but somehow need to be fiddled into the Git tree. So, that is a lot of... a lot of what we do with documentation, with making sure things are really as they should. An appropriate English understanding or language skills are helpful, but as you can hear, I'm not a native speaker, so it's not urgently required to be a native speaker, but of course, yeah, about that. So, if there's someone of you who'd like to pick up one of these tasks, that would be great. Dominic, do you want to go disappear with... You must be a native speaker in some language. Pardon? Dominic? You must be a native speaker in some language, is what he said. For the policy, it's not necessary. I have a question, do you want to just go hang out with him not really if it's about translating now? It's not about translating. I'm speaking about the Debian Policy Package. It's a document which says, if you do a Debian package, what does your package need to follow? So, we have something like 30, 40 bug reports saying this should be changing the policy, which are approved, but just not implemented. So, we have patches which need to be applied, sometimes rejected, sometimes other needs to be added. People need to be asked. So, it's really some, let's say, the basic piece of Debian infrastructure, but there's a text file, which is a basic thing. So, if you have been in session before about this new maintainer process, all of this policy which is asked, that comes from the policy package. So, I'm speaking about polishing that one. Yeah, I might have a good dust. Yeah, so... I think someone else has just raised hands. You do can just disappear into a hack lab if you want. That would be a success for me. Yeah, you can stay till it's fine. Okay, so then I'll keep iterating over the group. So, yeah, tell me your name. Kate Stewart. Hi, Kate. Hi. The one thing I know about Debian, it's the upstream for Ubuntu, where I've been active for a while. What do I like about Debian, is the actual social structures associated with it and the meritocracy aspect of it. And what do I want to learn more about, is the packaging and the policies and doing some packaging for some projects I care about. Cool. I have a question. What projects do you care about? Phosology got abandoned in 2012. Which program? Phosology. Oh, Phosology. And I'd like to see if we can get it in and... Cool. So, looking for mentoring that way, too. Great. Okay. I'm David Yangio. I like about Debian that it worked pretty nice before SystemD also. And... One thing you know about Debian, one thing you like about Debian, we are swap the order. Yes. And then one thing you want to learn more about. I know that it's probably the most free operating system around. And I want to learn packaging. Cool. And is there anything in particular that motivates you to learn packaging? Not yet. Okay. Great. Set up, please. Oh. If you want. I guess he says so. My name is Dieter Andriensis. I'm fairly new to this. I know that Debian is a leading distribution. I like about it that it's... Well, fully community-driven. And so many people contribute to make it work. What I want to learn... I've been using Debian for quite a few years now. And I'm more interested in how it all comes together. How does a package get into the... to a stage where it gets installed. There's one thing I saw already. There's this website contributors.db.org. Which website? Contributors.db.org. Oh, cool. That's organized all the... I gather all the information about all contributions over all the teams. So that's something I might be interested in. Cool. But I'm open to more than that. Great. Hello. I'm Guido. Trotter. The other way. There. Oh, that camera. Okay. Hello. I don't think she's interested. To be honest, no. So one thing you know about Debian? Yes. I know how Debian is great in infrastructures and as servers and for virtualization and things like that. I like how it's a great community that also evolves technologically very much over time. And I want to improve and learn on the new sites like system.d containers and things that I haven't had a chance to touch or that I have had a chance to touch a bit and maybe I can contribute to. Cool. Thanks. Thank you.  My name's Kyle. I know about Debian that it's one of the older distros out there. I also like how it's open both the code and the people. It's really a great community. And I'd like to learn about packaging more multimedia software packages, maintaining them. Yeah. What do you think? Great. Can I ask what you mean by multimedia packages? Like some examples or something? So things like Voktamix, DV switch, more the video switching. Great. Great. Or the editing, that kind of thing. Cool. Thanks. Okay. I'm Sitelo. And the one thing I know about Debian is that it can run on many architectures. And personally, I use it a lot on maybe the architecture, which I think is cool. And the one thing I like about Debian is among others, the stability, general stability of the system. And then what I would like to learn, I would also like to learn some packaging and maybe developing as well. And say again. To become a developer. Cool. In the distant future. Great. Yeah. If you have one interaction. Can you ask like in what microphone? I can repeat it if you want. Or here's a mic. Would you like to package? Yeah. Because I'm sure a lot of us here do have specialties. I do have a... I'd like to... The scratch on each approach works well. So if you guys have anything that you don't like in Debian, I think it's the best way to get started. So maybe you don't like some kind of packaging that is already done, or you think there is software missing. This is where I would usually start if I was a new contributor at least. Tell me, are there any specific areas you like packaging or you're interested in packaging? We're just learning about it as a... I guess what motivates you to learn about it? Is it just the coolness of Debian or is it that there's some software you really want in Debian? It's hard to say there's any software that maybe I don't like or I miss in Debian because it does have quite a lot of software and I've already mentioned that it's quite stable for my needs. I can't even think what needs to be improved. That's how good it is. Okay, great, great. So, yeah, I probably... I've used one package that I had to compile for one of the machines I use it on and it looked like it was becoming an offline package, but I think the developer is here at Debian. That was... Oh, no, no, no, maybe not. That was OBD GPS logger. So maybe something similar to that. Cool. Yeah, you can grab the mic. My name is Andrew and I'm a developer and I came here because basically since I gave up if I've done last year, I don't have any specific bit of Debian to work on or just maintain a bunch of packages. You have to follow the program. Yep. Thanks. Things I like about Debian, things in the noble Debian. Okay, things in the noble Debian that I'm part of it. Great. What I love about Debian is how some people already mentioned the social structure around it. So basically the people. What's the last thing you... One thing you want to learn more about or improve in yourself or... Yeah, so as I mentioned in the beginning, I'd like to not only maintain some packages mostly I use but participate somehow in the development of Debian itself, not only... I mean, I'd like to join some team, but you know, because lots of things happen in Debian sort of in background, like people work in teams already and you don't often know what exactly is going on. So it's not easy to join those teams, basically. Even if maybe I've got some experience and knowledge sufficient to work on some things but I just... It's not that visible enough. Cool. Thanks. Hello, my name is Kirtna. So one thing I know about Debian is that it's very robust and that's very good to use. One thing I like about Debian is the community because everybody is great, very supportive and one thing I'd like to learn, I think it's not one thing because there's a lot for me to learn. I'm very new and I'd like to contribute and build a package one day that hopefully strengthens Debian. Cool. Hi, I'm Nico. Something I know about Debian. Who? That one is tough. Well, that it's extremely committed to being actual free software and triggers much beyond what other people do to enforce that. Something I like about Debian is that I can basically run it anywhere and expect it not to break, unlike many other distros. And something I would like to help improve is well, I would like to help make Stretch as secure and as safe as possible out of the box for users. That's it. Cool. So I'm Chirayu from India. One thing I know about Debian is the vast abundance of packages that are available and that all of them are free software and that is also a thing I like. Another thing which I like is that I can hop on to IRC, Debian Descenters anytime and always find some help there. Some of the things I want to learn are packaging. I'm already working on a few packages but I'm just getting started so there's a lot of things I don't know. So I'd like to learn more about packaging in general. Cool. Thanks. I'm Jeref. A thing I know about Debian is that TAR lives in Slashbin whereas in some other distributions it lives in SlashUserbin. I know where SED lives because I've had to fix this. What I like about Debian is pretty much everything. Things I want to improve. Wait a minute. I will not accept that answer. You have to be more specific about what you like about Debian. One thing, you could say everything except this question. Something specific. It's a good default for pretty much everything I do. Cool. What I'm working on a lot at the moment is containers and clusters of containers and persistence and all sorts of stuff that uses tools that have only existed for a year or two. And I'm working on improving a lot of that stuff and I'd like to do some of that work in Debian. Cool. Hello. I'm Misut. One thing I know about Debian is that it has great community which I like and it's considered about freedom and diversity. One thing I want to improve and learn I would like to... I haven't decided where to start which sub-project to start with. I decide on a sub-project to go deep intervals. And is there something that you want to learn? I know that you want to learn which sub-project is good for you and Debian but also is there something you want to learn more about in general, in computing or in your life or some skill you want to be applying or something like that? And do you mean my team, security team maybe I can have or... Oh yeah. So like what kind of teams might... Yeah, what kind of skills or sub-teams might be interesting? You mentioned security maybe? I don't know. Cool. Thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. Cool. So according to my plan I was going to do these intros and then hope that you all would just like mingle and talk with each other because I don't think passing the mic around is sustainable because we can have lots of one-to-one conversations. We can't have very many one-to-many conversations. But yeah, so before we transition I'll take any questions. Everybody apart does not help mingling. Yeah, I know. So you'll have to get up and talk. That's like when the transition happens you will abandon your computer, at least on this side, just move over to that side and stand around people and listen and talk to them. Yeah? Wouldn't those guys have to say a few words about what they have to offer? Yeah, possibly, but they can tell you one-on-one. I don't know, sure. Who on this side wants to say at most ten words about the thing, the thing you are interested in helping with or like a task you're interested in offering or an aspect of Debian that they should talk with you about? I mean, a few words is great. I currently maintain the printing stack in Debian. Oh, and what's your name? Sorry, Didier Rabou, Odex in Debian. I also have to answer these three silly questions. These three questions? No, you don't have to. Sorry. They're good questions. I maintain the printing stack in Debian which has the nice feature nowadays to be mostly up-to-date. There's a lot of packaging work, but it's something on the midterm that I would like to hand over to someone else because I've soon had enough of that. But I want to make a good transition and I will keep maintaining it if no one takes it. And the other words I want to say about maintaining packages, a lot of you want to maintain packages and unfortunately Debian already has quite a lot and finding a good new package to put in the archive is quite hard nowadays because everything that we really need is already there. But we have a good opportunity coming that is the freeze where we need people to fix bugs. And fixing bugs in unrelated packages is a very, very good way to learn packages and to see how things are done across the archive and it's a very, very good way to help Debian. Well, but I don't have RC bugs in mind, so. Okay. Well, yeah, there exists a concept of bugs-washing parties where people around your city will get together and try to fix these release-critical bugs that are preventing Debian from being released. Maybe we can have some of these people do that with some of you after this, actually. I see some nods, so that's pretty good, actually. Anyone else on this side want to introduce yourself or a part of Debian you work on and have a task you want to offer? Yeah. I'm Antonio Tercero. I maintain Ruby, LXC, Vagrant, Chef, Redmine, JQuery and lots of other things that I want people to help. So if you, so you see that there's a lot of trendy stuff like Chef and Vagrant and Redmine also is very useful but I unfortunately don't use it myself anymore. So, and I have a couple of other packages so if you want to help maintaining those packages that are already there is usually way better than trying to add a new package unless you actually use that new package yourself. Yeah. I saw some other hands here of people who wanted to talk about they wanted to, yeah, just hand it over to anyone, really. Oh, hey. Does it work? Yes, it does. Hi, I'm Medhi. Before being elected as DPL, I was in the OCaml team and we were looking for volunteers to do packaging work and testing the applications. So if you're interested in functional programming I'll be more than happy to monitor and show you how OCaml is great. And if you're also into Python I'm also looking for volunteers to do like web interface for newcomers to easily find new things to do in Debian. I don't know if you've heard about what can I do for Fedora and the project would be to do something like what I can do for Debian based on the same code but I don't think it's for Debian. Cool, and I saw some other hand that people want to talk, yeah. So I maintain... I maintain... What's your name? I'm Thomas. I maintain all of OpenStack in Debian and that's nearly 400 packages and I need help. Hi. Hi. Yeah. Okay. Actually, I should probably be on that side because I think I don't really know whether that was just for... Okay, well, then you can make... For mentees also for newbies because I'm a newbie to Debian. So, anyways, my name is Shirish. I had been... I was a Debian... No, I was a U.N.2 refugee to Debian about... Well, you tell me, are you looking for something to do or are you looking... I'm looking for something to do. Actually, I'm supposed to be... Then... The publicity stuff. Oh, okay. Well, you should answer these questions for me. Yeah, so no, okay. So one thing I know about Debian, it's solid and it saved me a lot of headache, a lot of times. What I would like to work on is publicity, but unfortunately, I've just been overwhelmed by DEBKONF. So all my grand plans of covering DEBKONF just went for a toss, a huge toss. And now I'm trying to see if I can somehow do something with that. Thank you. And what's one thing you like about Debian? But I guess even you said, I forget. Actually, everything. I mean, just the... Just the huge amount of packages that I have. I actually like is there's a way that you can search for packages without, you know, without... with keywords. I don't... I forget the command right now, but there's a way through which I can find that out. I really love about it. Cool. Yeah. Okay, so you should go to that side. And also you should leave the mic where you are and see if anyone else on your side wants to talk about tasks they can offer to people. Good. I know. Questions already? Doesn't work, right? Okay, it works. And you're Thomas still? Yes. Great. That didn't change at all. Okay. One of the packages that I have, and I'm upstream, it's called Debokker. Anybody used it? No? Debokker. It's a... it's a small program to build packages, and it has a lot of Debian packages in Docker, hence Debokker. And it's like quite experimental. However, it's in stable. I mean, experimental as a project, not as a working software, it actually works in a stable way. It's experimental because what I would like to do is to make contributions to Debian easier because I find them quite difficult to make. It's like, for example, to provide a patch and test it yourself is actually quite difficult, I find, especially if you don't run Debian, which is kind of like obvious, but maybe. But with Debokker, you can actually build packages on any system that runs Docker, right? So you could theoretically contribute to Debian on, I guess, macOS, right? Yeah. I think it runs there. So I have this small software, and I kind of... I'm thinking how to make it better if you are interested in that kind of stuff, and that could actually teach you how to package because it actually wraps around packaging and that kind of stuff. And if you like Docker, I don't know. Okay. Great. So that would be my... And we have one more on this side, if you can... And there's Tobias. Hello. I am Alexandre. I am part of the Go Packaging team where we maintain a lot of things, that tools that play with containers, for example. Those are tools that are all relatively new, and it's a new language, also a new language in Debian, which means we are very much behind in terms of all the libraries we have to get in. So it's a team that went from like 100 to 400 packages in the last six months, and we are relatively a small amount of people. So, yeah, if you want to help, I'm sure you'll like it there. I'm also very much interested in configuration management tools and decentralized things. So, like, decentralized file sharing and communications. I do have some packages in that area if you're interested. So we have only five minutes left in the session. I want to sort of role play what good requests are from the mentor side to the mentee side are just before we switch into that. So, a good request is, Hi, person. You said you were interested in packaging tool, in fixing bugs and packages that you use. Bug number 749636 in CUPS is something where there's already a patch there and I just need someone to test it out. Can you do that? Yeah, I can do that. Great.  And a bad one is, do you want to join the CUPS packaging team? Sorry to pick on you, Odex. And then they'll be very confused about what that entails and then they'll wander off. So it's essential for you all to think about some specific tasks that match the things that people have said here. And, you know, you don't have to say a specific bug number, you can be like, I'm sure there's a bug that you can test the patch for. And then you'll probably spend, like, three hours with them helping them set up P-Builder and so on. And that'll be actually good for everyone, even though it might seem like a long three hours. So, with that said, unless anything else, yeah, no, okay. What I want to do then is, like, stop videoing and switch to that, like, one-on-one chatting. So, yeah, one question or... I can look here. Okay, thanks. Okay, it's green now. Okay, so somebody mentioned that there are many packages already in Debian, but at the same time there are many orphan packages. Yes. So maybe somebody from people interested in packaging could adopt or take care of many packages without maintainers. If one of you is willing to be so kind to the Debian project as to instead of promoting a specific thing you work on, but instead say, I want to help some people, I found a random orphan package. Do you want to adopt it, random mentee? They'll say yes, because they don't know any better. And they're not even wrong to, because it's a great learning experience. So, you know, the kind of specific tasks that you offer people don't have to be in the sub-products that you work on. That's a great thing from Debian. You just have to get creative to meet their needs.  And I'm going to turn off the mic. And I guess I can too. Thank you very much.


I know a lot of people probably already saw the clip that I'm about to play for you But I really want to talk about this because it just shows How awful of a candidate Joe Biden really is and this isn't a surprise to anyone who's watching this show because we've covered his Campaign throughout the course of the primary and he's bad, but I mean, I didn't know that he was this bad I didn't know that he was willing to stoop to this low of a level So to give you some background He was confronted at a recent rally by an immigration activist who wanted him to commit to zero deportations and all deportations on day one using executive action Joe Biden gets frustrated throughout the course of this confrontation and ends up telling him to vote for Donald Trump Literally take a look No, no, no, I'm not gonna do that But I want to make sure that immigrant families and people like Sylvia are not afraid And you have the power as a candidate to actually commit to stop all deportations from day one for executive action And we want to hear you say that.


have some of the best schools and best students in America are helping America prepare for the 21st century. The best high schools is Rockbridge High School, Puzzle Palaces on the Potomac. Thank you all. Thank you all very much for coming out for these warm welcome. God bless you all. Ready to do some role or read some descriptions for us, and we're going to try the government that is. And when you identify it, please tell me why you feel that branch is being represented. George, what branch do I work for? Group members. Two members come from the state of Missouri. I command armed forces, conduct foreign affairs, and recommend mods to Congress. I live in the White House. 135 people who work are built. Nine of my fellow members come from the state of Missouri. Who am I? Heather Watson. I am college secretary, and I was appointed by the president and approved by the state. OK, thank you very much. Who can summarize one of the branches of government for me? The judicial branch is the branch of government that oversees the rulings and enforces. Thank you. Who would like to summarize another branch of government? Robyn and I, the executive, which and it has a variety of newspaper articles for you today, boys and girls. And what I would like to do with your partner in just a minute is to take a look at those newspaper articles and see which branch of government you feel is represented, and your government down at the bottom, and be ready to support your opinion in just a minute after you've had a chance to look at those. Your partner today, Secretary Bennett, is up front, and would like to see your partner today. OK, you can work with your partners. Why do you want to read this? I don't know if you guys failed us. Now, why did you feel that the executive branch was illustrated in that article? Because it was talking about how the president was talking about President Reagan. So then you concluded it was the executive branch. Thank you, Michelle. Who else would like to share it with me? Jason? It was legislative. David, that your article perhaps represented more than one branch of government. Jeff? OK, so in your article, you found that two branches of government were represented. What does that tell us about the branches of government Do they have to work by themselves, or do they have to work very good? That shows us that the branches of government are just not independent of each other, that they have to work with each other. To help us summarize this, I'd like to ask some of you to tell me which branch of government you would like to work for. You could choose which one would you like to work for, and what would you do, and why? Malacca would be the president. Why would you like to be the president? You'd want to live in the White House. Who else would like to share? Heather Watson? I'd like to work in the judicial branch of Dirk Boyle to share his writing on patriotism, which he completed yesterday with Dirk. He always has an American flag flying around his house. When I see his medals, the felt new, far-fetched for his country, I think my grandpa is a patriot, because he loves his country and is very loyal to it. He cares about his country. Mr. President, I know your time is up, but I understand you have some comments that you'd like to share with the class tonight. Thank you. If you'd like to take that note. Well, I'm enjoying this. I wish I could go on longer. I hope that you all realize that you are part of a really exceptional school system. That's why we're here. The school is here in Columbia. Achieved in some quality. My secretary and I and the others are all here. But also, in this civics class, what you're doing, you know, it brings to mind about people like myself, like the secretary and the people you were talking about there in the Congress. We don't really make the country great. You, Mr. Cosmer, and you and your parents and the people of this country, determine the quality of the country, because all of us work for you. We're the employees of the people of this country. And the people of America are good, and they are, and they're patriotic. Things will go right. Many years ago, in fact, more than 100 years ago, when this brand-new Congress had suddenly achieved such a stature that was so great, becoming powerful. A French writer came to this country. His name was Petochia. He came because Europe was amazed. They wanted to find out, how did we do it? And he came and went all over America, meet the people in the looks and the scene, and went back and wrote a book about it. And he wrote one line in that book that was very wonderful and clean. He said, America is great, because America is good. And if America ever stops being good, America is not being great. And with all of this, and the checks and balances, which you've been speaking about here today, the legislative, the executive branch, the judicial branch of the law, and make sure you obey the law, all points up to the fact that when we had our revolution 200 years ago, there have been revolutions all over the world, before and since. Most of those revolutions just changed one set of rules for another set of rules. Our revolution was much deeper than that. We created something that had never before been done in the history of man. We created a government that was run by the people. And that's the difference between our constitution and all those others. I've read an awful lot of constitutions. I've read the Soviet constitution. It talks about right of assembly and freedom of speech and things of that kind. But what's the big difference then between their constitution and ours? Well, all those other constitutions say we, the government, will allow you the peace of the view of all the others. Our constitution says we, the people, will allow the government to do the following things. And the government can't do anything that is not prescribed there in the constitution. That makes us so totally different. Anyone else in the world agrees with me? You're going to be growing up again in a new center. And you're going to be running. You don't have to hold public office. You can do the people that deteriorated into something else. And as I said the other night, I'm telling you, I'm not going to make that mistake again. Well, I know that I've lost too much here. Thank you. We appreciate your coming today. Let's thank the President. The important thing is, because Thomas Jefferson, I don't know who he was back in our history, Thomas Jefferson said he'd have all the facts know the truth. The people will allow him to do it. Okay, and then we've been talking about that. So we're going to try to earn a pocket here. Okay, all right. Boys and girls, if you look at your computer screen, we've got some terms here. Your expenses are the sum of the cost of the relay and the cost of the sign. Your profits are the difference between the income from sales and your expenses. Okay, so you have to be very careful if you don't charge too much, but on the price you charge, on the number of advertising signs you use, you must get half of your assets because you can't spend more money than you already have or you're going to debt. Let's keep a record on your sheet. Okay, everyone, get with your partner on the side. How many glasses do you want to make? Do you want them?   She is a sugar girl.     I'm going to sell you a piece of paper to sell you a piece of paper, but also I also want to pay dearly for the great many viewers and spaceships all of our Clayanter. You never do or see many things you can't even imagine from this day. But this very problem also touched on In our country, there is one of the great things about our economy that is the ability for anyone who gets an I.P. and how that kind of business must be a business for themselves and do it for you. And we call that, in our country, we call that independent, maybe even small, business. Because it is not the great corporation that makes the automobile and the caravan and that sort of thing. And that small, independent business in our country accounts for most of the new jobs that give people employment and indeed is responsible for most of the jobs in the country that people must have to make their living. So you are learning something that is not just schoolwork that you can walk out and forget. You are learning some pretty special things between the end of the rest of your life. I just wanted you to know that you are way ahead of where you are. And thanks for letting us in and out. Did you make a profit on your lemonade sale, Mr. President? 370. Did you make a profit on the lemonade? He went for victim business and he made more. But we, we made a profit here. We have to look it up in the books. Yes, we made a profit of $2.10. It started out with assets of $2. We have now got $4.00 in the downing. Did you hear the part, Mr. President, about not being able to spend more than you take in, because then you wind up with a deficit? I didn't think there was any sense in getting into government. You know about deficits. What? You know about deficits. Oh, I do. Anything you could tell the students about deficits spending more than you've got? What they're all teasing me about is the fact that our government is spending more than it takes in. And in here, the debt gets greater. And I would like to say back to them because they're trying to attack me because we're having deficits now. We've been having deficits in our country for the last 56 years, spending more than we've been taking in until we now owe over $2 trillion. And what we're trying to do right now in Washington, people like to celebrate in themselves, is persuade the Congress to get back to where we're not spending more than we take in. Because if you did that with your foreign standard, you'd be out of business for the first day. Okay. Well, we think you're wonderful. Thank you for coming. Thank you. You're wonderful too. Thank you. Bye, boys and girls. Bye. Bye. Bye. You say no to drugs. Can you say no to drugs? No. That's right. And you've all got stickers on today that says most of the United States and the Secretary of Education, William Bennett. Well, good morning, boys and girls. I was done on the evening news and saw a couple of you crying and you were disappointed and that really touched me. And I said I was going to come back. Well, I came back, ladies and gentlemen and boys, and I privileged to introduce to you my boss, President of the United States. Well, thank you, Bill. And thank all of you very much for a wonderful welcome. You know, I put some things down in a card here, so I wouldn't forget. And then he took care of it and asked you and you answered all the questions. So I don't know whether this card is worth anything or not. But I'm grateful for your principal, James Wells, inviting us here to be here today. And I have a special thanks for Mrs. Hosmer and Mrs. Layton in the classes that I have just visited here. And also, I have with us Miss Joy Underdown. And she's kind of special to us because out in California before she came here, she was the teacher of our son, Ron. And we thought she was a very wonderful teacher. And so did he. And so I was glad to make contact again after a certain number of years that have gone by since he was there. But I wasn't surprised to find her teaching in such a great school. And because I know that you and that's great, the way you feel about it, but you know something else, a lot more of us hadn't even been here before know that this is a great school. And it has been so rated because of the progress that you've made and the quality of the education that you're getting here and the level of all of you as students that this is one of the truly fine schools in all of the United States of America. And all of you, it takes to make it that way.   So you are busy now because in the 21st century, you will be in charge. You'll be taking over. And what you're learning right here are the things that you need to know when you are running the country in that new century. So again, I just want to thank all of you for letting us come here and be with you for a while this morning. And I know that we've got someone waiting for us now at another great school, one of your high schools here. And we have to get on to that high school. You wouldn't want us to keep them waiting, would you? Well, there was a little divided opinion there. And I'm flattered by that, but the ones that said no are the ones that will have to decide and we'll have to get going. But again, thank you all. God bless you all.


This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Absolutely. Yes, there is life after statehood. I'm Jay Fidel, and I'll be the host today, even though it's kind of Ray's program, Ray Tsuchiyama. He'll be my guest because we're going to talk about something that has been remarkable since statehood, roads and traffic in Hawaii. We're going to compare. And we're going to ask the question is, how have we been keeping up? How are we keeping up with roads and traffic here? Welcome to your show, Ray. Thank you for having me and me to kind of have myself. And as you know, statehood was going to be the best of all possible worlds after the territory of Hawaii where people look back and say it was the worst of all possible worlds in some ways. And now, of course, we're living in a situation in 2018 where people have become numb to traffic or just to take it for granted. That is the new, I hate to say this, normal. So how did it begin? You have rich memories of life on Maui. I have memories too when I arrived here in 1965, a lot different about cars then. How was it as you grew up on Maui? No, no, no. I didn't grow up in Maui. I lived there recently. But I grew up in Kalihi. And around the same time that you arrived, I arrived also in Kalihi. And of course, as we spoke before, Honolulu was much more neighborhood-centric. And in fact, Kalihi where I grew up was a very unique area. And it's a very dense area. There's currently 42,000 residents of the census tract called Kalihi Palama. That's a lot of people. But even back then, the lands beyond Red Hill were, to me, pockets of like little towns and communities. Aeya, Waipahu, Wahewa, way out to not a community. Each one was another small plantation. That's right. That's right. Or the ending of plantations at that point. And Ag was still going strong. Dole of pineapple and sugar were still being harvested in the central Oahu. But downtown Oahu was very concentrated. But remember Waikiki was just getting started. There was the Ilekai, the Moana, and Royal Hawaiian, and Haleikulani, and some new smaller hotels for the middle-class tourists to come. And of course, downtown was where everything was happening. Downtown was the retail center. But there were other localized places like, of all places, Kaimukii, Wailai Avenue, was a bustling place. And there were strips of businesses along Baritania Street and King Street. And then one day, it became both from two-way streets to one-way streets. And that wrecked retail in those areas. Yeah, it's not funny. I mean, it was for traffic purposes. That's right. When you talk about traffic. But it wrecked retail all around the central business. And of course, the other one that really, everybody believed in statehood planning to alleviate traffic was H1. And that was to bring people in and out of the central core. And of course, what that happened is that it unleashed development out there beyond Red Hill. But when you look at H1, and take a look, as you're going down H1 towards Waikiki, how the on and off ramps are designed. Okay? They're all compromises. There's a lot of places where people are getting on, where people are trying to get off. And on the mainland, you don't see that that often. It's a very convoluted, it's very short, narrow place. And that goes to a fundamental point, a legal point about Hawaii. As I learned early on when I was working for the government here, Hawaii doesn't like condemnation. Oh, really? I can tell you stories. Nobody wants to condemn land for government projects. And so the result is they don't. If they can't make a deal with the owner that works for both sides, they don't make a deal. And they don't condemn. Result is you get the freeway. The freeway is a perfect example of that. They didn't want to condemn the ramps in and the ramps off. Okay? So that you have this really odd design about the freeway. It never worked then, and it doesn't work now. And it's because they didn't condemn the land they needed to condemn to make those ramps work. And this is not only around the freeway. It's really in many other places in the state. Now, why don't we have traffic circles, because we don't want to condemn the land? Why don't we build new roads that will allow new access, such as in the Oahu area, where there's only one access in and out. We should condemn land and build new roads that will improve the access. We don't do that. And I think you have a very good point, but places like Singapore and other places that really transform communities, they provide a very good positive alternative, an option, so that you could live in a better place or have a different ... I think the state doesn't offer those a menu of very good options. So what you do is just hang on to what you have as much as possible. So there's none of that great changes or transformations. Right now, the most transformational place that they're trying to create a very artificial neighborhood where people can live, work, and play in the same area is Kakaako. But it's artificial. Well, it did happen before. It happened in the old days, as you described, down Ieya and Pearl City and Waipahu, the three plantation towns where you stayed in the one town, and this was repeated on the neighbor islands. Right. Look at Hamakua, look at Maui, where you stayed in the same town. You didn't need a car. You didn't have a car back in the plantation days. You just lived your life in the plantation town. No, you have a very good point. I said before that my father grew up in Pune in a camp, had 11,000 residents and the total Maui was barely 45,000. So I think what you're saying is that in the history of Hawaii, there were many artificial towns that were made for living, working, retail. Company towns, yeah. Right. And for a lot of people, strangely enough, they have very good memories. And when you talk to people about the plantation, they don't talk about how bad things were. I think most times they would tell you how everybody was the uncle and aunt. No doors were locked. Which is right, Ray. Which is right. Were the plantations really kind of an illusion field kind of place where everybody was happy? Were the plantations really sort of a self-deception? I think there's, I think it's both. But you add another, because compared to what, compared to the life my grandparents had in Japan, wow, it's so much better when you think about it. Or China, or the Philippines, wow. You have running water, you have bathrooms, you have food, and all kinds of things. That you didn't have an oppressive police kind of thing. Of course, there were judges and police that were really self-contained, especially on the neighbor islands. The thing that really took people out and began to transfer their minds was education. Public education. In the 20s and 30s, Territory Hawaii education was very good for the children who could go. They were teaching Latin in Maui. That's right. My high school had Latin, had proms at Julius Caesar. My father's best friend was called Cassius. That's where it came from. And they began to pursue cars. Everybody had a license. Everybody tried to get a car. People would go to proms in the car, go to a driving in the car. And really, in the pre-war period, it was very technologically aware society. I think, you see, people look at the political society as a very static, immobile society. I see the beginnings of models and a transition towards suburbs. As much as California, but this was happening on the mainland, too. It was all that period of the 30s where everybody worshiped the car. Every kid had to learn how to take apart the model, put it back together again. We were, Hawaii was trying to emulate, I think, what was going on. Exactly. And they did a good job in those days. Everybody knew about the car. Then I remember, just a short story. This is not in the 30s, but it tells you the story. So I once represented a trustee of a trust fund that had unlimited amounts of money to give to certain beneficiaries. And one beneficiary, they said to him, look, you're graduating high school. We'll send you to any college on the mainland you want. Name it. And we'll fund everything about this college. And the beneficiary said, I don't want to go to college. I want to go to automobile mechanic repair school overnight, with the dormitory and everything somewhere in Arizona, I think it was. And that's what I really care about, because that's what I want to put my career into, auto mechanics. And this is fairly recently. I think there's a culture point that came out of the 30s where people worship the car. They'd rather do that than go to a four-year college. And I think that still exists today. And the trustee said, are you serious? I give you everything, and you want to go study one? Yep. That's what I want to do. And he went there. Wow. And up till I think the 60s, there were schools for mechanical engineers sponsored by GM's and Ford's in Detroit. And that's where my father went right before the war. That was the mecca of auto engineering in the world when you think about it. So now fast forward to after the war, fast forward to a time when people were coming off the plantations, I guess that's the 50s and the 60s, to a time when they had some disposable income. Now they're buying cars like hotcakes. Automobile dealers are here in force, and they're selling cars like hotcakes. Very profitable business in those days.  Now they have a car. Right. Now their wife has a car. Right. Now their kids have a car. Right. Now four people in the family, all four of them have a car. And that's where we are today. In fact, it might be five or six cars in that four-person stand. And then in a garage, and the only way to get a large place with a garage is out in the Kapolei area or in the western suburbs. And all this is a burden on the infrastructure, on whatever that freeway turned out to be, however many ramps on or off. And on the roads, whether they had traffic circles or not, whether they had modern timed lights or signal technology on the roads, whether they were one way or two ways or whatever. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because they couldn't handle the number of cars. What do we do about that? What did we do about that? Say nothing. Well, since that time, Neil Blaisdell, in an apocryphal story, held up the map of Manhattan, north-south. And he put it this way. That's Oahu. That's 1967. Very interesting. Very interesting. And there must have been people from Hawaii, must have gone to the Tokyo Olympics of 64 and rode in a motor rail from Haneda Airport to Hamamatsu-cho in Tokyo. They must have seen it at that time. But they didn't bring it back for some reason or another. That would have been the beginnings of mass transit back in the 60s. That would have transformed Hawaii. But Neil Blaisdell thought about it even back then. He was thinking of it. So that tells you that congestion was becoming a problem back in the late 60s. When I first started practicing law here in 1971, we would hop in one of the partner's cars. We would drive to Kaimuki. We would have a big lunch with the partner and three or four associates. And then we'd come back. And all of that was like in 45 minutes. Try that today. You know, and really, I mean, I really don't think that the city has put any significant money or planning into organizing and reorganizing the roads or the traffic systems so that you have too many cars on an aging and not an updated system. And it gets worse and worse. And then you have, and I would like to discuss this with you, Ray, you have what I call a flash jam, which nobody can predict, or at least without a computer. Nobody can predict when or where it's going to happen and how deadly it's going to be.  Plenty of room, all of a sudden bang, flash jam, for no good reason. And you would think that in the 21st century, living today with the Google, Facebook, Amazon, AI, artificial intelligence, that we could have algorithms that would change the lights and everything and channel people. And this is more open, so it sends you a little mobile text. And it would be so automatic that it would be prearranged how you get from place to place. So you would think that, but I don't think anybody is really placing any research on it. What interests me is, you know, you watch television in the morning and you say, oh, this one's crowded and the traffic is really bad, or here's that accent over there. But you don't have options. It's not like, you can't do anything about that.  It's informational. So you suffer. And the other thing is, you know, so you ask the city, what are you doing about it? We've built this really expensive, brand new traffic observation center where we know how the traffic is doing at all points around Oahu, okay? What does the traffic observation center do to actually control the traffic around it? Oh, we don't do that. We watch. It's informational. It's all informational.  It's the new normal. It's the way things are, you know, suffer through it. What's that word in Japanese? It means have- Gamon. Gamon. Gamon. It was in the allegiance play. Right? Gamon. Everybody sits there on the highway. Gamon. You have to suffer. You have to suffer. You have to suffer. You have to suffer. You have to suffer. You have to suffer and silence. You have to suffer.  And Gamon. And really, we have forgotten how to try to get government to do something. We have given up on trying to get a better arrangement. And government, through our giving up, they give up. Government's not doing anything either. There have been all these plans over the years, but nothing right now. And after this break, we spend a little time coming to some kind of suggestions about what could happen to improve this, and the possibilities flood your mind will come right back. Okay. Aloha. Hi. I'm Dave Stevens, the host of Cyber Underground. Every Friday here at 1 p.m. on ThinkTechHawaii.com. And then every episode is uploaded to the Cyber Underground. That library of shows that you can see of mine on YouTube.com. And I hope you'll join us here every Friday. We have some topical discussions about why security matters and what could scare the absolute bejesus out of you if you just try to watch my show all the way through. Hope to see you next time on Cyber Underground. Stay safe. You know, maybe we're going to have, what is it, guillet jaune? That's the yellow vest. Oh, yes, that's right. They're protesting with it in France, all over France. We're going to have people who protest the traffic and the lack of government action on fixing it wear a yellow vest and have a little protest. It wouldn't be bad. That's something that may change some of the letters. But going back to your question, and over time, of course, especially in the 80s and 90s was this emphasis in Hawaii about employment centers. You have to create an employment center where people live, which is on Oahu, the west side, so that you prevent people from getting up in the morning and commuting into Nantara Waikiki. Just leave them to just walk or, you know, ten minutes away that could be at their place of work. Utterly, utterly didn't happen. Look what happened to Kapolei and all that. It hasn't happened. It's not a second city. It's not a second city. Strangely, Waikiki and downtown are even more concentrated and more dense. That's where people like to be for business opportunities. But people used to argue there could be a lot of the back office operations, right? You don't have to meet people. You just have to have your computers and the people inputting things or the state offices all moved out. And it's an interesting kind of thing. You have to have some kind of huge transformational move, like in Tokyo. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government offices used to be near the Tokyo station. But the population of Tokyo had moved out in the western suburbs. They moved into Shinjuku, the western part of Tokyo. I mean, the central demographic point of Oahu is probably pro-city today. That's where the center of- The weight. Yeah, the weight. Exactly. The weight, the balance, right in the center. So, theoretically, you should move Honolahale to pro-city. That's number one. If you do that, all the people have to go there. And then people have to go there and then live nearby or have offices there. That's number one. It's a huge transformation. Something very egalitarian about that. And then you have to move offices, headquarters. You have to move two or three huge headquarters that attracts a lot of people, banks that were to Kapolei. Well, that's what Ron Moon was trying to do when he moved the family court to Kapolei. He insisted and a lot of the people in the bar didn't like it. But that's exactly what his analysis was in moving a significant government office to Kapolei. So that, again, brings lawyers, CPAs, and so forth. But it just doesn't happen on this, you're at a higher level. That's number one. Number two, where we talked about great incentives or disincentives. And incentives in a way of what can you do to legislate brings a great advantage is taxes or money to buy an EV, for example, or not to buy a car or go on bicycles and all that. That's number one. Or have great disincentives, which is how to make a car price so high that you can't afford it. Or gasoline prices so high, $8 to $9 a gallon, which is in Japan and many European countries. And people are not riding the streets, except in France right now. But in Japan, they're not riding because they have great options for mass transit. That's what you have to give them. You have to, you make one option less attractive and another option more attractive. Now you have changed public conduct. We don't know how to do that. We have to learn how to do that. So yes, you make gas more expensive. You make cars more expensive. You limit the number of cars and you require some kind of payment to the government on every new car beyond, you know, you can set it up so that it becomes expensive. They can say that's regressive. On the other hand, it's not really regressive if you're offering alternatives. You put a lot of money into buses, Ray, make buses read. Why haven't I seen that? I don't understand that either. Because I think the city treats the buses a profit center or something when they shouldn't be. But interesting when you say that, because one of the legacies of the Frank Foster administration were the bus and parks and efficiency. When you look at the city then, the city has changed for me. There's a lot more like areas near city parks or sidewalks. There's grass growing. It looks bad. It's bad. But it was a much more efficient city under Foster. But the bus, you're correct. And when you think about a reaction against, strangely against a bus in the 80s was that a lot of Japanese tourists didn't know how to use the bus. Who has $2.75 and change when you think about it? How do you know what the bus driver is telling you in English how to get from Waikiki to downtown? You have no idea. You can't read it. So that's how the development of an independent parallel bus system developed. The Lea Lea and the Oli Oli and all these open buses that pick up seemingly only Japanese tourists. That's kind of a parallel system that they developed. Because the Japanese didn't like to ride the regular system. Well, I don't think, you know, no, they don't like. I don't like to ride the regular system either. I think it can be much better. Of course, there's many things to improve. But why put more buses when you can have, you know, one bus system? Good point. Yeah. But anyway, that was an interesting impetus for that because there are still a lot of people who do not have a car from Waikiki who would like to travel out for short rides into Ward or near downtown. So that's another area. The larger, more sustained propagandizing of people about the culture of cars and the worship of cars has to start maybe in kindergarten. And consistently through and reinforced every year, cars are bad. Take a bicycle, walk, take the bus. I mean, all these things have to be like in the minds of children. So when they graduate, they have a much more sustainable view of the world. Yeah. And voters and the legislature. The legislature can solve this problem in one stroke. The city council can solve it in one stroke. They don't do anything. And I mean, it's just as bad on the neighbor islands, terrific traffic jams on the neighbor islands. Oh, even fewer buses and a far comprehensive bus service on the neighbor islands. They're absolutely right. So it's absolutely necessary to have a car. In fact, there are probably more cars per capita per family or Maui or island Hawaii or Kauai than on the Wahu. The problem was harder on the neighbor islands because you have to have more buses to cover a lot of distance. Back in the day, I'm talking about two or three terms ago. The term before Billy Kenoi, the buses were free from Hilo to Kona for all the hotel workers. Of course. Free. This was such a wonderful thing for everybody. People don't realize how important it is to have free buses. In Melbourne, Australia, they have free buses in the central business too. And it has made the place Kona-Wai. I would write a free bus. It was free.  It would make my life much more easier. So yes, we'll have to spend money for that. But think of the enormous change we would have. And it would change everything. And it would make rail less important, actually. That's another area. That's another area. Anyway, it sounds like incentives, disincentives, and the big incentives is the bus offering an alternative to people here and on the neighbor islands. Very important things to have to do. Somebody has to address this. It's not informational. It's not gamon. It's actually doing things. That's right. Because you have to have a strategy and a plan. Where do you want to go?  Is there a numerical target? Is there a maximum? This is the last car you can buy. Because after this, you have to pay $5,000 per car as a tax or something. At the year 2025, we talk about renewable energy. We're not going to get there or whatever, $2,050. But there has to be some kind of line in the sand or some number that people say, this is 700,000 cars for this little island. That's the end. We cannot have more. And then, but you see, what I told you about toothpaste or detergent, you can make it only for the people on one. People will smuggle cars. People will do anything to bring other. Because the culture is so invested in cars. Oh, they would do anything. People will spend any percentage of their income to do it. That's right. It doesn't matter what gas costs. They're going to spend the money. So again, it's back to the mind, I think. It really has to do with the mind. Even the taxes, people will, like you say, borrow or sell their grandmother or whatever for money to buy a car. I don't know. It's something that the plan obsolescence and so forth is part of it. But this branding of yourself, your identity, is like synonymous with a car. Yeah, we're still working on that. We're working on that in many ways about climate change, to sea level rise. But we have to demonstrate to ourselves and the world that we're able to solve this problem. Otherwise, we will be backwater. And this is one of the most visible things that happened when people come off the plane and they see the traffic jams. They see the potholes. They see how tough it is to get around. We have to fix this. It affects all of us. It affects our economy. So thanks for those suggestions, Ray. This is a great subject. At any time, all the people who founded the state, Patsy Meg, John Burns, didn't want this to happen. They wanted a very efficient society for all people, for all people. They didn't want an unequal society. They wanted an equal society and one that would be, again, very efficient and very community-based. But now we're in a crazy prime, I think. And we maybe, it's more of the same. Every year, it's more of the same. And we have to draw a line someplace in the future. This is it. We have to work at this goal that we are seeing for cars. Yeah. Well, we have to address it. And to answer the question, have we kept up? Answer, no. We have sort of forgotten our goal to keep up. But now, through this kind of discussion, which I hope we can do again, we will remember. And maybe they will, too. OK. Thank you, Ray. Ray Tucciama. OK.


a 22nd lecture in the course design and engineering of computer systems. So this week we are discussing how the internet works and in this lecture we are going to understand how internet routing and forwarding works, so let us get started. So in the previous lecture we have seen the concept of the various layers that are there in the network stack, internet software is built using the principle of layering and in that the network layer is sort of in the middle, it is also called the IP layer or layer 3 and it deals with forwarding of network packets from one IP address to the other, right. We have seen this in the previous lecture. So now let us understand what is an IP address, an IP address is a unique identification that is given to every network interface that is connected to the internet, earlier we said that every end host has an IP address, it is actually every network interface that is if you have an Ethernet card and a Wi-Fi card on your laptop you will get two IP addresses. The Ethernet card that interface will have its IP address, the wireless interface also will have its own IP address, ok. So every interface that is connected to the internet has an IP address and these IP addresses are 32 bit either 32 bit IPv4 addresses which are written this way in the dotted decimal notation or you can have 128 bit IPv6 addresses. So IPv6 has come about primarily because of a shortage of IPv4 addresses, we are running out of IPv4 addresses and end hosts are connected to each other using a series of IP routers and these routers run routing protocols, ok. So these are distributed decentralized protocols that is each router runs this protocol on its own and they exchange information with each other and as a result of this communication as a result of this routing protocol, all the routers discover all the paths between the various hosts of the internet and all this information about all the routes that are available is stored in the routing table. And from among these multiple routes available, one of the routes is chosen, the best route is chosen for forwarding packets, ok and you store the best route in what is called the forwarding table. So the forwarding table has for every destination which is the best path to send the packet to. For example, if you know you have a long path like this and a short path like this between two hosts A and B, then this routers along this shortest path will send the packet like this and not send the packet like that, ok. So usually routers forward traffic on the shortest possible or the best possible path and that information of for each destination which is the best path and where should I send the packet to in order to go on the best path, what is my next hop, that information is stored in the forwarding table. So the forwarding table is some kind of a summary of the routing table. And note that not all IP routers, so I am just drawing a line like this between routers, but does not mean they are always connected by like you know one wire running from one to the other. So the link between two IP routers can also be a very long link, there could be other elements on the path. So all of that the IP layer does not care about that is taken care of by the link layer. So the link layer deals with how to provide this connectivity between two end points between two IP routers or an end host and an IP router that is taken care of by the link layer, ok. We will come to that later. For now just assume that there are multiple hosts and routers each with their own IP address which are all connected to each other. So let us understand next the concept of what is an IP prefix, ok. So now we have seen that routing protocol exchange information about hosts. Now at what granularity do you exchange information? You know there are 2 to the 32 IP addresses and if everybody has to talk and exchange information about all of these 2 to the 32 hosts that is a lot of information on the internet. So we do not want to tell everybody about every host, instead what we do is we exchange information at the granularity of groups of hosts or subnets that is IP addresses are grouped into subnets. Now by using a common prefix they are grouped hierarchically. So if you have an IP address you know 32 bit IP address and the first 24 bits are common, the first 24 bits are 192, 168, 10 and the last 8 bits can be anything then how many such IP addresses do you have? You will have 256 such IP addresses, you know the last 8 bits can be any of the 2 to the 8 possibilities. Then these 256 IP addresses are combinedly referred to as 192, 168, 10 slash 24, ok. So the slash 24 is saying that the first 24 bits are common, the last 8 bits can be anything, ok. So this is called an IP prefix. An IP prefix is a group of internet addresses which have a common prefix. Similarly if you look at this prefix, this is the first 8 bits are common and of course if the first 8 bits are common then inside this you will have 256 slash 16 prefixes and each slash 16 will have 256 slash 24 and each slash 24 will have 256 IP addresses, ok. You can group these prefixes into bigger and bigger prefixes and a prefix is also denoted by its subnet mask. The subnet mask specifies that the first 8 bits, 255 are used, you know all once the first 8 bits are used then remaining bits are not used that denotes a subnet mask, ok. You can specify either the prefix length, you can say this is a prefix of length 24, a prefix of length 8 or you can specify the subnet mask. These are two ways of describing how big this grouping of IP addresses is, ok. And IP addresses are assigned at the granularity of IP prefixes, if an organization, so each end host will not go somewhere and get an IP address for itself, instead an organization will be given an IP prefix, a group of IP addresses will be given. Now, you know if an organization is given a slash 8, it can split it into multiple slash 16 prefixes that can or into slash 24 prefixes, whatever within an organization you can always split a prefix like how the slash 8 contains multiple slash 16s which contain multiple slash 24s, you can always split a prefix into smaller prefixes. But they are managed at this granularity, not at the granularity of individual IP addresses. Similarly, routing protocols also exchange information at the granularity of IP prefixes. So, every router will say, ok, these are all the prefixes that I am managing, I know how to get to these prefixes, this is the path to this prefix, all of that information is not stored at the granularity of individual destination, but at the granularity of IP prefixes. And when a router receives an IP datagram, even your forwarding table, everything will have for this slash 24 prefix, for this slash 8 prefix, for this slash 16 prefix, for various prefixes, this is the path, right, that is how your routing tables, forwarding tables, everything will be stored. And when a router gets an IP packet, it will find out for this IP address which prefix does it belong to and accordingly for that prefix, what should I do, where should I forward the packet to, ok. Now, what if multiple prefixes match, for example, if you have an IP address, you know, <IP_ADDRESS>, this IP address matches this slash 24, it matches this slash 24, it also matches this slash 8, 192 slash 8, it matches that prefix also, what if it matches multiple prefixes, then the logic is that you will pick the longest prefix, that is the most specific prefix, because that is the convention on the internet. The most, the longer your prefixes, that is more preferable. So, in this way, routing tables, forwarding tables, store information about internet hose, this routing information or forwarding information at the granularity of IP prefixes of various lengths. And this matching algorithm, where if an IP address matches multiple prefixes, you pick the longest one, this is also called the longest prefix match or LPM algorithm. So, next let us understand how the internet structure or the internet topology looks like. So, the internet is not one big giant network, but it is composed of multiple smaller independent networks which are called autonomous systems or ASS. So, this autonomous systems can be either end user organizations like organizations that have clients, servers, your college, your company or somebody providing a web service, NPTEL, all of these are end user organizations. The internet has these end user organizations, it also has what are called internet service providers who connect all of these end user organizations. So, you have an end user organization here, here, all of these are connected by an ISP or an internet service provider. And then you have another ISP, then you have another ISP, these ISPs are all connected to each other. So, you have multiple tiers, multiple layers of these ISPs, which together connect all these end user or stub organizations. And your internet looks like this, there are various end user organization, then there are various ISPs which are all connected to each other, there is a hierarchy and this is how the internet is structured. You have stubs and you have ISPs. And every network here, you know whether it is an ISP or an end user organization, each network will get a few IP prefixes for itself, from where there are what are called registries in the internet, you know, which are sort of neutral third parties which allocate IP addresses to these various organizations. So, if you are a company or an organization, you will go to a registry, get an IP prefix and then you will allocate the IP prefix to all the computers, to all the hosts inside your organization. And how are these IP addresses distributed within an organization? You know, an organization got a slash 24, you have 256 IP addresses, how do you give it to? You can either statically give it to a host, you can say every computer, this is your IP address. But what if you know a computer is not using its IP address, therefore you can also do a dynamic allocation. So, there is a protocol called DHCP, there is a DHCP server and if a computer wants an IP address temporarily, it can go to the DHCP server and get an IP address, use it for a short period of time and when the computer is not using this IP address, somebody else can use this IP address. In this way, IP addresses can be statically assigned or dynamically shared between all the hosts in an organization. But of course, you only have to assign addresses from the prefix given to you, you cannot randomly pick any IP address that you want. And then every autonomous system has some routers at the border, which are called border routers. What these border routers do is, they will announce these IP prefixes to other autonomous systems. For example, if you have some IP prefix, you will tell your ISP that hey, these are all my IP addresses, please tell everybody. And this ISP will tell everybody that hey, these IP addresses are here, you know this autonomous system owns these IP addresses, you will tell that information to everybody.  So, you advertise your route this way and traffic flows in the opposite direction.  So, the purpose of ISPs is basically they propagate this information. End users have these IP prefixes and these ISPs will propagate that information about the end user so that everybody knows about all of these end users. And these ISPs, they charge a payment for it.  That is what it means to get service, to get internet service from an ISP. What does it mean?  And within an autonomous system, also you will have internal routers. So, an autonomous system can be big and inside that also you will have routers. So, you will have some border routers which are talking to the outside world and you will also have some internal routers which are also exchanging information because you have split your network into smaller subnets, your prefix into smaller subnets assigned it to different parts of your network. And then these routers are also talking to each other and exchanging information about smaller prefixes. So, in some sense, routing happens in a hierarchical manner. So, there is this big prefix that you have advertised through your ISP and ISP will tell everybody else. They know where this big prefix is and all traffic will come to you to the border router. Then the border router will now send the traffic inside, then there are smaller routers. You know, you announced a slash 8, traffic to the slash 8 prefixes coming here. Then each of the slash 16s, this border router will distribute. Then each of these routers will then distribute to the various slash 24 prefixes. In this way, routing and forwarding happens hierarchically on the internet. You know, you will traffic to a slash 8 is distributed to the slash 16s to the slash 24s and so on. And this is important for the scalability of the internet, this hierarchical routing. You know, if everybody is learning about every host on the internet, it gets messy. So, instead, you will the border routers will only announce the bigger prefix to the ISPs and internally whatever routing decisions have to made will be made by internal IP routers. And then all of these routers, they basically exchange information about IP prefixes so that you know where each IP prefix is and you can construct this network topology and you can compute the shortest path. So, you have routers exchange information about IP prefixes and also some notion of a link metric. You know, to identify this link is expensive to use, this link is shorter, this link is longer. You will have some kind of a link metric so that you can identify the shortest path. And all these routers are exchanging information and periodically they will compute the best route to every destination or you know, whenever some failure happens, something happens, your network topology changes, all of these routers are dynamically constantly exchanging information and recomputing these best routes. So, there are roughly two philosophies of how you design routing protocols which are called link state routing as well as distance vector routing. So, what is link state routing? Suppose you have a topology like this of you know, multiple routers and then what is link state routing is every router will tell everybody in the network information about all its links. So, this router will say I have so and so all of these prefixes I am managing and I am connected to this guy. This router will say these are all my links, this router will say these are all my links. In this way, every router will tell the entire network about all of its prefixes and links, its information, its story, it will tell everybody in the network and once everybody knows about everybody else, then everybody can construct this full network topology. And once each router has this full network topology, if I want to go from this point to this point, this is my shortest path, everybody can compute that and accordingly forward packets. The other type of routing protocols is what are called distance vector routing protocols.  So, this router will say oh I know how to get to those IP prefixes, then this router will say okay if you know then I will use you. So, for example, if you have a some destination D over here, this router will say I know how to get to D, this router will also say I know how to get to D and I have a three hop path, this router will say oh I have a two hop path to get to D. Then this router will decide, after listening to the gossip from both these guys, it will decide okay maybe I will go like this in order to send a packet to D. In this way nobody has a full knowledge of the entire network topology, everybody is only talking to their neighbors. But from what their neighbors tell them, they are going to pick which neighbor to use to go to any destination. So, in general, I mean these are two different ways of designing routing protocols and in general link state protocols are somewhat better because they give you a more accurate picture of the network topology and therefore in case any failure happens then link state protocols can recover from that failure faster. But in the real world you have implementations of both these protocols in use and in a networking course you will study these protocols in more detail, we would not have time to cover them here. And the other classification of routing protocols is within a domain the routing protocols that are used are called intra domain routing protocols and these can be different from what routing protocols are used by border routers which are inter domain routing protocols because you know you have different considerations. Inside a network you just want to pick shortest paths but outside on the internet you might also have some policy considerations oh this guy paid me more money this guy did not pay me any money at all therefore I will pick this network. This network is cheaper to use this network is more expensive to use you might have other considerations not just the shortest path. Therefore, you have an inter domain routing protocol that is very popular today called the BGP or border gateway protocol that is like distance vector protocol but slightly different which can help you express all of these constraints also and it is that is why it is used for inter domain routing whereas within a network you will use a simple protocol like OSPF is a very popular protocol today which is a simple link state shortest path protocol. So, whatever is the routing protocol in use there are different routing protocols within a network and outside a network and the network operator has to suitably pick a routing protocol based on his or her goals. The other concept I would like to introduce is what is called a label switched routing that is traditional networks they use destination based routing given a destination I will take the shortest path to the destination but sometimes taking the shortest path may not always be the good idea what if you know some failure has occurred the shortest path is congested you know suppose you have a network like this and there is one long path to the destination and there is one very multiple long pass to the destination and one direct path to the destination and your destination is safe here and you have traffic coming from A, B through some router C going to this destination D. So, if C will you know for every packet it will always pick only the shortest path look at the IP address pick the shortest path then this link will get very congested to go to D this path will get very congested when there are other paths that are free right you might have as well split your traffic across all of these paths. But if you are just doing shortest path you know destination IP based shortest path routing you will always pick this path no matter how congested it is. So, an alternate way is to do what is called a label switched routing that is on every flow for example packets coming from A on this A to D path you assign some label to packets on this B to D path you assign another label to packets and you say that traffic with label 1 goes like this and traffic with label 2 goes like this. So, label switched routing so there are many protocols for this MPLS is the most popular one with labels switched routing of course is a complicated topic but the high level idea is that you can attach an extra label to a packet and use this label in order to do your forwarding you create separate forwarding tables based on this label. So, that you do not have to always do the shortest IP destination IP based forwarding you can assign these labels and then based on your load if this link is congested you move your label to here you move label 1 here you can you know shuffle around your labels you can pin different labels to different paths and you know ensure that your network is not congested and it is more optimally used. So, all of this is broadly called traffic engineering that is you can pin different flows to the same destination to different paths for better load balancing of traffic and this label switched routing also helps you recover from failures faster because you know you are no longer waiting for the IP based routing to converge. So, this is again not for every network but for large data center networks this can be used in order to efficiently use your network. Then the other concept that is being used in data center networks today is what is called software defined networking or SDN. So, until now what we have seen is every router does both the control plane that is the routing protocol as well as the forwarding and this control plane is distributed across different routers. But instead what people are designing in data centers today is they are using what is called software defined networking where you separate out the control plane the routing into a centralized controller that is there is one centralized controller and there are multiple switches in the data plane that are forwarding traffic and this controller will tell all of these switches what to do use this path do this this is your shortest path this path is better for load balancing this path is better for traffic engineering you know you can do better routing better traffic engineering recover from failures better all of that you can do better because you are using a centralized control plane and a distributed data plane. And so of course it has its own problems you cannot do one centralized control plane for the entire internet therefore this is mostly used in data center networks and you know small scale networks like this where there is a large amount of traffic and efficiency is important. So this is a new idea for how to design networks that is very different from the traditional ideas that were used in the internet. So the one other concept that is important when we study real life computer systems is the concept of private IP addresses. So there are of course there are 2 to the 32 different IP addresses IPv4 addresses possible out of all of these IPv4 addresses 2 prefixes, 2 groups of IP addresses this one and this one are reserved for use within organizations internally these are called private IP addresses. So what does that mean? These IP addresses are used only within an organization only for intra domain routing and are never announced in inter domain routing. And therefore multiple organizations can reuse the same IP addresses. In this organization also you can assign an address <IP_ADDRESS> in this organization also you can assign this address. So these are like nicknames these private IP addresses do not have to be globally unique they are only limited to one organization and announced only within that organization. So why do we use private IP addresses because you know IP addresses are getting exhausted we may not have enough IP addresses for everybody. So therefore that is one reason. The other reason is that you want to isolate the hosts in an organization. If somebody has a private IP address nobody from outside can talk to this host. Why? Because these private IP addresses are not shared with anybody it is like your secret, your secret nickname. Therefore it also gives you a certain amount of security. And if you have 2 different networks with private IP addresses you can also connect them over using VPN software virtual private network software. So suppose you are logged in your college has a private network and you want to log into your college from college network from home then you use a VPN that is a way to connect these private networks to each other over the internet. And so organizations today usually use a combination of both public and private IP addresses. Note that you cannot just live with private IP addresses. You need some public IP addresses for example for things like servers which are connected to outside client somebody outside has to send you a request send you a connection request then you need a public IP address that has to be announced via DNS and has to be known to the client. But if you are only talking to people within your organization then you don't need a public IP address you can simply use private IP addresses. It is like in your home all of you can address each other using nicknames but when somebody outside has to talk to you they have to use your publicly known name. That is the concept of public IP addresses and private IP addresses. And if there is a client inside that has to talk to an external server then also you need a temporary public IP address. Clients also need a public IP address why because you need the source address also put in your IP datagram and that has to be a public address. So temporarily IP addresses that are public IP addresses that are needed are assigned via what are called NATs or network address translator. That is if you have a client inside a network that has to talk to some other server outside and this client is using a private IP address then this network address translator or the NAT in your network will temporarily for this connection give you a public IP address and rewrite the header in your packet and on the reverse direction it will remove the public address and give you a private IP datagram. In this way this network address translators will just you know with a small number of public IP addresses they can manage large networks. So now putting all of these concepts together let us understand you know you have a client and you have a server on the internet how do they talk to each other. So this client will use DNS get the IP address of the server open a socket here write the message to the server into the socket then the OS will add all the headers the transport layer processing all of that send the packet out the packet will go through a series of IP routers and finally reach the server and how do you get to your IP router on the way you will have multiple ethernet switches or you know if ethernet is your link layer technology or some other wire or over a wireless network you will send the packet to this IP router this IP router might use another link layer technology to go to this other IP router in this way across different different links you will jump from one IP hop to the other and finally reach your server okay. So there are different layers here you have the application layer the transport layer IP layer link layer and finally the physical layer all of these working together to establish this end to end communication and of course there are many steps here many things can go wrong your connection can break at any point which is why we have a bunch of debugging tools available to us to help us debug the working of networks for example there are tools that will help you resolve a DNS name to check if DNS is the problem you can do something like ping is a special packets are sent to any IP address to see is the IP path working you can do trace route where you can actually find out if you run the trace route tool it will tell you the locations of all these IP routers along your path you can find out information about your link layer device itself using commands like if config you can find out information about all the socket communications going on using tools like net stat in this way for each layer there are separate debugging tools that will help you understand how that particular layer is working. So in this lecture I have briefly covered how IP addressing routing forwarding works and how the link layer works so I did not go into a lot of details into any of these because covering them in a lot of detail requires a complete course but I have given you enough to help you understand the end to end packet flow in a computer system and if something goes wrong how do you go about debugging this. So please try to use these tools that we have studied on your own this will help you understand these concepts better. Thank you all that is all I have for this lecture and let us continue this discussion in the next lecture.