What's up everybody, Jason here for jaskierskateshakes.com. We're giving away nine flawless random team spots away with this 2021 Bowman Chrome HTA one box break number four guys. So again, 30 total spots, everyone gets a random team they will be, we'll randomize the names and teams to the break, then at the end we'll randomize only the names and the top nine get into the flawless random team one box break. So here we go guys, let's dice rolling and do the break first, five and five, 10 times. One, two, three, four. Five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10. 10 times, five and five, 10, 10. Jason Caden on Nancy. And 10 times one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10. Astral down the raise. All right, now of course it is a filler break, so no trading, but there's gonna be three autographs in here though. Stick to what you got, but I'll give you guys a quick minute to see your teams. Also guys, Mosaic no Hado, sold a couple big teams. Most expensive teams still remaining guys is gonna be the Texans, but there's still teams like the Saints at 20, Rams at 25, Titans 34, where if we can grab those teams guys, I mean, it'd bring us down to potentially like four left. And I said, we didn't hit anything massive. And the first five boxes, Fanatics yesterday did a whole case. They got three one-on-ones. They got like a couple of golds. They got some really good autographs. So I mean, I don't know. I feel like we're missing out on a couple of nice stuff right here in that Mosaic no Hado. So seven left if you guys also want to do that. That's another break that's in single digits. All right guys, let's do the break now really quick. All right, Jefferson Quiero, which is gonna go to the brewer, Stephen P. Brian Ramos for the socks. Well, I talked to one of Tristan, and we got a blue Pedro Leon. Nice, he was actually a top prospect when this product first came out. I wonder if he still is on the pipeline. There you go. Raider has the number one prospect by an international class. Number seven on MLB.com at the time, yeah. Last one there for the Houston Astros. Jason K. Like I said, I'm not sure how far he is now, but I know he was a really big prospect when this first came out. All right. There you go. Now let's switch scenes. And again, top nine get into a flawless after. Six and a two, eight times. Good luck. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Eight times, eight times. Top nine, just missing all those twists. Sorry, buddy, but Steven, you're in. Tristan, you are in after all. Nancy, Eugene, Steven Flatt, Ron, Ryan, Gamsby, Ryan Presnell, and Chad Wright, congratulations. Boom, top nine. There you go. So again, obviously like I said, we had to do one more filler, but I mean guys, if you guys wanted to do this tonight, let's sell the next filler and we can break that tonight at some point. So here we go. That was HTA number four. Appreciate you guys. Number five is in the store, JaspysCaseBricks.com.


Commander 788 here and this is just a quick look at the 1992 headhunters. This figure was an army builder and it was part of the DEF or Drug Elimination Force subline in GI Joe. These guys were the bodyguards of Headman, the drug dealer enemy of GI Joe's DEF. Now I posted a picture of Headman on Facebook and Twitter not long ago and that figure is pretty crazy looking but whatever you think of Headman and the rest of the DEF subline this figure certainly is intriguing. It's got a lot of really interesting aspects to it and of course that black looks great. I'm still somewhat undecided on how much I like this figure but it certainly does have a lot of interesting aspects to it. It's got this kind of brown shoulder pad. The backpack is also very interesting. It has a holster that holsters his little shotgun here and the shotgun itself is not a bad accessory too. Looks pretty cool. Then he comes with this thing, this big purple rocket launcher that has a spring-loaded missile that's kind of football shaped. This unusual little missile here. This thing is huge and the figure can't actually hold it without toppling over. I'd also had a feature where it would light up when you fire it but the batteries are dead on this one. I'll have to replace the batteries. There was a lot of silliness in the DEF subline but I gotta say these guys could have been used to good effect elsewhere. I mean look at this. He has spurs on his boots. Why does he have spurs? I have no idea but just little things like that are very intriguing. This figure will eventually get a full review but I'd kind of like to review Headman first and I can tell you I'm not gonna get to Headman until at least early next year. So it'll take a little while to get to this figure for a full review but I'm looking forward to it. I definitely want to take a closer look at this one. And that was just a quick look at the Head Hunters. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did make sure you tune in on Sunday for a full vintage GI Joe Toy review. I've got a new review coming up this Sunday then I'm taking a week off. I've got more after that though so I hope to see you then. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.


178,568 COVID-19 deaths were reported from a total population of approximately 2.4 billion people over six weeks in 16 countries with high COVID-19 cases. Age and sex were associated with COVID-19 mortality, with individuals aged 65 or older having the highest mortality rate, IR equals 62.1, and men having a higher risk of death than women, IR equals 1.77. This article was offered by N. David Yanez, Noel S. Weiss, Fekendrey Romand, and others.


My name is Doug O'Keefe and I am co-producer and host of a series called Inside Leather History, a Fireside Chat. Over the course of a few years, I've been interviewing some of the big names in the leather community for historical preservation. And I've had the privilege of meeting some of the people who've really shaped our leather world. One is right here in the audience. Mom, Sandy's right here. And the purpose of these chats is to record for posterity in the leather architects of museum, the history of people who have shaped us. So what we're going to do today is videotape the actual chat, which I expect to last between 45 minutes to an hour. Then we're going to open the floor for questions. The question and answer session will not be filmed, so you can ask whatever you'd like. And I hope we're going to have a great chat today. I have a very special guest, someone I've wanted to interview now for quite a while. None other than Mary Elizabeth Boyd. Thank you, Douglas. I don't even understand why you are here, but I'm thrilled to be doing this. Let's start at the beginning. Tell us about Amelia Courthouse, Virginia, your hometown. That's really the beginning, and that's really a long time ago. It's a very small village. It's outside of Richmond, and it is sort of known for its war between the states. You notice I didn't say civil war. I'm a southern girl. The war between the states, it's sort of known for that because it's about 34 to 37 miles from Appomattox. So it was on the direct retreat. And one of the things that we like to brag about is that when the Union troops came through Amelia, they were going to burn the county records, and the county was founded in 1732. So General Custis stood in the Courthouse door and wouldn't allow them to burn the records. So the Indians may have wiped him out, but he saved our county records. And as a matter of interest, Jason's mom lives in Amelia's. Well, please tell us a little bit about your family history. You have an amazingly fascinating lineage. My family came to this country almost all of them very early, so I'm a long time resident of the United States of America. And we lived in a very hot spot area of the country at one time. I have to say I'm really proud of my mom because we were 24 miles from Prince Edward County. And anybody in this country knows that that was the first integration in the country. And my mother was a school teacher, and she was asked, are you going to go to the school system that had broken out, that was called the academy system, to keep from going to school with people of color? And she answered, no, I'm going to the public school because I believe in public schools.  And so a person that had lived in a segregated world all of her life went to the public school to teach. And I thought it was a wonderful thing. And I was so proud of the fact that when I was out in the country one day, the paper boy, who my mother had taught, delivered our paper and he threw it into the mud puddle on the side of the porch.  And my mother was so... So she said, we'll wash this off. It's okay. He doesn't understand. But when he came to collect his money, she walked to the edge of that porch and threw her money in that same... Oh, my God! My grit. Now, it's a little bit about your great-grandfather, John Mercer Brockenborough. He's got quite a clean history. And he was a Frickin' Dick general in the Civil War. And they actually, while between the states, had a plaque for him in Gettysburg. He couldn't do so well. He was one of the people that they get charged over. But anyway, my grandmother, being a broken boy, went to White House School in Richmond as a little girl. And that's kind of a fun thing, because if you've ever been to the White House of the Confederacy, she would say that they would stand on the second floor porch, which didn't have any railings. And they would say, kids, remember a little Jeffy Davis? He fell off of that porch and killed himself. Meaning enough to those children. Introduced to the leather. Introduced, I think I fell into it, was a horseman. And I think you will find a lot of people in the leather community that started with a introduction into either western horses, boots. I grew up in a day and age where western movies were a big thing. Lash LaRue was my favorite. And that's whips and black outfits and things. So that kind of gives you an idea of how it started. But I really loved my father's boots, too, when he was putting them on. And I always knew there was a stigma. And I was kind of a model and brand-o, salmoneo type of person. I always thought, even when the carnals came to town, those people with all those tattoo's and those earrings. Boy, they were so exotic, you know. And I kind of had a little thing for them. My mother was appalled. I thought it was just wonderful to talk to them and find out that this was a country girl that hadn't been exposed to those things. Well, tell us a little about the leather world that you knew when you first came out. Into it, I should say. It was always attractive. The one thing I can tell you that probably started me a little bit more than boots and a little bit more than the rodeo and all that kind of stuff was, I was an avid dancer. I loved the T-dances. And I even sponsored some of them in the D.C. area. And the D-dances were a time that everybody came out. It wasn't just the Twinkies out there dancing. It was leather people. It was everybody. And I used to dance with this guy that always wore leather pants. And he had a thing attached to his belt loop that I called a squirt. I don't even think they used that term anymore. But as he danced, and I would always dance with him, that squirt would go between my legs flogging. I thought, ooh, this is something kind of neat in here. You know, I kind of like this. What is this all about? He's a body that is a dancer. You get it straight right away when you go in. That dance floor is full. There are lots of different type of people out on that dance floor. You decide, I want to be associated with those guys over there. So let's move across this dance floor and get in with the group we want to be associated with. The group we know, the group we like, the group we want to be a part of. And a lot of that was the leather. Because the leather would come to these T-dances early in the day before they go to the D.C. Eagle. Because basically that was the name of the town in D.C. So that was kind of my first introduction. Then I lived for eight years with one of the Spartans in D.C. And I kind of lived underground at that time. Going back a little bit to your first grade years, I remember you telling me a little bit about a present you received that had very special interests. What was that? Oh yeah, I will remember this. One Christmas what I wanted Santa Claus to bring me was I wanted a cowgirl suit and boots and a hat. Well, Santa Claus exactly couldn't find boots my size. So they bought me these jean archery boots that were a little bit too big for me. I had this Dale Evans cowgirl suit that was red with white vinyl fringe on it. I thought it was the prettiest thing I ever had in my entire life going to the first grade. I put that suit on. I mean, all kids want to the first day back at school to either take what you got, or wear what you got to school. It's a common thing. You want to show everybody what you got. I came down and just pictured this. My mother was a school teacher. She said, oh dear, you cannot wear that. I said, oh, but it's so pretty. I really want to wear it. She says, you cannot wear that.  I lived in the village, I walked to school. She said, you can't. I said, mom, I have to wear it.  And indeed they did. And the boots were too big. And he was a slow girl. And there was all the high school people laughing at me. But do you think I gave a damn? I didn't care. I thought it was beautiful. And it, I believe, shaped me the rest of my life. I'm going to do what's right for me. I'm going to do what I want to do. And I walked the whole way and the whole way back and nobody was going to laugh at our old suit. To your father being a horseman. In our previous conversations, you've actually talked about a specific interest in his boots. What was that? What did that mean to you? Well, his boots were too hard to take off. I think we all, if you have a good relationship with your father, you have wonderful memories of something you did as a child or an experience you had. And he would come in from riding. He was an English saddle rider. And sometimes I would ride with him. I had a pony that we would ride together. And my pony would follow his horse. And I would ride in hunts and I would ride in trail rides with him. And when he would come in, it was hard for him to get his boots off. And so I would help him get his boots off. And because he, there weren't too many things that would ask of us as children. But one of them was to polish his boots. And I like that. A boy in this stage of my life. But I can understand how the boys enjoy the servitude of polishing boots and seeing the boots and having them for the person that you cared about. When I saw them, I thought, oh my. These Tom of Finland drawings. And you see, I'm an artist. So these Tom of Finland drawings really have a special meaning for me. I thought that Tom, in his exaggeration, all of you all don't drip when you see them. Even though we don't see a lot of Tom of Finland leather today. I grew up where anybody who wanted to be somebody, they dressed like Tom of Finland in those balls. They took a stance. They stood like those drawings. They put those glasses on. The bars just so goddamn dark, they couldn't have seen them. If their life depended, they would have fallen down if there was something not them. Because they just took a stand. Well, I think they took a stand because they couldn't see. The other drawings, the inner face, which are entirely different, are a drum from Drummer Magazine. Drum was so nasty. Drum was so dirty. His boots were always untied and coming down a little bit. You could smell him on the page. That was the visualization and the part you saw when you saw those drawings. The message that they communicated was just fabulous. You've been quoted as saying that leather is pushing the envelope. What does that mean? Well, I've sort of pushed the envelope and everything I've done off. But I do like the idea, the responsibility, the protocol, the push the envelope. And once you get it, it's not that people preach to Yucca people about Old Guard. I don't think anybody wants anybody today to say, how as a 20-year-old can I be an Old Guard? Because it is a progression of time. It is a growth. You can't miss a beat. You can't tell me that they wouldn't know not to touch the cover. With my picture that was in this booklet, I do have a movie star or whatever. How dare they show me without a cover and talking on the microphone. I'm upset about that.  But once you get the beat, you know that you would never do that to a person. I have my cover here. I'm not wearing it because I respect you that you have come for this. I earned this. The person I earned it is in me or with me. I had to make it my own. I put the chain across the top. You don't think he'd ever put all this guardie goo on it? Well, I'm a guardie goo. And so therefore that's my form of leather. And I had to make it mine. Because when it was his, every time I wore it, it went a little bit this way, a little bit that way, which wasn't too cool. It was like he was correcting me. This is mine. Don't quite wear it that way. And I promise you of something else, I carry this with me when I travel. I'm not checking this. I'm incapable of earning a cover from somebody. And this is mine and it will be running until I die. But I am honoring you by putting it under my arm today and having it here. But whenever I'm doing something of importance, my cover is going to be with me. This interview needed my cover because this tells you who I am. And that's something that is in my protocol of my day and my age. What one leather activity most intrigued you or shocked you upon first exposure? The shock? I'm not shocked at very many things, things I disapprove of, but things come to mind. One of them in IML many years ago when it was still in the Congress hotel and everybody gathered in the lobby. Wonderful, wonderful days. I'm sad that some of you didn't work that out for those days. There was a, in fact we were talking about this the other day, there was an old master, no a young master that came in who had probably called himself a master. I'm not sure he deserved that title. He had two slaves, they were hooked up and he brought them right in the middle of probably 200 people in that lobby every night, room to their knees. He called them to put their hands out as they did. He put out his scar in both of their hands and the colds went all the way into their skin, burned very deeply and you could see they were in a great deal of pain and there were several masters in the room and they looked across the room. They said, masters face to the wall and Mary Elizabeth and we turned their faces to the wall. We don't approve of this.  You don't do it as a show in front of other people. It's inappropriate.  So that was shocking. Sometimes in my early days when I would go to IML people would come in with faces and it was a movie about that time. We used to call it Silence of the Lamb People. We would give names to these people or a little extreme in the community when I'm almost Rommel with these boys. And any of you who have been to IML in the early days probably know exactly who I'm talking about when he came in with his little group. I don't know that they were shocking but it was a different thing with my leather part of it. The pride in the friends I have in level that I've made I would say that's the best. Here, here.  One time we were in San Francisco and it was drummer days and after the contest we went out to eat and there wasn't anything open and they sent us to the hamburger merries and they weren't really open for food. There were a lot of people in line and they told us to go over to this other place and this was Mike Zool to ask Mike about it. He'll know. And we went to this Chinese restaurant and we came in and we noticed everybody was watching us. We had full leather on. Irwin who used to do the voiceovers for drummer many years ago had this big voice that was just fabulous. And he was talking and there were a couple of people there that had in their mouths and big clunkers for their noses and the restaurant was convinced we were the village people. We're not the village people. First lady of leather, tell us how do you attain that? What does it mean? Well it's not a title, earned title. It was given to me and it was a person from Washington, D.C. that was mid-Atlantic, I believe Troy was mid-Atlantic drummer. You know I forget when, I was on the drummer Bullwood and I forget when drummer and leather served exactly the year, but I think he was drummer and he was competing in San Francisco. Well it would be drummer then. And he worked at the White House for 17 years doing the Blue Room Christmas tree. So everybody would laugh about that that I was just a volunteer there but my friends worked in the flower shop they hadn't got me down doing these trees. And so Troy said, Mary Elizabeth, you're the first lady of leather. Well it just caught. And it comes home to bite me because one time someone said is it because you're the oldest woman You helped the first claw nation party. Tell us about that. Well I came to claw and it dawned on me that Dennis and Bob Miller were working so hard and all the volunteers they had that they kept talking about it being bigger and bigger and bigger every year. Well you physically, it gets to a point and I think Mama Ryan Hart will understand this too that when you give fundraisers and things and you want them to become bigger how can you do it bigger? It becomes almost a physical impossibility of how you can make something bigger. And so it dawned on me that if they were doing charities and we were doing charities national why could the people go home and give a party where the money would go to claw? I think Cleveland put a party on but I could do one in Washington D.C. and my form has always been of doing a garden party in my home. And so I did a garden party. I cooked all the food and they had a full dinner. Dennis sent me some auction items. I collected auction items and I have to say the people by the will of God came to that party. I charged them $20 a ticket which wasn't anything for a the dinner of the type we gave them. We gave them irons of beef, we gave them salmon, we gave them anything, open bar, everything we had beautiful things in then we had the auction. People gave things, people brought things. Many people obviously did not give money at all. Many people gave $50 or $100 checks. Some of them were not even people in the leather community just came to support this. I never even really told them except, you know they do charity work. I never really told them where the money was going because in that day and age it wasn't really carefully delineated and you weren't able to do charity and I would not tell them how much I had raised but I was so ballsy that I stood up in the dinner and challenged everybody there to be what I could raise that I was going to have a party I challenged you to raise more money than I did and we raised $3,000. Well that was a lot. I didn't think about it and for a long time it was the highest they'd ever had come in and it was out of home it was not at a bar and so I'm very proud of that because it really started something but I did say to Bob and Dennis you cannot ask people in other towns to raise money unless they have a piece of the action maybe you need to give to name your charity in your town when you give your party and it was a really fun, fun thing I had a great time doing and they've just taken my picture with all of the guys of for the posters the call posters Well how have you seen claw evolve over the years from your pudding? It's a lot more attendance than it was there really were more auction items so years ago you that were here many years ago know they were huge amount of things and the things that bought big bucks were some very named people in the community and Jim and people like that that died and would donate their things and people really wanted them and they would pay thousands of dollars to own a piece of those people's leather so I've seen it that there are not so many auction items I've seen more people they didn't have as many workshops in fact they were having trouble they needed workshops they needed because of their schedule C status they needed workshops to be able to be in that category and so I've seen it change a lot I think that my suggestion to them and please take this the right way because they work so hard and they really do a lot and as anything that gets bigger and bigger and bigger M.A.L. has changed remarkably because of the number of people the centaurs used to cook all the meals can you imagine them cooking all the meals now it would be a physical impossibility they used to cook all those breakfasts and things it gets to a point you can't do some of the same things you used to do surely because of numbers and because of the cost of buses and the cost of things that as you are involved in my suggestion to them would be it is a charity thing it has been billed as that it has been billed as no contest and I believe that if we are going to have workshops and things like that if you have a package you should be able to take part in everything if you don't have a package maybe there should be a little charge because it is a charity thing and maybe there should be more workshops on how do you raise money in your community who are the people that have been successful what are the successful events and maybe even an award with people bringing information and pictures about that successful events maybe that would be a wonderful thing to do in the guise of this is charity shifting gears a little bit how do you see the role of women in the leather community when I came into the leather community women didn't have a role and I would hate to tell you how many women come up to me at events and ask me why are you accepted how did you get by how can I be accepted I can't tell them how because I don't know I'm kind of a horse of a different color and it's really hard for me to tell them how I never had any resistance never that's kind of a hard thing for me to address I think that women I think that anybody that has felt alienated from a group it is a matter of time it is a matter of interaction I am kind of surprised when I judged international Mr. Death Leather some years ago I was very surprised when some of the women did not want to be called gay they wanted other terms terms that I felt could be derogatory to a gay person queer they want to be called queer folks I was very surprised at that and I said where does that come from well I think it was an evolution I think everything is an evolution of being included finding your own way I think that all things that change need evolutions and many things happen in those evolutions I think that women definitely have a place I think that women are a pride sort I think they are an interesting sort I think that even men who don't want to associate with women when they associate rather find them interesting I can say for myself when I was first introduced to drummer when drummer was still owned by Amsterdam and the boys would come over here they didn't want to pretend I existed if I came into the room they would look at me kidding you and I thought they're going to like me whether they don't like me or not I'm going to make them see that I have as much strength as they do I have as much respect for them and I would like for them to respect me and those men ended up by eating dinner in my house in their bull leather and it was so sexy because they ended up being rats with the things they did with drummer and anybody that was there knows the ratty things that happened I don't need to go into that but in that time you know about me and I'm a woman and I see it and they sit down and they stretch that boot leg out of the floor it's worth those boots Hitler in the Third Reich but it's like the Third Reich is sitting there with those boots when they do those boots stretched out and they stay on straight they sit straight and having the stashes they set them on stashes I can tell you any way, shape or form I can tell you the way he sits in the child I can tell you the way he sits in the stage because that's part of him and that's the sexy part of him Where do I go after that? Tell us a little bit about your professional work What is healing design? Sign all my life I'm an artist inside of me always painting drawing and things as a child took a job with the it was Veterans Administration in that day and age it's Veterans Affairs now all of a sudden I happen to be sitting in an office when all the medical centers begin to rise up across the United States because the World War II veteran was going to peak in our facilities and we needed to build new facilities I can truthfully tell you and it is a source of pride with me I'm not bragging but it's a source of pride with me I have worked on more replacement hospitals nursing homes and medical facilities than any designer in the world and it will always be that and all of a sudden as I was sitting in the right place at the right time and this was all happening I began to know there was not one product to go into a facility that was called a healthcare product now the world is full of them but there wasn't one flooring there wasn't one anything that was listed as that and as I began to dig and find flooring that could be maintained flooring that were I was really the steward of your money your money pays for those VA hospitals taxes paid my job I began to invent colors that were better products that were better and I would tell anybody that would come in you know you're paying my salary I can tell you what we need and they started developing these products and all of a sudden the light bulb went out you know we shouldn't just be picking something that's pretty or something that works or something that's cheap doing healing design and I started talking about it I talked all over at every healthcare function they had about healing design hospital army runs on its stomach a hospital runs on its floors what will perform what will be what will tell you an Alzheimer's patient don't go through that door because they were wondering what will keep a person from having a hesitation and falling hesitation is a fall a fall is a broken hip a broken hip is death so I mean it began to dawn on me and as it dawned on me it began to dawn on other people too but I was one of the early ones that did that I brought the ASID which is American Society of Interior Designers I am in the healthcare I was the first one to go in the healthcare hall of fame and I'm a fellow in ASID and I'm very proud of that oh yeah when I was doing the White House Christmas trees they come rolling in there first north of Stuart comes rolling in there and they tell me you don't ever speak for the White House you are serving at the capacity of the people you're serving by and you never say anything the first lady talks or first folks person talks you don't talk so they tell me well Stuart's going to interview in here and we want you to be the person she interviews and I said I don't feel comfortable when you tell me not to say these things although you can do it well the first thing, just don't talk about the house the first question she asked me was about the buildings in this room it was blown around with the big tree and other statistics that I knew I wasn't supposed to say and she asked me why are the windows dirty well you know I shouldn't be talking about the White House about that I mean I'm only a volunteer working my year and I had done it a long time and I knew enough not to do that but the business with Martha Stewart I shouldn't but the interview on Good Morning America with Charles Garalt was you know how they do that every year with the things if you come to see me I've got a copy of it what's the biggest misconception that people I heard Sadie say this or someone say this in Sandy's interview that I saw for the first time today they think I'm unapproachable people will say I've always wanted to talk to you but you've always got people around you and I never felt you could come in well smack your face with me so bad person in the whole damn world if you haven't got fortitude enough to get through those people then you shouldn't be talking to me how do you see the future of the letter E you know I don't know no one knows that I think it again is going through that push and pull the same thing I talked about with the women I think that all of these fetishes is very hard for me I want them to have a place I want them to be there I want to enjoy them and when Alex was the ABW Alex opened my eyes to a lot of things because Alex had such a wonderful thinking about fetishes and what he was into and Alex is so good looking and he's so wonderful in those fetishes that I really saw a lot more it's damn hard when I see a bunch of dog heads coming in and comparing that with Thomas Fiblin stuff hard for me all I can think about is my grandchildren would love those dog heads hard for me I think that it is evolving into a more acceptance as everything is becoming a little bit more acceptance I think it's going to still be groups people that are more into the same things which it is kind of now I think that like myself and other people have heard me say this really just shout us in the passing of time when you want to know about the days we lived in my god if you had ever been there it would Sandy talked about this too we just cannot tell you our lives were changed completely by AIDS our roller-dexes were wiped out our friends were wiped out we would go to funerals we were crying for the person that was dead there we were crying for all of them we had lost and you realize that it gave you a heavy heart it gave you the same heavy heart that you see on the news today turn the damn thing off you can't afford to have those heavy hearts you need to move on and I'm so happy that people have come into the leather community and introduced new things and understand it I'm so happy for it I'm so happy of the joy and the passion they have of what they are into but I do think you're going to see a lot more things to come and then I think you're going to see a swing back I think all of this business with master Mike and the workshops are trying to show people some of the things that were their passions and were their joys I don't think they're going to come out exactly the way that they are being taught I think they're going to come out in a little bit different dimension when you build your own dildos here I don't think they're going to look like the ones that Tom and those guys had I think they're going to have little twists to them I think they're going to be maybe puppy penises or along the way I mean I don't really know it was always a fool but Sansan says they know everything and I'm not a fool and I certainly don't know what it's going to be I'm waiting to see I'm always looking around the corner when you judge a contest and you see a group of contestants there before you ask of them and what qualities do you look for in a successful contestant I want to know why they're doing it that's the first thing and are you prepared to represent who you are standing there to do also want to get into their head any way I can get into their head because I can't pick the right person I think the person looks right on the outside but if they don't have the right inside they shouldn't be doing that contest and you'll find they will disappear and you'll never see them again or they won't do the things they're supposed to be doing so that's kind of it's like a guy I judged and he couldn't understand he was the best one on the stage pretty good answers thank for bar title and he playing along which the interview is always 60% most of the contests said in the interview that he didn't expect to be in that city anymore that he had bought a house somewhere else and he didn't know when he'd be back do you really think I was going to give him that bar title he had sunk himself also in a couple men of color here and one year I was sitting in the cell block and Verne Stewart was sitting next to me and a gentleman was asked on the stage at the cell block which onyx started in Chicago for any of you that don't know this and he was playing along asked how can we get more men of color into contests and in the community one of us I will go to the colored bars do you really think that man was going to win that cell block title that was the year I won you look and being where I'm from you stand on that stage and I've seen this in many contests you've got dirty boots you're going diamond you don't have respect for me you have a Ralph Lauren and you think I don't see the mistakes I see a friend from D.C. Eagle that came up without any socks and tied up wing tips for his formal leather now come on I mean so I mean a little common sense but I would tell you one thing in my area this is not really the question but anybody that out there if you can mentor your contestants they don't see themselves those ways do you know how many terrific contestants we see at IML that don't have a ghost of a chance because nobody told them nobody told them not to do that what their good side was when Daryl was running for one of his titles and Daryl was going to rock at IML I said what have you done he said I can't think of anything then he thought and he said I was in Oliver when I was a little boy and we talked a lot about that I mean you need to mentor those people to get them to pull things out of them and to show them what their best sides are because they need to show that it doesn't mean you're changing them from who they are because I would never want anybody to be a contestant and say things that they don't really believe or that they are not but you need to mentor them along that way so in conclusion we have a lot of title holders here at Claw that are going on to IML this year what advice can you offer them go to the forum next that I'm going to be know yourself if you know yourself talk to yourself in the mirror know yourself the one thing that I would say to anybody and I encourage people every day in my life to run for contest you'll never know yourself like you know yourself after you've run for a contest you'll never meet as many people as you meet at a contest but you have to know yourself know why you're doing it know what it's for know what you have to offer know what the title the title has to offer for you but also don't stand up and say with this title I could do this you could do it without the title it just gives you a good it greases the slide for you it does grease the slide though just know what unique thing you have and you may have to pull that up out of yourself what uniqueness about you that you have before but it would be to your benefit to pull it up anyway Mary Elizabeth Boyd I would like to thank you for a wonderful chance thank you very much


I'm Francesca Pazquez, I'm the Director of the Cancer Dependency Map in the cancer program at the Brody Institute. Cancer Demap is an effort to identify systematically all the cancer vulnerabilities so that we can use this information to identify new therapeutic strategies for cancer patients. We create large scale data sets and we make this data available for the scientific community so the data can be utilized to identify new therapeutic opportunities. I'm Director of the Cancer Dependency Map. I work with the very talented team of project managers, experimental scientists, computational scientists but together we build this large scale resource that we name Cancer Dependency Map which is a preclinical resource to help accelerate physician cancer medicine. Some of the main challenges is that this is a very large scale project so it requires a lot of resources it requires to do work in a very systematic way. We have to build computational tools, we have to build software tools we have many many components so we need project management, we need software engineers we need computational biologists so it's a really truly multidisciplinary effort it requires putting together a team with different expertise to help with different aspects of the project. I think working with a multidisciplinary team is fascinating I think it's critical for projects like this where they have all these multiple components yet each team has a different area of expertise and they have their own language but I think we manage everybody to work together and learn from each other in my case my background is in experimental science, I'm a cancer researcher my background is in cancer biology but I feel now I can speak with the computational biologists with the software engineers and kind of we can understand each other it's a huge learning opportunity for everyone involved. International collaboration is key, again the data, we make the data available but everyone around the world is using the data in very creative ways I'm always surprised of how many use cases people find for them in very creative ways, different ways and I think that's key these are very large scale data sets and they can be exploited in so many different ways that it would not be possible if we were just doing it ourselves I think having this great collaboration is critical in addition other people are also generating data the space is huge, other groups are generating data that then we can bring together for example to our portal and enrich even further this resource so I'm excited for everyone to either use the data or contribute to the data whether our models, data sets, computational methods, software tools etc we have a lot of work to do and I'm excited to discuss some of this here in this setting in the next two days there's a lot of different aspects of the project that could be expanded from developing more models, screening more models using different types of perturbation, many different aspects of the project that can be expanded and we are looking forward to continue to develop them and make it even more powerful in the future


People say to me, you've got the best job in the world. What I love is all the fish that we sell on our scales are from Freshwater's locally called in South Australia. I truly believe that this is the best seafood in the world. Comes to our market, the buyers purchase that, go straight back to their shop, processed and generally even within 24 hours of that fish being caught. I believe South Australia has the best clean fish because our waters are kept so clean. It's well regulated, we have two gold systems, we've still got fish that we can catch. If you want the best seafood caught in the world, this is the place that you need to come and get it.


Diolch yn fawr. Mae ystod y digwydd iawn yn nodiadol. Diolch yn fawr i'r defnyddio o'r Lord Amnoly Gweithreth ynglyn nhw. Yr ysdynnu hon mewn cyntemi o esllou rheslwyddoedd y ddigwydd siaradau Raddeol arteecol yr Alun Cychllwynt ynglyn nhw. Fel rhydd yn gweithio,Jack Tamsen yn unig yn ei ffarladau. A hynny ynglyn sittingwynt yn cymdeimlu i'r unig yn ystod, yn ôl i'r buddau i discussiona oedd yn y Llywodraeth i Llywodraeth. In a world where divisions often lead to violence and death, we all seek ways of building bridges between us, no matter how large the perceived gulfs. It may have been this very Scottish tradition to bridge to the unknown that led me to the USA six years ago. Having just completed my PhD at Glasgow University, I was ready for a challenge and crossed the pond. The experience made me realise a lot more. Building bridges is a difficult business. Critical enquiry, such as we do in the academy, may lead to stronger bridges, but it can also make obvious the option of leaving a bridge well enough alone. It took me six years to realise that America was not the place I wanted to grow old as an academic. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy living there, but there came a point where I just could not bear being too far from Scotland. For the last six years, I have watched First Minister's questions. Being an academic, I've thought about these things a little too much. Reflecting on this room's structure, I see a semi-circle of unity. A bridge, you might say, that brings together all the MSPs of this chamber, yet they are far from united. Each party contributes to the glorious colours of the Scottish Parliament, but at the end of the day each holds its own convictions. As an ethnically Pakistani Muslim, I hold the conviction that Islam is the correct path to God for me, but I understand that this particular bridge, a religious bridge, is not for everyone. I've come to rejoice in this predicament of our colours. The impulse must always be for constructing peaceful bridges between people, but surely that cannot mean losing sight of our own convictions. That is indeed the Scottish and the Pakistani way for me. The path of critical inquiry, those difficult questions that trouble even the existence of God, are the very foundations of the way we think and connect as Scots. A way of thinking that builds upon our Scottish Enlightenment giants who taught us to build bridges but to hold strong to our convictions, even if they mark certain bridges as clearly outside our own individual paths. What's common to us all is that we have no use for flimsy connections. When superficial bridges are built on platitudes and politically correct statements, they are of no use to humans or God. God bless Scotland.


Boy, this is a great group. I have to say, about the most exciting things that I've taken part in in the long times and once around this, it seems to me that we have a couple of opportunities and a couple of challenges that surprisingly become easier when we do them together as opposed to what we do separately. So on the one hand, Harvard, like all institutions at this moment, needs to become much more initial, much more savvy internally in all of our operations. And at the same time, we don't seem to have the people to make that happen. All of you know something about that. And students, I think, have an opportunity and a challenge to develop a way to display expertise in the digital world. And it's not always a great way to be able to do that, as I hope my 21-year-old write her resume. And all the things that are formal in her life don't even register the things that she really can do because she's a digital native. And so that's problem two, is how can an emerging generation demonstrate the competencies that people have and also get more competencies in that story? And the last one is, I just think that we have possibilities here that are unmanaging about how to reinvent knowledge, how to reinvent learning, how to reinvent sharing learning. So I'm very excited about matching and about bringing together the challenges that may exist or that people want to actually pose with people who want to actually get to work on it. Hands on, make it happen. So thank you all for your interest. I think typically those who have worked very hard all summer to make this event and think it will all happen. And anything that I can do to help, I'm eager to do so because I'm not a digital native and I'm trying to become one. So thank you all. This is exciting.


not have heard about strategic lawsuits against public participation, or shortly called SLAP. It's something in the US that's quite common in Europe. Until now, it was rather uncommon, and it's getting more popular. Popple is probably the wrong word, but it's getting more used. Let's put it that way. I'm not the expert, but fortunately, we have an expert on stage. So please give a very warm welcome to Naomi Colvin in taking actions against SLAPs in Europe. Thank you very much. Hello, MCH, and thank you for taking some time out of an incredibly sunny and lovely Saturday afternoon to hear about nuisance lawsuits of all things. My name's Naomi Colvin. I work for an NGO called Blueprint for Free Speech. As a colleague just pointed out to me, we do all kinds of different stuff, and sometimes it's difficult to summarize exactly what we do, but we have lots of projects running across advocacy and campaigns and research and policy work, and we also do some software development as well, and you may well be hearing a little bit more about that towards the end of this talk. But to start off, I'm going to talk about one of the things that we're focusing on a lot right now, which are SLAPs, nuisance lawsuits, and different strategies for limiting their impact on public debate. So, but we should start from the beginning, right? And how do you spot a SLAP? And that's one kind of SLAP. It's not exactly what we, it's a cat's lap. It's not exactly what we're talking about, but there's a slight sort of power imbalance between the big cat and the small cat, and it's not totally irrelevant to where we are. SLAPs stand for strategic lawsuits against public participation. It's a term with its origin in the US, but we've been seeing a lot more of them globally, and what does it mean? Lawsuits don't come to you marked with SLAP, so it's more about finding different characteristics that mark particular lawsuits, particular kinds of legal threats out as SLAPs, and what do they have in common? They have in common a power imbalance between a very powerful, wealthy entity and a much weaker entity, often an individual or maybe an independent media company, somebody or something who is contributing to public debate and an important way. It's a legal maneuver which uses the costs inherent in the legal system against its target. So, if you're targeted with a SLAP, it's gonna cost you a lot in money, time, stress, the opportunity costs of what you'd rather be doing, which is getting on with your work or getting on with your activism, getting on with your writing, which you can't do because you've got to dedicate all this time and effort to fighting this ridiculous lawsuit, which may be hopeless to begin with, but it takes so long in order for it to get dismissed that it costs you a lot in the meantime. So, how do you spot a SLAP if you're targeted with it? And there's a real playbook for this, particularly if you're a journalist and what happens typically is that you're writing a story about corruption or a very wealthy person or a very wealthy company that's doing something a bit dodgy and you've done everything you're supposed to and then you contact the subject of your article for comment like you should do and you've got as a responsible journalist, you've got to give them a right of reply and what you can't get back is not an answer to your questions. It's a massively long letter with a very scary letterhead maybe for some very expensive legal company possibly based in London, who knows. With pages and pages of pages, a sort of nonsense allegations ranging from defamation to GDPR claims, GDPR claims great, really useful for this because everybody finds it totally confusing and it's very complicated and nobody feels equipped to respond to that without advice, asking you for all kinds of information saying, oh well, not talking about the allegations but you've been misusing my personal data and I want to see a thorough accounting of how you've used my personal data in the writing of this article, just total wasting your time, privacy claims, harassment claims, all of this is very common grounds for slaps. So if you get a really long letter with a whole shopping list of allegations and claims and demands for information, that's a sign that you might be facing a slap. If that letter comes with really determined threats like this is confidential, you must not tell anybody about this letter, this may not be published, that's another sign of a slap and actually this is one of the reasons why until relatively recently, we've been really lacking a lot of hard information about how serious the slap's problem is because people sometimes take these threats and if they take them seriously to the effect that they self-censor as a result of receiving these kinds of threats, you can bet your life they don't want to talk about it. So it's really hard to work out, it has been really hard to work out how widespread this problem is. So threats to keep things secret, definitely a sign of a slap. Really extortionate demands or threats that we're gonna sue you for this much money like totally out of proportion to what we're talking about, that's another common sign of a slap. And this isn't true of all slaps, right? But sometimes that scary letterhead legal company might be based in a different jurisdiction from you. You might be getting a threat from written by a law firm based in London or Paris and you're like, how the hell can I fight this? I have to like just think about it's really hard and I have to recruit lawyers in a different jurisdiction. Maybe they speak a different language to me. I'm totally unfamiliar with how the legal system works in that country. Makes it even harder, right? And much and really raises the level of threat and raises the level of challenge and nuisance in dealing with it. That's a sign of a slap. And another giveaway sign of a slap.  They're threatening you personally.  And nobody's gonna come and defend you because we know you've got no backup. You have to do it all by yourself. If they're trying to pick you off personally, trying to separate you off from an organization you may be associated with. If they're trying to make it as maximally unfair as possible. Hey, that's another sign of a slap. One of the characteristic signs. So who is getting slapped at the moment? As I've said, we've actually been lacking a lot of information on this until recently. There's been a bunch of good research done on strangely enough in slaps in the majority world and those initiated by big countries, particularly against environmental activists. A lot of those cases reach courts in various jurisdictions, so there's a record to follow. The impact of slaps on journalists or where threatening letters themselves have been effective is much more difficult to measure. There has been some work done on it recently. So in a report published in November 2020, a group called the Foreign Policy Center surveyed investigative journalists, international journalists, people who really specialized in writing on corruption. Less than 100 of them, so a relatively small sample, but you know, best we could do just to get an indication of it. And that report found that three quarters of those surveyed had received a legal threat as a result of their work. So it's almost routine if you're writing on particular issues. And furthermore and even more worrying, half of those who had received a threat said that it had affected their work in some way. They now went about their work in a different way, maybe keeping more notes as you're going along so you have something to respond with as a result of receiving those legal threats. More than that, we know that activists and campaigners are the subject of slaps. Activists get sued sometimes by the companies that their activism concerns, particularly environmental activists, we're seeing more and more the use of criminal charges as well, against activists and tightening of the criminal law against assembly and protests, which quote unquote, disrupt. So, you know, and that's part of what I think is a wider problem that we're seeing more and more of Europe, which I'll call government slaps, where the authorities are initiating nuisance lawsuits against ordinary citizens who are exercising their democratic rights, invariably rights to assembly and rights of expression. Poland is a pretty extreme example of that at the moment where, and I'll talk a bit more in detail about that, the moment where we've seen a two-pronged attack of really, like, of defamation suits against people who are visible in the public domain or speaking out online, like famous historians getting sued for defamation, for being critical of the government, on being sued either by the government or by sort of para-government entities which are quite close to the government and also an epidemic of misdemeanor charges against ordinary citizens who are out on the streets demonstrating, to try and isolate, to try and intimidate, to try and dissuade people from exercising their democratic rights. Those are also slaps. So why are we talking about this now? There has been a massive growth in the use of slaps over the past five or six years in Europe. There has been a survey of all the slap cases which make it to courts, which, as I've said, is a small section of the true problem because it doesn't include slaps which don't, you know, instances where the legal letters themselves are effective, but based on slaps which have made it to court, we know that there's been a, you know, sort of a five-fold increase in the number of slaps since 2016, 2017. That's within the EU and the larger Council of Europe area. So, you know, and if you think about it, it's obvious why this has happened because once it's been effective in one case, the legal firms which specialize in initiating these suits and advise their clients to initiate these suits will say, well, this worked for this client. I'll advise my next client to give it a go. They're sharing information. They're sharing notes. They're launching more cases. Another big reason why this has become a focus for policymakers in the European Union recently is the fallout from Daphne Krakowana-Galizzi's assassination. Of course, it's nearly five years since that happened unless we forget those who are ultimately responsible have still yet to be prosecuted. It's a disgrace within our geographic region. But at the time of her death, Daphne was facing over 40 lawsuits, slaps, defamation suits, which by all accounts was taking up a great deal of her time by that point, almost a full-time job in itself, thanks to the peculiarities of Maltese law, those suits were actually inherited by her family after she was murdered. And sort of the disgust at that has definitely furthered and sort of helped motivate civil society to organise and press for changes on the European level. There's a group called Coalition Against Slaps in Europe, CASE, which Blueprint is a member of, and that movement has shown some, has had some success. The European Commission has just published some draft proposals. On the side of government slaps, the fact that COVID introduced some obviously justified temporary restrictions on assembly that's been exploited by governments who wanted to clamp down on protest, and we've seen a lot more of that. And finally, the invasion of Ukraine has meant that even in pretty slap-friendly jurisdictions of which the UK is probably the primary offender, taking oligarch money to launder managed reputations is no longer the respectable business it used to be. So actually, just as I was on my way out to come to this conference, the UK government published some anti-slap proposals of its own fairly miraculously. So along with Daphne, there have been some other recent really egregious slap cases. I'm not saying these are the most important ones, but these are the ones which, if you like, policy makers have taken account of, partly because we're talking about Russia, partly because we're talking about journalists, like from established organisations, but it is important. So on this slide, Catherine Belton, former FT journalist, author of Putin's People, a book about the milieu around Putin and how he came to where he is. It's published by Harper Collins, writes at the one-year deadline for initiating a defamation case. She was the subject, she and Harper Collins were the subject of a major suit from a whole panoply, actually, of Russian oligarchs, like a whole group of them. And she was sued not just in London, but also in Australia. Harper Collins. Now, some of those allegations were later dropped and the case was settled, but it's very easy to see that if you're a publisher that doesn't have quite the clout and the resources of Harper Collins, you might not want to publish a book like that because you won't be able to afford to do it. Not dissimilar, Tom Burgess, another FT journalist, author of Cleptopia, was sued by an entity called the Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation, a highly, highly litigious holding company with some Asher Pajani oligarchs behind it that was thrown out in London's High Court in a very entertaining ruling where the judge said, well, it's funny that you've not sued about X, Y, Z in Tom Burgess' books, which also sounds quite critical of you and just sort of reiterated everything the book had been saying, basically. But ENRC also in London sued the Sirius Fraud Office, which is the agency that was investigating them for their activities. So that didn't, I think that had an impact and certainly didn't endear them to elements of the British government. And then there's also a picture there of Carol Cadwalada, freelance journalist, most associated with writing for the observer. She probably know. She did a bunch of reporting on Cambridge Analytica and the use of data during the US presidential election and then during the 2016 Brexit referendum. In the UK, she was sued by one of the major funders of the pro-Brexit campaign in the UK. And what is significant about that case is that she wasn't sued for anything she had written at the observer. She was sued by something she wrote on her personal Twitter account and something she said during a TED talk. Two instances where she had no institutional support from the observer at all. And the Guardian Observer have a pretty hot legal department. And in these situations, it's not that, say, the paper wouldn't want to support her. It's like their insurance wouldn't cover it. So she was sued in a way that would make, that would exacerbate the power disparities as much as possible. And that abuse is a telltale sign of a stab. As I said, there is a wider world of slaps out there. There's a lot of new and growing obstacles to public participation in Europe. Poland presents a pretty extreme case. Since 2017, the government there has basically tried to outlaw particular debates as part of public conversation generally. One of the key observers there has discriminatory legalism, i.e. the laws are used against people who the government doesn't like only. Again, that's very close to the concept of lawfare, really. VIP and economy class versions. So if you're someone with a well-known public voice speaking online, you're at risk of being sued for defamation.  These things were formerly not really used at all. We've seen it really grow since 2017. And it's only really mutual aid amongst Polish activists, which has really kept things going there, because it's extremely isolating. Because most of the people who are being hit by these misdemeanor charges have never been targeted by their government before. And it's a very isolating experience if you have no one to speak to. So notwithstanding that we all know that the Polish justice system has come under pressure over the past few years, there has courts have been admirably independent in the way they've dealt with a lot of these misdemeanor charges. But obviously, the impact of being targeted in itself is a significant obstacle to further participation. And a lot of people have really left activism entirely. The wide world of lawfare, I think, if you're looking beyond Europe, then big multinationals trying to get environmental activists to shut up is a real signature type of slap that we see all over the place. And we have these in Europe as well. One where NGO based in Munich was being sued by an Italian politician because they talked about the use of pesticides in South Tyrol has only just been settled. And that took, you know, it's good that it was dismissed, but it took four or five years to get there, which is a significant diversion of time and energy, which could be better spent on the issues we care about. So slaps are a complex problem, and it should be obvious from what I said that there are different kinds of slaps impacting different kinds of people. It's quite easy to reduce to just journalists, but it's not just journalists. So we're looking at a few different ways of limiting managing the problem. So there are definitely legal mechanisms, the introduction of legal mechanisms that would help limit the impact of slaps. So typically we're looking at things like introduce a mechanism so that cases which bear the hallmark of slaps, say they've been preceded by a lot of the angry legal letters that I've been talking about with nonsense claims, so they can go to a judge really quickly and the judge can say, this looks abusive, let's get rid of it before it starts costing everyone serious money. And then we could also do with cost regulations, which mean that there's an incentive for the people who initiate slaps not to do it because they could be landed with the cost. That's not the case at the moment. Another side of the problem is training and professional standards. There is a community of lawyers, particularly lawyers based in London, who have been involved in, you know, who specialize in reputation management and initiate a lot of these cases. One of the things that has to happen is dealing with professional associations, trying to change internal ethical standards and, you know, on a professional standards route, make it culturally, socially, professionally, unacceptable to be running these kinds of cases and recommending them to your clients. Another thing, so about 10% of slap cases, we think, the ones that come to court, are have a cross-jurisdictional element. Either they're initiated in a different country or maybe the plaintiff is in a different country or maybe they're forum shopping to start a case in London because the cost implications are higher and then, you know, it's more dissuasive, it's more frightening. So another thing that can happen is not enforcing orders that come out of slap cases and other jurisdictions. They're saying, well, you can say that, but we're not going to enforce the cost order. That's another thing that can happen. And if you like, actually, this is slightly hard to find, you know, positive outcomes from Brexit, but this is part of the Brexit dividend, frankly, because it's much easier now for the EU to say, we're not gonna enforce that order from London. In fact, the UK has not been allowed to rejoin the Lugano Convention, which is one of the agreements which makes orders in various European countries automatically applying others. So that's something that's happening. There are a couple more difficult things which really should be tackled, but a bit more difficult, I think realistically. One is reforming laws in national jurisdictions which can easily be exploited. Criminal defamation is sort of a pervenual problem here, and freedom of expression organisations have been calling on particularly European countries to get rid of criminal defamation laws for decades, but that still needs to happen. Are there easily exploitable laws? Yeah, and the same thing, like getting repressive governments to stop harassing activists, that would be good, a little bit more difficult. Trying to stop new repressive laws being passed which make activists' life more difficult. That would be optimal, tricky. Probably. There are some moves which are under discussion. As I mentioned, the European Commission at the end of April unveiled an anti-slap package which includes a draft directive and a recommendation, rather predictably, and partly because the EU, it's, there's only so much the EU can do when it comes to member states, domestic legal systems. A lot of the really difficult stuff is in the recommendation, rather than the draft directive, so anything that could potentially become law, but the draft directive will have an impact if it makes it through the legislative process without too much, too many problems, will have a real impact on cross-border cases, not just cases from jurisdictions like the EU, but also EU cross-border cases. And actually one of the interesting and innovative things in what the Commission is proposing is that they are using quite a broad sense of cross-border, which doesn't necessarily mean people are in different countries, but if the public interest in more than one country is implicated in a slap, then that should be considered a cross-border slap and something could be done about it.  Partly, I think this is, it's hard to see how this would have happened without the wave of sanctions, which has followed the invasion of Ukraine. I've not read the UK proposals in detail because they literally were unveiled this week, but the reaction seems to have been pretty positive and again it introduces a mechanism for early dismissal of cases with cases which bear slap-like elements. So we'll see how that goes. And there's some other useful stuff that can be used against slaps. Before talking about slaps, Blueprint was quite involved in the passage of another EU directive to protect whistleblowers and there are elements of that which are pretty relevant to slaps as well. So retaliation against a whistleblower, as long as they qualify under the directive, is banned. So that's pretty helpful. There are still some countries in the EU which haven't implemented the directive and they're well overdue in doing so, but it already exists here, for instance. So, where do we fit in? So Blueprint is running a project called PatFox, pioneering anti-slap training for freedom of expression and this is really a pioneering project. We're doing something which hasn't been done before at all. What we're doing is we're looking really at the more difficult cases of slaps, the ones which the EU directive, if it happens, is probably not going to impact on. So we're looking really at domestic slaps and domestic legal systems. And the concept of this is really, we know that one of the reasons why slaps have really increased over the past few years is because when lawyers launch slaps and they're successful, they share notes about them. So we want to get defense lawyers together and share notes about how to defeat slaps. We will be, we're putting together anti-slap curriculum which doesn't exist at the moment, so it's quite a task. It's a slightly complicated endeavour because slaps violate human rights principles, but they use the peculiarities of national legal systems to do it. So you need to be able to form a defense on human rights principles, while also having a lot of familiarity with the peculiarities of different legal systems. So we're putting together not just a curriculum, but sort of a recipe book for how you put together a bunch of European law with particular issues in domestic law and what would be helpful and what to look for. So there's a lot of different, there's a lot of voices coming together on this. The project is operating in 11 EU member states and we're putting together the curriculum now and then through the end of this year and through next year we will be training defense lawyers in 11 EU member states. If this sounds like something that you or your organisation could benefit from and you are in or have colleagues in any of those 11 countries where we're starting this off, please get in touch as we are putting together the sort of invite list for the first wave of trainings at the moment. Further than that, we are going to make as much of this as we possibly can, open source, so specialist curriculums and videos of trainings from each of these countries plus guidance on how to put together a curriculum in other EU countries, which we're not covering in the project. We are also providing sort of optional teaching in whistleblowing law and how to use the new EU directive and its national implementations to help prevent retaliation against whistleblowers and then also we've been providing digital security training for journalists for ages and ages, so we'll be also doing this and trying to help out lawyers as well. And on that subject, we have a whole bunch of projects in that area as well, not just teaching people to use the tools but also developing the tools. So I'm going to hand over briefly to my colleague Richard Pospizl who knows way more about that stuff than I do. Nailed it. All right. Hi, I'm Richard Pospizl. I am a software developer that works for Blueprint for Free Speech and I'm not doing that, I'm also the dev lead working on Tor browser for the Tor project. Maybe not. So we want to talk a little bit about Ricochet Refresh which is our kind of project that was being funded by Blueprint through grants as well as some of our future work that we are in the process of working on. So the talk was titled with, you know, it's a legal talk so that we're sneaking some tech stuff in at the end. So just as a show of hands, can I get an idea of like who here knows how Tor works is kind of understanding of on-and-routing and how about hidden services? You know about hidden services? Okay, so Ricochet Refresh is a open source private anonymous messaging app and it's originally a fork of Ricochet IM which came out like 10, 15 years ago. It's originally based off of V2 on-and-services which if you've been following Tor has been deprogated since like, I don't know, October of last year. But we started prior to that to upgrading it to work of V3 and add various other features and just the high level of how it works is it takes advantage of Tor's on-and-service feature or hidden services, so it used to be called and the idea behind a hidden service or on-and-service is that you have an address it's a very long kind of ID which is also a public key which you can use to privately and anonymously have a service on the internet. So I won't go into the details of how that works because it doesn't matter for this purpose. Assuming you have that building block of having the ability to open up a service to the internet without anybody knowing where you are or who you are you have built a in-semestering app on top of that. So basically everybody's ricochet refresh and before that ricochet I am ID is one of these on-and-services. If you want to talk to somebody you need to know their on-and-service and they need to have ricochet running and there's a handshake that happens let's you connect and they say, are you who you are?  And you say, yes, I am who I say I am. And you can connect and chat and transfer files and do all the kind of things that you would expect in an instant messenger. So that's cool. We've also added in a file transfer sometime in the past year on top of that. So it's something the original ricochet I am did not have. So we've kind of targeted this towards whistleblowers as kind of like our target demographic just because there's not really a good solution. Like right now the kind of go-to solution is oh, you want to talk securely, you signal which is great, it's not anonymous but it's better than nothing. You still have that kind of identifier tied to your phone number which for some of the models is fine. Just talking to your friends about where you want to get dinner. Cool, it's great. But if you are somebody whose life might be in danger or somebody who might get sued, you want to talk to somebody like a journalist or specialist and whatever it is that you care about then you really actually need like anonymity guarantees that are provable by the actual technology not just because some tech company says oh no, yeah, you're totally anonymous and we don't log anything, we promise. So like with Ricochet Refresh you can actually guarantee yes, you are anonymous. But, oh yeah, we'll have this little slide that's the kind of generic, like this is how Tor works slides. So you have the Tor network and you have an audience service and they have an audience service and when you open up Ricochet Refresh you go in and you connect to all the various audience services of all your contacts and it kind of initiate a handshake and you can determine why all your contacts are online and just kind of talk and then normally you wouldn't use Messenger. There are some problems with the current Ricochet Refresh sort of handshake which were kind of were sort of properties of how audience services work. So right now, if you want to share your handle in any kind of like chat client so like A1's Messenger comes to mind that's just because I'm old so like ICQ or MSN, you know, you have a handle and you add somebody's handle to your contact list and make a finding quest and you see if you want to be friends. But because you know, you are going through a centralized server in that case that centralized server doesn't expose people's online offline status unless you are actually friends and they can kind of like guard that because everybody's connecting to the server and going through the centralized situation with Ricochet Refresh and audience services in general. If you know the audience service ID or just the address to use a connection audience service then you can tell when they're online. All you have to do is open up a socket over tour and even if the service is protected by client authorization, you can still determine if the service is online which is not great, especially when that sort of like metadata can be used to prosecute people or like identify like, oh, you know, we are pretty sure that this person over here is actually this user over there. So we're going to spy on their house and it's sure enough as soon as they turn off their laptop and go to the cafe, this user disappears and then once they open up the laptop again, they come back online. You know, that's not the best. So that's kind of where Gosling comes in. So wait, what? Nope, this is still Ricochet Refresh. That's what it looks like. It's an app. You can download it here. This is where Gosling comes into play. So Gosling is basically a kind of ground up reimagining and re-implementation of how that sort of beginning authentication handshake should work.  You know, I mean, it's fine so long as, I would say that the current Ricochet Refresh is fine so long as you don't publicly publish what your ID is. So if you and your friends all want to swap IDs and that never leaks outside of the group, then all any adversary is gonna see is yeah, these people are using Tor. Okay, that could be anything. Assuming they are super sneaky and like using like DPEC inspection or doing traffic analysis or super advanced stuff, right? So Gosling kind of takes all that information and breaks apart your separator identity from who your actual end points that you use to communicate with people. So you still have a public identity and a public onion service. We call this like the introduction service, which they will probably be changed because it kind of collides with the idea of like introduction node and Tor, which we don't want to confuse the two. So the name will probably change. So we started with the introduction server that you use as your public identity fire just as you do now with Ricochet Refresh. And you can turn that off whenever you want but still talk to your contacts. Because what happens is when you do this initial kind of handshake with the introduction server is that, you know, a bunch of crypto to verify that like the person contacting you is saying like, yes, I am this other onion service over here on the internet and these are my keys. So, you know, use some signature verification and build a handshake and make sure they are who they at least, or at least they make sure they at least control the keys they claim they control. And as part of that kind of handshake if it succeeds, it hands out a endpoint server which is unique to that particular client. So if that client then, you know, wants to cyber stalk you, then, well, you have to accept them as a friend and then they can cyber stalk your endpoint but you can just block them or better yet, just stop running that endpoint and they won't be able to turn it when you're actually online. They can still see your introduction server but the cool thing about the introduction server is that you don't actually need that to talk to your friends. Like if you add your five buddies as contacts or add your, you know, journalist contact as a contact, then you can just turn that server off once the endpoint servers have been like negotiated and nobody outside that will just know like, well, they used to have this client service and all this client service doesn't exist anymore. So it's kind of a, it's kind of like a long, longer term like identity and kind of works like a handshake of prior. Like they do a similar thing but it was like a ephemeral audience service that kind of like introduction handshake and then hand it off. But so we're kind of are working on reworking that kind of handshake part and separating it out as its own library because, you know, while working on a peer-to-peer instant messenger it occurred to me like, you know, there are other peer-to-peer applications that might want to exist and also be anonymous. So we're kind of pulling out this layer and the tour management and the key generation and all of that putting into a nice Rust library and we'll eventually be ripping out the guts of the current X-ray refresh and using this for that low level application, low level like kind of authentic authentication application and then building an instant messenger on top of that. Like once you've done that kind of handshake then you just hand a socket off to the next like the higher level part of the application and it can do whatever it needs to do, safe knowing that if it received a connection then it came from who you think it is and you know that you're private and anonymous and all that good stuff. So you can go here. We have specs. There is a not quite working implementation as work in progress but we're expecting to have a work of proof of concept sort of implementation working within the next month or two. So come by. It has been not audited but some were reviewed by various smart people who know how to use cryptography more than I do but obviously issues and pull requests are very helpful and welcome. So that's my bet. I guess I'll let you end. Okay, I guess we have a little bit of time for any questions, is that right? Absolutely, please stay on stage. Maybe we have a technical question. So we do have time for Q&A. If you have a question, please line up on both of the microphones. As we have no question from the internet yet we'll take the microsoft, oh my God. The microphone in the front, please step up to the microphone, come close and please ask your question. So, technical question there. Does the ricochet support this new ricochet? Does it support the synchronous communication or is it only synchronous? Hello? Hello? Okay, it's only synchronous. So because there's no centralized service for you to connect to, it does depend on you being actually online to receive any kind of... So a question for Naomi on the other topic. Phil? Sorry. So, do you think we'll see more slaps in the EU? Should people be bracing for this, especially... Oh, so thank you so much for the work you're doing with especially reading up the lawyer part of the thing. But in terms of the community, you mentioned the mutual aid that happened defending the Polish people. Let's even think about the people doing the protestors in Bristol and other places where... So is that something that Pat Fox would address as well? So either helping or providing that layer for that layer of the targets of slaps and so on. Sure. So the project is targeted towards qualified lawyers but we're really interested in reaching, say the lawyers who defend activists pro bono and the people who defend LGBT activists, defend other kinds of activists, you know that. So that's totally within scope of what we want to do. And I think you're right to pick out Bristol and where there were some protests last year, people may not know. And as a result, people have been facing riot charges in the UK, which hasn't been heard of for many, many years and the penalties for riots are really severe. We're talking about decade, you know. And the police bill is here now, so the future is gonna be... What is happening in the UK is kind of emblematic of what we might see elsewhere as well in that slaps as far as they impact on journalists who write for major publications, there's some action against limiting those, coming up against deteriorating national legal systems which make it much more easy to prosecute activists for doing righteous things. So yeah, I think that's a totally predictable outcome of what's happening now and we should look out for. Wonderful answers, thank you very much. Do we have any questions from the internet? Any more questions from the audience? Now is your chance, free legal advice. No, it's not legal advice at all. I'm not a lawyer, don't ask me for legal advice. All right, well, if there are no... Yeah, come up to the microphone, please. Can you hear me? Yeah. So yeah, so I'm actually Polish and I'm also a journalist security trainer. So I am incredibly, incredibly interested in both of those things. And would you say that... So you mentioned that the protest laws were essentially enforced much more severely during the pandemic, yes? Yeah, in Poland, there's other things going on as well but say in Slovenia, you can really see that the advent of COVID restrictions really gave license to the then government in Slovenia to go wild and prosecute anyone for doing anything. I mean, in Poland, the problem was already there before COVID, shall we say? Yeah, I know, I know. No, I was just curious if you saw that the governments were using COVID as a sudden ramp up for it and now that COVID is gone, well, sorry, when I say COVID is gone... Yeah, the restrictions of God, maybe. No, no, no, like for some of the governments, like the health ministries are literally acting as if COVID is gone and has the COVID-related protest bans, are they still being enforced or not? Well, it's quite a big general question. I think, you know, in general, I mean, a lot of those restrictions have now been lifted, but it's normalized. The police action against gatherings of people in particular countries, things have stayed bad afterwards. Okay, perfect, thanks so much. Thank you. All right, one more time. Any questions from the internet? No, all right. Any further questions? Are you moving towards the microphone for a question? Excellent. All right, sorry, the person in the back was first. Stay, stay, stay, we have time. So do you know of any slaps where the people have accidentally even found guilty of the charges? So, I mean, the charges are completely untrue, but has it ever happened? Yeah, I'm sure it has happened. Here you get one of the measurement problems where if people are found guilty, it, people are often looking, when people are trying to measure slaps, they're often looking for lawsuits which get rejected and they're often looking for civil lawsuits. And one of the sort of wider problems here and say the particular problem that a lot of activists are facing, you know, sort of the on the ground activism is the use of criminal charges, even minor criminal charges like misdemeanours which often don't get put into those statistics. And look, I'm not knocking the people who have put the stats together because it's a bit of a task and like they've been doing it for the first time as well and you know, at the result of a lot of work to try and assemble an evidence base. But yeah, for sure. There's a lot of, I mean, anyone who's done activist support will know this, right, that particularly if say you're getting prosecuted in a area or a region of your country where the pro bono legal network is less well developed, you're much more liable to be found or you're at a lower court whilst often those verdicts are unreported, go unreported in official stats. Anyway, you're much more likely to get a raw deal. Okay, thanks from camera one. One more quick question and quick answer. Oh, I hope it's quick. I was wondering about that Ricochet messenger. So you compared it very shortly to signal. I was wondering if it also uses something similar to the signal encryption protocol to provide plausible deniability on the encryption level. So Ricochet IAM and with Ricochet refresh kind of depend upon the fact that any services themselves are encrypted. So it's basically built entirely on the encryption of Tor to work. So there is no actual like encryption of the day stream itself within the app. But because it's going through Tor to encrypt it and has all those nice guarantees associated with it. Okay, thank you. All right, lots of questions. That's always good. Thank you very much for your interest. We are unfortunately out of time. So I would like to ask you to give another wonderful round of applause for our excellent speakers. Thank you very much. Thank you.