Welcome! Today I'm going to tell you a story about things that I learned about incident response by being a firefighter. Let's get to it. Here's the agenda, what we're going to cover. I'm going to start with a little introduction about myself, tell you a little bit about my background in IR, and I'm going to tell you a little bit about myself as a firefighter. Then we'll delve into what IR is, for those of you who don't know what IR is, and then we'll talk a little bit about firefighting, because even though you might know what IR is, you might not be familiar with firefighting beyond obviously putting out the fire. Then we'll do some comparisons between IR and firefighting, definitely some similarities and some differences of course. Then I'll describe some challenges and opportunities, the things that I learned from being a firefighter that I then brought back to IR. I'll summarize and then end with some final thoughts. Let's get going. Alrighty, so for those of you who are not familiar with me, my name is Katherine Allman. I go by investigator Chih on the internet in the Twitterverse, and I've been with the University of Buffalo for over 20 years. I'm on staff with B-Sides Rochester and a cyber camp that we hold. I volunteer with some stuff. I've spoken at a bunch of conferences. I have some certifications and a couple degrees. Even those of you who know me from the IT realm may not be familiar with this information about me as a firefighter. I've been in the fire service since about 1997, and since then I've become a state fire instructor with New York State. I've done some credits, college credits on firefighting. I was a certified fire investigator at both levels in New York State, and I was also a member of the J Fire team. So the fire thing is something I've been doing a long time. Just in case you're still not convinced, this is me at the scene of a fire, and this is part of the story that I'm going to tell you. I'm holding what's called a thermal camera. When you look into a thermal camera and you point it at something, what it's going to show you is a difference in temperature. So things that are darker are usually cooler in temperature, and things that are warmer are going to be, are going to show up as lighter in color. We'll see why that matters later. And just in case you weren't sure, I'm the one with the camera and the person to my right is our captain. So now let's delve into what incident response is. I like this definition of incident response because it focuses on the technical components that you're going to need to analyze and contain an incident. We'll see in a bit why that's a little different from incident handling. So you're going to be the boots on the floor person, the person who's actually focused on dealing with this incident directly. You're going to address network events. You might deal with them in a reactive or a proactive way depending on your organization, and an event can be anything that's going to affect the CIA triangle, your confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information. The goals of incident response are going to be to make sure you know when there is, in fact, an incident or some kind of thing going on. You're going to stop that attacker. You're going to minimize the damage that is caused. And ultimately, you want to prevent it from ever happening again or something similar from happening. These are your basic phases of incident response. Preparation, identification, containment, eradication, recovery, and lessons learned. Let's break these down a little bit. Preparation. So during the preparation phase, we're going to document, document, document. You want to document both your network itself. You might want to document the particular machines in question. One of the most important things you'll want to document is where your important data is, right? Where are the keys to the kingdom? That's critical. You might do some toolbuilding, perhaps to help you respond better to an incident, or perhaps to help you know when something is happening that shouldn't be. Then the next step is going to be awareness of the attacks. And ultimately, this could be something as simple as an automated ticket system that tells you that there's a problem, could be from a phone call. Your containment phase, you want to stop whatever is happening. So that might be patching a system, blocking some sort of C2 connection, maybe pulling the power out of the back of a machine. Depends. Then during the eradication phase, you're ultimately going to remediate. You're going to remove compromised hosts from your network. Whatever it is you have to do to get them to get the bad guys gone. During the recovery phase, you need to restore those business functions, because of course that is the whole point of incident response initially is to get up and running again. Then you want to learn from exactly what happened so that the same thing doesn't happen again. Here we have an incident handling. You'll notice it's a little different. It focuses on the other things that are important in an incident. The logistics, communication, the coordination, planning, all of these other functions. And ideally, you want these two things to be separate. Now, I understand in smaller organizations, you might be the only person doing this job and you might have to do both. But if you're the person who's boots on the ground and you're working on containing an incident or eradicating the attacker, you don't also want to have to be the person who's communicating out every five minutes what's going on. So if you have somebody else doing that, it's a whole lot easier to focus on what's at hand. Now let's move to firefighting. What is firefighting? Well, it's the obvious. We're going to put the wet stuff on the red stuff as they say. We're going to prevent the spread and extinguish significant unwanted fires. So, you know, not your backyard barbecue unless it's out of control. And we'll do that for buildings and vehicles, woodlands, that sort of thing. Our goals, as you might expect, are to protect the health and safety of ourselves and of the public. We're also going to protect property and the environment. Just because we're in the process of putting a fire out doesn't necessarily mean we want to make things worse, right? So for example, if we have a situation that might involve hazardous materials, we need to make sure that we're doing our best to prevent that from making the situation worse. And we want to minimize, excuse me, the disruption of community activities. Great example of that would be a car fire or a car accident. You have a lot of people who are, say, trying to get to work in the morning or trying to get home. And if one of those things occurs, we need to set up traffic support to help you still get from place to place and minimize any disruption while we're taking care of the particular incident. We too have a preparedness cycle. It looks kind of like this. We'll do some preparing, then an emergency will happen. We'll respond to it. We're going to recover from it. We'll mitigate where we can and we're back to preparation. Now in this preparedness cycle, in the fire service, we usually start more on the mitigation side. And let me show you how and why. So mitigation for the fire service has to do with preventing future emergencies or minimizing their effects.  That's a mitigation. We want to see if we can help people understand how to prevent fires and accidents in the first place. Sprinklers in a building are another great mitigation method. Preparedness. We need to be prepared to handle that emergency. So we're going to make sure our gear is maintained, that we're drilling so we know how to use the equipment on the truck, that we have preplans of the building. Perhaps there's something unique about accessing certain parts of the building or getting people out if necessary. And then recovering. When we recover from an emergency, we're going to clean up. We're going to restore things to their functional purpose again. We're going to repair equipment that might have been damaged. This is pretty standard for us. So here's the next part of the story. You saw me looking at the camera, right? This is the same fire. Two more pictures from this fire. The one on the left has me, if you probably can't tell because my name's not on my coat, but that is me. And what I'm attempting to do in that picture is change out an air bottle. The way firefighters breathe inside a building that is on fire is we wear something called self-contained breathing apparatus. And that's made of a harness and a bottle and some other pieces that help redirect air flow. Needless to say, there are several components. My job on the left hand side is to change the air bottle. Your average air bottle is about 30 minutes 45, which can go very quickly if you're working hard in a scene. And when a firefighter runs out of air or starts to run out of air, they come out and they ask somebody to change that bottle. So that was my job at this fire. I was changing bottles for the people who needed them. If you look in the picture on the right hand side, you'll get at least a small idea of what that bottle and harness setup looks like, because you can kind of see the top of the bottle. What I want you to focus on in that right hand picture is the fact that the firefighter's shoulder has a lot of damage. If you look carefully, you'll see there's actually been flame and heat impingement to that shoulder area. What I didn't realize when I was changing that bottle is that it was not just his coat that had been damaged, but in fact the harness that holds the bottle and the air hoses that connect to it. So I go to change that bottle, and unfortunately, when I put the new bottle back in and connect it all up, I get hit with a blast of air in the face. Fortunately for me, I was wearing my gear correctly, there was no damage, and ultimately I instructed the firefighter to take the pack and make sure that it went out of service. Now, why is this important? Nobody got hurt, it wasn't a really huge deal, nothing bad ultimately happened, we'll get back to that. So pay close attention to that picture, think about that story, and remember here, I was just doing my job. All right, so one other piece of terminology in the fire system that's really important to understand is the incident command system, and it's this idea of an organized response to a problem.  If you've been in the military before, you're probably familiar with chain of command, obviously if you're in law enforcement that's something else you're familiar with, not dissimilar idea, this is what forms our effective chain of command. So here's what the incident command system looks like, and we're not going to spend time looking at all of this, but you'll see the incident commanders at the top, typically going to be one of your chief officers, and at the bottom you're going to have operations and planning logistics finance, and in between you'll have some other folks who report directly to the incident commander. What's important to note here is that the incident commander doesn't have a ton of people reporting directly to them, and the reason is it makes this whole situation way more manageable. So let's look at the pieces that are most often in smaller incidents. So you have your incident commander, they're going to define what the goals and the objectives are for that particular incident, again usually your chief or it might be a senior officer if no chief is available. And then you'll have operations. Operations is often the person who is in charge of making sure that those goals and objectives get met by figuring out what the strategy and the tactics are going to be. We sometimes have external operations and internal operations. If it's a large building we might have operations on multiple floors. So we might have operations for the first floor. We have a high-rise facility and sometimes we need multiple levels of operations. So that's not uncommon. The last three here, logistics planning and admin finance, are more common in very very large incidents. When you need to have lots of people and extra supplies and equipment brought in, if there's going to be a long-range plan, something like a hurricane hits, and we have to mobilize troops or demobilize them quickly. That's going to be on the part of planning. And then if we need some kind of licenses or deal with compliance issues, get some money together or whatever, that's where admin and finance is going to come in play. All right, so let's do a comparison of the two and kind of see, I think you'll find it interesting to see how they do compare. So methodology-wise, I think you've seen, they're very very similar, right? The only thing that was really missing from the firefighting circle were the lessons learned. And I'll tell you, even though it's not officially part of the methodology, if you are good at what you do as a firefighter, you absolutely pay attention to lesson learned. So I would say that these really, in terms of their functionality, are really very similar. But let's talk about some misconceptions. In incident response, there's this idea that every event is an incident. Well, that's certainly not the case. You can have an event where something is, you know, change, but it's not necessarily an incident on the part of the particular organization you're with. And not every incident is handled the same way, right? I mean, certainly a small incident involving maybe one social security number is going to be different than an incident involving 100 social security numbers or a thousand. Every incident is quickly solved. Well, we know that's not true. We can have an incident that's really fast, maybe gets resolved in 10 minutes, and it can take one that takes days, weeks, months. It can be a really long time depending on how big the incident is. If law enforcement is involved, it can be even longer than that, depending on what court cases and all the other details play into it. This is, I think, one of the most important ones. There's this idea that every person on an incident response team needs to be a rock star. Well, that's not true. I'm not a rock star. I'll tell you that right now. And as new people come into this field, we shouldn't expect them to be rock stars either. We can all learn from each other. Another thing that's a misconception in IR is this idea that we can accurately attribute whatever's happened to a particular entity. It's hard enough to, you know, figure out attribution at all, but to do it accurately is even harder. Likewise, in firefighting, we have some misconceptions. How about this idea that firefighters are always paid? How many of you know that there are tons of firefighters around this country that aren't paid? I'm one of them. I've been a volunteer firefighter for many years. I've never, ever earned a dime from firefighting, and yet I still love it. It's a fantastic hobby and one that I wouldn't trade for anything. There's also, from television especially, this idea that firefighters are big tough dudes. Well, I know you can only see my floating head, but guess what? Not a big tough dude. Never was, never will be. We also don't fight fires the same way every time. Again, yes, we put the wet stuff on the red stuff, as one of my fire instructors has said, but we don't do it the same way. Maybe we need to do a search and rescue first. Maybe the building has partially underground. There are all sorts of challenges with the situation that don't allow us to do the same exact thing every time. Certainly, there's this idea that fires get extinguished quickly, especially again on television shows, but it can take days. In large, really large situations, it can take longer than that. Just depends. Maybe all you need is a water can and it's a little bit of burning mulch. Sure, that's extinguished quickly, but not all of them. And definitely not a full-time job, because that's not my full-time job. My full-time job is incident response. But we'll see, they're pretty similar things in some ways. First, we'll talk about the differences. So, in terms of incident response, it rarely involves life safety, except in the universe of health care. If you work in health care, you absolutely can be the difference between life and death in some of the incident response situations you might wind up in. Patient records are critical. Ideally, there are things in place to prevent that from being catastrophic. But in the rest of the world, despite what everyone would have you believe, life safety isn't usually the issue. That's important to remember. Certainly, IR teams typically get paid, and as I already mentioned, firefighters, not so much. We use computers and software for our day-to-day job. And while firefighters also sometimes use computers in certain capacity, they use mostly water, foam, chemicals, hoses, and show up in special vehicles, like fire trucks. Most of us doing IR, drive whatever we want, doesn't really matter. Obviously, if you're in an organization like law enforcement, well, you might have a different experience. And we wear special gear as firefighters. I'm not going to show up at a fire in just a t-shirt and shorts. I'm certainly going to put on my gear, right? So, those are some differences. Now, here's where they are similar. In both cases, we're going to focus on that immediate issue first and find that cause later. We need to put that fire out. We need to stop that attacker. We'll deal with attribution and the cause later. We're also going to use triage to determine the bus course of action. If you're not familiar with triage, it's this idea that when you have more than one thing to consider, you're going to decide which of those things is most critical. So, what most people are familiar with in terms of triage is a situation where there's been a motor vehicle accident and you have multiple people who are injured. You might have somebody who just has a bump on the head. You might have somebody who maybe is beyond saving. And you might have somebody who's serious, but with the right interventions could easily be saved. And looking at all those details, you have to decide which one to treat first. Fire situations are exactly the same thing. You're going to want to take a look at the facts and make some decisions about what to do first. Ideally, you've pre-planned that, but we'll come back to that. They're cyclical in nature, both of them. We've seen that already, right? And they both require some pretty interesting thinking outside the box. In incident response, sometimes we use tools that we might use for other things to try to get information for the response. And in firefighting, we do the same kinds of things in the sense that, for example, I have a friend who's a firefighter in my hometown who had a patient on a multi-story building who was very large and they didn't have equipment that would easily facilitate getting him out of the building where he was. So he went to the local hardware store, got some equipment, and built something to get this individual out of where he was stuck. Thought outside the box, didn't just use the equipment he had, worked with other things that he was able to get a hold of. In both cases, we often bring in outside entities. Firefighters rely heavily on mutual aid, bringing in other fire departments as necessary, or perhaps specialty teams. We do the same thing in incident response. While I do incident response for the university, we might need another team if something were significantly serious enough to come in and help us. Maybe if it's a large enough incident, maybe if it's a certain kind of incident. And sometimes in both cases, there are inside teams. So again, I'm inside at the university, and there are companies that have inside firefighting teams because they're a manufacturing organization that's large enough. So now let's talk about the things I've learned from being a firefighter that I think are relevant to IR specifically. I'll start with this first challenge, tunnel vision. This is idea where we focus exclusively on one particular thing instead of seeing that big picture, right? And we make bad decisions when we do that. Think back to that image, the two images, of me changing out that air bottle for the firefighter and his burned coat. This is an example of tunnel vision. I'm focused on doing my job. That's all I'm doing. And frankly, I could have gotten really hurt here because of tunnel vision. I wasn't taking a step back in my head and looking at the bigger picture. I was just focused on the task at hand. Here's another example from firefighting. Look carefully at those cones. Pull up to the fire.  What are those cones protecting? At first glance, you see a fire hose. No big deal. So maybe you're going to use that hose. You're going to help with the fire out.  If you look more carefully, you may or may not see there is actually a live power line that those cones are actually trying to protect you from. And if you go rushing into the scene because you're so focused on putting the fire out or getting the gear that somebody needs, you could get really hurt. We have the same kind of thing in IR. We need to consider whether or not a scene is safe. In many cases, sure it might be, but it depends. It depends on the situation. The picture that I'm showing you below is of a server room that has asbestos. If there's an issue in a server room with asbestos, you don't want to go running in there. Consider if somebody tells you that you have a malware situation and you get focused on that. But it turns out it's just a misconfiguration. Or maybe you do blind hardware acquisition.  But that machine you find out later was powered on and was running encryption. And now you don't have the keys anymore because all you've done is grabbed hardware. You haven't thought about it. Maybe you were told that a situation involved ransomware. And you're worried now and you're focused on how you're going to handle the ransomware. But it turns out it's just a phishing email. So hand in hand with tunnel vision is reactionary behavior. Not only are we focused on one thing, but we react to it without thinking ahead. We're allowing those outside forces to make that decision instead of relying on the data we have at hand and thinking about that bigger picture. In the fire service, it can lead to really deadly situations. So the photograph you see here is from a horrible fire that happened not all that long ago in Worcester, Massachusetts. It was a cold storage fire in an old meat packing plant that was built in 1906. People hadn't been in that building in a very, very long time. It had been vacant. No pre-plans had been made. It turns out it had a maze of meat lockers in it. When this fire broke out, there was supposedly somebody trapped inside. So they sent in two firefighters. The two firefighters went in and attempted to find the individual they thought was trapped. They got hopelessly lost and radioed for help. So the chief sent in two more firefighters to help them. Unfortunately, those two firefighters also got hopelessly lost and could not get out of the building nor could they find the two original firefighters that had been sent in. So the fire chief sends in two more firefighters. Guess what? They too get hopelessly lost. And ultimately the fire chief says no more. I'm not sending any more in. Now at first he was harshly criticized by his team for this because of course their own folks were inside that building. But the reality is any further reactionary behavior to try to save these individuals would just have led to more death. These folks died because pre-plans weren't made and they didn't know it was in there and it would have been a reaction to just keep sending firefighters in. We see the same thing within IR although usually not as deadly, right? If we're doing forensics we need it clear explicit goals. If the reactionary behavior is just figure out the bad stuff. That's not helpful. You need to know more specifically what it is they want you looking for. Another example is just pulling a network connection. What if you need more information about the attacker because of what they're doing on other systems?  We've already talked about the situation where you have a key in memory and you turn the machine off and it's gone. Suspending all accounts is another example where it could be you have one account that's compromised and now you suspend them all and that causes more headaches. Another challenge is freelancing. Now in our field in IT, a freelancer we often think of as somebody who's more of perhaps somebody who's just not working directly for the company, right? They're a contractor but in the fire service this notion of freelancing is this idea that somebody is not following chain of command. They go off on their own and kind of do what they want in an attempt to get the job done but they're not following what's been laid out for them. And that can lead to dangerous and reckless situations and bad feelings and all kinds of problems. In the fire department we see this typically where we have what's called the crossing of the streams and for those of you don't know the picture in the bottom right is Ghostbusters and they always talk about never cross the streams. Well in firefighting the idea is if I'm streaming water through the front of a building and then a team comes to the rear of a building and that building is a small house, now I'm fighting the team that's putting the water in in both directions and that could be really dangerous. Another way we see this freelancing in the fire department that can be really dangerous is something where doors are opened or windows are smashed without coordinating it with other people. We've seen situations where a window could get smashed and a firefighter could be standing right on the other side of it because they don't realize somebody's there. It can also ultimately feed the fire because where there's more oxygen that fire is going to go. So if it hasn't been planned out and it's not coordinated it can actually make things significantly worse. In incident response we see the same kinds of things. Team goes in to do a response and you get somebody who thinks they're just going to collect everything. Well there could be legal ramifications for that. What happens if they don't collect what's absolutely required? Maybe they overlook something. Maybe there's a duplication of data collection which wastes time or maybe data gets altered or misrepresented because people are freelancing and not everybody's not following the same set of rules or the same guidance. Patience. This is a fantastic opportunity. Ultimately you want to take that moment to determine what the best course of action is. As one of my fire instructors would say, slow is fast, right? You want to be deliberate about what you do because ultimately it will take less time if you take a moment, think things through, and then proceed. So in terms of firefighting you may remember the same house here. It's the same story. On the left is what we pulled up to. You'll notice you can see flame in the picture on the right hand side. The sort of orangey bit that's on the right part of that underneath the eaves next to the downspout. And you'll see a little bit of a glow toward the front of that third window on the right. But we don't see flame blowing through the roof. Now what I was seeing in that thermal camera image was that all of the fire, all of the significant flame and heat for this particular fire, that was up in that roof area. So what would have been ideal is for somebody to go in on the inside, break through from the second floor up into that attic area and ultimately put the fire out. Unfortunately we had people who focused solely on where they saw flame and as a result we see what we see on the right hand side. Where flame blows through the roof and there's a lot more of it and it took us a lot longer to get this fire out. Which isn't to say that what everybody did was wrong but taking a beat and thinking this through might have saved a lot of time with this fire. Okay, patience in terms of incident response. For those of you not familiar with CHEG, CHEG is a company that rents textbooks. Now what do you think the odds are of an entity that rents textbooks to students in higher ed of them using, oh I don't know, same credentials at the university that they use at CHEG or vice versa. Yeah, pretty darn good. So CHEG had a massive breach that involved millions of accounts and because they provide services to multiple universities, as you might expect, many institutions wound up with this exact problem, tons of compromised accounts. But is it really the university's problem in the sense that is it their breach? No. What it is is password reuse. CHEG had the breach. Yes, the universities and institutions have to do something about making sure those passwords get reset, right? That's important. But it's not the same as having those passwords having been breached on the systems that are actually at the university. That is an incident. That's pretty serious. So before you panic when you hear about a huge breach, even if it could impact your institution, think for a moment.  What is the real risk here? And also consider that time is important. But as we saw with the picture of the asbestos room, life safety is more important. So taking that beat can also be life-saving an incident response depending on what you're walking into. All right, accountability. It's this idea, at least in the fire service, of knowing where all your people are. You want to know if they're in the trucks. You want to know who came with one truck. You want to know who's gone inside a building. You want to know who's getting rehabbed. But really an incident response. We do the same kinds of thing. We want to make sure that we prevent hazards and duplication of efforts. We don't want to step on each other's toes or have any sort of direct interference. So on the left are accountability tags that we use in firefighting. And for example, we'll use one of those tags.  That way, the officer on that truck knows where their people are at all time. They might put another, if they go inside the building, they'll use a second tag and put it with the accountability person at the door. So that they know where they are inside the building. For incident response, we can do the same kinds of things. Perhaps wipe card access. If you're going inside a facility where you work, we'll show you what room you're in. And maybe you need something more detailed like an incident access log, depending on the situation. So we can do accountability with IR and it's important. Okay, pre-planning. Pre-planning is absolutely critical. You want to know your environment. You want to know through your own documentation and planning, third-party documentation, and anything else that you can think of before it becomes a problem. And in the fire service, we're going to do that with what are called pre-plans. And in incident response, we're going to do it with things like tabletop and premortem exercises. So that we have this idea of what we might run into before we run into it and prevent those gotchas. So this is the kind of thing we do in firefighting. On the left is a map of a building, basically. I know it's a little difficult to see, but the idea is that it maps out for us where the hydrants are, where the electrical shutoff is, and it might tell us if there's any hazardous materials in the area. The thing on the right might tell us a little more about the building construction. This is more of a general pre-plan that's going to tell us about other hazards, other information, but it's the same concept, right? It tells us what we need to know about the facility we're going into to keep us safe and those that we're trying to rescue and perhaps the general public, depending on the particular situation. We can do the same thing in incident response. We can do tabletop exercises. If you're not already familiar with backdoors and breaches, you should be. The Black Hills folks, John Strand and his crew, have built this amazing card game which uses a 20-sided die and this set of cards, and it can help you build an entire event from the ground up, and then you can do the investigation using those cards It's really interesting and I highly recommend it if you haven't already tried them. But it can walk you through scenarios, everything from something happening in a natural disaster type emergency to the intern who's done the wrong kind of thing and made an accidental mess. Obviously documentation we've talked about, right? Document your servers, document your workstations, document where your data is and what your network is like and the more information you have, the better off you'll be. And hopefully it goes without saying to a certain degree that this would also include your incident response plan and whatever team you have. So to summarize, we want you to start thinking like a firefighter. I think that applying these firefighter ideas to incident response has really made me a better incident responder ultimately. You want to avoid tunnel vision. You want to do what's called a 360 of the problem, which in firefighting might literally mean a 360 around the building, which is what we try to do, or at least somebody does when we get there, whether it might be the operations person, it might be the incident commander, but at a minimum, we always pull past the building that's on fire or potentially on fire so that we can see at least three sides of the building. That gives us that bigger scope. We want to make sure we're acting. We're deliberate. We don't just react. We don't want to be misled by emotion. Follow whatever plan that you and your colleagues have come up with. Don't just freelance. It can be physically dangerous in certain circumstances and it can just be plain frustrating in others. Have patience and take that beat. You never know what you might have missed if you didn't. Those 30 or 60 seconds could save tons of time and even in the fire service, taking those few seconds ultimately could save a life even if you think going faster might have done it. Location. Make sure you know where your people are. Document, document, document your location. Both of your equipment, your people, where your data is and pre-plans they rock. Less chaos, way easier to respond if you already have a plan. And consider something like the incident command system so that you're organizing your response. The thing about the incident command system that's so cool is that ultimately it is fantastic for scaling to larger incidents. As I mentioned, you can have only one person in charge of just a few people. And if you scale that out, it works really well in larger situations. So bringing in outside entities, this is so much easier because everybody's on the same page. So some final thoughts. I know that many of you have never thought about incident response in this way. And that's okay. That's the idea. Think outside that box. Try some things you've never tried before. You may find that ultimately it makes your job maybe more challenging in the beginning because it's going to pull you outside that comfort zone. And the reality is great things never come from comfort zones. So do it. Push that envelope. Hopefully you will find these tactics helpful. I want to thank you for coming to hear me speak. And I want to thank Wall of Sheeps so much for having me. And I hope you have an absolutely wonderful DEF CON and a wonderful rest of your day.


Hey, Alan, do you know where the cake went? What do you mean? It's right here Have you ever wanted to pull the best April Fool's prank on someone well today? We're gonna be showing you guys the best and easiest prank that you can pull on your family your friends or someone You don't like alright, so this right here is one of my favorite pranks since all of our friends love Pringles What you're gonna need obviously is a Pringles can a water balloon what you're gonna Want to do is you're gonna want to obviously empty the Pringle can and keep this part still on it Don't rip it off So what you're gonna want to do here is you're gonna want to put the water balloon underneath the sink and let it fill up now Put the Pringles can underneath it. There we go So after you fill the water balloon up You don't want to tie it up You want to put the tip over the edge of it like this and then you want to put the film on top of it And then put the cap on it just like this So now the water balloon is secure and the next time someone opens this can of Pringles They're gonna be in for a little treat. Oh Alex. Can you grab me a can of Pringles? Yeah, sure Okay, so for this next prank right here, we have this cup filled with Red Bull inside Okay, not really so it appears that there's liquid inside the cup when there really is it and there's so many creative ways You can prank people with this for example. Hey Alex It's big it's empty So like we said This is a really good way to give your friends or family like a good scare by pretending You spilled a drink on them or you can take it to the next level like we did in the video So everyone in our family loves Oreos and if there's ever any Oreos laying around then you're gonna eat it And if your family's the same way then you can prank them by doing this So step one you're obviously gonna need Oreos and what you want to do is you want to replace the inside of the Oreos With this toothpaste like this So you separate the Oreos like this and you want to remove the cream with a napkin and once it looks like this You want to take the two Oreos and get your toothpaste and you want to squeeze the toothpaste onto the Oreos like this You don't want to put too much.  This looks like a vanilla ice cream cone and what you can do with this is you can give it to one of your annoying siblings And give it to them to eat and see their reaction. Hey, I've actually just ice cream right here Oh, just put it right here. Okay, cool. I would eat it really quick before it melts too Okay, so this next prank is a little bit more complicated But if you can pull it off that is probably one of the funniest things you can do basically what you're gonna need is body paint right here any color body paint and Basically if your shower head comes off you're gonna want to put this body paint inside the shower head And it should come out looking like this. Oh, what's wrong? Wait, I don't lock unlock it so I can know what's going on Alan Who did this you did I did that yes you did Brent or if your shower head doesn't come off You can replace the shampoo bottle with this entire bottle of body paint and then the prank should come out looking like this We're gonna do people live here, so I don't know I'll wash up one week.   Hey, did you want the rest of this water? Yeah, sure. All right. So for this next prank you are basically baking a fake cake and what I mean by fake is it's a fake balloon cake So what you're gonna need to pull off this prank is you're gonna need a balloon a cereal box some whipped cream and some sprinkles and tape All right, so for the first step you want to cut the top of the cereal box like this and there we go So for the next step, you're gonna want to take the edges together First edge done there we go Push it in like that There we go and there we go Okay, so after you've taped up all four corners You're gonna want to take the balloon right here and you're gonna want to blow it up to about this size right here And then you place the balloon in the center of the cereal box like this And now what you're gonna want to do is you're gonna want to take the balloon from this end to this end like so onto the cereal box Right here perfect Okay, so now it is taped down where the balloon will not move and the next step is you want to put whipped cream over the Entire tray like this This might take a while that's exactly what I was thinking Okay, and now we're just adding the last bit of sprinkles on it and there we go I know it's not perfect But this definitely sells it as a cake and now what you're gonna want to do is you're gonna want to offer this to some family Members and see they take the baits. Hey Alan. I baked you a cake for your birthday now. Come get a slice Not even my birthday, but okay. Yeah, right here. Cut yourself a slice What I did that I got scared Okay, so this is also a really funny prank to do so what you're gonna want to do is you're gonna want to take either your mom Or your dad's phone go into their settings and then you want to go down to general And then you want to go down to keyboard click on text replacement and then add click on the plus click on phrase change No to yes, um basically what happens now is whenever they say no it auto corrects to yes What you can do that is you can ask them something that they would normally say no to it would auto correct to yes And you can use that against them. Alright, so we're gonna send our dad a text right here And I throw a party tonight, so he would normally say no to something like this, but now it's gonna auto correct to oh I didn't think well I mean maybe that was the wrong thing to ask maybe we should just ask we can hang out with our friends Um, yes it can I at least hang out with my friends send them that there we go And now he normally doesn't let us hang out with our friends. So but this time it's gonna auto correct to yes Oh, maybe okay. Well, maybe so on a real note We do need more friends. So if you want to be our friend Let us know by subscribing and commenting down below. Let's be friends. So we know you subscribe Also, talk about commenting down below if you guys watch our last two videos You'll know that we were doing a hand sanitizer giveaway and all you have to do to enter was subscribe turn on our post notifications And comment done when you were done in the comments where it's pretty signed in a batch Shipping hand sanitizers away, but that giveaway is already over and we have picked a winner for this thank you But y'all thought we were joking we're not so it's alexi kano alexi You're the lucky winner check your instagram tm and we're gonna be shipping these away to you. So yeah, there we go Also, if you didn't want to give away, don't be discouraged because we're actually giving this away You can just prank your friends with this fake red wool water cup and yeah, you know So just uh same rolls apply here subscribe turn on post notifications and comment down done when you are done And uh, we're gonna be shipping this away very soon. Okay, so for this next prank right here It's actually a prank you guys can pull on us and the best way to prank us It's by subscribing and liking the video and trying to get us a 10 million subscribers Exactly, I feel like we got the 10 million subscribers. That would be a pretty good prank, right? I think it would be too. I think so too. Yeah speaking of pranks We actually filmed in april was twin prank wars on each other that we're gonna be uploading in a few days So stay tuned for that and um, yeah, so with that being said thank you guys so much for watching And we will see you guys next time


another test, another ebay account and another strategy. But this time our account got suspended immediately even before we listed one product. So this situation happens to a lot of dropshippers and it's so frustrating. So let's see what to do from this situation from A to Z, how to open any ebay account that got suspended immediately. Hello everybody! So in this video I want to share with you the full process that I made to open this account. A lot of people are opening accounts right now and struggling with actually just uploading their first product because they can't getting blocked immediately. So what to do to fix that? Let's see. So this is the first message that we got on March 19. Your ebay account has been suspended. Let's open this message. So your ebay account has been suspended because all these things have been removed, a message that a lot of people already got and know what is this message. So let's see what to do from this situation. The first thing that we do, we go to Google and we write ebay contact. Then we go to ebay customer service. We click on email us. Then we click on account. Account holds restrictions and suspensions. Email us and we got a form that we can fill to contact ebay. So let's see the form. Here is the form. So here we write our message. Now let's see what I sent and you just need to write it in your words. Actually it's not me, it's one of our virtual assistants that helps us with all of our projects and to manage for me the 35 even more now ebay stores. So let's see how it works. So in this form that's what we send them. Here was the message that our VA sent them. It was a bit funny but it worked. I'm husband and father of three little children and they created my ebay account around two weeks ago to start buying and selling my used for nature and I just realized that my account got blocked. Can you please clarify why I got suspended and what I can do to get it unsuspended? Okay so that was the email that we send them. Very quickly around maybe 24 hours we got this email from ebay. So here is the ebay message and what are the items that you are planning to purchase on our site, how you are going to pay and some questions. All what we did is to read the questions and understand what ebay wants us to tell them. So here was our reply. So the main points here are are you selling personal stuff or you have a supplier, an estimated time, how many items do you plan to list and stuff like this. The basic questions of ebay. So let's see what we replied to ebay. So I go to the next message that I got from them. Not here. Okay so here is the message that our virtual assistant replied to their question. I will go to buy groceries. My basement is full of all stuff so we are telling to ebay that we just want to list some products that we have on our house, on our apartment, what you want to list. So we can write here everything actually and in another account we just wrote here home and garden. I was selling personal stuff or you have a supplier so I wrote that for now we just have some stuff on our basement so that's what we are selling. I don't think that I will ship internationally but six to ten days since I'm in the United States you can write there actually anything. Just reply to their message. Just try to think what ebay wants to hear. So after we wrote them all these answers that we will send sell between 30 to 100 products and here are the prices we write 40 to 50 dollars. The last question is very important. Don't write something which is too expensive. Also about what you're planning to sell don't write things like electronics because it's high-risk products that ebay doesn't like. So what happened after this message that we sent to ebay? Actually we got the very interesting message. Reply your ebay account is reinstated. Boom our account was open. It was so easy you don't need to pay anyone to open the account. Just reply to ebay messages. Don't be afraid to contact ebay about anything. It works the same with feedbacks. Just try to contact ebay to actually point to ebay's representative heart and they will reply you and help you to fix anything. So they even write here that if you had any listings that were removed when the account was suspended we've restored those listings to see this listing go to my account and click activity and click unsolved under the cell. To release more actions. So actually all of the listings were deleted. We don't have what to do about that. We just need to release them. If you have them in autodesk just click on the few listings you can mark them then click bulk changes released and everything will be released on ebay. So again my main point here is never afraid. Just contact ebay and don't be afraid to contact them and talk with them about anything you have. It was super easy. I don't know why people are so scary from this but ebay taking these actions not because they don't want you to sell on their platform. It's just something that that can happen if they feel risk a security risk to their site. It means that maybe ebay thought that you are using proxies or something like that that can that using that you can scam their buyers and ebay don't want that. So we should understand their side too and just follow their directions show them that you're a real person you're not trying to scam anyone and that's all. I hope that this video will help you to open more ebay accounts and actually build a dropshipping empire. See you in the next videos. Don't forget to comment what do you think about this video. If it was helpful, like this video, subscribe to our YouTube channel and share it with your friends. See you in the next videos. Bye-bye.


أصدقائي وإسلام عليكم ورحمة الله وبركاته مرحبا بكم في another show of life from Karbala where we discussed in the previous two episodes the most discussed topics the most emphasized topics وذنهول القرآن we said حسين القزميني so let's welcome said حسين السلام عليكم or you said how are you finding the fasting during the first two days of Ramadan especially in Karbala I mean one of the whole these sites yes absolutely on earth it's been very wonderful very easy and we're the guests of Allah سبحانه وتعالى in this month إن شاء الله إن شاء الله خير so insha'Allah today in the third episode we insha'Allah discuss humility in the Quran is that correct Allah سبحانه وتعالى says نهول القرآن بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم the name of Allah the benefit the merciful and the servants of Allah are those who walk upon the earth with humility and one addressed by the arrogant and by the ignorant peace the words of peace so what is the meaning and the difference if you are between humility and arrogance بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم الحمد لله بالعالمين وصل الله على سيدنا محمد وعاله الطهرين we always say that humility is a good trait and arrogance is a bad trait being humble is a good quality and being proud is a bad quality but what is the meaning of humility and humbleness the way I see it when I picture the word well we don't want an exact definition of the word humility but let's try to imagine what humility and humbleness is when I think of the word humility when I hear the word humility I think of a person that lives with the people not above the people a person who sees himself an ordinary human being he doesn't see himself above others even though he might have qualities or she might have qualities that distinguish him or her from others for example knowledge lineage a special position yet he himself does not view himself as different from other human beings this is humility and this perception of course this is a perception when a person views himself equal to others when he has this view when he has his perception this perception and view will translate into actions of course who will not act above others for example his tone of voice his tone of voice is not condescending you should do this you should do that no none of this we we should do this we should do that you see this this person who feels humility and humble this person walks humbly meaning he doesn't walk as we say with his head up with his nose above others not saying salam to others one of the qualities of humble people and people that feel humility they say salam to everyone whether they are older than them or those that are younger than them if you like to test the humility of a person see if he says salam to little children that's a sign of humility another sign is that for example if this person were to go into a a gathering he wouldn't mind sitting at the end of the majlis as we would say or where the children sit or the last seat the smallest seat in the majlis this is a humble person he doesn't sit in the spotlight somewhere that you know people might not even notice him this person is humble this person is showing humility and the bigger this person is when he becomes humble this is more of a humility for him this is more of a humility for him this is more of an effort because if a regular person acts regular and normal that's not a big deal but let's say for example the prime minister or a minister or a a member of parliament or a top scholar an ayatollah or a top speaker sits with everyone else he doesn't have a special VIP room he sits with everyone he eats with everyone he walks with everyone without 200 guards behind him of course now when his life is in danger when your life is in danger that's another story but when your life is not in danger you're with your own people you come in between the two you don't need 200 guards when you have 200 guards walking behind you in front of you and all around this is not a sign of you this is not a sign of humility this is a sign of arrogance this is humility humility is a person who sees himself not above the people with the people a person with the people an ordinary human being an ordinary citizen an ordinary servant of Allah on the contrary a person who is arrogant he sees himself above others he sees everyone else who is here and he's over here why maybe because of his education maybe because of his PhD his PhD makes him a special human being that gives it he thinks it gives him the right to speak condescendingly to others it gives him the right to not live with the people but to live on his own to live in his own world always VIP whether it's during مجالس or in streets he takes the VIP road he feels like he always has to be recognized he always has to be recognized and if someone does not recognize him the world goes upside down yeah if he has a PhD people have to call him doctor if you don't call him a doctor that means you're stabbing him in the heart if he's a much-dehid he's reached the top you have to call him an ayatullah if you don't call him an ayatullah the world will go upside down if he's a doctor you have to call him doctor you can't call him hajj or you can't call him sayid if he's a sayid you know there's some that would prefer to be called doctor and not sayid this is arrogance arrogance is to is to live above is to feel recognized the need for recognition the need for titles the need for special seats if he's not given or she's not given a special seat in the majlis in the gathering in the invitation if he's given a bad seat they'll get up and leave this is arrogance this is humility and this is arrogance مرحبا علي السلام أكسبسي said about the topic we just mentioned an arrogant person is the one who sees himself above the people is like a person on a mountain who sees the people small but when they look up they seem smaller smaller that's so significant because it teaches us it's basic I mean there's no need for arrogance I mean we're all equal مرحبا علي السلام says there are two types of people in this world either a brother to you in religion or reflection in humanity so we're all equal but what's the emphasis of the Quran on humanity we see this is a recurring theme in the Quran the Quran emphasizes on humility we see several verses that talk about humility one is the verse that you recited in the beginning of this presentation بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم صورة الفرقان وعباد الرحمن and the verse is talking about the qualities of the servants of the merciful the servants of Allah these are the qualities of the servants of Allah وعبادوا the first quality وعباد الرحمن الذين يمشون على الأرض هون the servants of Allah are those that when they walk they walk calmly humbly without raising raising their necks and heads without looking looking down at people no they walk with the people عباد الرحمن الذين يمشون على الأرض they sit humbly they live humbly when you talk to them they talk humbly with humility when they sit down they say it in a humble way they don't speak to the people they don't speak to the people from a higher position even though they could be at a higher position but when they speak they speak in the same position one of the qualities of the companions some of the righteous companions the Qur'an says Muhammad the Messenger of Allah the Messenger of Allah the Messenger of Allah the Messenger of Allah the Messenger of Allah و الذين معه أشداء أشداء على الكفار رحماء بينهم رحماء بينهم they're merciful with each other they're humble to one another they show humility to one another and another verse الله سبحانه وتعالى addresses the Messenger of Allah صلى الله عليه وسلم this is a direct order and advice to the Messenger of Allah وخفض جناحكل المؤمنين lower your wings lower your wings to the believers this is a metaphor it's a metaphoric expression of being humble in the coming nights when we speak about the kindness to parents in the Qur'an one of the verses is regarding parents وخفض لهم جناح الضل من الرحماء lower your wings of humility to your parents this is an expression when you lower your wings it's an expression of of humility in humbleness الله سبحانه وتعالى tells the Messenger of Allah lower your wings for the believers have you seen birds crows falcons or peacocks peacocks when they want to show off what do they do they raise their feathers and their wings to show their colors there's a sign of arrogance but when it's not showing off what does it do or lowers even birds when they want to show off they'll raise their wings out of arrogance no when they bring down their wings it shows them more humble وخفض جناحة كل المؤمنين الله tells the Messenger of Allah to be humble and show humility to the believers in Surat Luqman Luqman gives advice to his son he tells him ولا تصعر خدك للناس ولا تمشي في الأرض المرحة ولا تصعر خدك في الناس means don't turn your face away from people those who are arrogant they don't live with the people they turn their face someone poor someone who has a question or a family friend they speak to them they turn their face they don't give their face this is the sign of arrogance ولا تمشي في الأرض المرحن don't walk with pride you know walking it says a lot about a person that's why we see a lot of verses that stress on walking وعباد الرحمن الذين يمشون على الأرض هنا ولا تمشي في الأرض مرحن and another verse ولا تمشي this is in Surat Al-Israa ولا تمشي في الأرض مرحن إنك لن تخرق الأرض ولا تبلغ الجبال طولا it's so significant walk humbly because you will never reach the mountains some people they walk they raise their their backs their shoulders they raise their necks as if they're basketball players the Quran is saying you're not going to reach the mountains أنك لن تخرق الأرض ولا تبلغ الجبال طولا it doesn't matter how tall you stand you're still going to be a small person compared to the mountains a person is not about size it's not about how big you make yourself a person does not become big by being arrogant a person becomes big with his actions with his actions and another verse وقصد في مشيك when you walk walk moderately again this is a sign of humility don't walk I'm sure you've seen people the way they walk when you look at them you think who does this person think he is an emperor a king a president no one even knows this person thus the Quran is basically trying to say that you're not going to make yourself big by doing this you make yourself you let 200 people walk behind you as bodyguards or there's a terminology called حاشية it exists still today there are some people when they walk they want 20 people to walk with them not bodyguards friends workers employees make them walk walk behind you why because when you have 20 people 30 people walk behind you this makes them feel important this makes them look important Quran is trying to say that you don't need 20 people to walk behind you to be important you can become important with your actions with your deeds with your contributions how much have you contributed to society that will make you important even if you walk by yourself even if you walk wearing rags even if you don't own a car you walk that makes you important but if you have no actions no deeds no contributions but you make 20 people walk in front of you behind you bodyguards that doesn't change anything it doesn't change anything about who you are that's weird because معلينا بطالب he says when you're in a position of ruling it's not to rule to rule over the people but to serve the people and that's weird to see because we just we just hear the sayings of Adid Bait and not actually and not talking and not live them in our lives you know we're not talking about western societies we're talking about actually Islamic Shiite societies that when they actually come to Ziyarah the most safest place on earth as I consider it is Karbala between the two shrines I mean even if you die in this place you die a death of of honor you know but they still have as you mentioned 200 bodyguards and I see that it's not like something exaggerating this is an arrogance yeah we see that but Adid Bait and the Quran they always advise the believers to be humble but what's the connection between humbleness and respect see you might have known this in your life with your experiences and I'm sure that my dear viewers have known this too the people that are most humble and show the most amount of humility are the most respected people the most respected people when you see for example a doctor a physician yet in the mosque in the center at time of oftar when it's time to serve food he doesn't sit and wait for people to bring him food he gets up and serves even though he's a doctor he's a physician doesn't he grow in people's eyes doesn't this bring him respect even though serving food or maybe even collecting the trash after people eat it's not seen as something respectful but when someone becomes humble enough and shows humility and does it he gains what respect he grows in people's eyes or if you see a scholar big scholar yet he says salaam to young children not just the older older people and the elders even to children doesn't he grow in people's eyes definitely and you see now these are deeds that people don't do because they want respect I know some people they don't for example at the time of oftar at our centers at our Hussainias at our mosques they want to say it respectfully so that people respect them you don't want to get up and serve because in their eyes that's disrespectful for them while that brings respect that brings respect that brings love when they see a doctor a scholar someone who has weight in the society he comes and serves that brings respect this person grows in people's eyes we have a hadith by the Ahl al-Bait that says من تواوة علي الله رفعه الله he who shows humility for the sake of Allah Allah raises him Subhan Allah he lowers himself it's as if Allah says you lower yourself I will raise you but if you want to raise yourself then I will lower you Subhan Allah I will lower you leave it to me the more you lower yourself I will raise you let's look at our friends our family members our neighbors people that we know you and I know and others the ones that we love the most and respect the most are the ones that have the quality of humility and humbleness our teachers I'm pretty sure that we all have teachers that we won't forget from elementary school middle school high school college my favorite teachers were the most humble teachers the ones that that made me feel you know I'm worth something they would answer my questions they wouldn't brush me off they wouldn't ignore me I still remember those teachers I pray for them when I go perform Ziyara I say Ziyara on their behalf because they're the ones that made me feel special they showed humility and humbleness on the contrary those that are arrogant they are the most disrespected and disliked people in every society those that don't say salam to anyone they expect everyone else to say salam to them those who have no respect for others they expect respect from others those that expect people to put them in good seats in good positions no one respects them no one even likes them these people are dreaded in every society in every community thus we see a relationship between humility and respect the more you show humility the more respect you will get the more respect you'll earn there's a definitely there's a relationship when we think about this when you said saying salam and being humble when we think about the greatest person on earth the first person that comes to my thought is Prophet Muhammad he says by Allah no one has beaten me to saying salams first he always would even to children even old people you know such role models that we have in Islam yet we're I mean we still have that also Allah would always say salam to young children yeah and this is a this is a test if you wish to see if a person is humble or arrogant see if he says salam to children or not saying salam to elders that's not a big deal that's an obligation but to say salam to young children that shows a lot of humility and humbleness so you can say that humbleness is one of the significant characteristics of a believer of a follower even any person but when we discuss religious scholars I mean there's a very it even catches my eyes to see when you go into a mejlis where it's a gathering you see the scholar who is actually the most knowledgeable person in that gathering he's serving the people and stuff so if you can elaborate on that and how is that we are taught from day one from day one we are taught in classes of akhlaq that a scholar has to be humble a scholar has to show humility if you see what are scholars scholars are knowledgeable people those who have read those who have studied those who have done research those who have read so much to the point that they have lost their eyesight or they're on the verge of losing their eyesight those who have read and wrote they have knowledge thus it's very easy for them to feel arrogant it's very easy for them to feel arrogant that's why we have narrations that emphasize on scholars to be humble and to show humility a lot of narrations that emphasize to be knowledgeable but at the same time to be patient to be humble to show tolerance for others because what's the point of being knowledgeable but not showing humility to others people are going to be they're not going to be attracted to you they won't be attracted to you what's the point of studying if you don't allow people to come and benefit from your knowledge and not even putting your education into action into action scholars are expected to live with the people to show humility to open their doors for everyone for all categories of people not certain groups not from this nationality sometimes we hear stories inshallah they're not true that we visited such and such scholar but they didn't allow us but they allowed a different group from another country that speak in a specific language I hope this is not true our scholars their doors have to be open for everyone of all races all nationalities whether you're rich or you're poor you shouldn't be allowed because you're rich and if you're poor you're not allowed to meet the scholar or enter his home or be able to ask a question this is not right this is not the teachings of Ahle al-Bait thus a scholar the more he knows the more he has knowledge increases the more his humility must increase and the more his arrogance should decrease you know in Hausa they give us a beautiful example very beautiful example they say a scholar should be like a fruitful tree fruitful tree you see trees that don't have fruits in the winter they're tall but in the spring or in the summer when they carry fruits they come down they come down that's a great example because the fruits are heavy so they bring down the what do you call it the fruits the branches the branches the branches are forced to come down because of the heavy fruits the more it has fruits the more it will come down have you ever seen a very tall apple tree or a very tall orange tree no they're all down to earth down to earth for people to easily get get their fruits the scholar should be the same way the more their knowledge increases the more they should be down to earth so that people will benefit from them what's the point of a scholar that shows no humility and people don't benefit from his knowledge who wants to stand tall and live above the people and let me share this story with you there's a very well-known scholar there was a very well-known scholar by the name of سيد عبد الحسين شرف الدين رحمة الله عليه the author of كتاب المراجعات this very very distinguished book المراجعات which is several correspondences between him and شيخ الأزهر and at the end of the book at the end of the correspondences he makes him شيعي شيخ الأزهر becomes a follower of him and this book has been translated into English under the name of the right path the right path my father went to visit سيد عبد الحسين شرف الدين امصور اللبنان and this was in the 50s early 50s my father was in his early 20s he might have been maybe 22 23 years old he said I went to visit سيد عبد الحسين شرف الدين this top scholar he wasn't a مراجع but he was not less than مراجع his position his knowledge his books he was in the position of being a مراجع my father says I went to visit him انصور they opened the door I went to the سيد he said he was lying in his bed because he was ill so he said I saw him get up from his bed he said I rushed to him I rushed him to make sure that he doesn't get up but he was trying to get out of bed he said I went I tried to grab his hand to kiss his hand he said he pulled his hand he grabbed my hand and he kissed my hand he said I was only 22 years old I was still a student in the حوزة he said I wasn't famous no one knew me I wasn't a famous speaker no one had seen me on TV I was a regular student yet the سيد grabbed my hand and he kissed it he said I was so embarrassed that I wanted as we say in العراق I wanted the ground to to swallow me I wanted the ground to bear me this is humility this is humility I saw a picture of one of the مراجع in قوم one of the top مراجع one of the oldest مراجع in قوم now I saw a picture of him embracing the hand of an African student beautiful picture beautiful picture this top scholar he's in his 90s he's a merger yet he grabs the hand of an African student and he embraces it this is the school of this is what the Quran teaches this is وعباد الرحمن and you will only find this in the school of you will find this in the school of this is very significant because a story mentioned and narrated by about Prophet Muhammad when he was giving a sermon and a farmer went to shake a wealthy man's hand the wealthy man looked at his hand and saw it worn out because of holding and working so he didn't shake his hand he felt like he he's going to get some kind of disease I don't know what so Prophet Muhammad came down from his place and kissed the hand of the farmer I mean with such a humility رسول الله with time and time again kissed the hands of workers farmers gardeners and say يدون this is a hand that Allah loves because this is a hand that works to earn a respectful income a respectful salary this is the humility of رسول الله صلى الله عليه وسلم I mean أهل البيت and especially رسول الله صلى الله عليه وسلم teach us the best lessons about humility what are the specific traits of the humility of أهل البيت we see the Qur'an describes رسول الله صلى الله عليه وسلم one of his qualities mentioned in the Qur'an says رحمة من الله لنت لهم عرف مرسي بالله you soft in for them you were soft with the believers رسول الله was soft soft meaning what with his أخلاق he wasn't harsh he didn't use harsh tones he spoke gently softly humbly with the people the Qur'an says وإنك العلا خلق عظيم you have great manners you have great manners you would sit with the people I've read narrations that in the Masjid of رسول الله رسول الله would give sermons he would sit in circles in circles why because in a circle there's no VIP section in a circle everyone's the same otherwise you've seen our Majadis our Majadis usually there's the endpoint and there's the beginning where the dignitaries and the important people sit this was not how رسول الله رسول الله would sit in circular fashion so that everyone's equal I had to say that he would give his companions equal amount of attention if you looked at this companion 20 seconds you would look at this companion also 20 seconds this one 20 seconds so on and so on he treated them equally this is humility and I am shocked when I see some that say this verse عبسة وتولة he frowned and he looked away when the blind man came to him some scholars say that this is رسول الله صلى الله عليه وسلم while we in the school of Talibah we stand against this how is this possible but رسول الله frowned and looked away because of a blind man how does this go together with وأنك العلا خلقين لقرآن كنجدكت itself this was another person if my dear viewers go and read about this person they will find out if they do the research this was someone else this was not رسول الله they tried to change facts they raised someone else at the cost of رسول الله at the cost of disrespecting رسول الله the greatest person on earth the greatest human being on earth when we read about Imam Ali عليه السلام one of his prominent qualities was humility ضرار بنظمرة he says regarding امير مؤمنين كان والله فينا كأحدنا by God he was one of us he was amongst us like one of us meaning he didn't act up we didn't feel that he was above us he lived with us امير مؤمنين عليه السلام امير مؤمنين yet امير مؤمنين loved امير مؤمنين so much to the point that امير مؤمنين would sit outside of the mosque and he would sell dates sometimes he would have to go home he would have to for example use the restroom he would ask Imam Ali to fill in his spot Imam Ali would come Imam Ali was the خليفة of the time recognized by all Muslims Imam Ali would sit on the corner he would sit on the sidewalk and sell dates on behalf of metham until metham goes and does what he has to do and they come back have you seen humility greater than this this is the teachings of the Quran this is the Living Quran that is why we say Imam Ali is the Living Quran the verbal Quran that's significant because اهدد البيت especially اهدد البيت when they sit in a meclis when they are gathering that's a very well known story about Imam Sadik at the end of the meclis near the door and someone shipped when he was walking by him not knowing that this was the Imam and later on when knowing he was surprised by the humbleness of the Imam I mean they teach us the most significant and manners and humbleness we are coming to the end of the episode so if you have anything to add on one of the qualities of Imam زين العبدين and I'll say this because this is the month of Ramadan and at the time of افطار some of us maybe we have workers at home bodyguards servants maids Imam زين العبدين at the time of افطار he would gather all of his servants and sit and eat with them he had maids he had servants he would gather them and eat with them he wouldn't send them food and eat by himself he would sit with the people these were our Imams this is the humility and humbleness that they showed الحمد لله رب العالمين إن شاء الله we learn from this lesson because we are in the month of Ramadan the month of forgiveness to some this may seem small because they would say if I say Astaghfirullah forgive me O Allah but especially in this month if a person does one good deed it's multiplied by hundreds so إن شاء الله we learn from the lessons of Ahl al-Bayt to be humble and to have good manners so respected viewers brothers and sisters in Islam if you didn't get the chance to view this episode or the full episode or the previous episodes you can go on to our youtube channel at محسينTV3 or if you want to discuss and join the discussion with say you can also go on to our social networking websites facebook twitter google plus instagram whatsapp there's a lot now you can check them out as well and join us with the discussion so stay tuned السلام عليكم ورحمة الله وبركاته ورحمة الله وبركاته


The thing that's so unusual, if not unique, about the Writers Award is that it not only frees up your time, but it also frees up your time at a point when you're in the process of writing a book. So it's an award not for a finished project. And that's so valuable in terms of, well, the endorsement it gives you, but also in terms of liberating you to spend time working solely on your book. One of the advantages of this prize for me was that it not only gives you access to the collections, of course, and to the expertise of the Eccles Centre, but it also introduced me to this community of shared scholarly endeavour. And writing can be a somewhat lonely activity. And so to feel part of the institution of the British Library and to have all the kind of emotional and sort of intellectual support that goes with that was one of the more surprising things about this award.


So, welcome back. Taking it further from the last snippet, we introduced the term quality. Let us again refer to this word quality of a mixture. Also understand the quality and dryness fraction. The next word, the other word for quality is what we call as dryness fraction. We will see how to compute a dryness fraction, that is calculation of dryness fraction. And also we come to the state of a mixture now at the end. Let us first see quality of a mixture. The quality of a mixture can again be seen from a PT diagram. We are talking about quality. Whenever I say quality, it is related to the two phase mixture or the mixture which is inside the dome or any system which lies inside the dome. Not outside the dome, not on the lines but in the inside the dome now in the two phase mixture. So, whenever I say two phase mixture, the two phase mixture lies on this saturated liquid vapor line. I am considering a point, the system which lies on this point and this is my two phase zone. The same thing I can see from the PV diagram. And on the PV diagram what you see again is a saturated liquid line, saturated vapor line. Very important to see that the saturated liquid F point as shown over here is 100 percent liquid. And the property of this 100 percent liquid can be obtained directly from the steam table as we know. Similarly, I got the saturated vapor line now here on the dome itself. And the properties related to this G point which is 100 percent vapor also can be obtained directly from table 1 or 2 or even table 3. So, for any pressure if I know the T set value for this pressure at T set you can get the values of F point and the values at G point. The properties at F point and the properties at G point. The point is how to get the values inside this between F and G. That is the most crucial. So, any point here in between F and G which is going to be two phase mixture. When I say two phase mixture means I got liquid and vapor staying together. Liquid and vapor coexisting together. Liquid and vapor at the same pressure and at the same temperature. So, this shows that if this point is closer to this I got more liquid and some little bit of vapor. Here I can see that this is a 50 percent vapor and 50 percent liquid and the vapor region is increasing on this side and on the right most side you can see 100 percent vapor. So, when I travel from 100 percent liquid to 100 percent vapor the amount of liquid will go on getting reduced. Isn't it? This is completely latent phase transformation from 100 percent liquid to 100 percent vapor. And as you come from left side to the right side 100 percent liquid to 100 percent vapor the amount of liquid will go on getting evaporator vaporized. So, more liquid less vapor both are around approximately 50 percent more vaporized portion over here or volume has come to liquid and here you have got 100 percent vapor. Accordingly the properties at this point F to G would change depending on how much liquid is there, how much vapor is there and the properties are going to change and that is what is what is going to be decided by quality. The point is how do I calculate these properties? That is the most important thing. How do I get values thermal energy, specific volume, enthalpy, entropy for a mixture? The steam table gives the values for this point and this point. How do I get the values? How do I get all the properties for this region for the two phase region? And that is the question now that we want to answer. Importantly now we are going to talk about dryness fraction or sometimes also it is called as quality. Quality is also referred to as dryness fraction and this dryness fraction is defined as x. What is this dryness fraction? It is ratio of mass of vapor to the total mass of mixture. So, depending on amount of vapor that it has in a liquid plus vapor region, how much vapor is there? This quality or x factor or dryness fraction is going to be determined. So, mass of vapor divided by total mass of mixture is what will be termed as x or dryness fraction. You can see both of these masses. Therefore, it is a ratio of two masses basically. So, dryness fraction is mass of vapor which is mg. So, vapor will have the same characteristic as g point over here while the mass of liquid is going to have the same characteristic as f over here. So, mass of vapor mg divided by total mass, the total mass will be comprised of mass of liquid and mass of vapor. And therefore, I can define now x is equal to mg upon mf plus mg. mg is the mass of vapor, mf plus mg is the mass of total mass of the mixture. Now, if I try to apply this definition to this diagram, I can now apply to point f, point g and any point intermediate to f and g. If I go by the basic definition of dryness fraction or quality or sometime referred to as x only, I can calculate this factor at various points. For example, at point f, what you have is 100 percent mf. That means, the entire mass of vapor is going to be equal to 0 in this case because entire mass is liquid mass. So, if I do that, in this case, I will have mg is equal to 0. And therefore, my x in that case for 100 percent mf is going to be equal to 0. And I can therefore say that x is equal to 0 for the point f, which is 100 percent mf or 100 percent liquid. This is the extreme case. The other extreme case is the point g, where the entire mass is going to be gas, 100 percent gas on the saturated vapor line. And therefore, mf will be equal to 0 in that case. In that case, what is the value of x will be 100 percent mg. So, mg upon mg because mf is going to be equal to 0 in that case. In that case, my x factor is going to be equal to 1 or 100 percent. So, these are the two extreme cases. Any point on the saturated liquid, x is equal to 0. Any point on the saturated vapor, x is equal to 1. It means that as I go from the left to the right side, as I go from left to the right side, the vapor percentage is going to go on increasing. And therefore, the x value will increase from 0 to 1. 0 is extreme case. 1 is an extreme case. Any point in between 0 and 1 is going to be two phase mixture. When you have got a x value, which lies between 0 and 1, I am for sure know that it is going to be a two phase mixture. It has got some vapor. It has got some liquid. But the moment I know that x is equal to 0, I know it is a saturated liquid. The moment I know that it is a x is equal to 1, it is going to be a saturated vapor case. So, anything in between, I will have a point which has got x value which lies between 0 to 1. So, I can conclude from here that from f to g, from saturated liquid to saturated vapor region, I can say 0 is less than equal to x less than equal to 1. That means x value can extreme case be 0 and 1. And in between, it will have 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.1 to 0.99 is what the x value can have. And therefore, whenever x is between 0 to 1, I know that it is a two phase mixture. It is a very important parameter which helps us to calculate the properties of a two phase mixture. Thank you very much.


Hi everybody, Sean with JaspysCaseBreaks.com just filled up 2017-18 Panini Flawless Basketball one box briefcase random hit number three coming from a fresh case. So we're going to open up the case, take a look at all the hits, type them all up into a randomizer and match that up with the randomizer for the names as well. So here's a list of customers, Mike Sommich, couple spots he purchased straight up with a couple spots that he, finishing with a couple spots that he won in filler breaks as well. This is where the randomizer for the hits will go after we've seen what we have in here and obviously we'll use a dice roll to randomize them both. But in the meantime, let's go ahead and look at the case. Here is the fresh case. So this is random hit number three coming from a fresh case, one briefcase in here. Random hit number four will be the second box in this case guys. So if we don't find what we're looking for in this one, random hit number four is in the stores already. You can see up here on the nit cam everything that's going on. So we're going to take a look and roll a dice to see which box we're going to do. So here's briefcase number one, go ahead and throw that to the left and briefcase number two. So we can see them both right there on screen, there you go. Dice roll here, let me find the lucky die, focus, one, two, three for the left, four, five, six for the box on the right. So dice roll into one. So we're going with the box on the left. This one will be four, random hit four, I'll throw that right there, RH four. In the store now guys, Dawei I think you are, I think you're lagging considerably. Somebody wants to let them know to catch up. So let's open this up, not John, Mike, Dawei. That's why I thought you were behind because John did not end up getting the spot. That's why I thought you were behind. I know it's late. This is my Friday. That's why I thought I'd be the one making mistakes and I was like, okay, so we're going to keep it like this so that we can keep the encased cards covered. Well, apparently the box inside does not have a seal on it like other years. So the lid came off already, but everything's good. They need to use this type of box or width box for noir this year because when they did this last year's noir, not as good. First off, world be free, five out of five, dual relic, Golden State Warriors, and we're going to type in the hits in order. Nice dual relic there. Next up, Jimmy Butler, Carl Anthony Towns, dual relic, three out of 25, dual diamond, nice three color patches there, Minnesota Timberwolves, first auto, Zadrunas Ilgaskis, Z-Man, 24 out of 25, Cleveland Cavaliers, David Thompson, 18 out of 25 for the Denver Nuggets, Harrison Barnes. This I believe is the Finals, NBA Finals tag on, is it playoffs or finals tag that goes on to the back of the collar to say how many times they've either been in the playoffs or in the finals or something like that? Harrison Barnes, two out of two for the Dallas Mavericks, doesn't say, but yeah, I know that that's like, I think that's the tag that goes on the back to say either how many times you've been in the playoffs or how many times you've been in the finals. Kevin Johnson, three color patch and auto, one out of 10 for the Phoenix Suns. Brandon Ingram, two color patch and auto, five out of 15 for Los Angeles Lakers, and one of my favorites, Allen Iverson. The answer, honored numbers, flawless signature, 18 out of 25 for the Philadelphia 576ers. So that was the box, let me count the hits in here, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and there are two encased in the briefcase. So there are 10, 10 spots, no need to combo any spots this time. Up, encased card, certificate of authenticity, diamond, Ronde, Hollis, Jefferson, two out of 10, flawless, dual diamond, yeah, dual diamond, Ronde, Hollis, Jefferson. You see one diamond here, one diamond here, I believe that this guarantees that they are genuine, not lab grown diamonds, so on and so forth. If you didn't know about the extra dalai, this isn't the extra, this is the meat of the sandwich. The rest of it is everything else going up to it. Jason Tatum, flawless, rookie auto, 12 out of 15, total we're looking for, right? There you go. So now that we've seen the hits, let's go ahead and enter them into the randomizer. We're going to pause the stream while I type in the hits in the order that they came in and then we randomize the list. So when we check back in, we'll have the randomizers all ready and see who gets all these beautiful cards. Okay, everyone, we're back. Uh, 17, 18, 18, flawless, basketball, one box, briefcase, random hit, number three. Obviously, list of customers again, Mike Sommage down to Mike Sommage, list of hits from World B Free, Dual Relic that we pulled off the beginning, five of five, down to the Jason Tatum, rookie auto, flawless, 12 out of 15. Dice roll, randomize both lists, two out of six, eight times, first on the names, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and eighth and final time, Mike Sommage down to Mike Sommage. You can see eight times there on the bottom, eight times again on the hits. Good luck, everyone. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eighth and final time. Good luck from Allen Iverson down to World B Free and match up the hits. Make it a little bit easier for everybody to read. Mike Sommage with the Allen Iverson Auto, 18 out of 25, Christopher Gerard with the David Thompson Auto, 18 out of 25, Christopher Gerard also with the Carl Anthony Towns, Jimmy Butler, Dual Relic, three out of 25, Mike Sommage with the Brandon Green Ingram, patch auto, five out of 15, Mike Sommage with the Jason Tatum, rookie auto, flawless, 12 out of 15. James Connell with the Harrison Barnes Tag Auto, two out of two, Christopher Gerard with the Kevin Johnson Patch Auto, one out of 10, Mike Sommage with the Ronde Hollis Jefferson Dual Diamond, two out of 10, Christopher Gerard with the Zydrunas Ilgaskis Auto, 24 out of 25, and Mike Sommage with the World B Free, Dual Relic, five out of five. Congratulations guys. Going to Mike Sommage, World B Free, five out of five, Carl Anthony Towns, Jimmy Butler, Dual Relic, three out of 25, Christopher Gerard, Zydrunas Ilgaskis, 24 out of 25, Auto for Christopher Gerard, David Thompson, 18 out of 25, going to Christopher Gerard, Harrison Barnes Tag and Auto, two out of two, going to James Connell, Kevin Johnson, one out of 10, Patch and Auto, going to Christopher Gerard, Brandon Ingram, Patch and Auto, a little bit of smear there unfortunately, five out of 15 for Mike Sommage, Allen Iverson, Flawless, Honored Numbers, Autograph, 18 out of 25, going to Mike Sommage, and Ronde Hollis Jefferson, Dual Diamond, two out of 10, going to Mike Sommage, last but definitely not least, Jason Tatum, Rookie, Flawless, Auto, 12 out of 15, going to Mike Sommage and the spot he won in that Don Russ Hanger box, break number two. Congratulations everybody. That was 1718 Panini Flawless basketball, one box briefcase, random hit number three. I'm Sean, jaskyscasebreaks.com, we'll see you next time.