Tom here for Lauren systems. It is September 27th of 2023 and there's been a lot of browser updates over the last few weeks This is because we know there was a vulnerability We just didn't have all the details in the webp codec Now the details have emerged and I'm gonna be joined by Jason Slagle because we want to talk about where this is besides the browser And it turns out it's in a lot of places So finding this is gonna be an ongoing investigation over the next few weeks to what software might have this embedded many companies And this comes bound to software bill of materials not being readily available with many of these companies Figuring out whether or not they have a dependency on it and whether or not they have it implemented in a way that can be Exploited is something that's gonna be coming out over time So I'm gonna have a forum post down below that I linked to that'll be dumping links in Actively even after this video goes up to try and keep people up to date with it And of course we're running around updating clients, but let's dive into the details and talk about just how bad this is And yeah, it's bad All right, I am joined by Jason Slagle here. How you doing Jason? Got woken up with some fun stuff going on this morning. So I'm doing okay I'm feeling better than yesterday and ready to go. Yeah, I'm glad like the brain fog cleared just in time for a Will just call it log4j ish event because log4j is the first one. So we have to bring it up This is just as critical. It's not necessarily a server vulnerability.  There's a lot of frameworks. You mentioned Flutter. You mentioned a few others Basically anything that's using the webp. This is CV. This is a 10 out of 10 like this is Full code execution and it starts with Apple. I think it was called was it blast pass? Yeah blast pass Yeah You're really advanced red actor This is the cool stuff and good news is doesn't usually happen to our clients But it's really cool to read about someone found a really clever hack But as they unraveled it of how they were chaining all these attacks together turned out to be a flaw That the one that impacts the greater community is this flaw in webp It's been hanging out for a long time. So who knows how long someone has known about this But now the world knows about it because it's being patched and it's in more things than you realize You might go well, you know cool. I just my web browser and updated it so I'm safe But it's way more complicated than that. That's what we're here to talk about. Yeah I mean, so to give you an idea this was originally released by Google it came out two weeks ago I believe two weeks ago But the details we didn't we didn't know what we knew it was critical to update So we always update but the why giving people two weeks to kind of catch up before the world gets to learn About just how bad this is and that's that's what dropped on us That's what we're sharing with all of you. Yeah, and if you look at the original the CVE 2023 4863 It does say it's webp, right, but it says in Google Chrome So, you know two weeks ago most of the browser is updated, right? So most of the big huge Huge things you would expect. However, I mean even Firefox, right, which does not use they use their own rendering engine They're not chromium on the back end, but they still use live webp, right? So they were vulnerable and all of those browsers two weeks ago released updates, right? So now today fast-forward to today The CVE comes out on webp itself and now people are starting to go. Oh, this is yeah A lot more prevalent than you think it is pretty much all the communication apps we use every single one of them is a flutter or electron Yeah, flutter electron and the if you're not familiar with electron You probably use it didn't realize anything this is a modern way they started programming things So instead of actually taking and signals an example and signal was up to date on this Use signals just wrapping a browser in what looks like a application window that way you can build a web browser-based thing So you can use slack in a browser or you can use what looks like the slack app, which is really just the browser Yeah, wrapped into an application So it looks like a standalone app, but it's technically running chromium on the back end and all the sport libraries And this is a real challenge because you don't necessarily know what version you're running of there You have to take it apart. It doesn't easily tell you its secrets of which version of the webp or more specifically Yeah, VP 8 codec that is in there. Yeah, it's VP 8 1 or v8 1. Yeah Yeah, the real nuance to it and Jason spent some time That's where we're doing a video now really taking it apart to make sure we work with a lot of other people in the Security community and we're all trying to make sure we fully understand it because we have to get this out To our clients to make sure not we browser updates. Sure. That's easy That's been taking care of two weeks ago. That that's not the nitty-gritty The nitty-gritty is what are those other applications that you might be running that our clients might be running? For example, Tom edits this video. This video is edited in a vulnerable version of DaVinci Resolved or is it vulnerable? Definitely if they used webp Unfortunately, I can't use webp in the Linux version So you couldn't send me a webp file to execute on my DaVinci Resolve. So don't worry. I think I'm safe editing Yeah, it's but there's a lot of that right and that that begs one of the questions is that you know, I went through Qt is the underlying library that DaVinci uses and a bunch of other applications of Funny note like the I play board of Warcraft occasionally So I have the Blizzard app on this PC. I'm using at home and it's uses a vulnerable version of webp I don't know if they actually use the SS on the back end, but there are a ton of things the Corsair IQ thing that makes all the funny RGB go on my keyboard here That's bundles of vulnerable version of it stream deck of bundles of vulnerable version of it and it may not be the case where you have to Display an image it could be the case of many of these things where you just open a directory with Images in it and it will render a thumbnail, right? Like and I don't know it's gonna require a lot of testing from a lot of researchers to determine What is and is not vulnerable here? I would assume at this point I would assume anything that bundles it is Potentially vulnerable because there may be a non obvious code path you can take to get things to execute things, right? So it may not be the case of it's vulnerable to the point of drive-by But it may be the case that a threat actor gets on your system and is able to somehow abuse one of these tools That's running as System right like the Corsair library thing they may be able to abuse that to do privilege privilege escalation So I think the first round of this will be a bunch of drive-by stuff You see and then you'll start seeing more clever uses of the vulnerability to start abusing things like Services and stuff that bundle it to escalate where you're gonna be more likely to find this is gonna be in your web applications Companies that run web applications that let you upload video That is where the huge target is because if they let you upload any type of web p video and they have not updated whatever the underlying rendering is you can upload a Modified version of this video file and then get execution privileges out there. Yeah, I'm sure large scale companies I hope like YouTube and LinkedIn anywhere you can upload different types of video Probably have this patched right away, but it's all it's gonna be downhill quick from all the smaller ones that may not do this So it's not necessarily like a firewall probably you're not gonna find this in your firewalls. I at least I hope you Well, unfortunately we have to break some bad news people Windows 7 probably not getting the fix for this Yeah, this is probably they'd nail in the Windows 7 coffin from what I can tell so so edge is certainly vulnerable And you know, this goes on all the way back to version 0.50 of web or webp Which is very old and so the last version of chrome or edge shipped for Windows 7 based on quick research this morning And maybe they they do something they said they weren't gonna do it or at least a new one But the last version at least was 109 and you got to get up to like 116 I believed to not be vulnerable to this Yep What I'm gonna do with this video here because there we are still examining MSP tools the tools we use to defend our clients and seeing What may or may not contain this is gonna be a forum post you're gonna find a forum post in the description down below I will also link because we are pretty confident our friends at huntress will also have their own rapid response Adding cumulatively all the links for this because I I think this is the story today The story is gonna keep expanding as we find things on there And I'll keep the links up to date so you can have a lot more knowledge on this as as you know We're compiling it internally. I'm just gonna dump it all externally as well for anyone who's interested in this and like it's described to Stay up with that check out the forum link. You don't have to sign up You can just view all the forums for free and so I'll try to a big link dump in there including that research previously on each two six four fuzzing because I Feel like there's some relationship here. I'm just speculating Yeah All right, thanks everyone joining us. So we're gonna get back to passion systems. Yep. See ya. Cool


My name is Andrew Woods, and it's a pleasure to be here. I am privileged to be a member of the DuraSpace team, one of the folks actually developing the DuraCloud product. Actually, before we jump into the session, I would like to go ahead and support the ongoing effort of trying to disambiguate the organization, DuraSpace, with the product DuraCloud. So something in the past, on the order of a year or so ago, the gaze of two organizations met across a crowded room, a d-space on the one side, and a fedora on the other. And one thing led to another. What ended up was sometime this past summer, July or so, the two organizations joined, realizing that they really had so much in common. And that joined organization became DuraSpace. And so DuraSpace is a not-for-profit organization that supports open technologies around the accessibility of durable content and working in collaboration with other organizations and institutions that share the same values, namely the academic and the scientific and cultural heritage institutions, as well as technology community. So with that, actually, I'm tempted to jump right into the presentation. But before doing so, I will take the moment to go ahead and recognize the team of people and the efforts that they've put into making DuraCloud a reality. So to begin with, there's a small group that we affectionately term the triad. So there's Sandy Payette, who is over here. Hi, Sandy. And Michelle Kimpton, Brad McLean, as well as we have Chris Wilper and Chris Smith, as well as Dan Davis and Danny Bernstein on the drums, or UI, rather. And particularly, I'd like to recognize Bill Brandon, who is not here today but certainly deserves so much of the credit for making DuraCloud what it is. We've been working on DuraCloud for something on the order of a year now. And what I'd like to do today is go ahead and give an overview of what we've been doing, talk a little bit about what DuraCloud is, discuss our pilot partner program that's been underway since this past fall. Some of the things have come out of that, as well as go ahead and take a slightly deeper dive into the architecture, take a look at a demo of a running instance of DuraCloud, and then make an attempt at peering into the future. At an organizational level, so DuraSpace, I'm talking about, we've put considerable energy into defining the mission that we believe in and that drives a lot of the decisions that we make as an organization. We're into and interested in promoting durable persistent access to digital data and creating these open technologies in collaboration with the communities that share those same values. All right, so now a little bit about DuraCloud itself. I'll start with saying that it is actually a service, or it will be a service, that you can go to, say, DuraCloud.org, you can input your criteria for what your storage needs are, maybe what your geographic concerns are, needs around where you want your content to reside, what sort of resource requirements you have. And then you can click on Go. An instance will be started on your behalf in the cloud that is hosted or supported by DuraSpace. So that's one thing. It's actually a service that's provided by the not-for-profit organization, DuraSpace. And a couple of things that this service does is, one, it sort of abstracts away the storage of underlying storage providers. So more specifically, on the commercial side, we work with Amazon in terms of storage, Amazon S3. We work with Rackspace cloud files, and we work with EMC Atmos on the commercial side. And as non-commercial providers, institutions come up. The framework certainly allows, and you'll see that when we jump into the architecture of plugging those right in. Additionally, in addition to being a service, it is actually a open-source cloud-based application. So you can run it as a service, or you can download it to your local institution and go ahead and play around with it, stand it up, and run it as your own internal service. And the pluggable service framework that it provides really leaves the door wide open for any number of service implementations. So if you leave this session with nothing else, I would hope that, at the very least, you pull away these key points, namely that DuraCloud offers mediated cloud storage. So it helps mitigate issues around having, on several different levels, issues around having to understand how to communicate and integrate with any given cloud provider, and it mitigates the possibility of that cloud provider making a business decision that's not in line with your business decision. So DuraCloud facilitates your content flowing across various providers, so it mediates that. And it also offers sort of ready to use out-of-the-box services that you can execute on your content that resides in the cloud. And obviously, from a user perspective, at the very least, the intention is for it to be easy. Just graphically trying to reinforce that same concept, the idea of, you can't really see it at the top, but mediated storage. So any sort of digital file, the format doesn't matter, audio, video, whatever, you can push into DuraCloud. And DuraCloud abstracts away the idiosyncrasies of having to interact with the various underlying providers, and it abstracts away the details of the various APIs that they offer. So the lower portion of the diagram basically indicates that you can push all the content to any one or more of the providers, and you could potentially stand up rules that dictate certain types of content go one place or another. And then also in terms of reinforcing the other key notion of cloud-based services, here what we're just talking about is you have the ability through DuraCloud to run processing on the content that is hosted in your DuraCloud account. All right, great. So now I'd like to change gears a little bit and talk about some of the experiences and sort of what the whole pilot partner program has been about thus far. So sometime back in the fall, we went ahead and started to establish relationships with these three organizations, the Biodiversity Heritage Library, New York Public Library, and WGBH in Boston, in order to create sort of symbiotic, mutually beneficial relationship around DuraCloud. So on the one side, we were offering the DuraCloud service to these three pilot partners so that in order to address real business needs that they individually had. And then on their side, they were offering concrete use cases that helped drive the processes and refine the processes and services that we were developing, giving concrete feedback around that. It has been absolutely wonderful. I'll go ahead and drive into a little bit of the use cases that they brought to the table. This is just sort of an aggregation of all three of the pilot partners use cases, or at least some of the top level ones. Namely, they were really all interested in, as you might expect in regards to DuraCloud. They're all interested in having an online off-site backup of their content. So DuraCloud certainly offered that. There was also, from the NYPL's perspective, an interest in converting what turned out to be sort of a subset of their corpus of TIF images. And actually for all three of the pilots up front, we defined a data set that was on the order of 10 terabytes for each provider. And so with NYPL, we started off with 10 terabytes of their TIF images. And they wanted to convert those to JPEG 2000s. So we developed services around that. And you'll see shortly there were some lessons learned there. Naturally, once those images were converted to JPEG 2000, then they wanted to be able to see them. So we stood up the J2K server, or sort of spelled Jitoka, JPEG 2000 image server. And with a view, we're on top of it. And we'll see that shortly. Additionally, the Biodiversity Heritage Library had the use case of an interest in internationally replicating their corpus. So what we're working on with them is we've already pushed, as it turns out, somewhere over 13 terabytes of the BHL content into DuraCloud. And then we're working with either in, we're not sure where it's going to land. If it's in the UK or if it's in Australia. But working through the details of then just pulling that content down from the cloud and any issues that may come out of that. Additionally, on the WGBH side, as you may expect, they're interested in streaming the video that they are responsible for. And so straight out of the box, sort of as low-hanging fruit, we have decided to just leverage what Amazon provides in their CloudFront service. They have a video streamer, so we can easily stream content that's hosted in S3 that way. But we're also in discussions with the open source video toolkit of Kaltura and have made some early steps in the integration of that. Additionally, just sort of at a high level, there is this notion of processing over the corpus of the content that is held in DuraCloud. And more specifically, BHL has a particular use case around extracting the scientific names out of their books that they have hosted. And the tool is called Taxon Finder, which you may or may not be aware of. But the idea is that we iterate over the content, their holdings, and are able to extract these scientific names using this Taxon Finder tool. And then the tool itself creates the links in their relationships. But from DuraCloud's perspective, enabling the mass processing over the entire content set that is held in one's account. And then also, just this notion, this came out of the New York Public Library, where they get a hard drive on the doorstep late at night or something. And you want to triage it, sort of do an initial look at what is this, what should we do with it, and so pushing it into maybe like a quarantine area in the cloud, having somebody analyze it, do some bulk tagging of what these files might be so that another department can pull it down or do whatever needs to be done with it. So out of those use cases, we had some good times. We had some bad times. But certainly, there was a handful of lessons learned that came out of it. And a lot of them, as you may expect, came out of the ingest process. So we're talking about three different organizations that, at least for this pilot round, had upwards of, or in some cases, exceeding 10 terabytes of data. And so we learned quite a bit from that. One thing that came up immediately was the fact that as we were loading content, so let me, I can speak specifically for the BHL case, their content was previously, or still is actually, hosted in Internet Archive. And so we were pulling the content from Internet Archive into their DuraCloud account. And in the process of doing that, realized during the validation phase of that ingest effort, realized that there are some errors. And some of the errors were around the fact that some files didn't make it in. So it was like, hmm. And then sometimes the initial MD5 associated with a file didn't match the MD5 that landed in DuraCloud. So in the case where files didn't show up at all, actually what was going on in BHL wasn't aware of the fact, apparently, from the beginning that files that exceed a certain cap limit on size don't get accepted into the underlying storage provider. So in the case of Rackspace and Amazon, that cap is 5 gigabytes. So all the files that exceeded that size, at this point you can't push it in. So that's where this chunking and stitching comes from. So we had to solve the issue of being able to take these large files. And as they're coming into the system, go ahead and break them into chunks, obviously we want to capture the MD5 of the chunk. And then also, as the stream is going through, capture the MD5 of the entire file and go ahead and package all that information in an XML document and push the chunks separately into DuraCloud. And then on the flip side, if we want to be able to stitch those chunks together, pull those constituent parts back into the parent file. So working through a lot of the details there was good fun. And so we have two use cases around ingesting content into DuraCloud. One was over the wire, like I was mentioning there, with the BHL. And we also, WGBH brought to the table the use case of not having the bandwidth to push the content into the cloud in any reasonable time frame. So they worked with us in developing processes around shipping that content via hard drives. And so obviously, some of our concerns were having a manifest of what the MD5s of each of the content items was locally on the system. And then on the hard drive, and then once it lands into the cloud with the MD5s there. So having the accountability and the verification from hop to hop that ultimately the file that ends up in the cloud is the same file that initially resided on the local system. And so one thing I'll mention, actually with the parallel upload, it also applies to the bulk image conversion. One thing that we found, and no big surprise, but we found in this effort in general is that one way to address time concerns, be it bulk image conversion or the time it takes to push content into the cloud is to go ahead and break up the job and parallelize it over multiple cloud servers. And I have a graphic here shortly that shows that we were able to, in the case of BHL, push this 13 terabytes of content into the cloud would have taken a month or more. But by standing up, I think what we ended up with was six servers and just having three different processes on each server pulling from internet archive and pushing up. And with that configuration, we're able to, you see here, like in a five day time frame, push the entire content up. And you see the green line marks. I imagine this is fairly unintelligible. But the green line marks, the 10 terabytes, and in each of the hash marks at the bottom are indications of a day. So this was just sort of an internal graph that we were using to track that progress. Additionally, a big thing, actually, talking about lessons learned is the bottom point about the asynchronous nature of cloud storage. So naturally, Duraspace, the organization, hosting, or supporting Fedora, the repository, as well as dSpace, it only makes sense to go ahead and plug Duracloud in underneath those repositories. And so currently, Fedora, you may be aware of, has a low level storage implementation called Acubra that the default implementation, it writes blobs to the local file system. Now, Chris Wilper, bless his heart, he went ahead and pulled together another implementation of Acubra using the same Acubra interfaces, but instead of writing to the local file system, writes to Duracloud. And it works like a charm. Well, except it takes a lot longer than you might expect because of this. When you write to a file system, you write a file, and then you get a return, and it's there, and you're happy you can move along. And when you're dealing with cloud content, you write a file, and it takes a certain amount of time, usually on the order of seconds or tens of seconds, for the other load balance servers within that underlying storage provider to register the fact that a new object has been created or has been updated. And so what Acubra does is, in order to maintain the contract of when Fedora writes an object, it's guaranteed to be there, it sort of spins until it gets that confirmation that, OK, the file's there, and then it returns and moves on. But the overhead involved is noticeable. So I'm quite sure that in many use cases, that's probably acceptable, depending on how you're using your repository. But it also drove us to come up with an alternative solution for integrating repositories in the cloud. And that solution revolves around a client-side utility that basically does a synchronization with your local file system and your DuraCloud account. So you can point this utility at a directory or any number of directories on your local system, tell it which space in DuraCloud you're interested in synchronizing with, and any sort of new files or changes to files or deleted files get synchronized with DuraCloud. So you can run your repository just like you normally would, and then in the background, it's being sort of out of the mainstream of requests and response. In the background, it's synchronizing that with your DuraCloud account. And so obviously, it works in the case of repositories, but it's really a general utility that anyone can use. And something that we're doing just internally within the DuraSpace organization is each of us standing up our own instance of this client-side utility and synchronizing whatever files we want to just sort of working through any kinks that might show up in the initial release of this synchronization utility. So a handful of things have come out of the pilot effort. Now I'd like to go ahead and talk a little about DuraCloud itself, try to pick up the pace. So talk a little about DuraCloud itself. Like I said, it's a service that you can go and sign up for. And once you input your criteria and actually sign up, you click on the button, and it launches an instance in the cloud for you based on whatever criteria you specified. And then from that point on, most of your interaction with the system takes place through that instance that was launched on your behalf. So it's actually a set of web applications that you can interact with. And we'll go ahead and pop the hood on that and look inside some of the moving parts of DuraCloud. So what I'd like to do, actually, is sort of a component view of the DuraCloud architecture. I'll sort of talk to this at a high level, just giving you an idea of what the various boxes represent. And then I'd like to flip over to a demo.  And maybe some of the smaller boxes will make more sense. So one thing I'll say before we jump over to the demo is that what I would consider the two main components of the system are the two boxes in the middle, the pink one and the greenish one, DuraService and DuraStore. So as you might expect, DuraService is the component that manages the deployment, installation, configuration of all your services. And DuraStore is what is responsible for mediating the requests for interacting with content, mediating that down to the underlying providers there at the bottom. And one thing worth noting is the fact that both of those components have a RESTful API sitting on top of them, which basically opens up all kinds of doors for other types of integrations. At the top, we have our own implementation of a web-based interface that interacts with DuraStore and DuraService. But that interaction takes place through the REST APIs. It would be easy to go ahead and throw away the DuraAdmin, the UI that we've put together, and strictly interact with your DuraCloud account via command-lined scripts, using just WGit and Curl or whatever. Or you could build your own applications at your institution that interact with the REST APIs or you could throw a Drupal on top of this that under the covers plugs into these REST calls. As it stands right now, we've pulled together just to facilitate that interaction. We've pulled together a web-based UI called DuraAdmin. We'll take a look at that. But in looking at it, I would like to just note that this is UI that we've pulled together. But kind of like I said, it's not required. This is not your only way of interacting with a system. We did it in order to simplify things at the beginning. So let me just go ahead and poke around in here a little bit. This would be the home page where you first experience with your institution's DuraCloud instance. You can imagine any sort of customization that could take place here in terms of icons and color schemes and that sort of thing, or messages about what content's been most recently viewed or used in some way or another. I will note that there are a couple different tabs here at the top, one that relates to your content called Spaces and one that relates to your services. We'll jump into those momentarily. And then also on the right-hand side here, we happen to show the underlying storage providers that are connected to this actual instance of DuraCloud. So in this case, we have Amazon S3 as well as RackSpace. So jumping into your Spaces, so I guess it's worth saying that a space in the DuraCloud context is really just sort of an abstract notion of a container for digital objects. And right now we have one space called CNI Content. You can have up to 100 Spaces as it stands right now, just as a sort of hard cap. But in terms of content that you can put inside of each space, it's unlimited, depending on how much storage you want to provision. So you see that there's some metadata associated with the space. You can add content to it. You can remove the space. You can add a new space. There's some special characters that you don't want to use. But otherwise, you can name the space whatever you want to. For example, something, maybe. And then there's this notion of access, open or closed. And it's really as simple as that. If a space is open, then that means that all the content that resides within that space, the URLs, the restful URLs that can access that content are publicly available. If it's closed, then they're not. You have to actually provide credentials in order to view that content. So before we, well, I will actually mention here on the left-hand side, if you can see it, there is the notion that you can associate metadata with the space. So any sort of metadata that would be appropriate. So whatever you want to, just sort of name value pairs that you can associate with the space. Likewise, you can add tags to a space which would potentially facilitate or just whatever you use tags for. So we'll come back to the spaces in a moment. But I'd like to jump over to services. So actually, in terms of available services, we have right now three that are plugged into this instance, namely replication service, which enables the ability to replicate content that, say, comes into your Amazon, replicated over to Rackspace. Simple as that. Also, there is the JPEG 2000 service, which stands up a JPEG 2000 server, as well as a viewer for serving and viewing images that exist in your DuraCloud account. And then likewise, there is this image conversion service, which can convert from any number of image formats to any number of other image formats. And under the covers, the image service is just using image magic. So let me go ahead and kick off. Say, for example, the JPEG 2000 service. And there's a little bit of a workflow here. It's fairly simple at this point. You can specify which server you want to deploy it on. But since there's only a single server here, it makes a decision somewhat trivial. And then this basically is just saying, OK, let's make it happen. And you may notice that it takes a little bit of time. And the reason for that is the framework, the way it's set up, is actually the services are bundled as OSGI bundles. And for those that are into OSGI, these are separate JAR files that can be deployed into an OSGI container. And what's happening is the service, actually these JAR files reside within Durastore. So we have a service repository that hosts a variety of services. And when you want to deploy one, you click on Deploy, it pulls the services from the repository, streams them over to whichever instance you want to deploy, in this case the primary instance. And then it deploys them into an OSGI container resident on that instance. As it so happens, the JPEG 2000 service takes a little bit longer than that even, because once it installs everything on the OSGI container, it goes and it starts up a new application server, in this case Tomcat. And then it deploys the JPEG 2000 service into that new instance of Tomcat. And then once that's all happened, then it returns back and says, you're good to go. I will also just go ahead and kick off the replication service, and then we can go back to the content same decision process, quite easy. With the replication service, in this particular release, and I guess I should mention that we've had a couple different internal releases of Diracloud, this one is the 0.2. So it's quite young, embryotic really. So we're going to have the 0.3 towards the end of the month, and we have a series of other internal releases that are mapped out in their associated functionality. But here, the replication service, you can specify which store you want to be the source and which one you want to be the sync. In this case, we'll say, OK, everything that comes into Amazon, go ahead and push that to Rackspace, please. And this one takes a little bit less time, just because it doesn't have the application server that has to come up and that sort of thing. But you see a listing of the services that are installed. There are two here that I didn't mention, the Image Magic service and the Web App Utility service. These are really from a user perspective. They don't matter all that much. They're sort of infrastructure required by the other services, as you may expect, the JPEG 2000 and the Image Conversion service. But there are some properties that are associated with a service. And you can look at those properties by clicking on View here. But it's just a rest call, so you can get that information by doing it command line as well. And really, one of the reasons that drove us to choosing OSGI as our framework for hosting services was the ability to, at runtime, reconfigure a service without having to sort of stop and restart any applications. So OSGI provides sort of a very dynamic interaction. Go ahead and cancel out this. All right, so let's go back over here to Spaces and maybe just add some content. You can go ahead and pull any sort of file from your local system. I was hoping that we would find a pleasant image, but maybe we'll just sort of grab something. Hopefully it's non-offensive. You can specify the content ID. If you don't specify anything here, then it just takes the file name under the cloud images. Or excuse me, Sandy? Sandy? Oh, just this one. I'm not sure what, so I'll just leave the extension off here. If it has the extension, then obviously it tries to extract or determine the mime type based on that. I'll just actually let it do its own thing in terms of the content ID and figuring out the mime type there, which it did. And so a thumbnail or a fist nail or whatever actually is created from that image. And I imagine this one, yeah, it's actually quite small. So if you click on it, it launches the JPEG 2000 server and viewer, as it so happens. Since it's such a small image, you don't really have the benefits of JPEG 2000, which deals with tiling and different resolutions. But this particular example is less dazzling. But a couple things that you might be interested in here are the checksum. So we retain the checksum of the file, which is later used by a bit integrity check service. And then obviously the mime type and the file size. And just like at the space level, you can also associate metadata and tags with digital objects. All right, so let's go ahead and just take a look at the rack space side. And you see that now that there's the top left hand or top right hand corner, you see we're looking at content that's stored within rack space. And you notice that there's this space that was created because we turned on the replication service. I created the space over on the Amazon side. That space was replicated over on the rack space side. And likewise, the image that we pushed into Amazon also got replicated over here on rack space. So I will go ahead and move along. Additionally, time permitting, we could go ahead and do an image conversion and change the PNG to JPEG or whatever. But we'll leave that for now. And talk a little bit in more detail about the architecture. So on the storage side, we have a REST API that we like to think is a logical naming convention. I'll show you in a second here of space and then content ID for interacting, creating, updating, deleting objects, leveraging the HTTP verbs. So like put and push and delete and head and get. But so those calls are translated in the storage mediation layer, translated into an internal interface. We call it the storage provider interface. So those calls get turned into calls into this interface. And basically, in order to plug in additional storage providers, in this case, we have Amazon and EMC and rack space. In order to plug in additional storage providers, all that needs to be done is another adapter has to be created that is able to translate between the API of that storage provider and the storage provider interface. And then you can just plug it right in and work right along with the REST system. On the services side, we similarly have the REST API, which gets translated into calls into the service manager. And kind of like I mentioned, the service manager is the one that's responsible for the listing of available services and services that are deployed. It is able to interact, and actually obviously, the arrow should be pointing, the arrow going off to the storage should be pointing up at the REST API. But it interacts with DuraStore through the REST API in order to pull the services over to itself or to the instance that is going to be hosting the service. And then those services are deployed into the OSGI container on the appropriate server. And in a similar way that the storage providers all implement a common storage provider interface, all the services implement a common compute service interface. So that allows the installation, the sort of statusing, and the update of services in a generic way. I will mention in terms of services, right here, we have sort of three different flavors of services. We have just sort of pure Java. So that would apply to the replication service, where it's just Java code that deploys within OSGI, and it knows how to interact with DuraStore, and it can say, OK, content, here's a message that a piece of content has landed in whatever is configured to listen to, in this case, Amazon. It knows how to talk to DuraStore and say, OK, go ahead and make a copy in Rackspace. So that's just pure Java code. It runs in the OSGI container and does everything it needs to do itself contained in that way. Another example of a slightly different type of service is the Image Magic service. And basically, it's a sort of thin wrapper that has a representative here in the OSGI container in order to implement the basic functionality of deploying, undeploying, and reconfiguring. But ultimately, the service itself is running as a local system utility, like Image Magic. It gets installed on the system in a sort of command line fashion under the covers of this. This just sort of manages and facilitates that interaction. So we have the ability to handle sort of system level services, as well as sort of these pure Java services. And then additionally, kind of what I talked about a little bit for, the JPEG 2000 service is actually its own standalone external web application. So web apps that provide some sort of web-based service were also able to handle within this framework. So this, I'll just sort of gloss through here briefly. It's examples of sort of the syntax around our REST APIs. And this is just a handful of examples for getting content, or getting basically a listing of contents within your space, getting any particular content item, and deploying a service. So your primary instance has a static IP associated with it. So obviously, you can map any sort of domain name to that. And then for the example of getting the listing of contents in your space, there's the context of Durastore, and then the name of the space ID. And actually, in our example, instead of images there, maybe it would be April 2010. And just doing a get on that URL would provide in XML format a listing of the contents within that space. In terms of getting an actual content item, the second example, the same context with Durastore, the instead of images, it would be April 2010. And then instead of the Rome JPEG, it would be the one that we used, whatever the logo was. So this is here just to sort of demonstrate the simplicity of actually interacting with the underlying or the storage and services at Duracloud, the API that Duracloud provides. So that's your primary instance. There are times, and I've talked a little bit about times where it's interesting to actually break up a job and run it over in a sort of parallel processing scenario, run it over multiple instances. So you can also spin up multiple managed instances that the little purple box is there to indicate that it has its own OSGI container, which hosts these deployable services. So you can break up a job and distribute it over managed services. Likewise, at the bottom, there is this notion of a preconfigured service. So that would be actually a virtual machine image that you have, or that you've created at your local institution, and implementing a few basic APIs in terms of management, something akin to the compute service interface. We can deploy and undeploy and do some reconfiguration of required to launch a brand new instance of a cloud server. But actually what's happening inside of that instance is completely up to whatever you've baked into that machine image. So it's sometimes of interest of how security is handled. So I'll just talk a little bit to that point. Have a couple different layers in DuraCloud. At the very bottom layer, each of the underlying storage providers has a notion of security. And what we do in DuraCloud is go ahead and lock it down from the storage provider perspective completely or lock it down to the point that you have to be the owner of the content in order to interact with it to do any sort of updates or additions. You have to be the owner of it. And then on top of that, we have the DuraCloud application. And we have the application level security, which provides the ability to log in or pass in credentials, which then give you the authorization to interact with the underlying content. And on top of the application security, we have channel security, basically just the encryption of the appropriate calls so that your passwords aren't being pulled as it goes across the wire. And that's just having Apache sitting on top of Tomcat, that your DuraCloud and DuraStore and DuraService web applications run on. And then on top of that, your whole instance is firewalled off so that only the common HTTP port 80 is actually open at all. All right, so moving along. On the home stretch here, we have a sort of look at the horizon. And some of the things coming up are, like I mentioned before, a series of internal releases, sort of dot releases that will push through the summer and into the fall. There are lots of things, obviously included there. But just pulling out a couple of the highlights, sort of the integrations with the repositories through this sync utility. And obviously, we're expanding the scope of the provided support for underlying storage providers, as well as compute providers. Right now, storage, we have the three, Amazon, EMC, and Rackspace. Compute, we have Amazon. Rackspace just came out with the ability to have custom machine images that you can persist, which didn't exist before. They just came out with it like two weeks ago. So that opens up the door for being able to use them in a compute capacity in the way that makes sense to Duracloud. And we're in continual, actually at this point, weekly conversations with EMC working through the issues of having their compute service work in a way that works for us and works for them. So expanding that support, and then certainly beefing up and expanding the service selection. And here's just some of the examples of services that are on the horizon. When you're talking about terabytes of data or more, obviously you want to be able to find that. So we'll have some sort of indexing and search capability on that, as well as more robust bit integrity services so that you can get in. We have several tiers of that. You can provide, say, a manifest or a listing of your digital objects and the MD5s associated with it, push it into Duracloud and say, OK, it doesn't match up. And it doesn't match up across your storage providers at a higher level of trust or assurance is the ability to regenerate MD5s. And potentially, the user could provide a nonce or a salt and have the content re-read, regenerate the MD5 with the salt, and then see if that matches what the user or the owner of the system was expecting. So beefing up the bit integrity assurance and putting more functionality around replication so you can replicate based on different rules, MIME type or space or whatever, as opposed to simply everything that comes into Amazon, I want to push to Rackspace. And then, like I mentioned before, the video streaming and auditing services. And so we're actually open sourcing the baseline for OR10, so early this summer. And we're bringing in another set of pilot partners. In the fall, a subset of that group we'll be working with earlier and in a similar way that we've been working with the existing pilot partners, BHL and YPL and WGBH, but more in a development capacity, particularly since the code will be open sourced. We'll be working with each other and having more eyes on the source code. And so the subset that we pull over will be helping with actually expanding the baseline itself. And then the first public release, at least a beta version of it, will be coming at the first of the year. And with that, I'll say that if you'd like to find any more information, there are the websites at dirspace.org and dircloud.org. And thank you for your time.


After 60 hours of sustained resistance from the residents of the Quilombo Campo Grande Camp in Minas Gerais, the military police violently evicted the families. The police, who had been trying to evict the residents for the past three days, on August 14th, finally resorted to shooting tear gas canisters, sound grenades, and violence to forcefully remove the residents who are part of Brazil's Landless Rural Workers Movement. Throughout the eviction process on Friday, the military police was live reporting on the eviction and using its social media platforms to slander the residents and the MST. Around 450 families had been living for the past 22 years in the area of the bankrupt sugar mill, Adriano Poulis, which closed down its activities in 1996. The Camp's educational center, Eduardo Galiano Popular School, where children, youth, and adults study, was also destroyed the day before. On Wednesday, August 12th, the first day of the eviction, the governor of Minas Gerais, Romeo Zema, had affirmed on social media that his government was calling for the postponement of the eviction. Despite this, the police forces remained at the camp. According to the MST, the state government affirmed that the suspension request was forwarded to the region where the camp is located, but the request was rejected. The official responsible for the eviction informed the MST that the action would occur as long as there was no official suspension. Quilombo Campo Grande has been occupied by the landless families for the last 22 years and has become a reference point of agroecology in Brazil. The governor of Minas Gerais, Romeo Zema, has said that the eviction is illegal and that we are going to resist, but he has said that the troops of several cities are here. He is disseminating the virus. We put our lives above anything. This governor doesn't think about life, he thinks about profit.  We need to get together and press the authorities, but, mainly, this governor is allowed here, he broke our school, he broke our families, and now, here, there are more than 250 police men from several municipalities, from Belo Horizonte, from Alfenas, from Bo Esperança. We will not allow this. We are here and we need everyone, everyone and everyone, to denounce what we are living here, press the authorities. But, mainly, this governor, Govarde. The eviction of the camp will result in the destruction of the agroecological harvest. At the camp, families produce corn, organic coffee, and dozens of other foods that are distributed at the cooperatives and stores of the MST. The federal deputy, Roheri O'Corea of the Workers' Party, classified the police action in the midst of the pandemic as cowardice. The movement has denounced that the police aggression against the members of the camp is commonplace. On July 30th, for example, more than 20 police officers invaded the camp and detained the landless worker of Salso Agosto, who they released later that day. The families also said that the police agents invaded their homes, carrying rifles and pistols, and destroyed doors and windows. The MST denounced that the day before the eviction began, the police encircled the camp with patrol cars, intimidating the families. Within Minas Gerais, Brazil, and on an international level, people mobilized to denounce the actions of the state government and the military police. The eviction of 450 families and the destruction of agroecological food production in the midst of a public health emergency has been deemed by many as criminal. The MST and the families of Quilombo Campo Grande have vowed to continue their struggle to produce healthy food for the Brazilian people and in defense of their right to land. The MST denounced that the day before the eviction began, the police encircled the camp with patrol cars, intimidating the families of the people of Salso Agosto, who they released later that day.


Hello, this is Laptop Media and today, we will show you how to open the Lenovo ThinkPad E15 and what's inside of it. In order to get inside of the ThinkPad E15, you need to undo a total of 8 Philips head screws. Interestingly, all of them stay attached to the bottom panel afterwards. Then, just pry the panel with a plastic tool. In terms of cooling, there is a single, rather thin heat pipe. The other components include a fan, and a heat sink, which is also smaller than what we're used to seeing. Upgradability wise, we feel that this notebook is more than good. There is an M.2 slot with PCI-EX4 and SATA support, as well as a 2.5-inch SATA drive bay. In terms of memory, there is only one RAM Sodom slot, a downgrade from the ThinkPad E590. Nevertheless, it supports up to 16 GB of DDR4 memory working at 2,666 MHz. Finally, there is a 45 Watt hours battery. If you'd like to see more disassembly videos of the latest notebooks we would highly appreciate if you hit the like button and subscribe to the channel.


TTIP, Washington Perspective on a UK-US bilateral trade deal, and then the Dermatis Personae, who are these people in the Trump administration that are trying to will do trade policy. These are all speculative topics, and it reminds me of a story about a conversation between Henry Kissinger and Joe Enlai in Beijing in 1971. Joe Enlai, you know, the Mandarin wise man, close associate of Mao Zedong, et cetera. And Kissinger asked Joe Enlai at a luncheon in Beijing, what do you think about the French Revolution? And as the story goes, Joe Enlai paused, looked up, and said to Kissinger, it's too soon to say. And so it might be a little bit with Trump trade policy too soon to say. But let's plunge ahead. And let me begin with a little bit of sort of the context for TTIP and US UK and all the rest. These are statements by Trump on trade. And I don't like to read, but just very briefly, from his inaugural address, in case you forgot, he said, Donald Trump, quote, we must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies, and destroying our jobs. Protection, he said, will lead to prosperity and strength. And a little later on in his speech, he said, we will follow two simple rules, buy America and hire America. And as Dan said, I've been in Washington a while and never heard a president speak in a protectionist fashion like this in his inaugural address. In a way, I think this is of a piece with the dominant message in the election to the demographic group that supported him most vigorously, 75% of the white working men without college educations. He said to them, the global economy is not working for you. And international institutions are not working for you. And with 75% support, clearly that message resonated with them. Similarly, in the State of the Union message, he said, Donald Trump, my job is not to represent the world. My job is to represent the United States of America. And if you're like me, that sends chills down your back in terms of the willingness of the United States to be a leader in the world, not just in trade, but in many respects. Thus, in his first days in office, Trump withdrew from TPP. I think that's the greatest mistake in US trade policy since smooth holly. We can come back to that. And he notified the Mexicans and the Canadians that we were wanting to renegotiate NAFTA. So that's the context in which we come to TTIP. TTIP is now on a pause, as you know. And the question is whether some of it can be resurrected. In the fading days of the Obama administration, our US trade representative, Mike Froman, was, along with Cecilia Momstrom, were trying to negotiate a phase one of TTIP when they would focus on rules rather than tariffs. Things like SPS, TBT, sanitary and phytosanitary, technical barriers to trade, customs, things that are in the nature of rules and not tariffs. They ran out of time. So the question arises, can there be now be perhaps a TTIP light? I say probably not. And I turn again, if you will, to the words of Donald Trump, speaking about multilateral trade negotiations versus bilateral trade negotiations. And I know you're all thinking that the US-EU is bilateral, not in the mind of Donald Trump, not in the mind of some of his trade aides. They see it as a multilateral deal. He says multilaterals allow any country, no matter their size, to have the same stature as the United States. So we're basically on a par with very small countries getting access to an amazing market. The beautiful thing about bilateral, says Trump, is that if one party wants to get out, they can do so at any time. They can renegotiate if they feel like they're not being treated fairly. And here I think you're hearing an echo of a real estate negotiator, someone who himself has used the leverage of walking away from the table if he doesn't like the terms of the deal. But in multilaterals, says Trump, it's very difficult to get out. And he says then, that's not putting US interests first. So there is a distinct bias in Trump's mind and in some of his lieutenants in favor of bilaterals. And that does not include, in his mind, US-EU. Besides Trump's view, Congress, the Republicans in Congress who tend to be more trade-minded, are not sympathetically minded about TTIP right now, at least a couple of reasons. One, the question of flow of data from the EU to the US. You have different values concerning privacy. This hasn't been sorted out yet. From the US view, the EU has not been very forthcoming in terms of this aspect. And this is enormously important to US financial institutions and many others. Similarly, services. The EU has been insisting on defining services in such a way as would exclude all new services. This is a hugely important sector in our economy. And my point is that given this posture, Republicans in Congress are not now inclined to say, yeah, we need to go ahead with a TTIP deal. Even a TTIP light. And the prospects for Congress encouraging Trump to pursue TTIP, as I've mentioned, are not very good. Consider the Democratic side. There are some on the Democratic side who are more favorably minded. It's not dead, they say. Trump can easily be persuaded to change his mind. Consider, for example, during the campaign, he was repeatedly bashing Japan. Then we had a visit of Prime Minister Abe to Washington. His tone changed quickly and decisively. And indeed, they became such good buddies that he invited Prime Minister Abe to his golf course in Florida, Mar-a-Lago. So on this and on other subjects, we can come back to this. It's hard to know which part of his rhetoric represents strong commitments, which part, things that he's prepared to give up or give back. Also, the Democrats in Congress point to the fact that there's less wage disparity between the EU and the US. So the question of job loss is not the kind of issue it is on other trade deals. And if we can manage to harmonize our rules, big exports are possible, so that means more jobs. Of course, despite Trump's view about MTN, and here I'm giving you my view, there are very distinct advantages to them. For example, in TPP, it was very helpful to have Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Mexico at the table for the United States when the US wanted to persuade Vietnam to come forward with stronger standards on labor and the environment. So coalitions can be built in the multilateral setting. Economies of scale, of course. You have more countries at the table. You can get a bigger bang for the buck. Also, very important regional security aspects of TPP. Consider Southeast Asia, consider China, very important dimension of regional trade deals. And speaking of TPP, on March 14 and 15, there will be a summit in Chile called by Santiago of all the TPP countries, including the US, plus China, Korea, and Colombia. US has not yet accepted that invitation. And so there's a big question mark on what Trump's policy on TPP, let alone TTIP, is going to be. So overall, I suggest that the environment for TTIP in Washington is not promising. And of course, Washington is aware that there are German, Dutch, and French elections in 2017. So overall, not a good year for TTIP. So let's look at US, UK. Maybe there's something more positive to be found there. And indeed, on the face of it, Trump and Congress and business are favorably disposed toward a US, UK deal. Trump invited Theresa May as his first visitor. He said, in distinction to what Obama had said, that the UK should not be at the back of the queue. They should be first in line in terms of making a trade deal. And as a result, the UK and the US have a working group in a dialogue now trying to identify some areas, rules areas, not tariff areas, such as SPS, TBT, I've mentioned this, customs, the open skies agreement, professional services, licensing professionals. So areas where the US and the UK, if you will, can cherry pick some of the least difficult areas and start to foresee a way that they can go forward. Congress is also supportive on US, UK trade. Within days of Brexit, the two most important members of Congress, Senator Hatch, Chairman of Senate Finance, Congressman Kevin Brady, a head of House Ways and Means, introduced a joint resolution, calling on the president to begin negotiating immediately with the United Kingdom on a bilateral trade deal. And on the Democratic side, the most important Democrat on trade said, we want to move the US, Richard Neal. We want to move the US and UK forward before Brexit. He said, don't prioritize, but don't penalize. Also, and this may not be already known to you, the business community has been active in support of the US, UK deal. The Chamber of Commerce of the United States in Washington has organized a new US, UK business council to be a platform in Washington, as well as Brussels and London, on US business concerns about Brexit. And this is not an insubstantial group. It has on its board of directors Coca-Cola, IBM, Dow Chemical, Eli Lilly, Microsoft, the usual suspects. And their goals, as you know, include the financial passport, open skies, the reach chemical standards, data protection standards, which we've mentioned, a united energy standard so that there's not one energy standard for the EU and another one for the UK. The point is that business, Congress, and Trump support the idea of a US, UK trade deal. However, there will be difficult timing and sequence issues. The baseline for the United States for negotiations with the UK is going to be made up of two parts. One, what deal does the UK make with the EU? And two, what deal does the UK make with the WTO? And so domestic regulations in the UK may change as a result of these. And the US does not want to be putting concessions forward when it is unclear exactly what the regime is going to be in the United Kingdom. As you know, some of these negotiations can take years, particularly, and here I want to be clear, the WTO is not simply a backstop position. When the UK negotiates with the 161 members of the WTO, they are going to have to negotiate a new schedule of concessions. And before, when the UK was in the EU, there was an entirely different set of economic circumstances. And so now the Chinese, the Indians, the Brazils may be asking the UK for new concessions to have continued access to their markets. And the WTO works by consensus. If any one of those countries is not happy with the deal, it's not going to go forward. So my point is that the WTO is not a simple fallback position for the UK going forward. Moreover, of course, there are potential delays in Washington. The last FTAs that we did were with Columbia and Panama. Those took three years to negotiate, plus another, if you'll forgive me, five years for Congress to approve them. So while the atmosphere for US-UK may be good on its face, it's going to be a slow slog and a time-consuming process. OK, let's turn to then who the players are in the Trump administration. On paper, there are three at the top in the organization chart, if you will. First and foremost among them is Bob Lighthizer, whose name you haven't heard so much yet because he's not yet been confirmed by the Senate. Who is Bob Lighthizer? He is a trade lawyer, protectionist trade lawyer. He spent most of his career seeking for US steel companies, anti-dupping duties against foreign steel coming into the United States. He was also a deputy US trade representative under President Reagan. At that time, he negotiated so-called voluntary restraint agreements with Japan, with Korea, on automobiles, on semiconductors. Also, if I recall correctly, with the UK on steel. So this is someone who, by experience and background, has been very much about protecting American companies from international competition. He said recently, we need to file more trade cases against China. We need to make currency manipulation a subsidy under US law. If you know that triggers a whole statutory framework, we can come back to that. He said, and I quote, markets do not work well when manufacturing shifts to China because of actions of the Chinese government. He's talking about state capitalism. Just nominated as Lighthizer's number one lieutenant general counsel is Steve Vaughn, who is a clone of Lighthizer, also a trade lawyer whose career was about protectionism. So he's number one, and he will be the most important, in part because statutory law in Washington gives US trade representative the lead on trade policy. And Congress, of course, is so very important on trade because under the Commerce Clause of our Constitution, it is Congress, not the executive branch, which has all power on trade. And any power which the executive branch has has been designated by Congress to the executive branch. And when trade goes as Congress doesn't like, it will be Lighthizer, who's called on the carpet to testify in Congress to explain why not. So, second in this troika, if you will, and second in importance, I think, will be Wilbur Ross. Wilbur Ross is the elder of the group. He's 79 years old. He was known on Wall Street as the king of bankruptcy. He bought, fixed up, and sold big companies, Bethlehem Steel, Ling, Tempova in Ohio, coal companies, textile companies, auto parts companies. And ironically, when he fixed them up or slimmed them down, if you will, and you know this perhaps from his investments in the Bank of Ireland, this involved laying people off. It also involved moving plants to Mexico to take advantage of something called NAFTA. And of course, he's now saying along with Trump, oh, NAFTA's bad, we need to reform NAFTA. Here are a couple of statements from his confirmation hearing. One, I am not anti-trade. I am pro-sensible trade that is not the disadvantage of the American worker in the American manufacturing community. We should give access to our market by those who play fair, play by the rules. Those who do not, should not get away with it. They should be punished and punished severely. On China, he said China is the most protectionist of large countries with very high tariffs, high non-tariff barriers. They talk much more about free trade than actually practice it. We want to bring the practice closer to the rhetoric. On restrictive tariffs, he said, and the concern that they might disrupt global supply chains. He said tariffs are a good negotiating tool, but the best way to improve U.S. trade policy is to encourage more exports and to incentivize American manufacturing companies to build manufacturing plants in the United States. And he hastened to add the tax and regulatory policies are going to be a big part of that. His deputy has just been nominated, named Gil Kaplan. He's a former Reagan type of protectionist, protectionist trade lawyer. He says that the main goal of trade negotiations should be to level the playing field for American manufacturing. And he also says the respective roles of this Troika, he, Lighthizer, and Navarro, will be a collaborator of effort. I don't think so. I'm betting on Lighthizer to be first and foremost, number one, Navarro to be number two. Sorry, Ross to be number two, and Navarro to be third, a junior partner. Who is Navarro? Navarro is Anik Peter Navarro, an economist, University of California, wrote a book called Death by China, which if you look at it, I think you'd agree is highly exaggerated and argues that we are at economic war with China and we need to be more aggressive about China. During the campaign, Donald Trump mentioned in a radio interview that he had read Death by China and he thought it was an excellent book. And of course, Mr. Navarro, ambitious academic as he is, used that as an opportunity to get a meeting with Mr. Trump and became Mr. Trump's Svangali for being tougher on China. And Trump of course sold this again and again to the American voters. So his reward for this loyal support is that he is made the head of a new entity called the National Trade Council. It's not, we haven't had it before, it's supposed to be similar to and parallel to the National Security Council, National Economic Council, but so far he has one staffer. Bob Lighthizer at USDR has 200 staffers. Wilbur Ross at the Commerce Department has 10 or 15 and Wilbur Ross is Wilbur Ross. So my suspicion again is that Navarro will be the junior partner. But he did interestingly say in an informal conversation with Congress, the US will increase agriculture, this is Navarro, and manufacturing exports to TPP in Asia. Through bilateral deals, and the first of those deals will be with Japan and the others will follow along. And his job at the National Trade Council is to boost American manufacturing through higher, by America, higher America, and also through infrastructure spending and defense spending. So those are the three on top, but there are three others to keep an eye on. All three of them, it turns out, come from Goldman Sachs. And I can talk a little about Goldman Sachs later if you like. They are Steve Bannon, Gary Kohn, and Steve Mnuchin. Steve Mnuchin, of course, is the Treasury Secretary. Steve Bannon, you've heard a lot about him. He is the Rasputin, if you will, in the White House. He is the title of Chief Strategist and he's unprecedented for such a political character, been made a part of the National Security Council, which of course is Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, et cetera. And after his career making some money at Goldman Sachs, he became an antagonist to the global and financial elite. He revamped the right-wing online news outfit called Breitbart News, which many think is racist and anti-Semitic and sexist. He is the key author, was the key author of the ill-fated immigration borders, which have now been redone, and also of the inaugural address. And one of the central ideas, which he obviously has sold Trump on, is to equate trade with a kind of nationalism. Here's what he said recently. We are a nation with an economy. We are not just some open marketplace with open borders, but we are a nation with a culture and some reason for being. So he's equating what's special and unique about the United States from separation economically from other countries. He also seeks what he calls the deconstruction of the administrative state system of taxes and regulations and trade packs that he says have stymied economic growth and impinged on US sovereignty. He thinks that the post-World War II consensus political and economic is failing, should be replaced with a system that, as he put it, empowers ordinary people over coastal elites and international institutions. So that's Steve Bannon. Gary Cohen and Steve Mnuchin, I think are more mature, less ideological thinkers about international economic issues and will be a restraining force, I hope, on Trump. Cohen was the chief operating officer at Goldman Sachs. Last December, he was introduced to Trump, came to Trump Tower, made a presentation to Trump on combining public and private funding for nationwide infrastructure. Trump was very impressed and Mr. Cohen has become the chair of the National Economic Council, whose job is to coordinate economic input from all of those agencies that advise the president on economics, a very important job. And his name, surface last week, by the way, correcting our friend Mr. Navarro on certain misstatements that Navarro had made about trade policy. I think that's a light motif you may hear again. Steve Mnuchin, also from Goldman Sachs, Secretary of the Treasury, founded several hedge funds after he left Goldman Sachs, bought a failed residential lender in California, fixed it up in the best Wilbur Ross tradition, and then sold it, made a fortune. And he was also national finance chair for Trump in his campaign. It is the Secretary of Treasury who designates countries as currency manipulators. And you may recall that Trump said many times during the election, on day one, I'm going to designate China a currency manipulator. Well, we're now on day what? Day 40, day 41. And last week, it was Steve Mnuchin who said, we will follow we in Treasury, which is responsible for China currency. We will follow the ordinary process, and that takes months, and indeed we'll culminate now in April. So here's a case where despite Trump rhetoric, statutes, and senior mature people are thinking more carefully. So I close by saying to you that in all my time in Washington, I've observed 10 different presidents. I've never seen one whose statements are less credible than the statements of Donald Trump. So I encourage you, as you think about trade policy, listen very carefully to what key cabinet advisors and leading legislators say about trade policy.


Surya Namaskara or sun salutation is a set of 12 asanas. It detoxifies and stimulates the every organ of the body. It has the positive impact on body and mind. Only the drawback is people who have neck pain or back pain in a chronic state that is cervical spondylosis, or disc bulge should avoid or consult with the doctor before practicing the same. If you have joint pain, you can avoid refined carb, saturated fat, red meat, junk food and deep fried food which will induce the inflammation in the body. Let us now practice Surya Namaskara. This will help in increasing the flexibility and also strengthening of the muscles. Stand in Namaskara Sthiti or Namaskara position. 1. Stretch your arms up and bend back, bend forward. Try to place your hands on the ground. 3. Take your right leg back and look up. 4. Take your left leg back and hold in plant position. 5. Fold your knee and go to Shashankasana. Relax. 6. Ashtanga Namaskara. Touch your forehead, your chest and knee to the ground. 7. Bhujangasana. 8. Lift your upper body up and place your feet on the ground. 9. Fold your legs and relax in Shashankasana. 10. Bring your right leg forward in between your hands and look up. 11. Bring your left leg forward, bend. 12. Lift your hands and look back. Namaskara Sthiti. Relax. Practise daily yoga. Maintain your health.


Staying fit is a funny thing and you know you can you can do a lot with technology to help you stay fit We've got trackers and so many things, but a scale is also really important, right?  But they were like look our our skill does a lot more than just you stepping on and seeing your weight Because it is incorporating an ecosystem that makes a lot of sense. So I said, okay Cool, let's see how this fits into my own lifestyle and how it actually works. So I've spent about Close to about a month or so with it And I wanted to give you guys my thoughts and why this is very interesting And also this might help you in your own lifestyle fitness journey. So As you know, if you guys follow me on Instagram, I do a lot of Mu Tai I've been in martial arts my whole life. I've done karate. I've done some Judo Jiu Jitsu Aikido Taekwondo is what actually started but there's a lot there to go with which is actually pretty cool So for me, I'm like, okay, how will I use this stuff to actually help me work out? So the the center for the body plus skill and the the steel HR plus watch, which is actually pretty cool here and it does Work out really well bringing everything together. Now the idea of a skill I thought okay, look, I'll step on the skill. I see my weight and then I'll go. Hey, all right Go back to my trainer. Okay. I weigh this much. Let's Let's do some more punching and kicking now. He will love that But it was not just that aspect the skill really provides a lot of more information you get on the The body plus scale which looks like a standard skills got a nice big screen. It's powered by four triple-a batteries What lasts quite a while In terms of just battery life. I have a friend's user for like six months and like we haven't changed it But you get on that scale and it gives you all this information.  It gives you your water mass It gives you a bone mass and I also can give you your weather as well as the steps You took that day from whatever fitness tracker, which is actually pretty cool So all that information is there and it's housed in the we things app now The app allows you to add in all we things, you know devices So like the body plus scale as well as also the steel HR sport, which is what I'm wearing now Now the sport I use while actually working out So when I'm doing all my moot high and kicking a bunch of actually have this in there It's strapped underneath in my gloves actually last and works pretty well. I rely from this bad boy is pretty great I think it took me three weeks before I actually fully charged it and I work out We're trying to work out five days a week now It's about it's about three to five days a week So I track the workouts and again easy process to just turn it on press and hold you can select your workout track And also it's a nice small screen for notifications and a few other things like that But it's not really about the watch is about what that information brings into With the body plus scale. So with that it now calculates What your true weight is because you're feeding in all this information through the we things app So he's connected via Wi-Fi the body plus scale So which means it connects within the ecosystem and everything is computed properly. So you just not know it Okay, look, I was like, you know One pound today was that water weights, you know, was that me gaining more muscle? You know, you can actually look at what you're doing and say, okay I need to improve certain things now You've got a daily chart when you're looking at the app that you can go through which is actually pretty nice You've got like a timeline You can actually scroll through and see where you are see where your BMI is and all that fun stuff And then you've now got your dashboard which shows you exactly where you are steps You took your sleep now forget my sleep because I don't actually will watch the sleep my weights current weights my fat mass as well as also my average heart rate for that day And you can go in and customize your food intake now. That's something that I just don't do I've never really done but it's something you can do with this year the activity program So if you want to do activity leaderboards of your friends There's also a sleep smarter trackers different things to help you Use the ecosystem world. But what I like about this is that it also works with different applications So if you're using like Samsung health that feeds in that information here So even if I don't wear the watch and I'm working on my phone My steps is still counted into this and it's also evaluated on my my weight goal So I have weight goal sets and things like that So all that information is brought in if you're using a Fitbit Google Fit all that stuff, you know My fitness power that information is brought in which is really nice. Now the scale itself when you look at the scale itself It's under devices. You've got some really cool aspects of you can customize the screen to what you see So for instance, you can see your weight trend your weight your fat mass your model muscle mass your BMI your steps Bone mass as well and then your weather now I'm sure this is not accurate to the T because it's bringing a lot of information and giving your estimation But it's a really good estimation, especially if you're trying to hit setting goals, you know The thing about fitness for me is that it's trying to stay healthy. I know that I am not going to look like Thor Superman I mean, I can try and work my way there, but it's the journey It's the journey and making sure that you are you have tools that help you and I like the fact that it does that for me here And you know, the skills is something that a lot of people are afraid of because you're right You step on it, you know, even if you went a night out drinking or you spent a weekend somewhere come back You're like, oh my god, I've gained so much weight But you step on this it gives you so much information and that information is correlated across different avenues That's why I like this, you know from my fitness watch to even my phone Which is doing some tracking for me and you know things like that that actually feeds it information say hey This is where you are and this is how this journey will lead for you to get to where you feel comfortable So for me, it's it's really cool and it's only 99 bucks for it, which is pretty nice So you can definitely go ahead and pick one up I would suggest if you're into fitness or you're looking to stay healthy This is a really good tool to use now. They've also got An active Portion within the skill which basically for people who are really into sports and like you work out every single day This actually tracks more precisely for that because you are gonna be losing a lot of weight Oh, you're gonna be burning a lot of calories. You're gonna be very active for that So that's that's a small option in there But I like it. I've really enjoyed using this like I feel more comfortable just stepping on the scale because like I know Where my journey is he tells me here's my journey. I'm like, okay, cool I know where I'm going you can see that graph and it's not just like it's a number, right? And there's breakdowns to those numbers and it's really cool. Plus the steel HR sport is a really cool watch That I mean battery life-wise it lasts really long And it does all the fitness track is got a heart rate monitor all that stuff built into it And then small notification screen, but it's a fitness watch that I think does really well now I haven't I use it running a couple of times and it's fine. I don't run that much So some people who might ask about run tracking and things like that. I think it does a decent job Again, it's not something I do. I do more of a, you know, fitness all-around workout with Mu Tai So hopefully that gives you some idea of how I deal with my fitness and also how some technology helps me out especially with the Body plus scale, which is I think a really nice way to show how you can improve yourself So if you have any questions any comments, let me know guys If you're looking to pick up the body plus scale use our link down below again I think it's a really cool tool to get you to where you are Otherwise, don't forget to like share subscribe and always enjoy entertainment


What's up everyone it's your girl Kenzie here from Layton Sports Cards and I'm ripping a personal for Alvin And we've got a 21-22 penini down wrist optic basketball hobby Alrighty best of luck Alvin. Thanks so much for hopping in 21-22 optic basketball Good luck. Hold you too. Yeah See a big auto with the guards of rookie Jalen Green right a rookie hollow Donovan Mitchell red coming up here. Siakum, Kessler Edwards, red Alvin Schengun for the Rockets nice color match there Nice hits that is 82 of 99 nice Schengun Simmons ball like 75 years Kade Cunningham. All right, Williams. We have a redemption Jalen Jalen sucks the rookies Let's see good luck here Alvin reader rookie signatures hollow card 186 Scotty barns, but they're for you Scotty barns hollow auto Congrats on that. I'll mag that redemption up for you Heck yeah Now we've been hot today y'all. I don't know what's going on Been a crazy Sunday.  We've got hollow raider rookie. Heaven Mowgli Another nice one Schengun raider rookie base Scotty barns hollow the rookies Wiggins Anthony Davis Hollow Luca Donchich. Let's look at that lime green David Johnson lime green of Joe Harris That is 103 of 149 Rosan Garuba light it up Katie or in Kisper. We've got hollow light it up Bradley Beale. Why hollow where do you go bear? Trimmer fifth third all stars insert Christo Arte 75 years Jamal Murray You pass left here for you Alvin Tray man raider rookie and we've got elite dominators red Anthony Davis that is 58 of 99 Raider rookie hollow of Jared Butler jazz Last pack got orange Cogie looks like a raider rookie orange of Darren Sharp for the Nets Nice couple colored raided rookies. We'll take that And one is 174 of 199. Wow nice Personal box there for you Alvin and congrats on the redemption Scotty barns on the rookie signatures Hollow now we'll do it for your box. Congrats again. Thanks so much for hopping in Alvin. We'll get this right out to you


Hi there and welcome to getting clean on the prairies I'm just going to do a quick video here because I want to make a couple of Exciting very exciting announcements Today the first one being that I have reached 500 subscribers This past weekend and I'm very excited that I've reached that milestone and I'm Hoping that I can continue to provide my Subscribers with some good content, and I'm really enjoying what I'm doing So I'm just want to say thank you to all those who have subscribed to my channel And I hope you will keep watching and learning along with me on my journey here So the second thing that I wanted to do is my subscriber giveaway draw So this was something that I had talked about on two of my previous videos the Canadian Seed Exchange video and also the making the paprika pepper spice Video where I encouraged you to leave a comment below and enter your name into when a couple packages of seeds That I will mail out to the winner and maybe along with another one of your choice here so I don't really haven't figured out how to do one of those computerized draws yet that I've seen people do on the other channels, but I am just going to do it the old-fashioned way where I just wrote down everybody's names that entered and put them into This bag here, and then I'm going to draw the name here right away okay, so I just have put Everybody's name on a piece of paper Put it in here I don't have anybody home with me right now to do the draw with me So I'm just going to reach in grab a name and see who the winner is and the winner is goat gal seven Congratulations goat gal seven. I know you have been following along with me and always leaving some great comments on my channel Thank you very much. I am going to leave my email below in the comments and I would ask that you contact me to get further instruction on how to Redeem your prize so again a couple packs of Saskatchewan heirloom seeds here going out to goat gal seven So here on the Saskatchewan prairies. We are starting to get our indoor growing going So I will be putting out a lot of videos on different things that I'm going to be starting indoors I hope to have some more winter sewing videos coming out and It is yeah It's getting busy here, and I hope that I can continue to share good content with my subscribers And once again, thank you very much for following me, and I hope to see you on the next video Have a great day