Okay, we're back. This is Dave Vellante, and I'm with Stu Miniman. We're at Wikibon.org. This is SiliconANGLE.tv's coverage of theCUBE, where we bring you the smartest people that we can find. We're here live in Las Vegas at HP Discover. We like to extract the signal from the noise, package it up, serve it up to you, our audience. You'll be a great audience. We appreciate the tweets and the questions that come in. I'm at Dave Vellante. He's at Stu, so please feel free to ping us with any questions or comments that you might have. We'd love to hear from you. We're here with Tom Flynn. He's a chief technologist within HP's Thin Client Group. Tom, welcome to theCUBE. Oh, thanks for having me. Yeah, so Thin Client. That is a term that is near and dear to my heart, because I'm an old guy and I've seen the industry evolve. But we've seen it come full circle, this whole notion of the power of applications actually going to the network. We had Scott McNeely on theCUBE a couple of weeks ago. And he's a cloud. The network is the computer, right? So it's all coming back around, isn't it? Absolutely. It's a real good business for us, so we're doing well. Yeah, so tell us about the Thin Client business. So I'll tell you, with our Thin Client, we kind of look at it in a couple different spectrums. We have our flexible line of Thin Clients, and those are incredible devices. They're all dual-core in our line with the 510 and the 610. We can support anywhere from two to six screens off a Thin Client, if you can believe that. And we do all the primary protocols, work closely with Microsoft and do RFX certification. We work with VMware, with PCO by P. We work with Citrix, with HDX. And then we also just introduced a whole new line a couple of weeks ago at Synergy, which is our smart client. It's all-in-one, smart zero client. Draws just 13 watts of power, but it's an all-in-one, so it's got both the display and the compute. And it delivers exceptional performance. And it's a true, flexible zero client. It's kind of an oxymoron there, but that's what it is, in which it'll do hardware-accelerated any of the three protocols, because we actually use a TI-DSP to do that protocol acceleration. So in that very small energy package, you now have outstanding performance, desktop-equivalent performance on that device when it's connected to either an RFX-based system or a VMware view or Citrix HDX. So some people talk about virtual desktop infrastructure, you know, VDI. We've been very vocal about, see that term is just the wrong term. Does anybody buy desktops anymore? Oh, absolutely. People are buying 20 million commercial desktops a year from this. The desktops, the demise is way overhyped. So yeah, of course, why don't people buy desktops because they can get a lot more for the money and if they don't have to be mobile. So the emerging markets, very strong. Domestic markets, very strong. But I mean, that's really not the debate, right? I mean, with the sort of tongue-in-cheek, it's really about any device, whether it's a desktop or a laptop or a mobile system, right? Absolutely, and it's great for our thin-client business. This will bring your own device to work. It's wonderful for our business because, you know, two years ago, it was a debate between the cost of a desktop and the cost of a thin-client plus a VDI infrastructure. That's not what our customers are deciding anymore. Now it's the decision of, do I port to a media tablet, whether it's iOS or Android? Do I port my application to a Mac and run it on Windows? Or do I stand up a VDI infrastructure and allow that to be delivered to that endpoint device? And when you do that, a thin-client's a natural fit to have in the office. Oh yeah, I have to say, I'm impressed. I mean, we all remember the PC days when IT was sort of shut out of that wave for a while anyway. But the traditional IT organization has really embraced the mobile trend. Why do you think that's the case and why is it different this time around? Well, I think they've embraced the mobile because you have no choice, right? I mean, it's an end-user-driven decision, so IT's a bad end-user-driven, right? And eventually, IT adopted it. It just took a long time. It just took a while. I mean, I've been doing this for a while. So maybe it's because we saw that movie before and we knew the script and we said, all right, we can't make the same mistakes? Well, I think because, unlike the initial implementations of PCs, this came in from the top with executives. It also came in the bottom from end-users, right? So when you're squeezed from the top and the bottom, what choice do you have? There's an even bigger trend. Plus the network's there. The network's there. Plus I think it's the investment we and all of our partners have made in the last five years. Because five years ago, VDI was not a true desktop replacement. It was niche to guys who really just needed the security aspects. But the investment everybody's made in the protocol performance, USB redirection, multimedia redirection, you get a true PC experience now on these endpoints that you didn't get with those solutions five years ago. Well, even less than five years ago. I'd say two years ago. Two years ago. 18 months ago. I'm telling you, the improvements are incredible. So you can give me a desktop experience or a laptop experience that's basically transparent. Is that what you use? You can promise me. That's what I'm promising. Graphics. The only caveat is what your network is, right? If you're on a really bad network, you're not going to get a very great experience. But if you're on a reasonable network with minimal latency and minimal error rates, you're going to get a great experience. Well, that's a trade-off that anybody uses like Gmail, you know, understands, right? Absolutely. It's always there, but you got to be able to get to it. Okay, so where do we go here in the next several years? I mean, is, you know, the vast majority, is this a sea change in terms of the infrastructure?   They still really seem to be leading the charge. Are we seeing a much broader adoption now? We're certainly seeing a lot of customers moving in that direction, right? Will it be 100% of that market? I highly doubt it, right? I mean, our industry, things rarely ever go away, right? We're additive by nature, but you're seeing a wide adoption in a lot of large companies because it makes a lot of sense, right? It's simpler to implement, simpler to ensure security patches. Your data's protected, so it gets all of that. And then if you use things like our T410 on the endpoint where you can have a 13-watt endpoint, the energy savings alone could justify the infrastructure setup. So there's going to be, the early adopters are going to go there, those with a burning need are going to go there, but it's moving to mainstream. I think it's crossing the chasm and it's going to a mainstream solution. So for a lot of people, this is a complicated situation, right? I mean, people think, oh, server virtualization, I can just do desktop virtualization or mobile virtualization, but it's a whole different ball game. So what does HP bring to the table to help people cut through that complexity? So HP brings the whole answer to the table. So we're from the desktop to the data center. We have an entire set of service offerings, whether that's consulting and integration, it's TS help implementation services, or a managed service offering in this space. And then from our product point of views, we have the HP Converged Infrastructure to set up your backend. We have a reference architecture. Part of the challenge people had with VDI or session virtualization when it first came out is how do you size it? I was just going to ask you that. Right, they thought it was a CPU, it's a disk, is it that? I.O. patterns are completely different. Well, we expect an inordinate amount of money, benchmarking and sizing in our industry standard server division has a complete reference architecture. You've got good data on that now. We've got great data on it. We understand it. We've actually made storage solutions for VDI that are targeted to be a VDI storage solution because of its unique I.O. profile, which is different than server virtualization. So question on that. We've talked to a lot of the practitioners and we really need that good planning ahead of time. Absolutely. Usually there's been some assessment tools, there's likes of liquid ware labs out there and others, EEG innovations. Is that something that HP has and then also internally? Absolutely, HP has a service offering like that. It will go and help you decide. Is there a branded solution for that? So I don't know what to do. I'm actually in the PPS group, so I know we have that offering, and I don't know what its name is. Okay, and when I think of thin clients, the name that most people know really well is Wise. And Wise was recently taken off the market by Dell, who's done pretty good. We've talked to a lot of Dell practitioners that have deployed their VDI.  Yeah, absolutely, very well known. So, what can you share with us kind of proof points on the thin clients? What size environments, how many do you have? We have one customer, 70,000 seats. Okay. Right, as their implementation. They are our largest customer for our thin clients. But 10, 20,000 is not an unusual number for us for customer implementation. And the uptake in at least the bidding process right now is pretty phenomenal. So we're a very well established, we're either number one or number two in every market we compete in with thin clients. We have a very wide portfolio of offerings. So we do everything from a little hardware zero client for a Microsoft multi-point implementation all the way through to our T610 top of the line that can drive six screens for the most demanding financial trader, right? So we have an entire range of offerings and everything in between. Our flexible lines all dual core so that you can run your voice over IP solution with this as well as your virtual desktop. So we have a very strong position. Okay, so another challenge for VDI has been it tends to be rather niche from a vertical standpoint. So government and healthcare is what we hear a lot about. Where do you see adoption of thin clients? We do see it in government. We do see it in healthcare. We see it in insurance. We see it in financial services. We see it in manufacturing. We see it in retail. We see it in banking. We see it at educational service especially in the developing world, right? Where this is a much easier system to stand up and support. So you referenced the developing world a couple of times. Do you want a lot in China? We do a lot in China, a lot in India. A lot of work there. That region's pretty close to a third of our business in thin clients. How about Africa as a region? I mean, we're kind of going outside of thin clients but it seems to be tracking to some of these emerging regions. And so our multi-point solution actually has been picked up in Africa because it was so low power that it could be solar powered, right? And that's kind of a requirement. There's it on the infrastructure. And when we talk about this new one that we announced two weeks ago, our Citrix HDX SOC compliant, the T410. When you think about that, I mean, it's 13 watts of power for the display and the compute. You're credible for solar power now. So you can do those implementations in small places throughout Africa where you don't have a true power. I mean, they have cell phones with animal electricity. Tom, I was wondering, Citrix has tended to have the lead in this space. From a software standpoint, they have a lot of still advantages if you're talking about voice and video. Where do you see the market dynamics there? Citrix, VMware, Microsoft? So we partner with everybody, right? And probably Citrix is the leader, right? In market share, for sure. Especially when they combined in Zen Desktop, both the Zen app and the Zen Desktop numbers together. But VMware is a very powerful player and a great partner and so is Microsoft. And so we're very happy with all of them. We're good partners with everyone. Open. Well, it's about customer choice, right? We want our devices to perform outstanding in any environment that our customer chose, right? And that's been our goal.  I sort of took it up earlier with one of our guests. Everybody's talking about we're open, we're open. We're trying to define the new open. And you guys, I think, I think you're affirming that commitment. I mean, it doesn't sound like your sales guys are averse to bringing in pretty much any technology. Which is somewhat unique on the product side. I mean, any services company will do that. I'm sure your services organization has always had that independent. We'll do what our customers want, you know? So that they can make a difference. They can make a change in what they do, transform their environment. What's required to do it is what will help them do it. It's hard, though, for customers, right? Because everybody's marketing open, right? I mean, everybody. I mean, Oracle markets open. We were talking, we were joking about this before. This is the Oracle open cloud or whatever it is. It's like, oh, okay. Oh, I'm sure. Oh, so the customer is saying, okay, I guess I got to make a choice. What is it that makes HP more open than the competition? Well, so I think what HP does, we have a tradition, a long tradition of partnering, right? I mean, we're Microsoft's largest partner. One VMware's largest partner. We're certainly Citrix's largest partner. About 65% of their implementations are on our devices, right? So we naturally gravitate to it because once we listen to what our customers want, we work with the ecosystem to deliver that, right? So that's the way we do it. And customers want choice. They want the flexibility to do what's best in their environment. And sometimes it's a mixed match of different things to get what the customer wants, achieve their business objective. And I think that's what drives HP. We want to do what's right for our customer and with our customer. Excellent. All right, Tom Flynn, Chief Technologist for the Thin Client Group. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Well, thanks for having me. Great to meet you. Appreciate it. Thank you. Okay, keep it right there. We'll be back with more guests live from HP Discover. This is SiliconANGLE, TV's theCUBE. Keep it right there. theCUBE is this conceptual box, if you will.  It's a place where people feel happy and are happy to share their knowledge with the world. And we're happy to be ambassadors of that knowledge transfer.


You have already met the presenter, Chetana, Elizabeth and Sudakara and you haven't met me yet. Since I'm the least important panelist, I get introduced last. My name is Augustin Fosu. I am deputy director of UNIWIDER, Helsinki. Now, it is your turn, audience. Questions, comments, please be precise and brief. Please proceed. Thank you for the stimulating presentations. My question is from Mr. Sudakara. You talked about estimating costs for cooking, water lightening, water eating and lightening. Can you just give us an idea how you did it? You know, there are several methodologies. Estimating the costs of cooking, water eating and lightening.  Because one of the things I'm looking forward to here is to get some practical solutions to problems. And then you also talked about aligning the actors at the various levels. Whose responsibility will that be precisely? Thank you. Shall we take a few questions and then the presenters can respond? Please proceed in the centre. Thank you very much. My question is a follow-up to what she just mentioned. In estimating the costs, the losses, for example, the economic losses you made mention about. On what did you base those estimates? On which parameters, for example, did you base your estimates? Thank you. Third question, comment. Please proceed. Yeah, please. Hello. I basically have three maybe observations or questions. One is a simple one to Mrs. Remedio. Do you include mind coal as a biomass? Fossil coal. I don't mean charcoal, but fossil coal. Do you include that as biomass as well? You don't. Because it originates from biomass. The other aspect is to Mrs. Chowdhury, you gave all those tabulations, etc. But I might have missed the early part as to whether that relates to the whole of India or to a part of India. The whole of India. Well, roughly speaking, I can tell you that what you have shown would not relate to GOA. To GOA, you see, because over there it's a very different scenario with fuel use. A lot of LPG is used, etc., and less biomass, actually. But I don't have figures to prove what I'm saying, but that's my observations. And then the last thing is there's a tremendous tabulation of solutions to the question, the last speaker, Mr. Basiredi. My question really is that India is full of tabulated solutions, but what are the chances that India can implement those solutions? Sure, please proceed. Thank you. Thank you so much all three of you for wonderful presentations. Perhaps I should stand. My question goes to the first presenter, the second presenter, Mrs. Chowdhury. Why are you talking about CDM at this point in time? CDM is almost into greatest degree of uncertainty at the moment. Could you just justify why you're actually talking about CDM at this point in time? First point. The second point I think, the point that he made is, I think India is full of heterogeneity as it comes. The national picture that you present may not actually reflect the actual situations in the real situations in the states. So why didn't you try to see what exactly happens at some states, representatively selected, one food state, one richer state, that would have probably given a real picture, then absolutely a macro picture which cannot be attributed to any state, as he's saying Gover could be different, Orissa could be different from what observations you made at national level. One question for the first presenter is, you have rightly shown that the wood fuel, our biofuel, is presenting about 12.2% of the total energy the consumer demanded whatever it is. One problem with renewable energies is, can it really take care of the growing demands of energy in the world? That limitation perhaps is there, and with that limitation, how do you justify wood-art biofuels as good energy alternative for years of mitigation? Thank you very much. One more. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'm Ababa from the European Development Research Institute, Ethiopia. Just a small question for the first presenter. She said that income is one of the most important determinant for energy choice. Though I haven't seen anything that relates income with energy choice, but the literature also emphasizes the role of non-economic factors in determining the choice of energy, especially by households like education, attitude, culture, and so on, are much more important than income as some literature shows. In the future, if it is possible, I would like you to just look at the role of these non-economic factors in affecting fuel choice or in just making a transition from lower quality energy sources like biomass to higher quality, or moving up the energy ladder hypothesis. Thank you. Thanks, Malcolm Smart from DFID. My question, I guess, is to the first and maybe the second presenters. Where you've done analyses of the introduction of fuel-efficient stoves, have you looked at the rebound effect? This is the effect whereby if you bring in a more efficient form of equipment, there's an income effect and people may very well consume more. So you may cut by half the amount of fuel you use, therefore you may start cooking things that take longer to cook because it's cheaper. Has there been analysis of this? Thank you. Anyone else? All right, I think you probably have enough. Perhaps you can start from the seat in permutation, Chetana, followed by Lisbeth and then Sudhakara. The first question is about the estimation of cost of cooking. It is simple. One is biogas plants. We have a community biogas plant for a village, 100 households village. We have estimated the costs and we also have estimated the infrastructure cost, that is pipelines, etc. We also estimated the wages. There is an NREGA wage structure is there. We all have to take into consideration and the number of households in different villages, how many number of plants are required, and the cost for infrastructure. There are three. One is the capital cost for constructing the biogas plant, then infrastructure cost, then is operation and maintenance cost, which includes wages. That is the way we have estimated the cost for cooking. And for lighting, what we have taken was, we have categorized households into three types. The first type of households, it is not at all possible to supply centralized electricity, particularly the hilly areas. We know the estimation of number of households in hilly areas. The second type of households, that is nearly 8% of the population, even though central electricity can go, but at present it is not served with electricity. That is the type of household, second type. Third type of households are those, even though in the village electricity is available, households cannot be obtained because of affordability problem. So, we have estimated the cost, how much it is a combination of decentralized, but centralized electricity, capital cost as well as operation and maintenance cost we have taken. And secondly, about the economic losses. Economic losses, what we have taken is how many hours starting from going to the nearly 2 to 3 kilometers per day, how many hours each household has to spend for obtaining the fuel load, for cutting it as well as for cooking it. And there is a wage structure, NREGA, Government of India, wage rate. We have taken into consideration for 8 hours, how much it is going to cost. So, total economic losses we have estimated using this information. And regarding tabulated solutions, my dear friend might have forgotten about the cable network. It is almost in all the villages cable network is being operated by the uneducated social enterprise. Same is the case with telephones and network, particularly in rural areas. What I just wanted to tell you is, I am not telling it is simple, but it is not at all difficult. It is not at all difficult for the government to facilitate. The role of the government is to facilitate. I did discuss with many government organizations, actually I was in the planning commission for preparing the 12th plan report, particularly pertaining to energy efficiency. I interacted with stakeholders and I actually made my presentations. But the only problem is indifference. Just like we have seen many models like this, it is not going to work. But I am from a village, I interact with many, there are many young entrepreneurs and that is the reason I told. I need not have to tell them. Actually, they are very good at it. What they need is financial backing and as a mentor, somebody has to tell them how to go about. Not as an academician, as an industrialist. So it is some sort of parental attitude. That is what is important. For the past 10 years, I interact with various stakeholders. It is feasible, it is possible and it is practical. Thank you. So the question of whether renewable energy is enough for the world's energy demand. I am not really an expert in renewable energy but my guess is that at the moment definitely it is not. The costs are prohibitive and it is very interesting for instance during the World Forestry Congress in 2009 in Argentina, there was a rotation and it turned out whether you are pro or anti-bioenergy and the result was 49 and 50. So 49 and 51. So it is like a tie. It is very interesting and definitely if climate change is caused by the use of fossil fuels and so on, the offer, the proposal to counter that is to use none, you know, fossil fuels and so the renewables would come into play. But whether or not it is sufficient to feed the world, I don't think so at the moment because of the cost, the technology and so on. So the question of whether income is the sole determinant or influences the use of bioenergy and wood fuels. Well, it is an area-based situation. It is a case-to-case situation but according to our study it does play a major role in the choice of primary cooking field. But then whether primary or secondary, it is a matter of culture. It is a very socioeconomic situation and particularly in the Philippines, you know, we have a major cooking device in the kitchen but outside the kitchen, outside the house, we have an improvised charcoal stove, for example, to heat water or to tenderize meat. So that's why we have secondary, so we use multiple fuels. So income really plays a major role there. And to the question of the rebound, thank you for that idea. We have not done it but I think it's a very interesting thing to do in the next round of things and particularly in 2008, there was a group that came to us and doing work in cook stoves and it was very interesting that charcoal now is a very dramatic increase in the demand for charcoal. But I waited for this time so that we have a 10-year gap for our studies but definitely I will include that. Thank you. But I suppose I would need to ask for more information about this rebound effect. Thank you, Elizabeth Machetana. Thank you for the questions. For the answer of why I am discussing CDM, obviously there are controversy regarding the CDM. But before scrapping the thing, we should need to discuss the cost and benefit analysis of that. In India, people are facing problems. I mean, there are so many people who are dependent on biomass and fossil fuel. They are using some inefficient equipment for cooking and lighting. And they don't have that much fund to buy a new efficient equipment. So we are discussing whether the CDM can provide them with those efficient equipment. Additionally, if we think the socioeconomic benefit of the CDM project, it is not only the case that it increases efficiency, but also it increases work participation rate and the spread of education will be more because people are now incurring huge opportunity costs because of collecting the fuel. Because a huge amount of time is spent by women and children, as Professor Reddy also said, for collecting the fuel. And the study of it would be more. I mean, the socioeconomic benefit should be also considered apart from the economic costs. And about the heterogeneity thing, obviously there are heterogeneity in different states in India. The characteristics of states' energy consumption is different. But my aim was to show how many people are there who are still depending on the biomass and how much biomass they are using. So, I mean, it is a cumulative number which is showing that in India this much percentage of people are still using biomass. So, I mean, for that reason I took the total India, not the states. The analysis of states can be done in a similar way. I mean, it would be another study. And the rebound effect about the rebound effect I have not seen. But the thing is that when I see the cross-section data, as people move from lower income to higher income, as we go from lower income group to higher income group, there are people who are using more efficient energy, even if that is expensive. So, I mean, we can think that maybe there is some rebound effect that people will stick to the cheaper fuels, but still there will be people, considerable number of people, who will shift to the efficient fuels. That's all. Actually, in India, when I work on energy efficiency, not many studies of the real rebound effect, I know it pretty well. Suppose, earlier the expenditure is 10 dollars, due to energy efficiency, the energy expected comes down to 5 dollars. We try to purchase some of the devices and there is an increase in your energy consumption. Any study, particularly about rebound effect, but west, there are quite a few studies. Thank you. I'm afraid it is time. Just to add, we have a kind of a range of income within which it will predominate, in a different range of income levels that may be as predominant as it will be. So, in the case of developed countries, I really wonder it will be as predominant as it is observed in the developed world, because the range of income levels essentially matters. The change is okay, but the range within which it falls perhaps matters a lot, as I understand. I think this is getting more and more interesting and exciting, but I've also been informed that I need to keep the time. That's my responsibility. May I leave the residual to bilateral interaction? If you don't mind, the next plenary is now, actually, maybe one minute from now, and I would observe the time. I would like to see the opportunity to thank the presenters for enriching us this afternoon, and to also thank you, the audience, for first being here, and secondly, productively contributing to the discussion, and having a real excitement this afternoon. Thank you all for being here. Thank you.


As we've been talking about in past lectures, the rapid growth of globalization, information technology and a changing environmental context are all working to take us into a much more complex world. This world is interconnected, interdependent, non-linear and more volatile. Over the past few decades, an acronym has emerged within the business community to define the fundamental internal and external conditions that affect organizations within this complex environment. This acronym is called VUCA and it stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity. The common usage of the term VUCA began in the 1990s and derives from military vocabulary, where it refers to the experience of officers in operations. It tries to capture the uncertain and dynamically changing situation of a military engagement where there is lack of information. Events often happen in a chaotic and unpredictable fashion in what is called the Fog of War. Military commanders sometimes describe this as being in a world of unknown unknowns. This is the extreme version of a VUCA world. In this section, we'll talk about how to develop strategies for operating within this VUCA environment. So let's start by talking a bit about strategy and our traditional approach to it in a non-VUCA world. Strategic management involves the formulation and implementation of major goals and initiatives taken by an organization's top management based on an assessment of the internal and external environment within which the organization operates. Thus how we approach strategy will obviously change in response to the environment within which our organization is operating. Owing to its origins within industrial age manufacturing, much of our modern management theory is focused upon relatively stable, predictable, routine environments where there is one relatively clear objective. These factors make possible an approach to strategy that is based around a few key concepts and methods. Firstly, there is one optimal goal or solution within these relatively static environments where there is one clear defined metric for performance such as maximizing revenue that can be one right answer, one optimal solution. And thus the aim is to obtain all of the information required and perform analysis upon it in order to identify this optimal solution. The objective then is to guide the organization towards this desired outcome through the control of the elements within the organization. Secondly, fix future projections. Due to limited volatility and the high level of predictability within the environments, we can project past experience and data onto the future and use risk-based analysis to calculate and ascribe quantitative payoffs to a limited number of future possibilities. Lastly, the use of progress planning. The progress towards our ultimate goal can be broken down into stages. We can create clear metrics for each stage and the movement through these stages is typically a linear incremental process. This approach to strategy works fine until we turn up the volatility, uncertainty and complexity within the environment. Turning a rapidly changing external environment to our advantage requires a recalibration of many dimensions across how we develop, deploy and deliver our strategy. And this is where complexity management finds its application to offer us an alternative paradigm with which to lead organizations in these more complex environments. So let's take a quick look at the different dimensions to the VUCA world and responses complexity theory offers to this changing environment. Firstly, volatility. In systemically volatile environments, change is a constant and our strategy needs to evolve from resisting it to working with it. This means creating organizations that are resilient through their agility and capacity for adaptation. The strategic emphasis shifts from creating fixed, well-defined goals and plans to trying to create agile organizations led by a clarity of vision and effective communications. So that it can be very clear about its values and objectives, but very flexible in how it implements capabilities and achieves that vision. Secondly, uncertainty. Uncertainty is the inability to know everything fully. This uncertainty is derived from the large number of elements within the system, their non-linear interactions and the capacity to adapt to local events as they evolve over time. This means that in these complex systems, the future emerges. The outcome of an emerging process cannot be known beforehand. Trying to compute the actual details and define a single future scenario is a lost endeavor. In environments where uncertainty is pervasive, our traditional risk-based analysis of the future breaks down. The only way to respond to this is to perform multiple simulations and experiments that will allow us to explore how things will really play out on the ground and to maintain a diverse and complementary system that is capable of responding to a number of different possible environmental conditions. Next, complexity. When people talk about complexity within the VUCA framework, they're referring to interconnectivity and interdependence. The non-linear interactions and interdependence within complex organizations renders our capacity for control over the system through direct interventions limited. In complex systems, we cannot always know what the outcome to our interventions will be due to these non-linear interactions and interdependencies. Thus, our capacity to directly align the elements of the organization towards some desired future goal is very much limited. The main response to this is for a leader to focus on creating the context that enables solutions to emerge in response to the changing environment. Lastly, ambiguity. Ambiguity is the quality of being open to more than one interpretation. When environments become complex, simple, linear cause and effect descriptions of events break down and ambiguity arises due to this lack of models to explain the observed phenomena. Resolving ambiguity means understanding the context within which events take place. It requires systems thinking to see the interconnections, to gain different perspectives in order to build up the full context within which an event can be properly understood. In this video, we've taken a brief introduction to the VUCA world. We've looked at our traditional approach to strategy within stable environments and a brief overview to how this needs to change when dealing with more complex environments and we'll spend more time in the coming modules exploring each of these different dimensions to the VUCA world in greater depth.


Security forces provide security and safety for insular airbase against any threats. We do that by providing law enforcement and safeguarding the vault storage area. We also, we're just ready to fight in case any old plan is implemented. So we just have to make sure that we're sustaining our training. It's important to the mission because we provide a small footprint in a strategic location so that we can do our mission from anywhere in the world.


Hi. I'm Joan Naturale. I will explain how to use the SIRS database. Notice we are now on the library home page, library.rit.edu. You'll see in the middle of the page there is a search bar and on that search bar there's different tabs. I will click on databases and I'm going to type in SIRS and click on the orange search icon. The title pops up, so click on the title. This database is similar to the opposing viewpoints database. You can browse for different topic ideas. I'm going to show you. Suppose I want to study the coronavirus topic. I see that, so I will click on it and look and see what's available. It gives you a summary of the issue and you can scroll down. It gives you viewpoints about the spread of the coronavirus. Some people think that we should be more careful and limit the spread. Other people think you can't avoid the epidemic, so you can develop your opinion after you read the articles. This is an example of a newspaper article and you can email it and download it, just like you can do for the other databases. You can also translate it to your home language if you want. Now I translate it to the Spanish language. It's not perfect, but it's a general translation. You can also listen to it by clicking on the listening icon. It's reading and voicing for you. You can also cite it, so I'll click on the site link. You have a choice of which citation style you're using, such as MLA or APA. I want to find more articles about the coronavirus, so click on find more. Notice in the left column, it tells you what types of articles you can read. Newspapers, magazines, pictures, websites, these have already been evaluated and are reliable. Government articles and peer reviewed articles. You have thousands of articles related to the topic that you can use. I want to explain how important it is for you to find articles that are easy for you to understand. This is important because if you select articles that are difficult to understand, you tend to plagiarize and you do not want that. Either find an article that you can understand or bring the article to the NLC and you can get more tutoring help. That sums up my explanation of how to use the SIRS Researcher Database.


This is Witchspace News for Friday the 18th of February 2022, I'm CMDR Buur. In Elite Dangerous News this week, the Empire wages a war on terror and the Colonial Bridge nears completion in this week's Community Gold Triple, as video game company Buyouts trend is F-Dev in the crosshairs, Frontiers meet and greet with the community is one week away and more. To make sure you don't miss any of our videos hit like and subscribe and remember to click the little bell icon and select all notifications and if you'd like to help directly support this channel you can also join our Patreon via the link in the video description. The server refresh on Thursday this week saw no new Thargoid attacks in or out of the bubble but it did bring with it the commencement of three new community goals. In the bubble and colonia the second of what we think is a four week cycle of CG's to finish the Colonial Bridge starports kicked off this week. The Alcor and Colonial systems are both asking for performance enhancers, personal weapons and survival equipment to be delivered in order to install pioneer supplies, a crew lounge and search and rescue services to the stations. In return not only will pilots be awarded with a top up to their credit balance but they'll also receive access to warm white cockpit like decorations with which to adorn their ships. Elsewhere if you've been keeping up with Galnet you'll know that the terrorist organization known as the NMLA that kicked off the last 18 months of ongoing story in the galaxy by initiating a sustained campaign of starport bombings have been roundly dragged into the open and a very big light shined on their support network that comes from within the Empire. Suffice to say the reigning imperial hierarchy is none too pleased with any of their shenanigans and by shenanigans I obviously mean the wholesale slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent civilians all in the name of restoring the empire to a system of governance that better reflects Marlinist values and has met with the private military contractor forces that the Marlinist architects used in their recent abduction of the emperor in the summerland system to duke it out. Up for grabs for participation are imperial hammer railguns, imperial ranks and exclusive decals. One final quick public service announcement the outcome of this particular CG is not in doubt there is only one side in the conflict for commanders to participate in. The Elite Dangerous Pilots Lounge community announced a competition this week running in Elite Dangerous Odyssey to win a voucher for use on the Steam PC gaming service. All you need to do to win is to grab a selfie of your in-game character next to one of the galaxy's many bartenders. To enter the competition head to the Elite Dangerous Pilots Lounge Discord server a link to which you'll find in the video description below. Serial explorer pillar of the SPVFA Elite Dangerous video graphic community and friend of this channel Commander Exorcist is launching season 4 of the Out There Elite Dangerous YouTube series this very Saturday February the 19th at 6pm UTC. If you've never seen out there before now is the perfect time to get on board with what has become a burpit household staple on Saturday evenings. The relaxing tones and beautiful vistas that Exorcist finds and commits to YouTube so consistently are sublime and a great way to wind down from a busy week. This Saturday season 4 will kick off with a live YouTube premiere and you'll find a link below this video where you can set yourself a reminder we look forward to seeing you there. This week an article appeared on the financial website thisismoney.co.uk delving into the current trend for high profile video game company buyouts on the stock market. Financially speaking in a pandemic affected world video game developers have become a hot property as more and more consumers turned toward home and online based entertainment coupled with the encroachment of large entertainment streaming platforms. The article is in particular riding on the back of the recent acquisition by Microsoft of Activision Blizzard which brings properties like Call of Duty and World of Warcraft into the Seattle based stable for the handsome sum of around 50 billion pounds or 68 billion US dollars.  Gaming behemoth Sony announced a similar high profile deal with Bungie soon after the acquisition deal was public and the article goes on to state that the money being thrown at gaming acquisitions this year is already as high as the total of last year's deals and last year's deals were three times the value of the previous year. The article making further note that when it comes to games development companies it's quote quicker to buy rather than build unquote. Interestingly the article further goes on to talk to Frontier's stockbroker in the city Liberum and then also mentions that Frontier themselves are ripe for a similar buyout bid after suffering a share price drop of over 50% in the last 12 months. And although the market generally feels this poor performance in share price will be short-lived the company taking such a serious hit makes it a much more attractive target to any circling prospective buyouts right now. Further as well as Warhammer Age of Sigma the company is developing games and expansions for other big globally recognized intellectual properties such as Jurassic World and Formula One adding yet more sheen to its purchase kudos. It's a reasonable assumption that if Frontier was negotiating with a prospective buyout offer they'd be prevented from doing or announcing anything that would affect their share price. As best we can determine the other live titles in FDF stable are not dealing with any serious share price affecting issues at the moment and are communicating with their own communities as normal. Profit warnings or new title announcements not withstanding the biggest share price affecting gorilla Frontier is currently wrestling is the issue of bringing the Elite Dangerous expansion Odyssey to the consoles a subject they are currently not talking about at all. To add further fuel to the fire as we've reported recently the community team have all but shut down meaningful communications with the community surrounding Elite Dangerous that they manage a community that before Christmas was understandably asking Odyssey on consoles when. It had been our perception here at the burpit that the weird shutdown in any meaningful community engagement from the Frontier's CM team happened on or around the 10th or 11th of January. The company's CEO and figure head David Braben usually very active on Twitter also last tweeted anything at all on the 11th of January. The exact same period that the comms from the community team fell off a cliff this could of course be purely coincidence but it is a strange coincidence nonetheless. There are of course a multitude of possible causes for the comms blackout as we've covered on previous videos it makes complete sense that the CM team won't want to talk anymore to the community until the sticky issue of console release is addressed. Equally they could in theory still be getting details and communication plans for 2022 in order. The Thursday live streaming slot in Frontier's regular schedule is empty waiting to be filled and is the logical spot for the CM team to return to and update 11 and fleet carrier interiors are still expected to be arriving sooner rather than later. We're rapidly however approaching the end of February and it is over a month since we had any engagement from the Frontier team regarding Elite aside from a very bland holding statement from Arthur Tolmy last week. In the absence of any news arriving from Frontier regarding the future of Elite Dangerous and given the current marketplace for video game developer buyouts along with Frontier's profile on the UK dev scene and their currently low share price we do think it highly likely they'd be on someone's buyout radar. Frontier's community team have their community meet and greet event this time next week in Cambridge. If nothing is said during the coming week then it's going to be a very interesting meeting indeed with a hundred or so commanders us included all watching every eye twitch lip twinge body movement or burp for any clues at all to the current happenings at Frontier towers. We shall of course report back on this very channel on how that meeting went and what if anything we learn from it. Are you picking up a particular community goal this week or perhaps taking a run at more than one? Are you headed to the community meet next week armed with a microscope to watch Frontier alongside us? Let us know in the comments below. That's it for now thanks very much for watching we'll be back later this week with more videos until then 07 commanders follow the Greens on the way out and do keep clear of the toast rack. We very much look forward to seeing you next time.


In drawing 101, form, depth, and volume, the joy of drawing with pencil and paper is encouraged as the foundation to increasing your skill in all mediums of art. To quickly improve your painting or coloring, improve the quality of the sketch underpinning your piece. This beginner course with over four hours of video instruction covers basic forms, an extensive study of perspective, and then explores drawing techniques on toned paper while learning about light and shadow. Two sketchbooks and a pencil are the minimal supplies needed and there are suggestions for other items that might help you in the free pre-class section in the curriculum. This course is recommended for artists of all types and it will also be a suggested prerequisite for other intermediate and advanced classes at art-classes.com. For more information, see the link in the YouTube description and see the supply list in the free pre-class area of the curriculum.


Alright welcome everybody. Wow. Maybe we'll just skip the agenda. The background, this is our scope, we're just going to do, originally we're going to look at network Pcap dumps of the video game systems, Xbox, PS3, we both server side and PS3, then we're going to look at the hard disk of all these different systems. A little closer. Everybody hear me fine? About me my name is Brandon Nezbitt, I'm a security consultant with Trustwave, I'm a member of their incident response team. I do credit card data breach investigations, I've got a little bit of experience and I like beer. The goal here is to take a in depth forensic look of common video game systems, how they're played, well not how they're played but how there's been but looking for game related data that may assist or may aid a forensics investigator in a, you know, compromise investigation. A little note here about consoles. Traditionally, you know, I don't think consoles have really been looked at, forensically, really seriously, I guess. But any more with these seventh generation consoles, the PS3, the 360, the Wii, they're all trying to really be the centerpiece here, maybe not so much the Wii, but, you know, both the PS3 and the 360, they have, they do everything.  With regard to the type of media, any type of internet browsing, internet browsing, save game stuff, and we'll get into that in a bit. So first, a little bit of background. Originally, my idea to do this was I was going to do, just try to look for personal information, sense of information. I do credit card data breaches, so I was like, hey, you know, you can buy stuff through these consoles, perhaps, you know, I can find credit card number stored in these things, or user names, passwords, all that fun stuff. So as that kind of, as I discovered that was going to become more of a fool's errand, really went back to a case that I worked on about a year ago in which there was a credit card data breach, and on this system, on this back of house system, there was a C-strike folder, you know, for Counter-Strike, old version, C-strike 1.6, and it was a default kind of a package install. In this install, they had admin mod installed with 1.6, and you know, as you can see here, we have a player's log, all the players that connected to this system that was compromised, you know, credit card numbers were being stolen, and we also had this game server, and we had these IP addresses and these names of people who were connecting to this system at the time. Now, were they the ones who were doing the investigation, or doing the compromise? Probably not, I mean, but the IP addresses that were on here, you know, we were able to trace them back, you know, using a normal GeoIP locate, you could go and see the fake originating in Russia, you could search their names, and you could find their little Steam ID community page, which we'll discuss in a bit, and all kinds of information. So it kind of got me thinking, and before I continue, a quick note on IP addresses and logs, typically IP addresses in a forensics investigation is more or less, more or less moot, really, because I mean, there's really no way for you to guarantee that source, because, matter of fact, we know everybody on the internet is behind seven proxies.   You're going to have a very high ping. Some might say over 9,000, and I'm sorry, this is my last name, I promise. All right. A quick note on our methodology. We want to keep warranty voiding to a minimum, because, you know, sure, we could take a PS3, you know, we could take an old one, we could rip it up, we could install a mod chip, and we can try to get access to the hypervisor or, you know, the NAND storage. But that's really kind of outside of a traditional forensics investigation. We really want to keep the tampering to a minimum. But there does exist several challenges with proprietary hardware, custom stuff, there's absolutely no, there's really no scientific documentation on any of these consoles or the software platforms really. The only stuff that you're really going to find with regard to documentation is going to be stuff that the hacker community has done. And PC server stuff, that was acquired using standard forensic, you know, best practices for acquisition. Scope, just real briefly. Again, we're doing network forensics, traditional disk analysis. These are the systems we looked at.  But just try to hit on the big ones. So first we're going to break down the PCAPs. How I did this was on my home network, I just set up an art poison, fired up the Wii, the PS3, had a friend bring over his 360, and just captured and see what we could find. There are some very, all console systems you have multiple ways to connect. I think the Wii is only wireless. Correct me if I'm wrong. But I know the PS3 and the 360, you have wired, wireless. There's Bluetooth, all that fun stuff. And you're going to see some common themes as we just kind of briefly go through the PCAP breakdown. There's a lot of UDP. I mean, you don't need a stateful connection to play a game. All the important stuff, which is really surprising, well, maybe not so much, but all the really important stuff, if you go through like Xbox Live Marketplace, the PlayStation Store online, all this is done over SSL TLS. So it's all, you can browse safely, you can buy safely, it's encrypted. But web browsing, like if you browse the marketplace or the PlayStation Store, it's all typically just like HTTP. So if you're to do a PCAP analysis, you're going to see the same kind of stuff that you would see if you were just, you know, analyzing a PCAP dump from a normal PC. So first, the 360, Xbox Live Marketplace, it's really built on XML, no surprise there. Again, it's identical to other PC traffic that you might see, and you can parse the data from the PCAP, you can extract stuff, you can use something like Foremost or Network Minor, and you could really just pull out images, files, you know, whatever's getting browsed through. And so here's a sample of an XML page that you'd see if you were to, you know, do some PCAP analysis. Here we can see the first thing to really note that's highlighted is the unique ID for the game. I'll elaborate on that when we get to the hard drive analysis. And then there's a constant points. They have a point system when you buy on the Xbox Live.  And again, you know, just like any other PCAP dump, you're going to get images that you can extract. And yeah. And important stuff, I actually had a friend, that previous screen that was for Magic, the Gathering, I think. I actually had the guy buy it. And this is the traffic you'd see. It's all SSL, TLS. So the next one is we, again, everything's done over SSL. The one thing to really note though, if the we, even in standby mode, even when you turn it off, it's still broadcasting. It's still going to broadcast out like over some sort of DNS. And as a result of We Connect 24. And that's the website to look for there.  Authentication is done, sorry, authentication is done over SSL, but everything else is like HTTP stuff. So if you happen to, you know, be breaking down, you can see somebody's Netflix queue. And as you can tell, this individual really doesn't have good taste in movies at all. PS3 browser. They kind of have a custom browser, which is really interesting. Like Network Miner, I have a screenshot there. It does a really good job of kind of identifying it.  The one thing that you, that that might be useful for a forensic investigation with regard to PCAP analysis for PS3 is the buddy list. That is done over SSL. So here we have a link down at the bottom, has an avatar, an online name. That would be the person's name. I've obviously obfuscated it to protect, you know, the quote unquote gamer. And so yeah, and here we have an image for the profile. And yes, that is an active image. So there's our gamer. So moving on, so that pretty much it for PCAP analysis. Again, all the important stuff, all the really good stuff that, you know, you know, you would want to get, it's done over SSL. But with regard to forensic investigation, if you do have a PCAP dump, it really would not hurt to go through because you can get a good idea. Because like I said, normal web browsing traffic is going to be like standard like you would from any other internet browser. First hard drive we rip apart is the 360. All about the 360, the only thing to really note here is the last bullet with proprietary storage. They only allow authorized storage devices, which is a, if you're following along on the, well, and the PDF, I actually show how to break it apart, but it's a plastic in case. It's a standard two and a half inch laptop hard drive.  Xbox 360s are notorious for the red ring of death. I'm sure anybody who has one, anybody who kind of follows the scene is aware of the red ring of death. So, you know, all I did was put a quick hat up in Craigslist, hey, I'm looking for a 360 for parts. I need the hard drive. And I got about 20 people saying, hey, you know, do you want more than one? So, and as we'll see, you really should wipe that before you try to sell it. Again, take it apart. It uses, it uses authorized storage. Take apart the hard drive at your own risk. If you were to take apart the hard drive, you're going to avoid the warranty. There's a little Microsoft holo sticker. And yeah, once you do that, you're not going to get your warranty on it. Once the drive is removed, you can just use your favorite acquisition method. I would recommend doing a DD because that way it gives you a lot more options to use some of these third party apps to load up the image. What's on the disk? You're going to have three partitions that are formatted FATX. You have partitions zero, which as far as I know, it's really just system information. Partition two, you're going to have legacy backward compatibility. So meeting like original Xbox games that you can play on the 360, all that information is going to be stored there. And with partition three, game saves content and cash. I do have a link there, which we'll talk about in the next slide. Also, if anybody is storing like media, pictures, music, movies, or anything like that, it is going to be in this directory. So for the 360, I've highlighted the first three things. Those are represent profile IDs. So here we can see for the system, there was three separate profiles that were used for the system. And you can break it down even further. Using that website, we could tell that this person had played Modern Warfare. And here we have a game save starting, you know, November 22, 2005 at 12.59 p.m. So here we have kind of a timestamp. Here we can say, hey, at this particular point in time, somebody on the system was in fact playing a 360. Now, as far as I do know, the MindEx directory, that's where your music is going to be stored. Again, you can find pictures. Now, this would be useful more along the lines of, I guess you could say kind of like a criminal investigation.  You're going to be able to find it. You can just parse it out. It's really, really simple. You can use tools like Foremost or any other forensic file carving utility to do this. Again, kind of locating the information. Most game specific information is going to be in Partition 3. Really what to look for. Just some bullets, just kind of reiterating what I already said. What can you find? Well, you know, obviously you can find the games that were played on the system. You can determine when they were played, at what times, when was the save generated. You're going to find gamer tags, you know, who are on this person's buddy list. And gamer tags, you can, it's public information. You can simply look it up and get this information. And again, media stored, music, movies, pictures. And again, like Foremost, all that stuff will work quite well. And here's just a screenshot of Foremost doing its thing. And here's some screenshots of the kind of stuff you're going to find. Here we have pictures of, you know, the avatar. The one on the top right is, you know, our gamer of that system. On the bottom left, here we have movies. Those are mostly advertisements for Xbox Live Marketplace. And then the rest of pictures, drive analysis. You can view live files in an allocated space. Viewing the live files is going to require a bit of a third-party utility, something like Explore 360 or WinX, HDD. Or if you have like the effort, if you, or if you want to put forth the effort, you can do some kernel modifications and just mount it into Linux. Some of the file things, some of the file types, they're easily identifiable. Again, there's no scientific documentation on the stuff. So there's really no way to, you know, confirm it. But, you know, we could make a good guess. SU system update, title update, and FM friend manager, I presume. Here we have a screenshot. I've blurred it all out, but it's just a list of gamer tags. Again, you know, you could look it up, you can validate, you can say, oh, these are this person's friends. Quickly, wrapping it up. FatX is the same, you know, file system type or partition type that was used in the Xbox One, so there's a lot of utilities to go through and parse it. There's, it's the same kind of stuff you would find on any other PC. You can generate time frames based on saved data, just doing kind of a live file system analysis. OS, another sense of information, is really closely guarded. Again, no real scientific documentation. If you're going to do like an investigation, really the best thing to do outside of, you know, taking the hard drive in an engine is really just to turn it on.   The next one we look at is the Wii. Real briefly about the Wii. The only thing to really note here is the 512 NAND flash storage. That's where OS and Game Save stuff, again, it's really not a lot of space. Getting to the storage, you can use legacy GameCube cartridges, or you can use an SD card, you know, aside from normal pictures, SD cards can be formatted to save games. And again, the 512 NAND storage contains the OS. It's all encrypted by the way, with AES 128 CBC. Unfortunately, I don't know who thought this would be a good design decision, but the decryption keys are on the NAND flash with the drive. So it's pretty trivial to decrypt the whole darn thing. To access the storage, you have two choices.  Or there are plenty of exploits you can use, the banner bomb. I know there was a, I think they patched it now. There was a Legend of Zelda hack that you could use to get to what you needed. What I wound up doing is I just procured a copy of HackMe. I used the banner bomb exploit.  And then from there you dump it, create a file just called NAND.bin, and it creates a separate file called keys.bin.  So you just use a separate utility to go through and decrypt it. And I make a note to this website, these guys do a lot of good work with we hacking and all that. So if you're ever curious, I'd highly recommend checking those guys out. What's on the NAND? Even decrypt it, you're not going to, there's really not a lot. I mean 512 megs of storage is just not a lot of space to begin with. Really, there's some things you'd like to focus on. If you go back to the previous link, they actually have a list of all the directories and what they mean and what you're going to find in there. Shared two, these are a couple of directories to note. Game saves, configs, stuff like that. Network config is stored in plain text. So if you, you know, you connect to Wi-Fi, right? You know, at home I use WPA2 and in clear text it's got my SSID and password and all that fun stuff. And we connect for some other reason, it likes to store your email. Now the Wii I have, I bought this used from somebody else. So I don't know why, I don't know who thought it'd be a good idea, but it will store emails sent and received.  So why, you know, it stores email, couldn't tell you, but it is on there. And I guess forensically, if you're doing a forensic investigation, I don't know anybody who really uses the Wii to communicate, but I guess the possibility always exists, right? Now, wrapping up, there's really no security like the Xbox 360. You're really not going to see a whole heck of a lot. The best you're going to get is game saves, browsing, you're going to get the avatars and stuff like that. Look out for SD cards, and again, really not a lot you can do. PS3, briefly, does that, all right. Just kind of, last thing to note, again, the last bullet point is full disc encryption. Before I get to that, getting to the hard drive, it is the easiest hard drive to get to. I mean, for the PS3 slim, the one that we looked at here, it's literally a little flap and a screw and you pull it out. You can easily upgrade. You can buy, you know, a 600 gig hard drive, easily stick it in, turn it on, and it'll do its thing. And no more OOS support. I'll get into that in a bit. What's on the hard drive? Who knows. Like I said, the entire thing is encrypted and there hasn't been any way to really break it. And once they got close, I'm not sure if you guys are familiar with the GeoHoff exploit, was able to get access to hypervisor, and Sony's knee-jerk reaction, of course, was to patch it and just, okay, no more OOS support. So it's kind of theorized, is that the decryption is stored in one of the SPEs of the cell processor. Again, since there's no documentation, it's really no way for us to confirm that. Looking at the raw bits isn't going to help. Again, it's just a bunch of gibberish. PS3, if it's not a slim model, and it hasn't been updated, and there's a way you can determine what patch level it is just by looking at, like, a PCAP dump. You could install Linux. It used to have other OS support, and that's easy to get to. But, you know, if you really want to determine whether or not the other OS is on, again, it's just like the Wii and the 360. Plug it in, turn it on, and there you go. Other OS version info. If you were to do, kind of like, if you had a PCAP dump, you're going to see it's going to go out, it's going to do check for updates and stuff like that, and it's going to download this PS3 update list dot text, and it'll tell you, you know, what version it's running at, and it'll check, there's like a pup file that you can download, so if any reverse engineers are out there, want to figure out what's on these updates, it's really easy because you can just go download it right to your PC. Wrapping up, turn it on, and go. Traditional file analysis, really, not at no go. Most of it's really outside of a traditional forensics investigation. I mean, if you wanted to crack the case, install a mod chip, and kind of go crazy with it, you're more than welcome to, but if you're to do, like, a, you know, a forensic investigation for an actual case you're working on, you're really likely not to do that. Now we leave the consoles, we're going to get to server side. There's a lot of game servers you guys can host. I'm sure you guys are familiar with Unreal, SourceDS. What is it and why? Again, SourceDS stands for Source Dedicated Server. Anybody can host, freely host any games. You don't have to buy the games. You can just download it, and you can host your own game. It runs on both Windows and Linux. It's multi-platform, and obviously there's a lot of games. For this, we focus on Left 4 Dead 2. All other SourceDS games are pretty much the same. Again, that's a huge understatement. I mean, I'm really just kind of glossing over it, but you guys get the idea. I hope. Steam and Source, a primer, just real briefly. It's multi-platform. The one thing to note is, you know, there's over, they reported in January, there's over 25 million active users. So it's not something that's esoteric. There's a lot of people that use this. There's a lot of people to play that, and there's a lot of information that, you know, that could be useful to a forensic investigation if you were to find this installed on a system. So what? Compromise box with this server? It's not as unlikely as you may think. It's actually pretty common if you find a compromise box. You're going to find a not all the time, but chances are there may be a video game server that's installed. I've seen it a few times. I know some of my coworkers have seen it quite a few times as well. Now, Steam itself, it generates a lot of logs, both client and server side. And what can you get from this? IP addresses, Steam IDs, time spent playing, and typed conversations if it's enabled. Only thing to note here is the Steam client. Here you have the UDP ports 2700 or 27,000 to 27015. That's the only thing to really know. Just kind of put it near for your reference. Directory structure. For the source DS server, it's very similar across Nix and Windows. Windows, the only real difference is, you know, Windows is going to be in the program files directory, whereas, you know, Linux, it might be more of a custom path. Now, non-Steam servers exist. Packages installed. Like the earlier example I provided with the IP addresses of the admin mod logs.  All those IPs went back to Russia. We had the Steam IDs. We were able to look it up. And I think we'll get to that slide here in a minute when I talk about the Steam community pages logs. Again, that's where they were located. Really, not a lot to report there. And there's a screenshot of that. What's on the logs? Your log files are going to start out like this. It's going to launch the configuration file first. So if you just open it up initially, you're going to see a bunch of gibberish that really means nothing to anybody other than it's the configuration. You might be able to see, you know, the ARCON password or the contact information of the server admin. But again, if you compromise the box, you're really not going to put valid, I would hope not. You're not going to put valid contact information in there. Continued what's in the logs? Here we can see people connecting. When they're connecting, when they disconnect their names and their Steam ID. Continuing on, the Steam ID, this really is a wealth of information. I imagine that some marketing guy just really loves the whole concept of Steam. It provides, again, a lot of information. Steam IDs, they're in that format. And you can easily look them up. If you have a Steam ID, there's a lot of different websites you can go to, or you can just Google it, and it may take you right to the page. Now, if you have somebody's Steam ID, you can go to their Steam Community page. Now, unless they have this disabled, you're going to get a lot of information about this individual. You're going to have their name, the games they play, how often they play them, when they play them, and all their friends and who they play them with. It's all there, and it's all publicly accessible, and it could be useful to a friend's investigation to give you an idea as to what these users are doing on the system or how often they play. And, now, there's our friend again. Wrapping it up. If you believe that there is a video game system that's installed on here, I mean, obviously, if you have a server and you're doing a forensics investigation, there's a lot of places to get good information.  But the logs, or the video game server itself, it's a very small footprint of the overall server, and it can provide a wealth of information as to the activity and the general usage of the server. Again, the configuration file, you know, you can find the server admin contact information, and again, it's a very small footprint to look for and the big scheme of things. Windows 7 OSX. In this section, you know, we're going to look at Windows 7. I just bootcamped off to this MacBook Pro. We look at Steam and World Warcraft trial. Unfortunately, didn't buy the full version, but trial, just as good, I imagine. OSX, something to note here, Steam was recently released for the Mac. So now, you can play all these fun games on your Mac. So the Mac, nobody can say the Mac doesn't have games anymore. You can play Half-Life 2, Portal, Team Fortress 2, and there's a lot more on the way. And again, the Mac, you can play, there's a World of Warcraft client for it as well. And just for silliness, when they released it, this was the image they did, or this was their little advertising thing, I thought it was pretty neat. Now, for the method of acquisition, we just use standard forensic methodology. Physical memory dump, volatile data gathering, and then, you know, we did a disk acquisition. That's kind of a high level overview and disk acquisition really why people get into forensics, porn analysis. The point, system profile, profiling. There's a wealth of information that you can be garnered. So if you see somebody, you know, you're looking through these wild con logs and you see somebody's logged on to 10 hours and wow on a Saturday, it's pretty safe to say they probably don't have much of a social life. Information with regard to general activity of the system and account information accessible. The perfect alibi, you know, sorry officer, it's plain TF2. Now, a quick note on that.   You probably need a lot more to go with that, particularly with like a criminal investigation. You're going to have more data points than just, you know, one log entry that somebody connected to a game server. Where you're going to find the stuff, OSX, application, asterisk.app, user profile, and this is a true for any system. Do a MIM dump against it and run strings against it. And that is just a really awesome dictionary file. Just kind of a tip. Windows, program files, user app data, and there's a little bit more security safeguards, I guess. It's a bit of a, a bit of an understatement, I suppose. Warden for WoW is installed by default. Warden is kind of a, it's like a piece of, I don't want to say spyware, but it's a client that enforces the eula of Blizzard's World of Warcraft. It's a client that runs in the background. It's there, it's by default when you install it, it's there. You don't really have much of a choice. On OSX, from what I understand, it is an optional feature. Now for the PCOSX, this is the general location of where you're going to find the data for Steam on a Windows box. Games are stored in a single non-compressed archive, so you're not going to see a bunch of small files. You're going to see a couple of big files and the program files directory. And the con logs are going to be there. Connection log 270, asterisk, asterisk. If you go back to the port list, the 27015 means that person actually connected to, you know, a game. If it was something else, you know, con log, 5,000 or whatever, it's probably not playing a game. It's probably like an update. OSX, lot, lot of the same. And the con log directory is in a different location. User profile, library, application support, Steam logs. The connection log for the user end, if you're connecting out, this is what you're going to see. The log starts. This is your IP address. You started connecting. And the connection complete. And it tells you, you can get a good idea for how long they played on this particular system. So if you need to prove that what actions are taking place on a system during this time, and you have these logs available, you can say, oh, well, you know, this person was playing Left 4 Dead 2 for, you know, 3 hours. Other notes on Steam. Most of the client side stuff, as with, you know, the PS3, the Xbox 360, the Wii, it's all encrypted. You're really not going to see, you're really not going to see a lot. It's all maintained on the server end. So none of it's stored. I know back in the day, Steam used to store your password and plain text in its installed directory. They don't do that anymore. At least, I hope not. They don't.  Again, not much documentation on that, but it functions very much the same way as Warden does for World of Warcraft. Game configure information. You have download directories, and it's noted by app IDs. You can find this. It's all public information. 220 is now marked for downloading. That's an example from a log entry. And here we can tell that at this time, Half-Life 2, it started downloading. Now, we looked at the World of Warcraft trial. What to look for, connection logs. You can find a lot about the user, what realm they play on, their character name, stuff like that. A lot of gamer info. Now, WoW has an official site that maintains all this character information. It's called their Armory. We'll get it in a second. Again, the same data exists. Those are the locations. Here's your connection log. Here you can see when this person connected, where they connected to, and for how long they were connected to it. It's all there. It's all easily readable.  They may assist you. They may, you know, just be littered on your system. But it's there. And, for a forensic investigator, it may be useful. WoW gamer information. Again, WoW Armory, this is another public venue for you to be able to gather information as to, you know, what this user is doing. In the install path, it's going to have the account name, the character name. So, you can go to WoWArmy.com, WoWArmory.com, and search that name. And you're going to see this general character activity. You're going to see what achievements they just got, what time they got them. It's all there. It's all publicly accessible, very much like Steam. So, if, again, if you need to corroborate evidence and timelines, it's all there. Other notes on WoW, Warden, Anti-Cheat, it's there to, again, very curious to call it, very spacious to call it, SpiWare. But, I mean, it's as much SpiWare as Norton is. Rootkit.com, somebody reversed it. They did a really great write-up. I highly recommend you go read it. They do have two-factor authentication, which is something that was interesting. This was a nice little bit that I learned. I didn't realize they were even offering this for video games anymore. You can do two-factor authentication. So, for an optional fee, they can provide you a token that will generate a pin, very much like an RSA token that you may have at work. So, you know, when you log on, let's say somebody compromises your account with maybe a key logger, something like that. They won't be able to log on unless they have that token. So, that's kind of a point of two-factor, right? Battled that earlier. I had a note that's going to extend to StarCraft 2 and Diablo 3, but StarCraft 2 is already out. Didn't really have time to make a write-up on it, but, you know, go StarCraft. Game settings and user configs. Now, what's really interesting, this is just kind of off the wall, not really forensic related. They all validate with hashes. So, you know, your video game, your configuration file, if you try to go in and edit manually, it's going to give you a check somewhere and say, no, this isn't right, don't do this. So, that's another option. Wrapping it up, you know, constant development on engines and games, you know, MMOs, I didn't really touch a lot. Again, World Warcraft barely scratched it. There's a lot of MMOs out there. They have a really long development, long life cycle, EverQuest. That's been around for, hell, it's been around for a long time and they're still coming out with service packs. I mean, I remember, you know, well over a decade ago, you know, people were ranting and raving about EverQuest and I guess people still play it. Big name publishers, they have a very strong commitment to security, but they also have a very strong commitment, not to release documentation on their platforms. So, if you wanted to get some really good technical information like about the warden, about the Valve anti-cheat client, it's just simply not going, you're not going to get it. The information that exists all comes from, you know, you guys, the hacker community. Modern big name publishers, again, not allowed to begin with all the subscription stuff, you know, for personal information. It's all handled server side. So you're not going to find credit card numbers stored on the system. You're not going to find, you know, username and password stored on the system unless, you know, somebody has a plain text file saying my wow account login information. Lastly, you know, not much documentation, proprietary code and all that fun stuff. And it went a lot quicker than I thought. If you're going to sell your console, wipe the drive. It's not that hard. Or if somebody's like, hey, I'd like to buy your Xbox 360. You know, don't give them a hard drive. You can buy their own hard drive. It's not that expensive. Wow. Comparatively speaking, it really isn't. In the not too distant future, these type of logs may be used in a criminal investigation. They may be used to defend you. They may be used to convict you. It depends on really what the case is.  If you need to tie it back to a particular user, you're going to need a little bit more than just a log entry in general. So it would be an aggregate of things. 7th gen consoles are maintained and updated consistently. The moment you see like an exploit release like the GeoHof thing for the PS3, the next day there's a patch out to fix it. Same thing with the Wii. The moment, like not the moment, but as soon as they can come out with an exploit to get access to the OS, there's a patch out to fix it. And they're really good about making sure that they maintain these patches. If you want to play online with your PS3, you're going to have the latest patch. Same thing with the 360. If you want to play online, if you want to use your thing, you're going to have to have the latest updates. And again, for a forensic investigation, if you're going to look at a console, the first thing you should really do is just turn it on, plug it in, look at it, bring up a controller. You know, if you have a copy of Modern Warfare fired up. And then go through and, you know, if you're looking for pictures, it's all very intuitive. These things are designed to be easy for, you know, 12 year olds to navigate. So it should be fair enough for, or easy enough for an investigator to kind of do their thing. Game servers can add a lot to an investigation. Again, keep out for the logs, and it can tell you a lot about what was going on, on that system during a time frame of a particular compromise. If you're trying to determine what happened on the system, even if it's more or less outside the scope of your investigation, if you try to determine a credit card data breach occurred, it's likely that the attackers didn't install a counter-strike server. But again, you know, it's good information to have for just about anything or any point you're trying to make. Newer PC games much better in security. DRM. Nobody likes DRM. Kind of what Steam is, right? It's just a big DRM client. But they're very good at it, and they're very good about, and then the reason is is because nobody likes cheaters. Well, not everybody, but in general, you know, back in the day, counter-strike, old school, there was a lot of cheating, and it was very easy to do. I mean, anybody with, you know, a modicum of experience could just easily go through with a aimbot and, you know, own an entire server. They got a lot of people upset, hence we developed back, and it's only being developed more and more. It's getting a lot harder to cheat in these online games. Same thing with, you know, bots for World of Warcraft.  Somebody made an example, I think it was an episode of Law and Order where somebody was, their defense was, was playing World of Warcraft at the time, look at the logs, and they're like, oh, well, yeah, but lo and behold, they were using a bot.  And I guess that's pretty much it. Just a couple of shout outs, spider labs, a couple of friends, and this guy, the anonymous friend on PS3. So if anybody wants a copy of these slides, I think my contact information is in the, is, is somewhere out there on the thing.  Because I took out a lot of information that was in the slide on the DVD. I go through step by step on the PDF as to how to go about, you know, taking apart your hard drive. You know, there's a lot more images, there's a lot more details, a lot more narrative. Here kind of broke it down and I think that's really early, aren't we? Yeah. Say lovey. So yeah, questions. Yes. The 360 is really good at that. I mean, like I said, is there's really no file system security on it at all? I mean, if you want to just, you know, go through and control through the partition directories, if you want to open it up and like let's say explore 360, it's there. I mean, you'll be able to find it or you know, you can find file system artifacts and like let's say an unallocated space. But like, let's say for the PS3, not a lot. If you do have, I do believe there's, there's various media center applications you can use for, like let's say the PS3 and you can stream movies using this application through your PS3. Now like I said, if you look at the hard drive, not going to see a lot, but if you do look at the PS3 media center, you're going to see, I do believe they maintain a kind of a backlog of what's been, of what was in the buffer, what was wrong, what was being done. But then again, you know, like I said, if you're investigating somebody's PC, there's a lot of other places to get information. But yeah, you can, you can find that information on some systems. We, not so much. Yeah. It's unfortunate too.  I mean, I'm not trying to gush, but it's really awesome. It is a shame, there's really no documentation and they're really a stickler for this encryption that's on there. Like I gave the example about, you know, the hard drives, it's easy to replace. If you were to take a hard drive out of one PS3 and put it into another, it's going to ask you to format it and reinstall. So that tells you that these encryption keys are unique per device, which is, wow, really? Whereas, you know, the Wii, it's you know, on the thing, it's on the hard drive itself. Like I said, it's again, it's theorized that these decryption keys for the hard drive exist in one of the SPEs on the cell processor, but as far as what's on the PS3, I really wish I could go into more detail as to how it works, because I would love that information. If there's any developers out here who work on the Sony PS3, I'd love to pick your brain. No, no hands. But, but yeah, I really wish there was more documentation if we could go through and it was little, the system was a little more open-ended. And after taking away the other OS, other OS support as well, I don't know if I took all that out of the slides or not, but originally, I kind of had a bit of a rant about it. I mean, what other system takes away features from its users? Some people bought these systems for the explicit use of, like, hey, I want to install Linux on my PS3, and now you can't do it if you want to, you know, maintain a PS3 as well. I do think, I think there's a class action against that now. Anybody joined in on that? No? Yeah, I've actually heard about that. I heard, what was it, the government had bought a whole bunch of these things that are using for password cracking, because it's a cell processor. I mean, what's it good at? It's good at crunching numbers. I mean, yeah. And again, I said I can't substantiate it either. I mean, all that's really kind of hearsay, right? But yeah, I mean, like they're pretty powerful machines. You can do a lot with them. Again, I just wish the PS3 is a little more open. Any other questions? Well, like you said, like you made a good point, you know, MMOs anymore, these online RPGs, they're a lot of people. Well, from what I understand, they love it because it's a big social thing. I know I was, I was a huge, you know, wild nerd for a long time. I recently quit the addiction. So I mean, people love the social aspect. It's there. I guess you could do that. I mean, it's not entirely impossible. It'd be interesting to see. I mean, as I know, like, for example, World Warcraft, the only reason I mention is because I've got what, 11, 12 million users worldwide, some ridiculous number. So it's, it's, I guess it's possible. I mean, if you can compromise somebody's account, or if you could really get together with like the other social network, or the rest of their social network, it's quite possible to do that, I imagine. Yeah. Any other questions? Yes, no. All right. I guess if there's any other Q and A, thanks for coming, everybody. I appreciate it. Thank you.


నанием ಅం పసె కికు ವై కాని ళాదు బ్డి మ్డినెtoi icano今 మాల్ ఙ Dreamsgreen themecakes సం పినె . 12. వ్ని న్మో E fee theme Shawry వంసె నిక prejudice P. 1reci잖아요 నినె సె ప౜నಿ ధక minimalist considering సినృ Fort 잘� le ces friend venture ఠి.issant as you did other portions of that particular unit and this portion we shall take up for discussion that after going through this particular video through that particular unit it should be able to explain the role and functions of sales managers. We have discussed in part 1 that sales management is basically management of the personal selling function and what is personal selling function? Personal selling function is basically recruiting, selecting, equipping, assigning, routing, supervising, motivating, compensation, payment of the sales force. So, what are the basic role and functions of sales managers? There are some other aspects also. We shall try to explore those other aspects. As it was indicated in the definition of American marketing association, the sales managers recruit, sales managers select, sales managers train salespeople and they provide them reasonable goals and motivate them to get the results. Sales managers coordinate personal selling operations with other marketing functions, specifically role of sales management. So, sales managers have to recruit the salespeople. So, you may think about that. What is the distinction between recruitment and selection? You see, recruitment is a prior step before selection. Requitment is inviting applications. Selection is offering the appointment. We have selected so and so. Requitment is we are having applications. We are having recommendations. So, we are having all those. So, we shall process those things. Then we shall contact interview. Then we shall make that selection. So, recruitment is a prior step before selection. So, sales managers will have to recruit. If we cannot recruit, then we will not be able to select good candidate. Is that it? So, recruitment is important. After recruitment, selection is important because the quality of salespeople will determine the quality of selling efforts. Is that it? So, sales managers will have to recruit, will have to attract the persons to the company, will have to select the right person for the right job, at the right time, for the right place. Then they will have to be trained about the company, about the products, about the customers, about competition, how to approach the customers. They have been selected, they have been trained. Now that they will have to be given reasonable goals, attainable goals. If you give them a very lofty goal, they will not be able to achieve it. And if you give them very low goal, they will not be, they will not feel motivated. They will achieve it. And in that case, we will be having only ideal capacity. Is that it? So, we need, after giving them the sales goals, we need to motivate them so that we can achieve the results. So, this is what sales managers will have to ensure. At the same time, the sales managers will have to coordinate this personal selling efforts with other marketing functions. Suppose the Indian organization, the marketing research is there. So, the marketing research people might be interested in knowing about what is happening in the market. So, that information will have to be provided by the sales people. Because they are the linking, right? They are the linkages with the market, the company and the market. The linkages are established by the company's sales people. So, sales managers will have to coordinate the personal selling operations with other marketing functions. Like, say, marketing research. Even advertisement, you know, sales promotion, at what time that discount, gift, coupons, lottery, etc., should be launched. If we give this, how that will be coordinated by the sales post in the field level. So, this requires coordination. We just cannot see sales management in isolation. So, if you are asked to describe the role of sales management, then you will have to answer in this way. That's sales managers. What are the basic functions? Requirement, selection, training, motivation, compensation. And then the second part is, the sales managers, not only management of the sales post, they will have to establish the coordination with other marketing functions of the company. So, what are the functions of sales managers? Sales planning and budgeting. Say, you are Mr. So and so. You are having a sales territory. You cannot cover the entire sales territory. So, you will divide your sales territory. You are the area manager. So, you will divide your area into certain, say, territory, sales representatives. Mr. Y, Mr. Z, right, like that. So, Mr. X will be having this target. Mr. Y will be having this target. Mr. Z will be having this target. So, you will have to plan their targets. You will have to plan their quotas. Then you will have to budget. That in order to achieve these sales, what are the type of explanation that they will have to incur. So, sales planning and budgeting. Then this sales planning and budgeting, you cannot just do it in hands. This needs to be backed up by overall estimation of the demand. So, estimation of the demand and forecasting sales based on the demand that this could be the demand level of the customers based on this demand. Right, the sales in this particular territory would be like this. For a new product, the demand may not be that high. For an established product, the demand is already high. So, for the established product as a sales manager, the sales manager is required to maintain the demand. But for a new product, the sales managers will have to, will be required to increase the demand. To increase the demand for the new product, to increase the awareness for the new product because many people may not know about the new product. So, estimating demand and forecasting sales. Then determining the size and structure of sales organization. Say, for a national level marketing organization, say India. So, what could be the size and the structure of the sales organization? One could be say, a zonal manager. Northern zone, Indian, Eastern zone, Western zone, Southern zone. Within the zones, there could be area managers. Suppose within Eastern zone, there could be a zonal manager, say area manager for Bihar. Area manager for Udisha. Area manager for the North Eastern states. Under the area manager, suppose for Assam, there is one territory manager. Say, Monipur and Mijoram together, another territory manager. Ounasal Portes and Nagaland, suppose another territory manager. We are having, say, three to four territory managers. Under those territory managers, there could be territorial sales representatives. Say, one representative will say, Lower Assam. Another is in, say, Upper Assam. Another is in, say, Barak Veli. So, what could be the structure of the sales organization? Territory representatives, area manager, zonal manager, like that. Then, requiting, selecting and training of the salespeople at all these levels. So that we can achieve the sales objectives at least possible cost. So that we can contribute towards the growth potential and the profit potential of the company. That is basically the basic essence of sales management. That is basically the main requirement, main function of the sales manager. Continuing it further, they will have to allocate the sales force and setting sales quota. Say, territory sales representatives of, say, Assam. He will give us a sales of, say, five crores. Territory sales representatives of, say, Ounasal Portes and Nagaland. He will give us a sales target of, say, four crores. So, someone may be given, it may not be uniform. That everyone will get five crores sales target. It will depend upon the market potential. It will depend upon the, suppose in Assam, Guwahati metro is there. So, Guwahati itself will absorb lots of demand. And Guwahati itself will also cater to the other north-eastern states. So, other north-eastern states. So, sales target could be less. So, compared to Guwahati, reaching the different parts of Manipur, different parts of Nagaland will require more efforts, will require more travel time. So, the sales manager or the journal manager will see all these intricacies. Logistics, geographical terrain, transportation possibilities. And accordingly, they will fix the sales quotas. Then, they will have to compensate. They will have to give them salary. They will have to give them incentives. They will have to motivate them. They will have to lead them together. They will have to have the conferences to discuss the things. And then, they will have to be evaluated also. Whether someone could achieve the sales target or not. Say, for Assam representative, the sales target was five crores. But he has not been able to achieve this. Why? Say, there was a very flat. There was some flat. There could be some natural digestors. Or suppose the sales could be exceeded also. Say, it was estimated that five crores. The sales was achieved at six crores. Why? Suppose the government declared the dearness allowance and the people got areas. So, purchasing power increased. So, demand increased. And then, we will have to monitor the overall marketing environment. These territory managers will have to give the information about the market, how the market is moving, what the competitors are doing. They are basically, as I have told you, they are the basic links of the company and the market. They will have to give continually required information, relevant information, reliable information to the marketer. So, these are the basic functions of sales managers. So, dear learners, hope you have been able to understand the role and functions of sales managers. So, if you are asked to answer a question that describe the functions of sales managers, you can describe the functions of sales managers in terms of these headings.  Thank you.