What is up you guys welcome back to another one if you're new to the channel I am GoldPotie and today we are in the new 2019 BMW M5 courtesy of Apple BMW in York PA and for me I've not yet experienced the M5 so I'm super excited to be reviewing this one completely for you guys today So as always let's start with racing and so there are essentially two ways you could set up the M5 the standard M5 Which is going to start at one hundred and two thousand seven hundred dollars and then the M5 competition for $110,000 even with either setup that you go with the power plant is going to be the same powering This one is a four point four liter twin power turbocharged V8 engine putting out six hundred horsepower fifty seven hundred rpm 553 pound-feet of torque available at a very wide power band actually from 1800 to 5700 rpm Power is going to be sent to all four wheels through BMW's four-wheel drive system And that power is going to be sent to the ground through an eight-speed automatic with paddle shifters and launch control We will be testing out the paddle shifters in a little bit here But when you put all of that together zero to sixty time for the standard M5 comes in at three point two seconds This is a family sedan that could hit sixty and three point two that is just ridiculous And as you can imagine it gets better with the M5 competition That's going to add 17 horsepower giving you a zero to sixty time of three point one top speed 190 miles per hour if you wanted to test it out on the autobahn in case you were curious MPG numbers coming at approximately 15 in the city 21 on the highway with auto start stop Functionality so when you stop to the stop sign it's going to turn the engine off help save you a couple MPGs And you can turn that feature off if you wanted to as well But so now before we do the paddle shifter test I did want to mention there are an additional two Paddles if you will on the steering wheel in red if you were curious what those are those are actually the memory settings for your drive mode So there are a few different drive modes located just to the left of the shift or you can adjust things like the suspension the exhaust Setup and we'll get to that as well in a little bit But it does have two different drive mode setups where you can save maybe for you and your significant others You can really better personalize the car to your own liking, but so now having said that Let me put it in that paddle shift driving mode here We are going to do a quick little acceleration and we're gonna see how quickly they react for us here in the 2019 M5 This car is quick, but yeah, the paddle shifters are insanely quick definitely no issues there more than enough fun on the weekends and it might not Holy crap Yeah, this thing is sick But so of course to go along with that acceleration braking is equally important and so the 2019 M5 will come with four-wheel ventilated Anti-lock disc brakes with cornering brake control and up front you will find six piston front cowpers single piston rear cowpers And as far as the braking feel today, I have had absolutely no issues whatsoever Another thing I wanted to mention is when you do let off the gas the exhaust crackle is absolutely Amazing but when it comes to ride quality the 2019 M5 does come standard with an adaptive M Suspension with electronically controlled dampers really giving you the best of both worlds tightening up the suspension during heavy cornering And at the same time reading the roads imperfections to provide you with more of a smoother ride as well And it also will come with twin-tube gas pressurized shock absorbers and there is a comfort mode when it comes to the suspension as well So when in that show when it comes to ride quality, I guess you could say it's not gonna be as smooth as your regular five series Perhaps what the trade-off is you were going to get absolutely insane power with this one and really the ride quality isn't all that bad Anyways, then when it comes to the suspension first thing I wanted to mention when I first got it in this one I noticed this the bolsters on the steering wheel are absolutely gigantic I wish every single vehicle came with these kind of bolsters because they are a lot thicker than most cars out there And they definitely provide a better feel to your hands giving you a better feeling of more control I guess you could say to go along with those grips You will find an M-specific suspension with the multi-link aluminum rear suspension And if you really wanted to push the M5 if you go with that M5 competition package They're just gonna give you a lower ride height along with retuned dampers It's also gonna stiffen the springs in the anti-roll bar by 10% In addition to that the front suspensions upper links have been shortened for slightly more negative camber to help improve front cornering as well And in my short driving stint today as far as the steering feel goes is definitely on the heavier side as expected So of course definitely a very nice steering feel to the M5 As far as cabin noise goes there really is lack thereof cabin noise It is a very quiet cabin in this one as expected It says a hundred ten thousand dollar car after all and when it comes to visibility really with any sedan for the most part We're definitely not gonna have any issues and that is definitely the case with the M5 as well So no issues whatsoever for me one additional thing when it comes to that visibility There is also a head-up display and a very large head-up display I will say as well giving you not only your speed but the speed limit of any given road and your RPMs up there as well That is definitely very nice and the thing with this head-up display is you can adjust it vertically and from side to side as well So that is definitely something I thought worth mentioning but enough with the driving dynamics you guys Let me get in place here and let's check out the exterior of this new 2019 BMW M5 It's so then taking a look up front to the sides You will find icon adaptive full LED headlights that will come standard and they are gonna come with automatic high beams as well So you'll have to worry about that at night but within that front grille you will find a subtle M5 logo Stinguishing itself from the rest of the five series lineup Then make your way to the sides there is that M designation within that front fender When it comes to the wheel setup on the M5 you will find a staggered fitment 19 by 9.5 inches up front 19 by 10.5 inches in the back and if you go with the competition package The wheel size is actually going to stay the same between the two But it will be a completely different design when it comes to that wheel setup And that's really the easiest way to distinguish between the competition package versus the non-competition package that we have today But also I wanted to mention the power folding side mirrors definitely a very unique design Kind of looks like the top part of the side mirrors is going to connect with the vehicle But they actually don't and I like that but regardless they are power folding heated side mirrors And make your way to the back you will find an M specific rear spoiler Just below that LED tail lights and just below that you will also find a center rear diffuser Along with dual exhaust outlets with quad tips and since I have continuously mentioned the exhaust Throughout this video one of my favorite parts about the M5 you can indeed adjust that exhaust note By the way the standard setup on the M5 is with that more pronounced exhaust system enabled So that is pretty sweet so you actually have to push the button to turn it off Because of course if you're driving M5 it has to sound like a performance car and it does So now that I have described it in detail let me let you guys hear it for yourself And as always here is that exhaust clip But so now since we are around back let me touch on how to open the rear trunk Because the M5 does come standard with a power rear trunk And there is the availability of a hands-free rear trunk as well If you kick your foot underneath the rear bumper there But once opened up cargo capacity is going to come in 18.7 cubic feet If that was not enough space for you there is a 40-20-40 rear split So translation you can fold down those rear seats for a ton of added space If you needed it there Making your way up to the rear legroom there is 36.5 inches of rear legroom back there So for example I'm in even six feet tall this is how much space I have back there You're also going to find a rear armrest with cup holders rear ventilation But you will additionally find rear heated seats That is a feature that is almost always an option on higher end vehicles But it is going to come standard with the M5 But so now taking a look at the front seats here You will find 20-way power adjustable front seats If you cannot find your perfect driving position with 20-way power adjustable front seats You are probably not going to find your perfect driving position But anyways with 20-way power adjustable seats You can imagine there are shoulder and thigh support adjustments I've been playing around with them And of course you do have memory settings for a couple different drivers as well But looking forward there is a tilt and telescoping steering wheel It is leather wrapped and heated And with some of the most pronounced bolsters I have ever experienced in a vehicle Which I absolutely love And so but then when it comes to the startup Let me first start by showing you guys the key It does have a heavy metal feel to it Has the M designation colors on the side And on the front lock unlock And the lock button is the BMW logo But also the button to pop the rear hatch But I am simply just going to put my foot on the brake here And press that red engine start button located just above the driver's right knee When it comes to the gauge setup You will find a 12.3 inch digital gauge cluster And it is actually fully digital There is a speedometer on the left Tachometer is going to be on your right There is a small M5 designation within that tachometer Which looks really cool And of course you will find your trip information Different driving mode information And whether or not you are in two wheel drive or four wheel drive Four wheel drive is going to be standard But if you turn off traction control That is going to put you in rear wheel drive If you are an enthusiast that believe the M5 Should only be available in rear wheel drive You have got it And then taking a look at overall interior quality Of course this is finished in typical BMW fashion With the Sensa Tech dashboard Merino leather finishes throughout aluminum carbon interior trim You will find a universal garage door opener as expected Also one of my favorite parts about the climate control Is it is all touch screen in front of the shifter there So to turn the fan up It is simply a touch screen that you press To turn that fan up Or to turn on the heated or cooled seats Same deal it is all touch screen it is digital It is pretty cool And as expected you will find ambient lighting throughout this one as well But now let me take you guys to the tech on the M5 Up front you will find a 10.2 inch High resolution touch screen display That will come standard with a factory navigation system As well as Apple CarPlay Which didn't previously come on all BMWs That is pretty cool that that is there now And you can check out the basics like your vehicle information Or the weather forecast for wherever you are in the world And then of course you can check out your radio settings And again one of my favorite parts here Because standard sound system on the 2019 M5 Is going to be a 16 speaker Harman Kardon surround sound system with 600 watts Ambient lighting within the front speaker That I noticed there That is pretty intense as well And you can turn that off if you wanted to But 16 speakers and 600 watts I think you guys know what we have to do next Let's turn on the radio and test out the clarity of this one Definitely a ton of bass Crystal clear ton of loudness Didn't think I would have any issues But really absolutely amazing sound system as expected And lastly I wanted to mention on that 10.2 inch digital display There is when you do put the M5 in reverse You will find a rear view camera And it is a 360 degree view Which can be adjusted To view different sides of the vehicle Or different angles if you wish So that is definitely an impressive one I found about the M5 But that as always is going to lead me into safety And so you will find front side and side curtain airbags Also in the back there is latch AKA lower anchors and tethers for children for the rear car seats Also there will be an adaptive cruise control system Along with lane departure warning Daytime pedestrian detection Blind spot detection Frontal collision warning A city collision mitigation system And an auto dimming rear view mirror But in addition to that Also a driver side dimming exterior mirror as well Definitely don't see that on many vehicles out there And so but anyways that is about it for this one You guys thank you so much for watching Be sure to like the video and subscribe Feel free to follow me on social media at the bottom of the screen there And I will see you guys in the next video Stay Gold


Unit 3, supports and services. As a resettled refugee, you will have access to different types of supports that will help you adjust to life in Canada. Where these supports come from differs depending on your resettlement program. There are four different types of resettlement programs. Government assisted refugees program. Individuals who resettle under the government assisted refugees program receive financial support from the government and immediate settlement support from government funded organizations. Private sponsorship of refugees program. Individuals are sponsored and supported by private groups or organizations. Individuals who resettle under the private sponsorship of refugees program receive financial support and immediate settlement support from their private sponsors. Sponsors are legally responsible for providing sponsored refugees with a limited amount of financial support under the private sponsorship of refugees program. Sponsors are not allowed to ask refugees for money or tell them that they need to prepay to be sponsored. Even if they promise to give the money back once refugees are in Canada. Joint assisted sponsorship program. Individuals who resettle under the joint assisted sponsorship program receive financial support from the government. They receive immediate settlement support from government funded organizations. They have private sponsors who provide them with additional support in Canada. Blended visa office referred program. Individuals who resettle under the blended visa office referred program receive financial support from the government and from their private sponsors. They receive immediate settlement support from their private sponsors. Regardless of your resettlement program the financial support you will receive in Canada is limited. The amount will depend on many factors including your family size, the ages of family members, where you live, and your family's needs. Your government funded organization or your sponsors can help you to make and follow a budget. The immediate settlement support you will receive in Canada whether from your government funded organization or your sponsors is also limited. The length of time that these supports last depends on the resettlement program and may change depending on your circumstances. Look at the immediate settlement supports you will receive in Canada. Winter clothes if you arrive in the winter. Transportation from your final destination to the accommodation where you will stay. Area accommodation. Help in finding permanent housing and household items. And referrals to additional long term support to help you settle in Canada. It is important that you travel to your assigned destination. There you will receive the support based on your settlement needs. Otherwise there may be a break in financial and immediate settlement support. If you plan to move to another community, you must notify your government funded organization or your sponsors as soon as possible. If you are resettled under the government assisted refugees program, there could be a delay in receiving your financial support if you move. If you are resettled under the privately sponsored refugees program or the blended visa office referred program, you may no longer be eligible for financial or settlement support from your sponsors if you do not live in the same community as your sponsors. You are also responsible for all the costs and preparations related to moving to a different community including travel and accommodation. Regardless of your settlement program, you should access long term settlement services from government funded organizations. They can help you resolve settlement challenges, meet people, develop skills, look for a job and much more. Remember, government funded settlement organizations are responsible for supporting all newcomers and their services are free. It is useful to go over this information after you arrive. You are strongly encouraged to access the supports available to help you resettle and adjust to life in Canada.


Hi, my name is Jason Hamer. I'm a PhD student and postgraduate representative in the School of Plant Biology. During my undergraduate, I studied environmental biology with a strong focus in botany. From then, I moved straight into my honours where I studied flammability and straight from my honours into a PhD here at UWA. My PhD is assessing the vulnerability of eucalyptus species to a changing climate here in the south-west Australian biodiversity hotspot. This involves a wide range of research, including ecology, ecophysiology. I study plant-functional traits and I also do some statistical and mechanistic modelling. At the moment, I'm trying to define the bounds of species distributions and I'm getting some pretty interesting results looking at root architecture. I chose to do my PhD at UWA because it's a research intensive school and has a great research culture. It also suits my research because it's in the middle of a biodiversity hotspot, which is a really great place to be for botanists. The facilities here at UWA are great and being a research intensive school, if there's anything we don't have and we need, it's easy enough to get in. There are plenty of opportunities to get involved with a student life even during your research. Personally, I have my hands full at the moment as a postgraduate representative, as well as organising a volunteering hub to connect undergraduate students to PhD students in their projects. I don't really have a dream job per se. At the moment, I'm just trying to keep all my doors open to see what opportunities come along.


Women throughout the entire world are using their voices. Four days after I sent that initial Me Too tweet, I got a phone call from UNICEF saying that a little girl from Ethiopia had heard about the Me Too movement and her and nine of her friends reported a teacher that was sexually assaulting all of them. We need men to say, I'm not going to allow that kind of talk around me or I saw you do that to her and I'm not going to stand for that around me. This movement, whether you call it Me Too or just the search for or the quest for gender equality we're not going to ever achieve it if men are not involved in helping us along the way. Women just have to keep using their voices. They have to be aware, they have to know that they are important, that we see them, that we hear them, that we understand them, that we believe them and they have to be nurtured and they have to be encouraged to speak out without being penalized. And I think that to be able to cross boundaries, to recognize that we are all human, that we are all women, that we will all stand together to stand in solidarity and to use this collective pain that we all feel and really harness it and transform it into collective power I think will really change things. Stand up for human rights, stand up for women's rights.


I'm thankful Thank you to everyone I'd actually mean it. It's customary to say it before but I can just imagine it, if we were in this period of the ramp up of conflict with the problem we walked into a discussion of reconciliation in the room where empty. It is gratifying that we've come here to try and work out."Is it possible that something gallwch chi'n gobeithio'n oedd ychydig arall yn y cyfrych sy'n cymryd. Roeddwn i'n gwybod, byddwn i'r cyfrannu rai'r cyfrannu rai'r cyfrannu rai'r cyfrannu. Wrth gwrs, mae'n gwybod, mae'n gwybod yw'r cyfrannu cyfrannu. Ond rydw i'n gwybod, mae'n gwybod i'r cyfrannu cyfrannu, sydd yn rhoi'r cyfrannu i'r cyfrannu sy'n ei ddiddordeb yr ysgrifennu ac mae'r gwybod i'r cyfrannu. Ac rydyn ni'n goffio ar eich falch gilydd. Ond, rydyn ni'n gwybod i'ch casg hynny a Yn Llywodraeth Tyllen, I ddweud ddim, fel i'n gwybod i'r Fyemddio, felly fyddol dw i'r colledau, i'n gwybod i'r fywch, i'r llyfodraeth at ddech yn rhan, oedd arwtiau i gyd. And one of them that certainly, you know, I remember when I think about just the importance of actually finding the negotiated solution. The reconciliation was jumping back to the first few days of September 2001, you know, pre-11th, .. producing of the lowest ebs of the conflict in Afghanistan... .. that phase of the conflict. There have been, of course, many phases. And I remember walking through the hills of central Afghanistan... .. minutes after a few thousand feet... ..where even in the first week of September you get a frost.  I was looking at the position of people who had been displaced by the latest round of conflict, which in that part in Central Afghanistan meant basically Taliban pursuing a scorched earth policy as they settled down for the winter by trying to put a nice space between them and the enemy in the field. So they were using matches and bulldozers. And I was dealing with the people who had been displaced by that who were sitting up what should be summer pastures, but they had nowhere to go back for the winter. And the task was to work out what on earth can they do and can we do with them to get through another difficult winter. And I came across a settlement where there was a whole community had gathered. They had a few tents. A lot of people were out in improvised shelters with no, not even canvas over the roof, but they'd all gathered in and around one tent. This kind of community has got no particular concept of purda. Men and women, children running around on the outside. And the mula was sitting, was reciting, and everybody was intensely following it. Somehow they'd detached themselves from the absolute immediate crisis like how do we get through the night. And someone, as I got there, they invited me into the tent and I sat down with them. And the mula came to pause and someone asked him, Mullisab, what does the Quran say about refugees? And he came out, I can't remember the exact quote, but what he came out with sounded straight out of the Gospel of Matthew saying, blessed are the refugees for they will inherit the earth. And I mean it was very moving to see these people in the most dire of predicaments that you could imagine. And I went, of course, family grouping by family grouping documenting those dire predicaments. They found some solace, they kept hopeful of what was alive. And they did not know that in the tragedy that would be visited upon people in this country only a few days later, somehow a new kind of hope for a joint resolution and joint moving forward might be created. Because when we think about the legitimacy of the intervention and the military forces that the West sent there, although of course it was the Al Qaeda sanctuary and the involvement of the Taliban in providing that sanctuary, which led the UN to justify a Chapter 7 intervention, of course these people were victims of the same Al Qaeda sanctuary because there were Al Qaeda forces were strengthening the Taliban, enabling them to burn these people's villages. And in them the response to the attacks of 9-11 also gave them a hope for the future. And of course now so many years later it's still in the balance as to whether it will be sustainable.  Can we make it last? So in the sense that the non-intellectual reason why we're here and trying to work out what is the reconciliation strategy, which will make such gains as there have been since 2001 in Afghanistan, make them stick. Although that was moving, I mean we all go through rather more cynical experiences in life and I remember one of the cynical experiences I have was listening to my wife as she came back from a brief venture as a Syrvanese internationally paid consultants. She went off on some if-ad mission wandering around the Tarparker desert in Sind where they were to come up with ideas and what you can do for sustainable development and livelihoods in a semi-arid environment. And she was horrified halfway through the mission when one of the real professionals can find, look, it probably won't work, but we have to give something to Rome and we have to design this project, just keep quiet. And she was horrified, my wife is a very principled woman, she did not like to be told that perhaps what she was doing was meaningless. I mean Alex said that they, I'm sorry, Dr Solomon said that the military commanders, they've got a strategy, they've got a vision, they are committed to creating some space for the political solution, which we know is the only way forward really. But this morning before I came over here, and if I had you on tenterhooks as why is Michael Mott arriving at half an hour before the event, of course I was taking calls from friends back in Afghanistan and basically Afghan friends have been through all the multiple phases of conflict, we're just ringing up to describe the later stage of the military operations. And of course those who have been following, we've been through the rationale, we know how it relates to surge, relates to creating space, relates to shaping the environment, relates to keeping people on the move before the elections and so on. However, what the Afghans are not perhaps in tune with the rationale, with the big write-ups that the commanders have said to explain the rationale of their interventions, they're saying look, on the ground the Afghans don't believe that the operations can deliver what they're supposed to, because none of the Afghans in the areas where the forces have now moved into believe in the capacity and intent of the Afghan government and U.S. are forces to stay there, that they don't believe that they're going to be there long enough to guarantee that Taliban don't come back and cut off the heads of people who have been involved in collaborating with us, they don't believe that the promises of the community development infrastructure work and so on, which have been hinted at in the early Shuras, which have been conducted in the immediate wake of the operations, that they're going to be delivered on, and they're not confident that they're ever going to see an end to the abuse of side of military operations. However much we put spin on them, nobody likes a military operation conducted in their area. If you have a conducted military operation somewhere in the U.S., nobody actually likes it there. Sometimes they want the benefits of it, the security, but they don't actually like to be at the rough end. The hope is that it doesn't turn out to be something like what the IFED pros were about. We had to do something so this is it. Finally before I get completely intellectual, go slightly intellectual, just a reflection.  Men aren't very good at saying sorry, but if trying a little bit to promote reconciliation peace, if it be a sin, mea culpa, I'm a sinner and I'm a repeat sinner. One of my latest conversations with a commander who's very much involved on the other side in the insurgency, and is still risking his life and persuading young men to risk their lives to fight against NATO forces. When you sit down and actually open up, however much you get inside his soul, that particular group of fighters, they have a conception of what they're fighting as national resistance. They have a conception that they are fighting to remove foreign forces. They have got very little conception of end state in terms of institutions or how Afghanistan will run as being terribly different from what they expect to be done. They haven't thought that through. They didn't have any particular political ambition to say, aha, this is a power grab. They have some idea of wanting to go home and live normally after it's over. Of course, any of us have done the kind of negotiating that Alex mentioned, I've done over the years. We used to tactical play, used to trying to guess what they're at, and we know it's Afghanistan.  That wasn't tactical. Of course, now I've been able to say, but you sort of hint back to the story of the families in the tents and what was the rationale of the Chapter 7 intervention and saying, look, nobody wants to occupy your land. President Obama has made it clear, if you need it more clear again in the Cairo speech, do you realise that you are persuading young men to go out and give their lives fighting for something that basically everybody on the other side is already committed to and vice versa? Before we get on to the minor intellectual part of it, I find it deeply emotionally troubling that we haven't got an effective political and reconciliation process when if you go by the non-tricky accounts of what people are fighting for, there's major convergence in the aspiration of the different sides. Everybody claims to be wanting peace and stability in Afghanistan with the security of Afghanistan maintained by Afghan forces who are subject to the rule of law. Everybody on every side says they want it, so where's the political process to deliver it? There are a few points in the book. It's about a dozen points. Let me just quickly run through it and read the book if you've got time to get more of the detail. Just after my experience of the Mullah explaining that the refugees will inherit the earth, we had the bond process which was supposed to have reconciliation built into it. The architecture actually looks quite good. It's certainly not about occupation. It's about an agreement amongst Afranes after a protracted period of civil war, not just the fight of us versus the Taliban in which you have agreed institutions, you have a process to strengthen those institutions and over time, and you have a principle of inclusivity where those who may be excluded at the start actually are able to come inside and there are specific references to reconciliation and acknowledgement that reconciliation is necessary. It all looks good. We shouldn't be sitting here today because bond might have been able to fix it. Of course the reality was that we know that the bond agreement was done in haste and it had to be done in haste partly because we weren't ready. We hadn't moved, guess what? We'd been tardy on the political side of things post September 11th and lots of resources thrown into the military side and actually the military did their job much faster than any of the civilians ever thought they'd be able to. So you had this whole thing of facts were rapidly being created on the ground because one faction had been more assisted by the United States. Anybody who watches their school by football, there's always a certain kind of people who don't do an awful lot of running around. They managed to hang around quite close to the goal and somebody else puts the ball fairly towards that and they can avoid an offside rule. Anyway, a faction had got themselves into Kabul on that basis. They were creating facts on the ground by putting in an institution, a temporary administration which looked awfully as if they would like to sit there and essentially reignite another round of civil war because it was not a broad nationally represented administration. Bond had to create a legal basis for an international presence in Afghanistan and the basis of a process which could redress the political imbalance that this temporary administration could have been created. It had to be done fast. So it meant that although there was a principle of inclusion over time, inclusion was not delivered in the interim administration that was signed off in Bond where basically everybody who got to the talks got to say ministry for you, ministry for you, ministry for you and make sure that the key security ministries go to the faction which had grabbed Kabul because otherwise how could you persuade them to sign off on the deal? It's sort of a gambit but there's an inherent logic to that gambit but it had to be backed up by subsequent political work making sure that the others really did come on board. And if you look at the political process that the Bond agreement was followed by this provision for Lloyd Jurga six months later, the constitution making subsequently through to the elections, there were opportunities for those people without whose participation you could not say there was a balance in sustainable administration. There were opportunities to bring them on board. We didn't manage. It's not that somehow there was this great exclusion that somehow anti-terrorist clauses or something prevented us from bringing the missing parts of the Pashtun political universe into the process. There was provision, we didn't manage to do it. We got few ideas on why that didn't happen in the book but other people will no doubt have to investigate it further. I propose in the book just one little indicator as to how little progress we made on it which was 12 out of 142. It's nice to know that these days you have to have metrics particularly if you're here. Thank goodness I got away without a PowerPoint today. This is a metric that one can use which I think there are 142 names on the UN 1267 sanctions list which are basically designating the big people of the Taliban. The nearest thing you can get to an objective statement of who are recognised as the ruling elite from the regime which had just been toppled. 12 of those have been brought in to the process subsequently. 12 out of 142. If you're talking about a stabilisation process which manages to keep the displaced side on board if not in power, 12 out of 142 is treading on pretty thin ice. There's been little inclusion of the previous regime which was part of the Pashtoom political universe. Anyway, we didn't manage to get them on board. If you look at what happened apart from the fact that in the Lloyd's Yergo we only had two or three of the Pashtooms coming on subsequently of the Taliban Pashtooms coming on subsequently in the election process, some participation, not much. Other things were going on in a sense underneath the radar separate from the major political processes which were of course the process of alienation and insider-outsider dealing. This is something which of course there's no commitment to it written down in Bonn but the reality was what happened was that as we put in all the money, put in the forces put in the support to an Afghan administration which was of course again the Bonn logic we were doing that on top of a legacy of multiple complex conflicts which were all overlapping and of course not all of which we understood some of which many of us have struggled hard to understand and of course conflict actors positioned themselves relative to the new political setup and many of the people who had been part of this of the ruling elite at the time that the Taliban came to power who were the Taliban had taken on and displaced that the new administration brought them back into positions of power they used those positions of power to prosecute their old conflicts but this time they were able to use a terminology which we provided to them particularly they used the great terrorist terminology one of the wonderful linguistic coincidences rather than something that you could explain using Chomsky is that to roar the Persian words to kill, murder is rather close to terror and so when the word terrorist has got a certain resonance people in a sense Afghans already understand it reflecting to roar, to roar, to roar so basically that the parts of the new establishment had an opportunity to label their rivals as terrorists and cut a long story short in the period of late 2001 2002 many of those who had survived from the old regime the Taliban regime who had expected to be able to stay on in Afghanistan and join the new setup basically they expect to be able to go home Taliban regime it's over there's a new Afghanistan we'll be part of it as well we've always done that we always know how to switch sides we're highly pragmatic they go home instead they end up being labeled as terrorists some of us are looking for terrorists thank goodness we found some because this helpful man here has brought some terrorists to us we raid their houses anyway we drive many of them to Pakistan we sow the seeds of a future insurgency because when you document how the insurgency originated many of the specific fronts places where specific groups of fighters came together they were initiated around a little pearl that had been formed of alienated former fighters who had tried to accommodate themselves to the new setup but were rejected and were driven out and it's something to remember that sometimes when people talk somewhat laxly about how we got here in the conflict in Afghanistan we sort of think of the fight today as a direct continuity of the fight of October and November 2001 that's not the case although maybe there's been no month when there's been complete peace inside Afghanistan you have to go back and periodise the conflict so there's a tough fight during October and November you can date it up to December you can perhaps take it through to February 2002 with the battle in Shahiqot under Operation Anaconda but then for the rest of 2002 essentially the confrontation with Al Qaeda Taliban is to all intents and purposes is over it's finished of course there's a bit of mopping up going on but there's no major organised resistance coming from their side and actually the conflict during 2002 was a different conflict entirely there are 12 major armed clashes which I've documented during that period all of them were, I forget how the colours are green, blue and blue, what do you call them? it's our friends versus our friends in just about all of those dozen conflicts in 2002 Marshall Faheim then the defence minister and soon to become vice president perhaps he was arming both sides it was not surprising that we should be through that there were policy measured responses to that I certainly was as a UN officer I would have been woken up early in the morning there's a commise after going to jump on a plane with Acef de Lawer and various people to go and do little bits of firefighting and then there was strategic work which was done as a shift over to SSR, DDR that the finance minister, Ashrafani he was extremely decisive in his intervention in trying to cut off the financing of the people who were running these militias and actually I think there was a, if I'm not wrong Wazir Saab, there was this showdown between Marshall Faheim and Ashrafani where basically came to it, it's either him or it's me because Marshall Saab was committed to he was doing political patronage building up a constituency trying to make sure that he was a force in the new Afghanistan at the cost of sustaining conflict and finance minister Ashrafani was committed to reining in the financing of that and using a strategic approach to removing the basis for continuing conflict and so in a sense, we have, actually there are good bits of the story that sometimes people forget we went through a different conflict during 2002 and actually it was solved and that's gone over anyway but subsequently in 2003 you get a new conflict going again which is the reemergence of the new Taliban movement, a confrontation against the the new Afghan government, the western support of that and in their recruiting strategy they of course they fed upon the mistake, our mistakes that they, our failure to see through the anticipated inclusiveness in the post bond set up and our failure to rein in the alienating practices of people in the middle level of the new establishment anyway although those are the frustrating parts when you start to look at the emergence of the new conflict there are bits of hope when you look at what happened post 2001 10 minutes, I can manage about 10 minutes some things went right which give you ideas of where to go to now that I gave you the figure of 12 people from the old elite who were brought on board when you start to look at significant figures who have been involved with the Taliban and the insurgency who have rejected continuing violence and have been incorporated into the new set up one of the little findings I got as I was doing this is that the big people haven't really come in through organized institutionalized programs the kind of thing for which you write a project concept note and budget it and structure it they've come in through much more informal and Afghan processes with political patronage being the most obvious one that they've come in that the big people have come on board when there's been an influential insider well placed in the regime there's a capacity to get things done inside the new set up when there's a problem they can pick up the phone and they can talk to somebody in the interior ministry and say this has happened to somebody, somebody's brother has been picked up they really ought to be inside and so on and where these insiders have had some kind of network link a bond of comradeship tribal link with the excluded members from the Taliban those are the links that they otherwise confidence have invoked to be because they're guaranteed a hearing that they know that that person can't ditch them can't throw them out so drawing on the social fabric of Afghan society gives you the most chance of making concrete progress and reconciliation they but when you do start to look at laying the groundwork for what's to be done now we had that joke earlier on in the year but we need to open an institute of Taliban studies anything which is going to use a political approach to address the current conflict has got to be based on an understanding of the actors and what's happening in the conflict so there's a lot and it's remarkable how thin the knowledge is one of the insights which I've suggested which should be driving approach to reconciliation is drop any idea of somehow this grand Leninist organisation that is the Taliban it's a coincidence of history that most of the insurgents are labelled as Taliban at the moment the anthropologists might say they're not real Taliban but that label was applied because who happened to control Kabul and Kandahar just before this thing got going there's a segmented insurgency on multiple networks which have got their own bonds of comradeship reasons that people have clustered around a charismatic or powerful commander and they've all linked up like this and then somebody applied the label Taliban to them so this is the kind of insight that you're going to have to do you're going to come up ultimately with a political approach to addressing this you've got to build this kind of insight into your strategy what you're going to do some of the interesting stuff I did in this was just looking at typologies of approaches which have been tried because quite obviously a lot of things have been tried since 2001 one of the things I've looked at is the terms of the bargain which is being offered and I think that I saw in the party's notes as well so she's just going to elaborate on it that they assumption when people inside the current regime and from our side when they started trying to come up with formal approaches to reconciliation so the idea was that look history is with us basically we've stabilised Afghanistan they're just a bit more mopping up that has to be done what we're doing is the idea of reconciliation is just to complete that mopping up so we offered something which is called basic co-option they've done wrong but fortunately they've come in and said I'm sorry we've laid down our arms, swear allegiance to the new setup and they will be allowed to go home and they won't get locked up so that's the formal programme that has been based upon that what I've been suggesting is simply it's no major reconciliation reconciliation has been affected by this and the current ground reality in terms of the relationship between the Karzai Government our allies and the non-state actors which are challenging them have changed in such a way that there's very limited mileage to be had from this kind of co-option one of the things has got to be you've got to move towards an accommodation now accommodation doesn't just mean getting weak in the context of where I say with the roots of the insurgency that many of the people who have been driven driven into the insurgency actually have a set of grievances which in a sense it's not that it's out of weakness we'd want to address those out of pursuit of social justice it's part of our core mission to adjust those so there's a very legitimate case to be made for inducing an accommodation process where the terms of a bargain are not just come in lay down your arms, say sorry but actually work out what went wrong to drive those people into the conflict in the first place and if it really is, for example, a wayward district governor who is deliberately trying to drive the other tribe out you know, address that with minds to your ten minutes I've got five, I'm going to be there I mean a quick little note, Pakistan can help that's what I said in my speaking point that so far one of the main things that all the things that international community or the US have been asking Pakistan to do in this post have basically been asked, I mean obviously been asking for concrete security cooperation, facilitate access for various kinds of military forces, arrest people don't make too much trouble when we kill people broadly that's the cooperation which has been looked at for Pakistan as it happens that there's been an interesting there has, even before there was much talk of reconciliation on the international side some of the Pakistani actors had been saying what more can be done to push ahead with the inclusiveness you said you were going to do, get those people who are currently involved in the insurgency actually politically incorporated in the new setup inside Afghanistan concretely there is cooperation which Pakistan can be requested to supply on that which may be more palatable than the thing which they've always been very effective at dodging which is in the sense that the major arrests because we know the history that they there have been a lot of arrests of al-Qaida inside Pakistan that the track record on moves against the Taliban have been much more limited it's not the time to go into all the details the mechanics of what can be done on reconciliation from our side but at least one can say that there must be continuing robust international support which means in terms of whatever is going to be done on reconciliation international actors are going to have to fund it we need to put resources behind it when you think of the vast resources which are committed to the military side an appropriate allocation towards reconciliation as long as we're doing the right thing makes sense but also there I argue and it's a hint of controversy in it that there is a scope for the international side to be involved in dialogue actually doing some of the reconciliation dialogue because hitherto the doctrine in reconciliation has been that the Afghan government must directly lead all reconciliation efforts and all the international community do was help when asked that one of the things that I propose is that the reality is as the conflict's transformed through 2001, 2002, 2003 we became confirmed in our status as a belligerant we're not just the neutral observers but even small reconciliation only makes sense if it is seen as one component in the overall strategy and unless you've got the investment in institutions unless you've got other work towards delivering justice the small reconciliation achieves nothing and I mean as somebody who has worked on justice in small ways over the years I find it deeply upsetting that the notion that one of the issues around which the insurgents are able to mobilize is actually absence of justice and when you think of how vilified the Taliban are here in this part of the world this notion that they are actually able in some places to be able to recruit people or try and justify themselves that they are the ones who deliver justice whereas our allies don't it's deeply upsetting when you think of the moral certainty with which we approached this back in 2001 that's a dilemma that we shouldn't have today but we do so just at the end I'd say that where this book takes us to is at this point that at least small reconciliation can be done which is that at least through approaches going about it systematically, strategically, sensibly with the grain of Afghan society many of the component networks who are currently mobilized inside the insurgency can actually be broadly brought inside the current setup that that will not end conflict in Afghanistan but it may have a strategically significant impact on the conflict basically reduce the number of people who are prepared to be on the battlefield that although this is not intended as a counterinsurgency argument obviously the counterinsurgency is great that makes it easy for us to go after the rest of them that's probably the current realistic pragmatic position but I think that there is an onus on all of those all of us who are inspired with this desire that surely piece is attainable if there is significant overlap between the aspirations of those on all sides we shouldn't take this as good enough we also have to look forward we have to see is it possible to do more than what I've said is doable in this book and what can be done to create the conditions in which something a bit more like a grand bargain can be achieved in which actually you do get to a political engagement which aspires to put an end to the major the national conflict of Afghanistan of course there will be multiple local conflicts that will be dealt with over time what has to be done to lay the ground that that can happen because I mean you know even if it's just another place in a forgotten part of the world God forsaken 30 years of conflict on top of multiple conflict even then it's not good enough to say oh well that's what they were born to but particularly given the way in which this country, my country, all of our countries have intervened there over so many years we are also morally bound to strive that bit further to come up with a reconciliation strategy which goes beyond the little things in this which delivers something bigger which delivers a political settlement in which we can get back to what it seemed for a while after the last months of 2001 that we would be doing which would be part of this rebirth of Afghan society a peaceful country building its institutions and escaping from 30 years of conflict


All right. Thank you for coming to hear our panel on open systems firmware. We're not kidding that we are passionate trailblazers in this area. Our passion comes because we are all concerned about the security of systems all the way from the bottom level device, the first time that the electrons hit a device in a system all the way up through the firmware, the hypervisors, the devices, the operating system. So in order to do that, we are here from... We represent competitive companies who are working together and we realize that the security of the systems only as strong as its weakest link and there are no systems today, none, in which the components are all built and controlled by one company. So for that reason we all work together and we are presenting today at least three different efforts that are trying to open up and make secure and more resilient the world of firmware. Our experience covers the whole stack. Collectively we've covered everything from smart cards to servers, the whole bit. So our full biographies are in the conference program if you want to learn more about us. But the format of our session today is to... I'll introduce the panel members. Then each speaker will describe briefly an effort that he's working in. We'll have plenty of time I think for questions and discussion which is why we have this as a panel.  So I personally work at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in the Secure Cloud and Systems Group. Most recently I worked on our Power and System Z servers for a secure boot. The reason I organized this panel was that I'm hoping that out there in the audience or some of your friends and colleagues, we might hit other passionate individuals who are also worried about these things and you might want to join in our activities. So the speakers, I guess you'll have to raise your hands. The first speaker is going to be Ron Minnick. He's a software engineer from Platform Security in Google. Ron's the inventor of Linux BIOS. It's also known as Corboot. He's a member of the Technical Steering Committee for Linux Boot as well as co-leader of the Open Systems Firmware Project at the Open Compute Project. The next speaker will be Nate Klein. He's from Google. He's co-chair of the Open Compute Security Project. He's a hardware engineer on the platform's infrastructure team that designs and deploys all of the hardware that powers Google's internal and cloud servers. So Nate's going to tell us about OCP, the security project. And third is Brian Kelly from Microsoft. He's also the co-chair of the Open Compute Project on security. He is the principal firmware engineering manager from Microsoft's Azure cloud server infrastructure team. His team designs and develops firmware that enables hardware solutions in Microsoft's next generation cloud platforms. And Brian will be talking about EDK too. So all three of these are open system firmware projects and we'll go on now to Ron. Oh, you're right. I don't need this mic. No, I'm good. I'm always a little shocked when we do something like this and it works. So this is a project we started at Google in January 2017. It's a Linux boot. Linux is firmware. And we decided in March of 2017 that we really needed to open this up to external participants in part to convince the chip set and board vendors that it wasn't just Google because the first thing you ever get from a lot of these companies when you come in with new firmware ideas, you're the only people asking for this. So by May we brought in Horizon Computing with John Reefer done. They buy today Facebook servers and resell them with Linux boot in them already. Then we have also gotten Trammel Hudson. You may know him from Thunderstrike. He's doing some really awesome work in a system called Heads. Let's see. Are you here, Todd? Okay, so go see Todd Weaver and see the neat stuff that he's doing with Heads if you get a chance. And then of course we have Facebook and Nine Elements and other people at Google. And here in a nutshell is the problem. I kind of been saying this for 20 years. I'm surprised I'm still putting this slide up. But basically if you don't own the firmware, the firmware owns you. That's just the way it works today. Now back in the day when I began this kind of thing we wanted to own first instruction after power on reset. We kind of accepted that that's not going to happen in the x86 world ever again. We used to do it, we don't do it anymore. Actually accepting that, accepting that the box in the lower left is going to be kind of owned by vendors from here on out is okay. That's what turns on DRAM, nasty things like that. It's 10% of the image in firmware. And what we're saying is, well yeah, but we want to own that stuff off to the right. And by the way, this is my nice shirt with a nice Bios Hazard sticker. If you see one of them parked Chris Cock over there, he can give you the stickers if you want to put on your laptop. We all have it now. But basically if you look at that set of drivers there, there are several hundred drivers of various own known origin in a typical server or in a typical laptop today. And that number sounded ridiculous to me until Tram will demonstrate it. And what happens is you start, you go into this intrinsic box which is just a quick call out to this thing called a dispatcher. And the dispatcher runs in that function in every one of the drivers in there. And then it'll often run the drivers more than once because if any one driver depends on some other driver, it just runs the driver over and over again. No matter how many times that driver's been run, some other thing is discovered that depends on the driver. The drivers all get run again. Then we go into a thing called the boot manager which runs a bunch more stuff. And then eventually on a lot of your systems probably is going to run grub. But the boot manager also might do a fun little thing for you which is install a thing called the OS present app. The OS present app is an app that runs along with your OS and shares the machine with you. And a lot of people don't even know that. So all the great work that's been done on Linux and SD Linux and all these things over the years doesn't actually really matter because there's this thing called the OS present app running. So this is a slightly scary situation. I used to give this talk to various people from the Department of Homeland Security and things like that. And the first time I mentioned this in around 2000, the response was, yeah, but we're not going to talk about that anymore from the U.S. government. And then about 2007 it got to God, that's refreshing. Let's not talk about that. And nowadays I can kind of go in and say, yeah, but I can offer you a little bit of hope. And a little bit of hope is this picture. And this is what we are doing today. And that includes all the participants I mentioned on platforms we can talk about and platforms we're not ready to talk about yet. But the OS present app is gone. Many of the drivers are gone. And travel literally is reduced on one platform. 400 drivers down to 80. 80 is 80 too many, but it's a start. And we put Linux in Flash. We don't have grub anymore because Linux in Flash runs. And Linux in Flash does a K exec for whatever thing we're loading. Now that Linux in Flash includes an init ram FS. And I'll talk about that more in a second. But look at all the stuff that's going. You know, it's not all the stuff we want going. This is what we really want. There's a proprietary blob. And I'll mention again, you're not going to get anything but that on an x86. You're not going to get that anything but that on an arm. There's always going to be this thing that's native machine code that runs that you can't get rid of. I find that regrettable as actually someone has been writing these BIOS things for 40 years, but that's just the way life is. We will have Linux in Flash. And then the init ram FS is a different project called Uroot. And Uroot is everything written in Go. So if you think of just take the GNU bin and don't use the GNU bin but have a thing that is not equivalent and all the code is in Go. And our security people love that at Google. You know, if you give them Go code, they're willing to audit it. And if you give them C code, they generally are not. So 90% of what's in Flash is now Linux and an init ram FS. And then we start a system we boot and there's nothing left. There's no OS present app, right? Everything is gone when you're running. You own the platform. And that's not the situation as it is today. On most systems you run. Why do you need it? We want control at the BIOS level. We want things like security and performance and security and control and security and ease of use and security and security. I start to sound like the spam script from MoneyPython, but we're trying to get security. If you really just start googling UEFI security issues and CVEs, it's a never-ending list. I've learned because of Trammel Hudson again about some really terrific ones that are going to come out this fall that will kind of make your teeth hurt once you read them. And this is the scary one. Because UEFI is supposed to update itself, right, you need a new UEFI. All of you own Macs. Sometimes you do an update and it says make sure it's powered in. Don't touch it. It's going to go away for a while. It'll be okay. That's the part where UEFI is updating itself frequently. Well, what that kind of implies is that it would be possible to have an exploit that would embed itself in UEFI and break the UEFI updates itself part and make it look like UEFI updated itself successfully. Now you're done. And your only option at that point is the firmware. You can remove that exploit with a chipper. You don't have a useful machine left at the end, but at least the exploit's gone. So we've got these hundreds of binary blobs. Now what's the last thing that gets done on a new machine? The firmware. The machine's late. The firmware is done in a rush. Is the firmware really all that good? Generally not. And you've got hundreds of other things. But we're actually making it a lot easier. We have a Dell R630. You can get clone a tree if you're interested in coming talk to me about it. I don't have time for the how-to. And in three minutes you've got a BIOS image. Now that generally takes about an hour to do a build with UEFI today for that thing. So three minutes is not half bad. There are 15 machines now that are public and on the website. We can point you to. And there are more machines all the time. And then the machines we can't talk about. You can today buy off-the-shelf OCP systems. They're recycled systems from Facebook. They're refurb and being resold. They're actually a pretty good deal from IT Renew. And they come with Linux boot pre-installed. So what we really do, we take the ROM, we scrape away 90% of it and replace it with Linux. That's the short form. If I'm running, am I okay? I'm good on time. Okay, Lane asked me about legal framework. Obviously, you know, Linux is GPL. Uroot, for a lot of reasons, just kind of a go community convention like BSD, Coreboot, because I first started demonstrating on this in Coreboot in 2014, is GPL and some BSD, things like microcode, Power Firmware, because we've made this work on Power. We replaced Pettit Boot with Uroot stuff. So there that's Apache 2, I think is still Apache 2. And Uroot is GPL 2. We've also done this kind of approach on arms and things like that. But the general rule is it's basically probably going to be GPL if you ask that question. We really need help. We can always use help. We need help at the kernel level. We need help at the writing go code level. You can go to linuxboot.org. You can look at uroot.tk. We have a Slack channel, slack.uroot.com. OpenCube platform that, you know, that initiative is there. We're always very happy to have people come in, especially people who make systems and people who make chips. You know, we have a lot of users. We have Facebook and we have nine elements of openCube platform call. What we don't have enough of, in my view today, is the guys who, you know, companies that write design boards and design chipsets. We're working to bring them in, too. And if you want a fun sticker, come and get one after the talk or there's bioshazard.info. And, you know, I think computer people look at that and generally tend to read bioshazard. We didn't leave enough of a space. So a lot of people look at it, say, what's a bioshazard? Sorry about that. We're going to have version two of that sticker soon. Thanks. My name's Nate. I'm here to talk about the OCP Security Project that Brian and I are co-leads for. And firmware security, it turns out, is a thing. As Ron said, it's not great right now, but this will hopefully help. So currently, the state of things is a really sad balloon. The secure boot is, in general, is very fragmented at best. Every chip vendor has their own different solution. So if you want something that, you know, secure boots universally, you don't have it. And there are also these proprietary black boxes that Ron mentioned that you probably want to make sure that magical black box is the correct magical black box and isn't just some random thing that you're blindly trusting. And unfortunately, as was mentioned in the IoT presentation, the lowest common denominator is no security at all. And I usually like to say the S in IoT stands for security. So the goals of our project are to improve security across the entire computing industry through open standards. We want to make security based requirement for anything, not a differentiator. And that also reduces a lot of redundant effort. And, you know, building your own security snowflake is generally not going to go well. Security is significantly better and more secure when it's open. There are lots of eyes looking at it. And so what we want to produce are some specifications for both hardware and software security implementations. We want to work across all different kinds of IT equipment. OCP likes to use IT equipment for basically anything that runs code. And we want to use, like, existing and emerging standards as much as we can and not have to, you know, reinvent the wheel when we don't have to. So the focal points are basically taking every single piece of firmware or storage that's on any kind of board and securing it. So we want to be able to provision firmware as well. So that includes, you know, secure updates and rollbacks, recover from a bad state successfully so that you're never turned into a brick by going into a bad state. And then the ever so terrifying attestation. So making sure that, you know, you're running on the correct thing. So we also like to standardize interfaces. We want to standardize both hardware, like hardware electrical interfaces and software APIs. And then very importantly we want to support change of ownership. So used gear should also be secure. Something like, you know, a key burned into one-time fuses is great for the first person who owns something. It's kind of useless for the next person unless you want to hand off your private keys to someone else, which probably don't. So the scope of the project, sort of physical security counter measures, or sorry, what's out of scope is physical security counter measures. So, like, disabling JTAG interfaces or things like that would be in scope. Someone hitting your server with a screwdriver is not really going to be our problem. And we're also not going to play with thermite, unfortunately. Tried to sneak that one in. They wouldn't let me. We're also not looking at, like, coding practices or compiler time checks or things like that. Also not really focusing on penetration testing of hardware software. And we do not want to invent new encryption algorithms. We'd like to rely on, you know, existing or currently, like, in the works very well proven technology for that. So we are making progress. In here, there are links to a couple of docs that we've been working on as a group. We sort of started out as our group by looking at all the common security threats that we want to be able to tackle and trying to categorize them and figure out, like, how we're going to tackle them. And then we've started drafts of sort of two of our subsections out of about six, I think. So we have a secure boot section and an attestation section that are both definitely still works in progress. And you should join us. We are an incubation stage OCP project. And we'll hopefully be transitioning into a full OCP project. There's a mailing list. There are weekly meetings that are the most exciting thing ever. Yeah, they are very early in the morning if you're on the west coast, unfortunately. And yeah, that's all I have. Thank you, Nate. Hi, so my name is not Gondrala Devinder Gaut. And I didn't plagiarize these slides. These are his slides. He couldn't make it today, so I'm standing in for him. I wasn't supposed to talk on this topic. But Devinder, as he goes by, is a co-lead with Ron in the open source firmware group in open compute. Open compute, if you haven't heard about it, tries to do what's been done in software in that it tries to take hardware and make a hardware platform open just like any open source software project. Obviously there's differences with the types of collateral that are made open. But a part that has a lot of commonality would be the firmware, because it's all software underneath the hood. This slide talks a little bit about the mission for the group. And their goal is to make the firmware as open as possible and provide more choice, just like all open source software. It's about providing transparency and through transparency you're going to get security. It's also about providing choice. So Ron had already covered a lot of this in his talk about the companies that are contributing to the open source firmware development. There's Intel, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Lenovo, Horizon, and others. The work streams inside this committee or project are open, EDK2, Linux Boot, Core Boot. Then there's the silicon providers also providing their pieces of the platform initialization. And that's the 10% Ron talked about as always been there just to do that platform initialization. So this part talks a little bit about one of the efforts inside that project that Divinder drives. And that is the open EDK Dixie Core work stream. The goals of the work stream of course are taking the EDK2 code base and making that open source. Supporting firmware security features like secure boot, measured boot and multiple OS boot. Supporting new hardware security modules like Serbress and others. Supporting out of band configuration making sure that the deployment of that firmware is easy to set up and also optimizing it for performance reliability, serviceability and deploying at scale. Of course there's an initial project that's been open sourced and the link is provided below. That takes us to the end. Oh, the end of the presentation. Yeah. So now we'll do Q&A. Who wants to be the first one to come to Q? It's very carefully designed to be impossible to find. Security by obscurity. There. Okay. Well, you've been working on this for a while. Why hasn't it done yet? We need more contributors like you to help us take it there. Great question. Hi, guys. I work on OpenBMC and OpenPowerFirmware at IBM. How do you see the work we do on things like OpenBMC interfacing with your work group and what it's going to look like when the rubber hits the road? Yeah, that's a great question. Let's get that one first. We're also collaborators in OpenBMC. So... Yeah. And actually have deployed instances productized of OpenBMC. And one of the only companies to do that to date is to deploy that at scale. So in OpenBMC and having the OpenEDK this communication that goes between the bootloader and the BMC for exchanging platform configuration data. Sometimes there's some error information that goes into the BMC about hardware errors. All of those interfaces and plumbing we've put in place inside in the OpenEDK. So... This... So you see yourselves as defining the APIs between the host firmware and the management firmware? There are APIs... There are APIs to find there already. I don't think we're defining all of those interactions that need to happen, but we have put some in place already. Okay. And it's based on IPMI. So there's like IPMI exchanges during boot information about the system platform into the BMC. Okay. So you want to create open standards for doing this between open firmware that's running on the host and open firmware that's running on the BMC. Is that the goal of your group? That's not the primary goal of the group but it's definitely one of the things that is discussed in there is what information should be exchanged and what is the payload format that should be exchanged. We'd encourage more people from OpenBMC and... Yeah, I was just wondering if I rock up for the meetings which as an Australian they're going to be at 2 in the morning or something. If I could rock up, what would my project better bring to the table and what would you better help out in? Well, with OpenBMC I know they've already got some IPMI framework as well as Redfish framework that they're putting in place. I think the communication between the bootloader and the BMC the bandwidth for that exchange isn't very large so those payloads are kind of more complementary to binary-based payloads as opposed to web-based payloads and XML. But architecturally that interface is still somewhat in its infancy and physically the interfaces too are a little bit different as you transition architectures and away from maybe an x86 architecture might have one interface to a BMC when you go to ARM and other platforms they tend to have different interfaces into the BMC so you can definitely contribute in some of the driver work there and enablement and APIs that are friendly across all platforms to make it more generic. So we welcome you to join. Let's throw in a slightly different angle on all that too. So IT Renew which used to be horizon computing is buying probably tens of thousands, let's just call it at the moment of Facebook nodes and they installed the Linux boot with the Go-based and it ran FS that I mentioned. They are actually going to be looking at the same model on the BMC and the reason is they have got the boot time on those nodes from 8 minutes spent in UAFI down to 20 seconds spent in Linux boot and what they initially then they immediately discovered that it has taken longer for the BMC to boot than it is for the main processor and so what they want to look at and they asked us to help them and the Go-based sort of and it ran FS boot so fast and we did actually put some design in there to make that boot fast on arm they would like to look at that same identical stack on the BMC that they run on the X86 because that cuts their maintenance tasks in half, right? They've got one stack not two and it's a considerably simpler stack with the Linux kernel and the Go-based and it ran FS. Based on that I'm not sure you know what I would be I would want to try and predict where things are going to go here but the change in boot time on the X86 side and I remember this a long time ago in the early 2000s there was a company I forget their name now anyway we put Linux BIOS on the X86 on the AMD and they had a power PC running hard hat Linux as their quote-unquote BMC and as soon as we had Linux booting in 3 seconds on the AMD we observed that 4 minutes and 57 seconds later the BMC came up and put some text on the LCD-based front panel and said hey man I'm ready to help boot your machine well by that point the machines would join the cluster they were running computing tasks by the time the BMC was ready to join the party so I've had this experience since really the 2000s of throwing away the existing firmware on the X86 putting in something that boots in seconds and then realizing that the maintenance system for the X86 is just barely hanging on keeping up so in my ideal world I was at a really great FOSTEM one year and I pointed out that the hard requirement for an automotive Linux based system to be up and ready and have turned on lights on the front panel is 800 milliseconds and in my heart of hearts what I really think should be the right time for a BMC to be ready and active and communicating and functional that's a good number and we're not even close we're about a factor of 40 off today because the number I'm seeing is 30 seconds so that's my slightly contrarian view of the BMC situation so attestation so one of the fun things about all of this about attestation it goes all the way up the stack and for it to be useful you've got to have attestation frameworks remote attestation serves all that sort of stuff do any of you see it as part of your brief to be interacting with those frameworks to be looking at the sort of big server remote attestation community blah etc what are your thoughts I didn't I didn't want to talk to that or did you want to talk to that this may be my mom it's not my mom can you hear me on this thing so on the attestation side that's one of the things that I'm working on in the OCP security project we first had to define our scope and try to limit what we did because it would take how many years to do this that's the first question right as far as how we're planning to do it for now is that it is a hierarchical plan so that devices within the system will attest to the server itself which may actually turn out to be the BMC in the server and then it will be up to the server to then pass that on or not to a data center so it will be hierarchical for now yes, from the device we are talking up from the device to the server but not beyond for now I just wanted to mention one thing because we the real expert on our plans is over here come and talk to him later if you're interested netboot is so incredibly broken in the x86 world that it's almost impossible to look at it and think of anything but just throwing it all away so that's what we're doing give you an interesting example everybody thinks pixie boot is slow and they're right but then they go from that to conclude that netbooting is slow and there they're wrong netbooting can be very very fast it can do it in a second or two so the plan where we are is you'll do we have a DH client written in Go of course we do a DH client W get and then somewhere linked in all that junk in ways I don't understand because these guys understand and I don't is our attestation framework but you know as long I worry a lot about netboot I'm a former high performance computing guy and that's how we did everything none of this has any use unless you throw away especially things like pixie boot so you really have to scrape the stack clean down to the silicon think it over again or you're just doomed in my view so between core boots sort of linux as an application operating system and open BMC are any of you concerned about lack of diversity in the stack from an attack perspective no concerns what you're using the same kernel for everything right so if there's I had an interesting talk gross used to be our VP of security Google I've known him for decades and I had an interesting talk with him about that the whole diversity thing right and he said to me he'd never actually seen a benefit and I've heard this discussion from security people a couple of times now if you talk about saying well you're depending on linux and firmware and you're depending on linux after you boot they've never seen a case that diversity would make that situation better make it a lot worse yeah we've seen it make it worse yes yeah it pays to fix that's the perfect friend just said it fix one bug not three so it helps you to focus a lot of your resources on the one thing as opposed to putting people and focused on many different things to try and catch exploits and bugs across different varieties of kernels if you can focus on that one and mature it then you're in a stronger place I don't know if you've noticed also from a an industry point of view the lack of security developers at all levels I mean you can see how many of us are in this room right and we found at least working in OCP that we have vendors who admit openly that they don't know security and they are relying on us to come up with the standards because they just don't know it and they don't have the staff nobody cares about security in the end here's the other comment so I had a friend once he worked in architecture office said how come the heating and cooling in every building and he says they always do that in the last week nobody cares about it they just throw it in the plants with all the junior staff who have never done it before that's why it's always broken so that's why my joke about look they build a motherboard and they ship the firmware out as the last afterthought so if you think about what do they even care less about than the fact of boots generally security is the thing everybody when schedule pressures hit that's the thing they throw away which is crazy but that's kind of what I hear over and over again so that's always the problem in the end nobody cares about security even though they say they care about security could I respond to the heterogeneity question heterogeneity is I think as Anain was saying is good if you have if you don't have a scarcity of resources if you have scarcity of resources I think trying to apply those resources is a small number of things and trying to get them as good as possible rather than having a large number of things which are all terrible is pretty bad I mean I agree but we do have scarcity I think that's probably the way to look at it fascinating discussion so this is sadly not unique to this industry but there's an accountability piece here so how do we implement accountability in a way that people will see the stake that they have I'm not quite sure I understood your question but I think having the open source and openness of the whole specifications will certainly help what we don't have in all cases are yet the infrastructure like you have with the Linux kernel and ways to do upstreaming and so forth there are I guess in some projects but not all that you can have all of the source code control and management it's just not there yet yeah just on that I think you do recognize that is a good point some of the projects are run out of Linux foundation like the open VMC others are like Tiano Core based and there's others then that are run inside OCP and there's slightly different governance models across those but I think the problem with trying to make it one way or one thing is it doesn't work for everybody there's never one solution that works for everyone so all of the firmware based projects although we support many of them from open compute there's no one governance model that we can mandate on those projects did that answer your question or no? have you talked about measured boot and attestation have you thought about how specifically with the TPM how are you going to map out PCRs for example in a PC client we in TCG I remember a trusted computing group created a PCR mapping systems have you really thought about how are you going to map for example as you take the measurements in the various PCRs standardizing that set of mapping across all of these verification engines can more easily figure out and do the verification which is why we did it in the first place have you thought that through at all? so there we go so obviously with the EDK2 that closely aligns with the with the TPM model with the Linux boot there's fewer boot stages so it's still the same you just need fewer PCRs firmly right we set up 8 because EFI is complex we think there needs to be fewer for this model and I was just asking the question how do you plan on standardizing that smaller set work in progress I'll give you a hand I'll help you with it I define the ones for the PC client yeah so I'll be happy to help with that I think we've run out of time now we're at the end of the session so thank you all very much for coming


What if I tell you that fungi are so widely distributed on our planet that you can find them pretty much everywhere? Yes, really.  The greenish-black patches on that two-week-old bread, fungi. That bottle on the kitchen shelf which is marked activated east, fungi. The mushrooms growing on those damp logs in your garden, you know it, fungi. And you've probably noticed by now that they're wildly diverse too. Each of these fungi has its own set of unique features. And using these features, scientists were able to classify them over the years. But the thing is that in all this time, fungi classification has changed dramatically. Many scientists nowadays refer to newer, more advanced systems of classification. So in this video, that's what we're gonna do as well. We're gonna talk about some of the major phyla in Kingdom fungi and their distinct characteristics. And while we are doing so, we'll try to stick to the more recent versions of fungi classification rather than the older ones. So let's get into it. The first phyla we have over here is chytridium microta. I'll be honest, I didn't get that pronunciation right the first time. And neither did I know that this phylum existed up until I actually started looking into it.  Most of these chytrids, that's what you call the members of this phylum, most of these chytrids are unicellular organisms that are often found in water bodies or wet soils. And like every other fungi, they also have chytinas cell walls and exhibit saprotrophic or parasitic nutrition. However, what truly sets chytrids apart from the rest of the fungi are their motile zoospores. The spores that the chytrids produce, they're called zoospores, and each of them come equipped with a flagellum like this. And using this flagellum, the zoospore can actively move around or swim around all on their own. And mind you, no other fungal spore can do this. They are the only motile spores to exist and chytrids are the ones that can produce these spores. A very famous example or a very famous chytrid is this organism right here, which is called allomycetes. Next up, we have the zygomycetes, members of the phylum Zygomycota. And we've already come across a zygomycete before. Remember the stale moldy bread at the beginning of this video? Well, the fungus that grows on stale bread, it's called the common bread mold. And that is scientifically called rhizopastolonephyr, which is this fungus right over here. So if you take a piece of that moldy bread and place it under a microscope, this is what you're going to see. Now, the most fascinating thing about zygomycetes is how they reproduce sexually. Normally, they reproduce asexually with the help of something called sporangiospores, which are these spores that are formed inside a structure called a sporangium. You can actually see a sporangium right over here. So this bulb-like structure here, this is the sporangium, sporangium. And inside of this is where the sporangiospores are formed. And sporangiospores are the way to go normally when things are fine. But when the environmental conditions become unfavorable, the fungus or these fungi, they resort to sexual reproduction. That is when sexual reproduction takes place. So let's take a look at this process. So during sexual reproduction, what really happens is that two compatible haploid hyphae will start extending towards each other till their tips touch, kind of like this. And the minute the tip touches, what happens is that it kind of walls off a section or a portion of this tip.  So this is a septum. I'll just write it down over here. So it starts to wall off a certain section by forming this septum. And once this partition is done or this walling off is done, what will happen is that everything in this portion right over here will fuse together, even the nuclei. Now over here I have, you can see that there are only two nuclei, but usually what happens like this is just an image that I've drawn, but in real life, like in nature, when this fusing happens, there are many haploid nuclei which are present in this area, depending on where this wall off thing happens, where the partition begins to appear. So based on where the partition appears, many haploid nuclei are present in between or they are trapped in between this section of the extension or the tips basically. So now what happens, these nuclei, they will also fuse along with the tips. So after all of the fusion, what really happens, what we get at the end of that is this zygospore. So this haploid nuclei will fuse with this haploid nuclei and give us this purple one. And again the same thing happens with these two nuclei and we have two basically diploid nuclei because the haploid nuclei, they're fused, right? So in the end, we finally have a zygospore which contains multiple diploid nuclei. Now what happens after this, this zygospore will eventually undergo meiosis. And because of meiosis, what will happen? This diploid nuclei will become haploid nuclei because of the meiosis that happens. And each of these haploid nuclei, each of them separately will become a haploid spore.  Now this type of sexual reproduction where the tips of the hyphae fuse together to give this zygospore which eventually gives us haploid spores, this entire process is called conjugation. And because of this, because of this conjugation process, zygomycetes are often referred to as conjugated fungi. Moving on, the third phylum on our list is Ascomycota. These fungi are characterized by the presence of something called a sci or an ascus. An ascus is a sac-like structure which contains the haploid sexual spores called asco spores. So these bead-like structures that you can see inside this sac-like thingy, so these are the asco spores inside the ascus. And because of this sac-like structure, these fungi are also called sac fungi.  Now this, so basically what happens, these asco spores, they are formed inside this ascus or inside the sci. And these sci is in turn found inside something called the asco carb, which is a spore-bearing structure. So inside this you will find the sci and inside the sci you will find the asco spores. Now the process of sexual reproduction goes something like this. Plasmo gamia or fusion of cytoplasm takes place between two compatible haploid cells and the fused cell enters a dichariotic stage where the nuclei, the haploid nuclei, they remain free. Eventually these nuclei will also fuse, that means cariogamy will take place and we will end up with a diploid zygote inside the ascus. This zygote will further undergo meiosis and that will give us the haploid asco spores. These asco spores are then released into the environment and they end up germinating at suitable places. Ascomi seeds also undergo asexual reproduction by producing asexual spores called cunidia. Ascomi seeds are incredibly helpful to us as well, especially commercially and a very important example of that is yeast. Remember how we talked about dry activated yeast being something that we can find in our kitchen. So we use yeast in a variety of different things like baking, brewing, fermenting wine and a bunch of different things. So yeast is an ascomi seed which is extremely important to us. Other examples of ascomi seeds include truffles, then there are morals. These are treated as delicacies in different parts of the world. Then there's also aspergillus which is something you might have heard of which is also an ascomi seed. So these are some examples of ascomi seeds. The next major phylum is that of the mushrooms aka phylum Basidiomycota. Basidiomycota seeds are easily recognized by their club shaped spore bearing structures called Basidia. Now there's only one structure here so this will be a Basidium that's the singular form and because of this club shaped Basidium or Basidia, these fungi are also called club fungi. Now where will you find this Basidium or where will you find all the Basidia? You will find them on the gills of the mushrooms. So these are lines that you can see these are the gills of the mushroom which are found on the underside of the cap and this whole protruding thing with the cap and everything that is the fruiting body of the mushroom called the Basidium carp. So this entire thing, let's pick a different color we can't really see it in here. So this entire thing the protruding part of the mushroom which is you know on the top of the soil that we can see. This is the fruiting body which is called the Basidio carp. So that means the Basidio carp bears the Basidia on the gills. Now inside each Basidium, Basidio spores which are these sexual spores by the way they are produced and these Basidio spores they are produced in very similar to how the Asco spores are produced. So once these haploid Basidio spores they are formed they will be released into the environment from the Basidio carp and then they will germinate into new fungi. Now remember all mushrooms, torch stools, then shelf fungi, then smuts and rusts all these types of fungi they belong to Phylum Basidium Icota. So they are all Basidium Icids. Now if you're wondering why I didn't mention an asexual reproduction here that's because usually all Basidium Icids reproduce sexually. So that's why we are not discussing about the asexual reproduction here. Now these are just some of the major phyla which has been included in Kingdom fungi now that doesn't mean that these are the only phyla by the way. There are other different phyla as well. For example, Glomerome Icota is one such phylum which is there in Kingdom fungi but one that we didn't really discuss here. This includes fungi which live in very close association with plant roots. There's another group that you might have heard of called Deuteromycetes aka the Imperfect Fungi. You know the fungi that do not show a sexual phase in their reproductive cycles at all. So those are the Deuteromycetes but the thing is that Deuteromycota is not considered to be a true phylum. Why? Because their members are more closely related to organisms from other phyla than each other. Let me explain this to you with an example. Aspergillus was earlier thought to be a Deuteromycete but after a lot of research and a lot of studies and molecular analysis they finally found out that Aspergillus is more closely related to Ascomycetes rather than Deuteromycetes. So that's a completely different phylum right? Ascomycota. In fact we literally wrote down Aspergillus in the lesson today under Ascomycota. So that's how Aspergillus was moved from Deuteromycota to Ascomycota. And that is why Deuteromycota or Deuteromycetes they are not considered to be a true member or a true phylum for that matter. So you see, fungi classification is an ever-changing, ever-improving ordeal. It's not set in stone. Who knows that maybe a few decades from now we'll have a completely new system of classification for all of these fungi. It is that dynamic.


From VOA Learning English, this is the Agriculture Report in Special English. The pressure to feed Asia's growing population has led to dangerous levels of overfishing near Pacific coastlines. An example can be found in Sindangan, a fishing town in the southern Philippines. Wild catches are falling while prices are rising. One fisherman says the area's once healthy fish stocks are in danger because of an increase in the number of fishing boats. Across the South China Sea, fish catches near shore have dropped since the 1980s. That drop has pushed fishermen farther offshore and into bigger boats. An official with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, or FAO, says some fishing methods are destructive. Benjamin Francisco says the use of fine mesh nets or explosives catch young fish before they can ever reproduce. This hurts fish stocks. The Fish Warden in Sindangan says most of the local fishermen use fine mesh nets. But these nets have been banned for years because they catch very young fish. To deal with problems like this, the FAO has been supporting the idea of licensing systems. The aim is to limit the number of fishing boats on the water. Asia has the world's largest fishing fleets. They represent nearly 3 million of the world's 4 million fishing vessels. And most estimates say that the numbers are increasing. In Hong Kong, there are increased efforts to supervise fleets and to ban trawling for fish near shore. More than $200 million is being spent in an effort to increase catches by small fishing operations. But Hong Kong's measures are costly. FAO official Benjamin Francisco says a lot of governments in Asia do not have enough money or the ability to copy them. For VOA Learning English, I'm Alex Villareal.