announcement, and then we'll get the talk underway. The tent has been running an hour late. It is now only running a half hour late. Again, the tent is now only one half hour late. Thanks. The tent is running a half an hour late. They were an hour behind, but they have picked it up to a half an hour. So there you go. All right, I'm supposed to get going because we're a little pressed for time. So good afternoon to all of you. My name is Thomas Holt and I'm from the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. I'm a criminologist by trade and my research focuses primarily on computer crime just generally and computer hacking specifically. I've spent the better part of the last three years examining the hacker subculture, hacker social organization, and I've tried to get at it in a number of different ways. I've been interviewing active hackers. I've been looking at web forums. I've been at DEF CON. And one of the things that's really surprised me in all of my research is the relative lack of women. None of the people that I've interviewed have been female. Coming to DEF CON it was apparent there's some sort of a disparity at least in terms of the population differences. And looking at web forums really, really struck me because there were very few admitted women. And in looking at one of the largest forums in the data sample I had assembled, I saw this passage. Now this is just an excerpt from it. Sure. This is just an excerpt from a forum that I was looking at. And some of the names have been changed. But as you read through it you can see some interesting things. The first person asks, how many of you have met any girls who are hackers? I never seen some girl who knows a lot about computers and hacking. Are there any girls who do this? And the responses don't really suggest there are a lot of them. Jigglebilly says, unfortunately I've not met any hacker chicks. The only ones I know about exist in the movies. The last one there, Godblocks. I am a female hacker and I know a few other female hackers. That's really it. That was pretty common. I only saw a handful of women maybe at most. And I was looking at six web forums of a variety of populations. And I thought this is really curious. Why aren't there women involved in this? And I thought there must be something more substantial going on. My interest was even more peaked when some comments were made recently by the president of Harvard. Lawrence H. Summers made some comments regarding women in the sciences. And suggested that there are genetic differences and some social factors that drive a wedge between the number of women involved in the sciences and the number of men. We don't have exact transcripts of what he said, but it was enough to really raise the ire of the academic community. And in some cases people outside of it. And so I thought this is really unusual. What is driving this? What's happening? And I thought this must have some importance not only for women involved in the sciences, but in computer science, engineering, and hacking. And I thought this really needs to be addressed. And so one of the things that I started with was looking at the number of women involved in academics for computer science. We know that for a good period of time from 1984 to 1995, there was a drop in the number of women who were enrolled in computer science degrees. Subsequently, after 1995, there's been a bit of an increase, but it's still relatively small. It was such a problem that many major universities began doing internal studies to determine why this decline was happening at MIT, at Stanford, a couple of different places. And there was no specific answer found. When we look at the business world, one thing that we know is that women have been increasingly involved in different technical occupations, but they take place in very low status, low income technical occupations. Women have increased, but they're still under represented in computer science and engineering, et cetera. In fact, interestingly, the way that women are dispersed in different occupations, 99% of all dental hygienists are women, but three out of 10 system analysts are female. One out of every four computer programmers are women. And there's even a gap in pay.  And if you look at, this is just a very quick slide, it gives you a real face of what's going on. This is a track from 1983 to 2001 for employed computer systems analysts by sex. The blue is women, the red is men. So there are definitely more men involved in this occupation. And I thought this is really odd. What is going on? And when we look at women in the computer underground or women in hacking, it's even more apparent that there's a disparity. Research tells us that the computer underground is dominated by men. If you're familiar with the work of Bruce Sterling, the author of the hacker crackdown, he made a very telling comment. He said that hacking is a, let me see if I get this right, a teenage male voyeur thrill power trip activity. You don't find female computer intruders any more than you will find female voyeurs who are obsessed with catching glimpses of men's underwear. Pretty salacious comments and you can hear pretty much the same thing from Gail Thackeray, a very famous prosecutor and the few sociologists and criminologists who have looked at this, at this issue have done so very quickly and they've made very, very cursory examinations. Jordan and Taylor in 1998 suggested that the computer underground is male dominated, so much so that they consider an important component of hacker subculture. A subsequent study by a guy named Thomas suggested that hacking is a boy culture, which is all about demonstrating mastery, whether it's of your physical or your social environment. Now, this does not suggest that women don't hack at all. There have been some famous women hackers, Susan Thunder, Carmen Kairasek, if I'm pronouncing that right, she's been involved in some hacktivism, but that's about it. Aside from that, we don't really get a lot of news on women in hacking. The few journalists who have looked at this problem have suggested that the number of women is increasing, but they don't give us any sort of hard and fast numbers. A publication by Ackerman in 2001 said they're more involved in white hat hacking and security interests, but that's about it. The few women who actually discuss issues of gender and hacking have suggested that there's quite a bit of harassment and difficulty that women face. A researcher by the name of Gilboa in 1996 described a great deal of difficulty that she faced. Sagan suggested that entry-level female hackers experience a great deal of harassment, and a study from Ipsos-Reed suggested that the population of 18 to 24-year-old women experienced the most heavy experiences of being hit on or harassed while online. Generally speaking, we know that women are involved in academic computer science careers, but it's relatively small. We know they're in the workforce, but they face some difficulties and some differences, and we know that they are very, very absent from the underground. Why is this? I know I only got 15 minutes, but does anybody have an opinion maybe as to why there's this disparity?  Yes, this is primarily based on the US. Yes, you, sir. Okay, the harassment and difficulty. Okay, good. Anyone else? Yes. Men are threatened? Okay. Well, yes, ma'am. Okay. These are very interesting questions. Yes. Okay. Others? Okay. Well, sure.  It's not something that women are expected to do. Would you say that's pretty good synopsis? Okay. Yes, and then I gotta go. So that's why women don't hack. Okay, so it's easier to harass women online. Maybe that's part of why women stay out of it. Well, since I don't have much time, let me skip ahead to some of the theoretical propositions that have been given by different researchers. The first is this notion of psychosexual theories. Essentially, the idea here is that hacking is a way for boys and young men to sublimate others, to dominate others and impose their will on them. And in a sense, basically, if you can't penetrate another person, why not penetrate a system? I know that sounds really harsh, but an attorney for a hacker named Ehud Tenenbaum, if you're familiar with that guy, suggested that in the past, we used to boast about the girls we have. Nowadays, kids boast about their ability to hack into different systems. And this notion has been furthered by the stereotype of the socially inept young male hacker. Someone who can't relate to others but can get along very, very well with hardware and software. And this is even furthered by some very esoteric notions about cyberspace or the matrix being a womb-like environment, a feminine place. But it gets a little abstract from there and it's a little difficult to explain. So let me just move on to the next one. Gender role socialization. This is something that some of you have already talked about. It's basically the idea that there are shaping relationships between technology and gender. Technology has a way of affecting the way that we relate to one another. The argument here is basically that technology, especially computer technology, has some very male characteristics. It requires self-confidence, assertiveness, analytical thinking, very cold logic. Whereas this is in direct contrast to more feminine traits. The ideas of nurturing, caring, protection, emotion. If you're familiar with the work of Sherry Turkle at all, she talks about hard mastery versus soft mastery. Hard mastery is the direct imposition of your will on something else through planned attacks. Whereas soft mastery is more of a free form kind of interaction, more something of a conversation than a monologue. But this is just one sort of argument. And as a result of these gender role characteristics, it affects the way that we are pushed into different things. Because of the way that we view technology, that has a way of keeping women out. Women who do decide to go into these careers can face a great deal of difficulty. They might face discrimination. They might face a number of different challenges. In fact, this is furthered by the notion of cyberspace as a wild west frontier. If you've read Gibson or Barlow, the discussion of hacking as a place, pardon me, cyberspace as a place for the cowboy, the outlaw. Women don't really have a strong place within cyberspace in that regard. And another researcher named Susan Herring has suggested that the language of cyberspace is gendered. It's very male oriented. It focuses on conflict, on adversarial forms of communication. And if you don't use these sorts of language, if you don't use these linguistic traits, then you're not going to be treated in the same way. You're going to be shunned. You're going to be criticized or what have you. And there are also structural arguments that are made. Essentially, women have not had these same opportunities as men in the workforce. Women's participation in labor has been based solely on the opportunities made available to them. For instance, when we think of World War II, women were needed while anyone was needed to fill roles working in factories. Women took on this role, but once the boys returned back home, women were expected to go back into the home, become homemakers. What have you? So women's roles have been affected by technology and structurally, women are not necessarily able to get good paying jobs. Their opportunities have been limited. And it's further affected by being tied back into some of the gender role arguments that it's hard to advance in your career if you have to raise a family, if you have to have kids, that kind of thing. It makes things difficult. So these are just some of the theories that have been postulated. What do you think of them? Do any of these make sense? Do they jive with your personal experiences? Yes, sir. Okay. So because of the ubiquity of technology, these structural arguments don't really make much sense anymore. Okay? Yes, sir. So the differences in how we deal with boys and girls who are sort of maybe socially awkward is different. That might drive the reason why men are involved in it more disproportionately. Does that sum it up pretty well? Okay. You, ma'am? Okay. So you think that these gender role issues are very important, that we don't necessarily give it to girls. Okay? So then you've had some very, very personal experiences with them. Okay? You, sir, over there with glasses. Okay? So the way that computer science programs are set up are also sort of structured because we don't push women into math and that sort of thing at an early age. Maybe that's going to keep them from getting involved in the academic portion of it. You, ma'am, in the black shirt. Okay? So women have not only had as much time, but there's a different attitude perhaps as well. Okay? You, sir, and then I've got to end. So even in a whole other country in France that there is experience that's available to both men and women, but by the time they hit the university age, things change. So again, it might have something to do with the gender socialization. Well, I don't have a very specific answer as to which one of these explains it best. And to be personally very frank with you, we need good research that's going to examine the female hacker's perspective. We don't really have it yet. People haven't focused on it very heavily. And to that end, what we're going to need is good research. And one of the best ways to do this sort of research is qualitative research. Qualitative research from an academic standpoint involves interviews, asking very open-ended questions and allowing the person to describe what their experiences have been, why they've been through the things that they've been through, why they've experienced it, and what their rationalizations are for why things work the way that they do. And what I'd like to do, one thing that I'm currently performing, is a research project examining female hackers. I've got a good sample of men going. And what I'd like to do is augment that with women to really get at this issue of gender and hacking because we don't frankly have it. What I'm doing currently is performing interviews that can be done via email by phone or in person, depending upon if you're in the Charlotte or North Carolina area, which many of you probably are not. And it's a very simple sort of thing. I ask very open-ended questions. You can be as frank about it as you want. And it allows you to tell me a great deal about your own personal experiences with hacking. It takes less than 90 minutes, regardless of how you do it, unless you're very long-winded, unless you have a lot to say, or unless you're a very slow typist. So it kind of depends upon you. And it allows you to talk about a subject you may not otherwise be able to talk about. If you're in a forum and you don't like to admit to people, yes, I am a woman, because maybe you're afraid that it might affect you in a different way. Or if you just really want to find somebody to brag to you about all that you've done, then great, you've got the opportunity through me. And since this is a university research project, there are very intensive protections that are available. If you've looked at the DEF CON disk at all for this presentation, you can see the institutional review board protections that I have to provide to you by law. And if I violate it, then it's my butt on the line. Basically what that means is I don't collect any identifying information about you. I don't want to know what your name is, I don't want your phone number. The only thing I want to know is are you a man? Are you a woman? How old are you? And that's it. So there are other protections I can talk about. One last thing to mention, there are benefits if you do this. I don't have big money, so it's $10.  This is my contact information. I'm using a very simple email address for this genderandhackingatyahoo.com, or you can call me. If you're interested in participating, if you think you know someone who would be, pass it along because I would love to be able to provide you all with some information. Maybe advance our understanding of what's going on at a theoretical level. So I've got to go. Thank you.


A new study shows that most Asian Americans view their mother country of origin favorably except for Chinese Americans. Let's talk about it. Yeah, this is going viral right now. A bunch of people sent me this new Pew Research study. Long story short, Andrew, they pulled a bunch of different Asian Americans about eight different countries. Andrew, the US, South Korea, and Japan ranked the most favorable. The most unfavorable ranking in terms of feeling was China. Not surprised. Right. Interesting things was that only 41% of Chinese Americans themselves had a favorable view of mainland China. That means 59%. We're in the neutral or unfavorable category. Oh man, we are losing the Chinese Americans. Are they self-hating or are they just trying to be self-preserving? I don't know. Yeah, we got to talk about it. Make sure you like, subscribe, turn on your notifications and we're silly to serious.  I'm going to say that the comment section at least got serious. The comment section got serious, but I think when it comes to debating this and this being a divisive issue, I don't want to say it's silly, but I want to take it silly because there's nothing you can do about it. But I guess, David, before we get into the comment section, which there was just a multitude of different perspectives more in defense of China, in defense of America, pro-America, kind of moderate in between, I guess, what are some things you want to say? I would like to pose the question, does hoping that people in China have a good life mean that you're anti-American? I do not think so. I think there's a lot of smart people that are more moderate, that are maybe more quiet with their opinions.  Right, right. It does often feel like a zero-sum game that only so many people can prosper in the world. I think it's weird that like, even if you just say, yeah, I wouldn't want to see China destroy itself and implode, then all of a sudden people like, you're pro-China. Won't you move over there?  I'm like, whoa, like, you can just, like what if you have relatives and roots over there? Anyways, I guess a question I have for people too to also ponder is like, what does it even mean to support China? What does it mean to be a China supporter or to be an American supporter? Like if you live in America, you pay taxes and you don't break the rules every day. You contribute, right? Yeah. You contribute and you go to school and you work a job, doesn't that already kind of make you a pretty solid American? But if you don't do those things, but then you go, I'm pro-Murica. Yeah.  Anything that has a huge imprint and a big impact is going to have different perspectives about it. It's like if a Costco or Walmart opens up in your neighborhood or if a Amazon warehouse does, right, there's pros and cons. One, it creates a lot of jobs. Great. It might boost your property value. But two, it's going to take up a lot of space and might put out small businesses.  Forget it. Forget the nuance. Right. Yeah. I think cool places have a longer leash too and are places that have soft power that create cool unique cultural products. It shifts the way people perceive their actions, right, whether good or bad. I'm not saying every big country, every country in general, has good things, gray area things and bad things about it. I'm not saying the distribution is the same. But the perception of those things is colored by soft power. Yeah. Of course, like all the cool music, the actors, the movies, the media, it's like, you know, China, I'm not going to lie. You know, yeah, maybe we could spend a little more time in the marketing department of China because we need to create a, you know, we need to promote Jackson Wang. And that being said, by the way, if, you know, proud to be American, if I was in control of China, I would definitely not make some of the reads that they make. However, if I was in charge of America, I would also not make some of the reads that America makes. Yeah. Well, anyways, let's get into the comments section because there was a lot of different perspectives from Chinese people, non-Chinese people. So I thought it was interesting. All right, let's get into the first comment. This was from a Taiwanese American. And someone said, well, you know, I think the rankings are quite reasonable. If you're a Korean American, Japanese American, Taiwanese American, your ancestral homeland is now a relatively free democratic nation in a first world economy. I could see why those would rank high on the list, unlike some other places I don't want to say, though. Yo, do you think Indians are kind of wondering, like, hey, man, why are we not higher on the list? Somebody said comments should be good, popcorn emoji. Because, Andrew, they knew that what, it was going to get a little spicy, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And again, I'm not surprised that China is ranking at the bottom, by the way, of course, knowing how everything is in the media and the geopolitics and everything that's happened the last five years. Yeah, and especially the way most people came over in the 70s and the 80s and stuff like that.   Yeah, that's true. I would say with 90% chance you're going to like it or at least find it super interesting and pleasant, more pleasant than the media would ever make you think. But I'm not telling anybody that however they feel about this thing is illegitimate either because everybody values different priorities in life, right? Somebody said, this is not very accurate. As a Chinese American myself, do I have a favorable view of China? Of course, I do. Good food, loss of history, and art traditions. However, do I have a favorable view of CCP? Heck, no. But same thing with Japan. I love anime, Japanese food, samurai, all the great general Japanese culture. The respect they show each other. But do I like the Japanese government? No, I don't. Look at all the bad stuff they did. Yeah, and I think, again, the survey in a weird way, and usually I never say this, but I don't think it was that deep. I think it was just based off feelings. And if you ask Chinese like, hey, how do you feel about being Chinese right now? And they're like reading all the newspaper. It doesn't feel good. No, it's not good. It's unfavorable feeling. I feel bad. No, which is like, obviously we talk about this on the channel all the time. And like I said, in the survey, I believe they did parse out what Taiwanese Americans from mainland Chinese, but not HK. Right, HK. And I don't know, I think they surveyed, what about Chinese Singaporeans, Chinese Malaysians, Chinese Vietnamese, Chinese Filipinos. There is a gigantic Chinese diaspora all around Southeast Asia and Asia in general. Anyway, let's get into the comments section, guys. Andrew, somebody said, what do you expect from Asian-Americans, okay? When they mainstream us, deem China the enemy in the only East Asian country, not under Western control, and the US budgeted 600 million to spread anti-Chinese feelings in the media, of course people are gonna feel this way. This was from this guy named Wesley Izesti. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then he's also like, yeah, there's 600 million spread anti-China propaganda. And a lot of people are talking about how Korea and Japan are vassal states of America. China chooses to just do the politically incorrect thing and oppose American power. Right. This is getting into some deep job, geopolitics. Somebody said, there I'm being misled by the deep state to maintain fear, hegemony, and pump up the military industrial complex for funding. Ah, yes. Why is it going down, and I'm not saying some of these things are probably not legitimate if you really want to look into them, but you're average citizen, you know, that's just trying to live a life, survive, thrive in America. This is going, woo! Yeah, but there's a lot of smart people out there who talk about the military industrial complex all the time that are not Chinese supporters, by the way. You know, so obviously it all kind of runs together though. I guess like, you know, some people are like, oh yeah, you know, US is working overtime to influence and drum up this beef between China and America, just in case there is a war, just to create more funding or money or anything.  Yeah, it's super weird because they are trading with China every day buying everything, but they're like, yeah, like we said, what we want our citizens to do is hope it crumbles, but the factory infrastructure stays intact. Right, right, right. I don't know man, it's super weird right now, bro. Somebody said, these are comments are more moderately pro-China and where they kind of like give one and take one and they're kind of seeing, like, you know, starting to move toward the 50-50 zone. Somebody said the USA accuses China of doing the exact same things the USA is doing and I'm surprised it's working on Asians. I've always been saying that superpowers are always on a timeline arc, but they don't link up because some of them are like different places in their arc. If social media was around when America was doing whatever it was doing in the 1920s to 1950s, 60s, 70s all the way through the civil rights movement, it would be insane, right? But it completely missed the social media era. Exactly, you're right. I mean, and would you say, is that a legitimate argument that, well, I'm looking at the man in the mirror, look at the man in the mirror then, see what you call in the pot called the kettle black. Man, I'd like to never say that thing to you. It isn't because whatever qualms you have with whatever's happening right now, it's still your qualms, but it's true that we're in a completely different media era where like whoever Bud Light endorses is turning into a fire bomb issue, right? This comment said, yeah, hey China, how dare they lift 80% of their population out of poverty and provide a bunch of cheap labor and be the world's factory?  Like 70% of everything, right? So it's like, do you hate all Chinese products or not, you know what I'm saying? And then also this, I believe Vietnamese girl said, I don't know man, when almost all of Asia, yes, not Asian-Americans, hates you, you might be doing something wrong. And this kind of goes back to something that I think is very interesting because even when you talk to Asian-Americans or Asians living in America, it depends on how closely they're tied to the motherland politics because David, a few years ago, we were outside of a nightclub in Seattle and I was chatting with a Vietnamese woman and she was asking me like, oh, and she was from Vietnam and she was like, oh, are you Korean? And then I was like, no, I'm Chinese.   And I was just like, all right, yo, I feel like this conversation's over, I'm out. What if you were like, hey, I'm getting out of the waters. You can have the spy back. Yeah, but it was because there was the dispute over the water. So if you're tapped into things like that, maybe especially when you're intoxicated, those feelings come out and they turn into words. I do think especially the older generations tend to be more tapped into geopolitics from Asia than like young Asian-Americans in the Bay Area going to arena. Yes, yes, yes, especially basically if you're from that mother, if you still hold that passport, I'm sure you're gonna have opinions about the politics. All right, Andrew, we're gonna get into some more like anti-China comments here. Somebody said, nope, let's be real here. China is basically like the evil empire in Star Wars with Emperor Palpatine. Somebody said, if you guys think China's so good, why don't you guys move there? And somebody was saying, why does everybody think blaming the bad things that China does on like American side-ops like Asian-Americans can't think for themselves? Ooh, I do think that a lot of the comments, in my opinion, the most reasonable comments are not necessarily saying everything's good in China or that living in China is better than America. Because that's not true. I don't think it's true. I wanna live here. Well it depends on how rich you are, but for the most part, on an average person, that's not true. Yeah, so I think life is still better here, but I think what they're saying is that not everything that China does is evil. I think that's kind of my stance. I'm not saying that they don't do things that I disagree with 100%. There's definitely some things where I'm like, whoa, stop doing that. But I'm also like, no, it's not all evil. So you're trying to paint this whole image anyways. Yeah, I think it has to do with the narrative, but then there has to be some truthiness to the narrative to spin. So it's almost like a combination. It's just like an algorithm or an equation, right? Typical math. These are moderately, I guess, against China comments. This Japanese guy said, listen, I know that both the US and China are fueled by propaganda, but at least I'm able to publicly expose that propaganda in the US without consequence. So this goes back to freedom. Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. I think a lot of people really value the freedom that we have in America. I value it, and I think a lot of people do, right? Somebody said, nothing more, there is nothing more Asian-American than hating on the homeland that you left. No surprise here. I mean, most corrupt CCP officials have moved their family and embezzled wealth to the West, so why are people surprised at this result? This is obviously talking about what? All the floor dies and all the things that the capital flows moving out of China. Yeah, I understand what they're saying. I've heard this for a while, obviously. A lot of people are still trying to move out of China, especially the ones with a lot of wealth. So I guess, I don't know. That's probably a, like I said, man, there is at least a shred of truth or at least anywhere to shred of truth to very solid points on all sides. And I don't think that it's just probably linear, this side versus that side. It's probably like an octagon because there's like different sides of the argument. Somebody said, I got no hate for the people, but I just don't agree with the government. America isn't perfect either, but at least I can complain all I want about America and South Korea and not get in trouble. I just hope that everyone can get along peacefully and that we won't see World War III in our lifetimes. I actually don't think that we will, but yeah, totally. I mean, people gotta do things to prevent it from happening too. Right, right. Who's to say that we're not already at war? Yeah, cold war, cold digital war. Somebody said, Chinese American here, I love the country and people of China where my ancestors come from.  Yeah, so when it comes to soft power and when we say soft power, we're talking about products and images and media and culture that can be exported to the rest of the world, especially I think actually a lot of Chinese culture is exported, but just not to America. Like I don't think Americans fully value it. And I don't think it's modern culture either. For example, Andrew, you know, like the Xinhua, China in France where they really value those Chinese plates from 1783, that's not gonna mean anything for how people feel about China in 2020. Oh, like fine China plates, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll get what you're saying.  Yeah, I get some guo-quiz, guo-quiz. Those are delicious on the street. But you're in America and you're around a lot of even other Asians and you're Asian friend group, maybe they're kind of talking trash about China or what's going on because of the news and you're just feeling kind of like, ooh, singled out and you're feeling a little awkward. So you're just kind of like, oh, I don't wanna debate all my friends but then I don't wanna settle and just defend China because I'm not like running China. You know what I'm saying? So I can see how uncomfortable it is sometimes. Yeah, and I can see why you're just going, I'm gonna go with neutral or bad. I just don't know enough about this. Right, right, right. Here's a bunch of neutral comments in the middle. I think these are just very reasonable questions to ask. Somebody said, focus on the governments and their actions. Unfortunately, the US is not much better now. I've been to China for a few extended stays. I can see both sides. Somebody said, don't Americans find it strange that their government has a new enemy for their citizens to fixate on every decade? How easy is it to manufacture consent over there? Yeah, I will say this. You know, Americans, it's interesting. They disagree about a lot internally but when it comes to like a foreign thing, it's pretty easy for people to like galvanize around that. Right, right, right. It's true. I mean, that's just the nature of, you know, I guess the way the country's built. Somebody said, this is understandable, considering the reason of the majority of Chinese Americans left the government in the 70s and 80s for economic opportunity and dislike the Chinese government. So that is why the study would be this way. Right, right, right.  Is it the same? I think there's a lot of arguments. Somebody said, can you really separate politics and culture though? It's easy to attribute. It's just as easy to attribute everything good to the people in spite of the government as it is to say the government created the environment necessary for good things to happen. This one, I think is tough. I'm gonna have to disagree. I feel like you gotta draw the line somewhere. Like the way I see China is like, I think the way I understand it right now is that a smaller group of people kind of run China. So that means, and China has made- You're saying, because there's no citizen participation in the government.  Did anybody vote for who's president? So I'm saying, I guess, if you don't get to participate in the government in voting, then it means that the average citizen is more removed from the decisions of the government. So in a way, you can say that the average citizen of China has less to do with the government decisions and is just living their life than even a citizen in America because we get to vote and we still have a say. Because everybody still voted for Trump or everybody still voted for Biden, not everybody. But a lot of people voted for these two people. So of course, you have more say in your government here. So you get to choose your government more than in China. So some Chinese people are just like, yeah, you know, I don't really know what to say. I'm just living my life. I'm just trying to live the best life. And maybe if I get to go to a place with more opportunities, I may take it more, but I may not. No, for sure. I mean, it's different too in the East versus the West. The West has more of this Socratic Seminar basis. And then over there, they've always been under a dynastic system. So it is very different. We could get into that for a very long time. Good point though. Somebody said, oh, next shark is pushing the good Asian versus bad Asian narrative. What do you think of this? Do you think that this is a way to get clicks and get engagement because of the name of the game and selling ads and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah? I know I would never want this to be a divisive issue amongst Asian Americans. I think it's fair if you could talk about it with your friends without dividing you all because at the end of the day, none of you have any say in what happens.  So it shouldn't be divisive amongst Asian Americans. You know, for me, what's interesting about this is I've been thinking about this for so long all the way back to citizenship class when I was like 15 years old where everybody was like asking me, ah, they're talking to class. But I would say for me, I could be totally friends with another Asian American who hates China. I could be, as long as it doesn't affect the way our relationship is. Right, as long as- It's just not the top of my identity even though I agree that we might like differ on that issue. Well, because you actually in a real sense, David, do not represent the Chinese government. Right. You don't. Right. Oddly enough, I thought you did, but you don't. Who would've thought, man? Anyway, man, let's just go. I mean, we could get it going for like two, three hours and say this point and that point and I think there's shreds of truth if not solid points on all sides. Like I said, it's more like an octagon versus even like a bing, bing, bing, bing thing. I mean, silly to serious. Why do some people take this so serious and other people are just like, I don't even know what you're talking about. Just trying to live my life and survive it. Yeah, I'm going to be honest. I think a lot of Asian Americans don't think too deep about this. I don't think that they want to. I think it is complicated and I think you're going to start getting into some weeds that are hard to get around and hard to talk about. I do think geopolitical leanings, political leanings as well as religious leanings oftentimes you are born into it. Yeah. And also there's even just a whole mix of information, you know, of like, Oh, what happened in China or this happened? Well, actually it didn't really happen the way you think. And then people are getting information from different places. And it's almost like, man, people cannot even agree on the facts anymore. You know, this just feels like you're almost debating some type of rivalry between sports teams. Like there really is no end to it. Like Laker, Celtics, like, oh. Yeah, I'm taking it to a macro level. I'm talking about global hegemony or whatever this right, wrong, the morality of dominance. And then over on this side, I'm just like, no, I'm just talking about you made me feel bad and you're not cool. And it's like those could both be true, but then they're almost like arguing on different geometric planes. Yeah, I think it's so weird because I think for China, I feel like most people that I've ever talked to that visited China for a short amount of time for like a matter of a couple of weeks enjoyed themselves. They really liked it. They were like, oh, it's interesting that people were chill. I had a lot of different food. I had some cool interactions with people. It took a bunch of photos.  Yeah, if you're non-Asian, you're like a, depending on if you're super tall.  Yeah, you look like an athlete or something. And then, but then, but then on a geopolitical level, it's deemed as so evil. And I also understand that why because like it's the governments that are fighting.  Anyway, guys, it's crazy right now. Let us know what you think in the comments section below. It's very confusing. Keep it civil. Like I said, I respect everybody to have their own opinions. But of course, some people know more than others and other people have different incentives and self-positioning and cultural positioning and blah, blah, blah. But I guess if you are a Chinese American and you're feeling some type of uncomfortability, I guess like hopefully this video helps you out. For sure. Hopefully this video helps any non, even non-Chinese out where if they're like wondering how like maybe some reasonable people may feel. For sure, wish it didn't have to be this way in a macro sense, but at the end of the day, man, we can still have great micro lives within all this. Let us know what you think in the comment section below. Until next time, we're the Hop Hop Boys. We out. Peace.


Hey everybody, welcome back to Magic Orthodoxy. My name is David and this is how a deck handles. Hey, so yeah, we're going to address that age old question, how does a deck handle? And if you've been familiar with my channel for any given time, you know that I don't do shuffles or spreads or flourishes in my reviews. And I kind of try to approach the review a little bit more analytically, historically. Yeah. And so people do ask time and time again, hey, how does a deck handle? And I've kind of answered that casually in comment sections, and I've even written a couple of blog posts about it, but I did want to address it. And so while I'm talking, I'm actually going to show you some of the different caliper measurements we've taken over the past year or so. I'm going to start with some United States playing card company cards, show you the readings, the thicknesses on those. And then I'm going to show you some of the designer decks. Just know that whenever we do a caliper measurement, I always use 10 cards as my scale. That's my go-to, that's my parameter. I measure 10 cards. And then of course, if you wanted to, you could multiply that number by 20, 30, 40, 50, whatever. And usually what I try to tell you is how the deck feels as opposed to how the deck handles. And let me tell you why. If you've been a fan of my deck reviews, you notice that every so often I measure the deck with a caliper. And so why do I do that? Well, because it's scientific and it can't be disputed. I would say that the deck was thin stock, or I could say it was thick stock, but really what does that mean? I could say the cards feel great, but that's a subjective opinion. I can't tell you how you will like them or how they will feel in your hands. Just because I like them, just because they work for me, doesn't mean they're going to feel good for you. So I try to create a list of measurements. So far, I've logged a couple decks, and you can always go back and check that. Or you could look past at one of our reviews to see how thick the cards are. Because what will happen is I'll say, oh, the coven deck feels the same as a Riderback 808. Or I could say, wow, the Memento Mori deck is really thin stock. But I don't want to be like other deck reviewers who give you information that you can't use or that doesn't apply to you. So I don't know when it happened or where it happened or how or who or what, but somewhere along the way, you and I, we were all influenced to believe the subtleties of either a fraction of a millimeter in card thickness or the amount of ink that's applied to the paper stock could be felt by an experienced card handler. In talking about the latest deck, we would marvel at the design, but then we would quickly ask, yes, but how do they handle? And that's what I'm trying to talk to you about. Because I really don't like this question, and it's not because I disagree with it, but because there's really no best way to answer it. Like I said, I've written some blog articles about this. I would suggest you go out and read those. That's a good place to start. But the reason why I don't like the question is there's just too many variables. And let me just tell you, for instance, how does a deck handle? Well, that depends on you.  Those are all inanimate objects, right? They don't do anything on their own. And yet you could ask the same question of those, how does that car handle? How does that skateboard handle? Well, it depends on you, right? How good are you? A great car can handle like junk in the wrong person is driving it. And a great skateboard, if it's just sitting there, it's not doing anything at all. But a great person who knows how to use a skateboard can make it talk and dance and sing.  So if you address some of the factors that are within us, you know, like say for instance, talent, how cards handle depend on your talent.  So I can't answer the handle question because I don't know what your talent level is, nor do I want to mislead you if my skill is better or worse than yours. The right deck might handle amazingly in your agile fingers. So, and that leads to preference, you know, all of us have different preferences. And the truth is, the subtle differences in playing cards might resonate more with you than they do with me. And you might be a person who prefers a smooth finish on a deck. I might prefer legends cards over other manufacturers. It's the same thing as asking whether you like Ford or Chevy or how those handle, you know, it's a bias. We each have our favorites. I've listened to card collectors just slam United States playing card company, but they're my preference. I would rather own a deck of USPCC, Duck Dynasty or Sleeping Beauty cards before I would use any other brand of cards. There is one more last factor and that's care, you know, how you take care of your cards is crucial to how they handle. So most questions about how cards handle, they're only really applicable to their feel and performance straight out of the box. But if you've handled cards over any amount of time, you know that cards change through the owner and through their care. So the best care for cards is the best care for all paper goods. And I covered this and how to care for your cards. And you can check that review out too. Store them in a container with limited air pressure, store them in a cool dry place, preferably low to the ground. I store all my cards in cardboard long boxes in the floor in my closet. So air, humidity, those all will deteriorate your cards over time. Sort of oils and dirt in your skin. Part of care is also breaking your deck. You know, that's also another way of saying, well, how do they handle? There's lots of people who actually prefer a deck that's been broken in over a deck that's been pulled straight out of the box. And so I think some cards handle better after a few weeks. The same way your bed or your favorite chair has like a worn indent or you sit or sleep, cards can also bend to your will, making those decks feel amazing. But in truth, you know, you've just conditioned that deck to fit your style. Okay, so that's my last piece of input. I hope that was helpful. If you ever have questions, I would say please post them below or contact me directly through my channel. Hey, and out of the three criteria that I listed above, what do you think influences how a deck handles the most? Do you think it's talent? Do you think it's preference or do you think it's care? Let us know in the comment section below and I'll see you next time. Bye.


from the Wynn Resort in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference 2016. Brought to you by Nutanix. Now here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. Welcome back to Nutanix .NEXT. NextConf, hashtag NextConf is the Twitter action, all going on there. I'm here with Stu Miniman. This is SiliconANGLE's theCUBE. We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. SiliconANGLE's a media company. This is our flagship product. We call it our game day. Glenn Allison is here as the vice president of Enterprise Architecture, a tractor supply company. Glenn, first time at theCUBE. Welcome. Great to see you. Dave, thanks for having me on, Stu. It's great to be here. So .NEXT, you know, growing. Were you at Miami last year? Were you down there? So this is my first time at .NEXT. So it's a good vibe to it, right? Yeah, it's exciting. And there's a lot of energy here. From what I understand, I've talked with Howard before. I mean, there's more than double the attendees from last year. So very clearly growing. Yeah, close to triple. So tell us about Tractor Supply Company and what you do there. Sure. So Tractor Supply is the largest rural lifestyle retailer in the United States. We've got over 1,500 stores. Last year, our revenue was approximately 6.2 billion in sales and we're growing. We're continuing to add stores expanding throughout the US. And in essence, Tractor Supply, a little bit about the store, the brand, our customers, they typically live a rural lifestyle. They're landowners. They have animals. They typically do it yourselfers. And they count on Tractor Supply. They come in for expertise on products. Our team members, we hire our customers. And we have the products that they need to live that lifestyle. And they're small to large retail stores? So we've got over 1,500 stores, varying kind of footprints. To some degree, we've got over 1,500 unique stores just in that we ensure we have the right products in those stores for the community. So community is something that's really important. Tractor Supply is involved with 4-H as an example. We're part of the community. And so in terms of the footprint and what's in a store, it's constantly evolving. And it's listening to customers and understanding what they need to make sure we have that. So it varies, though, right? You'll essentially have a store that's built for that community, right? It's not a, my writer, is it just sort of like Chipotle model? It's not a Chipotle model. It's not a Chipotle model because we have one in my town. It's a small, far-meaning kind of. Yeah, we're a unique niche. We support the rural lifestyle. In terms of the footprint, you'll see some similarities across each of the stores in terms of some of the products that we have. I'll give you an example. 4 Health Dog Food, one of our fastest-growing brands, multi-million-dollar brand. You're going to find that in every tractor supply store. Everybody has dogs. And you're an enterprise architect. I actually just got a puppy, the Allison House, a few weeks ago. Awesome. What kind of puppy? It's a mix. It's called a golden doodle. Yeah, yeah, cool. And it's part poodle and part golden retriever. Awesome. Puppies are great above them. When you get a puppy, it's like having a baby. You have to go in. There's a lot of different things that you need to get. We're in the store quite a bit. Pets can be like your infrastructure, especially puppies. If it's not put together well at the beginning, boy, you've got a lot of messes to clean up. You've got to care for it. Well, with the Enterprise Cloud Platform, I know we're here at .next and all that. But generally, our infrastructure is invisible. So the thing that keeps me up at night is generally the puppy now. That's great. We had one of the users at .next last week last year who said that when they put Nutanix in, they got their weekends back. And so it sounds like you've got a similar experience. We've filled that time back up with the puppy. With the puppies. So you use that term invisible, which ties into the messaging. And I want to unpack that a little bit. So as an Enterprise architect, you're responsible for the entire infrastructure of the organization? Is that right? Yeah, so I started with Tractor Supply a little over a year ago. So I moved from Chicago to Brentwood. And it's part of my role. So I'm responsible for enterprise architecture, infrastructure engineering, so things like our servers, storage, networking that support our 1,500-plus stores, our data centers, as well as IT quality assurance. All the testing and rigor that goes into ensuring our applications are deployed with quality.  So talk about the apps that you're supporting. I mean, obviously, you've got all these stores around. You've got to keep those humming. Describe, sort of, paint a picture of what it looks like. Sure, so as you can imagine, it's one of the largest, or the largest, rural lifestyle retailers, when you go in a store from a technology perspective, like Point of Sale, all the systems that go into supporting a customer transaction. So think about pinpads and credit cards as an example. Right now, a big focus is EMV and chip and signature for retailers. Things like wireless and mobility is another example. OK, so what's your infrastructure look like? Servers and the storage, the Nutanix product. Maybe paint a picture for us. Sure, so we've got multiple data centers. We've got hundreds of different applications that we have to support. And I would say the data center footprint's been evolving. So a little over a year ago, we did an assessment of each of the different applications, the underlying infrastructure that supports those applications. And it was abundantly clear that there were some opportunities to just greatly simplify our architecture at the time. Things that you might expect that are common with most companies. You had multiple different types of systems for compute and storage and networking and varying levels of complexity to support all of that infrastructure. And we worked with several partners, like in examples. We worked with CDW to help develop our strategy, the roadmap, and then set out on a journey. We had some strategic conversations with Nutanix, particularly around the Enterprise Cloud Platform, and then over a period of several months, I mean, we did a phased implementation as, in essence, moving workloads from those legacy three-tier architectures to the Enterprise Cloud Platform. And so we've decommissioned racks and racks of legacy equipment, compute, storage, networking, and the data centers evolving. So we've significantly reduced our power, our floor space. But at the same time, we're adding capacity to support growth. And for tractor supply growth is essential. We're adding 120 new stores per year. We plan to grow to 2,500 stores over the next several years. And it's essential that we've got the systems, the processes in place to support that growth. Yeah, Glenn, I mean, something we've heard from users for a long time is they used to build their infrastructure on a per-application basis. You kind of had this bespoke silo that you built for the requirements, and then you tweaked and optimized that. Sounds like you're making that shift to be able to create almost a platform for it. Can you talk about what applications fit on that? Are there any applications that don't fit on that environment that you're using the Nutanix? Sure. So from an enterprise architecture perspective, one of the things that we've been working on is just an integrated roadmap across applications, infrastructure, security. Obviously, security for retailers is incredibly important. So we've got an integrated roadmap across each of the different functions in IT that's looking out three to five years. In terms of the types of workloads that you can move towards an enterprise cloud platform, our initial waves, anything that was running, windows or Linux, we targeted for the implementation early on in the transition. Where I would say where we're now and looking forward in the future is looking at some of the more complex workloads like high IO database workloads as well as big data analytics. And so we're working together with our partners and just making sure that's a good consideration as part of our roadmap.  Does that fit into the picture of what you're looking at? Exactly. And so we've been working with partners such as Nutanix providing feedback. I would say one of the things that's really good about the partnerships that we have is they listen to their customers and are responsive to the feedback. So I think a lot of the announcements that were done this week, which there were some big announcements today, are in response to customer feedback over the last several months, which we deeply value. That's important. So and Nutanix powers all this stuff, all the apps, all the? So we've migrated the majority of our workloads. There's some exceptions that we're working together with our partners to evaluate. But essentially most of our workloads have been migrated now. Predominantly a Nutanix shop, if I can use that phrase. Is that true? Yeah, I would say the majority of the workloads are on the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud. And you're running VMware? VMware, yes. OK. And then there's also, I mean, there's a lot of announcements this week around Acropolis. And we're looking at expanding our usage of Acropolis over time. Are you doing anything with Public Cloud? Yes, so I'll give you a couple examples. And really, I would say we have the best of both worlds when it comes to Enterprise Cloud Platform. So we've got the majority of our workloads are within our data center. And we get the benefits of Cloud with the Enterprise Cloud Platform. But then with Public, we're able to kind of leverage the scale that we get with Public Cloud. So as an example, like our e-commerce environment, we have the ability to rapidly provision additional systems to support busy periods throughout the year. So like day after Thanksgiving as an example, for most retailers, there's very busy time of year. We leverage the Public Cloud to help scale up for those periods. Cole, you mentioned a number of announcements today. We got a wrap, but I'll wrap there. And then I have one final question. What's your favorite announcement? What in there is exciting to you as an IT practitioner, as a doer?  There was so many announcements today that are big wins, I think, for customers. Certainly the work that's going on with Acropolis, I believe, will be very disruptive for the industry. There's going to be a number of benefits for customers. I mean, in as example, is virtual desktops. That's essentially a turnkey solution now for customers. So I mean, I thought that was an important announce for customers. You welcome that disruption. I think it's going to be good for customers in the long run. Having choice. And then the enterprise cloud platform also, because it supports different hypervisors and gives customers choice, I think that's a win for most customers. So put the exclamation point bumper sticker on .next, your first .next impressions, takeaways, I mean, now it's early, but things that you learn or hope to learn?  There's a lot of technology. There's a lot of flashing lights. There was a lot of big announcements in terms of new features and capabilities. For me, I think it's the people. So here, I got the opportunity to meet with other customers. As an example, we spent some time in the customer advisory board yesterday, meeting with a number of other customers across different industries. We were able to share some of our experiences, also influence where the direction is going to go with Roadmap. We've gotten visibility with our partners, which have been invaluable through this transformation effort. And also the Nutanix team members. OK, sorry, leg cramp. All right, that's a wrap. Glenn, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. We'll be right back right after this word. Great to see you.


So today we're here at the airport sending off crews to two places one to the US obviously in the US particularly on the West Coast in three states they're losing numerous houses there's been lifelosses there's wildfire that's not yet under control and crews from Parks Vic, Delp and CFA are going across to both be on the fire line in firefighting and incident management and aviation. We're also today through MFB, CFA and SES sending crews across to Greece they also had bushfires and we've been asked to provide support across to Greece and sitting behind that we're doing planning for a deployment potentially to Canada so we've got people literally going all over the globe providing services in fighting bushfires so that's what we're doing here today. This isn't my first deployment to the United States I was involved in the fires around the Napa and Sonoma counties in California last October I conducted the same role that I'll be doing this time around which is the divisional supervisor position. It's a little bit nervous heading away again especially leaving the family for such a long time but I've got a bit of confidence in our ability to work well with the Americans the recent management team is very similar to ours and we're well received last year and I believe that it will be a positive experience and hopefully that hopefully we can make a difference. The 12 of us from Victoria will provide different levels of assistance personally my role is to assist with the logistics of the aircraft movements with respect to wildfire suppression so my role essentially or more commonly known as an airfield manager or an airbase manager over at over in the western states. Assumably California perhaps Idaho been told at this stage of deployments up to 42 days and involves 14 day shift rotation so 14 days on two days off 14 days on and we're looking forward to working with our counterparts over in the States learning what you know picking up some great experience and exposure from there hopefully you bring it back here


Secondary school students are set to enjoy new educational resources for the subject areas of French and natural sciences as Camdouh officially handed over educational materials from various donors. Daniel Dubois reports. Camdouh recently received the donations as a result of the kind patronage of the National Commission for UNESCO, the Martinique St. Lucia Consulate, and Nelvin Alphos, a St. Lucia living overseas. School Sciences Officer from the Curriculum and Materials Unit, Camdouh, Ms. Giannetti George, says initiatives like these directly and positively impact the teaching and learning process, especially for science, where resources like these incite excitement and enhance the development of scientific thinking and experimentation for pupils. So we had micro science kits that were donated by the National Commission for UNESCO. And the purpose of these kits are to foster experimentation among students. These kits were fashioned for secondary school students. And so it is our greatest hope that the use of these kits in the classroom can maintain the fascination and the interest of science among our students and also to make instruction more fun, to make it hands on, to ensure that we're engaging in the inquiry approach to instruction. This is one of many contributions that the Commission has made to science education in St. Lucia. Additionally, 10 electronic microscopes were handed over by Nelvin Alphos, a son of the soil residing in the United Kingdom who works in the biomedical field. To be so inspired to make such a donation is just so wonderful. And we want to thank persons in the diaspora who continue to support us here in St. Lucia in various sectors, whether it's education or family life. We say thank you to everyone and we really appreciate this. And we anticipate that the face-to-face engagement of students and teachers in terms of all grades will happen soon. And when this does take place, we are happy that we have these instructional material that can serve to strengthen the instruction. These microscopes were sourced and financed by Mr. Alphos and says this contribution to the field of science is an effort to inspire future St. Lucia scientists to seek answers to questions that affect St. Lucia and by extension the wider world. The curriculum officer for modern languages, Leonard Robinson, thanked Martinique's Ministry of Education and the Martinique St. Lucia Consulate stating the contribution of educational resources will all go well for the learning and the teaching of French. Books about the culture, pronunciation, and how to read and write in French were also sent to the Sir Arthur Lewis Community College. I've been working alongside the Ministry of Education in Martinique, Académie de Martinique. We've signed a couple of educational cooperation agreements and our Consul General, Miss Johanna Salton, has been in the background working feverishly trying to get donations and materials for us here in St. Lucia to facilitate the learning of French in schools. I hope that this material will help the students to be a little more motivated and to have some authentic material that they can look forward to getting new vocab and learning new experiences. The Microscience kits come complete with manuals that are available on the Camdu website and the learning instructional resources will be shared throughout learning institutions from the Communications Unit of the Ministry of Education, Sustainable Development, Innovation, Science, Technology, and Vocational Training. I am Daniel Dubois reporting.


Hi everyone. Good morning. Thanks for coming at this early hour. Hopefully no one's to hungover. So I'm going to talk about Enigma and specifically our decentralized data marketplace protocol. What's the... Make sense. Alright. Hi everyone again. Good morning. I'm going to talk to you about Enigma. Enigma is building a decentralized data marketplace that is part on-chain on Ethereum and part off-chain. So the background to Enigma starts at MIT in 2015. We launched the Enigma project from there where we basically conceptualized a decentralized computation platform that can guarantee both privacy and correctness and with better scale than just block-sends themselves allow. How many of you here have seen that white paper or are familiar with the Enigma project from that sense? Alright. Not bad. Not bad. So cool. Yeah. It's been cited quite a lot. I think it's one of the more cited white papers in the space. Downloaded quite frequently. So I guess there's a lot of people who share our vision. Anyone can help me with the slide? I have to go closer? Cool. So some about our motivation. So our motivation, data is everywhere. It's the most valuable asset right now in the 21st century. But right now the situation is that only a handful of companies can really capitalize on that. They're hoarding it. They're monetizing it. But that's not something that the open public can take part in. And that is what we are set to change with our protocol. I'm going to give you a quick outline of my talk. I'm going to first of all speak about what is a data marketplace at a high level? How does the on-chain work with the off-chain? Who are the stakeholders? And how are we thinking about designing this? At that point I will not focus on how the network stores data, how computation is done. That would be the second part of the talk when we go deeply into that. Again, given time constraints, this is going to be pretty high level.  Catalyst is an application that we're developing that is going to be the first one to live on the data marketplace. Alright, so at a high level the Enigma data marketplace, it has three main stakeholders which are pretty obvious and trivial. You have data providers, those who want to sell data, data consumers, those who want to consume data. And on the off-chain you have worker nodes, which are basically just nodes who don't have any stake in the data buying or selling, but they are the ones who are actually starting the data, doing computation, answering queries, and so forth. So my focus right now is going to be mostly on the contracts between the data providers and data consumers first. So starting with the data provider. A data provider comes, has a data set that they want to sell. What they do is, first of all, they provide enough context to the off-chain network. They basically need to register the data set. Now that could be in one of two ways. Either they upload the data to the network, and I will show later on how that's done securely. Or they can actually store it in some of their own nodes and just provide enough context to the network on where that data lives. The network then computes some kind of address, like a permanent address, kind of like a DNS, that the network can then route consumers to that data set. The data provider then takes that address that unique address, submits a transaction to the off-chain network, also puts the price of the data in some other metadata, and also stores a deposit, which I'll touch a bit later on. Now that the data, that data set is registered on-chain, there's a reference to it off-chain, a data consumer can actually come in and send a message to the blockchain saying, hey, I want to subscribe to this feed of data, and obviously they need to provide payment, and they also need to provide a deposit. A deposit is there in case the consumer defaults in their payments in the future. So one note about the incentive structure here, really what Enigma is trying to do is it's trying to kind of tokenize or capture in a token the value of data. We're trying to make something that's really implicit today, and kind of, I guess, stuck behind walls, we're trying to make that more open and very, very, very explicit. So there are two ways in which the incentives kind of work. The first one is the value of data, directly, that's an explicit metric, so a data provider basically sets a price to what their data is worth, and then the market either buys into that or no. That's the explicit value of data, and they have to share their earnings with the nodes, the worker nodes in the network that are doing computation, that are doing the storage, and that is really where the implicit value of data is also reflected. Another note about discovery and ranking. So we expect to have eventually many thousands of data sets in our system of all kinds. We can employ some statistical methods, we can tag data sets, but at the end of the day we need to find some mechanism to run data sets that are kind of in the same bucket. And the best way we see to do that is by directly correlating the economic incentive that is locked in a data set with its rank. What I mean by that is that simply the amount of money that people have bought into that data set plus some factorization of the deposit that the data provider has put in. So basically the idea with the deposit here is that data providers need to kind of put their money where their mouth is. That sets the rank of a data set and kind of break ties. Now this is a good way to transition to the off-chain computation and storage. Again would be pretty high level, but I want to go through some of the main ideas. This is really where the heavy lifting happens, off-chain, and we'll talk about that next. So the main idea is, and that's the main idea that we also set in the 2015 white paper is as follows. Global consensus is expensive, I think all of us here are aware of that. It's not scalable, it's very pricey. We need to figure out a way to basically segment the network and for different computations, for different storage, different data sets, data blocks that we're storing we need to make sure that only some of the network is utilized. And we need to do it in a way that's secure enough. Again it does, it's not as, you know, won't be as perfect security as like global consensus but good enough for, you know, decentralized needs and scalable enough. There are a couple of good ways to do that. You know, first of all let me touch on the stakeholders here. So you probably know this as sharding, that's kind of what's been popularized in the space. I'm going to use quorums. Quorums is more of an academic term saying that you have a large network, you select like a committee and that committee is really in charge of like some portion of the data, some portion of the state, some portion of the computation.  Likely small it's big enough that it's secure but small enough that it's scalable and to select that quorum, there are several techniques. Most of them use threshold cryptography or secret sharing which is very similar. You can also use random beacons on the blockchain which are very fast but they have some trade-offs in terms of the entropy that you can get. But with kind of like this black box, you can actually for each data you can select only a handful of nodes that will be in charge of that and that's where you kind of get like your scalability properties. Sorry. But that raises the questions. Once we have a quorum for one data set, right, and that quorum needs to make sure, we need to make sure that that quorum always runs the computation correctly over that data set and we also need to make sure that that quorum itself cannot actually see the underlying data if that data is sensitive. These are the tricky questions that we have and I'm going to talk about that now. So this is not an exhaustive list but this is meant to give you kind of like a quick overview of different techniques in the literature for handling outsourced correct computation with privacy. So let me go very quickly over that.  Like there's zero privacy in it and it's very, and it's not scalable at all. Then we have something I like to call partial encryption. Not a scientific term but that's like an umbrella for like order-preserving encryption, deterministic encryption, kind of like encryption methods that are not perfect but give you some confidentiality for the data but zero integrity. And then we really get to the interesting stuff of like the really heavy machine guns of cryptography. We have fully homomorphic encryption which is would be the best if we ever figure out a way to do it fast enough. Right now we're not sure how to do it. There's Snarks which are great if you want to prove a statement and then verify that many, many times but for other use cases it is unfortunately limited and you have multi-party computation which we feel is a good trade-off. Multi-party computation gives you, you can basically compute anything with privacy, with correctness under some assumptions. It is more scalable than the other cryptographic solutions because it really only uses symmetric cryptography but I do want to emphasize that it is still much slower than like hardware-based solutions and of course computing over unencrypted data. And this is why actually we at Enigma we're focusing, it's a bit off here, we're focusing on both of these technologies, MPC and secure hardware. So secure hardware is stuff like Intel SGX and trusted execution environments. We feel that MPCs is great for like applications like identity where you want to have zero trust but if you're okay with having some minimal trust in the vendor which is what secure hardware requires you then you can really get full functionality great scalability and privacy. And with that I'm going to yeah I think I have enough time. I want to walk you through kind of like the basics of MPC, right? MPC is an amazing technology, it's something we've been working on for a while and that also would help to illustrate kind of like the strengths and weaknesses of it. So MPC says something like this imagine there's an ideal world where we have like this Godlike computer that we can trust and we can outsource every computation to it. Now that trusted machine would never leak the data, no one can breach it and we can always trust it to run the computation correctly. But in the real world that's not possible so what MPC comes and said let's simulate that trusted machine, let's simulate that with the network kind of like the argument that blockchain is making by the way. Let's simulate that with the network and the statement says and this is a simplified statement that as long as there's at least one honest node, at least one node that is not a bad actor you can actually make sure that the computation is correct every computation and that no node in the network, no one in the network can actually see the raw data. And that basically means that data remains encrypted end to end. Let me walk you through a simple example. Let's imagine we have a network of three nodes a very small network and let's say we have the data provider on one hand and then a data consumer. I'm ignoring the blockchain here I'm just talking about the process of the off-chain storage and computation. So let's say a data provider wants to store some number X what it does locally it basically goes through a protocol called secret sharing that protocol essentially splits that data into shares and encrypted shares and sends one share to each node. So node one has X1 node two X2 and node three X3. These shares are completely encrypted no one and the others cannot see anything about the raw X. Then we do the same thing with Y and then actually the data provider can go offline data lives in the network now a consumer comes in wants to run some computation the state of the network is that they collectively hold X and Y but it's encrypted as shares in each node. Now the consumer comes in and wants to compute just X plus Y so because of the properties of secret sharing actually that comes for free. We can just each node can really compute their local shares which give them the encrypted summation and then they can just send all of the shares back to the consumer and the one thing about secret sharing is that if you have all the shares in one place you can reconstruct you can decrypt the data but the important part to realize is that there was a computation going on in this network and we can extend that network as much as we want but none of the nodes in the network have actually seen the raw data. They have just operated on fully encrypted data which is pretty amazing. So let's run another example with multiplication. I'm going to go fast over that it's like more complicated I just want to give you the main ideas so multiplication requires communication between the nodes they can just compute it locally but we know that if you get all the shares in one place then you can decrypt the data so we need some trick we need to avoid that so what happens in MPC and that happens here but that really happens in every like if you're writing a VM and you're implementing any kind of protocol you're actually going to use the same trick over and over and the trick is simple. Whenever you need to share some information with other nodes you're going to re-encrypt it using some like a one time pad and then you're going to send the information so that's what the nodes are doing here then they're communicating that information with each other and then they're doing some more local computation that if you kind of plug the algebra in you would actually see that the Z's here end up being exactly the encrypted shares of the product of XY and then you can send that back to the consumer and the consumer again having all the shares can pull them back in and decrypt the data and the network saw nothing which is and that's the point now why did I show you addition and multiplication other than them being like relatively simple well there's a nice theorem saying in computation theory saying that you know if you have addition and multiplication you can build any circuit essentially you can compute anything that you want so these are the building blocks that we need there are I mean a lot more complicated protocols how do you compare two numbers you know how do you do like floating points and fixed point operations many of these obviously I'm not going to get to here that was a lot of my T's actually doing in working about improving these protocols we got like between 10 to 100x speed up on quite a few foundational protocols but unfortunately I won't have time to discuss that here so that's it on the hard stuff I want to finish with like something simpler and kind of nice we feel that in order to bootstrap a data marketplace we need to also introduce some use cases right we need to set the demand side we need to bootstrap it with some interesting data and given the space we're in given what we're interested in given the state of everything that's related to like blockchain and cryptocurrencies data we felt that building I'm sorry in investment platform for cryptocurrencies where all the data that comes in and all the data that is like stored and is going to be kept on the enigma data marketplace and that kind of sets and boots up the network and also allows us to stress test the protocol as we are building this out now Catalyst is still centralized because the protocol is not yet live but Catalyst is live and operational if you're interested in algorithm trading like using crypto data for doing some research I really welcome you to try it out it's on our website this is one cool example so someone from our community has actually used Catalyst to build a model of Markovic portfolio optimizations on crypto assets which I think is fascinating we have a few other examples like that in our blog and I welcome all of you to really look into that and with that I'd like to finish if you're interested in you know off-chain computation the future of data, data marketplaces anything that I discussed right now please come talk to us I'm here John is John show your hand John is also here John is my co-founder please come talk to us and if you're excited about this and like you really want to be at the forefront of solving like really some of the most interesting and hardest problems like we're hiring people so come talk to us about that as well we'd love to hear from you thank you