7-1. We're back, we're live. Welcome back to Think Tech and our 3 o'clock rock. I'm Jay Feidel. This is Think Tech Tech Talks. Certainly everyone has heard of claims and sanctions around the hacking of our presidential and other elections in November. And we've heard of hacking in so many other places and contexts. After all, North Korea hacked Sony badly two years ago, and there have been regular hacks into government and industry in the U.S. and Europe ever since then. Seems like hacking is the word of the day, the new normal. And as it gets more malicious and dangerous to us and everyone else in the world, we should be increasingly concerned about it. Some say hacking large companies and government agencies by state actors or by state agents for actors is tantamount to war without the blood. Some go so far as to say we are not only at war, but that the level of hacking is really World War III. But do we know how they do it and how we can catch them doing it? No, not really. Maybe government knows, but the public doesn't really know much about it. Until now, until today. Today we have cybersecurity expert Andrew Lanning, who is incidentally the co-host of Hibachi Talk on Fridays. And he's going to elucidate what's going on in detail in the latest threat to our country and our society and our civilization. No stress, Andrew. Welcome to the show, Andrew Lanning. Thanks for having me. Happy New Year. It's good to be back on Think Tech. I think I was here Friday. We could never have enough of it. Thanks for the great intro. Oh, yeah. I'm scared, you know. I'm scared, too. They might shut us down right in the middle of this, if we'll get into too much of that detail you're talking about. Yesterday or the day before, and or the day before, every international airport in the country was stopped because the computer system that Homeland Security and Customs uses to vet people, you know, to vet people on the way into the country from foreign ports was broken for hours. I don't know if they fixed it even now.  Maybe this is some intentional maneuver. It's not the first time that Homeland Security and Customs have lost their computer system, but this is the first time it affected every international airport in the country. It's a little scary that this could happen, and it really makes you wonder if there are state actors involved in that, too, just giving us a warning, just telling us, watch out, because we can do this. My thought on that is that if, you know, if their intent on coming in, they wouldn't want to shut the airports down. So to me that's a little counterintuitive, but you never know what the intentions are.  Obviously everyone's concerned about the power grid, the wastewater treatment plants. All of these facilities are run by what's called programmable logic controllers, PLCs. These are devices that are, by and large, an interface between the controlling software and the devices that are doing the measuring, generators, pumps, these field devices that measure the flow of fluids, for example, through a pipeline or a gas through a line. You remember Stuxnet? Sure. It comes to mind, and those were Siemens' controllable PLCs, and somehow the Israelis, working with the US, found a way to create a virus that would go around the world but only visit in the ones in the Iranian centrifuges, nuclear centrifuges. And so it was really quite remarkable that they would only go into action when they found those Siemens' PLCs. But, you know, it can be done again. It can be done in PLCs everywhere. And PLCs that do incredibly critical things for our grid, for our water supply, for, you know, all our civic infrastructure. All of the automation that occurs in our critical infrastructure in the city is running with SCADA logic, right? So SCADA's very old protocol. It's on that side that talks to all those devices. Those devices, by and large, sat alone, and we talked to them through, you know, relay logic for many, many years. And then once they figured out how to put those onto the network, of course, they started talking via IP. And when they started talking via IP, those were initially, which is Internet protocol, they were initially closed systems, closed networks. But as things have gone on, those facilities ultimately brought in Internet connectivity, and the networks got merged, and somehow they found a way, you know, perhaps on purpose, perhaps not on purpose. But those controls were exposed to interfaces that were able to be opened. You know, when you say hacking, you're really just taking things that are available and putting them together in a new form, right? So, you know, these, when we talk about these things, we really have to talk about the people, the processes and the products, right? So this is what this is composed of. People say IOT, I call it the Internet of Theft. Most people think of that as the Internet of Things, and they think of the things. But things are only a part of that equation.  You've got social engineering possibilities. I mean, that's the way hackers started doing that. We had a hacker on ThinkTek back in the middle 2000s who used social engineering to get into, we get his software into people's homes. And he, you know, he had a way of appealing to them, and they believed him. It's still the preferred method. So in fact, you know, we talk about the cybersecurity framework. I'm giving a talk to the folks at RecordArma next week on a lot of this procedure that NIST has built. There's great guidance out there on how to protect ourselves, but it's all of the technical controls. So we have a cybersecurity framework. We have a CSC top 20 controls. All of these things you can do to really, really limit the tax surface that you have out there technically. But once I harden myself very well with my perimeter and all of my technology sound, and I'm monitoring for people trying to get in, what's the next thing you do? You pick up the phone and call you. Call the guy on the inside and get him to give me his password or find him how to give him some information. You know, Herman, this is, this is, well, I'm on the fourth floor of the company. You see me all the time in the men's washroom, you know, and I just forgot my password. And could you just let me have, meanwhile, that call is emanating from Moscow. Yeah, which usually they'll call as your IT service company. And hey, I got a problem with your account right now. I can see it's locked up. Can you do this? Yeah. And they try to get you to log in and share some information. Yeah, or the utility in Texas that sent away to China for boards, for boards, you know, for their, you know, electrical generation equipment. And the boards come back from China with a little tiny chip that's not in the specifications. Just piggybacking on the board, and they're all trying to figure out what happened. So I can tell you a bit about that. I sit on, on U.S. Cyber Security Committee, underwriter labs, which is responsible for vetting a lot of that technology that's been implemented, right?  And there's really not in the past been a process to, not that there's not a process, there's not a guidance or a regulated process to determine that your lab and the environment that you're loading this firmware onto these chips in is clean, first of all. It's not available to penetration. In other words, it's a dark room. It's not connected to the network road where I'm loading this. And in fact, that the load of firmware I'm putting on that chip completely fills that chip set up. Or, or that I can alert myself if that chip set's been tampered with after the fact. Once it goes out of production, out in the environment, is someone else taking it, you know, there's say you're only using 80% of the space available for your firmware. Well, there's 20% more space to put malware in there. And then I, if I'm a state actor, for example, and I want to get that type of equipment into a bunch of, of another government's military facilities or state facilities, sure, I'd love to be able to embed that into Cisco routers, for example, and sell fake Cisco routers.  Sure, like, you know, and, and, you know, procurement agent goes out and guy finds a way to sell, he may not even know he sold stuff that's not, you know, he maybe got a great price on it, doesn't know why, but doesn't question it.  Yeah, well, so a lot of the social engineering has happened, will continue to happen. Sure. And you have to be smart about it.  And there are people who make their living thinking like that. But I want to tell you an article that I saw over the weekend, I think it was in the Times, and it said that in Russia, Mr. Putin, remember him? Mr. Putin has made a concerted effort to build a veritable army of hackers. Sure. And he's hired them from the schools, he's hired from industry, he gives them incentives, he gives them threats, whatever you need. And he hires them from the prisons, too. Sure. So there's all these people who are all under intimidation, under sort of a control, social control that he has over them. And they're spread around the country, and they all work for this army of hackers. And they've been very successful. They hacked into the Ukraine. You know, as the war there was unfolding, they were bringing everything down. And now in the Baltics, you know, a couple of countries in the Baltics, you know, Estonia, Latvia, there's one other, where it's funny, the same kind of things happening. Their power grids are going down on a regular basis. Their government agencies are losing computer control. And it's just, it's too much coincidence to be coincidence. And so it's got to be coming from Russia. This is what he's doing. And, you know, I'm sure that social engineering is part of it, but there's a big part of it is getting in the back door, finding those ports. Sure. Finding ways to actually insinuate malware into government, you know, government computer systems. And with very smart guys, very heavily motivated or threatened to do what they got to do. So my question to you, well paid, well paid, our combination of the four. Yes, all the above. And so my question is this, you know, we have heard for years. Don't worry, Jay, because the United States of America has Silicon Valley. They have Andrew Lanning. They have all these guys in Washington in the NSA, you know, who do all the secret stuff. We are way ahead of them. And my question to you, Andrew, is really? Well, I like to think so. That is no reason to rest on our laurels. I do believe that all of these threat actors are actively collecting zero day vulnerabilities. I believe they have been for quite a while. Zero day means? Zero day means a currently undiscovered or unpublished vulnerability. So that, you know, if I know that I want to perhaps get into a Siemens controller, for example, and I've discovered a way to do that, and no one knows about it, I keep that. Or I sell that to some of these threat actors, for example. There are people that make a living going and discovering those vulnerabilities and then auctioning them off. All over the world. For example, sure. So a way to make a good buck. We also buy those. So, you know, that's a free market economy in the globe. I believe that as much of a threat as others pose, I believe we pose a similar threat to them. We are not inept in this space. I think we like to show a lot less of our capability than we have. I think in the cases that you're speaking about, perhaps these actors are showing their rays in their skirt a little bit high. This stuff is trackable. It's easy to figure out where it's come from. It's easy to see its footprint, how it moves. And so when I say easy, I say there are people that are watching this stuff constantly as it unfolds, as it develops, and then study in the ramifications. So it's kind of easy for them to see the tools that are used. And these tools are freely available for you and I to buy. They're packaged, bundled, talk about that because I've looked at that. That's Andrew Lanning. He's with Integrated Security Technologies. We're talking about cyberterrorism as a new normal in our world, not only our country, our world. We'll take a short break and come back. We're going to find out about these tools that you can do and I can do and anybody can do for the cost of nothing that are available on the web right now today.  We'll be right back. Hello, I'm Marianne Sasaki. Welcome to Think Tech Hawaii where some of the most interesting conversations in Honolulu go on. I have a show on Wednesdays from one to two called Life in the Law where we discuss legal issues, politics, governmental topics, and a whole host of issues. I hope you'll join me. Oh, huh. How are you doing? It's me, Angus McTech. Wishing you to welcome and join us to see us on Hibachi Talk on Think Tech Hawaii. Join my co-hosts, Gordo the Tech's out and Andrew the security guy every Friday from 1300 to 1345. We look forward to see you. We'll talk tech and we'll have some weave into fun. And remember, let your wing gang free where area B. Aloha. Okay, we're back alive with Andrew Lanning talking about cyber terrorism as a new normal.   It drives us here at Think Tech. We're curious about everything. All right. You know, lo and behold, I found a bunch of programs that allowed me to hack and they were free, actually free. And I know they're not the big time stuff that you would use. For example, they might not be any good. They might not even work. But if I wanted to be a cyber terrorist, if I wanted to discover some backdoor thing that I could sell, say to the Russian government, you know, how would I do that? Well, so anybody, I don't, I don't, I don't actually can't sit here and say that I know the law around reverse engineering things or exploring them for vulnerabilities. I do know that once you find a vulnerability there, you know, we have, you know, the Whitehead hacking team that tends to send that vulnerability out to that manufacturer, ask them to patch it. They'll tend to ask a few times, they'd like to be paid. If you don't patch it or ignore them, oftentimes they will release that information into the wild and then the manufacturers will patch it. You know, manufacturers have a part to play. Remember I talked about we have people, products, and processes, right? The manufacturers, by and large, the makers of many of these IoT devices specifically have been riding a wave of consumerism and they have been making money and they're not really willing to add expense to their manufacturing process unnecessarily. And as long as people keep consuming these products, these insecure products, they're not going to fix them. So there's one issue there that's a piece of this equation. But if you've discovered zero days, zero day vulnerabilities in an item, and this is something you would probably be doing in a lab, the feasibility of the vulnerability, of using the vulnerability, some are simpler, some are very difficult, some are man in the middle type of tax where you've actually got to be sitting on the device already. You know, they're not necessarily available through an open FTP port. But some are very poor manufacturing flaws where the default password and the default logon are actually available always, even after you've changed them as the administrator, they're available through an obscure port on the device that's open, like FTP for example. So this is a poor manufacturing flaw that I was sort of talking about, which Underwriter Labs is working to fix.  Then there's also the PLC, the industrial control system piece. So Underwriter Labs is working its way into that. Industry is obviously going away. We're not ready.  They want to fix it themselves, but they haven't for 20 years now. So I don't believe that they will. Can the government incentivize them to fix it? I think they've made enough money that government expects the industry, ultimately you and I'll pay. The better hardened devices will go up. The consumer, what I call this IOT to me is this consumer level of product that I think will always be fraught with this vulnerabilities. You know, the consumers are the last to get, take advantage of better technologies, right? It ultimately prices trickle down into the consumer grade products. The consumers, the guys with the the old junkie PCs on their desks. Yeah, they're killing us. Yeah, well what I mean though is if I have an old junkie PC at my desk and I don't have virus protection in there, then it's only a matter of time before I get a virus. I can sit there and watch it. It's a few seconds. A few seconds. Windows 95 today is broken in under a minute. You plug it in, you cannot patch it any longer. Now you can say oh that's bad because my machine will slow down and it won't work right but it's much worse than that. Oh yeah, it becomes a bot on there. It becomes a tool and agent for the bad guys. Yes. And then there's a global network of all this malevolence software out there and I am I'm part of it. Yeah. I'm part of the problem. Yeah. And I mean there must be millions and millions of junk old computers out there which don't have virus protection or do for that matter and have these bots on them and if somebody pushes a button in Vladivostok you know to activate all these bots we'll have a terrible price to pay. So you can go rent time on them. You and I can rent time. If I wanted to attack this studio for example and shut down this broadcast I can rent time from those bots, from those bot armies and they sell it by the minute, by the half hour, really, by the by the packet size, sure. So what does it take to take you down? So I don't want to buy 600 terabytes, I don't want to buy 600 terabytes per second for example or megabytes per second but if I only need 100 for example. So it's very tailorable to whatever I need. Maybe I just want to shut down a competitor of mine for a few hours because he's having a sale, for example. So this is all freely available. It's illegal. Don't get me wrong. You don't want to be involved in it. I could find it on the web. I could find it on the web and I could buy time on the bots to do horrendous things in around the world. Now just trust me. If you engage in this type of activity I'm quite confident there's people that know you're engaging in it, right? This is again how we talked about. We're also watching. Now we have organizations that are taking care of the security of our nation and they are monitoring this stuff so just because you go out of your home first time and you want to rent a bot, they want to watch what you want. This means they're going to come knock on your door. They're busy. They're really chasing. They're chasing really bad guys but they're chasing bad. Now if you're successful and you start to show a pattern of this and you actually cause some damage, you may find somebody at your door saying, hey Jay, we just like to talk to you and by the way we're going to take your computer with us and keep all your syslog files so we can demonstrate in court what you've done. Yeah and you can prove a case against me and I might get six months in the can. Or you might get a slap on the wrist. I might get nothing. It depends on the amount of damage. Because it's white collar crime just for kids. Sure. And you're not treated as having real criminals see enter over it. Yeah. And so I think a lot of them either don't get prosecuted or get away completely and that's got to change. I don't think. I sat through the FBI cyber or not cyber but the FBI citizens academy this year earlier the earlier last year sorry and we we got a briefing you know from all the different departments and I was amazed and I kept bringing up to them how often these white collar criminals only get very lenient sentences in my opinion. Like six years seem to be a very common thing for really hundreds of millions of dollars worth of theft or fraud or whatever oftentimes. Now they did talk the cyber unit has a very difficult time building its cases right because a lot of this stuff is international. That's what Donald Trump said yesterday. Yeah and they hard to prove hacking. It isn't hard to prove it attributing exactly who it's to takes a lot of forensic investigation and that's expensive. So I'm going to talk about that with the records group but you do want to you know if you're if you have liability for information you're storing and let's say you just decide well I'm going to keep two years of email well you know how much you might have to pay to have gone through if you get named in a suit two years of email so maybe you want to limit the amount of data that you store um from a liability perspective just so that the the in the discovery is not as expensive should you be named in a case for example. Huge expense undiscovery of all this all this forensic work is very very expensive in examining firewall logs and sys logs. But the likelihood is that there's really not not enough government prosecutorial interest in pursuing these cases and and putting bad actors in jail for significant periods of time and they do it and they essentially get away with it even if they have done real damage to the community. I was amazed to find and I can tell you that there are there's a lot of value gained in watching these actors until they really go too far there was a group of um gentlemen recently eight of them who were arrested for found they got into the controls in a dam in the united states uh they actually got to the controllers of the sluice ways Americans yes no they were not Americans they could have opened the sluice ways the sluice ways were offline for maintenance but they did get that far now these guys had been doing a lot of other stuff and our services had been watching them for a while doing crime but once they went that far they went and got them yeah so what I'm saying is they gain a lot of you know they're gathering intel right and you know so maybe they put up with a little bit of this and a little bit of that to get learn more about the operations of the team and learn more about the team members all that kind of stuff so gathering intel and I was when I left I was like wow you know they're bad guys me I wouldn't have the patience to do that kind of investigation but I'm glad that we have people that do yeah I hope we continue that but here we are and it's never been raised so starkly in this country where some foreign actor has manipulated I think it's clear that some foreign actor has manipulated our election process and it's not clear whether you know the ballot box was tampered with one way or the other I mean I our public opinion or whatever it may be sure it's public opinion that was tampered with which is actually it's a root of the ballot box you know very well and will leverage there than on the ballot box so you got to give them credit for going to where decisions are made and I think that Russia has done that before arguably we have done it before and I think that's the new normal too manipulating public opinion with false news fake news and then fake news about the fake news you get there was an article about that too how the people who are generating the fake news when charged with generating fake news they come back and and say that the charges itself fake news everybody's doing fake news and you can't believe anything anymore so my question to you here at our closing Andrew okay is all regard to reality to all that we know to all that you know in the business what's going to happen here where is the world going what is this new normal where is it going to take us is it are we going to resolve this are we going to you know sort of compensate for the problem deal with it or are we going to you know sink the ship under it oh well I'll keep getting better at the game it's a game it's a game and we'll all keep getting better at it and better at it and better at it where it ends up I don't know if we start to lock countries out of each other lock everyone's doors lock all their power grids and that becomes the the game so be it but it you know I think the world economy uh we'll we'll keep a lot of that in check you know we it doesn't it doesn't help any piece of the the world anymore to have a nation shut down so I don't know it's interesting to see what that type of impact would be yeah well you know Donald Trump and for that matter Putin have been talking about escalating nuclear proliferation these days and of course North Korea so we have this whole proliferation on us and then Donald Trump says that's not going to happen well remains to see be seen whether that happens but I think one thing is clear is that the same as you mentioned the same principle of deterrence is present on cyberterrorism it's the same thing if I know that you can you know really hurt me and we both have arguably equal capability with each other I'm not going to hurt you because I don't want I don't want to pay back it's surely a thing of where we don't know what we don't know and again that goes with hiding all those vulnerabilities that everyone knows about you know and so that's a you know we don't know what they know they don't know what we don't know and it's an interesting it's an interesting detente I guess of a new kind perhaps you know if I were a world leader it would it would concern me I don't think any of them will let up with their efforts to to raise their game let's put it that way it's the new normal it's the new normal thank you Andrew Andrew Lening great to have you on the show we gotta do this again it's fun


we're going to do lipocontoring of the neck area. No incision, a little hole in behind the ear so it's hidden. The other thing is I'm going to go down and chisel her jaw bone. There it is. The main area we're going to attack is this. We're going to give her a nice L-shaped jaw line. We're going to take all this out right here. Concentrated in this middle area. Take all this out. Sir, are you ready? I'm ready. Let's get going. Okay, so you can see we've added two-mesant solution underneath the skin and everywhere it's white. So that means that she's numbed up and the epinephrine is working.  We're starting to do the lipo. How are you doing? Very good.


All yours take it away. Alright, thanks everybody for coming today. I'm Brian Gary I'm the learning design and open education engagement librarian and State University is formally at high university. And I'm joined today by my friend and colleague Christopher Guter who is the subject librarian for education at Ohio University. And so we're going to discuss how we changed our open education initiatives at Ohio universities to move away from activities like workshops and trainings that were aimed more at. OER adoption and required a lot of time and labor from librarians to a grant initiative that was aimed more at we are creation. And where librarians took on more of a project management role so it was much less labor intensive for the library, and it, which you know makes it more sustainable and scalable for the library. But it also provided more opportunities for students to become involved and, you know, actually get to create OER. So I'll turn it over to Chris he's going to start us off. Cool. Thank you very much. Okay, so my name is Chris, and I wanted to start with just a picture of our library. It's done with some sort of a fisheye lens so it's kind of trippy looking and you really have would have no idea if you. This is unrecognizable but at least you get the color. This is our second for learning commons. I was taken by a guy named Thomas shift so Tom if you're listening I apologize. Okay. So, a lot of what I'm going to be talking about initially in this presentation has to do with labor. And so I thought this little snapshot of what our campus, what our campus library looks like would help you best understand as I move forward, our concerns regarding So we are a doctoral university high research activity, you can see the numbers of faculty of 34,000 students, probably more important to this though is our ARL statistics are association of research library statistics. I checked these last week, and we are at the bottom of the bottom quartile in terms of late staffing. So professional staff support staff and student support staff were ranked pretty close to the bottom 110106 and 113. So again just as we move forward keep that in mind. Okay, so here are the four open access projects, we called them initiatives at the beginning. We started in 2015 so I have like seven minutes to try to rush through five years of work so I apologize for that. But as you see, we started out in 2015 and then we culminated with a very good grant and 2018 which I will talk about in just a moment. So 2015 2016 we created what was called the alt textbook initiative. And the funny thing about this was you can see by the date it was right before the elections here in the US, and we did have a faculty member that asked that we change the name. He was a little worried that alt textbook would be too confused with the alt right. But I believe he was the only person that actually mentioned that and so we muscled through and to my knowledge there were no other complaints. You can see by the timeline October 2015 to 2016 to June 2016. I think that's nine months 10 months something like that. Pretty long time frame, pretty heavy in terms of staff. I think we had 12 to 13 librarians working on this workshop, and then two to three people outside of the libraries instructional committee members teaching and learning folks. So it was approximately 16 staff members over the course of nine months. The result was one workshop that was offered twice. So it was the same content repeatedly offered. So our incentives $500 if you were a faculty member that was working on a project that was under 99 people. It was a stipend of $1,000 if your project your OER textbook was going to help more than 100 students. This ended up being probably the most pricey of our alt textbook initiative 16,000 but it did end up in terms of savings, provide approximately $236,000 in textbook savings to students. Again, two identical workshops, probably nine months of planning. The next one 2017 our old textbook to initiative, much smaller timeline I think we're looking at five to six months but we actually upped the university staff. We spread it across three units on campus. So we had library staff we had Office of Innovative Instruction staff and then we also had a partnership with the Scripps College of Communication. So we split the costs. So for the library it ended up only being $2,000 and then each unit paid $2,000 which is where the total cost of 6000 comes from, and the savings to students was approximately 192,000. This actually ended up being a lot more work involved more staff, it actually changed from one workshop offered twice to six workshops open, offered once each time. And then if you had a faculty member in there then the librarian had to be present and several of us actually provided content so I think the picture the image on the screen right now is one of our A deans giving a talk about copyright. So, in terms of staffing and in terms of hours this one actually increased for 2017 2018 we started going in the opposite direction. So instead of offering workshops. We ended up offering one workshop where we did not provide the content. So in this case we joined OTN, which is now open education network. They sent staff to our library to present these programs, and then we offered stipends to faculty members who would agree to come to the workshop and then also agree to review and open textbook. So that's the streamlining. That's the next component of that year's work. This is something that librarians typically would offer so in this case we were really trying to push subject liaisons meeting up with faculty to talk about finding either library purchase content or we are to insert into syllabus into into syllabi and instead of textbooks cost saving students money. So the component of that year was we purchased be pressed to start an institutional repository, and we call our repository the Ohio Open Library. And I'll talk a little bit more about that. The second. So lastly before I hand this off to Brian. So we got Brian and I as well as Dr. Ganeshan received a grant in 2018. It's $20,000 grants, and it was meant to encourage OER adoption and aims specifically at undergrads. So I had $20,000 over two years to create these projects which you see on the screen. So one thing it could not pay for was faculty stipends. So we were sort of, we're sort of handcuffed in that regard, we could not pay faculty for their work. But what ended up happening was we changed the way we looked at these projects and we ended up producing. I would say some some projects here that I'm pretty proud of with relatively low cost so I'll just walk through these really quickly. So the art history test bank this ended up being probably our most valuable project that ended up saving approximately $52,000 a year in student savings from textbooks. What I did. So the art history entry level our history class. They had already committed to using OER products. What they did not have was a test bank and the professor I was talking with said you know this is the one of the most time consuming components of this. We really want to use OER but the creation of a test bank is problematic. I paid a graduate student to work with that faculty member to just create hundreds of questions for that test bank, and then those things can then be added to year after year. I think it's not going to go away and as I said it was a $52,000 savings. The Occupational Health and Safety textbook. This professor wanted to change textbooks you've been using the same one for many years. And since this particular discipline, a lot of it is government related and open access already. So I paid a graduate student to work with that faculty member to take his written calm content, as well as the free stuff that she could find online, and dump it into something into be pressed so you can see the at the bottom of the slide that that green cover that's one of the two volumes that they ended up creating for the Occupational Health and Safety course. In the journalism course, they had already made the transition to a O'Reilly book, which the library has in their collection digitally so essentially to the student it's a free textbook. But what they didn't have was the supplemental workbook and media content. So that's what I ended up paying I ended up paying a student to help that faculty create the content. So my consumer science project was just a straightforward syllabus streamline so that professor taught online courses they were going to use top hat and they just wanted to find readings that they could drop into top hat in exchange for the textbook. So that was that the Spanish linguistics textbook which Brian will talk about in just a second was actually one of my favorite projects and I'll just let Brian talk about that in a minute. So savings estimates you can see here in the middle. This is how much of the grant money was spent on each of those projects. So I think it roughly about $13,000 I returned about 7,000 to the actual to the to the university and unused grant funds. And then over here on the right, you can see the project savings so savings and textbooks, as well as the number of students affected by those textbooks every year. So it's roughly $80,000 saved, which is lower than the previous initiatives but I think. And where we're going with this is that instead of librarian labor instead of functional librarians and subject librarians and a dean's spending their time on it you have one librarian who is a project manager. And that project manager oversees the students that are working on these on these projects and you save a lot of time, and the ability is amplified that you could have multiple more than five projects going at a time and create that kind of savings. I think this is you Brian. Thanks Chris. Yeah, so, in addition to you know the cost savings aspect of all of this. The grant was also able to support faculty in terms of, you know, going beyond just we are adoption to having some pedagogical innovation and getting students to actually be involved in the creation of we are. Specifically this linguistics textbook that I'm going to talk about a little bit is is a really great example of, you know how how faculty were able to incorporate open pedagogy into their courses, and if you'd like to read more about it. We have a chapter about it. There's a link on the screen there. There also be a link on the final slide but if you go go ahead to the next slide please Chris. So this particular project was was motivated motivated by the fact that the existing commercial textbooks in this area were written at a level that was beyond the proficiency that that her students had with both with Spanish and with linguistic concepts. And so what she decided to do was to actually have students work on projects that would create a new textbook and so there were a lot of different assignments that were built into the course over time and from semester to semester. The general assignments would be built in that would contribute more content to this textbook and initially it came out of a study guide assignment that Dr Ganesh and I worked together to create a rubric for as part of a separate work series. But the the grading for this particular course is done based on specifications grading so students are given either credit or no credit so they're not having to focus so much on grade and can focus more on process and learning. And also they're given the opportunity to revise which again helps them to focus on learning but it also yields a final product that you know is a little bit closer to being ready to publish. The next slide please Chris. So anytime you're doing you know some sort of work with students you really have to be cognizant of their agency. And so with this particular project students were able to opt in so they didn't have have to have their contributions go into the final textbook if they wanted to. And so that there was no sort of undue pressure put on them, they would fill out a form that was handed into the departmental administrative assistant, who would hold on to those until after final grades were handed in. So we had a workshop on creative commons for the students so that they understood more about creative commons and open licensing and we're able to actually make the decision for themselves about how they wanted to license the textbook. And so the students were were the ones who chose the license for it. Go to the next slide please Chris. So the students in the course who were contributing content. The grants also paid for student editors to work on the on the project and so these were students who had greater proficiency with Spanish and with with linguistics, and they helped with a lot of different things like editing and organizing the content, but also incorporating more content to help keep it up to date and working on an audio version of the textbook as well. So go to the next slide please. In addition to those students. There were also some contributions from a fine arts student who was paid to draw illustrations for the for the textbook, and also an alumna of the university who is a current employee also was responsible for designing the cover of the textbook. Next slide please Chris. So there were a lot of benefits for students beyond just the cost savings aspect of it. This is really a much more engaging learning experience where they, you know, we're doing something more than just disposable assignments and we're able to, you know, be knowledge themselves. And then the student editors who were working on this also learned some specialized skills, as far as you know, putting this into press books and editing and all sorts of things like that. Another benefit of the fact that this was done in an open format was that because this is such a time consuming process done over multiple semesters. We're able to be put into use in the course as they were completed rather than having to wait for the entire textbook to be completed. And I'll hand it back over to Chris to wrap it up. Thanks Brian. On the slide here you can just see some recommendations. I think they're probably might be specific to us, but depending on how your, your institution handles this kind of thing. If funding is an issue, I would suggest working towards fewer library staff whose salaries are higher and instead pay student employees when possible to do this kind of work. And I think it benefits them as Brian said it helps. It helps with their CVs they have a project they can point to. It's not a disposable assignment it's something that's out there and can live on. If money is available, I think stipends and incentives seem to be attractive. And then as a sub bullet, try to encourage funders to be more flexible and to allow for those types of stipend purchases purchases for those stipends as initiatives. Because I think in our case it really would have helped us get more projects going. If dedicated professional staff are limited or non existent move towards project management again the 1804 grant for the most part was just me signing time cards and hiring students to do the work and dealing with faculty and making sure everything is running smoothly. And then lastly, faculty and staff leave so plan accordingly. I'm needing to figure out some ways to move projects forward now that some faculty have left so it happens everywhere but yeah just plan accordingly, I guess, and I believe that is it yes. So, we're here for a while I guess I don't know if there's time but if you have any questions, we can try to answer. Thank you guys so much.


USF-16 knocks out China's JF-17 from Argentine fighter deal, as Javier Malay vows no business with Beijing? Argentina's newly elected president, Javier Malay, has openly conveyed a less optimistic view on diplomatic ties with China. This stance significantly reduces the likelihood of the anticipated deal for Chinese JF-17 jets, to be sold to Argentina during his tenure. China's J-11 flanker L takes a toll on US Air Force, US resumes mill-to-mill contact with PLA to deflate tensions. Following the election of Argentina's new president, headlines emerged suggesting the potential strain in relations between Buenos Aires and Beijing under his leadership. Furthermore, Javier Malay's chief foreign affairs advisor, Diana Mondino, announced a shift in Argentina's stance toward. The Association of Leading Emerging Markets, consisting of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. According to Mondino, Buenos Aires would refrain from joining the block, citing a lack of perceived benefits, and be willing to reconsider if advantages emerge. During the election campaign against incumbent finance minister Sergio Massa. The right-wing libertarian Malay had declared his unwillingness to engage in business with communist countries. Advocating for the termination of relations, with China in favor of aligning with, what he referred to as the civilized side of the world. Malay also accused China of financing pro-Massa advertisements on YouTube during the campaign. This marks a departure from the outgoing government's approach, which actively nurtured the relationship with China. Malay is set to assume the presidency on December 10, raising concerns about the future of Argentina's economic ties with China, a significant trading partner and the primary export market for agricultural products. Argentina's economic ties with China are significant, with China ranking as Argentina's second largest trading partner in its primary export market for agricultural products. Since 2008, Argentina has entered into financing agreements with China totaling US$8.1 billion through nine loan contracts, with a substantial portion directed through the China Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China for various projects. Despite Malay's critical stance, Chinese authorities view bilateral relations positively and have cautioned the president-elect against severing diplomatic ties, noting the potential for steady progress and economic cooperation. Yet, Malay and his associates have also declared Argentina's intention to see state-to-state trade agreements and secret talks with China. Uncertainty surrounds China's aspirations to sell JF-17s to Argentina. Malay's critical stance towards China poses a potential obstacle in the negotiations, for Argentina's procurement of the China-Pakistan JF-17 fighter jet. This deal, previously hailed as a symbol of increasing collaboration between the two nations, now faces uncertainty. Argentina's long-standing endeavor to modernize its aging fighter jet fleet has frequently encountered obstacles. With the UK employing diplomatic pressure to discourage other nations, from selling aircraft due to historical disputes. Previous instances reveal British embargoes impeding Argentina's efforts to procure the Swedish Saab Gripen and the South Korean FA-50 trainer-slash-light fighter. When indications arose suggesting Argentina's potential interest in purchasing Chinese jets. The US, apprehensive about this increasing collaboration, intervened by presenting its F-16 fighter jets as a substitute for the JF-17. In parallel, India also proposed its Tejas aircraft to Buenos Aires. However, the JF-17 is frequently regarded as an appealing option for Argentina due to its immunity from potential UK vetoing of parts. Making it the sole aircraft that aligns with the budgetary constraints of the Argentine Air Force. Furthermore, China has maintained its position on the Falkland Islands matter, staunchly supporting Argentina's claim to sovereignty over the region. Under the outgoing government, Buenos Aires has engaged in discussions with Beijing to procure the JF-17 Block III. Considered Argentina's preferred choice in its pursuit of military aircraft. The Block III model boasts advanced avionics, flight control systems, an active electronically scanned array, AESA, radar. And a combination of China's high performance beyond visual range and short-range missiles. Yet, the dynamics between Argentina and China are poised for a major shift as the newly elected president assumes office on December 10. The explicit stance against advancing relations with China implies that Argentina might pivot towards considering options. Such as the US-made F-16 or the Indian-made Tejas for their military aircraft needs. Speaking to Eurasian Times, Andrei Serban Paan, international analyst and president of Argentinian think tank cries. Also suggested that under the leadership of the new president, the prospective deal, to acquire Chinese fighter jets is unlikely to progress. Paan, a former advisor at the country's strategic affairs secretariat, explained, as you may already be aware, the negotiation for the F-16, which is an alternative to the JF-17, is already well advanced with the outgoing government. This is partly because the minister of economy, Massa, the presidential candidate who just lost against Malay, was particularly interested in advancing that project to strengthen the relationship with the US. The US plays a key role in the IMF and therefore holds crucial importance for Argentina. He further said, we have to see the composition of Malay's foreign policy and defense teams. But there are clear indications that both are likely to adopt a very pro-western approach in foreign policy and defense issues. So, the prospects of Chinese fighters will likely be reduced significantly, and the option for buying US-made F-16s will be further strengthened. However, he also proposed an alternative scenario, highlighting that there is always a chance that. Argentina might refrain from making any purchases due to budget constraints. This possibility should be viewed as only a potential outcome, with the option for. The country to delay its procurement budget until the following year. The F-16s are part of the Denmark Air Force fleet, and the United States aims to transfer them to Argentina. The US vehemently opposes the prospect of Chinese fighter jets patrolling the skies of Latin America. This idea is unequivocally unwelcome in Washington, primarily due to the perception that many issues in the region are viewed through intense global power competition. Consequently, the US government has already authorized Denmark to sell used F-16s to Argentina. This decision prompted the Biden administration to inform Congress about its plans to endorse the Danish sale. Furthermore, a senior State Department official was reportedly dispatched to Buenos Aires to engage in discussions concerning this issue. Nonetheless, the prospective purchase will mark a key victory for Argentina's beleaguered Air Force. The F-16, a more advanced aircraft than the Chinese JF-17, would elevate Argentina's military capabilities to align with its neighboring nations. Beyond bolstering the Air Force's effectiveness, acquiring Western equipment carries additional strategic weight. It will ease tensions between Buenos Aires and Washington, which is especially crucial given Argentina's current need, for support from the United States at the International Monetary Fund.


Okay, we're back here live inside theCUBE. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angle. I'm here with Sacha Bates, the bratty redhead. Goes by, that's her firm name. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you for having me. So we were ending the day on a power women note here. We have a tsunami of power ladies coming into theCUBE. So welcome. Are you saying we're rolling over here today or something? I mean, it's got us some amazing guests. So tell us first, what's going on here in your world? Obviously, the Velocity Conference, this isn't about the browser anymore. It's about UI, UX performance, but it's about deployment, production, DevOps. That world is now kind of coming together. It's true. It's about people, really.  And when you can solve the people problems, I think the tech really just kind of falls into line. So what's your big take on, how would you describe Velocity Conference as someone saying, what kind of conference is that? Cloud Conference, the UI conference. What kind of conference is it?  And if you are in operations at all, or if you understand scale at all, or if you're working in a big way, or if you are looking for people like you in open source a lot of times, you will find them here, really. There's a lot of, you can also say hug ups, because we have a lot of that going on. We are big into people. I mean, there's a lot of tech here. You will, we talk about tech all the time, but if you check out the talk that I did today, one of my biggest points is that this is hard, but people are harder, and inside yourself, you're even harder. So these are the problems that you need to solve a lot of times, and the tech will fall into line. And if you go out and look at the talks, you'll see a lot of that where people are talking about, I just left a talk where James Turnbull was talking about the mythology of operations and how we tell ourselves stories and build up these mythologies around things. I love the hug ups we had in the earlier. So just talk about what you talked about, getting started with configuration management. This is an area that's in automation, it's a tricky thing, especially when you have convergence going on. It's not the same old load balancers, you got firewalls, you have networking gear. I mean, networking stuff is kind of in transition anyway. You got SDN and virtualization. So configuration managers is getting, seems to be getting harder and harder. When you look at that, is it getting harder? What's making it easier? I mean, puppet chef, these are some tools that are out there, but I mean, how do you look at that? What are some of the things that are happening there? Well, and first of all, I'm actually not sure that I would say that we're losing a lot of the old stuff, because yeah, I mean, if you live here in San Francisco and in Silicon Valley, that's the truth. But you know what, there's a big bubble here, and the enterprise exists, right? So the enterprise is not going away anytime soon, and neither are there data centers, and neither are there special snowflakes. I mean, we like to say that the world is no longer full of snowflakes, but it really is. And so, what you really get out of configuration management anytime is that it does make some things harder, but it allows you, when you use it, to actually get rid of the tedium. You automate out a lot of chance and unknowns when you write the automation, and it allows you to get the day-to-day stuff that you have to do over and over off your hands, so that you can actually concentrate on real problems. So, what you really get, it's a lot like automated testing, right? When you have automated testing, you have smarter QA folks, because they're writing code to do more testing. And what you get with automation is you get, you automate the stuff that you don't want to work with. It's tedious, it's boring, it's repetitive, and then you have smarter ops folks because they are actually working on real problems to solve instead of pushing buttons. So let me ask you about the enterprise, because that's an area we cover a lot of. She suffered a fine data center, it's the big bubble hype, but that's a destination, that's like the moonshot. That's like saying we want to get to the moon in the 60s, right? Eventually we might get there, we'll see what happens. But certainly like IT still has automation issues and planned downtime is a big problem. So planning the downtime to do the upgrades, to do the configuration, so it's still manual. What are you seeing? Where is the world at in your view? If you look at mainstream IT, mainstream enterprises, where are they on the scale? Are they almost in college? Are they still in kindergarten? Relative to, you know, I got multiple gear, I got rack and stack stuff. It really depends on where they are in the cycle of getting it. I don't really want to be all like clickish about that, but it's where they're getting it, right? So if you talk to places like Nordstrom or if Best Buy in Minneapolis has been doing platform transformation for three plus years now, and they have started to get it, so they are in that transition, right? Where they've started to start using the cloud and they understand the concept of disposable servers. You don't get attached to servers if they break, if they don't work, you get rid of it, and you only worry about it if it becomes a pattern of a problem, right? So a lot of these companies are starting to really get it. Some places have not yet, but like, again, HP and IBM are starting to really push a lot of this stuff too, and while they have corporatized some of the message, the patterns that they are taking with them are pretty sound, you know? And so some companies are still way back in the dark ages, but they're trying, so I've talked to a few companies who are really close to just kicking off this whole desire to, I mean, you hear it a lot, the concept of platform transformation, where you take stuff that is maybe five, 10 years old, and you start really trying to break it up, and you realize that you actually need the culture to go with the tools, otherwise it doesn't get very far. You know, I will say, we had the queue at HP Discover for three days there, and one of the things I will say, HP is willing to make change. They have moonshot, they're recognizing the challenges, and if they don't eat their own, someone else will. So, you know, obviously density in the data center, those are all challenges, but beyond that, it's a software issue, right? With big data and open source, what's your take on open source's impact to the enterprises? Because those guys are all trying to be the next Facebook, but they don't want, they can't get there fast enough. So they don't want to buy Oracle either, because they've done that, right? So a lot of the enterprises are like, hey, I bought the Oracle, I got the general purpose computing. I don't want that necessarily. I want to go commodity scale out, and I want to use open source. So, how does that change the game in your mind? It really does. I mean, what it does, one of the big things, one of the really obvious things, is it makes it more fun to work there for us. So the really smart people that you want to hire, if you say, come work on open source, you might actually get somebody going, okay, instead of, you want me to what? Yeah, how? You know, why do you want me to come in and do this thing with this proprietary software that I hate, as opposed to, come in, work on open source, we're going to let you be a part of the community, we're going to let you contribute back. Nordstrom's is doing that, Disney has started doing that a little bit, Best Buy is doing that, and it makes it more fun to work there, and that means that you can attract talent. Yeah, and you know what, that's the key thing you mentioned earlier, the human, it's all human issues, right? The technology was evolving, and that's the key, but I want to ask you a question, because we brought this up last week, I said in talking with the HP event, and the IBM event, we were at both events last week, open source is the new standards bodies. In the old days, when I was getting into the business, the IETF brand stuff, IEEE, all the standards bodies, they ratified stuff, right? Committees, hierarchies, not anymore. I mean, they're still around, but I mean, if you look at all the major innovation, it's community-driven. So, one, do you see that same picture, and two, what is out there? I mean, just look at OpenStack, what OpenStack has done in just such a short time, I mean, we were super critical of OpenStack at the beginning, because it was such a marketing program, they were, oh, I got cloud, I got OpenStack, but they kind of retooled and reset, and now it's just really delivering, because they deliver code. But OpenStack went from zero to hero, literally, in less than a year. Sure. Or maybe two, maybe 18 months. So, what's your view on that? Like, that's that dynamic that's people, it's tech. What's your- You mean open source in general? Open source is a standard driving, because a lot of stuff going on here at Velocity is a lot of the same way, the alpha geeks in the communities are driving through, I guess, crowdsource, democratization, I don't know what to call it, but it's certainly not a standard driving. I think people are starting to understand that the tech they use is not their secret sauce, right? I think that this is something we talk about a lot. The tech that you're using to drive your stuff, everybody else is using it too, and there's no point in keeping the stuff that you're doing a secret, because that's not what matters. Again, if you go back to people, especially with a lot of these web companies and stuff, what really matters is your customer and how you treat them, and how they can actually interact with you in things, and that's really where you're going to make a break, and not the technology that you use. Sasha Betts with Bates with Braddy Redhead Consulting. We are the queue. We will go until they turn the lights off. We will go where the stories are, we go where all the action is, so let's keep going until they pull the, at Oracle Open World was the only place they actually pulled the plug on the queue. They actually pulled the plug, literally pulled the plug out of the wall. So let's continue. This is quickly, just wrap this thing up. Velocity this year, how would you describe this event two days? What happened? What's your sound bite for velocity this year? Oh, well, it's different for different people, right? So we have a lot of different crowds that come in here. Those of us who have been here two or three years in a row or more, it's a lot like summer camp because we don't get to see each other very often. That's why Twitter is so active, right? Because that's how we keep in touch, and so it's like summer camp for a lot of us, but it's also a revelation for a lot of the folks who are new, right? I mean, a lot of folks are coming in from the enterprise now and they're really having their minds blown by a lot of the concepts that are still really fresh in the enterprise, and I'm really excited about that for them, having worked in the enterprise myself. It's great, great event. We got a wrap up here. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. We really enjoyed the conversation. I think you hit a lot of great points here that we need to amplify DevOps culture. It's not just what's in the Echo Chamber in Silicon Valley, certainly a lot of good stuff going on here, but mainstream IT, they're still got to be retooling big transformation there. People, people problem. Velocities at the center of it. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back with our wrap up after the short break here at the Velocity Conference, siliconangle.com and wikibond.org. We'll be right back.