Welcome back guys to the 21 convention before our next speaker was a teaching pickup with Neil Strauss himself for a couple years He was actually training law enforcement and military personnel how to kill without further ado. Here's Bravo the man himself Thank you for that awesome introduction, which I help right All right Before I got into pickup. I was actually a full-time firearms instructor. I'm a CCW instructor. I have three NRA Certifications, I'm a taser instructor edge weapon instructor low light. I went around and helped teach various military and law enforcement SWAT teams special forces group hostage rescue room clearing all that kind of fun stuff Did this just go out or is it still on? Okay So When I actually I got divorced too and that's how I got into this whole pickup stuff But beforehand this is what I did and we're talking about doing a cool like self-defense Awareness and also how to pick your first firearm So I was really trying to put all that together in this presentation if you guys have questions when I'm going through this stuff I'm gonna try to have a large Q&A section at the end. So write them down Don't so you don't forget them. I'm happy to answer as much as I can First off who here has ever fired a gun in their life before raise your hand Awesome I'm from Arizona, which is a pretty pro-gun place. So that's pretty cool How many people here have ever studied martial arts before raise your hand? All right, hopefully I don't make any of you mad when I rip on some of the bad ones Anyways, when I first got into Tactical training, this is something I always thought was if you cannot protect yourself for your loved ones you're not a man and You guys all heard about that court case a little bit ago Where the two drug dealers like kidnapped the wife went to the bank pulled out all this money Went did math came back raped the wife raped the kids set the house on fire the husband got out And then he lived everyone else died that whole court case just recently happened one of the senators houses Just got broken into like two three days ago And it was the grandson that came out with a shotgun and like actually protected him with a gun So that was always one of my things was if I can't protect myself I can't protect the people I care about I just didn't feel complete So I took this on my own to figure out how to defend myself how to defend my loved ones And if you guys want to do that, too If you especially would do in a firearm that I get asked this all the time What should you do go to a range and actually pay someone to teach you how to do it? Just like I got a motorcycle a little bit ago I didn't just go down to the dealership hop on it and ride home I went to the riding class learn how to do it responsibly so that way I don't kill myself or kill someone else This thing blew me away when I learned this the police have no duty to protect you. It's a little hard to see but that's a really overweight police officer eating a turkey leg and I have no confidence that someone like that is Gonna come to my rescue and help me and most of us have seen officers where they're pretty overweight and out of shape And you think they're gonna be there and help you out My brother's actually a cop my ex-father-in-law is a cop. I've trained more than I can count my brother's also a lawyer And a firefighter. That's what I had to compete with growing up But this blew me away when I learned this because we're all we're all brought up to think that when you call 9-1-1 The cops are gonna come there and help you well That's if they get there they might be dealing with something down the street and my brother would tell me that he would get a call It would take 20-30 minutes before you get to the house. So the whole time he's thinking like hopefully they can make it until then so when we're teaching the CCW classes we get into this kind of stuff and What I would recommend is you guys when you get home all Google this phrase The police have no duty to protect and just read all the shit that comes up But these are the two big ones and this is actually from the ACLU website, which I don't like the ACLU Just to show you how that other people besides crazy gun guys think about this Jessica Gonzales versus the USA and I'll just read it to you guys real quick June 1999 Jessica Gonzales's three daughters age 7 9 and 10 were abducted by her estranged husband and killed after the Colorado police refused to enforce restraining order against them Although Gonzales repeatedly called the police telling them of her fears for daughter safety.  I have an order against them by the time the cops show up They're already gone Nothing they can do So the cops can only enforce the laws they see them being broken now. Some of you guys might be thinking too. Well, I don't have restraining orders I don't have to worry about that What about someone else? Warren versus the district of Columbia March 16th 1975 Carolyn Warren and Joan Talifero who are roommates and Marine Douglas and her four-year-old daughter who lived on another floor We're awakened by the back door being broken down by two men later identified as Marvin Kent and James Morse They entered Douglas's second-floor room where Kent forced Douglas to sodomize them and then raped her So that's fucked up obviously with the sodomize. That's Extra fucked Warren and Telefino heard Douglas's screams from the floor below and they called the police They ended up going outside like the balcony. There's like this adjoining roof They waited outside and actually watched a police car do a slow drive-by past the back of the house The cops never even got out. They just drove by real slow Another officer knocked on the front door, but left when no one answered a few minutes later So they called the police a second time saying what the fuck? Someone's getting raped and attacked come back here Well that what that 911 call got miscategorized as an investigate trouble. It was never even dispatched a Little while later after the screaming stopped. They thought the police were there They called down which ended up alerting Kent of their presence for the next 14 hours They were raped robbed beaten and forced to commit sexual acts upon one another and the four-year-old daughter was there After this all happened they left they ended up recovering calling for help Sue the police department the court held that the police are not liable for failure to provide adequate police protection So it sucks, but you're on your own you got to learn how to defend yourself You got to learn how to take care of yourself and then afterwards What I always recommend is then calling the police and letting them know Hey, I just use my gun or whatever and then deal with it That's at least my thought because I've trained a lot of cops and I don't feel safe around a lot of them So how can we defend ourselves? So the first step is to actually be aware and they have the different levels of awareness the first one is white Unaware and oblivious to your surroundings and I'm gonna give you guys the first analogy for this And I want you guys to help me out with another one, but white people who are in the level of awareness.  I had a couple Snickers Okay, I've never done that. That's I can't even understand how people do that But it's also like maybe you're just not paying attention for a minute. You miss your exit So that makes a little bit more sense to him.  Perfect driving on the street.  So I get over like a mile beforehand Okay, but that was right on Orange so this one is your impossible danger and you're preparing to act So for this one, maybe you're driving down the freeway and all of a sudden people start slamming on their brakes ahead of you You haven't slammed on your brakes yet, but you're starting to like think like oh something's going on And then finally red fight or flight fee flee defend or attack So this is you're slamming on your brakes someone's next to you You're maybe putting your hand out to stop them from sliding out You're trying to swerve around or something you're acting or you could also they have another color that the Marines and other people Used to is black where people just freeze totally and they do nothing So this is the type of Pearson be like sees people the brake lights going on they don't even react They just freeze and slam into a full force which you guys have seen car accidents before it happens a lot So for being aware of your surroundings the the example for this would be White we're out at the bar. We're never in white yellow.


This is survival dock with part 2 of my video on Jerusalem Artichokes. Here we are a few months later. It is now middle of November and as you can see the artichoke plants have died off and it's time to harvest the roots. All you have to do is just dig up and pull up the plants. You have to plant these each year because there will be enough of these tubers left in the ground to grow another crop for next year. When you first plant these though all you have to do is just buy the tubers from the grocery store like I buy them from Whole Foods Market because there I know they haven't been sprayed to keep them from sprouting and when you buy it from the grocery store you find something like this and it will clean up a little better and all you have to do is just break off a little piece like that and just plant that in the ground and just plant that in the ground and it will sprout and grow into a new plant and all you have to do is just wash these clean them up a little bit with a potato scrubbing brush and I like to slice them up eat them raw I put them in salads and you can also cook it in numerous ways you can cook them pretty much like you would cook a potato. See there are numerous little tubers like this that will still be in the ground and you won't be able to dig them all out and these will grow into new plants next year so you don't have to plant this plant every year it will keep coming back each year. This is just the small part of what I have in the ground here we have more than we could use there's still lots more in the ground that I haven't dug out. Over here I have the geranium artichokes that I planted in a flower pot as you can see they don't grow as large or as abundantly in a flower pot as they do in the ground for those living in an apartment you can still grow plenty of geranium artichokes on your porch or patio. So you're peeling those? Is that what your recipe says to do? Oh, sun chokes? Potatoes. So you're going to make a casserole with potatoes and sun chokes? Yes. Okay, we oil the pan here, salted the potatoes and added thine made a layer of potatoes and we'll make another layer of artichokes and right now we're working on the sauce which is sauce is chicken broth. Okay for the sauce to the chicken broth you add a cup of whipping cream add a fourth of the teaspoon of ground cloves to the cream and chicken broth put half of the sun chokes on the potatoes while we're bringing the sauce up to a simmer then we'll pour the sauce on the sun chokes and potatoes and then add the remainder add the remainder then after that add salt a little thym pour the remainder of the sauce on the casserole. What is that cream? Just top with cream. Top with cream. Chicken broth. Bake in the oven. Hold on a minute. 20 minutes then reduce the heat to 400. All right preheat the oven to 500 degrees bake uncovered for 20 minutes then reduce the heat to 400 degrees Fahrenheit and cook for 35 minutes or until fork tender. Rest at room temperature before serving.


From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. Welcome everybody, this is SiliconANGLE's theCUBE. We have a special CUBE conversation around transforming healthcare through data science. Brent Richter is here, he's the director of Enterprise Research Infrastructure Services at Partners Healthcare. Brent, welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. Thank you. Of course, Partners is a combination, a partnership between Mass General and Brigham and Women's two of the greatest institutions in the United States, but talk a little bit about Partners and your role. Sure, so as you mentioned, there's the top two from the research perspective, organizations within the healthcare space in the U.S., Mass Choose General Hospital, Brigham and Women's Hospital, other AMCs, McLean Hospital, around behavioral science, Spalding, rehab. Those are the main academic medical centers and basically the hospitals of Partners that I support. There's other clinical hospitals there as well. But what my group does is support the research and clinical innovation of these hospitals through providing technology and tools. I mean, essentially in our discussions, my takeaway is you're providing cloud data services to your organization so that people can create better patient outcomes through data and maybe talk about sort of how that vision started in your journey. Well, it started with high-performance computing, actually 10 years ago when Partners found it strategically important to support the research community across Partners, across the hospitals. And from there, we've built other services around general services, around storage, but then more specific services around data and electronic data capture tools. But then as we're building high-performance computing, lots of the workloads were in genetics, then clinical genomic pipelines and areas. And then most recently as sort of the data volumes get bigger and people started to bring more and more data to it. For strategic purposes, we needed to sort of build this data science platform for investigators and clinical research groups to start to leverage for their analytics as they grow out of their ability to manage all this data.  A hospital is like this internet of things. These connected devices, sometimes they're connected, but they've increasingly became more connected and they were sort of, 10 years ago, not too functional, but now they're incredibly functional. So is that where all the data came from? And you just saw this huge increase in- Yeah, so we were seeing this trend, again, 10 years ago with sort of the transformation of these instruments from like on the genetic side from sort of, you know, sequencers that could do, you know, 48 lanes, so 48 individual patients basically, but only about, you know, 1,000 base pairs at a time. But now, then they transformed into, you know, providing tens of thousands, if not a megabase at a time and doing whole genome sequencing, you know, within a week or so, which is what we're at now. Now there's also, on the other side, there are other sort of clinical devices, EEGs, EKGs that are, you know, developing a lot more sensitivity and a lot more sort of capturing a lot more breadth of data. And we were seeing that explosion, this was just over the last 10 years, until today where, you know, sort of quite a lot of the instruments are imaging-based, but then also on the monitoring side, you know, that data's just a lot more sensitivity, a lot more channels, going from discrete monitoring to continuous monitoring, you know, some patients are in the hospital for a week, they're monitored the entire time, you know, for events in epilepsy, for example, or something of that sort. So, you know, that data is all getting captured. Some of it up until today, basically, you know, this year has been kept for clinical use and that, you know, you keep it around for maybe 30 days, but now as the utility of that data becomes apparent and investigators are beginning to leverage that data for, you know, looking at their analytics and do their proof of concepts today, they want to start to capture that data and start to build it up, basically. So, you decide, okay, let's not throw this data away, let's capture, there's a ton of data, so you created what's some kind of repository to put the data into, this was like a few years ago, so you probably weren't using the term data lake back then, but did you essentially create a data lake, is that right? Yeah, basically, so there's, I mean, there's data warehouses, right, and they're around. We have a clinical enterprise data warehouse. We have a, on the research side, a research, what's called a research patient data registry, RPDR, what is called within partners, which is based on I2B2, or actually, it's the reverse, I2B2 is based on our RPDR instance. Lots of other organizations have the I2B2 instance, but that's the data warehouse, and that's within sort of these SQL databases. What we were trying to do is capture the data that's not in those warehouses, because it wasn't thought to have utility at that time. We're starting to do that now with, across both the Brigham and the general, in the emergency departments capturing, what's called waveform data on EKGs for heart monitoring in ICUs with EEGs for monitoring electrical impulses from the brain, et cetera. So that, again, went into this for clinical use, it just sort of went in and kept for 30 days, but then it sort of just falls out of that server, basically. We've set up to go into our data lake now that we built within partners. That data is now starting to accumulate over the last three months within the data lake. Okay, so you came to the realization that, okay, this data has value, it's going to help the patient outcomes, and then you said, okay, we got to put the data into a place where we're making it accessible. We can't do that in our traditional SQL data warehouses and data marts, and so what did you specifically do from an infrastructure and software standpoint? Can you give us some details on the steps that you took and what was different about sort of the new infrastructure? Well, it's fairly simple once you have the infrastructure. So we've based our, what we call the idea platform that we describe it, which is the integrated data environment for analytics within partners. But that's based on these Dell EMC technologies. It used to be called the Federation Business Data Lake now, AIM, and part of that is quite a bit of storage, a lot of storage, petabytes of storage, a virtual environment as well, based on Vblocks and VMware. And then tools, data science tools, and data sort of database tools, Mongo, like the new database tools, Mongo Hadoop, Hortonworks, Spark, all these sort of soup of acronyms and names. But once we have that set up, and that's what we worked on over the last couple of years, setting up this ingesting is basically providing a VM to the emergency department, and the person sort of working the data scientist and the research group that's looking at this. I should say that they're not looking at it specifically for research, they're looking at it for clinical decision support going forward, and that's where they're starting from. They already did their proof of concept research using sort of an extract of this data, and proved out the utility and wrote some papers, and now they're scaling up. That was on their laptop, obviously. This has to be, if they want to scale up, it has to be within this kind of environment. So anyways, we provide them a VM. We put R and Python on the VM that's part of the service catalog that comes with our IDEA platform. And then they are now capturing the data via the APIs that's provided from where this data gets put into, which is a GE care space server. They're again collecting EKGs first, and then they're joining, they will be joining that data once that data sort of builds up with the patient records that's contained within our RPDR database, basically. So you built this essentially an internal cloud with a service catalog. You're providing these services. You said AIM, I always forget the names. It's called the Analytics Insights Module, Analytics Insights Module, which is the new thing. We've talked about this on theCUBE before that Dell EMC announced. It's kind of a combination of Dell EMC and pivotal technologies, sort of end to end platform. Okay, so who is accessing these services as a data scientist, as an application development? Can you talk about sort of the consumers of this service? It's all of those, basically. So our first customers, I call them customers, but our first internal users were clinical departments, the MGH Cancer Center, they have, and that was a joint project between, or that is a joint project between the MGH Cancer Center and a pathology group called the Center for Integrative Diagnostics at MGH. They have top tier investigators and researchers, but they're not thinking about, they're not developing this workflow for research, they're developing it for clinical care of cancer patients. So they have hired a bunch of data scientists together with Long Lee and John Iafredi who is leading this effort to develop this clinical decision support system. So that's one. We're also working with the Center for Connected Health. Again, not research, but they are developing applications, so these are application developers. Who have a bunch of projects, they're collecting data from activity trackers for the most part, this is more externally facing, that's connecting the patient to this kind of technology. So those are a set of application developers and then we are working with research groups that are more on the research side who started out as maybe statisticians or biometricians, sort of what's called the dry lab area, and now they're getting into the new paradigm of data science, which is a lot different from sort of a statistical approach. And beginning to try to understand and train themselves on the tools, the technology, how to think like a data scientist rather than as a statistician around the data. And the platform allows them to do that as well. So it's quite a bit of all three of those areas. So again, those sequential steps, come to the conclusion that data can help the organization, patient outcomes, you invest, you get data into this location that is accessible. Now you got to trust the data, you got to have data quality. Are you using the tooling inside of AIM and this platform to now improve the quality of the data? People joke about data lake, data swamp. What are you doing in terms of improving data quality? Obviously security's part of that, but that's sort of second nature or first nature in your world. But what are you doing in terms of data quality and things like provenance and the like? So we're inheriting a lot of data from, as I mentioned, the clinical, like the data warehouse, the clinical data warehouse that is fully structured. You know, the data maintains its provenance. There's a patient, a master patient data index. That's a part of that. So the same patient that could be seen at the Brigham could walk into MGH and they get different medical record numbers, but our master patient data index reconciles that and joins them both up. You do that today? Yeah. Okay. That's done today within our clinical group. And in addition, that could be a community hospital as well. So it reconciles all of those records. So one person seen 30 years ago could walk into a different hospital today in the system. We'll reconcile that. So we pull from that data, from the enterprise data warehouse that's also done within the research patient data registry. So we maintain that. Investigators can bring their own data as well. So they end the application developers. There's also the Partners Biobank, which is collecting tens of thousands of genomes, essentially, that's also part of this. So we're pulling data from these sources, which that data provenance and integrity is guaranteed. Then people using the platform can bring their own data. They have to ensure that their data is clean. So that's where we're at today. So it's sort of a inheritance and bring your own data type of approach. As we start to place additional data into the system from the enterprise, like this waveform data, for example, medical imaging or medical images as well, that's one of our challenges for this year is that data governance for the most part and cleanliness. So we're beginning to work with internal enterprise development groups to pull this data, join it together and put it into an index that basically was within the data. So kind of the next step in that whole data quality mission. So what have been some of the outcomes so far? And maybe you could give us some examples and we'll talk about sort of where you want to take this thing. So some of the outcomes, like the first customer, the MGH Cancer Center, they want to, and they've begun to sequence every cancer and or every tumor and patient that comes through their door. They are building up that data so that they can sort of be able to understand what worked in terms of a treatment for a cancer patient in the past and then apply that, what had the best efficacy to the cancer patient that walks in the door today. So based on that genetic profile, based on the patient history and other diagnostics and factors, they'll be able to apply the best protocol for that cancer treatment. They've shown very good results in doing that because cancer treatment in the past has always been, if you come in with lung cancer, you start with this course of chemotherapy and radiation treatment. That doesn't work, you go to this next course of change the chemotherapy treatment and continue. For everyone. For every single patient that has lung cancer. What's different now? Well, what's different now is that they can look at the genetic profile of that patient. See if that, before they start on a course of treatment, they can see if that, if a specific drug sort of works or more importantly doesn't work with that genetic profile. If it doesn't work, then they'll choose a chemotherapy treatment that does work with that genetic profile. And they've, some of these things come out of the blue. So they've shown that this one cancer patient that came through their door had a very far advanced sort of small cell carcinoma. So it was metastatic throughout their body. They realized doing the genetic sequencing that some of the tumor had the same genetic profile as a different tumor that reacts very well to chrysotinib, this one chemotherapy drug, which is not used in this patients. It's not prescribed basically for this patient's cancer, the small cell carcinoma. So what they did was this was in their research. What they did was provide chrysotinib to this cancer patient and in two weeks, their tumors basically shrink to almost nothing. Two weeks. And in two weeks. So that's a very good result. And that shows you the power of what this can provide. And that never would have happened without that sort of data other than just by dumb luck. Right, right. They, some of these drugs, I mean, there's some of the treatments now sort of take into account that you can sort of cross, cross cancer profiles. Some of this has to get through the FDA, but these things are happening in the past, these things may have taken 10 years to do. And what they're doing now is shortening that cycle to two years and then going forward is getting it even shorter through all that regulation and then also treatment. So as these things continue to speed up, they'll have, it's going to have a profound effect, not just in cancer treatment, but cancer treatment across the United States. So in the last three years, you're obviously able to deal with more data. You're able to wrangle data more quickly, doing more precise analysis, the data scientist I'm hearing. Are you able to operationalize the analytics and put it into hands of more people? We're talking, you know, the data warehouse days, it was insights for a few that took too long to get to. Are you able to sort of get, you know, people use that term, citizen analyst. Are you beginning to operationalize these analytics? Yeah, so if what you mean by that is providing these, the tools and platform to the data scientists and developers. Yes, absolutely. The researchers on demand. Yes, that's the way we started. So, you know, we've been in development of this platform for the last two and a half years or so. And the initial part of that was basically to develop the platform and provide a catalog so that as users want to use the platform, they can just go and interact with the catalog, get a virtual machine set up the way they want it set up. You know, it might have Mongo on it. It might have Hortonworks Hadoop. It might have RStudio for development or Python. And then also sort of access to specific data sets. We have lots of public data sets that are in there. As I mentioned, access to RPDR data. If they want to bring their own data, there's data ingestion tools that they can use. So that provides them with the environment. Through this catalog, we can get them set up, you know, within the day, basically, within hours and provisioned and up and running and leveraging and doing their development. So instead of, you know, in the past, they would have to request a server or figure out what tools they need. Here, they can mix and match and pick. So in the last two or two, now closer to three years, you've kind of made the investments, put in this infrastructure. Now you're delivering these services, that's working. Now you've got a new sort of analytics capability platform that's going to help you take the next steps. What are those next steps? I mean, it just feels like you're just getting on the steep part of the S curve. I mean, infrastructure was a lot of heavy lifting and you had, I'm sure, skills and training and things of that nature. Where do you want to go from here and what's the potential of this platform? So where we want to go is, well, there's a few things that we need to get done for this year, 2017. One is that data ingestion and bringing in more enterprise data. So we have to build sort of data governance around that, data provenance around that. That's sort of an outstanding challenge, as I mentioned in the beginning. We also need to continue training across the board, basically. So with, as I said, thinking like a data scientist and not thinking like it's a statistician. Understanding the tools and the power and how to manipulate the data, again, it can be a steep learning curve. Understanding the development, like with Pivotal or Docker containerization, that is also part of a learning curve. So part of our mission is not just to provide the platform but to provide the training of this next generation of data scientists, of scientists, of developers, so that they can really start to take advantage of this new era in sort of data science and data wrangling and munging. Diffuse that data innovation throughout the organization to create more patient, better patient outcomes. I got to ask you a couple of personal questions here. So we were surprised by Brent this morning brought in his bike. You rode your bike here from Lexington to Marlboro. You're going to ride back to Charlestown. So you're an athlete of sorts, sometimes known as old men in Lycra, but you go pretty fast. So you're up to almost 6,000 miles this year, which is pretty impressive. Getting close, yep. You'll get there, right? Yep. And then the weather holds. If the weather holds, yeah, exactly. If there's no early snowstorms. How long have you been a biker? I've been a biker for many years. I guess the last 20, 30 years, I started out as a swimmer, and that's what got me through college, but biking since then, basically. I dropped off sort of in the middle years, but then over the last few years, I've committed to biking a lot more. I do all my commuting on bike, so I try to avoid the wet streets and snow and wet weather, and then I have to drive, but other than that, it's keeping me sane. So Cincinnati Boy transplanted to Boston, Harvard educated. So those of you who are interested, a lot of times we get questions like, ah, you know, what's the background of these folks? So your background is in biology. Yeah, biology, genetics. And also philosophy, these are some ethics courses as well, but then you also have a computer science degree. So it's a lot of hard work to get to where you are today, but maybe talk a little bit about sort of how you got to this position and some of the background. Well, it's basically following, leaving doors open, right? And sort of taking the opportunities as they come. I was very interested in when I started college in pre-med, but then wanted more of a diverse education.  Started working in a more of a theoretical area of biology and population genetics and evolutionary genetics, which got me into the analytics, the algorithms within population genetics. But then sort of, you know, who would have known, and this is what this person that I worked for at Harvard, Richard Lewinton sort of describes today is that, you know, who would have known that population genetics would have become so important. You know, when I was doing it, it was just, you know, engaging of the mind and understanding like this evolutionary processes of organisms.  Today, what we talk about within precision medicine is all population genetics, basically. So, you know, just sort of keeping that door open as the data sets began to grow, as the Human Genome Project evolved, and genetics became more and more important. Computers became more and more important. Storage and data analysis became more and more important. So just keeping those doors open and sort of following that path is what led me to where I am today. Well, it's an awesome story and thank you very much for sharing us and thanks for the great work that you and your organization are doing and you live in this Boston area. You can't help but be touched by MGH and Brigham's, I got personal experiences with both of them, amazing institutions. So again, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate your insights. Thank you. All right, thanks for watching everybody. This has been a special CUBE Conversation with Partners Healthcare. We'll see you next time.


The topic of this week will be DNS security. The domain name system has been created with the goal of mapping human readable domain names to AP addresses. Nowadays, this is only one of the functionality that DNS provides, but we will refer to this basic one here to recap our DNS work. Let's assume you want to access the web page at www.toptop.example.com. This request will issue a DNS request to your local resolver to retrieve the AP address. The local resolver will typically initiate the name resolution process, which will consist in iteratively contacting DNS servers that are authoritative for the part of DNS information you need. This is done in a hierarchical manner. To start, the local resolver will contact one of the root servers, which will return the address of the name server responsible for the .com zone. The local resolver will then query the .com TLD server, which will respond with the address of the name server responsible for example.com. And finally, the local resolver will ask this name server for the AP address for the domain www.toptop.example.com. If everything works fine, this process will result in the querying host receiving the AP address associated with www.toptop.example.com. The domain name server is therefore built on information and infrastructure. In the next video, we will see examples of attacks to both the information stored in the DNS and DNS infrastructure. DNS is a core service in the Internet. However, given how it works and its complexity, it offers a quite extensive attack surface. For example, many of the middle attacks, cache poisoning attacks and injection of corrupted data in zones are some of the possible attacks. We can qualify those as attacks on the information in DNS. In practice, we have seen that attacks on the DNS information are not the only possible ones. There have been cases in which the infrastructure of the DNS has been attacked by using DDoS attacks for example. Last, there are attacks that do not target the DNS directly but that misuse its functionality. Think for example to a reflection and amplification attacks based on DNS. In this lecture, we will see examples of these three categories of attacks. This week, we will explore the following topics. After this introduction, we will look at some examples of attacks against the DNS system. Cache poisoning attacks are an example of attacks on the DNS information. DDoS attacks against the DNS are instead an example of attacks on the infrastructure. Then, we will investigate how the DNS security extensions, DNSSEC, could be misused for distributed denial service attacks. Finally, we will summarize.


Stories and content in Weird Darkness can be disturbing for some listeners and is intended for mature audiences only. Parental discretion is strongly advised. Welcome Weirdos, I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained. Coming up in this episode of Weird Darkness, it was a terrible sight. I have seen horrible sights but never anything like this. Those were the words of the local undertaker after seeing the result of a triple murder laying before him in 1932 Pennsylvania. Have you heard of the poor girl who was bullied and pushed down into a sewer by those whom she thought were her friends? I'll tell you the story. And while this episode is not a creepypasta episode, so all the stories are supposed to be non-fiction, that is true, I'll be sharing this urban legend anyway. Because when it comes to urban legends, sometimes it's best to err on the side of caution and simply assume they are true. A gypsy once told Leonardo that all of her children would die before her. A different fortune teller told her that she faced either a future in prison or in a criminal asylum. And the reason she gave for becoming a serial killer is something you'd hear out of a bad, direct-to-video horror film. And that's a tiny sample of this woman's insanely dark life, which began even before her birth. Ireland's Loftus Hall is considered by many to be the most haunted location on all the Emerald Isle. But the most infamous story of Loftus Hall begins not with terror but with romance, with a beautiful young girl falling madly in love with the devil. Weirdo family member Brad Hicks describes the experience as cool and creepy as hell. We'll tell you his story. While you're listening, you might want to check out the Weird Darkness website. At WeirdDarkness.com you can sign up for the newsletter, find paranormal and horror audiobooks I've narrated, 24x7 streaming video of horror hosts and classic horror movies. You can find my other podcast Church of the Undead. Plus, you can visit the Hope in the Darkness page if you're struggling with depression, anxiety or thoughts of suicide. And you can also shop the Weird Darkness store where all profits go to support depression awareness and relief. You can find all of that and more at WeirdDarkness.com.  Rome's Museo Criminologico, Criminological Museum, may not be to everybody's taste, but it's definitely worth seeing. The museum's collection features photographs and memorabilia from some of the most gruesome forensic cases in the long history of Italy. And this story is about to get gruesome. From renaissance murders to the mafia, this museum has it all. It was there that I first learned about Leonardo Cianciulli, also known as the soap maker of Corregio, and her bizarre criminal career. While almost unknown outside of Italy, Leonardo's career as a serial killer is still unparalleled in many ways, both for her unique method of concealing bodies and her rather odd motive for killing. Born in 1894, she was raised in one of the most poverty-stricken regions of Italy.  By most accounts, Emilia's daughter, Leonardo's early childhood, was a grim one. Her father died when Leonardo was young, but her mother's later remarriage did little to ease the situation at home. Due to emotional abuse by her mother, she would make two suicide attempts. Leonardo compounded her woes by marrying a man of whom her parents disapproved. They had a more prosperous suitor in mind. She would later claim that her mother had placed a curse on her as a result of her 1914 marriage of Raphael Pensardi and the tragedy she later endured seems to bear that out. Along with being imprisoned for fraud and later seeing her house destroyed by an earthquake, she also lost three of her children in childbirth and another 10 as children. Of her 17 pregnancies, only four survived to adulthood and she was especially protective of all of them as a result. Despite these troubles, she and her husband eventually settled in the town of Correggio near Naples and Leonardo apparently settled into a normal life as a shopkeeper and part-time fortune teller. A long-time believer in the supernatural, she had once consulted a gypsy fortune teller who among other things predicted that all of her children would die before her. A different fortune teller told her that she faced either a future in prison or in a criminal asylum though Leonardo seemed not to take that warning seriously. Her neighbors would later describe her as a gentle soul with a fondness for poetry. Nobody suspected what would be coming next. For Leonardo, everything changed in 1939 when Benito Mussolini began drafting young men to prepare for Italy's entry into World War II. Alduce's popularity had slipped during the 1930s and the prospect of Italy entering the war on the side of Nazi Germany alarmed most Italians. Leonardo became mentally unbalanced at the thought of her favorite son, Giuseppe, being drafted and possibly dying in combat. The prospect of losing Giuseppe apparently led to her decision to carry out human sacrifices to preserve her son from death. As she would later state during her testimony, killing others would keep her own children safe by providing God with other deaths in place of her own children. Since she had four remaining children, she would need to sacrifice four others to keep them safe. Her first victim was a 50-year-old spinster named Faustina Setti. Recruiting Leonardo as a fortune teller and matchmaker, Faustina paid her 30,000 liars to find a suitable husband. Telling her that she knew of a good marriage prospect in a nearby village, Leonardo persuaded Faustina to write letters and postcards to relatives that she would later post from out of town to reassure them she was fine. She also instructed Faustina not to tell anyone about her marriage plans. On the day Faustina was to leave Correggio, she visited Leonardo's home for one last time. There, Leonardo gave her drugged wine and then chopped her body into nine pieces with a hatchet. According to the official statement she gave to police afterward, I threw the pieces into a pot, added seven kilos of caustic soda which I had bought to make soap, and stirred the whole mixture until the pieces dissolved in a thick, dark mush that I poured into several buckets and emptied in a nearby septic tank. As for the blood in the basin, I waited until it had coagulated, dried it in the oven, ground it and mixed it with flour, sugar, chocolate, milk and eggs as well as a bit of margarine kneading all the ingredients together. I made lots of crunchy tea cakes and served them to the ladies who came to visit, though Yusepe and I also ate them. After pocketing the money Faustina had brought with her, Leonardo selected fellow villager Francesca Salvi as her next victim. After telling Francesca that she found her a job at a school in Piazzenza, Leonardo persuaded her to keep the job off her secret. She also persuaded Francesca to write a series of letters and postcards that would be mailed at a later date. Copying the murder of Faustina Setti almost exactly, Leonardo drugged Francesca and dismembered the corpse with an axe on September 5, 1940. She also pocketed her life savings, only 3,000 liar this time. Once again, no suspicion attached to her, so Leonardo was free to find another victim. It was this last victim who would prove to be her undoing. Virginia Cassiopo was a former soprano who had sung opera professionally at La Scala in Milan. She was also wealthier than Leonardo's other victims with more than 50,000 liar in cash and jewelry. After Leonardo lured Virginia to her house with the promise of finding her a job with a mysterious impresario, she was killed like the other victims. In a last ghoulish touch, Leonardo added cologne to the soap she made from Virginia's remains to make it more appealing to friends and neighbors. Virginia Cassiopo's sister-in-law became suspicious and began investigating her disappearance. When she learned that Virginia had last been seen entering Leonardo's shop, she went to the police superintendent. Following an investigation, Leonardo Cianciulli was arrested for murder. She was unusually open with the police and described her crimes and how she disposed of the bodies in ghoulish detail. Since World War II was still underway, putting her on trial for the murders was hardly a priority, though. It was not until 1946 and Italy's defeat that the trial of the Correggio soapmaker finally began, and it was quite a trial. Though her son Yusepe had been arrested as a possible accomplice, he was later freed. Leonardo's detailed confession of the murders, complete with descriptions of what she did with the bodies afterward, generated international publicity. During her testimony, she was quick to correct the prosecutor on any details which she regarded she considered inaccurate. At one point, she proudly pointed out that she, quote, gave the copper ladle which I used to skim the fat off the kettles to my country, which was so badly in need of metal during the last days of the war, unquote. She also described her reason for the murders, including her desire to help her son with human sacrifice. Whether she truly believed what she had said in court or was hoping to avoid prison through an insanity plea, the graphic details of her crimes attracted a fair amount of public attention in a country still recovering from war. Found guilty by the court, Leonardo Cianciulli was sentenced to 30 years in prison and three years in a criminal asylum. While in prison, she wrote her memoirs, which translated reads Confessions of a Bitter Soul. Unrepentant to the last, Leonardo died of a stroke on October 15, 1970. As she would later insist, I did not kill for greed, which I am sure we can all agree flies into the face of common sense after killing three people and stealing their life savings. It was a terrible sight. I have seen horrible sights but never anything like this. Those were the words of the local undertaker after seeing the results of a triple murder laying before him in 1932, Pennsylvania. That story is up next when Weird Darkness returns. Hey Weirdos, if you're in Chicagoland or are willing to drive here, well you can join me as I host from the stage the 2022 Laugh or Die Comedy Festival in DeKalb, Illinois on Saturday, July 9th. And then, very next day, Sunday, July 10th, I'm hosting Chicago's Indie Horror Film Festival. You can come on Saturday or Sunday, or grab a hotel room nearby and come to both. Both events are taking place inside a real castle, Altgeld Castle in DeKalb. On Saturday, you can watch comedy and horror films all afternoon, and then at 7.30, some of the best Chicagoland stand-up comics hit the stage to leave you dying from laughter.  You can get into each day's event for $25 each, or get both days for $35. And even better, just for Weirdo family members, if you buy your tickets online beforehand, you can get $5 off of your tickets by using the promo code Weirdo. This double day event only happens once a year, and I am honored to be asked to be the host of both days. And of course, the Weird Darkness table will also be there with all the free stuff that I give away. So, if you are anywhere near Chicagoland, you do not want to miss this. It all takes place at Altgeld Castle in DeKalb. July 9th for the Laugh or Die Comedy Festival, and July 10th for the Indie Horror Film Festival. Get the details for each event on the events calendar page at WeirdDarkness.com. The following is a story that might need an additional disclaimer, as it involves the brutal death of young ones. Listener discretion is strongly advised. The quiet borough of Likens and Upper Dolphin County, Pennsylvania was thrust into the spotlight in 1932 when Barney Godleski, an out-of-work minor, slaughtered three of his four children in a drunken rage in the basement of his home on the 600 block of East Main Street. On the morning of July 14, 1932, 10-year-old Helen Godleski awoke with visions of a nightmare inside her head. The night before, she had thought that she had heard the screams of her sister Lillian, who slept in the same bed, and her father's reassuring voice. Lillian bumped her head and hurt herself, but she will be all right. Helen wasn't sure if that had actually happened, or if she'd only dreamt that it had happened, but in the morning, daylight revealed that her sister Lillian's pillow was splotched with blood, and Lillian was nowhere to be seen.  In the kitchen, she found her father holding a rag to his throat. It would have been obvious to anyone, except maybe a 10-year-old child, that Barney Godleski had attempted to slit his own throat. Desperate to keep his daughter from asking questions, he ordered her to go to the store for matches. Hurry, I want to smoke, he said. When Helen returned, her father had another request. He wanted Helen to find James Helt, the undertaker, and bring him to the Godleski house. Helen obeyed, and when the undertaker arrived, Godleski told the undertaker that he had murdered three of his children with an ax. Helt appeared skeptical until Godleski said, go into the cellar and see for yourself. Helt had no desire to go down to the cellar, and he immediately summoned Justice of the Peace James Golden and Chief of Police C.J. Whitmer, who arrived at the home and found Barney Godleski sitting calmly at the kitchen table, holding the ax and butcher knife he had used to commit the ghastly crime. He admitted to killing his children, but refused to provide any explanation. Chief Whitmer, accompanied by Undertaker Helt, James Golden, Deputy Coroner George Wren, and former Justice of the Peace J.A. Barrett, discovered one of the bodies on the floor near a drain, and the other two bodies stuffed into the wood bin. These were the bodies of Paul Godleski, age 8, Lillian, age 6, and Alberta, age 4. Paul's body was the most mangled.  It was a terrible sight, said Helt the following day. I have seen horrible sights, but never anything like this. When the little girl came to my office about 9 o'clock yesterday morning and told me that her father wanted to see me, I didn't have the least idea what he wanted. I hadn't heard of any deaths in the family, so I was a little surprised to have him call me. One can only imagine what the Undertaker must have thought after Helen came to him. The Godleskis were known to be a happy family, and Barney, a model citizen who never drank liquor or got into trouble. It was widely gossiped, however, that Barney's wife Lucille had once spent time in a sanitarium battling drug addiction, and it was generally known around Likens that little Lillian Godleski had undergone a surgical procedure at the hospital in Ashland just a few weeks earlier. Otherwise, as far as anyone knew, the Godleskis were a healthy, happy clan. Godleski handed over the weapons to Chief Whitmer and was taken into custody. Later that morning he was given a preliminary hearing at the Office of Justice of the Peace Golden and transported to the Dauphin County Jail. Helen, the sole surviving child, was placed into the care of a neighbor. Meanwhile, Lucille Godleski was in Mount Carmel, unaware that anything was amiss. She had left Likens to begin work as a waitress in a restaurant, lodging at the Marble Hotel under the name of Lucy Sincavage. Sincavage was the maiden name of Barney's mother. While in jail, Godleski was questioned for three hours by County Detective John H. Yance. He freely admitted as guilt, but steadfastly refused to provide a motive. He said he wanted to make a statement to District Attorney Carl B. Shelley, and once inside the District Attorney's office, he began to talk freely about what he had done. According to Godleski, on the night of the murders, he had gone to a bar in Williamstown for a drink and had gotten into a quarrel that left him in a bitter mood. He returned home around midnight. The four children were sleeping in their beds. He sat at the kitchen table, brooding over domestic troubles. He had been out of work for months, and his wife of 12 years had left him on Tuesday to find work in Mount Carmel, where she had grown up. Godleski said that the trouble had begun four years earlier, when his wife discovered that he was having an affair. Since that time, she has been extremely jealous, he said. During every argument since then, his wife made constant reference to his indiscretion. He and his wife had taken their daughter Lillian to the Fountain Springs Hospital on June 18 for an operation, and on June 30, Lucille began looking for work to help out with medical expenses. She had told her husband that she would take the children once she was able to find a job. Godleski stated that on Tuesday afternoon, July 12, a man who lived across the street, John Lubold, took him to Williamstown to see a former neighbor by the name of Robel, who he found at a local tavern.  He began with Paul, taking him out of the bed and killing him in the basement with the butcher knife. Then he came back for Alberta. After killing two of his children, Godleski fell asleep for two hours. When he woke up at daybreak, he murdered Lillian, and attempted to dispose of the bodies by hacking them to pieces with an axe. However, after lopping off his son's head, he lost his nerve. He added that he had no intention of killing Helen. Finally, he attempted to take his own life with the butcher knife. I decided to take the coward's way out. Then I changed my mind, Godleski told the district attorney. I'll take my medicine. So why was Helen's life spared? Daddy didn't kill me because he liked me, bragged ten-year-old Helen to police officers. I kept house for daddy since mother left us, and daddy often said that I was a good little mother and that he was proud of me. Helen told authorities that on Tuesday afternoon, her father said that he had to go out of town on business and instructed her not to wait up for him. He told me to put Alberta, Lillian, and Paul to bed and go to bed myself. Lillian and I sleep together in daddy's room, and Paul and Alberta sleep in another room, the young girl explained. Sometime during the night, I believe I was dreaming about someone crying. I woke up and found Lillian was mumbling about something, and daddy was standing beside her. I couldn't understand what she was saying. It sounded like she was gargling. I asked daddy what had happened. He said Lillian bumped her head on the bed post. I didn't think anything was wrong, and I went back to sleep. Helen said that after arriving at the undertaker's shop, Mr. Helts told her to wait there until he came back.  I love my daddy and I hope that nothing happens to him, said Helen to the police officers, who then instructed them to feed him well. She even gave them a list of the foods that he liked to eat. I've been expecting it for more than a year, said Lucille Gottleski, after learning of the tragic news. She'd been located eating a lunch at a restaurant in Mount Carmel by a messenger who managed to lure her back to Likens under the pretense that one of her daughters had fallen ill. Only after checking into a hotel in Likens was she told about what had happened to her children. I feared that Barney was insane for several years. That's why I left. The trouble started several years ago when I was sent to a hospital in Toledo, Ohio as a drug addict. I was there for seven months until I was cured and when I returned home, I found another woman in the house. Lucille claimed that she'd been trying to find a home for her children for more than a year and had tried to get her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Frank Sienkowitz, to adopt them. I knew sometime he would harm them, she said. My father objected, so they stayed at home. Now I have only one. I hope they hang Barney for killing my children. He has it coming to him. He treated me cruelly for several years. He chased me from my home and children and now he has killed them. While public sentiment was firmly on Lucille's side, there are many parts of her story that don't seem to add up. For instance, if she was so certain that Barney was insane and if he had been as abusive and cruel as she had claimed, then how could she in good conscience abandon all four of her children? Those who knew Godleski best vouched for his character. His former employer called him a model employee and friends labeled him a devoted father and an ideal husband who never touched alcohol. So who knew the real Barney and who knew the real Lucille? If Walls could speak, the Godleski home might be able to answer those questions. Barney and Lucille were just teenagers when they met. He was from Shimokin, she was from Mount Carmel. When he accepted a position in the coal mines of Williamstown, their future seemed bright. The young couple bought a home in Likens, made many friends, and were soon blessed with four bright, beautiful children. By all accounts, the ballad of Barney and Lucille Godleski should have been a coal region success story. But somewhere along the way, things went horribly wrong. 12 years later, Barney Godleski, now 31 years of age, had traded his spacious home on East Main Street for a cramped cell on F-tier of the Dolphin County Prison. He would die inside this very cell. Shortly after 5 o'clock on the morning of July 22, 1932, the body of Barney Godleski was found hanging in his cell after a prison guard was alerted to a noise that sounded like a death struggle on the uppermost tier, Tier F. The guard raced to the cell, lit a match and discovered the body dangling from the steel bars, with a noose made from the sleeves of a blue shirt. The warden and the prison's night watchman cut down the body and the coroner, Howard Millican, was notified. We've been expecting it, said one of the inmates who was interviewed by a Harris Berg newspaper. He didn't want to live. Only a week earlier, Godleski had attempted to hang himself with a belt, but his attempt failed after the belt broke.  When that failed, he used his shirt to hang himself. Barney had taken off his shirt, said Edward Albright, the guard who discovered the body. One sleeve he tied around his neck, the other around the bars at the rear of his cell. According to prison staff and inmates, Godleski had been exhibiting bizarre behavior ever since his arrival. He refused to speak to anyone unless his back was turned, and he refused to sleep on his cot, referring the cold cement floor. He told us he was afraid he'd fall off and hurt himself, explained one of the prison officials. Ironically, it was Lucille Godleski who made the funeral arrangements. Her anger had given way to pity. I thought this would happen was the only thing she said, when asked about the suicide of the man she had wanted to see hang only a week earlier. She ordered the body taken to the home of her father, Frank Sienkiewicz, who was now living in Dornsife. The funeral was held the following morning at St. Anthony's Church in Brady, Coal Township, and his body was laid to rest at St. Patrick's Catholic Cemetery in Traverton, alongside the graves of the very children he had murdered. It's fair to say that the deaths of the Godleski children put tremendous strain on the families involved. Just one month after the funerals of her husband and three of her children, Lucille Godleski was arrested for disorderly conduct, thrown in jail, and fined $5 after causing a scene in Harrisburg. According to Paul Mallory, who was a bookkeeper or the Keystone Broadcasting Company, Lucille had shown up at the radio station offices at the Governor Hotel, insisting that she had been offered a contract to appear on the station and talk about the murders. When Mallory told her that she was not aware of such a contract, she became indignant and boisterous, and when police arrived, she began shouting profanities and claimed that prison officials had cheated her out of her right to kill Barney Godleski. In February of the following year, Lucille's father suffered a stroke while a patient at a hospital in Philadelphia where he had gone to receive treatment from a lingering illness. Frank Sienkiewicz, who worked for many years as a minor in Chimokin, was only 56 at the time of his death. Lucille's mother, Stanisława Stela Sienkiewicz, passed away in March of 1934 at the age of 53. They are also buried at St. Patrick's Cemetery in Treverton. Four months after Stela's death, a son named Henry was fatally injured in an explosion at the Alaska Colliery near Mount Carmel. Unfortunately, there are no records describing whatever became of Lucille and Helen. An obituary for Stela Sienkiewicz stated that she had a daughter, Lucille Godleski, who lived in New York at the time of her death in 1934. Did she marry a man named Godleski or was this simply a newspaper misspelling Godleski? If she did go to New York, did she take her lone surviving daughter Helen with her? If anyone out there knows the answer to those questions, I'd love to find out how their story ends. Coming up next, Ireland's Loftus Hall is considered by many to be the most haunted location on all the Emerald Isle. But the most infamous story of Loftus Hall begins not with terror, but with romance, with a beautiful young girl falling madly in love with the Devil. Plus, Weirdo family member Brad Hicks describes the experience as cool and creepy as hell. We'll tell you what he meant by that. These stories and more when Weird Darkness returns. Storyteller drama and true crime. And I could use your vote. Visit podcastawards.com, register to vote, then make your selections from the drop-down boxes next to Storyteller drama and true crime. You can only vote once, but you can ask your friends, family, and co-workers to vote too to help Weird Darkness emerge victorious once the voting ends. Again, go to podcastawards.com and then select Weird Darkness in the Storyteller drama category and in the true crime category. You better hurry! Voting ends July 31st, and thank you for your support of Weird Darkness, Weirdos. There are plenty of haunted places in Ireland, but none quite so haunted as Loftus Hall. The Loftus Hall haunting legend tells of a poor girl's imprisonment, as well as a visit from the Devil himself and ends with hauntings so vivid that according to lore, spirits appear vividly in photographs. Because the Hall has cycled through numerous owners over its vast history, determining who may still roam its ancient corridors poses a particularly eerie challenge. Loftus Hall, though it may be one of Ireland's many houses marked by the Devil, is still a lovely piece of architecture. Despite its dark history, the Hall elicits visitors from around the globe with its unique design and furnishings. Of course ghost hunters have ventured there as well, many of whom have met with a seemingly paranormal welcome. While the story behind Ireland's most haunted house may span hundreds of years and may be touched by elements of crime, danger and tragedy, the tale continues to be engrossing for those who love a few shivers up their spines. The most infamous ghost story of Loftus Hall begins not with a tragic demise but with the visit from the Devil himself. The legend claims that during the Tottenham family's residence in the 1700s, a terrible storm struck the coast. A ship washed up on the peninsula and one young man who survived the ordeal found his way to the Hall where he begged for shelter. The Tottenham's invited him in and he remained as their guest for several weeks. During that time, he became quite close with the family's youngest daughter, Ann. While playing cards one night with the young visitor and several other guests, Ann dropped some of her cards. Upon leaning down to pick them up, she saw that the stranger had cloven hooves in place of feet. When she screamed in fright, the stranger revealed that he was actually the Devil in disguise. As if to prove his identity, he transformed into a ball of fire and blasted through the roof, leaving a hole in his wake. From that moment on, the house supposedly experienced many strange phenomena. Some suggest the Hall's eerie occurrences are due to a continued satanic presence. Loftus Hall's most infamous legend goes on to claim that following the Devil's departure, Ann was both traumatized and heartbroken and her mental state soon collapsed. Her family, embarrassed by her erratic behavior, confined her to her chambers where she remained until her passing around 1775. Sadly, Ann was confined even after her ultimate end. Following her internment in a Wexford cemetery, locals were concerned she would somehow escape and her tomb was soon sealed with cement to prevent this gruesome possibility. While these locals may have sought to prevent the Devil or grave robbers from reaching her remains, the perhaps fretted Ann would somehow rise from the grave. Mysteriously, the hole in Loftus Hall's roof through which the Devil allegedly made his fiery escape does not stay repaired. The Tottenham's attempted to patch the rift directly following the Devil's exit, but it simply fell through again. The family conducted an exorcism meant to drive the Devil away, but as the hole persisted, his presence seemed to linger. Eventually, the family acquiesced the hole's presence, leading many modern-day visitors to photograph the gap. One owner of the hall fully accepted the rift, claiming the Devil could come and go as he pleased. Visitors to the hall can still observe the anomalous section of the ceiling. One portion appears offset from the rest, as if it still strains to fall through again. One alternative to the infamous Loftus Hall legend claims the shipwrecked visitor who fell in love with Ann intended to marry her. However, when he asked her father's permission, Tottenham turned the man away due to his low status, and allegedly never recovered from the heartbreak of the stranger's dismissal, leading her parents to lock her away and fabricate a devilish tale to save face. Another theory proposes Ann became pregnant with the stranger's child. To hide the illegitimate pregnancy, the Tottenham's shut Ann away until she could deliver. According to this theory, Ann tragically passed during either pregnancy or childbirth. The tale of the Devil's visit was then invented to explain away the ordeal. Loftus Hall stood abandoned for many years. Even then, the grounds still attracted much morbid attention. In the early 20th century, the Loftus family, responsible for the estate's title, disseminated and went bankrupt, leaving the hall to the Benedictine family. The hall would change hands frequently, even acting as a school and a convent for periods of time. Many were afraid to attend mass there, however, due to the hall's devilish reputation. In 1983, the estate was purchased to serve as a hotel, but the new owner perished in the hall once again leaving it vacant. Soon after, Satanists allegedly began to gather there to hold meetings and rituals. These sessions continued for around a decade and locals knew to avoid the area. In 2011, the hall was purchased and its new owners began plans to refurbish it to its former glory. The new owners were well aware of the hall's paranormal history and attraction, leading them to admit curious ghost hunting parties for investigations. During the hall's renovation in the 1870s, the owners reportedly made a startling and gruesome discovery. The skeletal remains of an infant hidden inside the walls. The child's identity and parentage remain unknown, though some believe the discovery supports the theory of Anne's pregnancy. The remains were even discovered in the tapestry room, where Anne was locked away for many years. The circumstances surrounding the child's fate are still unclear, whether they passed from natural causes during birth or, according to some theorists, remain a nefarious deed at the hands of the Tottenham's. Perhaps due to this infamy, many claim the tapestry room is the most haunted room in Loftus Hall. The first building to stand on what is now Loftus Hall's estate was constructed around the year 1200. This house, built by Raymond LaGrosse, was originally called the Hall at Houseland. However, this building did not last. In 1350, the Black Plague was at its height, and the LaGrosse family elected to tear down the old hall to replace it with a new one further down their peninsula, away from the all-consuming reach of the plague. This new building was called Redmond Hall, or simply the Hall. After centuries, the structure eventually transformed into the infamous Loftus Hall. Even at its inception, the estate was surrounded by disease and tragedy. Because of its rich history, imbued with tales of otherworldly phenomena, Loftus Hall has attracted much attention from paranormal groups. In 2015, the team behind the popular show Ghost Adventures visited the hall and included their experiences in the Halloween episode of the show's ninth season. A 2016 TV special called Irish Ghost Hunters toured the house and claimed to experience many strange phenomena. Novice Ghost Hunters have also made the pilgrimage to the area to film and write about their adventures. The house has also attracted attention from professional filmmakers. One project began filming in 2012 and another was announced back in 2006. Small, independent films have also been made about the hall due to its infamous reputation. The 2017 film The LaGrosse was even filmed on the estate. Ireland sports many haunted houses, but Loftus Hall is one of the most infamous and has frequently been called the most haunted house on the island. Over the years, reports of several resident ghosts have surfaced, one of whom may even be the devil himself. Visitors often report an uneasy feeling or strange sounds both outside and inside the hall. While many houses could claim similar phenomena, the truly unique aspects of Loftus Hall is its extended history. Teals of its spirits have persisted for centuries. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, the hall's residents reported many strange and seemingly unexplainable incidents, which they attributed to a ghostly or demonic presence. They even hired a priest, Father Thomas Broders, to investigate the predicament. Broders performed an exorcism on the house which supposedly proved successful. Even the priest's own headstone mentions the event. Given the purported hauntings that have persisted since that time, however, many believe the likelihood of his success is slim. Even before the recorded history of Loftus Hall itself, its land may have been a site for paranormal and spiritual activity. Legend claims that long before the construction of any large hall, the land was a spiritually significant location for the druids of the area. Wexford, the county in which the hall resides, was filled with tombs and standing stones for thousands of years before the Loftus family had ever seen its soil. Druids, a high-ranking class in ancient Celtic cultures, were very in tune with nature and revered the land as sacred. Reports of ghostly phenomena have persisted ever since Anne Tottenham's passing. Many claim to hear horses inside and around the house even when none are present. People have claimed to hear voices, witness poltergeist activity, and even suffer panic attacks on the grounds. Even alleged photographic evidence seems to corroborate the existence of at least two spirits. In 2015, a young Englishman named Thomas Beavis took a photo of the hall. When he later viewed the picture, he noticed the ghostly shape of a young girl with an older woman standing next to her. He initially attributed the site to a window reflection, but disregarded this explanation upon closer inspection. The photo quickly went viral online and has yet to be debunked or proved as a hoax. When asked about the photo, Beavis said the girl could be the spirit of Anne Tottenham still walking around Loftus Hall. It could have been some strange occurrence because of a supernatural power, but I don't know. Normally I'm a guy that believes in what he sees, but with this I still don't understand what's going on in that photo. Loftus Hall's centuries-long history is thick with darkness and tragedy. This state's land was the site of many conflicts in the late 12th century and many lives were lost on the spot where the hall now stands. In the mid-1600s, the Irish Confederate conflicts brought repeated brawls on the hall, even then a handful of people staved off onslaughts from nearly 100 soldiers. Not until 1666 did Henry Loftus gain ownership of the hall and grant its current title. Anne Tottenham's mother, Anne Loftus, also passed in the house. Even before the Tottenham's ordeal, the house had already seen its share of sickness, conflict, and tragedy. In recent years, Loftus Hall has been refurbished and opened for visitors. For a fee, guests can take a 45-minute tour to learn about the estate's history, as well as its infamous hauntings. Perhaps you'll catch a glimpse of Anne Tottenham, or one of the hall's numerous other alleged spirits. The hall also offers Halloween tours and, if you are truly brave, paranormal lockdowns on certain occasions. This happened years ago. My best friend and I were driving around the small town we lived in, me in the passenger seat and him driving. We'd do this all the time. When we were bored or just didn't want to be at home, we would cruise around and tell jokes, parody songs we loved, and tell each other ghost stories. That night was jokes and laughing. We'd already been driving around for an hour or so that night and it was near midnight. We turned down Main Street, heading west just after leaving the old convenience store in town. My best friend was Jimmy, crazy and side-splittingly funny 99% of the time. No different that night. We got a block down Main and he yells, right turn! And swing the wheel hard down a street that had an old feed store on the right and an old video store with an alleyway behind it on the left. At the entrance to the alley was a simple street light. We got onto the street and he stopped laughing instantly with eyes wide. I saw the creature a split second after he did. He was on the right hand side near the feed store. We thought it was a dog, but it was built strange. Long front legs and rather short back legs, which seemed even stranger when it took two quick jumps and ended up under the street light. Here's why that's strange. That creature took two jumps, right? Two jumps and cleared over 55 feet from where it was standing to where it stopped and turned to look at us. It looked similar to a dog, a dog-like head and body, except for heavily muscled front legs and very short back legs, so short that there didn't seem any way that it could jump like that. We both piped up, what the hell is that? Just as we said that, it ran, jumped into the alley with us right behind it. There was no way possible for this thing to get out of the alley, no exit at the other end. We were literally a split second behind it, but it was gone, just gone. We raced down the alley thinking it actually made it to the end, but nothing. We looked everywhere in the general vicinity and still nothing. We then drove to the supermarket parking lot to discuss what we had just seen and tried to rationalize it and identify. Now this was before the internet and Google. The only description I can give you is this. Remember the demon dogs from Ghostbusters, the gatekeeper and keymaster? It was built like that, only a little slimmer. We sat and talked for a time and the local town cop who was a friend pulled up to chat and kill time. We were hesitant to tell him, but excited at the same time. As Jimmy described it, the cop's eyes widened and he got fidgety and nervous. He didn't say much as to what it was or what he thought it was. You saw it, didn't you? Jimmy almost yelled at him. Our police officer friend proceeded to tell us where he saw it and when. The opposite end of the alley and about 20 minutes before we did, and it was the same situation. He saw it, chased it, lost it a split second after it jumped into the alley. Haven't seen anything like that again and never had a decent explanation about what we saw. Cool and creepy as hell. When Weird Darkness returns, have you heard of the poor girl who was bullied and pushed down into a sewer by those whom she thought were her friends? I'll tell you the story. And while this episode is not a creepypasta episode, so all the stories are supposed to be non-fiction, that is, true, I'll be sharing this urban legend anyway. Because when it comes to urban legends, sometimes it's best to air on the side of caution and simply assume that they are true. Hey Weirdos, our next Weirdo Watch Party is taking place on Saturday, July 23rd and it's hosted once again by the beautiful and funny Mistress Militius and her terrible team at Mistress Peace Theatre. They always bring us a great time with their skits and also all of the edits that they make to the films to make them even worse than they were originally. This time it's 1967's Hillbillies in a Haunted House, a movie so bad they even spelled Hillbillies incorrectly in the title. In this flick we see a trio of country singers stranded in a haunted mansion as they get mixed up with spies. Oh, and it's a musical! Yeah, it's definitely going to be a grown-up. It stars Lon Cheney Jr., Basil Rathbone, and John Caradine, but not even these horror icons can salvage this unorganized mess. Not even the appearance of country music legend Merle Haggard helps. The Weirdo Watch Party is always free, so grab your popcorn, candy and soda and jump into the live chat as we watch one of the worst movies ever made, Hillbillies in a Haunted House, hosted by Mistress Militius and her Mistress Peace Theatre. Again, the Weirdo Watch Party is Saturday, July 23rd and the movie starts at 7pm Pacific, 8pm Mountain, 9pm Central, 10pm Eastern, 4pm in Hawaii and 3am for Greenwich Meantime. You can find a trailer for the movie and also watch horror hosts and be horror movies all day long every day of the year on the Weirdo Watch Party page at WeirdDarkness.com. There is an urban legend about a 17-year-old student in Indiana by the name of Carmen Winstead, who was killed when she was pushed into an open sewer by five girls at her school whom she thought were her friends.  Carmen was new to the area, her father had recently lost his job and had to move to another state in order to find new employment and the relocation mid-term had been hard on Carmen, who had to leave her friends behind and attend a new school in Indiana. Carmen had a hard time making new friends at the school, as no one was particularly interested in befriending the new girl and initially she would spend the majority of her time alone, walking from class to class and spending her breaks alone speaking to no one. Eventually, however, she started hanging around with a group of five other girls whom she considered to be her friends. However, she soon discovered that they had been talking about her behind her back and spreading vile rumors about her around the school.  One day, after the bullying had become too much for her, she had decided to stay behind after school and tell the head teacher what had been going on, but she was killed before being able to do so. After lunchtime, the school announced they would be having a fire drill, and when the alarm bell went off, all of the students made their way out into the yard where roll call would be taken. The five girls saw Carmen standing near an open sewer and decided to embarrass her in front of the other students. They crowded around her, called her names and pushed her around until she finally tripped and fell down into the sewer. The five girls thought this highly amusing and were giggling when the teacher called out Carmen's name and one of them replied that she was down in the sewer. The teachers looked down the manhole and could see Carmen's body lying at the bottom among all the sludge and they called the police. Before long, her body was recovered.  The students were all questioned, but as no one except for the girls who pushed her had seen anything, all guilty parties managed to lie their way out of it. They all told the same story, that she had lost her balance and had fallen in and the death was eventually ruled an accident. Several months later, many students at the school started receiving emails and messages on their MySpace accounts titled, They Pushed Her, which told the truth of what had really happened that day. Carmen had not accidentally fallen into the sewer, but had been pushed. The emails did not disclose the identities of the guilty parties involved, but rather threatened that there would be horrible consequences should they not confess. Many thought this was a horrible prank to be played on those with the memory of the tragedy still fresh in people's minds, but the five girls involved in Carmen's school were by now extremely worried that someone knew what had happened and was threatening them. A few days later, one of the girls involved in Carmen's death was at home, taking a shower, when she began hearing a strange cackling sound that appeared to be coming from the drain and quickly exited the bathroom in fear. That night, when her mother went to her room to say goodnight, she found her daughter's room empty, and after calling all of her friends and their parents eventually called the police. They scoured the area and eventually found her dead and disfigured and left to be found in the sewer. Then another girl was found, one of the five friends in fact, and another, and another, until all five girls had somehow met the same fate, dead and disfigured at the bottom of sewers with their necks broken and their faces torn off from the fall. While you would think that would be the end of it, Carmen is apparently still not satisfied. According to the urban legend, over the years, she has become a twisted entity whose sole purpose is to have the truth of her death known. Not content only with the deaths of the guilty parties, today she will visit anyone who does not believe the story and tell it to others. So you know now why I am telling it to you, and why you should share this episode, just in case.  Unless of course you believe her story and share it with others. Thanks for listening. If you liked the podcast, please share a link to this episode and recommend Weird Darkness to your friends, family and co-workers who love the paranormal, horror stories or true crime like you do. Every time you share a link to the podcast, it helps spread the word about the show, growing our Weirdo family in the process, plus it helps get the word out about resources that are available for those who suffer from depression. So please share the podcast with others. Do you have a dark tale to tell of your own? Fact or fiction, click on Tell Your Story at WeirdDarkness.com and I might use it in a future episode. All stories in Weird Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise, and you can find source links or links to the authors in the show notes. The axe murders of lichens is from Pennsylvania oddities. The urban legend of Carmen Winstead was written by Paul Middleton and edited and added on to by Darren Marlar. The woman who made soap was written by Romeo Vitelli for Providencia. The girl who fell in love with the devil is by Laura Allen for Ranker. And the thing in the light is by Weirdo family member Brad Hicks. Weird Darkness theme by Alibi Music. And now that we are coming out of the dark, I will leave you with a little light. For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the sun he loves. Colossians 1 verse 13. And a final thought. Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly. Robert F. Kennedy. I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness. The first letter seemed harmless enough, possibly even just the result of a mistaken delivery. The second one drew concern. And paired with the unexplained visions of something darkly unsettling, Sam Morris finally caves. The every man safe world he lives in is about to take a drastic and dark turn. He quickly falls into a world of insanity, the morbid and the macabre. He's drawn into a darkness that is just as deadly as it is mysterious. A darkness that dwells in a house that could only be conjured up by a mad brain. It is a house that calls you, a house that haunts you with its ghosts. They'll scratch and claw through your fragile hide, bringing madness bubbling to the surface. Come see the ghosts for yourself, if you dare. Weird Darkness Publishing presents of a mad brain by Scott Donnelly. Now available on paperback, ebook and audio book versions through Amazon and WeirdDarkness.com


I am an archeological geneticist, I focus on ancient DNA in the past but what I'm really interested in is not just the DNA from a particular skeleton but I want to know about their whole life, I want to know about their life history, the diseases they had, the diets they ate but unfortunately very little of that preserves in the archeological record and this frustrated me for a very long period of time. And then I hit upon something really interesting, it's called dental calculus. You probably know it by the name tooth tartar, it's more common name. What it is, it's the dental plaque on the surface of your teeth that mineralizes while you're alive. It actually is the only part of your body that actually fossilizes during life and this entraps and preserves these materials on your teeth for very long time. And what's interesting is that dental plaque is very sticky, lots of things get entrapped in it and so we actually have this amazing record of behaviors, of all sorts of things that otherwise don't preserve at all right there sitting on the surface of your teeth that we can then go and mine out of the past. This fascinates me that we now have a window into this invisible world. When I started this research very few people were thinking about dental calculus. It wasn't very interesting, it's tooth tartar. What would you do with that? But the more I started investigating it, the more I started realizing that it preserves DNA for extraordinary periods of time, it preserves proteins for very long periods of time.  And as a scientist we can now use a wide variety of tools to mine those bits of information out and recover entire aspects not only of the genome of the individual which is also present in dental calculus but of all the things they did, the illnesses they had, the life they lived and the things they ate throughout their life. All the things that we wish we had a window to that don't preserve under conventional means we can get at through dental calculus. Initially we applied many methods in part because I didn't know where to begin, this was a material that has hardly been studied in fact for the past 50 years most of the research that's been done on dental calculus is just how to get rid of it, how dentists can more effectively remove it. There was very little known about the actual biology of the system so we had to be quite exploratory on our methods. We applied several different ones so for example we applied metagenomics, we specifically shotgun metagenomics, this is where you extract all of the DNA in a sample and then sequence all of it. This is a very new technique using next generation sequencing, it's only been available for less than 10 years and we applied this. It's computationally very difficult, generates lots and lots of data, terabytes of data so it's very complicated to analyze but it gives you an incredibly detailed window into the DNA that's preserved. We also applied a very new technique called shotgun proteomics where we applied tandem mass spectrometry. This is, it's only very recently that the instruments have become fast enough and sensitive enough to be able to do a bulk extraction of all the proteins that we can recover and then to sequence those or identify the proteins that were originally present. This was a particularly interesting aspect of the study to me because we were the first to apply this to an oral sample to a calculus sample in this ancient context but actually was the first time it had ever been done for even modern dental plaques. This was really pioneering, it was very very exciting. We also applied a number of other methods, conventional microscopy, light microscopy and scanning electron microscopy, rayman spectroscopy, all of these were coming together to try to understand the biology of the system, what minerals were present, what types of microfossils might be entrapped. We had very rich information but I was particularly excited about the metagenomic and the proteomic data. We found really rich sources of biomolecules in here. In the archaeological record in general ancient DNA and ancient proteins tend not to preserve very well. What we found in calculus is a very different story so we now know as a result of this work that dental calculus is the richest source of ancient DNA known in the entire record. In fact it's on average about a hundred to a thousand times more DNA in calculus than skeleton material from the same skeleton so it's really really rich and the same is true for proteins. We don't just find a narrow range of proteins which is what we typically find from dentin or bone. We find this incredible array of proteins that come from the bacteria that come from the human itself and also from diet. With the human proteins actually we don't just get run-of-the-mill proteins we get very exciting proteins like immune associated proteins and so we're able to reconstruct this entire relationship between the microbes and the host right there on the surface of the teeth. So the findings actually far exceeded my expectations. When I started this research my highest hope was that we might recover some oral bacteria that we might be able to associate with say dental caries. What I had no idea was that the ancient DNA and proteins that were preserved would allow us to reconstruct the entire ancient oral microbiome of this individual and the host response. We have an entire suite of immune proteins that were present and identified that we know are directly involved in response to microbial infections. So here we had in this particular case we had someone with periodontal disease and we could see the bacteria involved the host response all encapsulated and fossilized for us in time this detailed relationship. This is incredibly important if you think about how today we're starting to realize the tremendous importance of the microbiome in our overall health one question has always been well how could we ever look in the past where would we ever get it from and it turns out dental calculus is a fantastic reservoir of the microbiome sitting right there in our mouth in the mouths of these ancient people. We can go to almost any period in the past we can radiocarbon date the skeleton and have a snapshot of the oral microbiome. This is fantastic one of the questions we want to know what is the ancestral state of the microbiome you know if we think that today in industrialized societies we have a very disturbed microbiome that we have to know what it used to look like in order to make that comparison where does it come from it turns out we can actually get that information from dental calculus it's really rich so we were able to reconstruct this community of bacteria that's one thing we were also able to recover specific genomes from different organisms for different microbes one in particular I found really interesting is tannerola forcithia it's very associated with chronic periodontal disease and we had so many genetic sequences from it that we could actually reconstruct its entire genome and determine that the particular string that this individual had in medieval Germany lacked a conjugative transpose on which is a genetic element that conveys tetracycline resistance today and this person didn't have it so that was very exciting when we looked at the proteins we found it was just so interesting we found salivary amylase which is something you expect to find it's in saliva it helps you digest starch we also find this enormous range of immune proteins mostly associated with neutrophils which is a particular cell type that's engaged in defending you from dental plaque and other microbial infections and we also found dietary proteins in another study we looked at a larger number of samples and were able to trace milk consumption all the way back to the bronze age by picking out milk proteins from dental calculus so I find this incredibly exciting we can get angles of health and we can get angles of diet and also microscopically we see traces of things like fibers so if you think about clothing for example they don't preserve well in the archaeological record and yet we can go into the dental calculus of individuals and see bits of cotton bits of flax bits of hemp and we can then infer what types of clothing people were wearing if they were using people who were working with clothing or have clothing and that they're holding in their teeth while they're working on different fabrics so it's this real window into the past that we've never quite had anything like it the relevance of these findings is that we now have a new source of human life history behavior health and diet in the past that that was under our noses the whole time and we didn't know about and now is revealing complex information on a scale that we we'd never expected this is providing information about how the human oral microbiome has evolved and changed through time we can use this to see how changes in human behavior changes in human society may have impacted our microbiome which then may impact our health we also now have this incredible window into microbes ancient microbes that we can radiocarbon date put a date on and see how individual microbes change through time um we've had a long history of coalition with many of these microbes we don't understand these relationships very well some of them are actually quite protective against disease for us and we now have a way of actually going into the archaeological record and finding these microbes we can actually do archaeological microbiology this is a completely new area so I think this is very very exciting looking at how microbes evolve through time and how our relationship has changed with them in terms of moving forward we're still trying to explore how far we can go with this technology and everywhere we look we keep finding new and exciting things so one aspect is we noticed early on that we could recover human DNA from calculus but we didn't know what could we do with it is there enough to do any kind of interesting research with so we we recently conducted a study where we showed you could recover whole mitochondrial genomes from calculus this is really exciting in cases where you might not be able to analyze the skeletal material for one reason or another we're also really interested in understanding whether or not calculus might provide an unusual or even a better preservational environment for DNA in general than dentin or bone the fact that it calcifies during life effectively sealing off that DNA seems to have a protective effect on it doesn't seem to decompose or undergo the same kind of decay that the rest of the body goes under it's what's very protected so this reservoir aspect of it is very interesting to me we're also now starting to apply this to many many more skeletons we want to know how far back in the past can we go our initial study focused on the medieval period because we wanted a system that we we understood to a pretty good degree we wanted to know if the findings made no sense we know enough about the medieval period to know what we expected to find and we did find it this gave us a lot of confidence in our results and now we can take that information and start applying it to deeper and deeper periods in the past and so we're exploring in many many directions we're also further exploring proteins it seems like almost every year a new mass spectrometer comes out that can recover even more information and as we start to apply these technologies our protein counts are going from 40 to 80 to 100 to 200 to sometimes we even get 700 protein identifications in a single sample this is including health information host information dietary information we're really really excited about this and we're starting to pick up dietary items but otherwise we would never see and what's also really exciting about the protein work is not only can we say oh this person was eating oats or this person was eating something related to a cow which you would get from genomic information we can say oh this is specifically oat seed or this is specifically cow milk and when it comes to milk we can not only say that it's milk we can say it's cow milk it's sheep milk it's goat milk we can actually distinguish it so proteins because they're tissue specific we can actually say what specific foods we're eating and that gets really exciting this is a completely new area so right now we're pushing the limits of all the technologies that we have at our fingertips um to try to reach the limit which we haven't reached yet of how much we how much information we can really extract from this material