Hi and welcome to What's Up? Wilson, our monthly TV show where you take a closer look at things going on in our community. I'm your host, town manager Eric Wells. Happy New Year. This month I sat down with Recreation and Parks Director Todd Goodwin to check in and see what's going on in our recreation programming, talk about our new indoor recreation space, the Rec Zone, and take a look at our outdoor skating rink. We finally got some good snow and ice to get people out there. I sat down with Todd earlier today. Joining me next is our Recreation and Parks Director, Todd Goodwin. We're going to check in and see what's going on in Recreation and Parks. How are you doing, Todd? Good. Thanks, Eric. Glad to be here today. Appreciate it. Nice snowy morning out there. Yes, it is. Ski and ride day today. That's right, down at Cochrane's, right? Yeah, Cochrane's. How many students are participating this year? 225 participants and 29 student instructors, which is seventh and eighth graders. So we're up around the 250, 255 mark or so. Is that one of our higher numbers or is that? Yes, yeah. Increased enrollment. It's slowly increased back up to and beyond since COVID. So we're excited. Good day to be students. It won't keep you too long to get out there. So a number of interesting things going on in your department. One thing is a new photo contest at the launching for the program guide. How can folks get involved in that? Yeah, so yeah, we are doing a photo contest for a cover photo. Decided to do one photo. That's the whole cover to make it look like a magazine type of a thing. So we, in the last couple of weeks, we've reached out and asked people to send in photos of their families participating in, you know, rec program or at the. Community park and we got about a dozen or so and we picked the rec staff pick 3 of them that we thought would make it. They're good photos and we make good photo covers. And so now the voting is, is open on those 3 and people can go to our home page or our website and there's a under announcements. And they explain that and there's a link to click on so people can vote on a Google form and they see the 3 pictures they can vote for which one that they feel. So involving the community to send us pictures, but also to vote and then we'll use that as our cover photo on our spring summer program guide. And we hope to do this on all of our guides going forward and gets us great pictures, plus also if people are sending us some pictures, then they're okay with having their family on the front cover. Just a good thing. Yeah, that was great. Great way to highlight what's going on and get everybody involved to vote for the photo they'd like to be on cover here. Yeah, and our spring summer guide will be mailed home probably about mid February or so so look at a chance and I think we're going to use those other photos throughout the guide to get the people's permission to do that as well. But deadline for voting is this Sunday the 21st. So hopefully people will click on that link and vote for their favorite. The guide you know spring summer what months does that cover. The spring summer guide covers March through August programming.  What when can folks are signing up for those programs is it right about when, when the guy goes out. As soon as the guide, as soon as you got the guide home programs will be up and running probably they go online for registration a day before. We know the guides going to be in the, in the homes. And the other thing that we're doing separately from our spring summer guide is a camp guide. And that's going to be mailed out early February for camps that are June, July and August. We typically encourage folks to register early for camp, right? We sometimes camps and get filled up pretty quickly. And if there's that someone's interested into jump on it and get their name. Yeah, there's already people asking us when the camps that information will come out. So they're looking for that here in January, but the guide will be early February registration opens February 8 for residents and a week later for non residents. So residents have a chance to get into those camps that feel quickly and are very popular. You're looking for summer staff. Camp counselors that that's probably something going up soon. Yeah, that's actually posted. We. On our website as well under announcements we have job postings for. Head counselors. Camp counselor, regular counselor, junior counselors. So we're reaching out to past year staff last year summers and asking if they're returning, but we're also looking to. Get an applications of people that are interested in working with us. So we put stuff out to the colleges. It's posted on our site and they'll be taken to the. Town site for job postings and they get it all. Explanations and job descriptions are there how to apply and go for so. Yes, we had started that process like started early to get the good people. A great great opportunity for you to get engaged with us with a good summer job working for recreation. Yeah, college kids that are looking to work with with students a great experience. Teachers or TAs or any of those that are working in the school to have the summers off. That wanted to continue working with kids and enjoy doing that. We're looking for those type of people. Any, any camps this year you want to highlight any, any new enrichment camps or anything that comes to mind or just just in general what what our camps. Yeah, we'll have our day camps rec camp and the LIT for the other kids. The our camp, which is more of an adventure camp type, you know, for 6 through 8th graders that are looking to be outdoors and being more adventurous. The enrichment camps are lining up to be about the same. We were adding a new. Multisports camp and I know Alex is hard at work finalizing some. Gardening programs, more kitchen food. You know, we have the baking camps and we're in popular bringing in some more. Cooking and food prep and that kind of stuff. So those camps are, you know, either newest ones. Plus, we're always looking for instructors who are interested in offering camps or programs, you know, throughout. So just like we have job postings, we're always looking for instructors as well. There was going on for vanilla. Good time to be thinking about that. Definitely. Yeah. And then in time to talk about our, our rec zone. It's an indoor space, the town least about a year ago, we started getting it set up and start offering. Programming last spring. I'm sure folks who are familiar with the rec zone kind of kind of what it is. And the departments got it up and running over the last year and things that that's being awful there. Yep. It's a 2000 square foot space that we have split into two areas. One is a active area for fitness programs and any type of programs where you just need an open space for some moving around and stuff like that. The other area is set up with tables and chairs for more educational or programming that, you know, is kind of sit down and working on something. The, it's all one space. So we can't do those two programs at the same time, but it's a nice setup where we don't have to tear down and set up for each of the different types of programs. So there can be a fitness program going on and that finishes and half hour 15 minutes later, another program can start that's, you know, with the tables and chairs, an educational type of program. We opened last March. So it's almost a year here that we'll be going. We've had some senior fitness dance classes, jazz or size is going on right now. And those are ongoing programs where you just kind of drop in pay five or $10 per class. You don't have you don't have to pre register you're not paying for six weeks of a program. So we're looking to bring more of those types of programs in as we grow it. We're also moved some of our programming that we had in the school, like dog training. You know that we could only do nine months out of the year and not the summer now will be able to do year round. And we brought in other programs like who fitness yoga. Working on a fencing program, possibly table tennis starts at the end of the month. People can register for now is for registration is open now so they can register to pick up program. You know, only taking so many so we don't overbook it. We got four donated ping pong tables. So, you know, it's really great. There's a group out there that looking to do that. We're excited about that. So, again, just bring it in programs that we can do things programs that we can do year round. And we can offer at all times of the day or on the weekend and also programs that are ongoing where people can drop in, try them and pay like five or $10. Each class so it's a great. It's been a great addition to recreation programs and helped us to grow our programming. And we're excited about it and and looking to do more and basically we're only limited by the instructors that we haven't met yet and haven't created a program with to put it into that so if there's instructors out there that looking for a space to and they want to work with us. We've got space and we want to work with you. Yeah, for many years, space has been a challenge for us. So, you know, got a space we can utilize and it's really like you name different types of programs. It's a wide spectrum of interests and an idea and things to participate in it's, you know, really, you know, the active recognition classroom style different instruction dog training so it's. Take advantage of trying out our new space or your instructor you've got talent you want to share with others. We're game to take on most things so definitely appropriate to the space I guess. Yeah, we have a program proposal that people fill out submit to us and then we look at over and we get old of them. We do a We meet them at the space and we get them to look, you know, look over the space and see if it will work for them and if it does then we find time and we put together that and put it on our website and have people register and, you know, so we have the space we need the instructors and once we get the instructors, we need the participants and then the programs that go and it's successful from there. We're really using this as, you know, our initial pilot within your space to we're having a lot of good information and data. The town did a comprehensive community survey last year is first part of the big project initiative here to look at it in your community center recreation space and really get the libraries to try at the same time. And the recommendation from that steering committee is to kind of look at these at two different pathways with these projects pursuing an addition on the library and exploring community recreation center site in tap corners and pro center area. So we're really learning a lot from what the community. First there are great participation in the survey but then having the space to learn about what different types of things can be offered. The town is going to be continuing that project coming up here some more funding was appropriated for it so kind of will kind of continue to work on needs. The idea of the potential of what this could be in the financial aspects of the spring. So, another thing, you know, some upcoming programs mission of spring and summer guide coming out some recent programs you want to want to highlight from that top. Yeah, right now, you know, we still got January and February of our winter months so we get dangerous girls program coming up and Ninja intro for a lot of different age groups and those have done by not a studio over in the rehab. In the kismet building, and they're a great partner. And that's another thing we do is we partner with businesses that are offering programs already. And what we do is we kind of, we take registration for those programs that they're already doing so we take up some spots and we help to to get people because people are coming to our site to look for and they're seeing a dangerous girl and dangerous girls is for 14 and older. So it's a great program for a mom and daughter to take together teaching self defense and stuff like that. The Ninja intro intros are Taekwondo intros so it's great program. They also do a ninja science during the February school break. And then we have a woman's pickup basketball that still has openings. We do do men's basketball and we do volleyball but those are filled at this time, very popular, but there is a woman's basketball on Wednesday nights that still has some spots and other people can get involved with. So those are some of the ones that we have coming up. And then, like I said, Alex, our program coordinator is working on the camp step, but he's also working on the spring summer guide. Looking to bring back a lot of programs that we've done in the past, but also looking to bring back, bring some new ones in. And again, as always, we're looking for instructors for those those programs, new programs that we could bring in as well. Great options out there folks. She mentioned outside. If there are ice right in the village community parks, something to town purchase factor in the pandemic.  So how about, what's the, what's the conditions as of today? As of today, the rink has been shoveled off and the ice is good. We opened up yesterday with some, some good ice. It's, we've had great ice, but we haven't had enough of it all season long. There's been a thin layer, but it hasn't frozen through with all the warm weather. And with all the rain that we've gotten, it's, it's quite high. It's probably about twice the amount of water that from when we initially put it into it with all the rain and and the melting that we have. So there's a, there's a lot of ice, but it's, it's, it's good right now. And the rink is open and anytime that we close it or open it will post it on Facebook and also on the homepage of the other website. So people know before going, but when it is closed with the gate fences up that we have rounded on block in the entrance and the entrance is by the warming hot, as you said, by in village community parks. So it's a great place. There are lights there until 930 so people can go at night as well. Great outdoor activity in the wintertime. Is the generally want people to skate there. People want to bring a hockey stick or a puck. So what uses are allowed on all uses are allowed and we ask everyone to use it together and share it on one side. Definitely a group could, you know, have sticks and pucks on the other side. You can just be the free skaters or figure skaters or anything like that. So definitely it's a 60 by 60 rink. So it's a good size for everyone to share at some point in time. And when that's like all of our facilities, we ask that people share play together and invite other ones into play. There's, you know, tennis, pickleball, basketball, everything like that. If you're using the court, you know, invite other ones to come and use it with you. Yeah. No, that that's about it.  And again, the biggest thing is we're only limited by space instructors and participants. We now have the space. We're looking for the instructors and once we create the programs, we just need the participants to register for them sign up. And yeah, we'll have a lot of good lifestyle active lifestyle activities for the community. Yeah. Right. Thank you. Appreciate the time. Lots going on in the recreation and parks department. Our director Todd and Alex, our program coordinator do a great job there. So, so next this month, we'll look at our community notebook, a few things to be aware of coming up here in Williston. So as a reminder, final tax installment is due for the fiscal year 2024. That's due by February 15. You can have your taxes dropped off into the drop box. We have one one in the parking lot. You can do a drive through a town hall or one in the back of the building by February the 15th or we need a postmark by that date if you're going to mail in your in your taxes. And we are gearing up for town meeting day 2024. It's right around the corner. So Willison's town meeting will take place on Monday, March 5th in the Wilson Central School Auditorium at 7pm. We'll have an overview of town meeting articles, the town budget. We have a couple bond questions that'll that'll be up on the ballot as well. Then we have to be a school budget presentation as well and opportunity to ask questions. Then we'll have Australian ballot voting for articles on Tuesday, March 6. That'll take place in Wilson Armory next to the town hall annex in the village. Polls open from 7am to 7pm. You can also vote absentee or vote early. Contact the town clerk's office if you would like to receive a ballot early. And you can always, oh, Tuesday, March 5th. There's a typo in my slide here. Monday, March 4th and Tuesday, March 5th. I think I looked at the wrong month here. So thanks to the producer for the correction here. Everyone's aware, Monday, March 4th and Tuesday, March 5th. As a reminder, Willison 2050, our next town plan. We've been doing some community outreach the last few months here. We've had a community survey set up as well. We're calling Willison 2050 help plan the future of Williston. What we'll do is have this open until the end of January. The planning commission is going to be drafting the town plan language. Transmit that to the select board, likely this summer sometime. And then the new town plan would need to be adopted by the midway through 2025. So opportunity to get involved, help share your thoughts and ideas for the future of Williston and get engaged with this great process that we have set up. Reminder we're on social media. You can follow the town on Twitter, like us on Facebook. Our departments also have social media accounts, police and fire departments. They're certainly active on there as recreation department as well and our library. So always looking for feedback and segment ideas, contact information is on the screen. Send me an email, give me a call, stop by town hall. I always like to hear from anyone in the community. So that's going to wrap it up this month here on What's Up, Williston. Thanks for tuning in. I'm Eric Wells, Williston's town manager and I'll see you around town. Take care.


Hi, it's Linda again from the Linda Living in China blog and today I've finished Unit 11 of my 120-hour TEFL certification by ITTT. And this unit focuses on how to teach receptive skills, so that's reading and listening.  And oftentimes they even have completely different writing systems. For example, right now I'm in China, so they use Chinese characters. In Korea they use Hangul, Korean alphabet and so on and so forth. So there are obviously a lot of difficulties for these native speakers to learn English, to listen, to read first of all, for reading. And listening is the same because obviously it's a different language. And we have different tones in English than in other languages. Most languages don't have the TH sort, these kind of things. So this unit focuses on that, how to tackle these issues and find effective solutions. So it's a really, really good unit and very, very helpful. And then the next Unit 12 will focus on writing and speaking. So I'm really looking forward to that and I'll keep you updated. Bye-bye!


This research examined the current state of knowledge and practice regarding polymer-modified vitamins, PMBS, focusing on their chemical structure and microstructure, as well as their potential use in paving and industrial applications. The authors found that polymers and other additives can enhance the engineering properties of vitamin, but that these modifications may cause compatibility issues during storage and production. They also noted that certain waxes can help improve the compatibility of polymers with vitamin, which could benefit warm mix asphalt, WMA, production. This article was authored by Michel Porto, Paulino Caputo, Valeria Lewis, and others.


Welcome to the 2020 Celebration of Nebraska Books. This event is sponsored by the Nebraska Center for the Book, the Nebraska Library Commission, and Humanities Nebraska, supporting the One Book, One Nebraska presentation. We're here via screens, for obvious reasons, to celebrate books, authors, presses, and the state of Nebraska as these awards honor and celebrate the creativity and the stories of this state. To give the 2020 One Book, One Nebraska presentation on All the Gallant Men, we will hear from Rebecca Faber, Nebraska Center for the Book board member. I'm Becky Faber, a board member for the Nebraska Center for the Book. I'm going to talk about All the Gallant Men, the 2020 One Book, One Nebraska. Almost 79 years ago, the attack on Pearl Harbor redefined America, propelling us into World War II. And as President Roosevelt said, served as a day of infamy, a marker of integral change in American history. Donald Stratton, originally from Red Cloud, joined the United States Navy following his high school graduation in 1940. He had always lived in rural Nebraska. His childhood had been impacted by the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. His father had served in the Army during World War I, but Donald Stratton opted to join the Navy. He described himself as part of the hard-working poor in America, struggling just to put food on the table. In 1940, he left Red Cloud to go to Great Lakes Naval Training Center in Illinois for basic training. Then on to Bremerton, Washington, where he was stationed on the USS Arizona, one of the two largest battleships in the Navy's fleet. From there, he sailed to Long Beach, California and then to Hawaii, which was not yet a state. On the USS Arizona, Stratton was assigned to operate the Arizona's five portside anti-aircraft guns. The Arizona was scheduled to return to Bremerton, Washington in November of 1941. But during maneuvers held in foggy weather, the USS Oklahoma collided with the USS Arizona, resulting in the Arizona staying at Pearl Harbor for necessary repairs. This incident requiring the USS Arizona to remain in Pearl Harbor changed the course of Donald Stratton's life. Early on the morning of Sunday, December 7th, 1941, Donald Stratton saw and felt the bombs as the Japanese attack began. Like most students in American schools, I learned about World War II in history courses. What I learned was what was covered in standard textbooks. The focus was on events rather than people. All the gallant men takes this portion of American history to a much clearer level. Donald Stratton covers complete details of the attack on the USS Arizona, supplying details that must have been incredibly painful to recall as the fleet was destroyed. On that day, one to live in infamy, 92 U.S. Navy aircraft were destroyed. 77 U.S. Army Air Corps aircraft were destroyed. Two battleships were destroyed. And in human loss, over 2,000 servicemen were killed. 2,008 from the Navy, 218 from the Army, and 109 Marines. Of the over 2,000 servicemen killed, 1,117 were sailors on the USS Arizona. Donald Stratton did not survive that day without severe injuries. In his description of the Japanese attack on the USS Arizona, he brings us the real details of war, the chaos of battle, the brotherhood of the men who served together, their brave efforts to assist each other, his almost futile effort to escape the burning Arizona, the sight of those severely burned, those whose bodies were blown into piles of body parts, as well as the medical personnel who gave monumental efforts to heal the injured and comfort those near death. This level of detail told by someone who survived a horrendous event adds such depth to what any of us probably learned about Pearl Harbor and makes this book an incredible part of our historical and military heritage. I'll just have you repeat that part again with the last sentence. This level of detail told by someone who survived a horrendous event adds such depth to what any of us probably learned about Pearl Harbor and makes this book an incredible part of our historical and military heritage. Stratton, however, extends the importance of his narrative by adding the details of his medical and emotional recovery. Burned over much of his body and his hands almost burned to the bone, he also had one ear that was partly burned off. After many months of medical treatment, he received a medical discharge from the Navy in September of 1942. He returned to Red Cloud to recuperate physically and mentally until February of 1944 when he re-enlisted in the Navy, going on to serve in New Guinea, the Philippines and Okinawa. Donald Stratton then served in America's opening battle of World War II, Pearl Harbor, and the final major one, Okinawa. Donald Stratton, an 18-year-old boy from Red Cloud, a boy who had never even seen an ocean, stepped into a bigger world that impacted his personal story as well as America's. Someone once said of these men who served our country, in an hour boys had become men and men heroes. All the gallant men is sometimes a difficult read. The details of both the physical injuries and emotional distress are explicit. Mr. Stratton doesn't care to cover up the truth. He wanted this story to be told, and in 2016, 75 years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, All the Gallant Men was published. Mr. Stratton had wanted to develop a book about his experience, and when he made a connection with Ken Geyer, a professional writer, the project became reality. For me, reading All the Gallant Men was more than just a thorough immersion into an important day in America's history. It is the first memoir by a USS Arizona survivor. It is also the story of a generation of those raised in the rural poverty of the Great Depression. One of my uncles, like Mr. Stratton, joined the military before Pearl Harbor for financial security. He went on to be captured at Fiat Pass and transported for internment in Germany. I so wish that he could have written a book about his experience as a prisoner of war, but I respected his desire to rarely speak about his experience. My father also served in World War II with the 8th Air Force at Polbrook, England. Like his brother and Donald Stratton, he was just a farm boy serving his country. He did show us pictures in his uniform from World War II, and I have taken the idea of him as a young soldier and put it into a poem, which is entitled One Small Photo, the title poem from my book, and I would like to share that. One Small Photo, an Iowa farm boy sharply pressed in army khaki World War II whirling around him.  An army photo, evidence that Uncle Sam owns him, has given him to a war seemingly without end, the one following the war to end all wars. One of the lucky ones, he will come home, although he cannot know this, only dream it. Daily servicing planes that will take off, but often not return. Daily awaiting word of his brother, a POW, whose weight will drop to 86 pounds, his torture, dreams of their mother's meals. They will be reunited at their town's July 4th celebration, one hitchhiking for hours to arrive in time, impatient to see survival in his brother's face. One small photo, one small memory, proof of the smallness of history. Father never wrote his story, although he shared some of the lighter elements, including being stationed on the same base as Clark Gable. It is important to our history and our culture to keep these stories alive, and I think we have a variety of ways to keep them going. Here are my suggestions. First of all, talk to veterans. Be aware that not everyone wishes to share stories of military service, but sometimes opportunities arise where one can ask respectful questions. If nothing else, thank a veteran for his or her service. Secondly, I suggest that you work on family genealogy. It wasn't until I tried to learn more about the history of my mother's family that I learned that I had a relative who fought in the Civil War shortly after he immigrated from Ireland. I also learned that I had great uncles who served in World War I. My third suggestion is to support organizations or programs that assist veterans, active military, or military dependents. The program that I support is the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Military and Veterans Success Center, and they provide services for active military, military dependents, and veterans who are using the GI Bill to promote their education. My last suggestion is to support libraries and other literary or cultural organizations in Nebraska that promote related events. The Nebraska Warrior Writers, a writing program developed by Humanities Nebraska, the Nebraska Writing Project, and the Veterans Administration offers writing and learning opportunities for veterans and active duty personnel. I've had the opportunity to present to these men and women as they develop their writing skills. They will be publishing an anthology of their writing later this year. Donald Stratton was proud of his service and of his story. I strongly suggest that you read his book, think about all of the stories, both yours and others, and then find a way to bring them forward. Thank you.


Hi everyone, Joe for jaspyscasewrakes.com doing a quick random number block Random number block randomizer for the following teams here for diamond icons baseball one box picker team number 39 Which will be in a separate video. This is how the number blocks work Basically, you get a single digit and that represents a block of numbers So if you get three you get three out of whatever 13 23 out of whatever 33 43 53 63 so on and so forth Big thanks to PJ and Brian for knocking out this number block. There are the numbers here Let's roll and randomize and see what number you get after nine times each one two three four five six seven eight and ninth and final time after nine Brian in the seven Slot there, let's assign you a number three and a six nine times One two three four five six seven eight and Ninth and final time after now we got eight down to nine Now as stated in the description zero gets any and all redemptions including one-of-one redemptions But I think that's a moot point because PJ has both zero and one So PJ's all the numbers except for three So you're still within train whistle range Brian So you can get three out of five if Of any of those teams down there so fingers crossed there and so good luck to both of you Let's order those numerically All right, and coming up in a separate video will be that break itself. We'll see you for that jasby's case breaks calm Bye-bye


So without further ado let's jump right in because there are many slides and very few minutes. So you guys probably all know why you're here. So here's a little agenda. We'll get through it hopefully. I'll do a little bit turbo version. So if I talk too fast just kind of raise your hand and I'll try to slow down a little bit. But I have to go quick. So let's jump right in and talk about Android. Let's go. So I'm Josh. Go by Jduck on the internet. Some of you may or may not have interacted with me. I welcome you to say hello anytime. Currently I work for Zimperium doing mobile defense research. It's excellent to work. Lead author of Android Hector's Handbook and founder of DroidSec which we'll be having a little event somewhere in the building later. So if you see us drinking join us. Previous affiliations and all this stuff. So my motivations in doing this research really were to improve the overall state of mobile security especially in Android. There's been years and years of people talking about all these problems in Android and I'm like I got to be able to do something about that. So I kind of decided to do what I do best which is discover and eliminate critical vulnerabilities and also exploit them to show people that they're real. They're not some BS. I'm trying to save my phone battery. There we go. All right. So I also wanted to spur people to start thinking a lot harder on some of the mobile security issues so that they could really make the improvements in their organizations that they needed to. I wanted to increase visibility of risky code in Android. There's a lot of code in Android. It's like 60 gigs of stuff. And apparently people don't read any of it as you'll see later. And also last year I gave a talk at Black Hat and a couple of other conferences about the joint army. Basically I collect Android devices, have them all connected right now through USB to a computer, can query them at any time, cross versions, across OEMs, across CPUs, whatever. So I want to use that some more. So I want to thank the sponsors. I started this work when I worked with Occubant. We was now Optiv. They graciously allowed me to take this research on with me and see it through to the end or at least, I guess I would really call this the end, but at least do this. I want to thank Amir as Amir here. Come on. You missed Botox Amir. Man. I'll get him later. Don't worry. All right. So I also want to thank Colin and Matt Selnick. Are they in the room? They're probably not either. Okay. They're both fired too. All right. So what is stage fright? Stage fright is Android's multimedia library. It's primarily written in C++. There are some parts of it that are written in Java. We're getting that a little bit more. The handle is basically all audio and video on the device. It's meant to stand as a kind of go between the Dalvik applications and other sort of high level stuff in Android and the hardware because a lot of Android devices actually have hardware video decoders. Yeah. It also extracts metadata, which we'll see is kind of important. So a brief history. Android back in the 1.0, 1.5 days, they launched with an engine, a multimedia engine called OpenCore, which was apparently donated to them by some random organization. Later, during the 2.0 development, they added stage fright to the ASP. However, they weren't really using it. It was kind of like they were starting to develop it. In 2.2, they made an optional to use. So it had like a setting that you could set in the system properties. But all the devices I had with 2.2, which isn't very many, they had it enabled by default, so I just assumed everyone would do that. That's a pretty good assumption, I think.  Anyway. So, at 2.3, Gingerbread, and we're talking about 2010, I think, time frame here, set this as a default engine and got rid of OpenCore entirely. A side note, this code was pulled into Firefox and Firefox OS. Well, Firefox OS is a fork of Android at the beginning, so that's not really a surprise. But they also decided to pull it into Firefox, ship it on all versions of Firefox except Android, sorry, except Linux around version 17. So why did I look at stage fright? What was the big deal? And honestly, I can't remember exactly why I started looking at it. It might be the name when you kind of look through, you're like, oh, stage fright, that sounds interesting. Sounded scary, right? Definitely a big plus if you want to audit some code to look for native code. It's oftentimes much bugger than Java code. A lot more ways to screw that up. And also a lot of times the people who do end up writing native code often are not very good at writing code. They don't really understand what they're necessarily doing. So that's cool, especially with respect to security. So also there's various public mentions. So people on Reddit and other places posting saying, my phone keeps rebooting randomly and you know, you read down and somebody's like, oh, you have a corrupt file on your SD card or something. So I was like, that sounds really bad. It's got to be pretty bad code. I have to check that out. And then finally, like there was some related work that was published in my recently in April where I was like, you know, that is really cool stuff. Maybe I should do a talk on that stuff. So we'll talk more about some of the issues reported in this one. It's pretty cool.  And they work for Intel so they were x86 Android emulators. And basically they said they had like 11.5 terabytes of media files that they created that crashed stage fright, which was pretty intense. That's more data than I think anyone's going to go through. So they reported some bugs and we'll talk about them a little more later. So another related work was there was this paper about black box fuzzing on mobile devices. This is pretty much what I did in part of it. So it's definitely related and they also talk about some of the stuff they had found in stage fright. So related work, really old stuff, was Charlie Miller's talk where he talked about Android hacking like back before Android was even released. He found a vulnerability in a multimedia file that he reported. This was so long ago that it was on open card and on stage fright. So stage fright is pretty big. It's about I think something like 10,000 lines of code. Probably actually more than that. And it supports a wide variety of multimedia file formats. There's a spot in the code where you can literally look at this one function and it's like if it's this format do this, it's this format do that. And then you can see which way it goes. Most of the code that they support in stage fright is backed by common open source libraries like libvorbis or libflac or vpx, all these other kind of open source libraries which are projects of their own. However, there is also a bunch of code that it lives directly in stage fright. So that was my focus. I decided to pick MP4. I thought it was, you know, relatively straightforward file format. But I thought it would be a good one to mess around with. So the rest of this talk will primarily focus on MP4 stuff for the examples and findings. So system architecture, let's talk about how it looks on a system where this code runs. A little bit of high level. This is the new diagram that they like to that they're showing on the developer site. It's pretty cool. And now they're calling out media servers specifically. I'm not really sure why they decided to do that. There's many more things that run in the background besides system server and media server. What they do is a lot of inter process communication to talk between processes. Basically, media server is running as a background, native service. It starts from a knit. And in Android, I've heard somebody told me recently that this wasn't necessarily a case in older versions. But in Android now, if something that's running from a knit crashes, it's just automatically restarted. So we'll revisit the knit thing a little bit. There's also some other things that it affects. We'll talk about again. So let's look at privileges, right? Like what do you get if you pop this thing? That's very interesting to find out, I think. And this is actually another reason why I looked at this service. Remember, I wrote a little tool called PRIVMAP to look at processes and see what they were running as.  So you can see at the bottom line of the kind of like coded text area that they have all these groups there. So actually the media server, although you would think it's been sandboxed and moved and segregated in order to limit risk of the code, they're actually like making it very privileged, I guess, in order to do what it needs to do for the most part. So for example, the audio group is used to lock down access to the speakers and the microphone. If you have the audio group, then you can do anything with input and output of audio. Camera is a similar thing, iNet. There's actually things within the media stage fright and other parts of the media server that require connecting back to the internet.  And then also, you can see the group here for DRM. So I did a survey of the joint army. I wanted to figure out, yeah, this is that slide. So I made this slide, I had no idea what this number means on the left. Accessible groups sorted by number of devices. And these numbers don't make sense to me. 17 doesn't seem like a number that would jive with what I wrote here. So I will look into that later and fix it when I publish the slides. All right, so I did some more surveying just besides whatever the hell that set is. I think maybe it was the breakdown of devices. Okay, yeah, so this is how many devices I looked at out of the 51 were from Google or from Motorola or from Samsung. So this kind of gives you a little bit of an overview of what my joint army collection looks like. Okay, so the privilege survey, I want to look at each group and see how many devices had which groups. So you can see they all say 51 on the left because these groups are on all devices. So we already talked about what you can do with that. It's pretty bad. So let's look at the other groups that are hanging out. We start with this bandwidth band with the counting thing. I think that's really pretty much uninteresting. But then you have DRMRPC. Usually that is used to talk directly into trust zone. Which trust zone is a very sort of interesting attack surface I think on Android devices. Because it's kind of like ring negative one, right? So it's above the kernel. It's more privileged than the kernel. So then you have the next one which is system. So system is the number two sort of user on Android. It owns the slash data partition. So everything that's writable on slash data is writable by that user. And if it's not writable since it owns slash data, you can just move it out of the way and put whatever you want there in its place. So system is a very high privilege. It's really just under root and it's well thought of in the research community in Android that if you have system that getting root is pretty much just an engineering effort, not really too much of a serious full reach of effort. So then we have the next one is graphics. So graphics is used to lock down basically the frame buffer devices for Android. And there have been numerous vulnerabilities discovered and exploited in the frame buffer stuff. I think right now it's pretty solid. But I couldn't be proven wrong, of course. So we keep going down the list that we got input. That means if somebody gets a device, one of these eight devices and they get in through media server on that, then they can watch your keystrokes or inject keystrokes into your use of the device. At the bottom you have shell. So shells, the user, they assign to ADB shell. I have no idea why they would give that to media server at all. It blows my mind really. But it's interesting. And then the last one is radio. So radio is basically right below system in that if you have radio you can make calls and MMS, man in the middle, all communications with the cellular network. You can take down cellular network connection that you have. So it basically runs all the stuff that's between the cell network and the rest of Android. Okay, so architecture recap. Live stage fright runs inside media server. Media server is fairly privileged, including sometimes system. It automatically restarts whenever it crashes. It's a fairly large attack service that's provided based on all these groups that you're given. The path from remote to the kernel through another vulnerability that you have to find in a driver or something is probably not too difficult because of all this extra attack service that's being given to you once you're in with those privileges. So let's talk about the attack service of Android. Basically in order to figure out what's going on with the code I just opened up a movie while I had a debugger attached. I put a break point just on the open thing. I was like, okay, we're going to play a file so it's got to open it. And then when I hid I looked back and started digging around in the code. So here's what the back trace looks like. You can see I'm playing the playing .mp4 file. And you can see all the different functions that are called in the process, including some paths to where they are in the OSP code base. So when you start looking closer you can see the set data source function. I think it's like, this is not even showing right here, but basically you can see where at the top it calls create from URI and then after that it calls this media extractor. And so we start looking at that and we end up with this function that loops through all the tracks that you count. When you look at that it says read metadata. So in order to find out how many tracks there are in a media file you have to extract the metadata because that's where it stores that information. So we look at that and it just goes into this function parse chunk. So let's look at that a little bit. So the parse chunk function is the primary attack surface inside stage-fried .mp4 parsing code. It's a recursive function so when it sees an atom that's supposed to have more atoms inside of it, when I say atom I'm talking about a tag length data piece of the file. So they just, I think actually they put it length tag data, but anyway that's what it is. Hey Amir come in here. Let the guy in the green chair and his lovely wife in here please. Yes those two. Yes and the lovely wife of course. You missed your shot out again but now you're here. Give it up for Amir. When you look at Android all versions like across the ASP which is beautiful because Git is wonderful. I love Git. You see that earlier versions had about 80 atoms supported and newer versions had about 140. So it's roughly almost double the amount of code over the course of the development. So we'll look a little closer later but you can see here an example where the move and the track chunks are especially handled where they say oh well we have more chunks inside so it recurses. And the recursion is really not relevant other than it's annoying to debug recursive codes sometimes but let's keep going let's talk about attack vectors. So when I talk about attack surface I'm always thinking about things that are deep in the code that you're trying to tickle and try to find the volts in and when I talk about attack vectors I'm thinking about all the ways to get there. So the ultimate goal on looking for attack vectors is to figure out like I said how to get my data in there. Oh I'm in trouble now. So first you can try all possible ways to send yourself a media file. Unfortunately it depends on. No no no go ahead. All right you want to try? Sure. All right go ahead. A thorough methodology. Find all calls into this function and ask yourself can an attackers data reach here? How am I doing? You're good. Maybe I should try that more. You need to work on your graphics. So if you had any idea how hard it was to do graphics in this presentation framework you wouldn't say that. Just put a picture of a waterfall in the background. Waterfall? Make everybody have to go to the bathroom. So you just repeat this process until you find them all right? You can't really know necessarily without looking all through the code all the ways it's possible. There's some problems with doing the second methodology when it's more thorough and after you have to deal with all these complicated issues like there is a place inside media server in this code path it actually calls into and out of Java code like back and forth about three times in one stack trace. So that's pretty wild. You got to open a lot of files and have them all kind of in the background or however. Excuse me. Yes sir? This one is not. Let me come on the other side. Let's dance. All right. Are we live yet? Awesome. All right now. How many of your first timers at DEF CON? Awesome. But you all know the drill by now. What do first time speakers do? So how's he doing by the way? Geez. Slow down speedy. All right. Anyway, so I'll become a speaker with a little tradition we call shot the new. Cheers. DEF CON. Thank you my friends. I owe you a shot. All right. Let's do it after. All right. So the other thing is there's a lot of object oriented code. We mentioned C++. We mentioned Java. So that oftentimes when you're like auditing code paths or looking to try to understand the code you have to do all this crappy stuff where you remember the member functions and variables and all these crazy classes and stuff. So then again more files to have open. It's fun. You have to be careful about objects instantiation and lifetimes and things like that. Further on Android because of the modularity and the IPC you end up having to sometimes cross boundaries that are like between processes. That can be hard to follow. But you can get through it if you keep trying. Sometimes you might have to take a break or a nap or something. I know that works for me. So that's the best way all possible ways. Go to the code, right? If you want to know what the code does, it's in the code. So go there. So the first vector I kind of stumbled upon or thought about was the video tag in HTML5. It's like this is brand new. I wonder if it does. So I fire up the device with the debugger attached to the parseChunk function or actually the readMetadata function which is a little bit better. If you put a breakpoint on parseChunk, it's great. But as soon as you hit the first chunk, it will break. But then every other chunk it hits, even when it's recursing into more chunks, it will keep getting hit. So it's pretty annoying to just keep saying continue all the time. So definitely we hit the breakpoint. And so I went on and tried to, I was like, you know, Thomas Cannon back in the day talked about this way to force Android to download files. And they used it in some sort of vulnerability that would load JavaScript through a weird content provider or something. So this is actually a straight screenshot other than the part on the left where the path is wrong in the URL. But anyway, so you go and as soon as you touch this link, you see this page in the middle which can be anything. It doesn't have to be, you know, what it is right now with this big white screen. It can be like cat pictures or whatever you want. You see this downloading toast come up which disappears after basically like one second. The only other indication that you did anything downloading anything is this little downward arrow with a line at the top. Now if you swipe down from the top and touch that, it'll tell you that you downloaded a file, you can touch that and you see what's on the right. Now the crappy and scary thing is here that the vulnerable code, the stage fright code is actually triggered as soon as the file is downloaded and it does not require you to go and open the media or touch it or look at it or anything like that. That's interesting. Oh look, I also did a feature request that was like, hey, can we like get some kind of prompting for this? Like I don't really want auto download stuff. I may not expect a link that I click to cause a download. So maybe that's not a good idea. So when I look deeper into how this worked, I decided to take a step back and say how is this working? What I found was that this whole subsystem called the media scanner. And so the only thing really documented in AOSP that is for people to use as developers is the media scanner connection. And really all that does is you create an object and you say scan this file and that's really it. The other thing is they're in the intent documentation. So there's the intent class and the Java stuff for Android. They have this long, long, long, long list of intents that are supported in the system. They have these two media mounted in media scanner scan file. So they're documented as well although they're basically one line and a huge table. And then if you look closer, there's this class that's used a lot internally in the code, the media scanner connection client. That one actually is used a lot. So I don't want to go too much deeper into this. Actually when I was making the slides I went all crazy deep and then I was like, you know what, there's no way I can talk about that. That's like a whole other talk right there. So I put it at the back of the slide deck so when you get a slide deck, you can go back there and check it out. So tons of attack factors, right? We're talking about once I went through the methodology, I looked at all these different ways to call onto this media scanner and stage fright other ways. I basically found that you can do through MMS, it triggers this code because it's showing you a thumbnail of the video. Even if it didn't show you a thumbnail, I just wanted to know how many seconds long the thing was that would still trigger it. So there's client size, we mentioned browser and download, there's also email. So if you get an email with an attachment on Android, it'll basically say it has an attachment but it won't download it automatically. You have to like push the button to download the attachment. When it's downloaded, of course it will scan it. How nice. So to back up just for one second, there's a way inside of these APIs to actually tell it, so not media scanner stuff, but a lot of these attack factors use the download manager. That's what I talk about a lot in the bonus slides, the download manager. There's ways to call in the download manager where it tells it not to scan the file. However, everywhere where I saw it in the code where they said don't scan the file when you download it, immediately afterwards they called the media scanner on the file. So okay. So physically adjacent, that's stuff like we're all in the same room together. Or in the case of NFC, you're a little bit closer. These are also attack factors. If you have an SD card slot on your device, somebody could totally insert an SD card in your device and potentially compromise it. Or an OTG drive if your device supports that special USB mode. And then there's the MTPPTP mode. This has been the default mode on Android devices, including Nexus devices since 4.0. I have a whole bunch of other research into this subsystem, but it's not going to fit here. And so if you connect the device to your computer with this mode and you transfer a media file to it, it will also scan it. So I say 11 plus attack factors, but really if you think about it, anywhere that a media is thumb nailed or like in any way like probed for metadata will trigger the stage fright code. So do you guys use any of these to talk to people you don't trust? Or even worse, do you think anybody who you don't trust could somehow communicate with you without you asking with any of these? So the scariest part is MMS by far. My research initially was on doing stuff over the SD card. I said, discovered the media mounted intent, which basically says when you stick the SD card in the volume manager says hey, there's a new SD card mounted and then the media scanner does its thing. So that's where I started, and then eventually through the attack factor research I found MMS and I was like, wait that can be good. So one day I just was messing around, I sent myself a video to it, not a malicious video at all. Just sent it to myself with the debugger attached of course. And my screen was off, phone was locked on the table and it hit the break point. I'm just like, what? Are you kidding me? So before even creating a notification it's like trying to get a screenshot of this video and then it's going to put it at least on newer versions, it will put it in the notification. See if I have some pictures. I don't know if I have some pictures on this. Ah yeah. You're right, I need more pictures. So I don't have some, I just put them in here. So in theory hey Dan, how are you? So in theory, if you exploit this vulnerability through MMS and you do some pretty neat engineering work you could potentially stop the whole process of the MMS going through. You could delete it from wherever it's stored. You could stop the audio notification because you've already taken control of the process that does all audio. And then you can, nobody would know anything even if they were using their device at the time.  I don't know about you guys. But it is a lot more work. I did not do that work. I didn't want to do that work. So the MMS stuff works in hangouts. Further testing later like I guess a couple weeks ago the new version of the app Messenger which is kind of like the throwback of the old messaging app that they removed in your versions also does a lot of processing automatically and especially on receipt. The older version does not do it although if somebody sends you an MMS message you can imagine who it is and it's like hey did you see this video of you? You might want to be like me and then you look at it and then you're done.  So the vulnerable code is invoked all the time. This device here I think I disabled the app if you haven't had a MMS that comes in messaging in this phone like if you're looking at it it triggers the vulnerability if you turn the screen sideways it redraws the activity and then triggers the vulnerability again you do that again triggers the vulnerability again you lock the screen and then you unlock it triggers the vulnerability again so basically anytime it's drawing the screen it's like that's another trigger so are there any other attack factors? I do not know I got this question a lot on Twitter like is silent text effected is like the whatsapp effect I don't know I don't use any of those things because a lot of times when a lot of people jump on to a technology it becomes kind of like a big risk in itself. So reach out if you have any ideas or any thoughts or you do any testing I'd love to hear about that sort of stuff so let's get into bugs I think I have like 10 minutes or something is that not right? Who's got the timer?  First round the details again focused on MP4 we didn't bother to create a large corpus we basically just used one media file or two I can't see my cursor is it over there? Yeah here it is maybe we can play the video that we used fuzzing this is a total waste of time but it would be funny yeah not normal to use a computer screen that's 20 feet from you so yes thank you for that that was badass so you can imagine it was a lot of fun hearing that sound over and over again when you don't hear it you're like hmm wonder what happened then so we deposit for about a week and we found 6200 crashes I went through all these crashes and bucketed them and then looked deeper into them and unfortunately the crashes we found from the fuzzer were all very sort of not interesting bugs they're like checking if something is zero not the guys who wrote stage fright decided they were going to kill themselves and crash the whole process thus making you lose audio and everything else so about 20 bugs but they're not that awesome a lot of no point of reference as well but when I was looking at the code I'm like okay well that's lame but let's look around maybe just at this function and within two or three lines there was just very important vulnerabilities so I found about five during code review then they became these two CVEs the first one was like kind of a merger of several issues because of similar root cause and affected versions so on second round we decided to throw American Fuzzy Lop I don't know how many people have heard of American Fuzzy Lop because he loves it, he's used it how many people have actually used it we got really like not very many people who said they heard of it even and like tend heard it heard of it so American Fuzzy Lop is a fuzzer developed by Michael Zalewski he's been in the security industry for a very long time and basically he came up with this idea of like let's look at the way code flows and if code flows from here to here then let's treat that as like a transition and keep track of like I guess like three things like a try and then he's like if there's a new one like code flow from here to here instead of from here to there then that's new, that's good, we want more so his goal in creating this fuzzer it wasn't really necessarily to find crashes although that's always going to happen when you do a lot of automated testing his goal was more to find new code paths with the purpose of building corpus in a more programmatic and more sort of intentional way rather than you know the traditional other way is to go down with all the files you can find and then run through this like long process where you see like what code does it hit which not very much fun so I didn't really again develop a corpus the thing is with AFL you don't really need one so I'm just kind of like echo yo yo yo into the file and then I ran it and it went really well so the work involved I had to develop code I ran AFL on my Linux server that I just got it was like 32 core machine double hi-fines and every once in a while like I guess every day or so maybe two days I would stop the fuzzer go all through the results triage them and bucket them and then look at each individual unique thing and try my best usually I got it on the first try but sometimes I had to do a little more deep analysis to fix the vulnerabilities and start the fuzzer running again the idea being what is the point of finding the same free conformability 800,000 times not really fun so this slide is super cool I don't think I finished it but let's go ahead anyway like the testing we tested for about two maybe three weeks off and on going through that methodology the speed was about 3200 executions per second so it was about 1000 executions per second per core found a lot of bugs and when I say it was fixing vulnerabilities that includes no pointy references I'm like that's land crash let's get it out here so that's nice get rid of the noise so that resulted in some more bugs you can see the first four actually so I guess that slide before was a little inaccurate those first four were the ones I found during the first round and the remaining those other six came up during the second round in addition to all the no pointy references which didn't get assigned to these so let's look at that issue that I said we'd look at it again from the other related work so around a year ago they put stuff fixed into the AOSP from those guys who did the fuzzing and here they say check in a drill flow during the table these three bugs even closer I saw this go in Android 5.0 was released and I'm like that's really interesting so here's the new code you can see they're assigning the results of some math to a 64 bit unsigned integer that looks like it would be good but is it? I thought this was good by the way I don't know where I went just now so I thought this was good I was like they fixed that one let's just keep going so when I was running FL I actually found this crash over and over again and I'm like wait a minute I thought they fixed it but it turns out when you multiply a bunch of 32 bit integers together and assign them to 64 bit integers it does all the math first in a 32 bit sort of way and then it just goes in and assigns the result to the 64 bit integer so there's no promotion happening at all and so the fix and I don't think I even had the fix in here but the fix was basically just casting one of them to a 64 bit integer it could have been the 2 it could have been the size of it could have been in here so these vulnerabilities remain they basically zeroed in themselves by saying come look at this although it did look like it was fixed so let's talk about exploitability but let's just go faster so many of these results in memory corruption and heat memory these have been proven exploitable lots and lots of times especially in C++ code given that they often have virtual function pointer tables and other sort of strange things going on in heat memory so mitigations do come into play though and diversity although it is a barrier that will make it take more time it doesn't necessarily prevent something like a worm which could just build support for as many things as it knows about into itself so media server recap we talked about this before but let's talk about it in a frame of exploitation so we have a net starting media servers that means two things on the positive side that means this weakness that's been in Android since the beginning and is still there where Zygote as apps are created and it doesn't work because it forks but it does not exec and it does fork and exec so every time it crashes the address space will be completely more randomized again and this only applies to newer devices a 4.0 and later the AVE SLR at all so but on the downside because it restarts whenever it crashes you can just trigger it over and over and over and over again although that does depend on attack factor you can't imagine to download your email attachments and look at them over and over again he's going to get kind of fed up so it also means is that word possible or poisible that's new so you can also bypass with cheer root force so another thing is multiple threading in media server basically has some threads that listen for binder events which are completely uncontrollable by an attacker because they're coming from outside and that means that there's a little bit lack of determinism in the heap layout so apart from AVE SLR even if it was all not randomized chunks might get in the way cause a little bit of a boundary so how many slides do I have left so new and Android 5.0 so Android 5.0 added a mitigation that most people were probably not aware of in fact the guys who actually make Android were probably not aware that they got this basically the code here in the top block it's doing a new number of elements of an array creating an array with new bracket bracket GCC they finally like added a way to catch this sort of problem where the integer overflow happens kind of intrinsically inside of what's generated by the compiler this I don't have a link right now but the work that these guys did was almost ten years old so the compiler team and Android decided to switch to GCC 5.0 maybe because it matched Android 5.0 I'm not sure but they decided to do that so let's look at a breakdown of the big important mitigations on Android how they apply to vulnerabilities so SC Linux pretty much doesn't come into effect unless you're already in so if you get in it may limit you from what you can talk to although if you have a vulnerable audio driver it makes block you from the audio driver stat cookies completely irrelevant because there's not stat corruption going on fortify source irrelevant because these are all dynamically allocated heap buffers and fortify source has no visibility into dynamic memory allocation ASLR as we said it only applies we got another ten minutes I thought that was GTFO or big ups let's just keep going I understand you just drag me off when you're ready so basically what we're attempting to do is we're going to hold this track and go a little bit longer we're going to hold this track and go a little bit longer I'm almost done I want to do a demo first though so NX is not a big deal you can bypass through the rock ASLR again some stuff the newer versions it's still probably possible to bypass ASLR newer versions it just requires either something maybe an information like vulnerability or it might require you to do some really neat tricks because it's only a 30 minute layout so exploitability definitely on old versions very badly definitely on old versions the newer versions yeah I think it's doable and I want to spend some more time with it but right now I do not have time because I am speaking to you guys on stage so I think I have somewhere on this computer a window not the cap window let's try this one is that good can you guys read that in the back the text or do I need to make it super bigger if you're going to read I got a thumbs up from row like negative 3 bigger okay bigger boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom is that good enough where's my mouse it's on the wrong screen here so I don't know if this is going to work I did not do a live demo but let's try it we got the device right here I'm deleting messages I sent myself in the speaker room I'm just going to leave the screen on right here and then we'll run this exploit just like this so one point of importance is that this attack right now is not going over a carrier network it's a violation of the end user license agreement and in terms of conditions that you use the network so this is going over a tool chain basically that allows me to pretend like messages are coming in from the carrier network and then also host my own MMSC server so let's just run it so this made a big old 2 meg video file and it sent it down this channel I probably can't see this I'm just looking like an idiot over here I didn't get any messages yet either that's why you don't do live demos because people show up to your talk and they bring stuff like rogue base stations I still haven't got a message yet although I see it transferring something I want to show you guys the screen but it's like tricky it's tricky to show you both of the screens at the same time open what? something get, user, media I can't see down there so I still haven't got a message I think we're just going to go back to the video because this is retarded I'm really disappointed because this exploit works like every time but not always on the first try unfortunately except for right now because of whatever reason it's preventing it from working it looks like a network issue so let's play a video it'll be more fun and it's got cool music by Archie Vartek I'm going to tell you guys how we get audio from there so the first time we did it with the screen off just to show you that there's no indication that anything happened so also when the screen's off the device goes low power mode and it goes very slow this privilege escalation is old old old buck so that's the thing about old devices is they're easy to exploit and they're also full of old bucks that give you root that makes it extra bad there thank you how to do this, they hooked me up before you coming to beat me? a couple more slides I told people do not go out the side door go out the back it doesn't work go out the back not the side please so I hope you guys get an update soon I think they're rolling out now


Hi everyone, hope you had a great new year and a great Christmas holiday and now we're back to trading actually in fact The market is still going to be quiet until probably somewhere around maybe the eighth to the maybe the 15th of the market will start to pick up and and yeah, so it's back to The grinding in right and so in this video. I'm going to be going over the Political business cycle and really why the I believe the Federal Reserve are going to be cutting rates and why the US dollar is likely to be a sell at some point this year over the medium to long term I think as we start the year in fact we could actually see And my bias is probably maybe more towards the buying side of the dollar in the first maybe two months of the year, but as we get closer to the elections in in the States then I believe that the Fed will start to cut rates and Many of you who understand fundamental analysis might be a bit confused because of the fact that the the US at the moment have a Growing economy right so inflation is falling and There's a growing economy now for those of you who are watching this video who again don't necessarily Know or I'm familiar I guess with how We look at the fundamentals and really fundamentals. I believe are driven mainly mainly By interest rates as well as risk off sentiment, right? But if we're just looking at the fundamental side of things right we have interest rates, let me just write this down so we've got interest rates and interest rates are either Hiked by a central bank. They're held by a central bank or they are cut by a central bank and Hiking rates usually and typically appreciates a currency cutting Typically devalues a currency right and now why would a central bank want to Influence the value of a currency and it's mainly due to a GDP, right? GDP and inflation So these two Influence what a central bank does with their interest rates and again just to put this in kind of really kind of basic and simple terms central banks will typically They have a 2% target. Yeah, and if 2% inflation target and if in If inflation is seen as trending above The 2% target and central banks will hike rates Yeah, and if it's seen as trending below the 2% target Yeah, central banks are likely to cut and that's what they do. That's what it done historically now where GDP comes into this is is when when when The economy is in the business cycle when it's expanding, right? So you have a business cycle which kind of looks something like this Right, and even that you have an inflation cycle and you have an interest rate cycle as well by the way and I'm gonna get into into cycles and so What you have is a is a GDP cycle where you have an expansion phase Right, so you have expansion you have the boom phase where you have lots of growth you have a contractions side of things and then you have the Recession then you have a bust or slump and then you have recovery and then you go into the expansion and Then boom phase again, right and the really this should be sorry. I've drawn this bit wrong It should kind of be like this right where you expansion and you normally typically have the boom again, right? so and then it goes back into the contraction phase, right, so that's the economic cycle and Typically in the in the economic cycle Central banks tend to Hike rates when they're in the expansion recovery expansion boom phase of the cycle and they tend to cut when they're in the contraction recession bust or slump phase of the economic cycle and inflation actually tends to rise the typically rises in that expansion boom phase and deflation tends to Historically take effect in the contraction Recession boom side of things, right? And so you can kind of overlay both cycles, right? So they high crates crates get hiked as inflation goes higher in the In the expansion boom phase and then in the contraction a recession Bust or slump phase you'll see inflation come down and then you also have the interest rate cycle, right? Which again you can overlay With these as well where you typically have a hike in rates Yeah, and then when when you when you're in the expansion boom phase and that will typically have Rising inflation above the two percent target and then in the contraction recession bust slump phase you tend to the central bank tend to cut rates right and that should typically align with Inflation coming down so deflation, you know going potentially below the 2% target and that aligns with also the contraction recession bust or slump phase, right? So it's it's really about the you know the bigger cycles, right now understanding this the Federal Reserve are Looking to actually be one of the central banks that are looking to cut rates Apparently first Which is which is strange, right? Because when you think about where we are on the Economic cycle for the Federal Reserve, sorry Federal Reserve, but just where we are on the economic cycle And you look at GDP being at about I think it's like 5.2% Yeah There's really no reason to Cut rates at the moment even though yes, we know that when you think about cycles You know, we've probably peaked in terms of the economic cycle and we're likely to go into the contraction recession phase But until we really go into the contraction recession phase and by the way recession is deemed as two negative quarters, right so two times You know minus growth, right some negative quarters of of Economic growth, so just put minus 0.1 for example of growth and you know or lower We are Nowhere near We are nowhere near in terms of you know the US GDP and I say we but the US are nowhere near two negative quarters of Of negative growth in fact Europe are Closer to a recession a technical recession and the likely to go into a recession in their next quarterly GDP reading which should be I think somewhere in This month January February, right and So why are the fed seen as the central bank that are likely to cut first rather than Europe? Right because inflation is coming down, you know across the globe But where Europe are they're closer to a recession. They're somewhere around here and you would probably say that the US is Somewhere around, you know the beginnings maybe of their contraction phase, right? So they're up here Europe are down here and so is something you know the UK as well, right? but they're also seen as hiking late or sorry cutting later than the Than the US. So again, the question is why is the Fed? cutting rates and it really comes down to what is known as the Political business cycle and something that is not really spoken about really the stars have kind of aligned in terms of The business political cycle. So what I'm gonna do is let me just clear this for now and then I'm gonna Go here and read this out just a couple of paragraphs, right? And so it says that the political business cycle in economics, right? Is the fluctuation of economic activity that results from an external intervention of Political actors the term political business cycle is used mainly to describe The stimulation of the economy just prior to an election in order to improve prospects of the incumbent government getting reelected despite numerous attempts to establish their existence Empirical evidence of political business cycles remains rather a equivocal and equivocal means Subjected to or more interpretations usually used to mislead or confuse or uncertain in and in as an indication or sign Or of uncertain nature or classification. So it's not necessarily a science, right? But I believe that it makes logical sense and I'm going to break this down as to why the the the central bank is going to Is going to try to Assist and even though they should remain neutral they're going to assist in helping to What's the word sorry the used to mainly describe stimulation of the economy, right? Why do I like to stimulate the economy by cutting rates, right? So cut by cutting rates You stimulate the economy and what stimulating the economy means Basically helping businesses, right and and people to put money in people's pockets And so whenever you Cut rates. Yeah, whenever you cut rates is important to understand this And the effect of cutting rates and hiking rates. So if you've got, you know interest rates and You're on, you know, wherever you are in the cycle Yeah, when you hike rates the effect of hiking rates is that you are raising borrowing and lending costs, right? and that affects businesses and You know mortgage owners, right? Because if you have a mortgage that and your interest rate and your repayment on your mortgage is going higher Then you're going to have less money in your pocket. Same thing if you have a business Instead of, you know, taking out, you know, expanding your business Thinking about expanding and maybe hiring more if you've got outstanding loans or you want to borrow more money It's going to be more expensive because the, you know, the central bank are hiking interest rates You want to think twice about either taking on new business or hiring more staff and expanding, right? So what that has the effect of is contracting the economy Yeah, and it's the opposite when you cut interest rates. So as interest rates are being cut What that does is that stimulates the economy because businesses Likely to borrow more, right? Because the repayments are lower and Hopefully if they are in any kind of trouble with eases, you know, financial trouble with eases You know the burden and they can, you know, basically, you know borrow money at a lower interest rate and and hopefully, you know, not Not collapse or, you know crumble or anything like that and in terms of helping, you know, the consumer and mortgage owners and homeowners it will Put money in their pocket by reducing the mortgage repayments, right? Depending on when your time is obviously due for remortgaging and so it's obviously critical to understand that and so if the central bank are Cutting interest rates, yeah and stimulating the economy prior to an election to improve the prospects of the incumbent government getting reelected. Yeah That makes all the sense in the world and as I said the stars have kind of aligned because Inflation at the moment is coming down, which get which, you know, typically You know would would be okay there would really be no reason for the central bank to cut rates because Inflation is pretty much now at their two percent target. So they would likely hold especially with the economy doing, you know So good at the moment But they're looking to cut quite Quite soon. So it says here expansionary monetary and fiscal policies have political politically popular Consequences in the short run such as falling unemployment Economic growth and benefits from government spending on public services. However, the same policy, especially if pursuit to excess I've found to have unpleasant consequences in the long term such as accelerating Inflation and damaging the foreign trade balance. So what that's basically saying is just You know expansionary monetary policy and fiscal policy in terms of, you know cutting rates can have If you cut rates, you can have an effect on the economy in the short run such as falling unemployment Right and economic growth as I explained before if you're a business and you've got You know lower rates to pay or your your loans or you can borrow money for cheaper Then you can afford to expand and hire people therefore Unemployment comes down and economic and that should boost economic growth But you can't do it too much in excess because what happens is if you make money too cheap and keep cutting then Inflation starts to come back and inflation is the devaluation of a currency. Yeah, and so that pretty much spells out why I believe that the the Federal Reserve are You know are likely I think very likely to want to Cut rates in the This year and it's not really to do with the fundamental side of things purely in terms of Looking at where you are in on the GDP cycle Because as I said, you was really kind of cut Rates if you were more heading into the recession phase like Europe and the UK But they're not they're really probably somewhere around this I wouldn't necessarily call it the boom phase, but they're coming down this this end of the cycle into the contraction And by the way cycles are pretty inevitable. Yeah, so, you know You might be thinking is there a chance that you could go into it from the contraction phase Back into the boom phase, etc. And and that is, you know possible but historically what you would normally have is is Is the cycle kind of follow through right so boom bust and then back to boom again, right like that and again if we look again, but if we look at The trading economics website and this is interest rates. This is interest rates For the US economy and you'll see it since 2000 last 25 years You'll see that interest rates when they start to come up Yeah, and then they hold rates and then you start to see the cycle right then they cut rates Yeah, nowhere really when they start cutting rates Do you start to see them then, you know high crates and cut rates and high crates and cut rates, right? Normally the cycle is once they start to begin Then that's the end of the cycle that they're on and then they start to you know Holds can be for a long time or can be for a shorter time, right? depending on what's happening with the economy and The and inflation right and then you have bottom end of the cycle and you to have the interest Then you have a hold for a period and then you have hikes Then you have a hold for a period and you have a cut then you have a hold for a period hikes Cuts then hikes and what should come next obviously, you know should come cuts and so the central banks are pretty much Be an inflation and now wouldn't I should hesitate to say beat an inflation, but inflation is coming down disinflation Is is is in the works and so with inflation coming back down to the 2% target You also have You know the the beginnings of the cycle now another question finally before I do go is Somebody probably look to say well, what if inflation? Yeah, what if inflation? Re-accelerates yeah, because you can have a situation where inflation, you know even though it's you know in the cycle It may actually start to You know re-accelerate a little bit and so that is obviously possible Yeah, in terms of you know if let's say for example the 2% target is here and let's say for example at you know to Maybe this is 2.7% let's say right and then maybe we get a reading where In a quarter or a month where it might go to maybe 3% is that possible? Of course, it's possible inflation isn't just going to drop like a stone It's inflation and GDP doesn't necessarily work like how interest rates work in terms of In terms of it being a smooth You know smooth sailing on the way down a smooth sailing on the way up as we've just seen the interest rate cycle and So the GDP cycle and inflation cycle kind of works if you're looking at it It probably might work a bit more like this where you might have Periods where you might have you know loads of numbers and then within those periods you may have You know a contraction side of things or in or GDP start to come down a bit the debt start to come down Then all of a sudden you might see something like this in my periods where GDP or inflation, you know start to go higher as it's coming lower and make higher lower highs lower lows And then you get this end of the cycle right and so within These periods right these periods here Yeah on the way down Inflation you could have a situation where inflation may actually tick higher, but overall you're looking at the Cycle right once it starts to make its way up and then starts to make it make its way down You're going to see periods where you might have in a Manifest is rising inflation actually fall for a month or two right or three, but ultimately this is how it looks in reality Yeah, and the same thing with GDP so from GDP Yeah, and Inflation the cycle tends to look something like this whereas the interest rate cycles Typically again historically at least over the last 25 years that is have tended to be a lot more smoother in terms of you know hiking and Cutting rates and so is there a chance that inflation could come in Yes, of course, it could go higher But doesn't mean that the central bank is going to change its mind and so if that does happen in the US This year where inflation starts to come higher a little bit. I don't think it will be enough for the central bank to want to You know Not cut rates for example, right? I think that they will continue to look to cut rates I think the only reason why They would probably pause or maybe hold or they could actually even re-accelerate there was a chance, right? if you know, there is there is a really major inflationary event and that inflationary event may come in the form of The Incidents that is happening in the I think it's the Red Sea where you have the I think it's they called the Houthi and They are Targeting certain tankers With regards to Israel and that could lead to shipping disruptions which then leads to supply issues Which then raises inflation. So there is that risk. Yeah, which could You know re-accelerate inflation globally And let's see how that actually develops But if there are no risk events like that or risk off events like that then or it doesn't necessarily, you know Come to pass or it, you know, they sort that out sooner rather than later Then you're likely to see inflation continue to probably fall and maybe to that 2% target And if that does start to happen then what the central bank are likely to do is start to cut rates Yeah, to stimulate the economy and even though we're at 5.2% Yeah you know if they can cut rates and let's say for example and re Ignite the economy as it starts to necessarily, you know contract might go down to maybe 3% and Then, you know, maybe goes to 2% as we head into the election But then as we start to head into the election and it cut rates Stimulate the economy and then, you know, people have recency bias The economy is growing this year and then we might head back up to four five six percent as we're growing because there are red cuts And then, you know, Joe Biden can actually say well look at what I've done Look at what we've done to the economy and he gets Re-elected so the political business cycle, you know, it's something that I believe Is a real possibility now will it play out this way? Who knows? I haven't got crystal ball, but it does look like at the moment This is playing out and this is you know, not necessarily being said directly by the banks But a lot of the banks are forecasting the central bank to actually cut rates and in fact if I go to The where is it now one second? The Fed watch tool Yeah, so this is the CME Fed watch tool and what we can see here are the probabilities of rate cuts as the market is pricing it in And in January, it looks like it says there is the 15% chance right now of a Cut because at the moment and let me just maybe make this Slightly bigger right so we can see that is squint There's a 15% chance of a rate cuts at the moment so you have at the moment the current base rate is 5.25 to 5.5 550 and the Chances of it, you know being cut is 15% now as we go towards March you'll start to see those probabilities Increased right now. We're looking at 73% chance of a cut In March and then in May it looks like the market is pricing in you know Pretty much a nice a nice cut Right here. Actually in fact, this is surprising They've actually priced in maybe a bit of a hike it depends so there's something to that but in You know in the main in March, which is you know the most recent data, they're actually pricing in The the chances of a rate cut I'm gonna have to look into you know why the market is pricing in actually at the moment rate hike in the In June that's very strange. Let's see June and Again, we look at June You know and we're seeing more cuts coming in to the market You know in ease pretty much is a hundred percent in June in July Again a hundred percent chance of an ease Yeah, so it's strange that the that the market in May is Is is saying that there's an eleven percent chance of of an ease and actually a twenty two percent chance of a hike and 66 percent 66 percent chance of no change. So that's a bit of a strange one, but Nevertheless, you're seeing most of the mumps looking like, you know cuts into The November elections, right? So you're seeing a hundred percent chance of cuts pretty much most of the mumps as we get closer towards the Elections and so that's really, you know, it's not me, you know Hypothesizing in terms of you know, my theory about things. This is what the market is currently Pricing in and it makes, you know, all the sense in the world In terms of just the political cycle normally you probably wouldn't have the central bank hiking Oh, sorry cutting first because where they are on their economic cycle is really good But because of the political business cycle, I believe that the federal reserve Although it's not said out loud. That's the reason why the market is pricing in Rate cuts and so let's see what happens if it plays out brilliant if it doesn't play out then You know, the risk is minimal really because you're not committing as much capital When you're when you're losing but you know, you're going for risk-a-war trades high risk-a-war trades And so if you're right about a trade brilliant you're going for maybe 10 15 20 to ones overall But if you're wrong about it, then You know, your risk is defined So it's not going to be that it's not going to blow your account, right? Or you shouldn't necessarily blow your account on on any one trade idea And this is just one trade idea that we have this year There were many more to come and many more that we're looking at as well in terms of you know, for example, you know Japan the Bank of Japan potentially hiking rates as well, which is another trade idea That I speak about in the private mentoring group. So I hope that explains things Bit of quite advanced fundamental analysis, but let's see how this plays out and if there are any changes then I guess the The mentoring if you're in a mentoring group, you'll definitely be kept up to date on any changes to this trade idea So I wish you all a very happy new year and I'll speak to you all soon. Take care


Today, I'm going to talk about where everybody's hopes dreams desires and goals go to die This is your comfort zone This is where most people find themselves and they never push themselves out of it and their life never becomes what they Wanted to because they spend too much time here and never outside of their comfort zone But the secret is this everything that you want the life that you want is all located By pushing yourself outside of this comfort zone So let's talk about why comfort zones exist in the first place The reason why comfort zones exist is because your brain is designed to do one thing and one thing only and that is designed to Keep you alive Now tens of thousands of years ago This served a purpose for us the reason why was because if we were living in caves And it was the middle of the night and we were about to walk out of that cave out of that Comfort zone we didn't know what was outside of it could have been a lion And so we would get this physical feeling of fear inside of us because we were going to step out into the unknown Step out into something that was outside of our comfort zone Now that being said that gives you an idea of why when you're about to step out of your comfort zone and do Something that you've never done before you can sometimes get a physical feeling of fear and it sometimes can be Paralyzing to you if you let it be and you think about it too much But the problem is this everything that you want is outside of your comfort zone So what do you need to do? You need to understand that just because you have the feeling of fear Doesn't mean that you can't step out of your cave Doesn't mean that you can't step out of your comfort zone if you can understand the reason why your brain has this Mechanism that makes you want to shut down whenever you're going outside of your comfort zone You can embrace the fear and understand that it doesn't serve you anymore tens of thousands of years ago That fear would have served you but now in 2017. It doesn't serve you anymore Here's the best part about it though You can still feel that fear and go anyways You can still feel that fear and push yourself outside of your comfort zone Because everything that you want is located outside of this comfort zone The life that you want is located outside of this comfort zone and now that you know why comfort zones exist You can push yourself out of your comfort zone and start going for everything that you want in your life That's located outside of it So if you liked this episode, please give me a thumbs up share this with someone that you love and I hope you Have an amazing day


Hello and welcome to the session. In this session we discuss the following question that says in the given figure, that is this figure, angle A of triangle ABC is the right angle, the circle on AC as diameter cuts BC at B, if BD is equal to 3 and DC is equal to 9, calculate the length of AB. Before we move on to the solution, let's discuss some results to be used in this question. First we have the tangent at any point of a circle and the radius through this point are perpendicular to each other. Next we have a tangent externally then the product of the length of the segments of the chord is equal to the square to the point of intersection. The key idea that we use for this question. Let's proceed with the solution now. This is the figure given to us in which we have that this angle, that is angle BAC is equal to 90 degrees and the circle on AC as diameter cuts BC at D and we have BD is equal to 3 and BC is equal to 9 and we are supposed to find the length of AB. Now since we have the square A is the radius and the angle BAC is equal to 90 degrees and we know that the tangent at any point of a circle and the radius through this point are perpendicular to each other. So from this theorem we can say that AB is the tangent to the circle. So thus we have that AB is the tangent, AB is the chord of the circle and this AB and CD intersect each other externally B and from the second result stated in the key idea we have that if a chord and a tangent intersect externally then the product of the length of the segments of the chord is equal to the square of the length of the tangent from the point of contact to the point of intersection. So therefore we can say that the product of the segments of the chord CD which would be BD into BC is equal to the square of the length of the tangent which is AB square. That is we can say that AB square is equal to BD into BC. We have given that BD is equal to 3 and BC is equal to 9 and from this figure we have BC is equal to BD plus BC. BD is 3 and BC is 9. So BC is 12 and this means that AB square is equal to BD which is 3 into BC that is 12. So we have AB square is equal to 36 which means that AB is equal to 6. So this is our answer that is finally we have AB equal to a final answer. This concludes the session. Hope you understood the solution of this question.