Alright, okay, the recording of the class is on and welcome everybody to BC209, our course on Holiness. It's our second lecture this week and thank you for joining the class. May I request one of us to please lead us in prayer as we get ready to start. Anyone can unmute their mic and just pray with the class. I'll pray. Alright. Amen. Amen. Amen. Thank you. Welcome everyone once again. Thank you. See all your comments on the chat. Good morning. Welcome. Glad that people are doing well. Okay. So we are continuing in this study on Holiness and first two chapters has been a focus on getting a revelation of the Holiness of God. And we were towards the end of chapter two where we've really emphasizing in chapter two that not only is God holy, but everything else around him is holy. And he desires, if that's the right word to use, he desires for us, his people to regard him and his name to have this reverence or to have this regard for Holiness. In other words, there has to be that reverence in our hearts as a response towards his Holiness. That's kind of what we were, that's what we were talking about towards the end of the class on Monday. So we're going to just quickly review those points in chapter two and then finish up chapter two.  But then he wants that to be transferred to us. So that people shift towards seeing how Holiness is being given to us and how God works his Holiness in us, which is the main focus of our course is to see how we as God's people can live in Holiness. So we're going to be spending time on that. Let me go ahead, share the PDF so we can follow. All right. Chapter two, just quickly reviewing here. We've covered all of this. So we talked about God as the holy one, Christ holy, completely holy. He is name is holy. And he wants us to hold his name in Holiness. We must not profane. His name, the word profane, the word profane simply means it's wounding or piercing the very holy, you know, disrespecting God and really hurting God when we profane his name. When God speaks, he speaks in Holiness. His words are therefore pure. All the angels around him are considered as holy ones. Holiness adorns his house wherever he dwells. Everything about that is holy. And we were, you know, as we were discussing this on Monday, we were relating it to, you know, how we should respond to each of these aspects. Then we saw God desires to be regarded as holy. You know, we were kind of spending some time on this. He said, I must be regarded as holy. And we must serve God. We're looking at it from the New Testament. We serve God with reverence and Godly fear. So God wants us to have that kind of a heart where we are very conscious of his Holiness. And then therefore, whatever we do comes out of that place of reverence and Godly fear. And I was kind of just, you know, in passing mentioning some parts that much of the worship, much of the things that we do in the contemporary church, we have to be a little careful because while, you know, we're trying to be trendy and relevant and modern and all those kinds of things, sometimes, I don't know exactly where the line is, but sometimes it could seem like we are becoming irreverent of God in the way we, you know, worship or the way we do ministry. Because we have all the tools, we have all the mechanisms, we have all, you know, the know-how, how to make things happen. You know, we can run a ministry even without God. That's how good we are. You know, we don't need God to run a Christian ministry because we know exactly how to do all these things, you know, how to, whatever, you know, a lot of things. I'm saying that because sometimes in the ministry today, whether it's in worship or all the other things that we do, we could actually be doing things without this Godly fear in our hearts, you know. So that's the danger with, I think, with the advancements we have, you know, we have all the know-how and all the means to do things. And the danger is that we might quote-unquote be serving God without God in the picture, without reverence for God, you know. So, only we have to watch over our own selves to make sure that we are walking in reverence in Godly fear. As God said, you know, He wants us to be regarded, I must be regarded as holy.  So that's something we must never forget. And what is so, what is so touching is that even Jesus in his prayer in John 1711, when he's praying to the Father, he's referring to the Father as a holy Father.  That means he is also recognizing and regarding the holiness of God. That's a great example for us to follow. So it was a conclusion of this particular chapter. We are transitioning now to more of seeing, you know, how do we respond? How do we walk in holiness? In our own selves, we are unfit to come anywhere near the such a holy God in our own selves. God is dwelling in perfect light. We are not, you know, in our own selves, we are unclean. But it is the atonement that fits us or makes us fit to come into the presence of such a holy God. And this is an unveiling or a revelation that God kind of brings out early in the Old Testament. And then it's perfected for us in Jesus Christ through his sacrifice, of course. But he lets the people know quite early on in the Old Testament, you know, as he's giving the Lord to Moses and explaining things to them, he says, make an atonement for him and he will be cleansed from his uncleanness. And when the priest makes an atonement, he will be clean. So he's trying to get them to understand that this atonement is what makes the cleansing possible. So the atonement is really talking about a sacrifice that is made, the blood is shed. And that offering, that sacrifice, that is what will make the person clean and fit to enter into the presence of God. So we come into the New Testament and that is, you know, a prefiguring or is appointing to the reality, the real atonement, right? And we understand that the real atonement is the Lord Jesus Christ himself. It says, you know, through our Lord Jesus Christ, we have received the reconciliation, which really is the word atonement. So through Jesus, we have received the atonement. And it's because of what he has done, his atoning work, we are able to enter in, that gives us access into the holiness of God. And we are familiar with this truth. Hebrews chapter 10, verses 19 to 22 says, you know, we have boldness to enter the holiest by the blood of Jesus.  So God has given us access to enter the holiest presence of God, the holiest place, the innermost place, right in the presence of God, Bible is telling us, and we have this boldness, we have this confidence to enter the most holy place, the holiest place, how the blood of Jesus. So that, and that alone is our, what to say, entry into the holiness of God, the blood of Jesus, what Jesus has done for you and me through his work on the cross, the blood. Based on that, we are entering and we are entering with boldness. And that's quite amazing that you and I can actually come into the very, the presence of such a holy, perfect, pure, Christ-holy God, and that we can do so with confidence, with boldness.  That means your conscience doesn't have to condemn you. An evil conscience isn't a conscience that condemns ourselves, it's a self-condemning, a guilty conscience. So it says, you know, we come with full assurance of faith in our hearts, and this when you're going into the, the presence of the most holy God, we can come with full assurance of faith. Nothing, no sense of guilt, shame, and condemnation.  It's gone. Why? Because of this way that Jesus has made possible through what he did for us. And so that and that alone gives us access into the presence of such a holy God, because you and I can never qualify, right? You and I can never attain to such holiness, but it's through the atonement, through what Christ did, the Bible says, we can enter into the holiest presence of God, we can do so with boldness, with full assurance of faith, with no guilt, shame, and condemnation. So this is something we have to always be grateful to God for, and this is, and this alone is the basis for our entry into the presence of God. Having sat down, we are now going to shift, we're going to chapter three now. God in his mercy has given us access into his presence, into his holy presence. He's a holy God. But there's the other side to all of this, which is God expresses his heart to say that he wants his holiness to be formed in us. And that's what we're going to look at in chapter three, that the holiness of God, he wants it reproduced in us.  He wants us to walk in love. God is generous. He wants us to be kind and generous to other people. So like this, we understand that every facet of his virtue, his virtues, his nature, he wants it reproduced and revealed through us. And that's why he created us in his own image, giving us the capacity to be able to do that. But we are focusing now on the holiness aspect. So God expresses this in both the Testaments, in the Old Testament especially. He says, I am the Lord, your sanctifier. I am the Lord, your sanctifier. I am Jehovah Mekodesh. So, you know, he revealed himself through different covenant names or Jehovah titles. These, each name was expressing a certain facet of what he would do and what he would be to his people as a covenant people. That's what Jehovah, it's birthed out of covenant. His commitment is promised to his people. And one of those Jehovah titles we see in the Old Testament is, I am Jehovah Mekodesh. I am the Lord, your sanctifier. I am the Lord who makes you holy. So now he's our healer. He's our provider. He's our banner. He's our shepherd. All of that as covenant God. But he also says, I am the Lord who makes you holy. And you know, you find this repeated in many places. I've just given a few. I'm the Lord who sanctifies you. You find that in many places. So, I am Jehovah Mekodesh. The Lord, your sanctifier. The Lord who makes you holy. And so in the Old Testament, he began to declare many things in the lives of the people as holy. It's kind of interesting to just kind of look at that. So, I am the Lord, your sanctifier. I'm your covenant God who makes you holy. Now how is that going to play out in your day to day life? What does that mean? If you kind of probe a little bit into it. And I just put it down as a list here. Just for you to think about that God being our sanctifier. God being the one who makes us holy. Actually, it has its ramifications in every day life. It has its influence or its impact every day life. Just day to day things. You see, he talked about and understand this is the Old Testament, right? Now in the New Testament, we worship in spirit and truth.  But the point is, him being our covenant God who makes us holy affects us in every day life. That's the point I want to get across. But you look at, you know, he talked about those people, Moses and Joshua, when they encountered God, he said, look, you're standing on holy ground. What do you mean, holy ground? Well, God showed up. So where you are becomes a very holy place because you're meeting with God. He gave them holy feasts. So can you imagine celebration? But this is a holy celebration. You're doing something, but God's in it. It's holy. The day, the Sabbath day, the day of rest was holy. The entire nation was holy. And this thought has also continued in the New Testament.  All of us are a nation of holy people. The tabernacle in which they worshiped, there was the holy place and the most holy place. The garments, the priests wore were considered holy. They brought gifts that were holy. The anointing oil was holy. So you couldn't take that, but that oil and use it for other things. The anointing oil is holy. The priests themselves are holy. What they offered as incense was holy. The place was considered, the house was considered holy. Even certain things that they owned, who the people owned were considered holy. The field offering, the tide. It's actually theirs. It belongs to the people, but God is saying it's holy because they belong to God. So what they own, their field, the producer of their field, the multiplying of their livestock, everything became holy to God. And so you find many other things. So I don't want to take those old Testament concepts and start putting them, just take it literally in the sense of all these little things. The point I want to get across is everything about the life of the people became holy because God was Jehovah, make it dash, the Lord who makes them holy. And therefore he wanted them to treat everything of in life as holiness unto God, everything. So, you know, and we'll talk about this a little later. I mean, we're translating the principle to us as New Testament believers. We will do that. But the point, what he was saying is, everything, I am Jehovah, make it dash to you. I am the Lord who makes you holy. Therefore everything in your life is holy. I want you to treat it as holy. I want you to treat those things as holy to God, not just something unclean. The days, the way you worship, whatever you have, those things must be treated as holy. Now we know in the New Testament we shift from days, weeks, places to focusing on people. God is focusing on us as holy people. So we need to make that shift and I will explain it. So the New Testament, when you come into the New Testament, God in a similar way says, you know, I am the Lord who makes you holy. He is still Jehovah, make it dash to all of us. He is the Lord who sanctifies us. But in the New Testament, it starts from the inside, the heart. And then everything else about our lives becomes holy. Right. So the focus is, he wants to establish our inner person, blameless and holiness before our God. That means the inner person, we're talking about the inner man in the other course, your real person, your spirit man. So it's not the body, but the real person on the inside. God wants to be established in holiness before him. Now obviously, once your inner person is established in holiness, that means, see, holiness is not an on-off thing. That today I'm holy, tomorrow I'm not holy. No, it's something we're established in. This is how we're going to live. Your inner person is established in holiness. Then obviously, everything else about you and me will flow from that, will be holy.  So the New Testament, God is going after that.  Sanctify is to make holy. So, you know, so you could rephrase or rephrase this part saying, may God make you holy completely. And then what'll happen? That means your whole spirit, soul and body will be blameless in the coming of our Lord Jesus. So God is working this in us. In the Old Testament, it had to do with a lot of these externals. He was looking, he was telling them, look, I want everything about your life to be holy, understandable. Same thing in the New Testament, but the New Testament, he starts with the inner person. And then everything else about you, spirit, soul and body is preserved whole, blameless before God. Another parallel we could draw between old and new is this truth about being priests to God. It's in both testaments. God considers his people as priests. Actually, every believer is a priest, unlike the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, certain the Levites and the priests, the descendants of Adam were considered priests. So only a certain group or a certain group of people could be considered priests. But the idea of priests was there. And what about the priests? They were holiness unto the Lord. And so you can imagine, God is saying, for this priest, make him wear a turban and there's a plate of pure gold and it says, holiness to the Lord. That means this man, it's not about the turban, but it's about the man who's wearing the turban. He is holiness to the Lord. He's consecrated to the Lord, the priest. New Testament, well, we are all priests to God. Revelation one and verse six, every believer has been washed in the blood and has been made a king and a priest unto God. So the Old Testament, okay, I was certain people in the New Testament, every believer is a priest unto God. And so every believer has on his forehead, so to speak, holiness to the Lord.  That's who you are. That's who we are. So we are holy to the Lord and we must discern the holy and the unholy and help others to do the same. So the priests in the Old Testament, they were holiness to the Lord and they had to teach the people that was part of their responsibility. Hey, people, our God is Jehovah, make a dish. So therefore we have to live in a certain way as holy unto the Lord and separate what is holy and unholy. Keep it separate. So the question here as priests today in the New Testament, are we living lives and are we teaching? I mean, teaching means I'm not saying necessarily, some of us may be able to, as leaders, may have the opportunity to teach, but all of us by the life we live can communicate that we are holy unto God and there's a difference between holy and unholy and we have to discern if what is holy, what is unholy. It is discern. My question is, if somebody looked at your life and my life, would they see that we are actually separating what is clean and unclean? What is holy and unholy? Would they see it? Or would they be like, I don't know what is all, but they'd be confused. Now, I don't want us to go to that. I'm talking about that extent where, okay, I only wear white shirt and white trouser and I only, I'm not saying, you know, we have, this is all about external. It's not about external, it's about the life we live, that there is that sense of holiness, of being pure, sanctified, dedicated, set apart to God, because that's what he wanted of the Old Testament and surely that's what he would want of the New Testament priests. And that, that effect of holiness is interesting to consider where in this context here, I'm just talking, the 1st Corinthians 714 is talking about the unbelieving husband is sanctified or made holy by the wife or the unbelieving wife is sanctified or made holy by the husband and therefore the children are also made holy. Now, we need to understand this correctly, of course, that means there's one person in the household who is consecrated to God and they therefore extend the spiritual influence over their family. Now, of course, the life that each one lives is their choice. So if the unbelieving husband or the unbelieving wife, you know, is a drunkard and doesn't mean that those actions become holy, no, those actions are sinful. But God, because of that one person who's living consecrated to God, in that family, God therefore sees that whole family as consecrated to him and in some way he's going to deal with that household differently, even though the individuals may be making their wrong choices and they'll of course face the consequences, but there is something about that house that God is going to see different because there's one person who's living sanctified before him and he says the children are considered holy or set apart for him. So that's just something to keep in mind and that God sees that house sanctified holy to him because there's one person there. I feel that in scripture, when we look at other scriptures, Acts 20 and Hebrews 13, we can actually see this extended to a local short setting as well, but the Bible is teaching us that, you know, the Holy Spirit has made these leaders as overseers or shepherds over the flock and if they are standing consecrated to God, then God sees that whole place consecrated to him, that whole local body consecrated. Now, I'm not saying that the individuals don't have responsibility for their own actions, of course they do, but there is that sense where God says, I see this whole people sanctified unto me because there's one person here standing sanctified. Now, definitely in a local church, the whole congregation or at least majority would be living sanctified or holy unto God, hopefully, but God sees that differently because there's a shepherd there who stands before him sanctified. Just a side thought here because you find that here in scripture for Corinthians 7. So what we want to emphasize is that God is called us as a people to holiness. He's a holy God. Everything about him is holy. Now he's saying, I want you, I'm calling you into this place of holiness and so we want to understand what does it mean and how would God work it out in our lives. That's kind of where we are heading. So we see, now the focus is on the New Testament believer. The New Testament believer is called to be saints at many, many places. It's a calling. It means an invitation given to us by God.  We are made holy in Christ and called to be sanctified, means made holy in Jesus. We are called to be holy ones. So you see this repeated many, many places and you're familiar with it. God didn't call us to uncleanness, but of course he called us in holiness. He called, he called us as holy. So he says be holy, I'm holy and he has called us with a holy calling. So this invitation or a divine summons is a call to holiness. Now I want us to understand it very simply in two statements. First, it means we're called to be like him and share his nature. So the moment we talk about holiness and the call to holiness, in our religious mind, that means because we have been brought up in a religious way, we immediately think about all the do's and don'ts. The moment we say, God has called us to holiness. Oh, we start thinking in those lines, what I can do, what can I not do. But instead, I want us to look at this call to holiness as these two things. First, it's a call to be like him or to share in the very nature of God. That means to have his nature reproduced and revealed, reproduced in me and revealed through me. And secondly, it's a call to belong completely to him. The call to holiness is really a call. God is saying, come, just be completely mine. You know, God's giving an invitation, he says, come. I want my nature to fill you and be seen through you. I want you to just be completely mine. That's the call to holiness. So what is the call to holiness? It's the call to have the holiness of God fill me and be seen through me. And it's the call for me to be completely, for me to belong completely to God. If we see holiness from this perspective, rather than seeing holiness as just do's and don'ts or as a comparison between people, well, that brother watches movies, chews gum and drinks wine. I don't watch movies. I don't chew gum and I don't watch and I don't drink wine. So I'm more holy than him. That's kind of the religious mind things. But that's really not what holiness really is. It is a call to share in the nature of God and to belong completely to him, to the Lord. It's not a comparison between people. So let me see scriptures. I'm going to just touch a little bit here on this and then pause for some questions. So you find this here.  Holiness to the Lord. We are a New Testament. We are a chosen generation who chose us God. We are his own special people. We are the people of God. We belong to him. So the emphasis that I'm putting is belonging to God, being completely his. Yeah, time is up here. I'm just going to pause here so we'll have some time for discussion. But this is where I just want you to think about these two things that can I see holiness? Can I understand holiness from this perspective? It's a call to be like him, share his nature. It's a call to belong completely to him. What is holiness? It's this calling. I'm going to pause here so we can discuss a few things and we will pick up from here on coming Monday. So let me look at the chat and take up these questions. Okay. Okay, Shri Kumar, I see your hand raised. Please go ahead. Thank you, Pastor. Pastor, I want to know, as you said, now the holiness is not the human discipline. I need some more clarification on that. The difference between the holiness and the purification, that when we say the purification part, the repentance and purification part. And many times, this grace messages, that has actually, they have given that some messages are like this, that I'm not against the grace message, but I'm saying there's some messages seems to be like you are given the freedom to do in everything, but that reverence to God, that holiness of God somewhere is not preached. So how can we balance these things and what is the difference between the holiness and the purification? Or many times when we think holiness is also connected as purification, or is there any difference between that? Thank you, Pastor. So it is the same thing. So remember the word holiness or sanctification is synonymous. It means the same thing. To sanctify means to be holy. So I'm intentionally avoiding using the word sanctify, because it's kind of an old English word. So I'm just using the word be holy, but it's, you know, you could use either word. It's the same thing. So, and we will be coming to this, that is, the holiness of God works itself out in our lives, touching every aspect of us, of our attitudes, our thoughts, our desires, our motivations, our relationship with people, how we handle time and money and the choices we make. And so the holiness of God works itself into every aspect of our lives. We will be coming to it. That's the process of sanctification. And that's what God wants, like we saw today. In the Old Testament, he was, you know, specifying a lot of things. In the New Testament, it starts with the heart, the inner person being established in holiness, but then it affects spirit, soul, and body. It affects the whole person and preserves every part of us blameless before God. So the answer to your question is yes, the holiness of God works itself into every aspect of our lives. There's nothing that's untouched. My workplace, money beyond how we spend our time, our recreation, everything is touched by the holiness of God. It's holy unto God. But, okay, let me, so addressing the, you know, what the grace message has inadvertently or maybe knowingly, I don't know, but there's the misunderstandings out of the teaching and the extreme teaching on grace. You see, grace is true. It's the gospel of grace. There's no question. But anything pushed to an extreme goes into an error, right? So when even grace is pushed to an extreme, then people sell kinds of wrong things, which is wrong. So when in the name of grace, people say that you could do anything. Well, Paul addressed that in Romans 6. He says, you know, what shall we say then? Shall we continue and sin that grace may abound? You know, so he, he wrote it way back there in Romans 6. The same issues we are dealing within this church today. Yeah, shall we continue and sin that grace may abound? Obviously not, certainly not, right? So, yes, if the grace message is pushed to an extreme, then any act of sin can be, you know, endowed. But they seem to have a logic behind it, arguments for it, you know, and we will address that as we go along. And actually it's going to be addressed in both the courses on holiness as well as we talk about the development of the inner person, the human spirit. But it's wrong. You know, we cannot continue and sin and say grace covers it. No. The other part thought I just want to leave here is, I know we are out of time, but in our journey on holiness, and this is brought out in Romans the 14th chapter, I shouldn't use comparison, you know, because for example Romans 14, the comparison is somebody eats meat, somebody eats vegetables, a believer. Some believers regard every day as the same. Some believers regard certain days as special days. So what's Paul's conclusion he says that every man be fully persuaded in his own mind.  Okay, you know, each one make your own choice.  Let us not think that because Paul says, you know, each man is, he stands before God, he's going to answer God. So why should I judge another man's servant? This is all in Romans 14. So the point I want to say is holiness is not issue of comparison, but we are not condoning what is wrong. That means if somebody is doing something that's sinful, as far as the scriptures are saying, that is sinful. I cannot overlook that. So there's that balance that we have to have in letting holiness work itself out in our lives. Okay, I hope I answered your question. I said some good things. Yes, Master. I am not sure if I spoke. Thank you. Okay, there are two questions, one from Kennedy and one from Malaysia. Okay, yeah. So can we take up these two questions next class? I will make a note of these. I don't want to delay you to your, you know, for your break. And then so I've made a note of what these people pick it up next week. Okay. All right. So I don't, we're ending very abruptly. Let's pray. Let's close and continue to think about these things and, you know, I let the Lord give revelation to our hearts as we journey in this course on holiness. Let's close, please. And we will dismiss. Could somebody pray and dismiss us? Well, Father, we thank you a lot for teaching wonderfully this one on the holiness. Lord, you said that be holy as I am holy.  Lord, you are Jehovah to God. One who sanctifies us. Therefore, help us, Lord. We may submit ourselves to the sanctification and holiness, that every aspect of our life to the establishment of holiness, our thought, our spirit, our mind, everything we do. All aspects of our life may be submitted unto you in holiness, Lord. Lord, we may be truly sanctified according to the standard that you desire from us, Lord. Help us to study more in the coming days on the Sunday. Bless the pastor, Lord. Thank you for his wonderful teaching on holiness. Strengthen him for filling with the spirit that the heavenly visitor teaches more powerfully in the days to come. In Jesus' name you pray. Amen. Amen. Amen. Thank you everyone. Sorry, I took some time from your break. Have a quick break and we can head to your next class. Thank you so much. Enjoy the rest of your day. God bless each one. Bye now. Thank you, Pastor. Thank you all. See you next week.


US 2022 power plant emissions decreased on coal to gas transition. The Environmental Protection Agency reported Friday that US power plant emissions of pollutants that hurt human health and warm the globe decreased last year as the sector switched from coal to natural gas. Despite a 2% increase in energy demand in the lower 48 US states last year, the savings were primarily attributable to the shift off coal, a polluting fossil fuel. Nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide emissions reduced 4% and 10%, respectively, according to the EPA. Mercury emissions, a neurotoxic that can build in the environment and render some fish dangerous to consume frequently, declined 3%. Power plant communities deserve the same protection from environmental and health hazards as everyone else, stated EPA Administrator Michael Regan. We're not done, but the data show we're on the right track. The EPA reported that power plant CO2 emissions reduced 1% from 2021. The EPA data did not include natural gas industry methane emissions, which environmentalists argue should be reduced as the US becomes the world's largest LNG exporter. The EPA confirmed its 2012 legal and scientific judgment that power plants must regulate dangerous air toxics and mercury this month before strengthening air restrictions. In coming months, the EPA will issue a final rule on those pollutants, one of a series of measures to clean up the power industry and push power station operators to tighten controls or shut down aging plants. Leave your thoughts in the comments.


Hello everybody. My name is Jaap Saverbergen. I'm a professor in Land Administration and Management at TITC, University of Twente. And I'm really delighted that even though we cannot meet in person, we'll still have a LandAC encounter this year. It is very important to stress everybody's tenure security, because many people are in fear of being evicted or moved away from the land that they live on or work on. And this has been shown again during this pandemic, where many people have been in extra trouble and being extra vulnerable due to the lack of security.


So, why do you want to make a lot of money? I think this is an important question to reflect on, and we'll spend this video doing that. The types of reflection we're going to be doing is maybe a little different than what you might have done for yourself. Before I get into it, I'm going to share a couple of personal things, so you can fast forward this video about, I guess, two and a half minutes if you want to skip the personal stuff, but I'm experimenting with talking about some personal things in the front of my videos to see if it works, and I'm still experimenting, so please do let me know if it is working for me to chit chat a little bit, talk about personal things before I get into the topic of the video, and I guess you can skip forward two and a half minutes if you want to. So, a couple of things. I wanted to show you what's on my shelf. First of all, kind of a funny thing is my favorite candidate for 2020 right now is Andrew Yang, so I got a t-shirt and let's put it there. And then my wife said, this is my background for most of, I'm in the living room, by the way, and this is where I usually do my videos with my clients.  And then she said, well, she's thought about it for me. She's like, actually, won't I be uncomfortable? Because she's supporting, instead, Marianne Williamson, so she put together a funny piece of paper. She literally just wrote Marianne 2020 and put it there next to mine. Let's see, the other thing I wanted to share was, is my current favorite spiritual book, The Purpose of Life. I can't reach it right now. I highly recommend checking it out. This is the book, Purpose of Life, as revealed by Newt that experiences around the world, David Sunfellow. I read the previous version, I think this one is even better, so really good. And then shout out to my client, Diane Allen. She has a thing called Better Questions, Better Life Cards is there. And then one of my old favorite books, The Tao of Leadership. Yeah, it's made a difference for me. Well, I think it has made a difference for my leadership over the years. So anyway, let's see what else can I tell you about my setup here. There you go, a little painting I found years ago. It's a little dog on the skateboard. I think it's really cute. It looks a little bit like my dog. And then there's dog toys and stuff right next to me. I was trying to figure out a way to point to it while I'm looking at the screen. Anyway, a little too much pointing. Okay, all right, so two and a half minutes. Let's talk about the actual topic. So why do you want to make a lot of money? I'm bringing up this topic because over the years I have been doing business and marketing coaching now since 2009, so in my 11th year now. And a lot of people have come to me and said, George, help me make a lot of money. And sometimes, I mean, I ask them why do you want to make a lot of money? But sometimes it doesn't feel appropriate to ask the why. So we just go into, well, let's talk about how to do it in an ethical, authentic way. And if you're interested in that, that was what I talked about in one of my previous videos in blog posts, how to make lots of money authentically. So you might want to look that up. I have a blog post on that. But today, since I'm not talking to any individual here, I'm talking to the lots of individuals who have asked me this question over the years, I want to explore publicly, why do people want to make lots of money? And if you don't explore and reflect on this thoughtfully, you will end up spending your life chasing the wrong thing, in my opinion. Okay? So first of all, I think people want to make a lot of money because they have a friend who has made a lot of money. Or they know somebody, family member, friend, colleague who has made a lot of money and who is making a lot of money. And they think, well, if she's making a lot of money, why can't I? I mean, I'm at least as talented as her and hardworking as her. And look, I mean, she can do lots of good in the world. She can travel. She can have all these fun experiences. She can donate to lots of causes. I want to have that power too. I want to have that freedom too, right? I want to have that sense of security as well and the pride of supporting my family. I want lots of money. I want to be able to make lots of money. I want to make a million dollars a year working just a few hours a week so that I can travel. I have spiritual experiences, spiritual retreats, pay people lots of money to do spiritual counseling and and you know, relationship coaching or whatever it is that maybe I can't afford right now.  And that all sounds noble and wonderful, right? The problem with that is there is no guarantee that even if you work hard and even if you work smart and hard, that you will end up at some point making lots of money. And I know that this sounds like a limiting belief, George, limiting belief, but it's reality. I'm not talking about limiting belief or not. How many people do you know? How many people do you think have existed on this earth who have been smart and hard-working and did the very best to try to make lots of money and couldn't do it? I mean, let's have a real conversation. And they probably didn't have any limiting beliefs. I don't know if they did or not. Again, I'm not a fan of limiting beliefs. I don't believe that's, I don't believe limiting beliefs are actually limiting people. I think limiting structures are limiting people. It's not limiting beliefs, it's limiting structures. And the structures could include societal structures partly. It could include our genetic structure, but it is, of course, what's in our control is our habitual structures are the way we spend our energy and our time and our thought, thought, but the thought trains we allow ourselves to go on. Those structures, and you might say, well, George, that's a limiting belief right there, isn't it? Are you talking about limiting beliefs? No, no, no. I'm not talking about what you choose to do with your time primarily and with your energy. That's primarily what's in your control, but what's not in your control, that is like 90% of your destiny. I mean, I really have seen that. I think, because again, like I said, I've seen so many smart and hard-working people try to make lots of money who have not been able to do it. So what's the reasoning? It's not their fault. It's everything else in society and their genetics and their family needs from them and whatever it is that is not allowing them to make a lot of money. And that may or may not be true. You may have some limiting structures in your life that will prevent you from making lots of money. I don't know. So let's be realistic and not have this fantasy thing that, oh, just because I want to and I'm going to work hard and work smart that everyone can make lots of money. I don't think that's true. I don't think that's not true either. The point is that we don't know if you're going to make a lot of money or not. But if you focus your mind and attention on making lots of money, getting to the million dollars a year, like if you think about that every single week, what's happening? What's happening?  And that is not good for your business to have the energetic experience of continually falling short. Do you see what I mean? Versus, here's what I do. This is counterintuitive. I have, I set extremely modest financial goals. And then I have the constant experience of surpassing them. It's very different from how most people think it. Law of attraction. Imagine yourself making a million dollars a year. Success literature tells us we're supposed to imagine and visualize ourselves making a million dollars a year and then we'll get there. Yeah. How many people have read those books and have, and worked hard and worked smart and not gotten there. That's my point, right? It's, it's, it's not guaranteed. And secondly, it's a terrible journey. It's just not fun to be able to constantly, I'm not there. I'm not there. I'm not there. Versus the alternative strategy, the counterintuitive strategy I'm telling you is you make more modest financial goals than you think you can reach. And then you're constantly surpassing it. And then you can make the next modest financial goal and you surpass that. You see what I mean? So, oh, I don't know how much you're making right now. Let's say you're making, like you could like, okay, I definitely can make $2,000 a month. I don't know what your financial situation is. But let's say that you feel confident you can make $2,000 a month. Like, yeah, that I can, I can do that for sure. For sure I can do that. Then set that goal, set that goal, make $2,000, make $2,000 this month and next month. And you've done that twice or three times in a row now, three months in a row, you've made $2,000, you surpassed your financial goal. Fine. The fourth month set a goal for 2,500 or 3,000, whatever you feel confident to reach. Got it? You surpass that goal, 3,000, month four or five and six. And by the way, during those months, you may, the month you set $2,000 a month, you may be reaching 2,500 or 3,000 or 4,000, whatever. There is no such thing as limiting yourself. Oh, I set a goal for 2,000, so therefore somehow magically I'm only able to make 2,000. That is BS.  Okay, if there is such a thing. No, beliefs don't, this is important. Beliefs do not equal results.  Law of attraction is your biggest limiting belief. Let me tell you that. The law of attraction, your biggest limiting belief, your beliefs do not equal your results. How often have you disproven that from yourself? No, your structures determine your results. Like I said, there are societal structures, there's familial structures, there's genetic structures. What you can control is your time structures and your habit structures. That determines your results. I constantly have low beliefs about what I can achieve and I constantly surpass them. How do you explain that? And not just me, but lots of other people too. How do you explain that? It's the opposite of the law of attraction, but it happens all the time, every day, all around the world. It's because we have good structures. And by the way, structures can include privilege too. However you believe in that. For me, I have maybe male privilege. I have living in San Francisco Western society privilege. I have growing up in a rich family privilege. So you might say, oh George, you have positive limiting beliefs or you have positive beliefs from your upbringing. Maybe, maybe that's true. I don't know. I grew up with a rich family. And then of course, not of course, my dad, when I was in college, she had a huge business downturn and he never recovered from that. So we've been middle class at best for 20 years, when I started, starting when I was in college. But before college, we were making millions a year. My dad was making millions a year. So I grew up rich. I grew up in a gated rich community thinking that, oh yeah, money, money is no problem. And maybe that's, it partly explains my success. I don't know. Again, that's a, that's a, that's a structure that you grew up with or not. But I don't believe you can change your beliefs based on law of attraction, affirmation crap, because it hasn't worked for most people that I know. But I know what you can do is you can change your structures in terms of how you manage your time and how do you manage your energy and how you manage the people around you. Now you can change those things. And yes, they might eventually change your subconscious beliefs. I don't know. I, I'm an, I am, I'm an atheist about limiting beliefs, maybe an agnostic.  Thinking that if you're not making a million dollars a year, you're not successful. Bogus, like I said, let's be counterintuitive, set the goal for $2,000 a month, surpass that. So you're constantly experiencing success or whatever the modest goal is for you. It might be $500 a month right now. I don't know. It might be $10,000 a month. I don't know. But what is modest and totally, totally reachable? You set that goal, you surpass it every single month and you set, you set the next modest higher goal and surpass that. And you keep going until you're making lots of money if you want to. But the other thing I want to talk about real quick before, before we go, I got a request to keep my videos to about 15 minutes. So I'm trying to do that, but I'm going to work on that. So I have a whole blog post about the why that I think you should read, which I will put the link to it about an hour after, after I make this live video. But it is also really important to look at the spiritual aspects of this question. Why do you want to make a lot of money? When the truth about studying the great spiritual traditions of the world is that every great spiritual tradition is very suspicious about money and wealth. Seriously, right? Jesus, the Buddha, you know, Hinduism, I don't know about Judaism. Judaism, Old Testament has a lot of stuff about God blessing people with wealth. But it also has a lot about being, you know, God helping the poor. I don't know. I'm not clear about the Judaism part. So if someone please chime in with that. But I know for sure, Christianity, New Testament, what Buddha taught, I believe what Hinduism taught and any other religion, I have a link in my blog to an interesting website that studies what the world teaches, what the world's religions teach about money and wealth. So you might want to take a look at that. But what I have seen, at least let's just take Jesus and Buddha, the two very credible spiritual figures. Jesus said, I mean, look at Jesus. Did he make a lot of money? No. Did his disciples make a lot of money? No. What did Jesus say? Don't worry about money. Jesus didn't say you must be poor. He said, poor in spirit. Not necessarily poor in bank account. But Jesus said, you've got to be poor in spirit. And it's not about the money is what Jesus said. Jesus said, hey, don't worry about the money. Don't think so much about making a million dollars a year and, you know, having an easy life working a few hours. We don't think about that stuff. Let God take care of that. What you should focus on is the kingdom of God and his righteousness, right? Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all the stuff that you need will be given to you as well. The stuff that you need that God knows you need, not what you think you need. You might think you need a million dollars and working 10 hours a week. But God says, no, no, I have better plans for you than that.  Your ambitions are like a teenage ambitions, right?  That's the best possible life for me. That's what I aspire to. And the parent says, God, you have no idea the richness of life that you are throwing away and what the parent wants, the wise parent wants, is for the kid to do things that grow their intelligence and their character and their courage and their creativity and their ability to influence and communicate with other people. That parent wants that for the kid. The kid doesn't want that. The kid just wants to have instant pleasure and easy life all day, right?  And I think what God says is listen, I have a much better life for you.  Like that is what's much more important to get out of this life than lots of money able to donate a lot to charities because that's actually the ego speaking. The ego says, hey, I want the power to be able to give money to charities that need me, they need me. And I'm able to direct the world in a certain direction. That's the ego speaking. Again, teenage ambitions, right? It's not what this world spiritual and what did Buddha say? Did Buddha say, ah, yes, you need to make lots of money so that you can have an easy life, work 10 hours a week, 20 hours a week, 30 hours a week, whatever easy means to you, to have lots of people praise you, to have a big following of people and to be able to donate lots of money to people. That's not what the Buddha said. The Buddha said, what did the Buddha say? The eightfold noble path, right view, to have a right perspective about life, the right resolve, to have the right purpose, right speech, right action, right livelihood, not lots of money livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness. I'm not a Buddhist scholar. So there's a lot of depth here that can go into this, but he didn't say, right possessions, right amount of wealth, right amount of power. No, I think Buddha would, Buddha also grew up rich and Buddha would have said, it's not, it's not that I want you to be poor. It's not that I want to be rich either. It's the money, you got to detach success with money. That's the main, main point here. You've got to detach success with money. They've got to be separated. Success is about character. Success is not about how many hours you're working, how much money you're making, how much you can donate to charity. Success is about character. Now character may mean, and you end up working 60 hours a week, but you're so joyful doing it because you're helping so many people, or you may end up working 10 hours or five hours a week or no hours a week. I don't know. The success is about character here. Okay. And if you pursue character and a life of character, then everything else will be given to you. Everything else you truly need will be given to you. Okay. I think I've gone long enough here, 20 minutes. I hope this has been helpful. Apologize my, my preachiness. I think in part for this topic that I'm so passionate about, but also in part because I'm trying to keep it to 15 minutes, which I failed miserably out today. So let me, let me read for some of the comments here. Thanks for those who are joining me live. Thanks, Alejandra. Thanks, Miriam, for your comment. What is modest and reachable? Lovely. Yeah. And, and then we keep increasing that as we want to. If we want to, you could eventually, what's modest for you might be 20,000 a month. It's like, oh, yeah, I, I, I got $25,000 a month last year. So 20,000 a month is very reachable this year on next. So it's not about an exact number, but it's just about focusing on the service and the character building and every, the business is going to work. If we focus on service and character building and joyful productivity, making sure we, we have a lot of self care in there. That's what I'm aiming for, right? You know, like joyful productivity, authentic marketing, which really is about service and character building and creativity. And then everything else is added to us, right? Yeah. Yeah. Alejandra says, you know, that these messages, if you have the right to be rich, you have to raise the bar and many other messages, making lots of money can actually be an inhibitor of real growth. Greed runs deep in our society. Yeah. It's that's exactly right. It's like, if we, if we focus on the money, if we put any kind of, the key is this, when I say focus on the money, again, modest goals, I think are very, very reasonable and, and, and good. But when we, when we have fantasy goals, if you're making $50,000 a year right now and you want to make $500,000 a year next year or even whatever years, I don't care. That is what I'm talking about. That is the, the, the wrong aim. Okay. That's the wrong aim. You might end up making $500,000 a year next year. I don't know. But to focus on that number, when it's so far from your current reality, you end up having to sacrifice a lot of people along the way, including yourself. You, you'll sacrifice your spirituality along the way, because you're so focused on that number and that timeline for that number. Okay. Detach money number and detach timeline from success and then include, and then add in character, service and your for productivity and you'll be good. Right. Essentially. And let's see here. Yeah. Tucker says, do I have everything I need in this moment? Beautiful question. Do I have everything I need in this moment? That's a profound question. That's a profound question. That's, that's like a co-on, right? A co-on meaning a question that is not meant to have the right answer, but it's a question that can be danced with. And yeah. Do I have everything I need in this moment? No, that's a great question. So thank you for that, Tucker. Yeah. It's a question to self and fear about money.  It's, there's a miracle called the fact that you are still here. No matter how much we've been afraid about our security in our life, we are still here. You still have the ability to be watching this video right now. And compared to many people in the world, that is, that is wealth. That is wealthy. Right. You are still here and you will keep being here and being taken care of as long as your mission on earth is not yet finished. That's the beauty of it. And so let's pursue our mission rather than, and I don't think our mission on earth is a certain amount of money in a certain timeframe. It's working a certain hours a week. I think our mission is something different than that. Right. So let's pursue our mission knowing that the needs will always be taken care of. So anyway, enough preaching. I hope this is helpful. And until the next video, I wish you a joyful sense of success all the time because you have goals that you're continually surpassing. So blessings. Be well.


Hello everybody! Watch this video to learn how to delete a file or folder that can't be deleted because of write protection, denied access, virus infection or opening a file in an unknown program. Do you have a problem when you can't delete a folder or several files from your PC or laptop? Does Windows show you an access denied error? It can happen because of various causes when you delete, edit or override files. Check if write operations are possible for the device from where you want to delete files. In one of the previous videos, we showed how to disable write protection for various devices. You will find the link in the description. If you got this message when deleting a file, could not find this item, verify the item's location and try again. Your computer is most likely infected by a virus. You should boot your computer in the safe mode and you will find the link to this video in the description. If the cause of blocking is a virus, in most cases you can delete the files without any additional actions. If Windows operating system shows you a message that you have no rights or need permission to modify files, log in as administrator. If you don't know the password, you can watch this video on how to reset it. Find the link in the description. If Windows operating system shows a message that a file or folder cannot be deleted because they are opened in any other program, remember the name of such program and then do the following. Press Windows plus R. In the run window type in resmon.exe and press Enter. In the tab Overview, find the program that prevents you from deleting. Right-click on it and select End Process. Repeat this step if the name of the program is shown in the tab Overview several times. Then try deleting the files again. If you couldn't delete the files or folders in any other ways, ask questions in comments. If you liked this video, click the Like button below and subscribe to our channel to see more. Thank you for watching and good luck.


So I'm going to tell you a little bit about Tor onion services and the sort of things that we've been doing lately. I'm going to try to do a bunch of different topics at once. How many people here know about Tor or how it works? Something awesome. Okay. So I'm going to skip over most of the how it works and so on. We finally made the projector work which is awesome. I can't see what I'm seeing so I'll be looking to the sides every so often. So Tor is a nonprofit. Tor is software. Tor is a privacy tool. Tor is a lot of different things. It's a network of volunteers around the world. It's a group of researchers who try to study how to make privacy better. The Tor network has something like two million users every day using it. So it's a lot of different people all around the world. We've got a lot of people in the Middle East. We've got a lot of people in Europe. We've got a lot of people in North America. And each of those are for a lot of different reasons that I can get into. So what's the situation here? We've got Alice over here. She's trying to browse the web to some bob and she wants to keep some security properties. She wants to stay safe. She wants to make it so that somebody watching her doesn't know where she's going. She wants to make it so that somebody at the destination can't figure out where she's coming from. And she wants to make it so no single like tier one ISPs like AT&T, which I guess means NSA, get to track where she's coming from to where she's going. So anonymity is more than just encryption. More than just crypto. I talk to a lot of corporations who say, well, yeah, I don't need Tor because I use a VPN. I don't need Tor because I've got encryption. I use something else. And encryption is good. You should use encryption. But even when you're using encryption, people watching you get to learn who you're talking to, when you're talking to them, how much you're talking. And that's what the intelligence agencies use these days. It's not about let's try to break the crypto. It's about let's build a social graph of who's talking to who, find out who's in the middle of that, and then go break into their house and change their laptop or steal their hardware or stuff like that. So the goal of Tor is to protect the metadata. I'm sure you've all heard the phrase we kill people based on metadata from our fine government. Okay. So I actually only use the word anonymity when I'm talking to other researchers. When I'm talking to my parents and ordinary people, I tell them I'm working on a privacy system. Because anonymity, maybe it's a bit scary, but privacy is a good value that the whole world should have. And when I'm talking to companies, Google and Walmart and so on, I tell them I'm working on communication security. Because privacy is dead and anonymity is scary, but security, yeah, yeah, I need some security. And then when I'm talking to governments and militaries, I tell them I'm working on traffic analysis resistant communication networks. And again, it's the same system, it's the same network, it's the same set of users, it's the same security properties. But the goal is to blend all of these different groups together. Because when you go to the government and you say, I've got a security tool, they're like, yeah, I've heard that one before, we bought 50 security tools. We're all set or we don't like security or whatever their answer is. But traffic analysis resistance, oh yeah, I do want to send the diplomat into Israel and not have people learn what her affiliation is. And then there's the fourth category, which is the reachability or the censorship side. So all of these are different talks, I'm going to skip over most of them. I should be around for the rest of the weekend in a bright green shirt, so if you want to ask me more questions about Tor, I should be around. Okay, so how do you build one of these? The easy answer is you have a single hot proxy, all of the users show up and they each request whatever website they're going to. And this is bad news for a couple of reasons. The main reason is that big juicy center target. So I was actually talking to the CTO of one of these companies years ago, I think it was anonymizer.com and he said, yeah, we never answer subpoenas. If we ever answer subpoena, nobody would trust us again. So of course we never answer them. And then I was doing a talk for the US Department of Justice like six months later and one of them interrupted me and said, why can't you be like anonymizer? It's easy. We send them a subpoena. They send us an answer. It's easy. Why can't you be like that? So I don't say that to pick on anonymizer in particular. The problem is the architecture. The problem is the centralized system where they have all of your metadata. They know exactly what you're doing and they promise not to screw you. They could screw you. They've got everything. They promise not to. I want a system that's based on privacy by design, based on distributed trust, rather than there's a centralized system and they make some promises and there's no way for you to tell whether they're following through. Okay, and it's actually worse than that because if it's a centralized system, there's one cable going into the computer, same cable coming out and if you can tap that cable or the upstream or the upstream's upstream, then you get to do pretty simple traffic analysis and say this flow came in and a very similar looking flow went out. So I'm pretty sure that this user is talking to that destination. So the goal of Tor is to distribute the trust over multiple relays. So there's no single point the guest to learn about Alice and Bob in the same circuit. Okay, so far so good? Great. So that's actually only half of what Tor is. The first part I was telling you was the location privacy or network metadata or something like that. The other half is the browser side, the application level privacy. So in your browser there are so many different ways. Awesome. I hope my slides continue to survive as people mess with them. So in your browser there are so many different ways to screw up from the privacy side. Cookies, HTTP headers. I hear Flash is finally dead. That's awesome. So one of the things that we do is we've got a fork of Firefox called Tor browser that tries to keep all of those other things from messing you up. So it tries to isolate all of your state. When you close Tor browser it all gets thrown away. So that's a second thing that we work on and I'm not going to talk about that one here except to mention that it's an important piece of things. Okay, so here's a graph of the performance of the scalability, the bandwidth of the Tor network over the past seven years or so. So the green line is the capacity of relays in the network. We're up to about 8,000 relays and the purple line is the load on the network which is the people who are using it for going to Facebook or going to CNN or going to WikiLeaks or whatever they're doing with Tor. So there are a couple of interesting things here. One of them is the more the gap is between the green line and the purple line, the faster Tor can be. So we were discovering this long ago. In fact my last talk at DEF CON was eight years ago and it was entitled Why Tor is Slow and What We're Going to Do About It. And you can see on this graph where that talk was given. So that was at the zero, zero point in this graph. And since then we've moved up to something like 100 gigabits of actual traffic and maybe two or three times that of capacity. So there are a lot of relays out there in the world including run by a lot of people here. You should all run relays in order to make the Tor network be able to handle more traffic. And it's not just that. It's also the diversity side of things. It's not just about being able to handle bandwidth. We need to have a lot of different relays in a lot of different places around the world so that a single attacker, maybe French intelligence or something like that, won't be able to see enough places on the internet in order to be able to map this user is going into the Tor network and this flow is coming out and I can see them both so I can match them up. So one piece of the diversity is the diversity of relays where they are. The other piece is the diversity of users. So if we had an anonymity system for cancer survivors and everybody on it was using it to talk about how they survived cancer, then the fact that you had Tor installed would give people a really good hint about why you have Tor installed. So one of the really important pieces of the security is having a lot of different types of users. So we need Egyptian activists and cancer survivors and feds and Russian feds or whatever the equivalent is all in the same system so that you can't guess what's going on just from the fact that they're using Tor. And another piece of that is imagine there are 50,000 people in Iran using Tor right now. The average person in Iran using Tor is using it because somebody blocked their web comics, somebody blocked Facebook and they want to be able to look at their cute cats or something like that. It's not that there are 50,000 dissidents in Iran all trying to take down their government using Tor. They're all trying to be ordinary people on the internet and their country is censoring them. So the fact that most of them are ordinary is a key piece of the strength of Tor.  You need a lot of other cover traffic and a lot of other people blending. Okay another key point transparency for Tor, the Tor project is a key property. So one piece of that is it needs to be open source, it needs to be free software. Another piece is we need to actually give you the design documents and the specifications and say this is what we meant to build, this is how we thought we built it. Here's the source code, here's the design document, please look at whichever of those you're most comfortable with and try to find bugs and mistakes and so on. Another piece is publicly identified developers. So here we are up here saying hi I work on Tor.  We see a couple of hands awesome. So there are quite a few people here who are part of the group of people building Tor.  Privacy is about choice. Privacy is about giving people the ability to choose am I going to publish this information about me or not. And we believe that the best way to build a strong global anonymity system with a community around it is we choose to identify ourselves and we choose to describe who we are and what we're doing in order for you to be able to trust us. Okay and yes there are bad people in the world and some of them use Tor but at this point with millions of people using Tor every day the average Tor user is the average internet user.  So yeah you could look at it as a two-edged sword, you could say you know you got to take the good with the bad or something like that. But really so imagine two scenarios. Scenario one I want to build a tool that works for millions of people I want to tell you all about it so you can help me analyze it and I want it to work for the next year or two. So that's the Tor problem. Scenario two I want to build a tool that works for the next two weeks only ten people will use it and I'm never going to tell you about it. That's the the terrorist the bad guy problem. So the bad guys have so many more options it doesn't have to scale, doesn't have to have peer review, doesn't have to to be sustainable. Whereas the Tor goal is to build something that works for everybody and can continue to work and can push forward understanding how to build privacy tools in the world because there are a lot of really big well-funded adversaries out there and we the security community need to learn how to build things that can defend against them. Okay so another piece I wanted to talk about there are if you only learned about Tor from slash dot or some crappy newspaper article there are a lot of people who've been spreading memes over the past while and I wanted to tackle a couple of them here not to try to like change your mind about something but many of you are Tor activists so hopefully this will help you when you go talk to your parents or your cousins or something and they say well I heard that Tor so hopefully this will give you some ammunition back. So one of the exciting things I hear I heard the Navy wrote Tor so how can we trust it? The very short answer to that is I wrote Tor, not the Navy. So here I am. And the other piece of that so years ago I was at a hacker conference in the Netherlands called What the Hack and I did three talks in three days and I got a lot of people coming up to me saying how can we know that we can trust this thing and I got to try two different answers on them. The first answer was it's open source, it's free software, you can look at it, you don't have to trust me, you can decide for yourself if it's safe and they actually didn't like that one because I think some of them heard it's bad news, you should look at it, I can't tell you. The other answer that I tried was no dude, don't worry about it, it's fine. And that worked great. Which it shouldn't have worked, it should be that we should teach people about free software and open source so we've got some more work to do in that world. Okay so myth number two, I heard the NSA runs half the relays. First of all Ed Snowden's documents showed us that GCHQ ran like five relays for a week on Amazon EC2 some years ago. So indeed some intelligence agencies have run relays every so often. But I actually know the people who run like two thirds of the relays by capacity. So I know that the NSA does not run half the relays because I know the people who run the relays. So that's one answer. Another answer is it doesn't make any sense for the NSA to run the relays. This is maybe sort of a bad news answer but they shouldn't run the relays, they should continue to monitor the internet and they should let excited enthusiastic people run relays and then they're already watching AT&T and Deutsche Telekom and the cables underneath the oceans. So they don't have to run the relays to attack the Tor network. They're already investing in surveilling the internet. So it makes no sense for them to try to go through the red tape and so on of getting some feds to approve running relays in the network. So that one's kind of complicated but I don't think there are many actual intelligence agencies running relays because they don't have to. Okay. So myth number three, I heard Tor is slow. If you use Tor 15 years ago it actually was kind of slow. But because we've got a lot more capacity in the network these days it's become a lot faster than it used to be. So I talked to a lot of people who last used Tor 10 years ago or something. Try it out if you haven't tried it lately. And I heard Tor gets a lot of its money from the U.S. government. This one is alas true. We get something like 80% of our funding from the U.S. State Department or the National Science Foundation or the Open Technology Fund which is part of Radio Free Asia.  We're diversified inside the U.S. government. That's not as much as I'd like to be. So we have something like 15% of our funding coming from donations and things like that. And we'd love to grow that so we're more sustainable and we don't have to keep coming up with shiny things to try to convince some funder that they want to pay for us to build. Okay. Another exciting one. A few years ago there was some researcher who came up with some bad methodology to measure how much of Tor is bad people and then some journalist misunderstood it and like wrote a bad article about it. And before we knew it there was a U.S. like Department of Justice high muckity muck who was saying in front of Congress 80% of Tor users are doing bad things. And every step of that chain was bad news. Another I guess another way of looking at that. Akamai wrote a report a while ago looking at the people who were going to Macy's or whatever companies that Akamai hosts. And they found that the number of people buying things over Tor successfully and being ordinary people was the same rate as the people buying stuff over not Tor. So that was the argument that they were using to tell all their customers yeah you shouldn't be scared of this Tor thing now that it has millions of people it is a cross section of the internet. It looks like everybody else. And then myth number six I shouldn't use Tor because if I do that the NSA is going to watch me. So on the one hand a few years ago we actually found some X key score rules that the NSA might be operating where they were spying on my computer at MIT and tracking all the connections that came to it. On the other hand so imagine your friend comes to you and says I heard that when I use HTTPS the NSA is watching me. So I'm not going to use encryption anymore and now I'm going to be safe. That's crazy talk. The same things happening here the NSA is watching everything they're already building databases of everything going on. And if you say well I'm not going to use any security tools because then I'll be safe somehow we have to get to the world where Tor is normalized enough that people think that it's totally crazy to say I'm not going to protect my metadata because if I protect my metadata then they'll be watching me. They're watching everybody. Okay and then myth seven a lot of people look at Tor and they say well I read an article four years ago that said there was an attack so I'm scared I'm going to use this crappy single hop VPN instead. So part of the challenge here is teaching people about the security system ecosystem.  That's how systems become safe to use. If you design a thing and anytime it's broken you throw it out and you start with a new one you're never going to get anywhere. So part of what we need to do is help the world understand how the security ecosystem works. Okay so I'm going to talk here about onion services and what they are so far and what we are doing to make them stronger and change them. So here's a screenshot of using Tor browser to go to blah blah blah dot onion which is one of the onion services that RiseUp uses. So that blah blah blah is the hash of the public key for the onion service. So every onion service is its own public private key pair and you address them using the public key. So what do you get out of this? One of the really cool things is they're self authenticated. If I go to that public key address my Tor client makes sure that I'm really talking to the Tor on the other side that's running that address. So there's no man in the middle. There's no certificate authority mafia that's telling us who can have encryption and who can't have encryption. It's all built into the system. You get end to end encryption out of that. Built in not punching is awesome. There are a lot of people who run onion services behind their firewall. No packets are allowed through the firewall at all. It's just you can go in through the onion service which build a connection out and that way your surface area is really limited. For example there are a lot of people who run onion addresses for their SSH server and that way they can connect back to their computer but nobody else can connect. You can't send you know standard IP packets. You can't send weird IP packets. You can only talk to the computer through the onion channel and that gives you authentication and encryption and a lot of other good stuff. So that's one of the neat things that onion services can provide. We looked a while ago at the same time the journalist was saying the bad like 80% thing. We were thinking let's actually try to figure out what fraction of traffic in the tour network has to do with onion services. Because if you read the BBC articles about Silk Road you would think that tour is only Silk Road. So let's actually measure tour and try to figure out what's going on and how much traffic there is. So we instrumented the tour relays in a way that is privacy preserving and safe to try to figure out how much total traffic each relay kept or handled that was related to onion services. And here's a graph over the past two and a half years or so and it's about a gigabit per second of onion traffic. So that's something like 1% of the traffic that I was showing you before. But actually the math is a bit more complicated because we were just measuring in the middle and that means three hops. So the very short version is something like 3% of tour traffic has to do with onion services at all. So the other 97% of the traffic is people going to ordinary websites like CNN and WikiLeaks and cute cat pictures and so on. Whatever people do on the internet. So that's a really important point because it means, so I wrote onion services back in like 2004 or something. I wrote them as a toy to show that once you had tour you could build building blocks on top of it.  They've got a couple of early adopters. A lot of people who are early adopters for any technology tend to be bad guys in one form or another. But part of what we need to do here is get a lot more users and a lot more people thinking about it because the broader it gets the more ordinary it becomes. So whenever you see journalists and so on trying to show you the picture of the deep web, I have to wave my hands whenever I say deep web or dark web. Think about what they're trying to sell you because there's basically no dark web. It basically doesn't exist. There's a company out there called terbium labs that found like 7000 websites on the dark web total compared to the billions of web pages out there and other places. So whenever somebody shows you the picture of the iceberg try to figure out what their incentives are. What are their motivations? Okay. So what are some cool use cases for onion services in terms of other things people have done with them? One of the really cool ones is secure drop. This is basically a way of interacting in a back and forth way with journalists where let's say you've got some story about some terrible thing the government did and you want to get it in the hands of the New York Times or the Washington Post or the intercept and so that they can write a good article about it but you want to stay anonymous. So there are actually like all those places that I just named are actually running secure drop instances. The New York Times has one. The Guardian has one. There are like 30 different major newspapers that have these whistle blowing platforms as ways that you can reach them safely with built in encryption and built in authentication in a way that nobody's going to be able to man in the middle of it. So that's an awesome first step. Another out of the box approach is a tool called ricochet. So how many people here use Jabber or XMPP or Google talk or some words like that? I see far fewer hands than I expected. You're probably all Skype users. Okay. So one of the really cool things, one of the really sad things about the centralized tools like Jabber is there's a central server where all of the traffic goes through that central server and if you're in the middle you get to learn all the friends lists and who's talking to who and so on. So one of the cool things about ricochet is every user is their own onion service. So there's no middle. I can talk to somebody else's onion service. I don't have to know who they are or where they are. I just need their onion address. And now there's nothing to tap if you want to do European style data retention there's no place to go to. If you want to do like American style I'm going to just you know break in and take all the data. There's nothing to break in to. So there's no middle which is a an awesome metadata security for chat. There are a lot of the I mean signal, yay signal but there's still like a computer in Europe that Moxie gets to look at and it's probably not just Moxie. So we really need to think about metadata security for our communications apps. Okay another cool one is onion share. This is actually written by journalists for journalists at the intercept. And so let's imagine you have a two gigabyte file and you got it from some guy named Ed at the NSA and you want to give it to the journalist next to you. Do you use Dropbox? Do you use a USB key? Do you email it to them? Do you set up an FTP server?  So onion share is a way to use onion services where the website spins up for just that one download. You fetch the file over the onion address. The website goes away. So it's up for just the transfer and then it's gone and there's nothing left over afterwards. So that's a really important way of more safely sharing files when you need to share important files.  One of the ones that I think is especially awesome is the Debian packaging system. When you do an apt-get update or apt-get upgrade, they have onion addresses for their package servers. So that means that you can get end-to-end encryption and authentication when you're fetching your updates. And anonymous updates is an awesome concept. So imagine right now you go to get your next Debian update and they're looking at you and they're like, oh, him. Yeah, I want to give him the exploit. Imagine you're going through a tour, they don't know it's you.  They can't target particular people because they can't, there's nothing recognizable about them. It's all just a mass of anonymous people fetching their updates and if they want to target somebody, they have to target a lot of them, making it much more likely that somebody is going to notice that they're being sent a bad package or an exploit or something like that. So I think we, the security community, really need to think more about anonymous updates in general because the targeting problem seems like a really big one. Okay, so what do you think the biggest website on the dark web is?  Turns out that the largest website that you can reach with an onion address is Facebook. Facebook set up an onion address in order to let their users choose, do I use the normal HTTPS mafia, do I use the onion address so that I don't have to deal with that? Imagine you're in Turkey and you're trying to go to Facebook but the Turkish government is actually attacking you and Turkish Telecom owns a certificate authority so they actually do target people by signing SSL certificates. So Facebook wanted to give users around the world the choice of what sort of security they're getting. And the Facebook people, this is actually a post from Facebook on their blog saying last April, I guess two April's ago now, a million people logged into Facebook over Tor in that month. So a million people was a lot but they have, I don't know, a billion users or something. So 0.1% of Facebook's user base logged in over Tor last April. That's huge. That's a lot more people than we were thinking we were using Tor. That's a lot more ordinary people than we were thinking. So part of the thing to realize here is this is a cross section of the world that's using Tor at this point. Okay, so how do these things actually work? So imagine I'm Bob, I want to run some service, some website or something and I want people to be able to reach it as an onion address. So the first thing I do is I generate my key pair and I establish circuits out into the Tor network so that, and then I hold them open and those are my introduction points. And at that point, I'm going to publish a descriptor into the database in the sky. I'll talk about that in a bit. And the goal of that is I want to put my introduction points, all three of them, and I want to put the public key for my service. And then Alice is going to learn blah blah blah dot onion somehow and she's going to pull that down from the directory and now she knows the introduction points and she knows the public key so she can verify that she's really reaching the right place. And at that point she's going to establish her own circuit into the Tor network to what we call the rendezvous point and then she's going to send an introduction to the introduction point saying hey I want to talk to Bob and it will get passed through to Bob and then Bob will receive a message saying somebody wants to talk to you and they're waiting over at this rendezvous point and here's a cookie for how you can recognize each other. So then Bob is going to connect to the rendezvous point also and at that point they do the handshake so they get end to end encryption and authentication and in the last step they just talk to each other through the rendezvous point.  One of the really important ones is that rendezvous point doesn't know who Alice is, doesn't know who Bob is, it's being used once for this transaction and then it gets thrown away. So it doesn't basically it knows nothing about what's going on for that individual transaction. Okay so I talked about the database in the sky, how does that actually work? Each onion service publish picks six of the tour relays each day and it publishes its descriptors to those six. So it uses this hash function to try to map to which ones. The reason it needs to use the hash function is the tour hidden service, the tour onion service needs to be able to predict where to publish it so that the clients can do the same calculation and fetch it from the same place. So the service publishes to these six places, the client fetches from one of the six and then it can go do that dance that I was talking about before. So far so good? Okay. So what are some problems with the old design? One of the really big problems is those old addresses are too short and they're built with bad news keys. So the simple phrase is it's the first 80 bits of the SHA-1 of the 1024 bit RSA. Every single word in that sentence is bad news. So in fact there's a talk in here in this room next about finding a collision with SHA-1. So we need to fix most of those pieces. And the very short answer is the new ED25519 keys are stronger, safer, they're based on elliptic curves but they're not based on the NIST curves. So things are a lot better in that shape. One of the downsides though, it used to be that the onion address is a really short and simple and the new ones are 56 characters long. But the plus side is you actually get the key, the whole key, it's not the hash of anything. That's actually the ED25519 key in that lower onion address. So that lets us do some cool stuff with crypto that I'll talk about in a bit. Okay. So what are some other problems? I talked earlier about how each onion service picks six relays to publish to. That hash function that I was talking about is predictable into the future. So I can say I want to target this particular onion address so I'm going to spin up six relays that have just the right identity keys so that next Tuesday I'm the six that it's going to choose. And at that point I can censor connections to it because when somebody tries to fetch a descriptor I say oh no I've never heard of it. It's down, it's gone. Or I can measure popularity where people are going to have to go through me in order to fetch the descriptor so I can just count how many people do that. I can't de-anonymize it. I can't attack it in that way but it's still kind of bad news. And in fact there was like a researcher at I think it was Black Hat Amsterdam or something who made six relays that were going to be the six relays for Facebook like a month or so after that. So people have been doing this in practice. We've been noticing that relays pop up that have really close together identity key hashes for reasons that I mean maybe it's this attack, maybe it's something else. So so far we've been kicking those relays out but that's a crappy arms race. So the better way is to, I'll take your question at the end I hope. So the better way is to be able to change it and the way to change that is to add another input into that hash function which changes every day. So it needs to be a global, a globally agreed shared random value. It needs to be, everybody needs to agree on it but nobody should be able to predict it beforehand. And basically we're doing that every day there's a new shared random value and the toward directory authorities work that into their consensus process and so that's a key piece and hopefully we've finally destroyed the bad people want to run relays in order to attack toward like this arms race. Okay so there's another problem. Those six relays when I publish my onion descriptor to them they get to learn my onion address. So maybe I didn't put it on, you know, an index, I didn't publish it, I didn't send it to all my friends, I didn't tell anybody except the one person that I wanted to know my onion address.  So in fact there are thread intelligence, I have to wave my hands when I say that phrase too, there are thread intelligence companies who have been running relays in the Tor network with the goal of discovering onion addresses that aren't published any other way. And then they go to like Fortune 500 companies and blackmail them and scare them with phrases like dark web and pictures of icebergs and so on.  So we'd like to stop that particular arms race also and the way to do that is because of the new crypto system that we're using, the new keys allow us to create sub keys and you can sign the descriptor with the sub key in a way that everybody can check the signature without anybody being able to learn the primary key, the main key from that. So it's cool crypto magic that we get from the particular crypto system that we picked for the new keys.  If you want to run a relay because somebody in America might be unsafe or somebody in Egypt might be unsafe, that's awesome, please do. If you want to run a relay because you're trying to make money off of something unrelated, you're not helping Tor. So I want to make it so that the Tor network is made more of safe relays. Okay. So something else that is exciting that's going on are called rendezvous single onion services. So in the old design, Alice makes three hops into the Tor network, Bob makes three hops into the Tor network, and then you've got a six hop circuit that they go over. In the new design, if you want, you, the onion service, can just make a one hop circuit into the Tor network. So now it's a four hop circuit and you get the end to end encryption and authentication and so on, but you've got a lot better performance. So Facebook did this, Debian's main page did this. So if you're not trying to hide the location of your onion service, but you want all the other security properties for your users, then it makes a lot of sense to do this. And there's even a cooler step than that. There's a guy in Europe named Donica who has a tool called onion balance and this allows you to run a bunch of different versions of your onion service and it aggregates them all into one place. So for example Debian does this, they've got like six backup onion services for their package service and they, they can restart any of them whenever they want to, they can take them down for a while because there's this meta service that aggregates all the introduction points they have. So it makes things scale better, it makes performance better, it makes it easier to manage. Okay, so there's another challenge. So how many people here know the phrase entry guard or guard relay or, okay, not very many, awesome. So there are a bunch of attacks that I don't have time to get into, but the fix for many of them is you pick one relay as your first hop and you stick with that for weeks or months and the fact that you don't change it means that you don't have a much surface area against bad guys who are trying to run a bunch of relays and hope to be that first hop. So this is great except there are still a bunch of attacks to discover what your first hop is, what your guard relay is and these guard discovery attacks are, are pretty easy and then once you do them it's pretty bad because you know the guard relay and you've got a while to break in, you've got, you know, some weeks and maybe it's in Malaysia and you'll never be able to break in but maybe it's in Ohio and you just call up the cops in Ohio and there you are. So there are a bunch of different fixes we're looking at, it's still an open research area but one of the key things is that we need more layers of guards that don't change as often, some of them change more often, I'd be happy to chat about that one afterwards. So you can learn more about the vanguard design into our proposal 271. Okay, so the hidden service side of the new next generation onion service stuff is in, the relay side is in, the client side and the service side are not in Get Master right now but if you get cloned that branch you can build it, it works, I just used it this morning so I'm running an onion service, here's a screenshot of my new style onion service and you can grab that address and go to it, you can set up your own. Over the next couple of weeks we're gonna clean it up more, merge it into master, do an actual release that includes it but you can use it right now if you want to. Okay, so a couple of other things to keep in mind before we finish up, one of the important things, tour is not perfect, there are very few, there's no such thing as a perfect privacy tool out there especially in the face of billion dollar adversaries, so one of the big things we hear about over and over is, oops I wrote my name on my blog post, I was using tour but shit, and I mean it's really hard to be perfect in the OPSEC world but that's a thing that if you're trying to remain safe is something to really pay attention to. Another piece is the browser metadata side, we just started a bug bounty program for tour browser and some nice person gave us a proxy bypass bug yesterday and we put out a new version of tour browser yesterday that patches it, so yay for bug bounties but there's, I mean browsers are terrible things, so somehow we need to find a way to have a secure tour browser and maybe that involves more sandboxing, maybe it involves trying to find all the other problems that we can patch, Chrome is especially bad news here because it basically has some built in proxy bypasses that are part of the design so it's really hard to turn it into a tour browser and then another piece, browser exploits, I mean Java's bad news and flash is finally dying but JavaScript is not so great, image handling is not so great, there are all sorts of pieces of browsers and every so often we hear about some government that bought another Firefox zero day and used it against some people in the world, so that's certainly a thing that we need to keep working at and then there's traffic analysis, imagine you're a large intelligence agency and you want to be able to monitor as much of the internet as you can in order to be able to see a lot of the tour relays, in order to be able to match up this user's go into that place. Okay, so how can you help?  I see a very tiny number of hands more than before, please run relays, make the tour network stronger and safer, each relay has an exit policy that lets you decide whether you want to be the third hop in the circuit, whether you want to be the person who goes to the website, so running non-exit relays is also really useful, you can set them up at your university or your work or whatever, you're not going to be that last hop in the circuit so it will be reasonably safe, nobody's probably ever going to care except for the bandwidth use, so please help us make the tour network stronger and safer. Another piece of that is teach your friends about privacy, teach your friends about tour, there are a lot of, I mean every time I turn around some fed somewhere is lying to us about how the internet works and we need to try to help the world understand how security works, why privacy is important and we this community are the ones who are going to do that, because who else is going to do that. Help find and fix bugs, I talked about the bug bounty thing, I was talking to Tom earlier who wanted me to remind everybody, we especially need Windows developers, most of our users are on Windows, most of the tour developers are on Linux or BSD or Mac or something, so if you're a Windows developer we'd especially love to hear from you and we need a lot of help there and so PetSymposium.org is a conference that happens every year, the next one's in Spain, the last one was in Minnesota a couple of weeks ago and that's basically where the academics and researchers all get together to think about new attacks and new defenses and new designs on being able to keep people safe and of course there's Donate.TourProject.org, we're a non-profit that's relatively small compared to the size of the billion dollar intelligence agencies out there so we'd love to have your help there as well and I will end with an amazing endorsement from, I'm not sure if it's NSA or GCHQ because they didn't actually sign the slides that Ed Snowden walked out with but it's still the king of high secure low latency internet anonymity so says NSA or GCHQ and with that so rather than trying to do the Q and A thing in here because I've got like 60 seconds left or something I'm going to go outside of that area and I'm going to be the guy in the bright green shirt I'm happy to chat with you and answer your questions and give you a card with the tour PGP key on it or a sticker or stuff like that and I'm also going to be around for the rest of the weekend so love to talk to you. Thank you.