We'll be talking today about gaming in the glass safe, which is about games, DRM and privacy. My name is Ferdinand Trober and I'm a security researcher and I've got a strong background in games. I've done game development and game security. So let's look at the privacy aspects. The outline for my talk is, first we'll start off with some historical development, which is about the copy protection that actually DRM and everything we're going to talk about and the privacy impacts actually came from. I mean it's important to understand the historical development, to understand where we really are at this point in time. Then we'll look at the different DRM approaches that exist at the moment. We'll do a privacy study on each of them. We'll look at some of the failure cases, which might be or might not be depending on if you did it or not, quite amusing. And then we'll look at some of the case studies in particular and give names to things.  And at the very end there's something that I tossed in on a recommendation from a friend is we'll talk about why games are actually being cracked and there's some interesting tidbits here that basically put everything else into perspective. And then if you still have time here, we'll do Q&A and otherwise the breakout session is in 106. First of all, we've got the historical development of copy protection. One of the very first things that happened was we had floppies. And floppies were the big distribution media in the 1980s and around this time. But the problem is also floppies at that point in time were relatively cheap. I mean, they were feasible. They were cheaper than actually buying, let's say, a game. So the very simple thing that had already happened at that point previously was disk layout protection, meaning you have a very unique disk layout that your normal operating system copy routines don't understand. The application and game itself actually understands it and therefore you can get away with this. You're basically breaking the standard to some extent. This wasn't a big hurdle for copy protection and we'll actually see that has been done in the same way later on because we didn't obviously learn at it from all, from a copy protection perspective. But the resolution for this is really simple. You do enable copy and enable copy just means you're reading out the raw data and you duplicate it. So to counterbalance that, the next thing that came out was the so-called feelies. I'll actually have a specific slide for those because I think they're really interesting. The idea behind those is that you have a physical token that you get with the game or the software.  So you had a lookout table that was printed out. And these are all bound based on the idea that you have something physical that comes with the game that is hard to replicate and therefore you need to buy the original game to actually use it. The other thing is they also give you need little content. But given that you can replicate most of these relatively easily, at least with today's technology, they are totally useless. The other thing that also plays into this here is that if you can remove the little bit of code that actually checks for it, then you can just play the game and don't have to worry about this. So as a side note, the feelies in more detail because a couple of the younger folks might not have seen this. I still remember when I had games that I actually played with this and I really liked them. Especially in the middle we have Ultima 7 and Ultima 7 had this beautiful cloth map and it was really nice, it still hangs on my wall actually but it also doubled as a lookup table. So you could figure out where something was and you needed to answer some questions. This is only effective as long as the token hard to copy. For example, on the right side here you've got like SimCity and that's in red because black and white printers or copy machines would not be able to copy this. These days you take a picture of it with your cell phone and you're done, you put it into the internet and you've just voided everything. So it's completely outdated but it's kind of nice to see that there was a part of DRM or copy protection that actually added value to the user and this is the last time we'll actually see this, that there's added value to the user. So the next step that came along was the revolution with using CDs and later on DVDs that is then again mirrored and that was around 1995. You had games that previously came out of floppy, now it was too big for a floppy, you came out in disks and the CDs were again harder to copy in the beginning because you needed to have expensive hardware, the empty disks were relatively expensive but again like the same thing with the Nibble copy as long as you have a hardware that can actually read the disk and you can copy it bit by bit, there's not much to it. The tricky part here is that the game publishers and game developers or anybody that was in this copy protection scheme broke the CD standard and that's where we get a lot of the disks these days that are bigger than what the original standard was envisioned to be because they just could get away with it. And this is obviously only applies to digital media and we see how this moves forward in a bit into the digital realm as well. A couple of years later after everything failed with the CD protection, the duplication, people were just duplicating their CDs, the next thing that came along which had actually been previously applied to office software for example is the registration key. And very simply put, a registration key is a secret that certifies that you have actually purchased the software legitimately and how they are done underneath the hood is there's typically some cryptographic function that has a couple of parameters that the publishers or game developers can tweak and that will generate a sequence of valid registration keys. Now there's two problems with this approach. First of all, the registration keys can be reverse engineered if you have a lot of them or if you can actually figure out what the checks do because the checks have to know part of that algorithm to actually work and part of the parameters. So again you can break this either in the brute force method quote brute force where you generate valid registration keys and dump them in or you remove that little bit of code that actually checks for it. One of the games that actually used this for the first time was as you can probably barely make out up in the picture is Half-Life, the original Half-Life. And they used it for installation and then later on if you had a collision of registration keys during multiplayer you couldn't play a multiplayer key but it wasn't as essential and as baked in as it is these days. Now I've been talking a lot about these techniques that you can remove a bit of code and then everything is avoided. Like you can work your way around this. So what happened really early on like in the 1980s and even earlier and then again in 2000 and that's why I have two numbers here is code obfuscation. The basic idea of code obfuscation is that you make something so convoluted that it's really hard to remove it or really hard to figure out what it actually does. And pre-2000 at least in the game space this was all mostly homebrew stuff. So people would generate their own little code pieces, they would drop it in, they would have something in their compiler chain that would do some magic and ideally that would thwart all breaking of the software. In reality it doesn't. And this then just moved into a greater business where people specialized on actually code obfuscation and you have the emergent code obfuscation middleware in 2000 and that's why it's listed a second time. And the idea here is that you as a game developer as a game publisher, you don't bother about the code obfuscation, you actually purchase this from a third party, you drop it into your compiler chain and you're good. Well, this has a couple of problems. First of all, you've got these pieces of middleware that all do things simultaneously. And that actually helps as a cracker, if you're in the cracking scene, to identify what's going on and to possibly reverse engineer it faster. The other problem that you have is code obfuscation theoretically could be applied significantly stronger than it is. But it then has a significant performance impact. And since everything about games is performance, like you want to get the very last frame out of it. And I've seen this myself, code obfuscation sometimes would have a feelable performance and measurable performance impact. Or even worse, you would break your ability to even analyze failures in the program. So if you have crashes and code obfuscation is running, you might have no clue what just happened because the point is that you have no clue what happened. So, but this is the state of the art. This is going on even now and there are smarter ways of doing it so you can still get some information out of it at least for debugging purposes. Now the first big category that is still applicable now, everything up to this point is kind of like little bits and pieces that are still applied, but not a whole system. But the first real big one, it came out in 2002 and onward. And that's what I call the network DRM. And the idea is previously we have done stuff on the machine. And since we own the machine, at least from a gamer's perspective and from an adversarial perspective, we can eventually break it. But now you bring in the network. You verify your registration key or some other properties of your machine remotely. And since you don't control in theory the remote machine and the remote server that checks that, you should be able to add more security here from a copy protection perspective. Well, that's not necessarily the case because again, you can remove these bits and pieces and you're adding a lot of additional overhead that is problematic for the user which I'll talk about in a bit. It just raises the bar. And this is all an arms race as you'll see as we move along. It's always a step up and it makes it more complicated and convoluted to the gamer as well. Oh, what I actually should still say for this, this is also the first time that we really have to worry about privacy because before we have been on a local machine and there might have been changes to the local machine, now we are moving, we are sending stuff out. We are broadcasting. And at that point, you actually have to start worrying about privacy. Now in 2003, this is actually a really rapid succession here. There's the so-called social DRM. And specifically, if you look at the picture, I'm talking about Steam for the 2003 date and since then that has emerged into a couple of other platforms and we'll give names to those later on. But the fundamental difference between the network DRM and the social DRM is that you add what is now perceived as a social network to it. And you still have the DRM and everything cooked in, the copy protection, but you now have a user identification instead of a machine identification. And then the last little piece that came around in 2006 is not necessarily DRM, but it's an extension of this which is interesting because it's a big money-making thing these days and that's DLC. That stands for downloadable content and the idea here is if you have already shelled out 60, 70 bucks for a game, we'll sell you an additional content for an additional five dollars and you're probably gonna purchase it because you want to know how stuff continues. But at least in the beginning it was a bit ridiculous because the picture you see up there is the famous horse armor from one of the Elder Scrolls series and that was literally just the texture and I think it cost about two bucks at the time so that is kind of very blatant money-making. Now let's give these systems that we have talked about names.  And these are the three categories that I'll mainly be talking about. We've got the copy protection on one side and copy protection is partially outdated so you might still see the names pop up but they are not very effective and they might be employed with other DRM systems on top of them. And I classified them roughly into the obfuscation, the CD copy and the mixed ones and the most successful have been the mixed ones. And by the way, this is by no means a complete list. There is way more out there and as a little segue, it's kind of interesting when I was researching for this, I was looking through a lot of pages and web pages of DRM and copy protection companies. And getting information from them about what their copy protection actually does is surprisingly hard. You would assume that they would advertise, hey, we have this big thing, we protect your memory, we do this and that. No, they're like red cubes and the red cubes for some reason mean copy protection. And then there is a phone number. There isn't even an email address. I think they are so scared and paranoid at this point that they are gonna just get mail-bombed or whatever that they don't put information online anymore. And I didn't really feel like calling them up and explaining to them that I'm actually talking about them. I don't think that would have gone over very well. Okay, back to the topic at hand. So we have the network DRM here that is basically what's more or less the state of the art for a lot of games out there. And three in particular are really popular with games these days and they're actually employed even on top of the social DRM. So you might have two layers on the DRM which doesn't necessarily increase security as we all know, but it just increases annoyance. And my favorite one on there is actually the Tage and that's just because I don't know how to pronounce this stupid thing because it's a French company that makes it so I want to pronounce it in French but it doesn't look like it has an accent or anything in there. And we'll hear about this more in detail why this is so amusing for functionality purposes. The other thing that is in the network DRM because they don't employ social systems is the what I call NextGen DRM. And this is basically publisher oriented. Ubisoft and EA have been dropping them on their games and they are really strict and stringent. Then we also have the social DRMs which are broadly categorized into two categories. You've got the content delivery which is steam where you have a focus on digital delivery of content so you don't have to worry about putting on pants to purchase your games. You can just, you'll just purchase everything online. You'll gift them your credit card or somebody else's credit card and everything is cool. At least until it is covered that you give them somebody else's credit card. And this is where I see most of the game platform starting to move into because they are trying to use the social component to convince you to really buy a game. What is a side note here is what I've put in gray here is the vault garden model. And people don't usually think about this but these are all the consoles that are out there and that's why they are less interesting to some extent to talk about and most of the stuff that I've covered so far is all about PC based gaming. The vault garden is basically you've got specific hardware, you've got specific software and you've got a gatekeeper that prevents software from arbitrarily coming into the garden or uses from arbitrarily coming into the garden. And the iPhone and other mobile platforms are basically similar to this. Now let's hop into the privacy aspects of this because that's one of the main topics here. So again, I'll repeat myself here for the copy protection, we basically have the main intent of copy protection is to locally prevent you from duplicating something. So you keep a local state that is not exposed to the vault. Although one thing that might already be of a little bit of privacy concern or concern in general is that they modify your operating system. They install drivers that later on could wreak havoc and cause a couple of crashes or just bring your system to a crawl and it also stores data locally. So somebody later on could still figure out that you have used the specific copy protection scheme. And sometimes they start on each other too which is kind of funny. Now, the biggest failure of copy protection and that's why they are basically outdated is that the advances in the current technology have made them to some extent obsolete and it's all of this arm race. And the biggest points here is the digital reproduction and I'm thinking specifically about the feelies that I talked about earlier anything that uses a lookup table that is printed and you get with the game. But also binary analysis, technology, hardware in terms of like we can just rip any disk at this point and then the internet that gives us this great big community where we can chat about problems that we have how to break a DRM and also how to share data. But the very fundamental problem that is really the underlying basically I would say Achilles heel of this whole system is that you have everything on copy protection relies on an error case functionality. So you have this one check that will say do you have the proper disk? Do you have the proper registration key? And then there is a yes, no branch and that's pretty much it. And you can toss as many as you want in there but if you find them all, you can just continue playing. Now, the network DRM as I said is a step up from this and actually I want to formally define DRM if I can actually read this on my screen here through the glare, it's technology and this is courtesy of Wikipedia. It's technology that inhibits users for digital content not desired or intended by the content provider. And if you think about this a bit it's significantly more than just copy protection. This basically means if you start this I mean in a really broader sense this could mean if you start this up at 12 a.m. at night or at 12 a.m. at night and it's not intended to be played between 12 a.m. and 3 a.m. then DRM will take care of that. That's way more than copy protection and so this restricts the usage and therefore it needs to monitor you more closely and it needs an external monitor because in a local monitor you could just change. In terms of privacy this has significant impact because first of all we either have a unique machine identifier or we even have what's called a use ID where we fingerprint the user or we fingerprint the machine and fingerprinting the machine means that you basically query and look through all of the hardware that's there and you could theoretically already publish that to somebody. Then all of this naturally needs to be exposed in some extent over the network and this exposure might be just a data stream because it's encrypted and they're actually doing that due diligence but it could also be more that you have a user account and so on, I'll get into this in more detail. But basically I can identify at this point if I'm installing a game, if I'm starting a game and if it's a runtime check, if the game is actually running. And one of the big things here that is on the horizon and hasn't quite happened yet is the content execution thing and this is what Ubisoft in particular has been talking about and I've actually tried to leave names out of this but it's in some extent not possible. The idea here is that you don't have the full program on disk. You have most of the program and at specific points it pulls down critical pieces of executable content and this when you think about it has first of all the privacy aspect that now since these are bigger pieces of content I can probably identify more directly what you're doing but in the other aspect it's also you get executable code through just other means. If somebody high checks this all bad things can happen but this is more, it's on the horizon and it's something that might be of concern in like a year or so. Now, network DRM has had a couple of spectacular failures and I'll go through a couple of those because they're quite amusing and it also shows that they just don't learn. The first one that I want to bring up it has been extensively in the media so I'll gloss over it, is Spore. It uses the Securum DRM and the main idea here is that it requires an online registration on install and it has an install limit which should already ring all your bells. If your computer or your hard drive crashes a couple of times you can't install this past three or you couldn't originally. And it also quotes phone's home meaning that it contacts the server from time to time to make sure everything is still valid. This was in 2008 and in September it basically was the most pirated game ever before it ever came out. Developed about half a million torrent downloads before it released it and this was a major failure in terms of DRM. It was just stripped off the disk immediately. A lot of the people that actually used it really didn't like it and that's that little picture there that is the content in the game for the people that don't know Spore. The idea is that you have a little amoeba and you develop it into this galactic civilization and along that you can create a lot of custom content. And the game just got one star ratings although for all other intensive purposes it's a cool game. From a DRM perspective, the binaries also stayed on disk so you got those binaries for good. Luckily with all of the buzz around this in December there was actually a release of an uninstalled tool and the uninstalled tool if you did it correctly would remove most of the binaries and it would also reset your install count. But the question is why not immediately get it right and this is one of the first examples of the network DRM starting to completely fail and fall apart. The next game, Stalker Clear Sky. It's a more obscure game in this sense because it's a first person shooter that's around Chernobyl with sci-fi aspects. I encourage you to check it out because it's actually quite a lot of fun to play. But it uses this obscure target as a DRM or I shouldn't say obscure is pretty popular but it basically has the same idea behind it. You have an online registration, you've got an installation limit and by the way this time they already learned the lesson you can uninstall and that you get the installation back or you can at least go to a site if you know what you're doing and say yes I uninstalled this. But in December of 2009 after this game was released Steam had a sale and here we see already Steam itself provides a DRM but the DRM from Tarje was still on top of Stalker and so once you installed it through Steam it would go ahead and contact the DRM server from this DRM system. And as it happened over Christmas because of so many people using it the DRM servers went down. And I don't wanna blame the French for not being in the offices during Christmas but it took a few days for them to bring them up online and it was intermittent failures. So imagine you bought this and for three days you can't play because it tells you you haven't purchased this legally or I can't verify this. And this is the next step that points towards that this is just not feasible anymore. Now the next one has been in the media quite extensively and that's Assassin's Creed 2. And this is actually kind of different problem here because before we had this activation limit and the problem was basically the activation and this was a single point in time where it was checked and then ideally we were good for a while. The UBIS of DRM on the other hand and it by the way has a real name but nobody really cares for it. It's just used by all UIS of games. And it requires a permanent connection and I want you to fully understand this. Permanent means that if you play single player and you never intend to go online you never intend to play this with anybody or it's a full single player game you still need to have a perfectly fine internet connection. And if you don't and it drops then you would be reset originally to a checkpoint which you can always see if I can mess with the network then I can pretty much make somebody scream in front of their computer and we'll get into that in a bit. But this whole system was tied to a user account and it also stores safe games in the cloud and that was actually the big selling point for marketing. I guess they couldn't come up with any other reason why people should really buy into this except for your safe games are stored in the cloud and if your computer catches on fire your private files and your bank account is lost but at least you've got your safe games because we have it in the cloud. So in March of this year the obvious thing happened. Authentication servers went down and depending on who you listened to it was Adidas, they just didn't know what they are doing probably it was all of the above. The fundamental fact is that the servers were down for plus 10 hours multiple times and this means a block of 10 hours where you just cannot play on multiple blocks and you have purchased this game for 60, 70 bucks so this is not good and this impacts single player users and the official statement from Ubisoft was 95% of the users were not affected. These are not the droids you're looking for but it's just the fact that even the clouds here have said this point failed. So what was the answer? Patch it, obviously. Luckily it was patched relatively quickly some of the connection problems went away and the good thing is that they at least reacted now the game pauses when you lose connection and then it resumes at the same point that you dropped off you're not reset to a checkpoint that was five hours ago and you can also do local saves. So we see a bit of positive development but the question is why should we use this and there's also data that streams over the network that I'll get into in a bit. The next thing is I apologize if there should be anybody from Ubisoft in the room but I mean this is just what happened. There's Settlers 7. It might be a bit more obscure in the US market but in German market this was a big game and the idea here is that you have like little settlers that run around and you have like you mine stuff you build buildings and so on. It again uses the same DRM like Assassin's Creed and so on, same selling points and in April of this year it came out in Germany and there were immediate authentication server failures. This was so bad that they had within a couple of hours 50K posts in the forum and this wasn't like random people screaming like your game sucks, this was like literally I can't play this, I want my money back. And the multiplayer component for it was virtually unplayable and it's kind of unclear if this was an interaction with the DRM if this was the game being totally like just full of bugs but the main essence here is that the DRM didn't make it better. It was patched with little effect and then the actually really hilarious part was that in June it came out in Australia and the Australian players were immediately greeted with this game isn't active in your region yet. So I mean this happened for a short period until they got their act right but it is kind of a problem that you see with DRM too if nobody flips the bit then you're screwed. Now I'm pointing out the obvious thing here. The network DRM is just a futile attempt and the internet summarized it very well with this picture that I don't even have to further explain. The only measurement or metric I want to give you here is that Assassin's Creed II has been cracked and Assassin's Creed II had the uncrackable DRM and quote was cracked in 25 hours. So this is not a major hurdle for anybody. Now from a publishers and game developers perspective what's the next step? I mean this is clearly broken. Oh, sorry I'm getting ahead of myself. The privacy impacts of this that is definitely interesting to get into. So the Ubisoft DRM is the most stringent of this of these sets of DRMs. And when you look at the network traffic that is going on in your system when you actually run one of those Ubisoft games it has a TCP connection that's encrypted over port 80 or any other port that is tunneled because it could depend on what your network looked like. It actually does a fair attempt of trying to get out obviously. It's also required for single player and it has the whole failures. But what this actually means is that you have the ability to track all game usage at this point. You have this data stream that goes back and forth and you can actually measure when this data stream stops and then you know that whoever played the game stopped playing the game. And this is applicable especially for wireless networks. Now to what I got ahead of myself before. Now the network DRM for most parts are cumbersome and a failure. So let's start over with a semi blank sleeve and look at a different approach and that's what game publishers did. And that's where the social DRM comes in because apart from having the DRM components you also try to use the social media and the aspects of that to have psychological reason for actually buying games and sharing games with other people. The only problem here is this is also for content delivery and therefore you have this whole tale of additional privacy relevant information that now gets tagged onto your games. Specifically you've got everything we talked about in the network DRM. But you also got user account information and what is really interesting here is when you deeply look into what kind of privacy information you have actually your personal information you've got to reveal is, you at least for me, whenever they ask me for my date of birth, I'm like, why? Why do you want to know my date of birth? There's a lot of havoc you can wreak with my date of birth. And so for all official purposes I'm born on the 1st of April 1980 which is not my real birth date but they could eventually bite me in the ass if there's really something that they need to check and forget about this. They also want your address and so on but this gets even worse because you have to have payment information with this because remember digital content delivery you don't wanna send them a check and then receive your digital download you give them a credit card number or your PayPal account. Then you also have got a purchase history because you want to know what you or you have to know what you actually purchased and you have got a friend network because that's when the social content ties in. And this expands because the social content also includes the new thing that is really hip which is achievements or badges and I use these abstractly so these are not copyrighted terms if they're even copyrighted. The main point of this is you get little tokens for actually achieving something or doing something in the game that would either be not normal or is like a little bit goody because people like to be rewarded but these rewards also allow you to create a very accurate game history. I can look at when you got these achievements and build up a pattern of when you are at home playing and when you are very likely not at home playing and I can clean out your living room and steal your Xbox or PS3 or what have you. I also can create a behavior profile because for a lot of games you have or more and more games these days try to give you ethical choices. Let's think about like Bioware games or even like Fable for example. You have the good choice and the bad choice and both of them typically have achievements. Now fast forward like 10 years from now and you have like a whole history of this if I always chose the bad achievements and the evil achievements and my boss sees that because there's time with the next thing to use bigger social network then that could be a problem. I mean, I'm looking a bit forward here but very simply put you can also have the single player versus multiplayer hardcore versus casual do really want to hire the guy that has a gamer score of 150,000. He's probably not gonna be productive. He's just gonna play all the time. And then I also have got a gaming location. In general this just gives you a whole wealth of data and I won't name the social DRM network that does this but there is one that actually gives you achievements down to the second. If you just create a dummy account and browse through other accounts the only thing you need to know is the username and you can buy the second figure out what happened. And this is not necessarily something that makes me feel warm and fuzzy. The next big thing is obviously integration with other social media because you want to for whatever reason have the people from Facebook that you've said hi to once at a bar when you were really drunk and added them you want them to know when you got your next achievement on let's say your Xbox because that seems to be hip. So you're now linked into this profile that already exists all of the previously inaccessible information, your pictures, who your parents are, what your other friend network is. And this is in two levels here because first of all you're bringing that network into your gaming world which you might want to keep separate but you're also now giving the game publishers and the game developers that you don't necessarily trust perhaps as much as your bank or perhaps you trust them even more. Your whole social network so this all blends together and everybody has access to everything. So for me I feel a bit like I'm being watched by Batman like in a most recent Batman game and when you look at the case study for social DRM it becomes a bit more obvious concrete what is actually revealed here. And I just want to say I like Blizzard and I don't want to bash on them. But the battle net has introduced a couple of additional privacy features that I was like what is this? So just to give a quick explanation the battle net is and now called like to some extent the real ID system is an account needed for the install and for playing specific games that Blizzard releases. And this is it's kind of understanding that you need an account with personal information for MMOs like World of Warcraft but for Starcraft and Diablo it's kind of an additional add-on to convince you to not steal the game. At some point this was also considered for official posts for the official posts in the forum but there was such an outcry that it was removed that just happened recently. The main point that Blizzard tries to make here is that it's not needed for single player but on the other hand there's the statement that if you don't use it you don't get a lot of the cool stuff, whatever that means. So you're probably gonna want it especially if you want to be in the beta. So let's walk through the sign up and this is basically what you can just verify through their website.  And this is something that I'm not sure if I'm the only one here but it really ticks me off when the first thing they want to know. At any point in time they want to know my date of birth. Because the question here should be are you an adult? Yes, no. And that should be all. There's no reason they need my date of birth but that's the first thing you need to reveal about yourself. Then you reveal email address, full name, full address, full number and then you have payment information and so on attached to this. You obviously eventually create a friend list, bring your friends in and what's interesting here is that your friends and the friends of your friends are listed with your real name. Now this might change as the battle net matures but at the moment that's just happening. To some extent this is optional because I mean you can choose never to add any friends but do we really want to be the loser that has zero friends? The other thing obviously here is as this grows and we have seen with this with esteem you've got a game list. So there's some additional information here and then you've got an achievement history because achievements are all hip. Now looking at this social media and all of the DRM that we have talked about it's relatively straightforward to mess with a gamer as we've probably already seen but I want to make this precise.  That's your point for the next week. You might not even have to screw with him too much because we have this artificial point of failure where you have network connection that are inherently unreliable and you might already have network restrictions like firewalls or antivirus that might already interfere with your DRM but the bandwidth already could be so small and that's literally a problem with the Ubisoft DRM if you have a small pipe you might run into trouble and might not be able to play it and when you then attack such a system that is kind of on the breaking point of failing that it is relatively trivial and what you can do here is obviously inject local traffic into the local network if you sit there locally but the other thing is also you can interfere with the wireless network and you can DDoS the server and that's what happened with Ubisoft and this is actually a more difficult aspect to control because you could not even be playing the game and you just want to make 500 gamers scream out in pain then you DDoS the Ubisoft server and watch them all cringe. One thing that a lot of people don't think about and when you really look at these games is registration keys are also a problem because they're vulnerable in the end. First of all, I could steal somebody's key like let's say malware lifts your whole user directory I could reverse engineer and see what your key is and post it on a forum. This key is most likely gonna get banned but that becomes more problematic because I mean to some extent just don't get malware, right? But if you then think about the aspect that somebody reversed engineered the key algorithm and is now generating keys if you've got a key collision with a valid key out there and that key gets registered it will probably result in a power ban eventually as well when they detect that they've been installed on two different machines that shouldn't be associated and I kind of imagine that it's really difficult to tell a service representative on the phone, hey dude, I never gave this key out I bet it was a key gen that conflicted with mine.  Accounts are also vulnerable because when you think about this they're just secured with a password and there might be additional security on top of that like Blizzard is doing for example for Vow and that's where a lot of the additional security comes in because MMOs are getting hacked and hacked more at least accounts for them. But fundamentally humans are not good with passwords and so there will always be a problem on this side but then the reset questions that you have for these passwords if you should have not played it for ages and forgotten it can be guessed as well because think back to what I said before the social networks like Facebook and so on will and have been partially tied in already. So the question of what's your hometown is right there on your profile? What's your mother's maiden name? I can probably look up her Facebook page and additional like what was your first dog you'll probably find that out as well. So these, when I see these questions especially for like banking sites and stuff but this is also like a lot of assets are here it really ticks me off and there's not necessarily an easy answer to make this better except for custom questions but then people will just be like what's your hometown and you've got the same problem again. The other thing that you can do if you're really evil and malicious and you don't mind to talk to people on the phone or over email for a while is initiate a false this account has been compromised action where you basically say hey this is my account I can't prove to you that it's my account because it has been hacked but could you please block this until I can show you that this is really my account? The real user of this account will not be able to play until this is resolved and this could take a couple of days and I won't name the gaming platform but I had something similar happen to me and it took five days to get my account back and I couldn't play any games and I just felt like I was being treated by an automatic machine that every like 24 hours would be like yes we are still here working on it and that was all I got. So especially if all your games are on one platform you run into problems. Then the thing that will be really hard to find out unless you have a whistleblower is accounts can be compromised on the back end too. I'm pretty confident that I didn't give out my password for this account that was that in question that I had the experience with that was actually compromised. So my guess is that there might have been something on the back end or it was just like dumped from some disgruntled employee you don't know but this will not be publicly admitted but you should also consider that this will probably the most likely leakage of privacy data that you can have in this whole system. Now we have talked about all of these chunks that you can use to basically mess with a gamer. Now let's do it a specific game study and I picked the Ubisoft DRM because it's really easy to mess with that thing. You've got a couple of methods. Basically it depends where you sit on the network. If you sit locally it's obviously significantly easier and you can make it targeted but you can also do it remotely. So locally let's assume for a second that they have a wireless network. Then it becomes really easy.  But ultimately their router is probably gonna keel over because who of us hasn't experienced that wireless routers or routers in general are not very stable. And so you just dump a ton of data on it and hope for it to overheat. For wireless you can also do the disassociation attacks which might not necessarily kill their whole connections but it might make it unstable enough so you really run into problems. And we are just talking about barely dual digit drop rates and you're in trouble here. The remote method is a bit more complicated. It depends where you sit on the network. If you sit close enough then you can probably do TCP reset attacks and SSL replay attacks. And the SSL replay attacks here are kind of interesting because most of these connections are configured that if you have a replay you have to fully renegotiate and that sometimes takes long enough so that it will drop out of the game. But in general dumping traffic is a good idea.  Ultimately this will just cause this to most gamers. So what am I trying to say for a bigger picture here? The idea is the fundamental idea of DRM is we don't want you to steal our stuff. And I kind of see that, I mean this is a valid concern. You don't wanna work years and years on some software that you sell and people then steal it. But the problem here is that in this process of preventing duplication and protecting your software a lot of data is being made available that shouldn't necessarily be made available for the sole purpose of protecting software. And the bigger question is then also you introduce a lot of complicated systems and systems that can easily fail into this whole mix of games and a system that most likely already has bugs. So a lot of people don't like this and this leads me into this segue of why are games cracked? And the quick answer for this is like I mean if you talk to anybody that is working on DRM they will tell you like people always want free stuff of course they're gonna steal from us. But it's significantly more complex if you look at them most recent cases. I mean we all know first of all it's a challenge. If somebody challenges you and says this is unbreakable you're gonna prove them wrong obviously. But it's also from a gamer's perspective that doesn't necessarily have the motivation to break something and to look at the inner workings. DRM is freaking annoying. It can just be so annoying that a crack game is significantly easier to use. So it's similar to the ripped DVD movies where if you don't rip it you have got this whole big tail of like stuff that happens FBI warnings trailers and so on and if it's ripped you have one movie and that's it you don't have to mess with it. And the same thing is true for crack games. So unless the DRM becomes significantly more streamlined there's not really anything that will prevent crackers from ever succeeding and there will always be people that will show you or like it's human nature to just go ahead and be like you're wrong I'm right. It is also a problem that I might not be able to really play where I want. And actually that was in national news a couple of months ago where people that were stationed in Iraq wanted to play I think out of all things Call of Duty because I don't think they have enough things to shoot at. But they were basically saying like I can play this because there is problems with DRM and other stuff. So I mean this is really a concern.  Then if you're like me there is also privacy and policy concerns around this. All of the data that is now available to the publishers that is transmitted over the wire that is just waiting for somebody to listen in and break the encryption net. The data that is stored in a ton of networks and databases that I don't really trust and I don't have given specific agreement to. There's a lot of things that need to be cleaned up here. And gamers and users in general worry about this legitimately. But ultimately the biggest question is if you look at the old games that we are still playing we are still playing like old Tetris, old games from the 1980s. What do we do if these DRM servers completely go offline? If the company goes out of business and it's just done. We need to either use a cracked version which is not fully legal or we are screwed. We can never play this game again. And this is actually more of a call to the industry in general and to, like somebody needs to figure out what to do here. There needs to be a more generalized system where we store this in a cloud because clouds are always hip. Where we just have no loss of games in the future because this is our heritage to some extent. People have grown up with games and we don't wanna lose games just because of the DRM. Just look at the gaming vintage market and all the emulators. And this might be the answer that we'll just have to in 30 years write an emulator for this DRM server and then for the machine that it ran on. So that's pretty much my rant on this end. And I want to open for Q and A and I think I'm a bit under time. So any questions out there? Otherwise we can take this to 106. Oh, over there, go ahead. Oh, you're talking about the unique challenge and response. So the question was, you're thinking specifically about World of Warcraft, right? So in World of Warcraft there's a little token authenticator that basically verifies on the end. That helps a bit with piracy, but it helps if your machine hasn't been compromised. So over the network it gives you a certain advantage because you actually hold a physical token of security and to some extent that's a feely, although it's not as as cute as the feely's before and it's way more advanced. But that definitely helps with account security, yes. Okay, I'll stop here and I'll take this to 106. Thank you.


Alright here we go guys 22 23 elite basketball hobby 4 box number 2 pick your team Yeah, Alexandra's with the thunder nuggets Jazz and cabs Andrew P with the Clippers Anthony C Warriors magic Brian C sons Hilton with the Pistons hung why Mavericks Jared H heat Jason T Celtics Jerry has the spurs Joe s bucks Kevin C with the Knicks Sixers Marcy has the Hornets Matthew B Grizzlies Mike J Nets Minsu at the Pelicans Pengian Rockets Parham has the Bulls Raquel Lakers Robert P Blazers Ryan B Wizards Vaughn has the Pacers and the Kings Victor F Raptors Wen Long WT Wolves and Zachary W Hawks here we go. Let's do it Haley unfortunately or Fortunately depending on how you want to look at it prism is all sold out for tonight There should be some spots available with rich tomorrow morning though. Yeah, all football sold out tonight guys But it's all prism all day tomorrow with a guest breaker rich. They're so shiny What is this? Jam on green insert These are blinding There's a rookie Johnny Davis for the Wizards That's verlander stuff right there could be doing that for USA, but nope I Guess the Mets are paying him a lot more than Team USA though.  Well, I'll take them not every day you get rich breaking a major release Like prism, I know I'm working a double, but I'm working a double tomorrow watching watching rich And then Sam tomorrow orange Bruce Brown nuggets. I'll be driving to Savannah tomorrow watching. Oh man That sounds so safe. You guys please don't do what Lane is gonna do don't do that God a pen pals rookie Christian Coloco for the Raptors.  It's like a combination of What we usually look like and then like Next day Yeah, it's kind of like a next day And pals Coloco Raptors Blue Jalen Brown 69 and 99 Celtics Joshua, who are you chasing on the Raiders spellbound Anthony Edwards T Wolves. That's purple to 49 47 to 49 Dang Carl Carl brought the receipts full throttle orange Jason Tatum Orange not ever right so correct not number Star status stuff Bowl Bowl Dude, I sure am I I would have known if I would have I would have worn my bulls or say if I knew I was breaking basketball balance you in this glass masters Believe a bowl Yeah, Super Bowl Is there's just a base pack? Oh, there he is. I say I'm oblique cabs rookie There's just two though, right? There's a lot of the lower lower buy-in teams that have some like Richardson orange sneaky value I'm gonna stop flipping the the base over guys. It's all vet base Everything we're looking for is in the middle Oh, that's a one of those lenticular inserts Jalen Williams next up This is fire They look really good this year. That is a SSP. I'm not sure if it's technically a case it but that is SSP That's awesome, dude Awesome Jalen Williams congrats to the thunder That's a good point Higley that's a good point. I didn't think about that Did you Yeah, no, yeah, it actually legitimately changes are him staying there to him dunking that is so sick That's what I'm saying in years past. They would just move like this He dunks or he's just chilling with the ball Pen pals rookie auto for the Clippers is musta the abate Clippers pen pals holding the ball. Yeah, so they have base pen pals They should these to all be number We get more of them Red the Anthony Melton to 92 for the 60s Mag, pretty much any case hit Especially him he's good, but he's actually really good and I'm not just a biased under Luca power formula. All I know is there's two Jalen Williams. That's awesome. Yeah There's gonna bust people that were like can the NBA make a new rule that there's only one Jalen Williams allowed Spellbound Donchich that's orange That's the the the first C I know that because it has that I don't know what that character is called over the C But yeah, the mini V it has the V on the C mini V spellbound Zion base spellbound All right, he's reminding me of like cards from like the 90s This reminds me of the topsterman 3d set. I mean the lead has been around a long time. It's a long running brand So like it's a soup. It's way more popular for football than it is for basketball Yeah Spellbound orange is I on again gonna have a whole orange Zion First straight there was the Devon Booker power formula, I'll make that joke every now and then I'll be like, oh, there's not even There's not even an eye and Devon Booker's last name, dude There's not even a Oh and Devon's first name Tim Duncan acetate insert Yeah, we're just gonna jump past all that that's the Vince Williams junior rookie for the grizzlies And rookies in this are short printed even if they're not in number. There's only two per box Power formulas orange Devon Booker What do we got on today? spring's right I would not like to watch the spurs was uh be the magic again power formulas. Yannis Cade Cunningham On the clarity So number three is sold out. We need to get number four sold out now guys Jalen Williams rookie the other Jalen Williams for the thunder Orange Gary Harris spellbound Steph Curry Nets calves nuggets and clippers left everybody coming up soon orange Miles Turner Pacers Class of 2022 auto rookie Benedict Matherin. That's what I'm talking about There you go Pacers congrats on that one What's that? Rookie blue is my yang four of 99 thunder thunder killing it It's like 12 rookies between the last two draft classes Star status Donovan Mitchell for the uh for the calves I was gonna say jazz. I was gonna say it Steph Curry spellbound star status Donchich Need Stephen Curry the J rod show full trottle Donovan Mitchell 25.64 miles an hour, but I could go for a grilled cheese burrito right now Signatures TJ Warren Nets last spot mojo Nets TJ Warren auto I also did not get a grilled cheese burrito Bradley Beal on the power formula They're pretty they're pretty insane. I just don't like cheese on top. It's like it's all in my damn hands Zion Williamson spellbound for the pelicans if I ate one of those I washed my hands three times I still wouldn't be able to break some cheese grease Poster like super heavy. I'm like I want more than one thing to talk about. This is a lot of pack They can do this They can do this all in like Just a few packs you cut out Almost the base cars power formula those orange kevin durant Nets Spellbound Zion again. Do they have anyone else in spellbound other than Zion and Steph and luka acetate alan iverson back to the future sixers doc Nicola Yovit rookie for the heat Debug power formula Come on now Blue bronze ion tray stefan and I feel like we've only seen three players Let's try it in that room. Here's again Steph curry But we've only really seen Steph and Zion here luka.  Chet holmgren likes ribs basically Like basically rice with gow and zirky for the hornets Can I see ribs? Yeah, that's essentially what it is that mac and cheese Huh the man enjoys things a lot of people enjoy orange lamello ball Your spellbound josh's jna not even his last name anthony edwards spellbounce orange wiggins Big wig as they call them Just kidding Rookie walker kessler pen pals Three honors and three rookies in this box You're grant you jazz and the walker kessler Robert williams numbered a 44 for the celtics No, vaughn doesn't vaughn doesn't have the jazz star status trey young It's also it's also not it's also not next day. So and star status orange james harden for the sixers Yeah, elite is super shiny. I don't even look directly at the cards. You might go you might go cross-eyed Doesn't have a loss though Orange marcus mark for the celtics class of 2022 rookie auto palo ben caro That'll go in a mac congrats orlando Palo ben caro Great hit Like and what I see like and what I see Number four nets calves nuggets clippers everybody Blue josh heart 63 and 99 for the blazers I'm trying like I can try as much as I want guys There's still going to be some shine and like glare off these cards. There's not much I can do about about these full throttle edwards Only so much you can do with one of these elite cards orange star status jama rand grizzlies orange zack wavine for the bulls There's not a rookie Is this the base pack this is the base pack. Okay. No rookie. That's weird Haven't seen just a base pack yet Reds eric white number to 91 Celtics what's going on guys A eddy curry bulls auto impact impressions eddy curry bulls Power formulas blue devon booker suns number to 99 Yeah, that one had two there. I just hadn't seen one yet orange power formulas anthony edwards t-wolves anthony edwards spellbounds What up, manny Daria's garlands clarity What's zappy?  I yeah, I got you that it's pretty sick, man The verpool out It was five two a few weeks ago, and then they lost one nil today. Oh, and they lost a born with over the weekend too After Oh, man, they had their one other back down to nothing spellbound step curry.  All right. Give me a second to a real quick recap Autos of eddy curry for the bulls walker kessler pen pals for the jazz brandon clark grizzlies tj war and nets benedict matherin pacers on the rookie yearbook Diabatoe clippers colloco raptors palo van caro rookie auto for the magic On the rookie yearbook and next up jillian williams thunder Super short print that'll do it everybody. Thanks again onto more elite


We have guys that have battled through. We've been dealing with stuff all year and guys consistently find a way to battle, find a way to go out and compete. Hellyard has just gone 68 yards. We did some good things. Jones in trouble. Zack! We did some obviously things that are going to get you beat. We got to have complimentary football. We just got to play better on defense. We got to create turnovers. We have to try to get the ball out. We just have to be able to reset and do it together. Here's to another edition of the Mike Brable show. The Titans enter there by week eight and four after falling to the New England Patriots on Sunday. As you review that one, you summarize it. What jumps out? Well, I mean, I think the same things that we talked about after the game. We had seen it the first time. We probably did enough good things to win the football game, but too many bad things to win it as well. And that was just turning the ball over special teams, penalties that created poor field position. And we just didn't make enough plays on defense. We didn't create enough negative yardage plays, and we didn't turn the ball over. Let's take a look at some of the good plays for the Titans, beginning with first touchdown of the ball game for the Titans. It came in a third and goal situation. Interesting call. Well executed by your team. Yeah. You know, I mean, it's something that we've been working on in practice. And, you know, there's a timing element to it.  And I thought they did a nice job of doing that. You know, Nick Westbrook there being able to secure the catch and finding a way to get in the end zone. We had to challenge that one. Had to challenge it, but the Titans are able to come through and are able to get the touchdown. It was 7-6 at that point.  Westbrook Akina involved again. Return to center. Return to center. Great job by Hilliard. You know, Don Trell getting there. Recognizing the safety pressure. Getting rid of it. Ryan being patient back there.   Dez really did a nice job of selling it on the left side.  Speaking of Don Trell, you're talking about Don Trell Hilliard who finished the game. 12 carries, 131 yards. 68 of it coming on display. I love the call here. Love the play third and four.  Right before halftime, Don Trell Hilliard with 68 yards was 16 to 13 at the half. In the second half, some sharp defensive plays for the Titans getting pressure on Mack Jones. It's the fourth career sec for the mayor of Murfreesboro, Kevin Byer. Well, well timed. And again, I think that this was well executed. Thought it was a good time in the game to call this and try to create a negative yardage play. Everybody did a great job. Kevin disguised it well. The coverage was really good. You know, made Mack try to go somewhere else with the ball and he just didn't have enough time. He finishes the game leading the team with 12 tackles. Offensively, the Titans got over 100 yards from Don Trell Hilliard and got 109 yards rushing from Deontay Forman. Here's one of his better efforts of the day as he shows quickness and power. Yeah, he gets it on a landmark and is able to run through there. Tori Carter out there leading the way. 14 yard burst there.  They did a couple other good runs and, you know, those guys did a nice job for us. Unfortunately, they each put the ball on the ground, which we can't have. How did Tori Carter do it fullbacker? How has he done? I think he's gotten better. And I think that he went in there and played physical against, you know, two physical linebackers and Bentley and Hightower. He didn't turn his face and didn't shy away from contact. Speaking of physical, let's talk about some of these young defensive linemen. Naquan Jones. I got ready to call him Daquan. Naquan Jones combining with Derek Roberson for a sack. Yeah. And I would say that Naquan's gotten some more opportunities because he's taking advantage of the ones that he's gotten. You know, Roby there. I thought Roby factored at times yesterday. I really did.  And I think he really factored the other day. Maybe the best he's played in terms of run defense and pass. That's probably fair. You know, there's probably some plays that he'd like to have back, but I think he did factor.  I noticed them during the game. A lot of new guys getting opportunities and that's, that's part of it is you, you hopefully have built some depth during this stretch for players that you'll be able to count on over the final five games. Yeah. I hope so. I think that's probably fair as hopefully that these guys have gone out there and had some battle scars and wounds and good things and try to continue to improve and help us down the stretch. When we come back, we'll talk by and we'll also talk Delta Dental as Mike Grable. Not Delta Dental. Yes. I love it. We'll try to guess the Titan, all that more coming up as you're with us on the Mike Grable show. Titans in the pie week. It finally comes in week 13. Everybody out of here on Tuesday evening. I guess you'll be back tomorrow on Wednesday for a little bit of work, but not heavy stuff. And then everybody getting out for a couple days. Yeah. I think everybody's going to get away. We have to get some guys healthy. We've got to, you know, we're going to have a busy training room. You know, Todd and his staff will be in there busy training, trying to get these guys back healthy. You know, the ones that are healthy are free to go. But I think we have to kind of recover here a little bit physically and mentally. You know, I think physically and mentally I think that that's a component to it. You know, get our minds as sharp as we possibly can to come back here and be ready to work and make a strong push. You talk about the mental part of it, the grind. I mean, 12 straight weeks, two West Coast trips. It's very much of a job. It's very intense. And at a certain point you have to let it go for a couple of days just to be healthy. Yeah, I think so.  I want them to go to as many games as they can and do as much with their family in the next four days that they possibly can. I want our players to get away from football. You know, we talked a lot about the truth today. Tomorrow we're going to try to make sure that we continue to show them all the positive things. But today was about, you know, fixing mistakes in the football that just is going to get you beat. All right, let's take a look now at a man who never gets the Titans beat. This week's subject for our Delta Dental. Can you guess this Titan? We're going to show it to Mike Vrabel. He took a look, an advanced look. Now he gets this look. I get the whole break to figure that out, right? Get the whole break to figure it out. Delta Dental's got to be loving this, right? That's a great look. He does wear a mouthpiece. How do we wear the mouthpiece? Yes, he does. Okay, we need to go to, what? We'll get this. We'll get this. Yep. All right, we're going to bring one to check that up. We're going to break, and when we come back on the Mike Vrabel show, we will talk about the subject of this week's Delta Dental. Can you guess this Titan on the Mike Vrabel show? His favorite part of the show each week, Delta Dental's, can you guess this Titan? It really should be, can Mike Vrabel guess this Titan? It is absolutely my favorite part of this. I know it is. All right.  It's a frightening Halloween-ish, ghoulish smile. It's a smile only two people could love. Okay. Delta Dental and that person's mother. And that person is Ben Jones or David Quisenberry. Which is it? It was either or. No, no, no. There's no either or. It's Ben Jones. Okay. Thank you. Ben Jones. Ben Jones is amazing to me. Every game he gets up and you think there's no way he can keep going and he keeps going. It's the standing A-count. Right. It's the standing A-count. You know, there's always, that is a tough profession to be in there wrestling, 330 pounders, and then having running backs and other people falling your legs.   I made a decision at the end of the game just to run it and get out of there and try to get some guys out of there. And I was going to have Ryan go hand the ball off. And I had substituted Ben and Ben says, if Ryan's going to be in there, I'm going to be in there. And that just meant a lot to me. And I know how much, how important this team is to Ben. And it's guys like that who are going to make this group go the rest of the way. Absolutely.  Those are guys that I'm going to want to be around for a long time. When we come back, it's time for the Titans Files. We talk special teams with NWI. And also take a look at the Titans standings and what is to come just to make sure you're on the same page with us on the Mike Gravel Show. What's good, Tennessee? It's hard to say we're clocking in because we never stopped. Let's go to work. Back to the Mike Gravel Show. To have great special teams units, it takes total buy-in. And that buy-in has to come from players at several different positions. In this week's Titans Files, Amy Wells finds a receiver who's having a really good year catching the ball, but is totally bought in to being a part of teams. If you're a regular viewer of the Mike Gravel Show or any football coaches show, you know that special teams is a favorite topic. Always. In 2021, it has been even more relevant than a year's past as the Titans overall special teams have been nothing short about standing. Randy Bullock making field goals has been exhibit A and Brett Kern's amazing punting has been a topic for over a decade now. But go deeper into Titans special teams than just the men kicking the football and you find a group changing games every single week. Nick Westbrook, Akina shows up a lot. The second-year wide receiver is typical of the player that is standing out on the Titans special teams largely because he really enjoys it. It's so much fun for me because, you know, it's a different aspect of the game that people don't really see and there's kind of like a beauty to it because if you're good at it and you understand the situations and how to make those plays, they're real impactful plays in the game. So I'd probably say that's the biggest thing is it's the most underrated part of doing it is just being able to make an impact that people don't see and, you know, it's my chance to play on defense. You know, as an offensive player and it goes the same way for some of those defensive guys to be able to, you know, play on offense and have that experience. The Titans special teams performance has been a byproduct of the hard work of coordinator Craig Ackerman and the infusion of players who have added professionalism and leadership. Long snapper Morgan Cox heads that list. The native Tennessean made three Pro Bowls in Baltimore and he's a steady hand for the Titans both on and off the field. He's just automatic to feel like in the same way as Brett, you know, really unsung hero, you know, in our special teams unit being able to be so consistent but then also behind the scenes the research he does for us to understand, you know, a game plan and understand where they're going to be kicking the ball so we can know and have a better game plan on kickoff return and just all those kind of things and also, you know, just like a spiritual leader on the team as well as Brett, you know, helping to lead this team more than just football and just being, you know, great men as well. Matthias Farley is a leader in our special teams room more than anything. Brings a lot of experience, you know, he plays and leads our special teams unit just by being smart, understanding situations, being competitive, you know, and bringing the juice to our special teams meetings within all sort of practice and game. Nick Zubnar, he's a leader as well. He leads our team, he's always the one breaking us down before we're going out on the field on kickoff or kickoff return and kind of sets the tone, you know, for our special teams to be able to play fast, play aggressive and do whatever it takes.  Another guy who works his tail off was mentioned earlier, special teams coordinator Craig Ackerman. He's been well respected for years inside St. Thomas Sports Park and his attention to detail, his ability to communicate and the juice that he brings to the Titans special teams unit all are very important. Plus, like every good special teams coach, the man known as Ack might be just a little crazy, but you know, crazy in a good way. Ack's a great dude.  Ask any Titans special teamer who has won so far, and the answer would be consistent. Dylan Cole's caused fumble and Tori Carter's recovery of the second half kickoff against the Saints. It was an obvious big play, yes, but it came from not just hustle, but a lot of preparation.  We got to do whatever it takes, accept your role, you know, whatever it takes to help the team win and understanding the importance of special teams and just have an alpha dog mentality. You know, that's something we always talk about is being the guy that's going to win your one-on-one matchup against, you know, their best special team player and turn the tide in the game in the special teams aspect and, you know, play competitive football. We're totally up to speed on where the Titans are in the standings right now and what is to come. Let's take a look first at the AFC South picture where we find the Tennessee Titans with a two-game lead on the Indianapolis Colts. It's actually a three-game lead because the Titans have swept the Colts, magic number for the Titans to win the division, any combination of three Titans wins or Colts losses. In the AFC overall right now, the Tennessee Titans stand third. First place, obviously, in the AFC South puts them third overall behind Baltimore and New England. If the playoffs started today, the Titans would open up against Buffalo in a three-six matchup. Now let's look at what is to come for the Tennessee Titans, of course. This Sunday, December the 5th, the Titans are off a bye weekend and then it's Jacksonville at home on December the 12th. That's a noon kickoff. A noon kickoff the following week in Pittsburgh against the Steelers. Tennessee turns around and plays the following Thursday night December 23rd hosting San Francisco many bye weekend following that game and then on January 2nd Miami comes to town for the final regular season home game. The Titans finish the regular season playing in Houston on January the 9th playoff weekend begins January the 15th. So that's what's coming up. What are the Titans keys to having a great bye week? Mike Vrable rejoins me for that. The Nissan Keys to Success next on the Mike Vrable show. The Nissan Keys segment is one of my favorites on the Mike Vrable show each week. The head coach gives us his keys to victory. Well there's no game this weekend so how about the keys to a successful bye week? The Nissan Keys for Mike Vrable just a couple of keys to success to a bye week recover physically and mentally. Yeah there's a lot to this first one you know I mean we've got guys that played a lot of football for us that are grinding through that are battling we also have some guys that haven't played football for us or have been off a few weeks that we're going to have to get back in there after this bye week and this will be a great week for them to get healthy get an extra day this next week and and also the mental aspect of it is that one we can make corrections and that we you know we're not preparing for an opponent this week but we we could take a look and take a step back and say what are we doing well what do we have to fix in order to win football games and I think that's critical. The other Nissan Keys to Success is really quite simple says Mike Vrable it's about taking care of assignments. Well every week you go out there to be a perfect look and so you have to be able to adjust on the fly understand your job be able to to go out and execute and that's really just making sure that our coaches are coaching better we're better teachers and that our players are taking the initiative to retain the information to transfer the meeting room out to the practice field and then ultimately take it from the practice field to the game where it matters the most and that you only get maybe one or two cracks out of the game and you have to be on it. What do you do during the bye weekend? I will try to get away from here I'm going to get away from here Jen and I are going to go get away from it. Relax. Relax. Good for you. Well you deserve it. 8-4 pretty good place to be. Yeah no time to look around no time to look around and see where the finish line is our goal is to be really great this week and get healthy and come in here ready to go for Jacksonville. Thanks for your time. I appreciate you. If you want to follow the Titans board join us for the official Titans podcast the OTP go to Tennessee Titans dot com slash podcast and find out how you can subscribe and download the official Titans podcast every single week. For Mike Vrabel I'm Mike Keith thanks for joining us and we'll see you next week.


With that, I'll turn it over to our Governor, Governor Brown. Thank you. I want to announce that I've filed a letter with the President asking for an emergency declaration for the kind of relief that that kind of petition will make available. The federal government is already providing quite a lot of help right now, but this will formalize our request. And then that will be the first step toward a more permanent request for federal assistance. Obviously, this is a very serious matter. And as I've been briefed over the last several days, it strikes me that this is quintessentially a challenge of engineers, of on the ground, hands-on people that know how to fix various construction elements of this dam. So it's not one that the political mind may have something to say about it, but this is an example of our very interdependent, complex society where the engineers and the managers who are right there, far below the hierarchy, on the spot are the people we're depending on. People around me are the overall leaders. And I would say that the evacuation has gone well. They will be able to say when, not tonight, but when this order will be ready for some kind of modification. Again, we have been investing substantial sums in our infrastructure, probably $5 billion on various forms of flood control in the last 10 years, about $400 million in the last two years. So there's a lot to be done. There's a lot more. Things can fail. And whether it's levees or dams or bridges, we've got a lot of work to do. And as we've mentioned, our deferred maintenance is great. And stuff happens. Things occur. And we have to be able to respond. And the people have been really good, the sheriffs, the people who are responsible, Cal Fire, the Department of Water Resources, National Guard, OES. They've all been putting their hands to the plow here and getting it done. So I am proud of what they're doing. And my heart goes out to all those who have to live with the concern and the fear that this is kind of a situation engender. So it is serious. Our folks are doing the best they can. And we'll know more in the succeeding days. I'd be glad to take any questions. Governor, you were talking about the early reports questioning the state of the spillway. The state of the spillway. You were talking about the early reports. Well, so far it's holding. And that's why the evacuation is still in place, because there's uncertainty. And the norm is better be safe than sorry. And what exactly it is, as I mentioned just a moment ago, this is about engineering. It's about construction. It's about repair. And those people who are doing that are the ones that have to bring those kind of ideas to the fore. And I'm just here to make sure that from the top down, everybody is aligned with those at the bottom who have the responsibility. Any comment? Are you referring to that whatever it was that the 10 years ago or 12 years ago? Yeah, I think that's glad we found out about it. It was not part of the record before that, at least the record that I saw. So look, we have a lot of stuff out here. In the Delta, we have a lot of, as I say, bridges and dams and spillways, and more to come. We're in a very complex society where things can go wrong when they do, they ripple out and affect hundreds of thousands, in some cases, millions of people. But that report, there's lots of reports. So we have to depend on the professionals and the engineers and they tell us what we need, then we do it. But I welcome more scrutiny. President Parsons just called me on the way over here, said they have their own concerns, and I said, great, we'll put you in touch with DWR. So we'll get a lot of eyes on the problem now that we have a problem. And the problem is big, and we're responding. Governor, you sent a letter to the president asking about it. Yes. Have you... Yes, I spoke to a cabinet member earlier today. I was very... Who was that? I don't know, we have to give you all the... I personally spoke to a recently confirmed cabinet member. My office has been in touch in the White House. I think that will be sufficient. No vulgar details beyond those that I'm giving you. No, whatever it is. No, that was... No, I'm not answering you. Not, no, you didn't pick the right name.  Well, I wouldn't try to pick any one comment out of the last three weeks. There's a lot of buzz on a number of fronts, domestic and foreign. And I'm sure that California and Washington will work in a constructive way. That's my attitude. There will be different points of view, but we're all one America, and we all have challenges that we share in common. And as we defend America, we defend California and vice versa. Any other people can go home? We're not making that announcement tonight, but you can ask the sheriffs will be saying something tomorrow, I think, on that. Yes? I've been on this, that this is an example of both water problems that we have and water reliability and infrastructure. And that's been talked at the capitals and other places. What would you take on that? But this is an example of what we have not done for years. Well, we don't know what it's an example of because we didn't even think about it three days ago. So it happened. And the rain is not as great as it was in prior years. And some of the spillway gave way. And then we had the other problem with the other spillway. So I think you can take this from it. That infrastructure is profoundly important. And in our complex society, whether it's electricity or gas or water or roads or bridges, there's a lot to be done. And we're not talking about a few million. We're talking about tens of billions. And that's why I was very glad to see President Trump announces $1 trillion infrastructure program, which I fully embrace. And I was strived to make sure California gets 12%. That's our population representative. And we have 12, we have certainly 120 billion that we can spend it on wisely. You're playing 12 normal at any point? I don't have any plans right now. Right now they're busy. I don't think we need politicians fluttering around without able to do anything. That's my point. When I hear what these, when they talk about this, this is not law, it's not politics. It's not what I'm used to. So I'm gonna leave this to the engineers and fly whatever appropriate management and monitoring and good skeptical eye that I can apply. But I don't have to fly around and wave at you guys. Governor, there's a lot of them right now that help shore things up. Is that something that could have happened sooner perhaps in your estimation or things are on the right time for people? I, you know, that's not a question that you or I could probably opine wisely on. So I assume these folks to approve and otherwise are doing a splendid job. You bet there are. There are gonna be a lot of things that are gonna get scrutiny. Every time you have one of these disasters, people perk up and start looking at analogous situations and things that you might not have paid as much attention to. But we live in a world of risk. The earthquake shook the Bay Bridge and then we, the state and all the different governors had to put up a new bridge. So stuff happens and we respond. So this is part of the ordinary process and in that sense it will be helpful to stimulate more infrastructure analysis and more infrastructure investment. Yeah. Well, my message is that we're doing everything we can to get this dam in shape that they can return and they can live safely without fear. It's very difficult. I don't, it's hard to understand how people have been able to evacuate so quickly and the disturbance to their lives. And just know that their government and their representatives are doing everything they can and will continue to do whatever it takes to make sure we have a safe dam up there and in all the other places where we have these kind of potential threats. With that, we gotta get back to the question. Did you get any assurances from the cabinet secretary you talked to who was unnamed? Did you get any assurances like, yes, we hear. I got a very congenial conversation. That's what I will say. And I was glad about that, but details to follow. Thank you.


The government, their involvement has destroyed the institution of marriage. They don't give many couples options and they interfere. I try to advise men of what they can anticipate if they decide to be married. If they don't do their due diligence and they rely on the media to sell the marriage, which they say it's about love. Well, then what's going to happen is he's going to find out the hard way that there are judges, mediators, lawyers, child support offices, child protective services. A lot of people that are involved in the institution of marriage, which benefits the court if your family is destroyed.


We are here today to bestow the order of British Columbia the highest form of recognition the province can extend to its citizens on these outstanding British Columbians. In previous years I was the Chief Justice of the province and so I served on the advisory committee and over that time I had an opportunity to see just how many people have made such wonderful wonderful contributions to the life of this province and to be included in that group is really very touching. I received it for environmentalism the environment doesn't really care whether or not I have the order of BC however it does allow my voice to be amplified a little bit and in doing so I can further that cause and so that's the importance of the order is that it allows me to do hopefully more and better work. It is important to me because it acknowledges the contributions that I've made in my career and also the importance of the work with Indigenous peoples and so you know it's really important that First Nations people also be held up for their work and the the difference that we're making in our communities and so I really appreciated the honor and having that uplifted. As the representative of the crown in British Columbia and as Chancellor of the Order of BC and on behalf of all British Columbians it is my enormous privilege to welcome these 13 new members to the order. On behalf of the province of British Columbia the government of British Columbia I want to say how proud I am to be here as part of the investiture of such an extraordinary group of individuals spanning education philanthropy industry the bench as well as on the other side of the bench arts culture all that we want to aspire to as British Columbians represented here in the individuals before us. It is sometimes said that the greatest gift possible is the gift of oneself. We owe you much gratitude for giving that gift so very generously to all of us. You give me hope for a better world and I am deeply honored to be in your company today. Aitchka, Merci, thank you.


Mycobacterium tuberculosis encodes three different types of translation polymerases, which are responsible for repairing damaged DNA. These polymerases are known as DIN B1, DIN B2, and DNAE2. DIN B2 has been shown to be particularly active in causing mutations in mycobacterial cells, and it is capable of inducing both substitution and frame shift mutations. Furthermore, this polymerase is able to use manganese to increase its mutatonicity, suggesting that it may play a key role in the development of antibiotic resistance in M. This article was authored by Pierre Dupuis, Shreya Ghosh, Alison Faye, and others.


Welcome to Wilson's Wildlife Solutions! Important! This critter profile is outdated! Due to recent events, the critter profile for our good boy Sparky is no longer up to date. I will try to personally update it with relevant information regarding him and our guest within the next couple of days. I just need to sit with what happened for a while. Thank you for your understanding. Signed, Tim Wilson. Critter profile, Sparky. Overview. Name. Sparky. Species. Canis lupus familiaris. Dog, Bernie's mountain dog to be exact. Primary caretaker. Terrestrial team, Jeremy Hudson. Daniel. No, he said he'd prefer to keep his surname private. Diet. Sparky'll eat any food, but he really likes beef and pork. Housed. Creature features. Sparky is the name of this beautiful little Bernie's mountain dog. Although Sparky doesn't really like other dogs or any other critters really, and prefers to live and play by himself, he has shown a lot of interest in interacting with our personnel. Most of all, he loves his owner, Daniel. More on that later. Sparky is a pretty sleepy fella, which is pretty ironic considering his name, who likes to snooze for most of the day in his comfy pen. Once in a while, he peeks through its door and wags his tail at us. He's just so friendly to us caretakers. Hopefully, with the help of our therapy animals, we will be able to show Sparky that not all critters are bad. Now, Sparky is a very unusual dog. If you look closely at his back paws and some parts of his belly, there you can see some bone structures and flesh sticking out of him. He's even got a big gaping hole in his chest cavity, but that doesn't seem to bother him at all. Our vets were really concerned when he first came in, and even examined Sparky multiple times, but it seems he really doesn't care. He's just fine with his bony and fleshy self. His lower body parts are also somewhat constantly dirty, no matter how hard our volunteers try to shower his belly.  Once in a while, he will lose control of himself, flopping on the ground like a doof. Poor guy! However, the rehabilitation team and I are working hard on teaching him how to control his body a little better. One thing that does worry me, however, is how often pieces of him just fall off. One day, we'll come into his pen to find that his tail or a paw just fell clean off, but we do our best to stitch him back together every time. We initially got a hold of Sparky when his owner, Daniel, came into our Wildlife Center with him in his arms, clearly not happy about Sparky's condition. He was in a very messy state, flesh mangled, skinny, and bones jutting out of him. Daniel was crying, asking us, what did he do wrong?  Unfortunately, he didn't seem to take too kindly and that only cried harder, but we weren't going to give up on Sparky. We covered his damaged feet and bandages, stitched up the exposed bits of flesh and bone, at least the parts we could, and gave him a luxurious bath. I won't lie, it looked very grim for a while. Our vets couldn't hear his heartbeat, and he didn't seem to want to move, but after a few hours of trying and trying, we helped him walk again. We still have a lot of work to do in the rehabilitation department, but we're making very big progress in these regards. We also need to get new stethoscopes, because our old ones are clearly faulty. Since his arrival, Daniel's been showing up every day to check on Sparky. He is clearly very engaged and loves him very much, but we are very confused as to what happened. When asked what caused Sparky's condition, he kept murmuring about how it's all his fault, and how he doesn't know what went wrong. We didn't press on him as it clearly was a bad memory. Plus, we're not the ones to judge here at Wilson's. Like the sign says, every critter is welcome. Sparky is currently housed within a solo canine enclosure due to his problematic relationships with other critters. We're currently trying to teach him to understand that living with other doggos is really fun, but he has quite a hard time figuring it out. His pen is filled with comfy grass and a pillowed part where he can sleep without a problem. Once in a while, we buy him a new toy to cheer him up in his voluntary isolation, and he seems to enjoy them very much. Just remember, don't buy any toys resembling animals. Remember to keep a needle and plenty of thread around in case pieces fall off of Sparky. Sparky should be fed twice a day, with his water being changed every hour or so. He's quite the drinker, you see. It goes right through him. Literally.  Our vets still don't know what's up with that. Sparky should be allowed free roam of our patio, with Daniel being able to come around him whenever either of them wants to. His presence has been shown to greatly increase Sparky's happiness. Notes about Sparky It seems that Sparky still has a couple secrets up his sleeve, though. You see, during his time with Jeremy, one of his very hard-working caretakers, some very weird events have taken place near him. It seems that he is quite the magician, even for our standards. Jeremy told us that during playtime, he accidentally threw Sparky's favorite toy onto one of the trees on our patio. Sparky was very much too short to reach that tree. When Jeremy went to get the ladder to be able to, when he returned, Sparky already got the toy back in his paws. A really surprising fella he is, and knows his ways in sticky situations, it seems. The toy Sparky rescued that day is unfortunately no longer with us. We lost it two days ago and can't find it anywhere. Thankfully, Jeremy bought Sparky a new and shiny toy, almost identical to the previous one. He was very happy with it. It also seems that no matter his somewhat problematic shape and physiology, Sparky is quite the eater. Though we try to keep him well fed with the best of foods, he sometimes gets carried away and eats the grass and dirt in the patio. It's quite the bizarre diet for a dog, especially for his size. But it seems he enjoys it, so we don't forbid him that much from doing so. Hey Jeremy! I'm writing to you to inform you that during my watch over Sparky, he started being very aggressive to other critters, especially our cats next door. I know that not liking cats is normal behavior for dogs, but this worries me. Sparky started shaking violently when he saw even the smallest of them and even managed to shake loose an ear. This has never happened before. Please forward this message to his rehabilitation team. Signed, Tim. Sent by Tim Wilson Recipient, Jeremy Hudson Date, November 4th Hey Jeremy! Sorry for bothering you again this busy weekend, but do you know where Furball is? You know, the cat from Enclosure 2 says on her clipboard that you were the last person to feed her. I've really looked everywhere and can't find her for the love of me. If you have any information regarding her whereabouts, please notify me. Signed, Tim. Sent by Tim Wilson Recipient, Staff, Volunteers, Everyone, Date, November 5th It is with great sadness that I must announce that Furball has been found dead. I have no idea what could have done this to her. Her entire body was twisted beyond recognition, with fur missing all from her face. The worst part was whatever did this to her also took her eyes. Rest assured, we will be monitoring all security footage in the last few days in an effort to discover who or what did this to our beloved Furball. If you have any ideas, please don't hesitate to talk to me in my office. Signed, Tim. Sent by Tim Wilson Recipient, Jeremy Hudson Date, November 6th Jeremy, Anna and I are starting to worry. You haven't been to work in three days now. You know I'm not one of these people to make you stay overnight, but we could really use your help here, man. Sparky seems to be falling apart more often, and we're running low on thread to stitch him back up, so if you can grab some on your way back, that would be appreciated. Sorry if I'm a bit messy, but punchy went missing today too, and we're all pretty distraught. We don't want to repeat a Furball. Signed, Tim. Sent by Tim Wilson Recipient, Jeremy Hudson Date, November 7th Jeremy, please come to work now. We have a very serious emergency. We locked all the animals in their pens, but more and more of them keep disappearing. Daniel hasn't responded either. Last time I saw him, he was reading some sort of weird looking book. Anna told me the title was some creepy stuff, something along the lines of souls and somas. Apparently it's about film emergency or something like that. You spent a lot of time with Daniel. Would you happen to know anything about this? Signed, Tim. Sent by Tim Wilson Recipient, staff Volunteers Everyone Date, November 8th I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I must share this with everyone. Last night, Sparky went on a rampage. Anna and I tried restraining him, but weird shadowy tentacles came out of him and tossed us aside. He then got out of his enclosure and proceeded to the feline enclosure next door and ate all of Minerva's kittens. Every last one. We tried to stop him, but couldn't. Had it not been for Daniel, who suddenly appeared screaming at Sparky, I'm sure we would have lost more. He seemed to calm down for a bit, but then he started shaking violently before exploding.  It and Daniel gave each other a long, final look, with Sparky giving out a short whimper before it let out an ear-splitting howl and disappeared to one of the walls. I will be taken a day off to process everything that has happened. If the supervisors need me, tell them Faye is in charge for now. Thanks for understanding. Signed, Tim. Sent by Wilson's Wildlife Solutions Automated Email Response Pod Recipients Tim Wilson Date November 8th System Notice User Tim Wilson The account of user Jeremy Hudson You have been messaging for the last 7 days Has not been active for a moderate amount of time. Due to this, the messages sent by you were not received nor read by anyone. The last time user Jeremy Hudson was logged in was November 1st 1500 hours 23 minutes Terminal 3 Wilson's Wildlife Center Canine Care Center Enclosure 2 Sparky Sent by Daniel Tim Wilson Date November 8th I'm so sorry I should have never tried bringing it back I'm so sorry I'm so sorry


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