Howdy, how's it going? My name's Davy Chappy, and today it's time to look at another side of a story once told in a previous Chappy video from the gnomish world of the Nelfs and the Newman's to the knack-knack-knacking of the little dragon fanboys themselves, The Cobolds! I'm gonna talk all about the lifestyle of the Cobolds, how they interact with the rest of the world, and give stats so that you can play your little knack-a-dial however you'd like. As always, keep in mind that a lot of this is just my opinion, so if you decide that making incidental homestuck references every time you want to talk about a Cobold isn't your style, feel free to run you little half-baked lizardfolk however you want. But with that out of the way, let's begin. So, Cobolds are teeny-tiny little level one fodder enemies who bear a vague resemblance to dragons, and that vague resemblance to dragons gives them the mightiest charge of unearned confidence in the world. These little critters are really good at digging holes and hide from every other race for fear of being enslaved for their extremely good skill of digging holes, and yet each Cobold has a small connection with dragons that makes every individual one think that despite all of their various shortcomings, they are still destined for greatness from the moment that they're born. And the beginning of a Cobold's life is pretty basic, all things considered. From the moment that they're hatched into their communal agnes, they have no idea who their paternal relatives are, they just recognize that they are a part of the tribe, and that all other Cobolds in that tribe are their extended family. This connection leads Cobolds to work in a very communal way, always doing what's best for the tribe, and working together to ensure that it both thrives and stays out of nose from the other races who might want to do it hard. From the hunters, to the tunnelers, to the tiniest scavenger, every Cobold works in a symbiotic relationship to ensure the survival of the pack. As the Cobold grows older, it will find mates to make eggs with, and since Cobolds don't exactly have a concept for monogamy or any particular notion of romance, these pairings are usually just out of convenience, up until the Cobold lives a long, natural life of over a century, or, if much more likely, until the Cobold dies a horrible death by around 20 years or so. But death isn't all bad, since Cobolds believe that when they die, their soul will just find its way into the body of the next laid egg in the nest, ready to pop out and dig a little hole once again. It's for that reason when a particularly valiant and powerful Cobold dies, all of the people in the tribe suddenly go right to the nest, and they're all like, hey, you give us that egg, and they nurture the Cobold that comes out and coddle it, and make sure that it's pampered because that Cobold was important, God damn it, and now it will be important again. And I may not be painting the best picture of it, but the tunneling skills of Cobolds are actually really, really good, to the point where they've developed an innate, instinctual understanding of where to dig, and how deep to dig without the caves collapsing on them, or which way will lead to water and cavern systems, and this spectacular skill of theirs doesn't always go unnoticed by the rest of the world. Oftentimes, cities that have discovered that there are Cobolds living underneath it will actually barter with the tribe, offering food and safety if they build irrigation sewer systems for the city, or alternatively, if they're met with antagonistic races, mean-spirited humans, or even dragons, which they actually literally revere as demigods, the Cobolds will still do the same work only with a bit more malintent headed their way, meaning that every time you go to a town, there could be hundreds of Cobolds living under you, and you would never know. And Cobolds prefer it that way. Their other incredibly useful, if not off-times irritating skill is scavenging items from the areas surrounding their homes. Oftentimes, this means going into a nearby town and digging a secret passageway into someone's house, then slipping in every once in a while and taking things that would potentially go unnoticed, like an extra pair of knives or a few cups, or perhaps a delicious raspberry pie that's been left out on the table. But they never take anything that would be missed, because they don't want to instigate the people that they're stealing from to actually want to do something about them, so they stick to just being a little annoying at worst and completely unnoticed at best. There are only two things that break this trend, and they are magic items and gnomes! Both for the same reason. Now, if you've watched my gnome guide, then you already know the story of the honorable and innocent Kirtlemark and the conniving and trixty Garl Glittergold. But, spoken from the Kobold point of view, Kirtlemark was just being a good vassal to his lord, the mighty dragon goddess Tiamat. When Garl Glittergold, jealous of Kirtlemark's good fortune, stole some of Tiamat's hoard and prompted Kirtlemark to chase after him, where, as we know, he was led into a never-ending maze, Glittergold turned around and said, You got nomed, and he was trapped there for all eternity.  And getting magic items means that they are potentially one step closer to freeing Kirtlemark from his never-ending prison, just as soon as they can figure out how to get the things to work. Regardless of the outward intelligence to normal folk, Kobolds, for all their insecurities and their penchant for being manipulated by people wiser than them, actually happened to be one of the cleverest little creatures in the entire multiverse, even more clever, I dare say, than the gnomes. These little guys are always prepared for the worst situations, having already studied every room they go into for possible escape routes and distractions, and their tunnels are filled to the brim with traps and endless passages to nowhere to ward off any intruders. Honestly, I can fight a dragon or a giant all day long, if it means that I never have to go through the unbridled horror that is navigating a kobold den.  Hell, even their biology is intuitive. On one hand, certain rare kobolds are hatched with wings, and on the other hand, when a kobold tribe is partially wiped out and the survivors are left with either too few males or too few females, kobolds can, over time, change their own sex to balance out what's left of the tribe, making actually getting rid of kobolds an absolute chore and a half. But, we have spent a nice long time talking about the wonder that is the kobold, so let's get into the nitty-gritty of their own steps, so that you can start knackin' at your own problems. The modest kobold gets a plus two to dexterity and a minus two to strength. They also get dark vision, sunlight sensitivity, advantage on attacks when there's an ally nearby, and a kobold unique ability known as grovel, cower, and beg, which lets you distract nearby enemies to give your allies advantage on attacks against them. Now, unlike most guides, I actually have a bit to say about this stat block, which is that while the kobold has always been one of the more slapstick comedy type races, meant to be basic fodder enemies that bushy-tailed adventurers can handle without too much of a problem, this stat block makes playing them feel the same way, particularly with the fact that kobolds only get a bonus to one stat, and then also get a negative to another stat, which is something that's shared with literally only one other race, the orc. I'd personally recommend home-brewing it to maybe giving them a plus one intelligence to give some credibility to the idea that they are actually clever enough to fill their entire caves with millions of traps, and getting rid of the negative to strength, because even if you're one of those people that preferred the olden days when D&D would give negatives to almost every race, Fifth Edition has never made a thing until now, and it doesn't look to be doing it again in the future if Mordenkanans, or the Guildmasters guide, is anything to go off of, so giving two races a negative on the grounds of, oh, well, it fits with the lore, but then shrugging at the elf not having a negative to Constitution, or the dwarf not having a negative to Charisma, is just trying to hand-wave the problem away. The whole idea of not giving things negatives is to reward the player for choosing the race's archetypical class options if they match up with their ability score increases, but not analyze the player for wanting to try something off the wall or different, like a half-orc wizard. So even if the kobold is a monster race, and wizard says that they wanted to stay true to the monster, that shouldn't be into the detriment of the player. Okay, rant over. But that'll about do it. I hope you liked the video, blah, blah, blah. Subscribe to PewDiePie, but yeah, dev.io.


Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Splunk.conf, 19, brought to you by Splunk. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here inside theCUBE for Splunk.conf, their 10th year conference. We've been here seven years. I'm John Furrier, you're the host. Our next guest is Sherry Kaltwick-Jaroni, founder and executive director of the Global Emancipation Network, a cutting edge company and organization connecting different groups together to fight that battle, combating human trafficking with the power of data analytics, we're in a digital world. Sherry, thanks for coming on. Thanks for coming in. Thank you so much for having me. So, love your mission. This is really close to my heart in terms of what you're doing because with digital technologies, there's a unification theme here at Splunk. Unifying data sets, you hear on the keynotes. You guys got a shout out on the keynote. Congratulations. We did, thank you. Unifying data can help fight cybersecurity, fight the bad guys, but also there's other areas where unification, this is what you're doing. Take a minute to explain the Global Emancipation Network. Yeah, thank you.  So when you think about that, what that really means is that we interact with thousands of stakeholders across law enforcement, government, nonprofits, academia, and then the private sector as well. And all of those essentially act as data silos for human trafficking data. And when you think about that, is trafficking as a data problem or you tackle it as a data problem? What that really means is that you have to have a technology and data-led solution in order to solve the problem. So that's really our mission here, is to bring together all of those stakeholders, give them easy access to tools that can help improve their counterpostery. And where are you guys based and how big is the organization and what's the status? Give a quick plug for where you guys are at and what the current focus is. Perfect. So I am based in San Luis Obispo, California. We have just started a brand new trafficking investigations hub out at Cal Poly there. They're a fantastic organization whose motto is learn by doing. And so we are taking the trafficking problem and the tangential other issues. So like we mentioned, cyber crime, wildlife trafficking, drugs trafficking. All of this sort of has a criminal convergence around it and applying technology and particularly Splunk to that. Yeah, and I just want to make a note. I think it's important to mention Cal Poly is doing some cutting edge work. Allison Robinson, Bill Britton runs the program over there. They got a great organization. They're doing a lot of data oriented from media analysis data. Big focus there. Cal Poly, quite a big organization. They are and they're doing some wonderful things. AWS just started an innovation hub called the DX Hub there that we are a part of. Really trying to tackle these really meaty problems here that are very data centric and technology centric and Cal Poly is the best place to do that. Great, let's get into some of the details. One of the things around the news, obviously you're seeing Mark Zuckerberg doing the tour, Capitol Hill, DC, Georgetown, free speech. They Facebook has been kind of blamed for breaking democracy. At the same time, it's a platform there. They don't consider themselves as an editorial outlet. My personal opinion, they are, but they hide behind that platform. So bad things have happened. Good things can happen. So you're seeing technology kind of being pigeonholed as bad, tech for bad. There's also a tech for good. Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of VMware, publicly said, technology is neutral. We humans can shape it. Okay, so you guys are looking at it from shaping it for good. How are you doing it? What are some of the things that are going on technically and from a business standpoint that is shaping and unifying the data?  It's a way that people bring their product, in this case, it's sadly human beings, to the market to reach buyers, right? And technology absolutely facilitates that. But as you mentioned, we can use that against them. So actually here at COMF, we are bringing together for our first time the partnership that we do with Splunk for Good, Accenture, and Global Emancipation Network to help automatically classify and score risky businesses, content, ads, and individuals there, to help not only with mitigating risk and liability for the private sector, whether it's social media giants or if it's transportation, hospitality, you name it, but also help ease the burden of content moderators. And that's the other side of it. So when you live in this space day in and day out, you really exact a mental toll here. It's really damaging to the individual who sits and reads this material and views photos over and over again. So using technology is a way to automate some of those investigations and the identification of that content could be helpful in a variety of ways. In a way, it's a whole nother adversary formula to try to identify. One of the things that Splunk, and as we've been here at Splunk Conference, they've been about data from day one. Logged data and then grew from there in this platform. It's a data problem. And so one of the things that we're seeing here is diverse data, getting at more data makes AI smarter, makes things more so. But that's hard. Diverse data might be in different data sets or silos, different groups, sharing data is important. So getting that diverse data, how difficult is it for you guys because the bad guys can hide. They're hiding from Craigslist to social platforms, you name it, they're everywhere. How do you get the data? What's the cutting edge, ingestion? Where are the shadows? Where are the blind spots? How do you guys look at that because it's only getting bigger? Absolutely. So we do it through a variety of different ways. We absolutely see gathering and aggregating and machining data, the most central thing to what we do at Global Emancipation Network. So we have a coalition really of organizations that we host their scrapers and crawlers on and we run it through our ingestion pipeline. And we are partnered with Microsoft and AWS to store that data, but everything goes through Splunk as well. So what is that data really? It's data on the open web, it's on the deep web. We have partners as well who look at the dark web too. So Recorded Future, who's here at COMF, Deep Owl as well. So there's lots of different things on that. Now honestly, the data that's available on the internet is easy for us to get to. It's easy enough to create a scraper and crawler to even create an authenticated scraper behind a paywall, right? The harder thing is those privately held data sets that are in all of those silos that are in a million different data formats with all kinds of different fields and whatnot. So that is where it's a little bit more of a manual lift. We're always looking at new technologies to machine PDFs and that sort of thing as well. You know, one of the things that I love about this business we're on the waiver on is we're in digital media businesses that we're in pursuit of the truth. Trust, truth is a big part of what we do. You can talk to people, get the data.  You're classifying evil. Okay, this is the topic of your shop track here. Classifying evil, combating human trafficking with the power of data analytics. This is actually super important. Could you share why, for people that aren't following like the inside the ropes of this problem, why is it such a big problem to classify evil and like why isn't it so easy to do? What's the big story? What should people know about this challenge? Well, human trafficking is actually the second most profitable crime in the world. It's the fastest growing crime. So our best estimates are that there's somewhere between 20 million and 45 million people currently enslaved around the world. That's a population the size of Spain. That's nothing that an individual or even a small army of investigators can handle. And when you think about the content that each of those produce or the traffickers are producing in order to advertise the services of those, you know, it's way beyond the ability of any one organization or even like I said an army of them to manage. And so what we need to do then is to be able to find the signal in the noise here. And there is a lot of noise. Even if you're looking at sex trafficking particularly, there's consensual sex work or, you know, there's other things that are a little bit more in that arena, but we want to find that that is actually engaging in human trafficking. The talk that you mentioned that we're doing is actually a fantastic use case. This is what we did with Splunk for Good and Accenture. We were actually looking at doing a deep dive into the illicit massage industry in the U.S. And there are likely over 10,000 illicit massage businesses in the U.S.  And it generates, you know, $2 billion a year. We're talking about a major industry here. And in that is a very large component of human trafficking. There's a very clear pipeline between Korea, China, down to New York and then being placed there. So what we ended up needing to do then, and again we were going across data silos here, looking at state owned data, whether it was license applications, arrest filings, legal cases, that sort of thing, down into the textual advertisements. So doing NLP work with weighted lexicons and really ascending a risk store to individual massage businesses, to massage therapists, business owners, and then again to that content. So looking again, how can we create a classifier to identify evil? It's interesting, you know, I think about what you're talking about. This is a business. This is a business model. This is business continuity. This is a supply chain. This is a bona fide, underground, or overt business process. Yeah, absolutely, and you're right on that too, that it is actually overt because at this point traffickers actually operate with impunity for the most part. So actually framing it that way as a market economy, whether it's shadowy and a little bit more in the black market or completely out in the open, it really helps us frame our identification, how we can manage disruptions, who need to be the stakeholders at the table for us in order to have a wider impact rather than just whack-a-mole.  Why don't we just solve it? I mean, why doesn't something like the elite class or the world organization, just Davos, and people just say, are they staring at this problem? Why don't they just say, hey, this is evil, let's just get rid of it? What's the- Well, we're working on it, John, but the good thing is, and you're absolutely right, that there are a number of organizations who are actually working on it. So not just us, there's some other amazing nonprofits, but the tech sector is actually starting to come to the table as well. Whether it's Splunk, it's Microsoft, it's AWS, it's Intel, IBM, Accenture, people are really waking up to how damaging this actually is. The impact that it has on GDP, the ways that we're particularly needing to protect vulnerable populations, LGBTQ youth, children in foster care, indigenous populations, refugees, conflict zones. So you're absolutely right. I think given the right tools and technology and the awareness that needs to happen on the global stage, we will be able to significantly shrink this problem. It's classic arbitrage. If I'm a bad guy, you take advantage of the systematic problems of what's in place. So the current situation sounds like siloed groups, somewhat funded, not mega-funded. This group over here, disconnect between communications. So you guys are, from what I can tell, pulling everyone together, is going to create a control plane of data to share information, kind of get a more holistic view of everything. Yeah, that's exactly it. Trying to do it at scale, at that. So I mentioned that first, we were looking at the illicit massage sector. We're moving over to the social media to look again at the recruitment side and content. The financial sector is really the common thread that runs through all of it. So being able to identify, taking it back to a general use case here from cybersecurity, just indicators as well, indicators of compromise, but in our case, these are just words and lexicons, dollar values, things like that, down to behavioral analytics and patterns of behavior, whether people are moving, operating as call centers, network-like behavior. Things that are really indicative of trafficking and making sure that all of those silos understand that, are sharing the data that they can that's not overly sensitive and making sure that we work together. Sherry, you mentioned AWS. Teresa Carlson, I know she's super passionate out there. She's the leader, Cal Poly, we mentioned that. Splunk, you mentioned, how is Splunk involved? Are they the core technology behind this? Are they powering? They are, yes. Splunk was actually with us from very day one. We sat at a meeting actually at Microsoft and we were really just whiteboarding. What does this look like? How can we bring Splunk to bear on this problem? And so Splunk for good, we're part of their pledge, the $10 million pledge over 10 years. And it's been amazing. So after we ingest all of our data, whether no matter what the data source is, whatever it looks like, and we deal with the ugliest and most unstructured data ever. And Splunk is really the only tool that we've been, that we looked at that was able to deal with that. So everything goes through Splunk. From there, we're doing a series of external API calls that can really help us enrich that data, add correlations, whether it's geospatial data, network analysis, cryptocurrency analysis, public records, lookups, a variety of things. But Splunk is at the heart. So I got to ask you, obviously, as this new architecture comes into play for attacking this big problem that you guys are doing, as someone who's not involved in that area, I get like, wow, spooked out by that. I'm like, wow, this is really bad. How can people help? What can people do either in their daily lives, whether it's how they handle their data, observations, donations, involvement, how do people get involved? What do you guys see as some areas that could be collaborating with? What do you guys need? How do people get involved? Yeah, one that's big for me is I would love to be able to send an interview like this or go about my daily life and know that what I am wearing or the things that I'm interacting with, my phone, my computer, weren't built from the hands of slave labor. And at this point, I really can't. So one thing that everybody can do is demand of the people that they are purchasing from that they're doing so in a socially viable and responsible way. So looking at supply chain management as well and auditing specifically for human trafficking. We have sort of the certified fair trade, certified organic seals. We need something like that for human trafficking and that's something that we, the people can demand. You know, I think you're on a right track with it. I see a big business model wave where consumer purchasing power can be shifted to people who make the investments in those areas. I think it's a big opportunity. It's kind of a new e-commerce data-driven, social impact-oriented economy. Yep, and you can see more and more investment firms are becoming more interested in making socially responsible investments. And we just heard Splunk announced their $100 million social innovation fund as well. And I'm sure that human trafficking is going to be part of that awareness. Well, I'll tell you, one of the things that's inspirational to me personally is that you're starting to see power and money come into helping these causes. My friend Scott Tune, he just started a venture capital firm called Valo Ventures in Palo Alto. And they're for-profit social impact investors. So they see a business model shift where people are getting behind these new things. I think your work is awesome. Thank you. Yeah, thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thanks for coming on. Congratulations on the shout-out on the keynote. Appreciate it. The global emancipation network. Check them out. They're in San Luis, Bispo, California. Get involved. This is theCUBE with bringing you the signal from the noise here at .com. I'm John Furrier, back with more after this short break.