Hi, I'm Victor Schupen. I'm going to be talking about the security analysis of S-PAKE 2 plus and As let me start with some background going back to the olden days where we just had traditional password authentication protocols We have a client with a secret password pi a server who stores Some salts along with the hash value and this is a hash of the password Identifying information of the client and server and assault That's this is so these are the two values at the server source stores And then when the client wants to log into the server, he simply set his password over to the server The server would hash everything he would hash the password this identifying information along with the salt and test whether or not These two values this hash value here matches the hash value that was computed here So that's the way kind of things worked back in the 1970s or 80s I think we use this thing called telnet way back then and of course it was very insecure because if you logged in over the internet or Over then then what would happen is that you'd be sending your password out in the clear And of course everybody could just see your password and steal it So what that's been replaced by and what's actually quite widely used today is the following kind of scenario Where we combine this basic password protocol with one-sided authenticated key exchange So here the client and the server would run a one-sided authenticated key exchange protocol Using just the server's public key. We assume the clients don't have public keys and then once this A secure channel has been established in this way Then well the client knows he's talking securely to the server and the server also knows He's talking to somebody, but he doesn't really know who he's talking to yet So then what then the client in the server would use the secure channel to run this simple protocol here And that's and then once that was done then the server would know that he's talking to the client Who knows the password? So that's kind of the way a lot of things work now on the internet Some limitations of this approach is that it requires a public key infrastructure Certificate authorities etc. And it's also open to so-called phishing attacks Which most people I think knows know know what those are so one way to mitigate these limitations Is to use something called password authenticated key exchange or PAKE for short This is an idea that's been around for a long time is introduced by Belevin and Merritt in 1992 It eliminates the need for a PKI Which is nice? And it prevents So-called offline dictionary attacks. So I'll have more to say about that in a minute But the main ideas are as follows. So We have an adversary that If he actively interacts with the client or the server Say the adversary might pretend to be the client and interact with the server or pretend to be the server and interact with the client Then of course what the adversary can always do is just run the protocol with some Particular guess at the password and at the protocol succeeds. He'll know he's gotten the right password and if it fails Well, he can try it again, right? So with every run of the protocol The adversary effectively just gets one guess at the password If an adversary Passively observes the client and the server talking to each other running this protocol then the adversary should get no information about the password and All of this should hold even if the adversary learns Some information derived from the session key Or the session key itself So let to illustrate like what are the issues involved here? Let me just Go through a couple of simple examples by way of background and this is more for people who really haven't looked at this problem very much before Here's a simple protocol. That's not a very good protocol. I'll call it spake zero simple peak zero So client server have a shared password pi and they just exchange random nonces x and y And then they compute their session key as a hash of the password their identities and the two random nonces and The idea is that, you know, this should at least we're not sending the password in the clear here But the problem with this is that an eavesdropper Even though he can't see the password directly from the protocol. He can still mount What's called an offline dictionary attack and understand how an offline dictionary attack works? suppose that the adversary watches The parties exchange x and y so he knows those two values and say that then after the session key K is established One of the two parties sends out a message M along with a Mac a message authentication code applied to that message using the secret key K and the adversary learns this Mac and say The adversary just knows this message as well So the adversary knows all of these things he knows M He knows T the the value of the Mac And what the adversary can then do is try a whole bunch of passwords pi prime coming from some dictionary of likely passwords and test whether or not when you plug in well, when you plug in that password into the hash function and get a Test value for the session key and then plug that test value for the session key into the Mac algorithm Do you get the tag that you saw right? So this is really bad if you know these Passwords of course can be somewhat weak and I thought be that difficult for the adversary to run through, you know a few million or even a few billion passwords to Figure out what the user's password is just by eavesdropping on a session like this. So this protocol isn't very good. Here's a protocol that Tries to improve things a little bit. I'll call it protocol simple pick one This uses some elements of Diffie-Hellman key exchange. There's no public keys here So each party generates an ephemeral Diffie-Hellman key. So the P here generates you as G to the alpha Q generates V as G to the beta they exchange group elements U and V and then they each compute the the Diffie-Hellman key G to the alpha beta so Q computes that as U to the beta and P computes G to the alpha beta as V to the alpha and then they dump all of this information into the hash function U, V, and W and And that's their session key What you can prove about a protocol like this is that under the Computational Diffie-Hellman assumption and modeling the hash function as a random oracle you can prove that an eavesdropper Can't mount an offline dictionary attack of the type that we saw on the previous slide. However an Active adversary who plays the role of either P or Q can still mount an offline dictionary attack So for example the attacker can run the protocol as Q against an honest P So he just runs right this protocol knowing beta and so he can compute W and he just makes a stab at the password pi just like before and Once the protocol gets to this step, right? And then if the attacker can okay for this attack to work the following has to happen The attacker runs the protocols Q and then he hopes that P is going to send out a Tag like this a Mac value like this and then if P makes that first move Then the attacker can again carry out an offline dictionary attack because he knows all the inputs to the hash function Except the password and so he can just do that kind of dictionary attack like in the first protocol so this is better than the first protocol since You the adversary has to actively engage one of the parties But it only has to engage the party once and then once it does that it can do an offline dictionary attack So here's a protocol Called S peak 2 which is actually from of dollar and point of all in 2005 And it's a very simple and elegant protocol That does provide Security against offline dictionary attack. So I've highlighted in blue here the things that are different from The protocol in the previous slide. So basically what this protocol does is well, it makes use of two random group elements that are kind of Posted as public parameters for all to use and it's assumed that nobody knows the discrete log of these two random group elements Then the two parties what they do is well party P here kind of masks the first group element with a to the pi and party Q here masks its group element by multiplying by B to the password pi and then When it comes to the next step, they both kind of unmask the the values they receive from the other party Here and here and then they do the same thing so this extra bit of masking and Unmasking is the only difference between the two protocols and what of dollar and points of all proved was that Under the CDH assumption and modeling H as a random oracle There are actually no offline dictionary attacks And again, there are still online dictionary attacks, but these can't be avoided right a party can still run the protocol once The adversary can still run the protocol once And make one guess at the password. So those can never really be avoided So one limitation of this protocol is symmetry in a typical scenario Where you might use a protocol protocol like this the client memorizes the password pi and the server Is going to have to store pi in a password file, right? And so if the password file is compromised Then All passwords for all users are immediately compromised right so this is very bad in fact, it's even kind of this this kind of If this kind of password file compromise leads to even worse results Then in the traditional protocol where the server just stores a hash of the password plus himself here we've improved security in one sense by By You know not requiring a PKI and avoiding phishing attacks, but we've made security worse by Making, you know a password file compromise lead to much more catastrophic results than in the traditional Password protocol so To try to improve this situation people have studied this notion of asymmetric PAKE and This has been around for a while one of the early papers on this that has had a lot of influences this paper by Gentry McKenzie and Ramzan from 2006 and it it basically defines a notion of security whereby you do provide a Protection against password file compromise and more precisely the notion of security introduced there says that Essentially in order to impersonate a client to a server The attacker must carry out an offline dictionary attack even if the password file is compromised So think about what happens when a password file on the server gets compromised now the attacker knows everything in the Password file so that adversary can now play the role of the server to an unsuspecting client That you can't prevent because now the attacker knows everything at the server knows But we should still hope that even after the adversary obtains the password file That there's still some security left in the system and and that security says that the security property We want is that now that the adversary has the password file. He still has to perform an offline dictionary attack in order to Break the system So This here's a protocol that just embellishes S-PAKE to slightly I call it S-PAKE to plus This is in a paper that I published with cash and kilt in 2008 and also Appeared in my textbook with Dan Bonnet in a preliminary version that's been available online for quite a while And it's very similar to the to the first to S-PAKE to the main difference is that Now We take the password pi and we run it through a hash function f and that generates two exponents Phi zero and phi one the server is only going to store phi zero and instead of storing phi one He just he just stores the group element C Which is g raised to the power phi one Okay, so this is what the server is going to store He doesn't store the password and it doesn't store the output of this hash function He stores this Transformation of the output of the hash function the client of course is going to know phi zero phi one because well if it's a human client They'll know the password the hash the password to get phi zero phi one now What happens is in the protocol the differences is first of all we're going to use phi zero here in place of the password In all the places we did before And in it so that's one change in addition Where we're going to use phi one is as follows The client is going to compute in addition to the group elements UVW that they computed before it's going to compute an additional group element D Which is going to be basically The same as W but instead of computing w here we could raise this group element to the power Alpha we we raise this Same group element to the power phi one the server is going to compute the same group element by taking C Which is in its password file and raising that to the power beta and you can check that if the both parties follow the protocol Then these two group elements are the same So this is the only difference and intuitively You know while the server Can compute this group element knowing C right and Beta which the server chose itself the client really has to know phi one to be able to log into the server and the only way intuitively that the Client is going to know phi one is if he actually inputs The password into this hash function to get both outputs five zero and five one so this protocol is currently being standardized and In both of these sources it was claimed that this you know is a secure paid protocol And it provides resilience against password vial compromised, but nothing was ever proved One limitation of this protocol is that it's Subject to what's called a preprocessing attack, right? So here the problem is this for a given pair of users P and Q an attacker could pre-compute all Values of this hash function f on all Passwords pi prime coming from some dictionary and then if it pre-computs all of that data as soon as the Attacker obtains the password file information here. You can do a quick table look up to determine What is the right password, right? So even though the attacker still has to do an offline dictionary attack by computing, you know f for all these passwords He can take that pre-processed information and immediately upon Obtaining the password file get the user's password. So this this is a limitation. It's it's not as robust as we would like it More recently a stronger notion of asymmetric pake security was introduced by by Jerecki Kravchak and Jew in 2018 This also provides protection against pre-processing attacks But the difference is that in order to impersonate a client to the server The attacker must carry out an offline dictionary attack and that attack has to start only after the password file is compromised So that's the distinction but this is a limitation of spake 2 plus and We can't really say more about that, but I do want to But what I do want to do is focus on what we are able to prove on of this scheme It's definitely not secure in the stronger sense, but it is secure in the or in the original sense of asymmetric pake Introduced by Gentry McKenzie and Ramzan So what we the original goal of this work was to prove that under the computational Diffie-Hellman assumption and under the random oracle model for the hash functions that this is a secure Asymmetric pake, but to even prove a theorem like this. We have to talk about security models So there are two popular security models for for a pake One is what I'll call the BPR model just named after the inventors Bellari point you all in Rockaway from 2000 It's a game-based definition. It's actually very nice and fairly natural But the problem is there's no natural extension of this to asymmetric pake definition was originally crafted for a symmetric pake and There's no real nice extension of this definition to asymmetric pake The definition that's another model for security is the so-called universal composability model. This is simulation based and The UC model goes back a bit further, but it was applied originally to the pake protocol to pake protocols in 2005 One nice thing about this approach is that it extends to asymmetric pake This is what was done in the Gentry McKenzie and Ramzan paper But so this is the actually the the model that we want to look at here, but unfortunately S-paked to is not even secure in the symmetric variant of the UC model. So That's bad news and for the same reason S-paked to plus can't be secure in the asymmetric UC model I'll talk a little bit more about that later The main results of this work are to Define a new protocol which I call Casey S-paked to plus and this is basically just S-paked to plus together with Some straightforward key confirmation just vanilla key confirmation adding a couple extra flows to the protocol to do key confirmation and Then once we do that once we add key confirmation then indeed we can prove that this new protocol Spake S-paked to plus with key confirmation is a secure asymmetric Pake protocol in the UC model assuming the computational Diffie-Hellman assumption and in the random oracle model Along the way, we also prove that Casey S-paked to so this is just basically the original S-paked to with key confirmation We also prove that that's a secure symmetric peak protocol in the UC model under the same assumptions We also look at a particular variant of of Casey S-paked to plus that's currently being standardized and prove that secure as an asymmetric pace and take in the UC model and we also Fix a few problems in the in the current Formulations of security in both the symmetric and asymmetric UC definitions of PAKE So quick review 30-second review of the UC framework you have the real world where you have a Environment interacting with various machines running the protocol You have an adversary that interacts with these machines and with the environment and when we're modeling a hash function as a random oracle The random oracle is kind of also down here And the adversary can can interact with the random oracle Directly although for technical reasons the environment can't interact with the random oracle directly And in the ideal world we just have a simulator Which is kind of just the the ideal world's version of the adversary interacting with some ideal functionality that kind of is a trusted third party that kind of does what the protocol is supposed to do and then the the protocol machines in the real world are kind of just replaced by Dummy machines that are just repeaters that basically forward all the inputs to the to the trusted third party and Forward outputs from the trusted third party back to the environment And security just means that for all adversaries there exists a simulator Such that for every environment that there's no way for the environment to distinguish computationally speaking The real world whether it's operating the environment can't tell whether it's operating in the real world Or in the ideal world to to So we we formulate security for Symmetric pick and I'm going to skip over all of this because I don't have time You can read the details in the paper And I'm going to have to finish up So what I do want to do is to talk about in the last two minutes that I have available Why is an s-paked to you see secure because I think that's kind of like the most important thing So I think I can prove a theorem although I haven't really done it that protocol s-paked to is not you see secure According to my definition or any others in the literature, but I haven't worked out the details of that whether or not it's a theorem is not so Important or more fundamentally. What's important is that? Any secure channels protocol that you might layer on top of s-paked to is not going to be you see secure either By the way in concurrent work. Another paper that came out Also made the same observation that s-paked to is not you see secure and they in fact show that s-paked to is is Is you see secure with respect to a weaker? Ideal functionality that they call lazy extraction security and I'll refer refer you to their paper To see the details of that but in a nutshell what what's wrong with s-paked to In the uc model without key confirmation, so suppose that we have a Server running with the the right password pi and we have an adversary Who's just trying to make a guess he's gonna run the protocol with a guess pi prime at the password In the role of the client so he sends to the server. He just runs the protocol with this pi prime and And he sends this group element to the server the server responds With with this group element v computed in this way just like in the ordinary protocol then suppose what happens next? Server computes the third group element w Dumps it all into a hash function to get the session key and now say q starts encrypting Messages using the session key okay The problem is the simulator must immediately decide whether or not this key k is a fresh key or as a spoiled key meaning fresh means that His guess at the password who's incorrect and spoiled means His guess at the password was Correct Mean and that means and if his guess at the password is correct that of course means that the adversary now knows the session key So the question that the simulator has to answer at this point in time without knowing anything more is Whether or not to treat this session key as a is a secure session key or an insecure session key Because the simulator has to start simulating the the encrypted ciphertext above in some higher-level protocol and it's a later point in time much much later the adversary might come along and And Finish off the protocol get his session key and then and only then will the simulator now Be able to see what the adversaries guess at the password was because he's going to input it into this hash function and now the simulator can test whether or not Pi prime equals the adversaries guess at the password is equal to the right value of the password So it seems like kind of a technical point, but it's actually an important technical point which tells us that to achieve any Meaningful and useful notion of you see security for a peak protocol For a protocol like as picked to we have to add key confirmation flows to it So I invite you to see the details of the of the paper for more information about the details of the protocols The details of the security definitions, which I think are also interesting as they do Clean up some problems in previous work and then the proofs of security themselves, which I think are interesting So that's it. I'm out of time. Thank you very much


Okay, my name is Siobhan McCafferty and I'm the Research Data Coordinator for NANUP, which is the National Agricultural Nitrous Oxide Research Program. NANUP is the most recent iteration of a National Nitrous Oxide and Gas Emissions Research Program, hence the name, and this program brings together researchers from at least 10 Australian universities and six institutions and government. NANUP's coordinated from QUT in Brisbane and I'm part of a small team of two embedded in the Healthy Ecosystems and Environmental Monitoring Group, which is part of the Institute for Future Environments. My job covers all things data management, but the focus of it now is a service manager for the interway data repository and portal. For those who like technical information, the portal is our own version of a MetaCat repository, which is Java and Tomcat, developed by the Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity using the software's web server, a Postgres relational database management system, and an LDAP. Other features that were spliced on are a GeoServer software for mapping and a web interface which allows users to access and interact with the records. We also have an OAI-PMH Metadata Harvest to Research Data Australia and the system has an integrated DOI minting facility. Minting is providing by ANS using a nice little piece of software called Website Content Managed Using Jumler CMS, PHP, and my SQL as a database and I devolve the content for the website. I also advise on data and metadata standards, licensing and access, and encourage researchers to provide us with their data and metadata, either by self upload or via Morpho upload software integrated DOI minting facility and our minting services provided by ANS with a nifty little piece of software that we developed called DOI Monkey. Website contents managed with Jumler, PHP, and my SQL as a database, so there's a whole lot of stuff going on in the background that's taken care of by our wonderful developer Moises. I also advise on data and metadata standards, licensing and access and I encourage researchers to provide us with their data and metadata either by self upload via Morpho or with my help. I spend a fair amount of time talking to researchers about what they need, how to get their data where it's meant to be, and how to make it useful for other people, and how did I get where I am now. Like many librarians, this is not my first career. My academic background was in philosophy and religious studies and I began my studies in Wellington, New Zealand at Victoria and I continued at Sterling and over at the University of Glasgow. I've got lots of years teaching at universities and working in libraries to support myself while I tried to develop an academic career. So consequently I had a nice collection of soft skills and technical experience. So when the GFC hit Europe and jobs in the humanities became scarce, I moved to countries and I began training to be an archivist which eventually became a study for masters in information management at ECU and led to my current incarnation. While I was nearing the end of my studies, I took on a short-term contract with a new e-research team based at the Institute for Sustainable Resources at QUT. That team was externally funded by project work and our bread and butter was repositories and data portals for scientific research and developing scientific software and applications. I was also involved then in a few ANS projects and also with the turn data portal which Michelle was working on. So I got to know a few people. In 2012, I started Spandid and became the Institute for Future Environments at QUT and I was absorbed into the heme, so absorbed back into the bloodstream of the institute and for the remaining duration of the NANORP program, I was there data library and or research data coordinator. The main challenges of my work will be familiar to everyone. The first one is working in an emergent sector. Data librarians and information specialists don't fit in traditional boxes and it's often difficult for employers and funders to see why and where you fit and that can make writing proposal costings difficult. So when projects come up that will need my work, it's often been difficult to say why they need my work. I was very lucky to work in an overarching project that was willing to take on new technologies and try and develop them. But sometimes your funders don't really understand that, which brings us to funding. NANORP researchers work with gas emissions and climate change and they're not very favored areas of funding at the moment unfortunately. There's also been a lot of cuts to long-term research funding which has put a serious squeeze on research and made it necessary for us to curtail sun schemes and change the scope of others. It's also meant I've need to expand my role to fill the gaps where other members of staff may have been, which I think has been quite positive actually. Most of our projects are short-term and run on a skeleton staff now and funding will also unfortunately endanger the future of my portal. So it's possible that we're going to lose this internationally important collection. To counter this we've changed some of our practices and descriptions of our aims for example instead of our research looking at farming practices and man-made gas emissions we talk about increasing yields for low fertilizer usage. We try and make what we're doing very focused towards farmer needs, agricultural needs and working with industry to provide solutions rather than a purely academic kind of climate modeling focus. The other challenge has been culture change. Soil science is a very traditional area or has been and being part of an emergent sector working in an interdisciplinary way with a traditional area has been very challenging but also a lot of fun. So research in general as well as traditionally been an area where sitting on your data and keeping it secure and secret was necessary and the way to get ahead in your academic career was to have exclusive data to write about and the more exclusive and more secret the data the better. Working to spread the idea that sharing data was the way forward and even more so. Open data was the way forward it's been very difficult so I've employed carrot and stick methods so we have a really useful big stick which is our researchers get funding for supplying us with their data. It's built into their contracts so no data no funding but I don't want to use the stick all the time I prefer the carrot and I want to really make research as aware of the benefits of making the data open and putting it into a repository such as ours and putting DOI on things linking things up it's going to be beneficial particularly to early career researchers because they're the guys that are going to drive this. So making open data and data sharing work for my researchers has been key we've got really tight licensing and attribution controls so they can see their data is protected and we make sure to broadcast any good use of our data. Someone uses it in an article and make sure everyone in the network knows about it. Something gets published everyone knows about it. Yeah we make sure to broadcast all the good press and make researchers aware that they can use other open data as well to augment their own so kind of spread the good news. How do I manage without supporting confines of a library? I was really lucky when I picked up that first contract I had a great mentor and friend as my manager and he helped walk me through a lot of things and that I needed to know. It was a massive learning curve and it was really daunting to walk into Fresh from Study as well and changing sectors but I was invited to every meeting going every workshop and every product presentation whether I really needed to be there or not for a while so I was made aware of the complexity of data and metadata management and encouraged to read and explore current issues in the area and slowly I built a very practical picture of data librarianship as it applied to me maybe not as broad as other people but certainly I learned what I needed to know. I also had a team that was willing when it had the funding to take the risk on an emergent area and sent me to get training as the need arose and made sure I could attend workshops. If I asked to go to something 99% of the time yes no problem how can we help which was wonderful. I also have an excellent relationship with the library. I'm sitting in it right now I actually work here two days a week at the moment and I've worked with them as much as possible towards common goals and they've really included me and others like me in the university in their planning. We consult relevant aspects of both our domains we go to a lot of the same meetings. I've also got a strong project team we've in the past been larger but now there's two of us and my developer is a great guy really knowledgeable willing to sit down and explain things to me he is endless patience and likewise anything that he needed to know I sat down talk to him through it as well. The last thing would be because I'm part of the university I am subject to staff development so even though I'm not not really within the university DUD librarian group when I'm working for IFE but I can still get access to the same training for example project management training I was able to attend that and last on the screen there was willingness to ask for help I was really lucky during some of our projects that everyone was in the same boat we were developing things from scratch we were making new exciting products and I could ask what are you doing how are you doing it I'd ask guys at Ann's QUT the guy in the coffee shop I asked everyone their opinions how do I develop my skills I think I kind of covered that there I just went to everything going I've maybe got a real eclectic collection of qualifications and skills because of that every time I needed to upskill I had the opportunity or I could seek out the opportunity and was supported so what advice would I give to others who are thinking of moving into a role such as yours first of all I've said this before being advocate for your users front end and back end they're the people that create and consume the data and the metadata they're an ultimate audience and if the product doesn't suit them then it won't get used no matter how pretty it is or how much work you've put in nobody will want it so ask your research is what they need and be prepared to negotiate and make concessions from your ideals about data management to make sure that they get that be flexible having an open and flexible attitude invites open and flexible dialogue if a researcher is having problems with the software and everyone does it's not the easiest thing to use then I'll try and find the best way to help them some people like emails some people like online help some people like to be visited if they have firewall problems I will upload their data sets even though I encourage them very strongly to do it themselves if they break the internet I will fly to help them even if they're in Western Australia I will be there keep high standards because data repositories are evolving and it's an emergent area it's easy for people who are newly in contact with data librarianship to say oh that'll do you know it looks good fine but in keeping to agree best practice and industry standard and being seen to do so you convey the importance of data management and storage and you find that people will rise to your standards as well especially when you can couple that with a willingness to be flexible in your approach and to help your contributors you'll hopefully end up with an excellent product for the end for example I have researchers who are very very busy I say I know you're busy but we really need all those metadata fields here's a pre-filled and word document with what I already have you just need to have technical details get it back to me get it up that way everyone reaches their deadlines you know milestones are met and everyone's happy and that's me thank you very much everyone any questions how do we attract people to data librarianship when it's largely unknown misunderstood field go and go and talk at them about it and how wonderful it is attract people to come and beat other librarians really go for me go to different academic streams go to different disciplines and talk to people about how they can apply what they know because a lot of the time you know we develop these collection of skills and there's not all the jobs there in academia or in industry and people who know a little bit about an area can learn a lot about another thing put them together and suddenly the great data librarians how to make it attractive I don't know maybe yeah we just talk to them a lot more be more present don't hide in cupboards like I'm doing at the moment here we've got another one that comes in that says are there traditional librarian skills that give a pathway into data librarianship sure cataloging I learned a whole lot when I was doing my paper on cataloging that I directly apply all the time but I'm maybe not the best person to ask because I'm not a very traditional librarian and I purposefully negotiated my way through my qualifications so I didn't need to do very traditional librarian things I think all of the skills that we develop in traditional librarianship are applicable especially the people skills interview techniques all of them you mentioned you attended as many conferences etc to learn how did you convince management to fund this as I quite pretend anything as there is no not money yeah when that when we had funding early in the projects that was a lot easier I will admit that but I also do fund myself in some situations so well they'll partially fund me or I will pay for something and agree that I can have the time during work to go to it so some of it is negotiation time because of funding issues fantastic thank you everyone


In today's video I'll be taking a look at a brand new model of studio monitor the T8V from Adam Audio. You may not be surprised at my conclusions but I think you should be surprised at the price. All of that coming up. Hi folks I'm Mike and I hope you're well. Now I've been extremely fortunate in receiving the very first pair of these studio monitors in Australia the Adam T8Vs and in this video I'm going to be running through all of the information you need about them as well as giving you my honest opinion. Now I will say up front that these monitors have been loaned to me for the purposes of this review but I have not been required to say anything specific nor has this video been reviewed before released by anyone but myself and I'm not being paid in any way for this video. In other words this is my true and honest opinion. Now I'd also like to say up front that for around about the last seven or eight years I've been using the KRK Rocket 8 monitors and during the course of this video I may refer to them because they are my point of reference and you may have heard them also but this is not a versus video that simply wouldn't be fair. Now with all of that said let's start off by looking at the specs of these studio monitors. So the T8Vs are active near-filled monitors meaning you won't need an amp they plug straight into your audio interface. The 8 in the name refers to the 8 inch polypropylene woofer and the V stands for vertical as they're designed to be used in an upright position. Now along with that 8 inch woofer we have the distinctive UART ribbon tweeter. This is something you won't see on competitor monitors and Adam claim that the design gives a greater range with less distortion. These monitors are by amp meaning that the woofer and the tweeter have separate amplifiers 70 watt for the woofer and 20 watt for the tweeter. In terms of range you get a respectable frequency response of 36 Hertz to 25 kilohertz more on that low-end later. There are two switches for a 2 dB cut or boost on high or low frequencies and you can connect with an unbalanced RCA or a balanced XLR as I did in this review. Lastly if these monitors are controversial in any way it would be with their large rear firing base reflex port but more on that later. Now you could have gotten all of that from their website so the question is what did I think? Well the very first thing I noticed was a lack of noise from these monitors. In the past I'd been used to hearing a little bit of a hiss from the tweeter especially when I had it up at higher volumes but with these you have to get your ear really close to the tweeter indeed to be able to hear that hiss. That was really pleasing and it speaks to me of really quality electronics inside and it's not that it was really terrible with my current monitors but I did notice this difference right away and I was really pleased to hear that or not hear it. So the first thing I did was fire up a mix that I've been working on for the past couple of days on my current monitors and I've probably heard this mix at least 50 times in recent days if not more so I was feeling very familiar with it and then something very scary happened. You see I've got some backing vocals in this mix which all feed through to a bus and that bus was ever so slightly clipping. Now I'd never noticed it before as I've been mixing this song but the very first time I heard it with these monitors my ears picked up on it. Scary indeed because it made me wonder what other small things I'd missed previously using my current monitors. So that really spoke to me about the clarity of the mids and highs with these monitors. So I could definitely hear a great amount of separation between the instruments especially on the mid to high frequencies but it was the low end the bass that had me really excited. You see although my current monitors are 8 inch woofers as well I knew over the years I always had to check my mixes on a system with a subwoofer because that subwoofer always revealed something about the low end which I just hadn't heard on my monitors but with these I knew I would not have to do that anymore. It sounds absolutely wonderful and I don't mean hyped in any way I just mean that I felt I could hear a greater range of low end frequencies and it was balanced across those frequencies. It made me want to listen to my mix over and over again and I even ran out to the rest of the house and grabbed other members of the family to have a listen but you know I see they didn't really care but I just loved it. So the next thing I'd like to discuss is the rear firing bass port. If we turn this monitor around here you can see the bass port just at the top here. Now some people say this is a problem because if this is flat up against a wall then those bass frequencies can't freely exit that port but I wonder if this problem really stems from people thinking about hi-fi speakers because with studio monitors I don't really see how this can occur. First of all you need to plug your cables into the back your power cable and also your connections from your audio interface so that's going to create probably at least a few centimeters of gap at the back. Secondly if you're using these monitors correctly you're going to have them angled in towards your listening position hopefully trying to create an equilateral triangle and that creates even more space at the back of the monitor and really I feel that because of this it's not really a problem and as I say the low-end did sound really good to me but it is a consideration for you if you really feel you must have them very close and flat up against your wall. So talking about space and position you really do need to consider the size of these monitors before you purchase them. They have a depth of around about 33.5 centimeters a width of 25 centimeters and a height of 40 centimeters. Now I prefer to have my monitors on stands but if you do have them on a desktop and they're angled in you will find they do take quite a bit of space and if you're in a small studio or have a small desk this may be an important consideration for you so do take note of that. So do I like these monitors? Well I absolutely love them and they're definitely going on my shopping list and it means that I've been able to remove that subwoofer which was previously on my shopping list so I weirdly feel like I'm actually saving money. Now talking of money when you consider the heritage of Adam Audio and their great reputation and the fact that for some of their monitors you can actually spend thousands of dollars per monitor you'll be pleased to hear that these ones are actually really nicely priced for the home studio market and they compete very well against similar spec monitors. Now the price does vary around the world so I want you to check in the description down below to see how much they cost in your region. So thank you so much for watching this video I hope it's helped you to decide whether these are monitors you'd like to purchase in the future. Let me know in the comments down below what you think and tell me about the monitors you've been using and why you might consider upgrading. I also want to send a big thanks out to Chris and Boss from Federal Audio here in Australia who shipped these monitors out to me for this review. Now if you did like this video make sure you hit the like button that lets YouTube know that it should show this video to other people. If you didn't like this video make sure you hit the dislike button twice and do it with an angry face that really helps. If you like this kind of content all about home recording, DAWs, gear reviews, plug-in reviews that kind of thing then please do make sure you subscribe and ring the bell on YouTube so that you are notified about my future videos and I'll see you in the next video.


This is the only type of relationship that will work for the narcissist There is only one type of relationship that narcissist want It has to be a relationship that suits their agenda. It has to be on their terms The narcissist targeted you Because they believed that you were going to be a suitable source of supply for them They believed that you were going to fit in well with their plans They were not looking for someone to love or care for They were not looking for someone to share anything positive with Narcissists are looking for doormats the looker for people that they can walk over and While you may not have been that in the beginning Narcissists know whether or not they can mold you into what they need you to be They need someone who is going to believe everything they say They need someone who is going to doubt their own intuition Someone who is going to do whatever they want Someone who isn't going to stand up to them.  They only care about themselves But they need people to serve them They need people to regulate their emotions They need an emotional punching bag They need an emotional tampon Someone to carry that emotional baggage Someone who they can unload or their pain and trauma onto Someone who will attend to the things that they don't want to deal with and that is why they target empaths That is why they target kind caring people People who want to help people who want to fix things People who are people-pleasers Because they know that you want them to like you They know that you want them to approve of you And they use that to their advantage They use it to make you jump through hoops Because that's what gives them supply When they can make you do all of these things to try to win them over To try to get their validation and they hold it in front of you like a carrot on a stick But you're never going to get it because they can't even validate themselves They're very insecure and that's where they need you around to feed their egos To validate their false self to make them feel important While they don't even care about you While they treat you like you're worthless and beneath their consideration Because all they want is attention and validation from you They want you to feed their souls and they also want any resources that you have to offer Narcissists want money and power And if you have that they will try to take it from you They will try to milk it out of you They will try to claim it as their own while professing that they love and care for you When really it's extortion. They're just using you Narcissists do not care about anyone but themselves But they don't like it when you speak on it There has to be this elephant in the room Where they're doing all of these things, but you can't talk about it You have to keep this code of silence. You have to pretend like everything is okay Because all they really want is the fantasy They want you to validate the illusion that they are trying to portray And as soon as you try to deviate from that They will intimidate you They will pressure you into returning to the box that they have created for you Because all they really want is someone who will reflect back to them Just how powerful and in control they are Even though the opposite may be true They don't care about the truth All they care about is what they believe about themselves Which is a reflection of what people believe about them Which is why they're so focused on their image of reputation They're so focused on managing the impression that people have of them Not because they care about other people But because they care about what is being reflected back of them People commonly misconceive That all a narcissist cares about Is how other people see them But really that only matters to them Based on how it pertains to them All a narcissist cares about Is how they see themselves And this can be affected by how other people see them But really they're so self-absorbed That the only thing that matters Is the reflection they get of themselves People are just pawns in this strategic game of chess That they have created in their own minds Which they use to change how they see and feel about themselves Thank you for watching. I hope this video resonates with you Please like, comment, share and subscribe If you would like to donate My PayPal link is the name of the video description Coaching inquiries You can email me at coaching.naksafiver.co.uk Thank you for watching and I'll talk to you soon


What's going on guys? It's your boy the E.P.J here today with another Destiny video and today I've been in your top five sword plays of the week. Well I say of the week, I mean I've been saving a few of these clips for quite a while now. Don't get many sword plays submitted so if you have any badass ones do send them into the email I'll just link to the top of the video description. But number one in this video is something beyond belief. You wait until you guys see it. But guys hope you enjoyed the video, do hit that like button, I do appreciate the support and I'll catch you guys on that next one. Only five minutes left. Heavy ammo inbound. They're all pushing. I'm dead. I'm dead. He's right there. And I just killed myself with my own grenade.  Up top, up top, up top.  This shouldn't work. Does the kid have heavy bellow? No. Go, go, go, go, go.


Look, I gotta be honest with you folks This is getting old isn't it yet another developer saying that hey switches for kids Nintendos for kids their primary audience is children and It always comes from somebody who's not releasing games on the Nintendo switch This is something that was common back in 2017 I kind of died off over the years after all we've gotten games like do me turn all the witcher three It's just Hades just a slew of games that clearly are not aimed at children And have sold really really well on Nintendo switch I mean breath of the wild isn't exactly I would say arguably for everybody even though it can be And that's one of the top sellers in the platform I get it when you see animal crossing blowing up you see Mario Kart 8 the likes blowing up it gives off this perception but those games have a wide range of appeal and Nintendo's already put out metrics twice now in the switch lifespan Proving that the Nintendo switch audience is primarily over the age of 18 It's literally like 80% of the audience is over the age of 18. So the switch is Maybe not so much for children, but that's neither here nor there because the creator of Yakuza has come out to Basically slap down the Nintendo switch yet again in an interview He said these words and these are Translations I have a clarification on the translation as well to try to put it in more in context But the original translation goes I think even now the Nintendo platform is still a game Console that is played by a wide range of age groups, but basically I think it's hardware for kids and teens Amid all that at the time Nintendo was also putting a lot of effort into the kids market and I thought it would suit knees just talking in general terms of all about why Yakuza isn't on switch He goes on to point out that obviously Nintendo has some other games like Breath of the Wild and stuff that has sold really really well that appeal to Core gamers, but he still feels a vast majority of the switches audience as children Ergo the systems for kids now the clarification on these quotes is that he doesn't specifically say the Nintendo switch is For kids he says the primary audience of the system is Children that's basically what he says and he uses a very condescending Japanese word that doesn't have a direct translation to English, but it's a It's a word that's understood to be demeaning in the way It's said and this is why people are taking some issue of what he said So even in context because I know some people say well in context with correct translations He's still insulting Nintendo switch and Nintendo switch gamers by calling us primarily children and It's cool if he believes that I think he has this general belief that because the top two selling games on the platform You know you throw Pokemon in the mix as well You throw animal crossing the mix my credit deluxe they are games that appeal to everyone from children all the way through adults So then he just firmly believes the primary audience is children when The primary audience playing those games are adults it turns out that adults aren't just in the M rated video games like doom We really love games that are just fun. We don't need to base What we enjoy in this medium based on the rating of the game I mean this has been so true of adults when you look across the spectrum like when you look at you know say TV shows Right. I enjoy a wide variety of TV shows, you know things like better call Saul and You know things like I don't always I've been watching Hannibal from you know You know what six seven years ago now The three seasons of Hannibal I've been watching they clearly shows intended for a mature audience You can argue the same with like Game of Thrones or something like that But I also enjoy something like SpongeBob, you know, I still enjoy SpongeBob to this day I enjoy other shows that are more light-hearted and could arguably be watched by family like home improvement as an example that doesn't make me a Child for enjoying content. That's not necessarily Intended for an older audience. That's that's what I when I get so baffled about this It's just another game developer dismissing Nintendo because they have this perception in their mind that adults can't enjoy The same things that they feel like are meant for kids So because this guy looks at Animal Crossing looks at Mario Carlson Mario in general sees this cutesy thing going on It says oh look at these popular games for students popular arm Look at all these Nintendo games. They're all made for children Without recognizing that most of you were playing those games aren't actually children. I think that's the hard part When we have this conversation.  They also play games on our tablets Like they play a wide variety of content children's games exist on everything games that we play my kids exist on everything I mean literally I know new super lucky sale is is on switch But it's on game pass on Xbox and hey, hello my son Aiden my middle child he's seven years old has been playing a ton of New super lucky tail on my Xbox oh no Xbox's primary audience must be for kids Oh wait, it's not because you know they push games like Halo or Gears these m-rated games Okay, so Nintendo isn't pushing m-rated games But it turns out that if you look at some of the audience metrics of some of these games Like say Call of Duty there has been some research done That's something like 40 to 50 percent of the audience that plays that game isn't actually old enough to play that game Mind blown. It's almost as if children are drawn to things that are considered cool and Adults that are more mature tend to not care if something's considered cool or not I am not embarrassed at all to sit outside at GameStop waiting for an Xbox Series X and Playing animal crossing on a Nintendo switch. No embarrassment at all In fact, there was two other people that were doing the exact same thing when I was waiting for my system Like this is this is not new like adults enjoy a wide variety of content people enjoy why so yes Obviously Nintendo's You know very family friendly and how they approach many of their video games It's very rare that they approach a edgier more adult way of going about things Maybe more teenage way of going about things and something like Fire Emblem or Xenoblade But it's very rare to see Nintendo get edgy, but adults are into edgy, but they're also into cutesy They're also into Everything we're into fun now. This isn't me. This isn't platform or is not about PlayStation or Xbox or PC I play games on everything. What type of PlayStation 5? I will officially be playing games on every available platform. That's current It's just it's frustrating to see developer after developer after developer still dismiss the switch is like, you know what? We just don't care with that platform. It's for kids like I'm I'm just tired of it. I don't know if you're too guys are tired of it This is my Nintendo defense force and like full full go here because this is just again I don't know how many more times the stats need to be thrown out there that Nintendo has given us. They have told us Most of the people that own and play a switch right now today are adults That are their kids with a switch?  Well, yeah kids want PlayStation 5 too cuz it's edgy. It's cool. It's hip. It's new just like adults. I think We need to mature as a populous when it comes to understanding What people play and why they play it. All right?  Heck when I was a kid I played doom that came was way out of my age range. I played doom I was you know played Wolfenstein. I was killing some Nazis like It wasn't that big a deal But it was emrated Nobody cared at the time because the visuals weren't that realistic So, you know it is whether it is you know, don't really care that you were shooting You know a gun at a fireball on a screen and doom or some blob looking demon thing like nobody cared back then but as we got Older as things look more realistic as they're gorier and bloodier and just you know, it's just very Especially in first case of doom eternal very gruesome. Yeah, okay.  I can't blame children for that because hey dad was playing it My children happen to think I'm pretty awesome my daughter god I do YouTube that's like her dream is to be some big social media star as I try to curb her from it while doing YouTube see a Conundrum of being a parent as a youtuber that Fundamentally does this and enjoys it but knows it's not a realistic goal to be a youtuber to be a social media star if it happens great, but like Don't really think that should be a life goal but That being said hey Follow your dreams if I'll help her when the time is right when she's old enough I don't think I might Problem is I'm not really allowed to get into it until she's pretty much out of high school But anyways, that's just me guys. I am then it over just from the center prime Let me know what you think about these comments From the creator of yakuza. His name is a toshiro Nagushi, I don't I don't know a Nagashi Nagashi. I don't know I might have butchered it I apologize for that. I'm just trying to I Guess dispel another attack I suppose The demographic that plays Nintendo games and play switch because I am 34 years old and Well within Nintendo's 18 to 35 that they claim are the primary audience that plays switch. All right folks That's all I got. I dropped the mic, but like it's attached So how have folks under that a robot just from the center prime Let me know what you think about this down in the comments below if you enjoyed this video subscribe for more We're on our road to 70,000 subscribers if we can hit 70k in this month We got some special stuff happening for you in January. Otherwise, I'll catch you guys in the next video


Hey there fellow astronomers and night sky enthusiasts. Last night here in the Pacific Northwest, a bunch of people saw a string of lights in the sky. Understandably, when you walk outside and you see lights hovering in the sky slowly moving, it's very unsettling, a very unnatural feeling. Every time these kinds of things happen, people's imaginations race to absolutely incredible places. What we saw in the night sky was satellites. These were 60 or so Starlink satellites. This is the wireless internet company that Elon Musk and SpaceX is running that's in the news a lot. A group of these satellites had launched from Florida on a Falcon 9 rocket earlier that day, Star Wars Day, May the 4th, and they had gone around the Earth a few times, and so they were still in a very low orbit. It was nine o'clock, the sun was in the right place, the satellites were low, and what you were seeing was just reflected light. Now we call this line of satellites a Starlink train because it kind of looks like little cars on a choo-choo train moving through. People are reporting seeing these kinds of Starlink train events all over the world. But as a professional astronomer and someone who cares about like the environment, they're more than a little bit annoying. When we wanna study the edge of the universe, we need to be able to see it. And if there are bright things moving in front of us, we can't. This is actually a huge issue that a lot of people are concerned about here at UW, here in Seattle and elsewhere.  Now the satellites we saw last night were brand new, fresh out of the rocket. And they're gonna rise up over the next few weeks and get fainter. You won't be able to see them with your eyes. But we have telescopes that are the size of buildings and they can see them. SpaceX has been working with astronomers and with scientists to try to make the Starlink satellites a little fainter, a little darker. They've tried painting them and putting various covers on them. But the fact of the matter is you're gonna have tens of thousands of shiny things up in low Earth orbit and they're just gonna be in the way. This is a complicated issue because it involves technology and money and powerful people and it involves like environmentalism which doesn't always have the best PR apparently. Humanity has a long tradition of whenever we go into a new frontier or a new space we feel like we can just use it however we want. We've done this with the oceans and with animals and with land and with resources. As a species, we take a lot of things and consume them and use them. And we are not always mindful of our impact on our environment. Low Earth orbit is part of the Earth environment. Very much so. Throwing thousands of pounds of heavy metals and glass up in orbit and letting it come down and burn up and land on the planet.  It was incredible and dramatic and beautiful even. Like fireworks are beautiful. And most of us said, including me, we don't expect much of this to hit the ground. It's not a big issue. Lo and behold, a couple of days later, people found a carbon fiber wrapped tank, something the size of a small table. I would not want that following on me. And look, you should not be actively concerned about space debris hitting you in the head. It's extremely unlikely. And most of the time NASA and spacefaring companies are able to get their debris to land where they want it in the ocean far away from people. But just basic statistics is gonna say that if we keep launching more and more of these things, if every week we're putting 60 more starlings up in orbit and every week more and more hardware is going in orbit, more stuff is gonna come down on us. I don't know what the balance is. I love outer space, both as an astronomer and just as a space nerd and space enthusiast. I love outer space. I love that we have people on the space station and that's an international cooperation. I got to go see a Falcon 9 launch, one of the very same SpaceX rockets that are taking starling satellites into orbit. I got to go see the test mission launch a couple years ago and it like brought literal tears to my eyes. It was an amazing and powerful experience to see something leave the earth. And I don't think we should go back to a time when we don't do those kinds of things. But what I know is that in the absence of any kind of mindfulness, of any kind of dare I say regulation about these issues, we're going to use and even abuse the resource that is low Earth orbit. We could put so much stuff up there that it becomes impossible for people to launch into space, space telescopes that taxpayers spend hundreds of millions or billions of dollars building get obliterated. And yes, more garbage will fall down and maybe somebody will get hurt. I don't know what the balance is. I don't know what the answer is. But I know we're only going to figure it out if we keep talking about it and if we keep looking up.


It's very easy to accept pain when you train, when you do something physically active. It makes your day a little bit happier to know you've done something actually productive, which releases a lot of chemicals in your brain that allows you to mask some of the pain that's going on. And then when you're at home at night, you're able to say, well, I heard this bad today. I'm this mentally exhausted today because I actually did something. I didn't just wake up and hurt. So it's tricks I've learned to trick the body into accepting pain. There's no point in just sitting at home crying about the pain. It doesn't go away.