Hello, I'm Ty Davis. You may remember me from the film DevOps, Handle with Care, and Revenge of the Waterfall. Organizations looking to control development assets should take into consideration the benefits that Git has to offer. Git allows a wide variety of branching strategies and workflows. Because of this, many organizations end up with workflows that are too complicated, not clearly defined or not integrated with issue tracking systems. Since many organizations new to Git have no conventions for how to work with it, the repositories can quickly become messy. The biggest problem is that many long running branches and merges that all contain part of the changes. People have a hard time figuring out which branch has the latest code or which branch to deploy to production. There are many valuable approaches you can take, such as making a production branch that reflects the deployed code, you can deploy a new version by merging master into the production branch or creating stable branches using master as a starting point and branches as possible. It should be common to protect the long live branches, for example, the master branch so that most developers can't modify them. So if you want to merge into a protected branch, assign your merge request to someone with maintainer permissions. Permissions in GitLab are fundamentally defined around the idea of having read or write permission to the repository and branches. To impose further restrictions on certain branches, they can be protected by preventing pushes from everybody except users with maintainer permission, preventing anyone from force pushing to the branch, preventing anyone from deleting the branch. So therefore like that, that helps you make any branch a protected branch is strongly encouraged to get code reviewed by reviewer as soon as there's any code to review, to get a second opinion on the chosen solution and implementation, and an extra pair of eyes looking for bugs, security issues, or are there any other problems. The reviewer can be from a different team, but often it's someone who knows the domain really well. Before assigning a merge request to maintainer for approval and merge, you should be confident that it actually solves the problem it was meant to solve. And it does that in the most appropriate way, satisfying all the requirements. So there are no remaining bugs or vulnerabilities, or any underlying issues. Code ownership reduces the risk that the absence or unavailability of any one developer will start or slow work. This increases the chance that the overall design results from sound technical decisions, rather than from some kind of social structure. Retaining the privacy and integrity of your data is crucial. And you can use a GPG key to sign commits made into a repository, enabling dependable data protection that makes it easier for creating digital signatures and file encryption. With GPG, you have a system for encryption of data that afterwards can be transmitted through open communication channels such as email cloud providers, messaging, and many others that are used daily. Protecting and securing product assets is important for every organization. Let's talk about the importance of having the right practices in place to control changes to development assets. Be sure to check out our next video and to continue our conversation around source code management. Go on get


We have a lot of choices to make about our diet, add to that doing the right thing when it comes to preventing or treating a chronic disease, fighting a virus, or losing weight, and suddenly our nutrition choices can seem almost overwhelming. Well, I'm here to help. Welcome to the Nutrition Facts Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Greger. It's time for the Nutrition Facts Grab Bag, where we look at the science and whole variety of topics. Today we start with an unusual finding. Did you know that burning incense has been found to generate about four times as a particulate matter as burning cigarettes? Here's the story. Frankincense and myrrh date back to thousands of years before the three wise men, the burning of which is incense may have actually had a hygienic function, like maybe repelling mosquitoes. And when put to the test, incense fumes were able to kill off some bacteria and mold in the air, but may also carry health risks. Although the adverse health effects of secondhand tobacco smoke are well recognized, the impact of burning incense in the home has received less attention. But burning incense has been found to generate like four times as a particulate matter as cigarettes, so incense maybe even works. No wonder home incense use may have significant adverse health effects, particularly in the heart and lungs, including childhood asthma. No wonder since the incense smoke particle size peaked down in the danger range, so ultrafine they can float down to the deepest parts of the lungs. It's not just the little ash particles in the smoke, though. There's carbon monoxide, nitric oxides, sulfur dioxide, carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and volatile organic compounds like benzene and formaldehyde. The World Health Organization suggests limiting indoor formaldehyde to about 80 parts per billion, but even with a window open during the hour or so incense is burning, formaldehyde levels exceed the safety limit. What does this all mean in terms of disease outcomes? Studies on rats show incense can do all sorts of terrible things, but what about people? A study of thousands of children followed over time found that exposure to household incense burning was associated with impaired lung function, reduced lung function growth, and increased risks of respiratory diseases and symptoms. Daily exposures associated with impaired lung function in adolescence, too, though interestingly those who had pets at home appeared to have better lung function, something I noted previously, how having a dog or cat in the house during early life may protect against childhood asthma analogy. What about the heart? Long-term exposure to incense burning in the home environment was associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular mortality. Approximately 8% of heart disease deaths and 12% of stroke deaths could potentially be attributed to incense use, though they were looking at long-term exposure, so like incense burning at home on a daily basis for more than 20 years. What about cancer? Temple workers exposed to incense day in and day out were found to have evidence of significantly more DNA damage, including DNA strand breaks. Does this translate into greater cancer risk? One unsolved mystery has been why non-smoking Asian women have such high lung cancer rates. Might it be incense? Probably not, since the association between incense use and lung cancer remains inconclusive. Though incense use does appear to be linked to cancers of the upper respiratory tract, as well as brain tumors among children whose mothers were exposed to incense. Three times the odds, even more than that of second-hand smoke. In fact, even more than the consumption of baloney sandwiches. Process meat consumption only appears to at most double brain tumor risk among children. Even without tumors, a study of 15,000 infants found that household incense burning was associated with a delay in brain development milestones, such as when they start to walk. And then on the other side of the life cycle, incense exposure among older adults was associated with reduced cognitive performance and adverse structural changes in the brain. The researchers conclude that this calls for safer practices, such as avoiding burning incense indoors or using safer incense alternatives. So-called environmentally friendly types of incense have been put to the test and they were found to contain even higher concentrations of several potentially carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Despite being a recognized health hazard, burning incense remains in widespread use. And at the very least, we may want to avoid burning incense in the home when susceptible individuals are present, such as the very young, the very old, or people with a family history of allergies or pre-existing cardiovascular or respiratory disease. One innovative suggestion is electronic incense, like the e-cigarette of the incense world, so you can get the fragrance without the combustion byproducts of smoke. Most of the concern about e-cigarette-related adverse events traditionally have evolved around the nicotine, which wouldn't be a problem with e-incense, the concern that e-cigarette use would lead to real cigarette use. But now that there have been thousands of cases of lung injury associated with vaping, and we're still actually not sure what's causing the issue, it seems to me we should figure that out before we push for the electronic incense equivalent. One option in the meantime is scented candles, which, under normal conditions of use, do not appear to pose known health risks to the consumer. Next up, we look at specific foods that have been shown in randomized control trials to improve symptoms like hot flashes. There's a great variety of symptoms suffered by women undergoing menopause. They're the so-called vasomotor symptoms, like night sweats and hot flashes, difficulty sleeping or full-on insomnia, vaginal dryness and pain during sex, as well as adverse effects on mood, including full-blown depression. Might exercise help? Exercise can certainly help with physical and psychological quality of life in general, but unfortunately there's no evidence for the effects of exercise on menopause-specific symptoms. You know, researchers are getting desperate when they try to see if giving people big placenta will help. Spoiler alert, it doesn't. Well, we know oxidative stress, which is a consequence of excessive free oxygen radicals or impaired antioxidant defense, is linked not only to diseases such as diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular disease, but also menopausal symptoms like hot flashes. Low free oxygen radical defenses associated with more menopausal symptoms, just like having a diet with more antioxidants is associated with fewer menopausal symptoms. In fact, high intake of fruits and vegetables may delay the onset of menopause in the first place. Thought to be because the presence of antioxidants in fruits and vegetables may counteract the adverse effects of free radicals on the number of functional eggs you still have in your ovaries, whereas the reason high meat consumption has been related to degenerative diseases may not just be the saturated fat and cholesterol, but the pro-oxidation products generated during their production, storage, digestion, and the metabolism of meat. Similarly, since a pro-inflammatory diet has also been associated with higher menopause-specific somatic symptoms, meaning like hot flashes and sleep issues, that would mean moving towards a more plant-based diet packed with anti-inflammatory components like fiber and away from pro-inflammatory foods containing saturated fat and cholesterol. No wonder whole-plant food's intake has been associated with fewer menopausal symptoms. In terms of specific foods, poultry and skim dairy products may be particularly bad, whereas soy milk seemed to help. So women may derive benefit from lower consumption of poultry and skim dairy and a greater consumption of vegetables than soy milk. You don't really know, though, until you put it to the test. And indeed, women randomized to drink soy milk reduced their menopausal symptoms by 20% within 12 weeks. No wonder that those eating strictly plant-based diets report less bothersome menopausal symptoms. Among women undergoing menopause, vegans reported less bothersome symptoms and within the diet groups more vegetables and in the meat-eating group less flesh food was associated with less bothersome symptoms as well. So eating a plant-based diet may be helpful for women in their menopausal transition who prefer a natural means to manage their symptoms. Consistent with all the other studies demonstrating reduced menopausal symptoms in those consuming greater quantities of plant-based foods and less meat. But again, maybe there are other reasons healthier eaters have fewer symptoms. You can't prove cause and effect until you guessed it, an interventional trial to see if change in your diet actually reduces symptoms. And in this study, where women were encouraged to decrease fat and increase fruit, vegetable, and whole grain intake, they were significantly more likely to eliminate their phase of motor symptoms like hot flashes and night sweats compared to the control group. So it's certainly not all or nothing. And within a plant-based diet, those randomized to a meat-free diet with daily flaxseed oil, walnuts, and almonds did better than those randomized to the same diet, but with daily extra virgin olive oil. After 16 weeks, the vegetarian diet that was rich in omega-3s did better reducing vasomotor symptom frequency. In fact, even just two teaspoons worth of ground flaxseeds a day alone can significantly decrease menopausal symptoms to about the same extent as hormone replacement therapy, but without the side effects. Finally today, we have more info on that fabulous spice, fenugreek, and how it can help control blood sugar. The spice fenugreek is considered to be one of humanity's oldest medicinal plants. What can it do? In my last video on fenugreek, I explored the evidence showing you can improve sexual function in both men and women, decrease menstrual pain, and boost milk production in lactating mothers. And what are the side effects? 15 are randomized controlled trials show, on average, a significant improvement in cholesterol levels. And a dozen other studies show significant improvements in both long and short-term blood sugar control in diabetics and prediabetics, using an average of about a half teaspoon a day over a period of an average of two months. Results clearly indicate that fenugreek is an inexpensive, low-risk dietary supplement that has potential to improve blood sugar control in diabetes. What exactly is the mechanism by which it lowers blood sugars? There's a peculiar amino acid in fenugreek that increases insulin release from the pancreas. The peculiar phorehydroxy isoleucine has been described as an efficient compound in the regulation of insulin secretion. Due to the fact that it acts as a secretagogue in the presence of elevated blood glucose concentrations, it has been proposed for the potential treatment of insulin resistance, diabetes, and obesity. Now, there's a class of diabetes drugs that does the same thing, sulfonereas, sold as like glucotrol, gliburide, micronase, gliposide. The problem is that the increased insulin secretion whether you need it or not, and so there's a risk of severe hypoglycemia, driving your blood sugars too low. The funky fenugreek amino acid, on the other hand, only boosts it when you need it. When your blood sugars are normal, it has no effect. It only seems to stimulate extra insulin release when you need it most when your blood sugars are high. What these researchers did was after consent was obtained from family members, pancreas were obtained from brain-dead organ donors. Put the insulin-secreting cells in a petri dish at a low blood sugar concentration, and they release a little insulin, and at high blood sugar levels, they release more insulin. That makes sense. That's what they're supposed to do, since insulin is the hormone your body releases when trying to bring down your blood sugars. Add in some of that fenugreek amino acid though, and you can boost insulin production. Great! But if that happened even at the low blood sugar concentration too, it would be like the drugs and you could dip too low. But no, when you don't need extra insulin, no fenugreek effect. What about the role of fenugreek in the prevention of type 2 diabetes? A three-year randomized controlled study of the efficacy of fenugreek on men and women diagnosed with prediabetes. Those randomized to fenugreek were told to take one-third teaspoons of fenugreek powder twice a day before meals, and both the fenugreek and controlled groups that didn't get any fenugreek were both given identical diet and lifestyle advice. And by the end of the study, the cumulative incidence rate of diabetes was reduced significantly in the fenugreek group. Check it out. Those who didn't get the fenugreek had a four times higher chance of developing diabetes, and you could already see the group starting to diverge within six months and all from just a few cents worth of a spice every day. If you yourself want to intimately support this kind of amazing research in the future, be sure to register at organ-donor.gov. We would love it if you could share with us your stories about reinventing your health through evidence-based nutrition. Go to nutritionfacts.org slash testimonials. We may be able to share it on social media to help inspire others. To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, or studies mentioned here, please go to the Nutrition Facts podcast landing page. There you'll find all the detailed information you need, plus links to all the sources we cite for each of these topics. For a vital timely text on the pathogens that cause pandemics, you can order the e-book, audio book, or the hard copy of my latest book, How to Survive a Pandemic, or go to your local public library, for that matter. For more recipes, check out my new How Not to Die? It's Cookbook. It's beautifully designed with more than 100 recipes for delicious and nutritious meals. And of course, all the proceeds I received from all the sales of my books go to charity. Nutritionfacts.org is a non-profit, science-based public service where you can sign up for free daily updates on the latest in nutrition research via bite-sized videos and articles. Everything on the website is free. There are no ads, no corporate sponsorships, no kickbacks. It's strictly non-commercial, not selling anything. I just put it up as a public service, as the labor of love as a tribute to my grandmother, whose own life was saved with evidence-based nutrition.


You know about it. F Mary kill. Okay, go, you got another one? Yeah. Okay. Molly Allen edition. Oh, okay. Fafa. Okay. Mohanlou. Subban. It's kind of the same as the other one that you did. You married Fafa. No, no, no.  No, no, no, no, no. It's like the choices I'm making. I would marry Mohanlou. Okay. And I would have Cuddly. Yeah, Cuddly and protective and would kick people's butts for me. And then Subban was the one I'd roll my hay with. And Fafa, just because I would love to watch the dramatic entity, he would be such a great, he'd give me a thespianatic death. I could never kill Fafa. No, that's your choice. I'd marry Fafa. Okay, what about the other two? I know what you're going to say. You're going to go for the more cushion, the better the push.  I'm Rick. Let us know who you would have married and kill. Come on. I don't know why I just did all these things. It's just everything today. Today we got a food video. Yay, this couple explores Kerala street food. Okay, cool. Have you ever done a Kerala street food? I don't know. I know we've done Kerala food. I just don't know that we've done Kerala street food. No idea. I would love to have some though. Yeah. Heck yeah. And wait till we can go to Kerala. Yeah. It's so amazing. Here we go. Can't wait to go back to India. Period. Beautiful state of Kerala and India. Now, as soon as we got here, we got a lot of requests to try certain foods around here. Ooh. Oh, it does suck. You can discover a lot of culture through the food that they eat. So our first video of this Kerala series is gonna be a food tour. It's a first for me, it's a first for you. Let's see what they've got. Everything we're gonna experience is a traditional juice from this South Indian state. And it is called Kulaki Sarba. Kulaki means shaken and Sarba means juice. It is a way of just welcoming us here and getting us to cool down, freshen down before we go and start filling up. Let's go. He just broke the ice in his hand. Crap was that? It's Tom Cruise and cocktail. Dang. A lot of skill. Ooh. So this is Indian Sada, Kulaki Sarba. It has got lemon, sugar syrup, chia seeds, and a lot of ice. It looks kind of like a lemonade, it looks like. Yeah. Looks like it has fish eggs in it. Ooh. Those are the seeds. Those are the seeds that are in this drink I get. They're so good, they're squishy. Oh, like oba? No, no, no, no, different. They're a version of a chocolate shake. And it's kind of like a fish egg. Yeah. Oh, what the? Definitely tip that, man. I did that to your brother last night. Wow. Look at the bubbling. I like her headdress.  You're very good, very good. That was incredible. Tip that. Love it. Great way to start. I'm cool, I'm centered, I'm focused on to the next stop. She's going to like that stinker. The most popular street food, all of Kerala, is something called Payam Bhun, which is essentially a banana fritter, and something you like. And the most popular thing here, I have to try it. So we've come to the streets of Kerala. I'm going to try this thing. Oh, I bet this is going to be amazing. Thank you so much. All right. So here's what you can see. You can get a close-up of that. The banana fritter, the most popular street food. I bet that's going to be amazing. All of Kerala. Oh, I can practically smell it. You can see the banana caramelized from the inside. It's gorgeous. Almost looks like fried fish a little bit. I just got a really crispy part, and it was. Now we're going to try what they call is the second most popular street food in Kerala. And it's something called sugyin. And sugyin is essentially a sugar cane, or they call it jaggery, that is put into a bowl and deep-fried. I mean, sugar, deep-fried, you can't really go wrong with that. Deep-fried jaggery, payam Bhun, sugyin. Deep-fried jaggery. Have you ever had that? He knew before I even asked. I know exactly what you want. Probably hard of spelling over there. You can see the fritter in the batter, and it looks dark on the inside. But the only way to really know what this is or what it's like is to actually indulge. So we're going to try one. And this one, la. Oh, why? It's like sweet lentils. Put it into a bowl covered with batter. Dang, that was a deep-fried jaggery. So we're taking a short break on our food tour, and I needed a soft drink. Thumbs up. Yeah! Yeah! Another staple of Kerala is something called panakya, which is in guava.  They either put chili powder, and I think we're getting ours with salt. So, you know, healthy guava. Mexican culture has something similar. It's very similar. There's a lot of similarities. Talked about that before, and Trani put in a lot of similar between Mexican foods and culture. And apparently, you can eat it with the skin with everything. Around the same place, geographically, yeah. One bowl with chili powder on top, and one bowl with that. Here we go. Smell that. Oh. Well, that's got a kick to it. She's loving it. She's just going. Yeah! Ignoring the chili powder, like it doesn't exist. I don't know how she does it, but... Oh, wow. It's so nice. Enjoy it here. Enjoy it here. Oh, my God. That's spicy, man. Oh, wow. Oh, now it's in my throat. Okay. She's just... Delicious. She's just killing it. Definitely a lot more spice than I'm used to. Whoo. It's the gap. It's all good. Yeah, I wouldn't be partaking in that one. It says you and me right here. It happened a few times, like in Manchester. I know. He's having an existential crisis. Ooh, pomegranate. It's delicious. So, we are at Pai Dosa right now. We're about to try one of the major dishes of Kerala. So, what a dosa is. It's a cooked, thin layered rice batter. You're finding good dosas here. And what they do is while it is cooking, they start adding ingredients in there. You can't find a good one here. You can have potato, veggie, onions, whale eggs, all these different things depending on what you want. Whale eggs. Anything based on your first preferences. And then around that, they put various sauces and chutneys for you to dip in. So, we're trying one of the classic ones. I think ours has got potato because we like that. Yes. Potato eggs and a bunch of different potato dosa and filter coffee. So, what happens here? Here you've got one of the dosas. You can make some filter coffee again. I have a machine for it. You do all the filling in there? You do? I have the filter coffee thingy. Oh. All the sauces. I made it on my channel once. I can go for that right now. Any day of the week. Any time of day. Especially in the morning. And she is completely silent right now. I don't want to interrupt her process. You know, on holiday, you don't get calories, right? Nope. They don't count. They don't count. That's my kids. I like her. Anywhere in here would be concrete without a classic chai. And we are here at the Sri Balaji Coffee House to try some classic Kerala chai. This tea shop is pretty famous. It's run by an elderly couple, Mohana and Vijayan, who are famous because they traveled around to countries all over the world. I think it was something like 25 countries and introducing their culture. Which I think is... How you build bridges, right? The way they make chai basically from what I know is hot milk, very strong tea, loosely tea, sugar, a little pinch of water and you drink it and enjoy it. Kind of like... He meant ginger. A couple of goals. And cardamom. But there's different kinds. They don't always have the cardamom. Ginger. Ginger is a pretty interesting one. Every day, they travel the world together. Even at an old age. You see so much love for each other. It's beautiful. Here we are at the classic chai. Once again, we need a chai water. Around the world. I can't tell you how many places we go by. I'm in Johnny's. We can set up a chai stand right there. Like, yes, we could. On to the next stop. See you there. Now it is time for dinner. And we are at the traditional Kathukada. Which are basically roadside shacks for a classic Kerala dinner. And that is paratha. So we are going to go find it. Go taste it. The way to end their day. Let's go try it. Paratha beef. Yes, please. Thank you. You understood me. So my language skills are improving. Goodbye.  So here they have the beef station. And they got all the spices and the onions. So there we have the... The paratha is amazing. Now it is going to add the beef to it. They put it on a separate plate. Give me some of that. Oh, wow. Align some onions. And now just tear it and dig in. It probably costs like... Additional roadside... 30 dollars. 30 cents or something like that. Another option you can add, we just found out, is you can add an omelette with the beef.   We're going to go big and go home. Nice to see you. You know what? I like her. Why not? A bit of lemon. Here we go. The paratha looks amazing. No words. No need for words. I'm in a good place. It has been interesting doing this food tour today. I think for us, it was a first. We've never made a food tour video. What did you learn? Great shot. That was a great shot. They were probably trying to get the thumbnail there. There's a lot about the people, their kindness and their warmth when we came to try something. The passion they have for what they're making and what they're serving, no matter what it is. Whether that's a cup of tea, a bit of juice, a curry, there's always a magic to it. There's always an excitement to it. And that's what we learned through the food of Kerala today. That there can be magic in everything. No matter how big, no matter how small, if you have love and passion for it. Thank you so much for all the beautiful food. We're gonna get finished. Much love. They're very lovely. Yeah. They're lovely. She's silent but sweet and he's very positive, which is just how we are on this channel. Yeah, I really like them a lot.  That's true. Anyways, yeah, that was good. I could eat everything they showed on there. I would like to try everything, but I don't think some of the... Yeah, the chili powder, you'd probably have a similar response to the chili powder aspect, but... But they were eating fruit, was that? That was like a... It was a... It wasn't a mango, I don't think. No, it wasn't. It was sort of a pea? It wasn't a papaya? Papaya. Was it? It was a papaya. Yeah, but it looked amazing. I really want Indian food now. I know. And all we can eat... Light years north Indian food. There's one... It's a place that's pretty good. It's a Punjabi place. It's close to that Indian store by my old place. Well, I'm blessed to have... I've been eating more Indian food than ever for two reasons. One, my Bengali wife makes stuff for us to eat. You mean? Yeah, and our landlady, she had us over dinner a few times and had some delicious food been eating with our hands, the feasting. It's been... Well, and actually, you know, where she goes to get lunch, she likes to go, and we've been to the plate... Indian suites of Tupang and Sherman Way, where we went for one of our very first places to get food for food video, and it's a grocery store, and you walk up and you order it's one by a Punjabi family. They... When we've eaten there, and oh, you've eaten there many times. We just wet there recently. That's where I get a lot of my stuff. Yeah. They got good food there. You should go there when the holidays are, because they like for the valley, they have little fireworks. Oh, really? Nice. So, whenever you... I'm sure they'll have... Yeah, it's actually, now that we're back in the valley, that's where we do actually another one that's about... You guys don't care about this? Yeah, it's like like a half a mile up to Banga. Okay. It's on the right. On the right hand side up to Banga. I know what I've seen. It's another good... It's not as good as that one. It's a grocery store. Cool. By itself. Yeah. In case you want to know. It's where we get our teets, where we get our milk. They have some pretty good chai at that one too. Yeah, we get our... And the stuff that we take at home, we get our incense, we get our thumbs up, we get our biscuits, we get our... And we get some chai. Yeah. But... I'll have her lessen the... I'll have her lessen the... Immediately smiling. I'll have her lessen the ginger. Because I remember you guys don't like as much ginger as she did. No. Okay, with ginger she could literally have the entire thing, just taste like ginger-ju-drinking. She could probably could... They could loves... In trying to loving ginger. Sometimes it's like really spicy for me because Sometimes ginger can be spicy. It can be spicy. It can absolutely be spicy.  Let us know what other food videos we can react to. This is great. Oh, that will. I'm so hungry now. Let us know down below.


Seriously What's up money gigs the V here welcome to another video guys so into this video We are going to talk about a firm which is a pay later platform that has filed to go public They filed back last year and they're listed. They is coming up here. I think January 13 So we're gonna cover that into this video and see if this is a buy or a wait But before we get started guys feel new to the channel We talk about how to earn money how to save money how to invest and build wealth So that's something that interests you go ahead and hit that subscribe button and your notification bell So you don't miss out on new content again a firm like I mentioned is a company that is in the process of going public And so far what I've been reading about them the numbers look good But again when I look at the platform and I'm thinking to myself. What's the business model? Basically, it allows people to buy things now and pay later as you can see here on the website We say is pay at your own pace. So basically the company was actually started by one of the previous co-founders of PayPal so it's not a company that is just out there somebody that has done it before Being able to be part of PayPal to where PayPal is at today So the company does have some reputation. So that's I just want to put that out there again This company has filed to to go public and they did actually file last year I think November 18th that's when they actually file and they're gonna be under the ticket symbol af Rm again, I'm gonna repeat that a F RM That's gonna be the ticket symbol and they expect to offer about 24.6 million shares Price range would be somewhere between 33 dollars and 38 dollars. So somewhere between that that price range So the company operates in short-term finance market So they actually integrate their platform with popular e-commerce websites like Shopify that you know out there the big ones and big comments So they actually integrate so you can actually go on the website you buy stuff. It links you with a bank You get a payment plan that you want for that particular Item that you bought and then you can start paying later So they're kind of like taking away the traditional credit card But in this case you they give you a one-time fee that you just pay and so you don't have to be making a monthly Payments with interest what I want us to do is I want us to kind of talk a little bit about The numbers for the company because obviously the company is there as they're doing great But what sort of numbers are do they do kiss to me? Those are that's what's gonna help us see if we want to invest in this company or not So for the last three months ended in September of last year the company actually reported about a hundred and seventy four million dollars in revenue and a net loss of about 15 million dollars and then For 2019 they actually reported about eighty seven million dollars in revenue and about 30 million dollars In net loss. So if you look from 2019 to 2020, they've actually cut back that net loss from 30 Million to 15 million. So I think to me that's a good sign And so they are latest filing as you can see if you look at their s1 filing You can see that a company has actually grow About 77 percent year over year. Again, if they showing consistent growth year over year, that is a good thing So, I mean when I look at that and I look at the fact that the revenue is growing I think this one is one that you can definitely give a shot Straight and right out of the game most of these Platforms or most of these IPOs they're gonna spike because if we take again from what we have last year from just general tech IPOs We had a crazy 2020 a lot of companies went public some truth back some through IPOs like Airbnb and then the valuations was just insane. So these guys to gain their pricing They're just share price about between 33 and 38 I think this is gonna come out of the gate and start trading maybe somewhere around 45 or $50. So again If you are not day trading it, then I'll say just wait because usually when it comes out like that is always that Whole chaos where everybody wants a piece of it and then you're gonna push the price up You know when things set it down, it's gonna pull back and then you can actually buy in for long-term investors So this one, I'm just gonna day trade it once it goes public again. The listed date is January 13 2021 so I'm gonna day trade this one then wait to see if there's some Opportunity to buy to hold long time because again right out right out of the gate This thing is gonna just gonna skyrocket But when when when it set us down and that's why I'm looking for a long-term position. So that's my take So let me know in the comment section. What do you think about the company affirm? Do you agree with your business model which is buying out pay later? Is this sort of encouraging people to kind of get in debt? Again for me, I'm looking for my investor standpoint If they if there's a service out there that people are using and you can make money investing in it Hey, I mean, I'll take advantage of it and and go ahead and make some money So let me know again in the comp and in the comment section and before you guys invest in companies like this I want you to do your homework do your research So I'm gonna put the link to the investor presentation as well as the S1 filing So you can definitely go there take a look for yourself before you start making Investments like this and also if you're new to the channel guys We talk about how to earn money how to save money how to invest and build wealth So if that's something that interests you go ahead and hit that subscribe button and any notification bell so you don't miss out on New content if you're looking to get started with investing as well We both is still doing a promotion right now If you sign up and deposit a hundred dollars you get four free stocks links in the description below And as always always do your homework do your due diligence.


I'm Ronaldo Lamos, I'm the director of the Institute for Technology and Society of Rio de Janeiro. And we're just at the end of the artificial intelligence and inclusion seminar that just took place in Rio. And for me, the most important thing that we discussed is what is the impact of artificial intelligence over inequality. So it seems like artificial intelligence is going to be a game in which the winner takes it all. So the question is, who's going to be the winner? Is it the United States? Is it China? So does that mean that a lot of resources are going to flow to those two countries? And what does it mean for the entire geopolitical repercussions of that? Number one thing is to invest in science. I think developing countries have to take science as a priority. We cannot afford not to participate in these debates. Second thing is to invest in education. So training people for new skills is also extremely important in a moment in which there's a lot of possibilities of job insecurity and transformations in the job market. So these are the new forms of infrastructure. The infrastructure of the future will be investing in people. That's the way that it will actually prevent a lot of the bad effects that artificial intelligence might have. In Brazil, we have the micro-civil law, which is a bill of rights for the internet. And basically what it does, it regulates fundamental rights online. So I think that can be a good inspiration for artificial intelligence, especially because the process in which it was built was a collaborative process. We call it a multi-stakeholder process. And I think that's the best way to build public policy regarding technology, when all sectors of society actually have a say in the outcome of regulation. So I think like this experience that Brazil has had with the micro-civil can actually inform in terms of process how we should deal with challenges, for instance, like artificial intelligence and the policy issues that it's going to bring.


HBC Dutchess Radio, welcome back. I'm your host, Jared Carter. We are continuing our coverage of the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic. And we are having specific emphasis on our dynamic leaders, faculty, staff, students, alumni who are playing a significant role in keeping black communities and campus communities protected and informed during this response period. There is no better guest to have on than our distinguished leader today. He is Dr. James Hildreth, the president of the Manhattan Medical College in Nashville, who has made headlines over weeks for his expertise and his forward thinking, along with that of his faculty, in trying to develop medical solutions and treatment options with a particular emphasis on the African-American community during this pandemic. So, doc, it is an honor to have you on today, man. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so pleased to be here. So today you announced that, or at least this week, leading up to this, you've been talking about the priority that the nation has to take in protecting the lives of brothers and sisters, particularly those of us in African-American communities, where we know that the statistics on our infection and death rate are higher and disparate in comparison to other ethnic groups. You have recently talked about Mahary's effort to develop antiviral treatments for this. This is obviously a huge thing in breaking news. Can you talk about that process and what is happening at Mahary to help the nation and the world, in fact, get to a better place with this pandemic? So we have a great team of scientists that Mahary, who are interested in infectious diseases, they've done work on HIV, of course, which is my field, on Zika, parasitic infections, terpenisomes. And so clearly, like the rest of the scientific world, we'd like to turn our expertise to try to find a solution for this horrible virus that's causing a rick and such havoc in our communities. And so we're doing two things, really. One, myself and one of our faculty members are working on antivirals. We're actually taking drugs that we were developing for HIV and another one for Zika. We are changing the composition slightly to make it targeted to the coronavirus. And we're gonna be evaluating those two compounds to see whether or not they have some value in slowing down the virus or blocking infection by the virus. And I'm very excited about that. The other thing that we're doing is we set up an assessment center for COVID-19 back in early March. We weren't able to launch it right away because we couldn't get supplies that we needed, but we launched it at the end of the month and we've now tested hundreds of people from our community. And I just feel it's very important that we do that because, as you said, the virus when it infects members of our community, the outcomes are not as good as they are for other communities. I heard you on another interview talk about the, and I guess I don't have the right terminology for it, but the infection rate for this is about a four. I mean, for every one person, there's a possibility of spreading it to four people. Can you kind of explain that to folks who've never really gotten into the details about what this virus is and how it gets transmitted so quickly to different people? So in virology, we rate the infectiousness or contagiousness in viruses according to how many people an infected person could possibly transmit the virus to. A familiar virus is measles. It has an effective, basic reproductive rate of 12 to 18. That means that every person who is infected by measles who does not have their virus controlled can infect somewhere between 12 and 18 people. The number for the coronavirus in this case is considerably lower, but it's still significant. Depending on the area of the country you're looking, it's gonna be somewhere between two and five. And if we just say that that number is four, that means that every person infected with coronavirus could pass the virus on to four other people. And that would mean if you do the math, that a single person over the period of 60 days could be responsible for a million people getting infected. That's just how infectious this virus is. And that's how we get to the numbers that we have worldwide. For African Americans, there's such an emphasis, at least over the last two weeks, about the disproportionate numbers that we're facing in infections and death rate. And so much of that conversation has talked about these underlying health conditions, asthma, and cardiovascular issues, and things with lung capacity. As a doctor, as a practitioner, and as an academician, do you look at that and say, hey, this is a hard fact? Or do you look at it and say, well, there's more to the story than that? There's a other narrative beyond the one that just leaks out black folks who are just unhealthier than other people. Well, there are layers to this, and I would start with the biology. The biology is that when a virus infects our bodies, the immune system is responsible for expelling it from our bodies. So if your immune system is not functioning at the highest level, you will not get rid of the virus as quickly as someone who might. The other thing is viruses tend to damage the organs that they target. So for example, hepatitis virus causes liver damage and because it infects the liver, there are viruses that infect the heart that cause myocarditis, they cause heart failure because they infect the heart and it fails. In this case, coronavirus is targeting the lungs. And so if you have any condition whatsoever that compromises your lung function, you're not gonna do as well as somebody who does not have that. So if you smoke, if you vape, if you have asthma, if you have any other condition that makes your lungs less than optimal, when you get infected by coronavirus, we can predict that you're likely to have a poor outcome. And there are other things that fit that category, cardiovascular disease, asthma, diabetes, hypertension. Those are all things that either in combination of the immune system and our lungs, they cause them not to function as highly.  Because as you know, for decades now, this is not a new thing. There's been a disproportionate burden of those diseases in our communities. And a great example is the other pandemic that's still raging, which is HIV. We're only 13% of the population, but 43% of all the HIV infections occur in African-Americans. So this is not new. And the biology explains it. The social constructs that make us less healthy than others, they will have to be addressed. And I think that I'm hoping that one thing that will come out of this pandemic is that leaders in the appropriate settings will make the decision needed to change that. But for right now, because of social determinants of health, we are less healthy and the virus is racing to our communities and causing much more harm than it is in other communities. Let's go back a little bit because you raise an interesting point. One of the effective things that HBCUs in particular do is they build awareness in black communities about health maladies and treatment options and the importance of going to a doctor regularly, the importance of participating in trials. Can you kind of reflect on when you first heard about this novel virus and when the moment kind of occurred for you, like man, this is gonna be serious and this is gonna hurt or kill a lot of people? In January, when I started reading the reports coming out of China, and keep in mind that China is a very racially homogeneous place. There's not a lot compared to other countries, of course, that genetic diversity in terms of racial attributes is much less in China than it would be elsewhere. But even in China, if you smoked, had heart disease, diabetes or high blood pressure, they also observed that those individuals tend to die much more often and have severe disease. So if you extrapolate to the fact that this virus is definitely gonna spread around the world, and unfortunately, we as a country got a late start because of the politics and just be honest about that. We had a late start, but knowing that, they had observed that in China and knowing that the virus was gonna spread around the globe, you could extrapolate fairly quickly and a lot of people did, including me, but this is gonna be bad news for our communities. And unfortunately, that has turned out to be the case. What has been your reaction to the social distancing guidelines are at least at this point, our capacity to observe them and kind of slow down the spread, even though we're still in kind of a dangerous place? Have you been satisfied with those things? Do you think that we should be more aggressive? And what's your reaction to, I guess the socioeconomic part of this, particularly as a practitioner, because you gotta look at this and say, yeah, we need jobs and money and all that, but people gotta be alive to have the jobs and the money. Well, yeah, I mean, that's the other thing, is that layered on top of the diseases or conditions that make us more prone to severe disease, we are not necessarily able to do the things that other people are doing or do them as well. For example, if you live in a multi-generational household, you may not be able to do the social distancing when you're in your home, if someone happens to test positive for COVID-19, which means that if you're living with an elderly grandparent or parent and you get positive and you can't move out of the house or have somewhere to go, there's a great probability that that virus will now spread to that whole family of it, right? So those social factors are contributing to a rapid, more rapid spread in some communities, i.e., some African American communities, then would be the case in some white communities where the density in the house and the ability to socially isolate and keep distance in the house is much better. So one of the things that I've been advocating for is that in our communities, we're gonna need the capacity to provide lodging or place to stay for some individuals for some sort of period of time so they don't have to go back to the household where there are elderly parents or grandparents. In other words, to keep those individuals protected, we have to provide accommodations for those who might test positive who otherwise will be going back into the family setting and infecting others. And that's one of the biggest concerns I have is that it's not as easy for some folks in our communities to do those things as it is in majority communities. And so that's just another factor that's adding to the challenge we have to deal with this virus compared to the majority population. When you think about the numbers of African Americans, particularly with this virus, do you think that even as large as they are that that's accurate or could we be missing a sizable portion of people who never reported being sick, never reported to a hospital, maybe dying at home? Are you afraid that there may be under-representation in those figures? Well, I'm convinced that the numbers we have are not accurate. And in fact, in New York, I just read or heard, they're gonna reclassify some people who died in recent weeks, who almost certainly died of coronavirus infection. And at the time, they didn't get tested or we weren't fully appreciating what those symptoms might have represented. So they're actually going back and changing some death records to reflect the fact that those individuals probably had COVID-19. Another thing you point out, which is really, really important here, many individuals can be infected, have no awareness that they're infected, while at the same time transmitting the virus to those that they interact with. The great example that everybody probably knows is Joe Stephanopoulos, who's a journalist who works for ABC, I think, who got the virus, was tested positive, and according to him, and there are many others like him, he never had symptoms that would have made him think he had a viral infection. And so, and that may be related to the status of one's immune system. It might be related to the mode of infection that you have, but I'm convinced that the virus was circulating in the American population, U.S. population, long before the full awareness of it was there. And I said that because the world has become a small place and people are traveling between continents freely now. And I'm reasonably sure that one of the major airports that was connected to China, San Francisco, New York, Miami, whatever it might be, that we've had the virus in this country for a few months, much longer than part of far. Let's go back to the work that you and your team are doing with the development of these anti-viral treatments. What kind of support have you gotten from state, federal agencies in funding or knowledge-based transfer? What is that behind the scenes look like for institutions like Meharry that are at the forefront of kind of helping to develop solutions for this? Well, of course, we have very limited resources, but I think like other organizations, we've decided to invest some of those limited resources in this because it's so important. So what we're doing is we're trying to get preliminary evidence or preliminary data to show that there is something worth pursuing here. And at that point, we're only a couple of weeks away from having that. Then we're going to submit proposals to try to get some additional funding for this. Drug development is a very expensive undertaking. And we want to make sure that you have some good solid evidence that what you're pursuing might actually be something worthwhile. And so we're in that stage now. And it's so promising based on the science that's already been done. So we're in the process now of confirming in kind of test tube experiments that this compound can target coronaviruses. And once we have that preliminary data, we can move on to the next step. And we are collaborating with, I'm collaborating with some scientists in Brazil, for example, and I know that's happening all over the world that people are collaborating globally, trying to accelerate the discovery process. And for me as a scientist, that's very exciting to know that that's happening. And then we finish up with what I hope is not an easier question, but certainly one of note that a lot of folks, particularly in your seat, are considering, you're a little unique in that your student body and your community is comprised of graduate students, medical school students. But when you look at the future of, I guess the industry of higher education and what happens with international students and student recruitment, what happens with people coming to campus, what happens with researchers coming to campus, are you concerned that the industry will change so much because of what we have to do just to stay safe and alive? That Mahari or other HBCUs may look really, really different in the near and distant future in terms of what a campus looks like and how it operates. Well, I think one thing is that the pandemic accelerated a process that was already underway. And that is converting a lot of our teaching to a flipped, we call it a flipped classroom whereby the students are learning in their own spaces through technology. A lot of our professors have committed their lectures to a video where the students can watch it when they want to or need to. And then the face-to-face time, which is really by Zoom or through technology is now about discussion. So to one degree, the pandemic just accelerated a process that most universities had already undertaken to change how we teach is a little bit more complicated when students have to be in a clinic interacting with patients to learn their craft. And so we've had to bring back all of our students who are in clinical rotations for safety reasons, but also to free up PPE for the doctors and frontline folks. So we are like all the other medical schools trying to figure out how to make sure our students can have acquired the skills they need to finish their medical training and go on to their residency. But I do think that when we get back to normal it's not gonna be the old normal, it's gonna be a new normal. The virus is gonna be with us until we find a vaccine probably for 18 months to two years. And so I would say that during that time we're all gonna have to find ways to keep ourselves protected in our communities. So folks need to know it's not gonna be going back to normal. We're not gonna flip a switch and be finding ourselves sitting in a crowded theater with hundreds of people and more for a little while. And I think in terms of education and teaching a lot of it's gonna remain in the flipped classroom kind of modality. But there's some things where you have to be in somebody's space. And a good example of that is our dental students. Our dental clinics are virtually shut down because by their very nature what dentists do create aerosols. And aerosols, of course, are one of the ways that this virus is transmitted. So from my perspective that the influence or the impact has been pretty profound especially for our dentists, our dental faculty and our dental students. But we're adjusting, we're learning from other medical schools, other dental schools. And that's been exciting as well to share best practices so we can all get through this together. But you're absolutely right. Things are gonna be different. We're not gonna go back to the old normal. We're gonna be going back to a new normal which is a combination of things we used to do but some new things we have to do just to keep each other protected. So I think that's gonna last probably for 18 months or so.


My name is Moxie Marlin Spike. I'm from the Institute for Disruptive Studies. I don't really like introductions, so instead today I'm going to introduce two friends of mine, Shane and Sarah, probably two of my favorite people in the world. And exactly one year ago today, they were hiking in Kurdish Iraq and were kidnapped by the Iranian military. And for the past year they've been held in prison in Iran. Sarah has been in solitary confinement. And there doesn't seem to be any sign of them being released. It's a pretty disempowering situation. There's nothing that I or anyone that I know can do. But I think about them all the time and I just want other people to know that people are stuck in prison in Iran and it's been exactly one year as of today. Okay, so I would like to take some time to talk about privacy. What I'd like to do is start by looking into the past, talking about the threats that we saw, the things that we thought were important, the projects that we thought were worth working on. And then I want to talk a little bit about how I feel like trends have changed and then look into the future and talk a little bit about things that I think might be important moving forward, things that I'm interested in working on and that maybe other people might be interested in working on. So looking into the past, the sort of technology narrative of the 90s was largely dominated by a clicker that doesn't work, by this thing. I'm just not going to use this. The web browser. When Netscape first introduced Netscape Navigator, it was almost revolutionary and a lot of people moved to capitalize on that knowledge. In particular, one of the major players that wanted to protect their interests was Microsoft. And when they introduced Internet Explorer, the narrative changed from the idea of a browser to this browser war between Netscape and Internet Explorer. And we all know how the browser wars turned out. But at the same time there was another war that was happening and it was somewhat more subtle, but it was just as fierce and perhaps more important. And it was a war over this thing. The little padlock in the bottom left-hand corner of the web browser. And more importantly, the technology behind it. On one side of this war were the cypherpunks. These are people who wanted to see this information and technology spread widely. They wanted to proliferate this throughout the world so that many people could use it. And on the other side of this war were the eavesdroppers. And these were people who wanted to prevent the spread of this information and stifle the use of this technology. And so the lines were drawn. And on the cypherpunks side you had people like Matt Blaze, Phillip Zimmerman, Ian Goldberg, David Schaum, and Timothy May, the heroes of my teenage years. And the eavesdroppers thought that these people were dangerous.  They were talking about the move from a world where they had ultimate control and ultimate access to all information to a world where they would have no control and no access to any information. In fact, they thought this was so dangerous that they classified these ideas as weapons. That if you wrote a little bit of crypto code and sent it to your friend in Canada, that was tantamount to exporting munitions. And you could be tried and prosecuted as such. At the same time, however, they realized that this privacy thing might be important to some people and that this idea might catch on. And so they decided to come up with their own solution, which they called key escrow and was best embodied by this thing, the clipper chip. What they wanted to do was make this chip and then embed it into every piece of consumer communications electronics, every telephone, every fax machine, every personal computer. And what it would do is some cryptography. But it was a closed system and you wouldn't be able to get access to the internals of this chip and you would be able to use it to start secure sessions. The only trick was that the government would have the equivalent of a master key, which they could then use to decrypt anything that they thought might be interesting. So the eavesdropper's problem here was that cryptography is not a banana, which is to say that it's difficult to treat information as objects. If I have a banana and I share it with my friend, there's still only one banana in the world. If they then share it with a friend of theirs, there's still only one banana in the world. However, information works differently every time I share information I'm copying and there's a chance for an exponential explosion. This sort of fundamental dilemma was made worse by Cypherpunk mantra. Cypherpunk's right code. The idea was that a lot of good work had been done in academia and research circles developing public key cryptography and other encryption systems outside the government realm. But not a lot had been done to actually put into practice. And what Cypherpunk's wanted was actual software that people would download and use right now to communicate securely. And so they kind of went nuts. Some people moved to Anguilla, an island in the Caribbean that had very favorable laws in terms of exporting cryptography and started writing crypto code and trying to ship it throughout the world. There were more creative strategies like in 1995, Philip Zimmerman published a book in conjunction with MIT Press called PGP, Source Code and Internals. And the deal was that the book was just the entire PGP source code printed in a machine-readable font. Because digital representations of cryptography were weapons, but if you printed it in a book, that was speech. So they printed this whole thing in a book and that very small print run and then just shipped it to every country in the world where they wanted to see this. And then people there just scanned it back in because it was a machine-readable font. And now PGP had been distributed completely legally all over the world. So this kind of stuff continued and the strategies got more and more rabid and cryptography became more and more ubiquitous until 2000 when suddenly the Clinton administration repealed all of the significant laws limiting the export of cryptography. And so it sort of seemed like the game was over, that the world was won. If you go back and you look at the cyberpunk predictions about what would happen once cryptography was ubiquitous, the first prediction that they made was simply that it would become ubiquitous, that it would inevitably spread throughout the world. And this turned out to be their most prescient prediction. This was really one of the first times that we saw that information really does want to be free. But if you look at their predictions about what happened once it was ubiquitous, they were somewhat less prescient, that anonymous digital cash would flourish, that intellectual property would disappear, that surveillance would become impossible, that governments would then be unable to continue collecting taxes and that governments would fall. If we flash forward 10 years from when these predictions were made, cryptography is the thing that allows you to securely transmit your credit card number to Amazon.com so you can buy a copy of Sarah Palin's book on going rogue. You know, sure some of these ideas have been eroded somewhat, but surveillance is probably at an all-time high, while privacy is probably at an all-time low. So what happened? You know, it sort of seemed like we were wedging this war and it seemed like we won the war, and now here we are in the strange situation. Well, I think part of my thesis here is that in many ways I feel like the Cypher punks were preparing for a future. And the future that they anticipated was fascism. But what we got was social democracy. And that's not necessarily better, it's just different. Let me give you an example. How many people in this room would feel good about a law which required everyone to carry a government-mandated tracking device with them at all times? Yeah, not even one person. So that's fascism, right? That's the fascist future. Now let me ask another question. How many people here carry a mobile phone? I'm guessing actually 100% of the people in this room. And so that's social democracy, right? So what is the difference between a government-mandated tracking device and a mobile phone? A mobile phone is just a tracking device that reports your real-time position to a few telecommunications companies which are required by law to turn that information over to the government. So logistically they're the same, you know? So what is the difference? You can turn it off, but you don't. Psychological choice. And you pay for one. Yeah. Choice, right? Choice is the big difference, you know? You choose to carry a cell phone, and you wouldn't choose to carry this government-mandated tracking device. So let's talk about that. Never in my wildest dreams did I think that I would have a cell phone. You know, it's a mobile tracking device. It's a mobile bug and operates over an insecure protocol. Why would I want one of these things? And yet I have one, and I carry it with me all the time every day. Well, I think if we look at the way that people tend to communicate and coordinate in groups, often there are sort of informal mechanisms and channels that people use to communicate and to make plans and stay in touch. And if I introduce a more codified communications channel, there's a well-known problem called the no network effect, where I invent this thing, maybe like the GSM cellular network, and I start using it, but it's difficult to use because the value of that network is in the number of nodes that are connected to it. And if I'm the only one using it, then it's really not worth very much. If, however, I somehow manage to get everyone to start using this thing, then it becomes very useful and very valuable. But there's an interesting side effect, which is that the old informal methods of communication and coordination are destroyed. That technology actually changes the fabric of society. I mean, there are many sort of trivial or trite examples of this in the mobile phone world, where we see that mobile phones have changed the way that people make plans. It used to be that people made plans. They'd say, I'll meet you on the street corner at this time and we'll go to this thing. They'd say, I'll call you when I'm getting off work. And so if you don't have that piece of technology, you can't participate in the way that society is communicating or coordinating. And so what actually ends up happening is now, if I decide that I don't want to participate in this codified communications channel, I'm once again victim to the no network effect. Because what I'm trying to do is go be a part of a network that has been destroyed, and no longer exists, and I'm once again the only one using it, and I'm part of a network that has very little value. So yes, I made a choice to have a cell phone, but what kind of choice did I make? And I think that this is the way that things tend to go now, that what ends up happening is the choice to start out very simple. Do I have a piece of consumer electronics in my pocket or not? And over time the scope of that choice slowly expands until it becomes a choice to participate in society or not. That on some level today, to choose not to have a cell phone means in some sense to choose not to participate in society. And so I think if we start looking at this pattern of small choices becoming big choices, you start to see them everywhere. One of my favorite most recent examples is from this Firefox extension called Adblock Plus. I'm sure that many people are familiar with this. The idea is that it's supposed to help you block ads on the web. And the way it works is it allows you to specify a set of regular expressions that would match URLs, that would be advertising URLs for ad banners and stuff like that. And the problem with this is, you know, it's quite effective, but these URLs are constantly changing, and so you want to be changing your regular expressions as well. And it could be kind of a pain to try and keep up with that. So they've done a clever thing where they have a subscription model where what you can do is you can subscribe to a list of regular expressions that someone else is maintaining. That way, you know, you only need one person or a group of people who are sort of on the ball looking at these regular expressions, and everyone else just benefits from that research. And now, so there's a number of popular subscriptions, and they're not all for ads, right? So there's a few popular subscriptions for blocking trackers. You know, these are like web bugs that track your movements around the web as you browse along. And so I'm subscribed to one of these tracker lists. And, of course, one of the trackers that I'm most interested in blocking is Google Analytics, because, you know, there's no problem with Google Analytics at all. And one day, something interesting happened. Google Analytics disappeared from the list of trackers in my subscription. And, you know, if you think about the old world, the way that things used to work, you imagine that some Google executive tracked down the person who's maintaining this list and, you know, showed up with a briefcase full of cash and there was some shady backroom deal where hands were shaken and, you know, Google Analytics was removed from this list. As far as I can tell, that's not what happened, and that actually something much more subtle and much more insidious actually happened. The way that Google Analytics works is through JavaScript. What happens is website operators who wish to use Google Analytics just import a little bit of JavaScript into their HTML file. And when the page loads, the JavaScript tracks you. Now, what Google did was they started including small bits of just usefully generic JavaScript functions into this Google Analytics JavaScript file. And what they were essentially saying was, hey, you guys are importing this JavaScript file anyway, just to use Google Analytics on your website. We're going to throw in a few just generically useful functions and we've done this right and, you know, we figured this out, that you can use as long as you're importing this thing. That way you can just use it for the core functionality of your website. And so now what happens is if you block the Google Analytics JavaScript, you don't just break Google Analytics, you actually break the core functionality of the website because now the JavaScript functions, the website is actually depending on for the functionality of the website, don't exist. And so again, what they've done is they've expanded the scope of the choice that you have to make. It used to be a very simple small choice. Do I want to be tracked by Google or not? Simple enough, you can either block the JavaScript or now block the JavaScript. Now the choice becomes larger. Do I want to visit this website or not? And again, that's a much more difficult choice to make. So, you know, why is this significant, right? Well, okay, this guy's name is John Pointexter. And then he's an incidentally the guy who was found to be most responsible for the Iran Contra scandal. He was convicted of lying to Congress, but then never went to jail. And in 2001, he started a program, a government program called Total Information Awareness. And he made a speech when he announced the program where he said that data must be made available in large-scale repositories with enhanced semantic content for easy analysis. And essentially what he wanted to do was have the government siphon off all email traffic, all web traffic, all credit card history, everybody's medical records, and throw it into one big sink. Just put it in one big pile. Don't worry about analyzing it or processing it in real time. And then develop the technology to really efficiently mine this data, to pull out the interesting statistics, relationships, profiles that they were interested at any point in the future. So you just collect this big sink of data and then at any point in the future, you can go back and pull out anything that you want from it. So this was the totalitarian future. This was the cypherpunk nightmare that, you know, they had been worried about, right? This is what they had been thinking about and preparing for all this time. And people freaked out.  People were up in arms. And in fact, even Congress was like, what are you guys doing, you know? And eventually the program was shut down.  First of all, these people are clearly from the old world. They really don't know what they're doing. This was their actual logo. This isn't like the onion made a logo in parody of this. This was the logo they came up with. They have the pyramid with the eye of God and a light beam shining down on the planet. That little bit of Latin under there means knowledge is power. I mean, come on, you know.   Call it the kitten surveillance society or something, you know?  Something like this. Because if you go back and you look at what total information awareness was trying to do, Google has done all of it. I mean, in fact, they have exceeded the original scope of what TIA dreamed to collect and process. And one thing that we know that they've really excelled at and actually how they've made their money is in being able to really efficiently mine the data that they collect and pull out the statistics and relationships of everything that they have. Now, clearly, their intent is different, right? They are not John Poindexter. They're trying to sell advertising. But make no mistake about it. They are in the surveillance business. That is how they make money. They surveil people and use that to profit. And so the effect is the same, right? Now, there's this quote, who knows more about the citizens in their own country, Kim Jong-il or Google? Now, I think it's Google. I think it's pretty clearly Google. So once again, there's this question. Why are people so concerned about the surveillance practices of Kim Jong-il or the John Poindexters of the world and not as concerned about people like Google? Well, again, I think it comes back to this question of choice, right? You choose to use Google and you don't choose to be surveilled by John Poindexter or Kim Jong-il. But once again, I think the scope of this choice is expanding and that it's going to become harder and harder to make that choice until, once again, it's a choice between participating in society or not. I mean, already, if you were to say, well, I don't want to participate in Google's data collection, so I'm not going to email anybody that has a Gmail address. That's probably pretty hard to do. I mean, you would be, in some sense, removed from the social narrative. You would be cut out from part of the conversation that's happening that is essential to the way that society works today. So once again, I think that this is going to become this on the scope of society itself. So I would think that I would say that trends have changed, that now we're dealing with a situation where technology alters the actual fabric of society, that information, as a result, accumulates in distinct places and that the eavesdroppers now just move to those distinct places. The past was really direct, right? We saw the eavesdroppers trying to embed surveillance equipment into every consumer communications device. And the present is much more subtle, right? Instead of doing that, they just move to the few distinct places where information tends to accumulate. Places like Room 641A and the AT&T World Comp Facility, where the NSA has been operating a fiber optic splitter for who knows how long. The past was direct. You saw people like total information awareness directly trying to take your data. And the present is a lot more subtle. It starts by soliciting, rather than demanding your data, and then the eavesdroppers just move to those points where the data collects. So when I'm thinking about the future, the first thing that I want to think about is these choices that aren't really choices. And I want to deal with those as problems. I want to acknowledge that the choices are expanding and that in some sense they are becoming demands. So some projects are all in those lines. And some projects are along those lines. At first I started by thinking, okay, well, so what's up with Google, right? The main problem is that they have an awful lot of data about you. They record everything. They never throw anything away. They have your TCP headers. They have your IP address. They issue you a cookie. They know who you are. They know where you live. They know who your friends are. They know about your health, your political leanings, your love life. They know not just a lot about what you're doing, what you're thinking about. They've also done a really good job of controlling this debate by defining the terms. They say things like, well, we care about privacy, so we anonymize your information after nine months. Well, what they mean by anonymize is drop the last octet of your IP address. That's not anonymity, right? But they've done a very good job of being able to define that as anonymity so that they can just start throwing that word around. They also did this brilliant thing with this Google dashboard, where they say, oh, you know, we're putting privacy under your control. And first of all, they only show you some of the information that they are most obviously capable of collecting about you. They don't show you any of the other correlational stuff that they could easily derive about you. And the most sort of diabolical thing about it is that to get privacy, you have to be tracked, right? Because to control your privacy using the Google dashboard, you have to stay logged in all the time and maintain a cookie.  And, you know, they have warned us, right? You know, Eric Schmidt said this famous thing, if there's something you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place, right? So they've warned us. And, you know, lastly, we now know that Aurora, these Aurora attacks on Google were at least partially about intercept. You know, one thing we learned from those attacks is that the government is running intercept systems on their networks, and that not only that, but other eavesdroppers were trying to gain access to those intercept systems. So what we're seeing is as data, more and more data accumulates in these places, it becomes more and more valuable. And so eavesdroppers move to those places and then even eavesdroppers without illegal backing also try to move to those places. And so I think we're going to continue to see that problem as these become more and more valuable over time. So one project that I started working on is called Google Sharing. And the basic premise of Google Sharing is that this choice that we are given is a false choice, and that we shouldn't accept it, we should just reject it. And so what we should say is, you know, it's not really possible for us to stop participating with Google. And so instead what we want to do is that allow us to continue to participate and still maintain our privacy. And so the way it works is it's a two-part system. It's a Firefox add-on as well as a custom proxy server. And the add-on sits in your web browser and it watches your web requests. And all of your non-Google traffic just goes directly to the internet, totally unmolested, not modified or impacted at all. Then if it sees a request to a Google service that does not require a login, these are things like Google Search, Google News, Google Maps, Google Groups, Google Images, Google Shopping, but not things like Google Mail or Google Checkout. Then it shuts off that traffic to the Google Sharing Proxy server. The Google Sharing Proxy server maintains a collection of identities. And each identity is a unique HTTP header set.  And so these are maintained in this pool and every time a request comes in, one of these identities is randomly chosen from the pool and the identifying information from the request is stripped off and the stuff from the identity is tacked on. The process of the request responds to the proxy and the information is proxied back to you. So, you know, the upshot is that Google can't track you, right, because these cookies are constantly moving around and your traffic does not come from your IP address. Additionally, we encrypted this first link using SSL between your web browser and the proxy. So that means that actually you even get SSL protection for services that Google does not provide SSL access to. Google now has SSL protected search, but none of the other stuff like maps or shopping or groups or images are SSL protected. But you get that with Google sharing. And how does it look? It looks exactly like it's indistinguishable from using Google directly. You can use all of their services, Google Maps, Google News, whatever you like. Totally transparently, the only difference is that in the bottom right-hand corner there's a little status telling you that Google sharing is enabled. Additionally, Google has sort of given us a win here by allowing us to make SSL protected searches. And so now what we can do is have the client prefetch cookies from the Google sharing proxy server and then make an SSL connection end-to-end directly to Google. And so now the Google sharing proxy server is proxying the data and sharing cookies around identifying information around but cannot actually see the requests because they're SSL protected all the way to Google. So now you don't have to trust us not to examine your requests. So anyway, this project is available online. It's been active for about six months now. We have about 80,000 users and you can get the add-on from Google sharing.net. Another project that I think is interesting is this thing called Face Cloak. It was developed by Professor Urz Hengartner from the University of Waterloo. And the idea or his basic premise is that using Facebook what you're trying to do is share information with your friends or friends of friends. But you're not actually trying to share information with Facebook. There's no reason to give them the information. And so he developed this interesting sort of proof-of-concept Firefox add-on that sits in your web browser and any time you type anything into Facebook you can prefix it with two equals. And when you do that it will just transparently encrypt it before sending it up to Facebook. And then he has these mechanisms that allow you to really easily share keys with your friends. That way, if they're also running the add-on then it will transparently decrypt it before displaying it. So the net result is that everything works just totally the same and everything appears as normal to everybody in your friends group. But Facebook never gets the data. It's an interesting project and an interesting theory that I would like to see more of. You could possibly apply it to things like Twitter. Twitter is one part broadcast and one part conversation. For the conversation bit there's no reason for Twitter to actually have the data. My second thesis here is that the crypto war was largely about data freedom that at the time you were talking about trying to get information out into the world and other people trying to prevent you from getting information out into the world. And so it was very easy to extrapolate a future of data control from that. In those moments it was easy to think that, wow, we're going to be dealing this with this forever. And so a lot of projects were born out of that reality. A lot of the anonymity and privacy projects that we have today are things like dark nets, data havens, hidden services. Does anybody here use those things? One person? Two people. Not many. But because I think that that's not really the future that we got. We got this other future that we're talking about that's somewhat more subtle, more complicated this social democracy. And so one thing that I've noticed is that privacy advocates, people who are working on these privacy projects are really in love with the other. These are people like Iranian dissidents or Chinese dissidents in far away parts of the world. And I think the interesting thing about it to me is that if you look closely at Iranian dissidents or Chinese dissidents, they really have very little in common with what privacy advocates are doing. And yet they're still sort of obsessed with these struggles. And I guess I would suggest that it seems like that's because these are the few places in the world that are still speaking that language of data control, that language of information freedom that all of our projects were sort of born out of. So they just happen to sort of dovetail even though they don't really connect with the lives of the people that are working on the projects. And I would say that even those places are beginning to realize that the strategy of data control is not entirely effective. Iran recently announced that they were launching a national email service. Unlimited storage. Nice web interface. Because I think that even they realize that the Google strategy is more effective than their strategy of deep-packing inspection and trying to lock everything down. And I also think that the loss of the crypto war was less about giving up and more about changing strategies. Particularly the strategy of key escrow I think has eventually become a strategy of key disclosure. We've seen laws like RIPAA and the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe that essentially say, okay, we're going to let you do cryptography. We're not going to try and regulate that. Because that's a really hard problem. We have failed to do that in the past. And so instead we're going to let anybody can use whatever cryptography they want. But if at any point in the future we want to see what this encrypted traffic is we come to you and we ask for your key and if you don't give it to us you go to jail. And so this is a problem of key disclosure and I think that this is a problem of security in the secure protocols that we're using today. So again, if I'm looking into the future the first thing I want to do is deal with the choices that aren't really choices. The second thing I want to do is worry a little bit less about information freedom and the third thing is I want to worry a lot more about forward security and this key disclosure problem. What happens when you show up at customs? What happens when you're living in Europe and someone comes knocking on your door? And Eric Brewer wrote a pretty nice paper I think in 2004 or 2006 called off the record communication or why not to use PGP. And in this paper they make a pretty simple observation. They say, okay everyone's familiar with the PGP model you have an email you want to send to Bob you encrypt it with Bob's public key and you send it to Bob. The next time you want to send an email to Bob you encrypt it with Bob's public key and you send it to Bob. You could do this for 20 years and when you're compromised all previous traffic is compromised as well. That someone could easily just record all traffic and that's totally not unrealistic today. And then at any point try and compromise Bob's public key and then go back and decrypt all of the previous traffic. So the first thing they note is that one key compromise affects all previous correspondence. The second thing that seems weird is the secrecy of what I write is a function of your security practices and I feel like I'm somewhat paranoid I have reasonable security practices but I don't know about the people that I'm communicating with I would like for what I write to somehow be a function of my security practices. And the third thing that they note is that the PGP model gives you authenticity but not deniability. That if I sign my email hey Bob today I was thinking that Eve is a real jerk and at some point this email is compromised and discovered there is no way for me to deny this. So the nice thing is that Bob knows that I wrote it but there's no way for me to deny to everyone else that I wrote it. You have this undeniable problem. And so the OTR model works a little bit differently. What happens is every time you wish to communicate you do an ephemeral key exchange and you have public private key pair just like normal except it is only used for signing ephemeral key exchanges. It is never used to actually encrypt data. Then every time you're exchanging messages your message also includes one half of a new key exchange. So each time you complete a message exchange you're also doing a new key exchange. So the key material that you have is constantly rolling forward and the old key material is discarded. So if at some point in the future somebody comes and tries to get something off of your computer there's nothing for them to get. The old key material is gone there's nothing that you can use to decrypt previous traffic. It gives you forward security. Additionally you have messages that are encrypted with message authentication codes. The key for the message authentication code is derived from the session key and two parties have that session key, Alice and Bob, me and Bob. So signatures are undeniable because there is only one possible author. But Macs are deniable because they have two possible authors. Both me and Bob know the key that could be used to authenticate this message. If Bob receives an email with a Mac on it he knows that he didn't write it so it must have come from me. But now he can't take that and show it to the world and say Moxie wrote this because it's just as likely that he wrote it. Additionally since this session key is constantly rolling forward the old Mac keys are constantly rolling forward as well. And every time they roll forward you can just broadcast them in the clear and now anybody could just as likely have created an old message. So you get authenticity but you also get deniability. These are two principles that I think are going to become more and more important in the future as we roll forward. Some projects that I've been working on that line one is called whisper systems and the idea is to try and bring forward secure protocols into mobile devices. So these are these two spaces, right? Mobile devices are this place of a choice that isn't really a choice and forward secure protocols is this thing that's becoming increasingly important with this new strategy of key disclosure. So the apps we have one is called red phone and basically it's a encrypted voice application for mobile devices.  And so looking at this we wondered okay well why is it what is so bad about VoIP in the mobile environment and we realized that the problems often almost always come down to the signaling layer. And so the way it usually works is there's some asterisk server out on the internet and you do signaling through this thing you have to maintain a TCP connection and then do SIP to notify the other client that you want to try and call them and all this stuff, right? And so it's a big problem because in the mobile environment your connection status is usually pretty flaky and so you're moving in between networks and maybe you still have a connection maybe you think you do but you don't and also it's it doesn't allow your device to go to sleep because you have to maintain this either UDP or TCP connection and so your device can't ever really power down and so it's bad for your battery. Well what we realized is that the mobile environment actually has an entire signaling infrastructure already built in by the telecoms made it for us and they use it to signal mobile devices and so potentially we could just leverage that and so now instead of like some asterisk server allowing you to communicate to other devices using SIP we just use SMS which is a signaling piece that's already built into the mobile environment. The nice things about this are that you don't need to maintain some constant network connection to some server so your phone can go to sleep you don't need the equivalent of like a Skype ID or a SIP account or something like that you can do addressing based on your normal phone number because you know we're using SMS for the signaling and the third thing is that you don't need to run a VoIP server or set up an account or anything like that you just install this one piece of software and now you're ready to call anybody whose number you know so then the question is okay well how do we provide security and so normally VoIP has just a simple RTP stream of voice data between two devices and so we have what's known as a ZRTP stream it's a protocol that was developed by Philip Zimmerman and it's actually a pretty nice protocol the way it works is that you do some ephemeral key exchange and then from that key material you derive what's known as a short authentication string and once the call is set up at the bottom of the in-call screen you display the short authentication screen short authentication string in this case the two words flat foot Eskimo now if there was a man in the middle attack the key material between the two devices would be different right you have one key on one side of the man in the middle and one key on the other side of the man in the middle and so these two words would be different on the two phones that were trying to talk to each other so what happens is now you set up a call and you just read these two words to each other flat foot Eskimo and if they're the same on both sides then you know that the call is authentic and so you don't need certificates certificate authorities you don't need fingerprints digital signatures web of trust none of that stuff you just read the two words to each other and you know you have an authentic call it's also kind of fun the two words always end up being somehow it's like a refrigerator magnet poetry or something like that the two words always end up being you know like some kind of profound haiku you know flat foot Eskimo yeah that's how I'm feeling today you know that's I don't know so it's actually kind of fun to read the things to each other the other app we have right now is called tech secure and it's an encrypted text messaging application using a protocol this derivative of OTR this thing that gives you nice forward security and deniability properties and it works just like the normal stock sms app for Android we've cloned it feature for feature and so the idea is you can install this and fully replace the default messaging app and use it to message anybody you like and at the same time if someone else is running this you get an encrypted session the way that the session works once again every message you exchange includes one half of a new key exchange and so the key material that you're using is constantly rolling forward if someone were to record all of your sms traffic and later try and compromise your phone and get something to decrypt all of that they can't because those keys are gone so anyway these projects are a small hope of mine that we can come up with technical solutions to reduce the scope of the choices that we need to make we have the whisper systems projects are actually on a table in the vendor area and we're doing demos and stuff you want to stop by and check it out but otherwise you can download all of the stuff for free the android apps Google sharing online and feel free to contact me and thank you for listening to me talk.