Let's pray.  You're so very thankful for the promises that we stand upon where it says, Father, every morning your mercies are renewed, Father, and we dwell in that mercy of our Father this day. We thank you for those mercies. We thank you for the promises. We thank you for this platform. We thank you for APC Bible College and every teacher who is zealous to teach us your word above Father and equip us for the ministry that you have called us for, Father. And as we are in your presence today, Father, we invite you to come and teach us through pastor. We invite you to give us that wisdom and favor to understand the word in its depth and, Lord Father, be filled with your revelation to be equipped to do your ministry above Father and to reach out to nation and to nation's Father for your glory, honor, and praise, Lord. Bless each one who is here. Bless each one who would be hearing this word. Bless each one who is seeking you above Father at all this heart, Father. Help us and guide us through the day. Let all things be under your control, Father. As we give you glory, honor, and praise and ask this prayer in the precious and matchless name, Father, we also want to uplift brother Elisha who's not been keeping well, Father, whose request is on the page, Father, we pray for your divine intervention in his health, Father, that the spirit of infirmity be broken, Father, and he be strengthened in your grace by the blood of Jesus, root out every infection from his body, Father, and strengthen him in his mind, body, soul, and spirit to be Lord, Father, completely healed and, Father, be able to join back his work, join back the college, Father, and, Father, be a blessing to everyone who comes across, Father. Bless him with good health, with your favor, and with all of those who are suffering, Father, in this time when many of them are suffering through viral zone, Lord, Father, being attacked, Father, by any kind of sickness and infirmity, we pray for your divine intervention and for your healing virtue to flow through each of them, Father. We give you glory, honor, and praise once again for bringing us all together to worship you, Father, and to learn from your word. In Jesus' name, we ask and we pray. Amen. Amen. Thank you so much for the prayer. Okay, we will begin our class for today. We seem to be almost at the end of the book of John. So today we will be covering chapters 18 and 19. So we are almost reaching the end because, you know, these two chapters deal with Jesus being arrested and then being crucified. And there are a lot of interesting details that we see in these two chapters. So to get started, maybe we could just have someone read out the very first verse and then from there we'll go along. So John chapter 18 verse 1, if someone could read out first, please. Yes. So it says very specifically in the book of John that Jesus went into a garden in the other gospels. We just see that there's Gethsemane, the town Gethsemane which is mentioned. But then here we are told that he goes into a garden in that particular city. So which is why scholars, you know, tend to draw a link between this garden and the Garden of Eden and they talk about how the first Adam, he fails in the Garden of Eden. But over here, we have the second Adam who comes and he's successful in gaining victory over Satan. You know, rather than look to his own self-interests, the Lord says, let your will be done and he submits to the Father. So the contrast is drawn between the event that took place in the first garden, the Garden of Eden and the event that we see over here in the garden in this town of Gethsemane. And we see that the second Adam was successfully able to gain the victory for all of humanity through his act. On the other hand, the first Adam in fact led down all of humanity by dragging us into sin and bringing death into the world and all of that. So Jesus is able to cancel what the first Adam did and he is able to redeem and restore mankind once again. We will now maybe look at verses 2 to 6 where we have the basic outline given of the events that start off this whole arrest. So if someone could read out verses 2 to 6. Now Judas who betrayed him also knew the place for Jesus often made there with his disciples. So Judas having procured a band of soldiers and some officers from the chief priests and the Pharisees went there with lanterns and tortoise weapons. Then Jesus knowing all that would happen to him came forward and said to them, who do you seek? They answered him, Jesus and Nigel. Jesus said to them, I am he. Judas who betrayed him was standing with him. When Jesus said to them, I am he. They drew back and fell to the ground. Yes, so we see that they are using tortures and lanterns and all of that and it's very very clear that this entire incident is taking place in the night. So the Jewish leaders are very aware that what they are doing is crooked, that it's not transparent and honest and good. So they are doing it under the cover of night like as if they are guilty people and it shows that they are aware that what they are doing is wrong. If they had tried to do something like this in the broad daylight with all the public present, then the people who are watching the onlookers would have seen all the events taking place. So then they would make a judgment for themselves whether what is being done is correct or wrong and they probably would have reached a different conclusion. So the leaders don't want to take that risk. They don't want their crookedness exposed and so they are doing it in the secret cover of the night and they would not have been very aware of Jesus' movements, where he's going to be at which point of time. So Judas' offer becomes very useful to them because Judas would be aware of where Jesus' itinerary, where he would be going next. So they probably would have told him at an ideal time when Jesus is kind of isolated away from the public, let us know. So Judas of course now comes to them and tells them that Jesus is going to be going to a garden where he would be alone with his disciples. So with his help, they plan to use this particular night to make the arrest and so we have Judas coming along over here along with all the soldiers and it just says over there in verse 3, detachment of soldiers and some officials from the chief priests. So it looks like the soldiers also belong to the chief priests and the officials as well. So this seems to be the temple guard because all the way from the Old Testament, at times we had the Levites who had been appointed to be on guard duty, to guard the treasures of the temple and to guard the temple premises. So these soldiers are probably those, you know, Levites who are attached to the temple guard.  He just says, I am. So there, so when they say, when he says that, when he says, I am, it says over here in verse 6, they drew back and fell to the ground. So the power of his name, the power of who he is, is, comes through in those two words which he utters when he says, I am. And if these events had taken place during the daytime, the crowd in fact would have seen that happening. So, you know, they don't get to see all of that because it's taking place in secret. But the power of Jesus is very apparent over here. And then if we could read out verses 7 to 11, please. So he asked them again, whom do you seek? And they said, Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus answered, I told you that I am he. So if you seek me, let these men go. This was to fulfill the word that he had spoken of those whom you gave me, I have lost not one. Then Simon Peter, having a sword drew, drew it and struck the high priest's servant and cut off his right ear. The servant's name was Malchus. So Jesus said to Peter, put your sword into its sheath. Shall I not drink the cup that the Father has given me? So we have a very lovely incident mentioned here. And it shows the heart of Peter, who he really is, what he really feels towards his master. So Jesus speaks up in verse 8 and he says, if you are looking for me, then let these men go. He doesn't want the disciples to come to harm. He doesn't want them getting involved in the violence which may take place. And so to protect them, he says that, and which is why John the writer, he emphasizes that once again in verse 9 and he says, these words, Jesus spoke these words to fulfill the statement which he made earlier, I have not lost one of those you gave me. So he doesn't want anyone to get hurt. So he says, you've come here to arrest me, take me, but let these others go. Don't harm them. And immediately you see Peter's response, even as Jesus shows his love, his compassion, and his concern for his disciples, he made it to his rescue because of the sword he has with him and he's willing to start an attack. So he begins by cutting off the ear of one of the servants. And then Jesus commands Peter and says, put your sword away. Shall I not drink the cup the father has given me? So he is saying, don't do this. I am willing to be arrested. I'm willing to go through this. And that would have puzzled Peter a lot because Peter was willing to fight to the death. He was willing to do whatever it takes to save his master. But the master is saying, it's okay. This is something I want to do. This is a cup which I want to drink from. And that would have made Peter feel helpless. And in fact, it would have puzzled all of the disciples because they want to fight. They want to defend. They care about him. But the Lord himself is saying, you know, it's okay. I know this is something that I want to go through. He has been warning them about this. He has been kind of preparing their hearts for this, but they just never caught it. So when it actually is happening, they are so puzzled. They're wondering why, why is Jesus kind of giving up?  He's giving up. Why is he giving up? You know, so but they're still very, very concerned. And so when the soldiers begin to take him away, you have two of the disciples who follow, you know, a little behind the crowd, because they don't want to completely go back home and just sit over there. They're still very worried, very concerned. The love is still there. And so we see in one of the later verses that Peter and John, they continued to follow the soldiers, even as, you know, the soldiers are leading Jesus to the house of Anna's. And Anna's would be the father-in-law of the high priest. So they didn't go to the high priest's house. They went to the house of the father-in-law of the high priest. So which is why, you know, maybe Anna's is the real power behind the throne. So maybe he's the one who kind of, you know, manipulates everything and controls everything. So they take him over there to his house. And yeah, in your, in your textbook, there are some things mentioned about Anna's. He was the high priest from 680 to 1580, at which point of time the Romans, in fact, remove him from his position. So it's probably after that that Caiaphas is placed, you know, in his position as high priest. So he's somebody who's very powerful and we're not very sure why the Romans, you know, remove him and appoint another person. So maybe he was very, very crooked. Maybe he had, you know, involved in some kind of dealings that they were not pleased with. So now we have the, you know, the preparation starting for the illegal trial that they want to do. And so here it just talks about Peter and John who are following Jesus. And we have verses 15 to 18, where you have the servant girl asking, are you one of the disciples? And now Peter says, you know, he replies, I am not, because it seems to be pointless to be taking Jesus side when Jesus seems to have, you know, given himself up. He seems to be willing to get arrested and imprisoned or whatever it is that's going to happen. And so Peter probably would have thought, you know, now where's the point? You know, he was willing to actually die for him. He was willing to fight for him. But now Jesus is not doing anything. So he probably, you know, uses his logic and thinks, you know, where's the point now when associating myself with the Lord? Because the Lord seems to be saying, I want to go through this.  And he doesn't want to get arrested. So we see, we see that what Peter is doing over here can be, you know, logically explained to an extent. And we see that there are two things, this logic and this loyalty. Sometimes when you are trying to be loyal to someone, you know, you don't really care how logical or illogical it is.  And here you see Peter reasoning in his heart and probably thinking, you know, where's the point? Now if I associate my name with Jesus, who doesn't even wish to defend himself, where's the point? So he's being logical about it. And so he's in fact not being quite loyal. It's a fine line between these two things, you know, when someone in a situation like this, but there are many Christians down the ages who are persecuted who kind of had to make a choice, whether they would be logical about their faith, or that they would be completely loyal to the Lord. I mean, I'm just reminded of the, you know, Communist era when a lot of Christians were being persecuted.  And there would be people who would, you know, think logically and say, you know, I mean, if I spit on it, it doesn't make a difference. Because in my heart, I still love the Lord and I still will be worshipping him. And they would go ahead and logically they would, you know, spit. But then that there would be others who would say, it doesn't matter, even if I get killed, it's alright. But I refuse to, you know, it's just symbolic. I mean, they're just symbolically doing it. But still they want to go all the way and declare their full loyalty. And so they would, there were many people who said, No, I will not spit on the Bible. And I'd rather get killed. So you can be logical, or you can just allow logic to go out of the window and see, I don't care whether it makes sense or not, but I am going to express my full love and loyalty to my Lord. So in this case, Peter actually fails badly on that front. He's being very safe. He's being very careful and logical. But that is not actually the loyalty, you know, so we see that he denies him. And we see one more, I mean, later on in the, you know, it talks about how he denies him once again. And moving back to the other events which are taking place over here versus 19 to, okay, we have a person who has raised their hand. Yeah, please go ahead, brother. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, Pastor. Pastor, I want to know that, as you said, Peter was actually loyal, was not able to be loyal. But I just want to know, as you said, as you gave that example, so if the Peter was loyal to the, to, to, if he showed the loyalty in that way, at that time, might be he could have killed and the prophecy what Jesus said, we should speak, Jesus spoke about him, how it could be fulfilled. And second thing, I just want to know that is what it is, like that point of time, he became logical, was wrong, or, or that, that protected him so that through him, he could able to, because later he proved his loyalty through his ministry and all. So to ease, like as you said, that the minister, like many people did not spit.  And Jesus also had a plan that he should be the one who is going to carry the key of the kingdom. So how you will judge it. Thank you, Buster. That's my question. Yeah, now in Peter's case, it is very clear what Jesus would have preferred, he would have wanted loyalty. He says, Peter, you will deny me. Peter says, Lord, I'm willing to die for you.  And the word used over there is deny, betray, you know, say, no, no, I'm in no way associated with this person. So in Peter's case, it was very, very clear that Jesus wanted display of full loyalty. And Peter did not give that. Now, when it comes to other believers down the ages, I think that's just a choice which, you know, each person would have to personally make.  But I mean, I don't know, that's just a personal choice which each of us would have to make for ourselves. Now coming to the other aspects, if God has a prophecy that needs to be fulfilled, he can do anything in a situation to make that prophecy come through. So it's, say, Jesus could have, I mean, God could have worked in ways which would have prevented Peter from being kind. So nothing can stand in the way of God's prophecies. So if there's a prophecy upon someone's life and they are living in accordance with God's leading, that prophecy will come to pass. God will arrange circumstances and make sure that it comes to pass. And regarding the keys of the kingdom being given to Peter, if we look at that particular passage, there are portions of the passage where when Jesus says to you, giving to you, and it's the singular word where the words are being spoken directly to Peter. But then in the later portion of the same passage, when it says, you know, you can bind and you can lose, it's not referring to the singular you, it's talking about plural you, all of you. So no, it was not something that was given, especially a position that was especially given only to Peter. Now that's a position which has been given to all of the church. So the church is not built on Peter at all. Because again, even that word used over there, you have two words, Petra and Petros, two completely different words. They're not getting to the all of the details of that. But it's very, very important for us to know that the kingdom was not built on Peter at all. Yeah, okay, so I think Peter was Petros and the foundation is Petra. Petra is feminine. Petros is masculine and they are two completely different, you know, usages of the noun. So that entire structure of that passage, and the Roman Catholic Church kind of got it wrong. So they regard Peter as the first pope and all of that. But the whole basis on which they lay that is completely wrong, because when you look at the basic Greek used over there, Jesus is in no way saying that it's going to be on Peter that the whole church is going to be built, not at all. Yeah, someone else had raised their hand, if the person would like to speak, otherwise we can move on. Yeah, let's just move on. Thank you. Yeah, so we, yes, we come to verses 19 to 24. Again, we have some very interesting things mentioned here. So if someone could read out all of those verses, it was 19 to 24, please. The high priest then questioned Jesus about his disciples and his teachings. Jesus answered him, I have spoken openly to the world, I have always thought and smoke out and in the temple where all Jews come together. I have said nothing in secret. When you ask me, ask those who have heard me, who I have said to them. They know what I have said. When he said these things, one of the apostles said, standing by, is that how you answer the high priest? Jesus answered him, if what I said is wrong, bear witness about the wrong, but what I said is right, then why do you strike me? And then send him down to the high priest. Okay, so over here you have Kaya for speaking and he's trying to find some kind of defect in Jesus' doctrine and Jesus' wordings, so that, you know, he can later on say, yeah, yeah, see, because of this false doctrines that Jesus is holding, that's the reason why we had to take this extreme step and have him executed. So he's trying to catch Jesus in his speech and Jesus very openly says, look, this is not the first conversation that we are having, you know, out in the open, out in the public, I've always very, very clearly expressed my views and there had been a lot of debates which went on between the Jewish leaders and Jesus with all the public listening and in all those debates, it was the, you know, leaders who went away defeated. They could never ever say, look, this man is, you know, breaking the law of Moses, he is denying what the Old Testament scriptures are saying that none of them could ever say that. So in all of the debates which took place in the open public, Jesus very carefully proved what he was saying using Old Testament scriptures and these people could never win any of the arguments.  Because whatever I had to say has already been very, very clearly spoken out in the open.  So if this debate had happened in the out in the public in the daytime, again, Jesus would have very plainly spoken the things which he has spoken earlier. Again, these people would have stood defeated in the debate. So here they are doing it in secret, in the night, because they want to just go out in the morning to the crowd and say, you know what, when we were talking to him, all these false words came out and he's holding all these wrong doctrines and he wants to spread them. So they are kind of trying to come up with fake things. And so in verse 23, Jesus says, if I said something wrong, testify as to what is wrong, you know, but if I spoke the truth, why did you strike me? So Jesus is very confident about his stand and even as he's saying all of these things, I'm sure all those leaders and all these people standing over there, they very clearly know that what they are doing is very, very crooked and they don't have, you know, any proper standing to be doing what they are doing. So we see that, we see the transparency of Jesus coming across. You also see the crookedness of these people. And in your textbook, it talks about how trials like this should have been conducted in the day time, you know, where the public clearly knows that there's a trial going on. Also, it would be something that would be done in the Sanhedrin. The entire Sanhedrin would get together and then a decision would be taken.  You have the High Priest, you have his father-in-law and you have a few others. It's not the entire Sanhedrin which is meeting together and taking this decision. And moreover, one single person actually cannot pronounce judgment, which is what they are planning on doing over here. So they are doing the entire thing in a very, very crooked manner because they actually don't have any charges to bring against Jesus and they would have to fabricate false charges. So it's easier to fabricate false charges when you're doing it secretly, which is why they're doing it in the night. So John kind of leaves this part of the, you know, narrative here. He doesn't go into further detail. In the other Gospels, you have more details given about Jesus' conversations with these people. But John over here moves on to the interactions which take place with Pilate. So Pilate was someone who had never really cared about the Jews, had no respect for their culture or their faith. And in fact, he had been so insensitive in the past to their religion and their faith that in fact the Jews had, you know, given a complaint against him to the Roman emperor. So Pilate was someone who could not care less about any of the religious matters of the Jews. And now Jesus is taken to Pilate. So they come over here to the Roman governor's palace in verse 28. And yeah, we have a lot of verses. Maybe we don't really need to read all of those. If we could maybe read out verses 28 and 29. Yeah. Yeah. So they started off first in Anna's house from there. They go to, you know, Caiaphas house and now they have come to the palace of the Roman governor. And they do not enter the palace of this Gentile, because if they enter the Gentiles palace, then that will make them ceremonially unclean and then they will not be able to eat the Passover. So they are very, very eager and very, very keen on eating the Passover. And John mentions that over here, because it's so ironic. They're getting all ready to, you know, murder the Passover lamb, but they want to eat the Passover lamb. It just shows the sheer hypocrisy of the whole thing. Even as they are making serious plans to have the Passover lamb killed, they also want to act like as if they want to participate in him and, you know, be a part of him.  So it says over here very specifically, they wanted to eat the Passover and that is why they did not enter the palace and they're standing very piously outside. And so Pilate comes outside and he speaks to them. And oh yeah, there was something mentioned in your notes, which was interesting. If you know, if someone could read out versus 31 and 32, please. Yeah, so when they say over here, we have no right to execute anyone. They're very specifically talking about execution through crucifixion.  So over here, they're speaking specifically about how they do not have any rights given by the Roman government to crucify anyone. And that is why they need Pilate's permission to be able to, you know, give Jesus this kind of a death sentence. Why didn't they choose stoning? Why did they not choose beheading? You know, they could have chosen those methods as well. But I think they probably chose crucifixion because when it comes to the scriptures, when it comes to the Old Testament scriptures, crucifixion is considered something, something like a curse. And also when it comes to the Roman point of view, crucifixion is something that's reserved for only the worst people. So in case they had chosen, you know, stoning, or if they had chosen beheading, the public would question and say, are they doing this to an innocent man? Is there injustice happening over here? There would be talk, there would be conversations and they don't want that. So they decide that, you know, these leaders decide that crucifixion would be the best method to adopt because that is something that, you know, they go through very serious procedures before they come to that particular kind of a capital sentence. Because it says in Deuteronomy 21, 22 to 23. Yeah, I mean, I mean, we're familiar with that, but if someone could read out Deuteronomy 21, 22 to 23, and what it says about crucifixion. Deuteronomy 21. Deuteronomy 21, verse 22 and 23, and if a man has committed a crime punishable by death and he is put to death and you hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain all night on the tree, but you shall bury him the same day for a hand man is cursed by God, you shall not defile your land that the Lord your God is giving you for inheritance. So it's not just bad that the person has been, you know, killed and then just hung on a tree. It also implies that this man is under a curse. So it's somebody very, very evil. Someone who has done something very terrible. Only such people are, you know, literally under a curse of God. So they want to demonstrate that they are really this good pious leaders who have done this to this man because there's actually a curse upon him. What he has done is so terrible.  So they're not satisfied with just opting for stoning or opting for beheading. They want to go all the way and have this particular form of punishment imposed because of course crucifixion was not there in the book of Deuteronomy times, but the whole idea of somebody being hung from a tree so that it would indicate that there's a curse upon this person. This person has done something very, very terrible. And also it would kind of make them give them a kind of legal, you know, backing because the Romans were not very, you know, casual about crucifixion. They killed many people. But when it came to crucifixion, that was something that was reserved for only the worst people, the worst offenders. So you would never have any of the Roman authorities very casually crucifying someone. You would need to have proper reasons for it. And so these leaders would have conspired and thought this is the best method to employ so that the whole public will think that, you know, we are really justified and we are really right in doing what we are doing. So they asked Pilate and say, you know, you got to cooperate with us and help us in this because we don't have the right to do the crucifixion. But if you say yes, then it can be done. So this is kind of a bit of a background regarding why they choose this particular mode. But of course, they were also fulfilling the scriptures, which they don't realize at that time. So now the conversation between Pilate and Jesus begins. And if we could read out verses 33 to 35. So Pilate entered his headquarters again and called Jesus and said to him, are you the king of Jews? Jesus answered, do you say this of your own accord or did others say this to you about me? Pilate answered, am I of you, your own nation? And the chief priest have delivered you over to me. What have you done? Okay, so Pilate, like I said earlier, really wasn't interested at all in the religion of the Jews or their faith and their beliefs. He's just basically looking at this whole thing from a political point of view.   Because if you're calling yourself a king, then maybe I need to take action against you because you know, the emperor, the Roman emperor doesn't want anyone going around saying that they are kings and trying to make themselves independent of Roman authority. So are you the king of that?  So he asks, are you the king of the Jews? And then Jesus very plainly says in verse 36, my kingdom is not of this world. You know, I am a king, but my kingdom is not from here, which is why I even told my servants not to put up a fight, you know, not to defend me. So he gives Pilate the assurance that he is not trying to create any kind of rebellion against the Roman emperor. His kingdom is a different kind, something else altogether. So he says that to Pilate. And once, you know, Pilate hears this, he kind of loses interest in the sense. He's only worried about some kind of political insurrection or some kind of rebellion. So once Jesus says that he is not of this world, his kingdom is not of this world, then it really doesn't matter. And we see his response in verses 37 and 38, if someone could read out that.  For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice. So here, yeah, yeah, yeah, verse 38, please go ahead. Yeah. Pilate said to him, what is truth? Yeah. After he had said this, he went back outside to the Jews and told him, no guilt. Okay, so this is the first time that Pilate says, I find no guilt in him. He will go on to say this another two times, three times very openly. You have Pilate, the Roman governor, very clearly declaring in public that I find no fault in this man. Okay, so the basic conversation here, so Pilate says, okay, you're saying that you're not from here, but you are a king, is it? And Jesus says, I have come to declare the truth. And if you believe in this and all those who believe in the truth, they are on the, those who believe in me, they are on the side of the truth. So here Jesus is giving an offer to Pilate, are you willing to believe in this truth? Are you willing to accept it and stand on it? So in the middle of all of this, there's a salvation offer actually being extended to this man, to this very powerful man. And Jesus says, I came into the world to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me. So are you willing to listen to me? Are you willing to accept me as a king who has come over here and Pilate's responses, what is truth? So this is a very popular view that we have today and Pilate obviously held the same view. Everyone's opinion seems to be nowadays, you hold on to what you believe in, I hold on to my version of the truth. You have your version of the truth, I have my version of the truth because all our versions of truth are just no different philosophies. You have a philosophy, I have a philosophy. So let's all hold on to our philosophies and then let's peacefully coexist. Why are you saying that your philosophy is better than mine? Why are you saying that your philosophy is more truthful than mine? Because there is no one constant truth is the general belief, that's kind of prevailing. There is no one solid, solitary truth. There are just multiple truths in the sense that our multiple philosophies is what people say. So over here, Pilate is saying, what is truth? Truth, there are different versions of it. But Jesus says, everyone on the side of truth listens to me. He says, I have come to testify to the truth. So there is one solid truth. There are many philosophies. Some philosophies line up with the truth and many philosophies do not line up with this the truth. But there is one singular truth which we cannot escape from. And the world does not accept that. They are like, oh, what is truth? Your truth is your truth. My truth is my truth.  There is one single established truth which the Creator God has set up. And either you believe in that or you don't. There are no multiple truths. So that is something which many people refuse to accept. And yeah, we will, we could maybe, no, I think we'll not have time to get into the next portion. So maybe we could go for a break. So at 10 o'clock, we'll log back in and we'll continue with this passage. All right, thank you.


So, for anybody who doesn't know me, my name is Caitlyn Penya, I am the Director of Operations and Programs for the Center for Election Science. We are a nonpartisan, non-profit dedicated to empowering voters with voting methods that strengthen democracy. So the main thing that we advocate for is called approval voting and it allows you to vote for as many candidates as you like and a candidate with the most votes wins. And we've got today Kunal Goyal, he is here from Ballot Ready, he's a business development representative and he's going to fill us in on how we can make sure that we are able to vote safely and vote informed this election. So thank you so much for attending Kunal. Thank you, Caitlyn, and thank you to Center for Election Science. We're obviously sort of partners in this space, but I can definitely say we're big fans of you all at Ballot Ready and love the topic of this call and love the work you all are doing, so I appreciate you having me. Awesome, thank you. Yeah, I love the work you guys do. It's really important to make sure that voters know how to vote in the first place and then also that they know they're informed about everybody, all of the people who are on their ballot and all of the issues because so often we go into the polling booth and we're just thinking about, you know, the president or the governor or some of those top line races and people aren't always ready to vote on these random, you know, city council members or judges or those sorts of things. So I think it's really helpful to have a tool to be able to know what's going to be on your ballot ahead of time so you can vote on every issue and every person. And I think this year, so it's election year, obviously people are always concerned about making sure that they can vote, but this year things are even more uncertain, even more different because of the pandemic. States are changing the things that they're changing their requirements. So some of them are expanding vote by mail, some of them are expanding the absentee ballot access. And so I'm curious, like what have you all at ballot ready been hearing from folks on the ground or organizations that you work with about what people are going through this year as far as voting. Well, absolutely. And you nailed it on the head, you know, to start, as you mentioned, it's already difficult for voters to know about their down ballot candidates to know their rules. Even pre pandemic that was already a sort of sort of a challenge of ours and what we embarked on doing was making it much easier for every voter regardless of what state or county you're in to be able to find the information you need to vote and to vote informed. And just as you mentioned that challenges, you know, grown exponentially this year, do do the pandemic changing voter rules at the county level at the state level at federal level. And then also a perception problem as well right so you know if you look at certain polling data, people feel worried about voting this year they feel uncertain about about the vote. And yeah, that's exactly the gap that we want to help fill and that our partners want to help fill is that uncertainty but nonetheless that desire that people have to vote and be engaged to this year and to be informed. What's interesting is that in terms of you asked like what we hear on the ground and you know what what that looks like is the reality is that we just have to turn out the vote as much as possible right we have to do what we do in that sense and that is make all the data that is out there easily accessible people to people, provide people with their options on how to vote. You know whether it be by mail drop off in person early in person on Election Day, give voters their options let them make a choice for themselves on how to vote. You know, it's very difficult for Val ready or for any of our partners customers users to account for a lot of the issues that are going to occur within county election offices within certain institutions that we ultimately have no control over. What we can do and the best that we do is we just try to be as communicative with county offices that we work with with different services we work with in terms of vote by mail and just be clear about our goals. So ultimately you'll hear it all the time but through all the uncertainty through all the changing rules, our goal remains the same and that is just to help people vote. What happens on Election Day or after Election Day is not totally within anyone's control. Yeah, I think. I think focusing on getting the information that we are able to get and controlling the things that we are able to control is really important right now right there so much uncertainty and there's so much that feels out of our control. But just getting the information that we can get is really important and so we're, we're about, I think 47 ish days, maybe away from from Election Day on November 3. So seven weeks. Yeah, seven weeks, seven weeks. So for anyone who hasn't registered yet is there still time. How can they find out how to register. There is still time. It depends on what states you are in so registration deadlines vary from state to state registration is coming up soon I would say the majority of states have registration registration deadlines in mid October. There's a couple ways, which you can find to find out this information so one thing I do want to say to that I didn't mention is that already is a non partisan organization. And we are we are literally non partisan and what I mean by that is that all the data that's available through our website is sourced directly from county election offices from the state and then from candidates themselves so there is no piece of data on the website that comes from anything but the source that is directly presented. And that goes to for everything registration vote by mail. We work with county election offices and and that's what makes it non partisan. Two ways so the first is the non ballot ready way which I just will offer up in case it's useful is to visit your state, your Secretary of State website for your for your whatever state it may be so for me I'm in Georgia you can just type in Georgia you can also most states I should say when you go when you click on that link will have a portal. It's not always the most user friendly portal it's not always the most easy understand and we'll get into that ready in just a second but almost all states should have a portal where you can check registration and then get registered directly. Again it varies from state to state so I don't want to give a blanket coverage of like you can do this no matter what. But so most states do have portals you can also call your county elections office so again the best way if you're not going to use a voter tool would be just to Google your county and just the words elections office and a number should pop up and you can call and confirm that. With that said to simplify all that process. You can also go to about ready.org and type in your address into our tool into our widget and pull up all the information you need. I'm happy to go through that now if you'd like or shall I go ahead and share my screen. Yeah sure go right ahead you should have screen sharing privileges. Fantastic. Alright so are we looking at the right screen here hopefully. Yep. Awesome so this is about ready.org and my wife has been a little funky so bear with me hopefully everything goes the way we hope. You can get here type in in www.bowleray.org Google bowleray.org about ready it should be the first thing that comes up. And you can see right away there's this bar where you can type in your address and hit get started. There's a bit more to the website. We can talk about that later but for now we'll go ahead and try this out. So I will go ahead and type in my address and hope that no one shows up at my door. So you just got to select your dress hit get started. And yes so our tool is called the election center this is a new tool actually for us in 2020. Basically we had all these separate tools for separate tasks just as Caitlin mentioned researching your ballot finding out registration we figured okay let's put that all together in one. When it first starts it comes up with a little prompt with a little helper to guide you through. I'm going to exit out of that because today I'm your helper to guide you through so we're not going to need that. So you can see here hopefully this is easy and I'll make sure it's on that we organized it so that it goes in sort of the order of all the steps of what you need to do to vote and vote safely and vote informed.  And simply for typing in your address it gives you this sort of you are 20% ready to vote. The idea here being that people like seeing a progress bar. People don't like seeing an unfinished progress bar so you know we all want to just make sure we're finishing our plan. So the first step and I know you mentioned registration so we'll get to that Caitlin but one step is you can pledge to vote. This is sort of the simplest tool that becomes kind of available all year where you can just sort of commit sign give a reason why you're pledging to vote in this election. Useful for times like June July, you know, keeping people engaged and so, you know, if anything please come and pledge your pledge to vote. And then you also have this check your rights about that real quick I think I have actually heard that there's research that shows that even just the act of someone saying I am going to vote this election increases the chance that they actually follow through and do vote. And that and that's exactly right and that's exactly why we had it and you know it's it's not the most dynamic part of this process but you're absolutely right you know just by saying you're going to vote committing to it verbally digitally. It makes a big difference and it's helpful to to get an idea of how many people are committing to vote you know what is the excitement like so absolutely right. And then there's the check their check your registration box. So if you go to about ready.org. You type in your address, it will help you walk through checking registration for that specific address. Depending on your state, and we won't finish this flow just for now, because I am hopefully I'm quite sure I'm verified and registered. But one thing you'll notice is that this flow will vary from state to state. So Georgia was fairly straightforward in terms of registration, we're able to check that ourselves. Some states you'll see that it'll take you to the vote the state portal instead they prefer that they do it on their site. So it's configured differently for all 50 states and that makes it usable for voters in all 50 states as well. So just keep in mind we're going through the Georgia flow right now, but that may or may not be what you see exactly for your check registration so it's whatever is most readily available. That's, that's super helpful. And so that I see the next step is requesting a ballot and that was that was one of my next questions is, you know there are some states that are 100% vote by mail there are some states that are expanding the access to ballot or to absentee ballots so states where normally there are only certain requirements that you have to meet. Now, more people can can have access to that. So, yeah, what's that step to request your ballot. If you want to vote by mail or absentee. Absolutely. And you're right again, all these rules have have changed somewhat a record number of states will have vote by mail option this year. I actually think just today, a new state opted in for some form of vote by mail so up to 46 states that are offering vote by mail. Some states, I think it's four states including Washington and Colorado, send absentee ballots to all registered voters. So that's also important to know. Recently a few organizations have pushed out vote by mail including the United States Postal Service and Washington, Colorado became upset because the wording did not apply to their system. So, you're absolutely right there are tons of caveats and different rules. With that said, again, we put together this FAQ page for voting by mail. You can go to about about ready.org slash FAQ, and just very straightforward for your state I'll do Georgia again because I'm partial. You can find out all the very important details you need all the dates. Whether your state has vote by mail so there are some states that offer conditional vote by mail so you can only vote by mail if you, you know, qualify based on certain criteria, you're a veteran or something like that. And then there are states that have no excuse absentee voting Georgia is actually an example of one of those states. And on this FAQ page you can see. So let me break it down actually just a little bit farther just because I do want to be clear on this so there's a couple steps to vote by mail the first is getting registered. The second and these are the basics but the second is to apply to vote so we mentioned only four states send out ballots automatically and all the other states you need to apply in order to get a ballot and vote by mail. Let's talk about the application process in the tool just a little bit. So you have dates on when is the first day to apply when is the last day to request about to apply. Once you apply to vote by mail you wait and your county election office will send the ballot to you in the mail, along with a return envelope. Some states stamp their return envelope some states don't that's another team thing to keep an eye on but you get that about in the mail you fill it out, you put it in the return envelope you put it in the mailbox, and can emphasize this enough everyone hears it all the time do this as early as possible. You know, there will be a lot of people who will attempt to request ballots in mid October and it's a fine line you know that that's when you want to be returning your ballots at the latest so it says here, you know, for example in Georgia, when is the last day to request about Friday October 30. Okay, but you have to get your ballot returned postmarked by November 3 at 8pm. So what you have to ask yourself is if you apply that late do you think you're going to get about and be able to return by then. So here I'll, you know the rules per state there are being updated but I encourage you if you're interested in voting by mail to check out your dates mark your calendars. And then we can also talk about the the tool itself, if you're interested in that. But yeah any any other questions on vote by mail, Caitlin. I don't think so not right now it's it's such a. It's such a state by state thing that it makes it difficult to say this is what you're going to do or this is what the rules are because literally every single state is different. I think what you emphasized about requesting it as early as possible is really important. I know I was listening to a podcast last week with the Secretary of State, or the deputy secretary of state for Ohio, and they have similar to Georgia. Request state, I think is it's actually that Saturday. So October 31. And he's like the deputy secretary of state has been asking for that to be moved up because he was even saying there's no way for us to even get those ballots to you that fast it's kind of even have this as our as the deadline because it's it's just about impossible so request it as early as you possibly can. Absolutely and and also when you get your ballot to you know if you get it a little bit late. One key thing and again will mention as always this amendment that it does vary by state but for most for most states. It just needs to be postmarked by November 3 and order to be counted. And the reason that's important is that you might be a little bit better off if you get that ballot late, not dropping it in a mailbox but instead going to the post office and having them kind of just doing it there because they'll post market right away. So even if that mail doesn't get delivered until maybe a few hours after because that postmark will be set the ballot will count. So that's another another tip to. Yeah, actually another question that I just thought of with that is, I know that a lot of states I don't know if all of them do this but a lot of them have the ballot drop off boxes. And or you can take your ballot and drop it off at the polling place. Do you know any more information about that or how people can find those details. Okay, so it gets tricky quickly. Yes, you one great option is also dropping off so you apply to vote by mail you get your ballot, and instead of mailing it back, there are various drop off locations in your county provided by the county office. Usually the county election office itself has a drop off location.  You know, for me I'm always going to encourage you to go to about ready.org in the request about it flow, as well as the find a kind of polling place flow you can also find drop off locations. And you can sort of make a plan for yourself so you can choose your time choose your location, email it to yourself, and you just have that information it also provides directions, and we can potentially look at that and just a second depending on what's available through this flow as of now. And then Caitlin you mentioned as well. People who apply to vote by mail but then choose instead to vote in person. This does happen, you know, probably. I think in the Georgia primary, there were about 500,000 voters who applied to vote by mail but instead decided to vote in person. Again I just use Georgia as a reference but either in early or on the primary election day. Rules vary by state. This is one where we are still collecting data on what the state rules are so it will be included as well in these frequently asked questions, how to vote if you applied to vote by mail and instead want to vote in person. As I mentioned, we're still collecting that information. Frankly, a lot of counties and states are still determining those rules for themselves. This is such a dynamic election with vote by mail. So we're still collecting that but most for most states, the rule is that if you apply to vote by mail and you want to vote in person you just have to bring that ballot with you that you've got in the mail to your in person polling location. That way you're not don't have a ballot, you know, at home and a ballot at the polls. So again Georgia for example you just bring that ballot with you and they all get you set up in person. So that also is an option. It is out there if you apply to vote by mail. You can for the most part in most states vote in person should you wish. And I'll add one more one more thing to Caitlin is that I think voting by mail and dropping off are safe choices.  But you know I just want to express that like, these are secure ways of voting if you do it in time. Yeah, I think that's really important to emphasize as well. It's, it's completely secure. There are many states, as you mentioned earlier who have been doing 100% vote by mail. There's at least four I think maybe now five states that do 100% vote by mail, they've done studies, and the incidents of voter fraud is not any higher than what we see for in person voting and voter fraud in general is very, very, very, very small. It's, it's a tiny, tiny fraction of a percent. So I think people should feel confident in voting by mail voting absentee and especially if they drop it off because then they know exactly when it got there where it went. 100%. Awesome. Well, and so if people do choose to vote in person or maybe that's the only way that they are able to vote due to their, their state's rules. How can they find their polling place and this year obviously people might need to be concerned about is there social distance distancing enforced do I have to wear a mask, am I going to vote from my car, like there's lots of other things to consider as well. Absolutely, there are. Yes, so absolutely agree with what you said regarding vote by mail and voter fraud and vote by mail historically has always been a secure way to vote. You know, we started the year emphasizing vote by mail because of COVID right you know that why vote by mail is playing the role it does because people feel somewhat insecure just as you mentioned, I'm going in person. With that said, a lot of people are going to vote in person this year. You know, again, just a recent poll doesn't anything happen but more than 50% slightly more are planning to vote in person either very early on Election Day. In terms of finding your polling location again would encourage you to visit ball ready.org. There is the find your polling place box. When you type in your address again it's going to pull up unique options for your specific address it's to you coded all the way down to your address. And here it's as available soon. So right now, we are still collecting and states and counties are still determining early voting locations. Early voting actually starts tomorrow I believe in two states and sort of gets rolling throughout the month. And then obviously becomes pretty much widespread. I think through almost all 50. Now there are a few that actually don't have a person in voting but the majority of states do have early in person that will get going in October. States and counties are still determining that. So if you're curious if it's not yet available about ready.org. Again, would recommend calling your county elections office if you're trying to find out that information. You can also try their website. That's exactly where we get the information from. And it's not always the easiest to use. So that can be tricky, but would encourage you to visit your county election office or call, or come back to about ready in a week or a few days and find find that information. In terms of election day polling locations. That's done a little bit differently that you should be able to find on through your state portal. So we are all we are still sourcing those as well, but they will become available through about ready.org. At least with a few weeks to go. But for most states you should be able to if you're again keen on finding your election day location right now. In the same portal where you check your registration it should also tell you your registered election day voting location. Unfortunately, I can't go through this flow of find your polling place because it's not available for for my precinct in Georgia, but it does look a little bit like this, the request about flow. And here's another really useful page. By the way, if you click request about you see your vote by mail information, the dates, how it works, who is eligible, and then the same thing for in person. You can find your early voting dates. When you if you click find your polling place here, it'll ask you to sign up for a reminder. So feel free to go to balleray.org. Go through this flow sign up for reminder and will text or email you when your location becomes available. So that's a really great feature. But basically, it'll take you through a flow where you'll verify all your information find your polling location. This obviously is for requesting about another incredible flow that allows you to apply to request about digitally online. But basically there's a flow for each of the options that are presented here. And that should do the trick to help you make a plan to vote and vote either by mail or in person. Awesome. Yes, I hope everybody will make a plan to vote, especially this year with things just being uncertain. It's really nice to have this tool to, you know, get those reminders have an email or a piece of paper that tells you that you requested your ballot or where your polling places that you've checked your registration and you verified it if you're like me and you recently moved. That's really important to do. So I hope folks will do that. And part of making that plan as we talked about earlier is just knowing what is going to be on your ballot. Right. So how what are the tools that ballot ready has available for seeing who the candidates are what they stand for and the same thing with referendums and initiatives. Absolutely. So already is covering the ballot and all 50 states this year. And that is very much underway. So counties are releasing the lists of their candidates for different races. We're adding those lists verifying them and then conducting research on those candidates. And we will provide a voter guide for every single address. That's the goal anyway. And yes, just same in the selection center. You can still on the same screen if you look at research ballot and if you click on that it will take you to your personalized ballot guide. And just to give you a really quick look at this, you can see on the left hand bar, all the candidates and measures that will be on on your on your ballot you can sort by the level of the races. And I believe we have finished candidate gathering so these lists are finished and then you can also see your measures to. What you can do is you can click on the race that you're interested in. You can read a little bit about what that race is that's more useful, especially for down ballot positions that people are a little less familiar with. And then you can see the candidates up for election in that race, you can click on a candidate profile and view the research research that we have sourced so far for that candidate again a process that is very much underway and will become much more popular. But for a big Senate candidate like John Ossoff we do have some most information. We have all the social media links a website link to the campaign website. I think that is as useful as anything, especially for some down ballot candidates to just go to their social media and go to their websites, not always easy to find. Again, very key. This is all sourced from what candidates themselves provide so nothing nothing here issue stances as well so you can see where they stand on various issues broken up into specific categories. This, this wasn't me writing this this was this is John Ossoff on his campaign. If you click on it you can see it's hyperlinked I won't do it right now but it'll take you right to the spot in the site where we pulled this exact quote. So you can see issue stances for different categories and then you can also see endorsements again endorsements that he provided. So you can see key endorsements and should you wish to should you decide okay this is my pick you can also click add to my ballot and make a sample ballot for yourself. So what I would recommend is whenever maybe a little closer to when you plan to vote when you get your ballot after applying for in the mail or a few days before you go to early vote. Go to about ready.org typing your address go to the ballot guide and just one by one go through and add in each each race your ballot. You can save it email it print it share it with your friends. And again, Caitlin just as you mentioned the real value of this is in the local candidates. We're still collecting data but, you know, being able to see okay who's who's up for election as my county sheriff. I'm getting to read a little bit about her. That's the value add that we have as long as well as the measures here. So, as I mentioned, you know, data research is underway. But we have will have comprehensive ballots and I encourage you to go ahead and check it out as well already and start getting familiar with races candidates. And this is one thing Caitlin unlike many of the other things that I said that you can't find on county portals or state portal so this is a very unique thing that we do. And it's one of the big gaps we wanted to fill something you mentioned the beginning so hopefully people find it useful and I encourage people to use it as much as possible. Yeah, I love this especially for the the local race part and for the the ballot measures and initiatives, because, you know, so much of government happens on a local level we just have all of this attention on on the national races and that's where, you know, the drama is and people like to fight and complain. But, you know, the things that affect us every day are being decided in our city governments and in our state governments and so it's really important for people to be informed about that and be able to vote on those candidates and know who they are.  It might be difficult to understand sometimes that ballot language, the language of those initiatives it's written in kind of some legal ease, you know, and it can be it can be hard to decipher. And so getting this information ahead of time gives you the chance to read about it on ballot ready and then also do your own external research to know what's going on. Absolutely. And to your point, you know, you can't you can't totally blame the voter for having difficulty knowing what's on the ballot. It's not always really available. So, you know, that's what this is for. And, and yes, this is an opportunity to conduct your own research as well. And that's why we also just provide the racism and the names and keep it all 100% nonpartisan. Yeah, I love that. It's great. So if somebody wants to use this site, it's available online and then there's also an app, I think. There actually is not an app in the app store. But for some reason. Yeah, so there is a very mobile friendly version. So if you Google already on your phone, it's designed to there's a whole different design for mobile so it's very easy to use. But yeah, would encourage you to go to ballot ready.org on your phone on your computer. And there's also the flip side of our company, which I'll just allude to really quickly, which is that we also provide that widget and this data to other organizations who help us reach different communities and different groups. So we have both pay products and of course all this data is available for free as well. So, you may be using about ready tool through another source and not know it and that's great and that's what we want. So, you know, this this data will get out as much as possible. And if anybody's interested in learning about obtaining this data for your organization or these tools for your organization. You can also visit civic engine calm and find out a little more. Wonderful. Thank you so much. Is there anything else that we should know or anything we didn't cover that that you'd like to share. I think we covered, you know, a lot of the the main things that that we wanted to, you know, I might my sort of last word I think would just be that, you know, I do think there is some fear of voting this year, despite the excitement and I would just say, fear stop you, you know, go check your registration request a ballot. If you don't want to request a ballot vote in person research your ballot you know do do everything you can. And if you don't don't let it be that fear that prevents you from from doing it right so, you know, excitement for this election is super high I know there's uncertainty but the only thing we can each control as individuals is to try to vote and vote informed hopefully not ready or provides the resources you need to do that and even if it doesn't that's no excuse either so. But yeah otherwise like I think we covered what we want to and Caitlin thank you so much for your time. Awesome, thank you so much canal and yeah I will I'll just reiterate that I hope everyone who wants to vote will go vote this year and that they don't let any concerns about safety or about security stop them there are lots of ways. There's early voting, there's vote by mail, depending on your state.  And as everybody knows we love approval voting we want to make sure that people are empowered and that their voices are heard. And so if you like approval voting if you want if you want more people to be empowered with that if you want to see more events like this one. You want to hear from more people. We can always use contributions and support from you so you can go to election science.org slash donate to help us out. But thank you to canal thank you to all of our supporters who help make these awesome events happen. And yeah, go out and vote everyone. Thank you have a great day everyone. Thanks you too.


All right. Thank you. Sorry for the delay. My name is David Feifield. I'm an end map developer for about two years, and I'm the maintainer of the end map scripting engine subsystem. That's what we're going to talk about today is end map scripting engine or we call it NSE for short. I hope you all were able to pick up one of these. We're going to refer to that. If you haven't and you have your laptop, you can go to this URL and download one. But do pick one up. I mean, I've got links on here for resources and things if you want to get into script development. All right. So I want to start by assuming that not everyone in the room is an end map expert. There have got to be a few newbies in here. And even those of you who think you are experts may not be as expert as you think. That's something that happens to me just about every day. So let's look at what we're going to do for this talk. Okay. Don't do that again. About 10 minutes we're going to spend on NSE for end users. How do you use the scripting engine? How to interpret the results? About 20 minutes we're going to talk about how to write scripts, how to be a developer, and we'll walk through maybe writing a simple script. And then finally, I have an application of kind of a neat application of NSE that I want to show you and stick around. I think you're going to like that. Oh, and do pay attention. There are only two jokes in this presentation. And that was the first joke. Okay. Okay. So for those of you who are not familiar with end map, please go to look at this highlighted section of the handout about end map. I would run a live scan for you. This isn't my computer, so we're just going to show you the results that are here. These are typical end map results. scanme.nmap.org is a website that's set up just for people to play with end map or to test other kind of port scanners. So if we run end map scanme.nmap.org, this is the output we'll see. It scans in about nine seconds. It has scanned the 1,000 ports that we found empirically are most likely to be open. And it has found two open ports, four closed ports, and 994 filtered ports. Filtered ports are those that didn't send back any reply at all, not a SINAC, not a reset or anything like that. So this is great. And this is what people know end map is for. And end map is really super at this. We're always looking for ways to improve end maps results, and NSE is part of that. So let's talk about why NSE exists. How many of you are familiar with end maps version detection? Okay, yeah. So you just give it a little dash S capital V, and end map will, for every open port, it will send probes to that port and try and get a response. And then based on the response, it matches it against a database of regular expressions.  This is probably IIS. We have some pretty crazy ones. Like this is probably a web thermometer. This is probably a car wash, you know. Yeah. Version detection is great, but it can't do everything. There are some network tasks where you need to send more than a single probe. You need to send the response, get something back, and then depending on the response, you may need to send, you know, one of three things or whatever. You need some degree of programmability. I wasn't around when NSE got started, but what I have heard is that one of the original use cases for it was detection of the Skype protocol, Skype version 2. It's really a tricky protocol. I think one of the reasons is because they try to make it hard to detect. If you send something that looks like an HTTP get request to Skype, it will send back something that looks like an HTTP 404. If you send anything else to Skype, it will send back what looks like random data. It's probably encrypted or something. I don't know much about the protocol. I think people have tried to reverse engineer it. But anyway, you really need two probes to detect it accurately. So, I mean, that's one of the original motivations. Another thing that we hope NSE is used for is exploit research and development. Say that you are a security researcher and you found a new exploit and you want to demonstrate it. You might write a proof of concept, you know, in Python or Perl and it runs against one host and it exploits this. Or maybe it doesn't exploit something, but it tests for a vulnerability and you've got this tester that runs against one host and you say, okay, now let's make this real. Let's bring in some threads or something to make it fast. Let's make it run against lots of hosts. We'll add in name resolution, everything like that. All of that is sort of nuts and bolts coding. It's separate from your exploit or from your vulnerability checker. NSE is sort of designed to free you from that. So, if you write your original script in NSE, that's your proof of concept and that also becomes your production scanner because it automatically becomes parallelizable. It automatically can run against multiple hosts. It automatically is fast because it's using NMAP scanning engine. So, how to use NSE? Simplest use, it's very easy. We just add a new option. You say dash s capital C. I guess that sort of looks like script. It's not that hard to remember. We're running out of letters to name NMAP options. Now, these results are almost exactly the same as before. You'll notice it took quite a bit longer, about 27 seconds. And we only have one extra line. It gave us this HTML title. That's the title of that web page. So, unfortunately, that's not very inspiring just because ScanMe doesn't respond to a lot of the scripts that we have currently. But let's adjust the command line a little bit. Now I'm using the dash dash script equals safe option. What that's going to do is run all the scripts in the safe category, which is more than you get with just the default scan. And now you see we've got a whole lot more to look at. We've got the HTML title. And if you went to that web page, you would see that's the title of that web page. Another script called HTTP headers has downloaded all the headers. A third script called HTTP date has got the date, which is obviously a subset of the headers. And it's also showed you how far the remote clock is off from the local clock. And I don't know why. ScanMe is always like 5 to 10 seconds off. I have no idea why that is. And some extra information here. ASN, ASN query script didn't return any answers, but we also got who is results. So this is sort of the who is script is like a replacement for the who is command. So now this is a lot more interesting. And this is just a taste of what NSE can do for you. Okay, now I'd like you to turn to this highlighted section using NSE in your handout. And this is going to give you a quick rundown of how to activate NSE in various modes. We mentioned dash SC dash dash script equals default. Those are actually synonyms. And NMAP dash capital A. Capital A is advanced and aggressive scan. Can anyone tell me what else that option turns on besides script scanning? This, this option here, sorry. Yeah, OS detections one. Turns on script scanning OS detection, version detection and tracer. So if you want a lot of results and you're not afraid of, you know, raising a few snort eyebrows or whatever, that's the option to use. If you have a specific script in mind you want to run, you just give the script's name SSH dash host key. We follow the convention that NSE scripts have a file name that ends in dot NSE, but you can omit that. You can use shell like wildcards. So this will run all the HTTP scripts and all the SNMP scripts. And obviously you have to quote that to protect it from the shell. We try to follow common naming conventions so that you can, for example, run all the HTTP scripts like that. Scripts are divided into categories. So that first example I showed you, script equals safe. That's just an example of category scan. You can separate multiple scans, multiple categories by commas. So here we're going to run all the scripts that are safe default or that check for malware infections. And then finally Boolean selection you can use and or parentheses and not to make anything you want. So for example, you want to run all the default scripts and all the discovery scripts, but nothing that could be considered intrusive. That could possibly crash a machine or things like that. Now I'd like to see if I can open this in a tab. Oh, never mind. That's not going to work. Yeah, that's right. Sorry. I would like to show you this, but definitely if you're interested at all in script development, write down this URL. This is what I would show you nmap.org slash nse doc. This is where we have documentation for all the scripts. We have 94 scripts I checked this morning and a couple dozen libraries. All the documentation is there online. When I'm writing scripts, I consult that just about daily. I'm not going to read all the script categories to you. You can read them and also in the online documentation we've got more information. Just a few notes on some of them. External means that it could contact a third party. And so if you're trying to be very private in your scanning, you want to just put and not external at the end of your script selection. Intrusive is also worth a look. When it says may crash systems, that's not a joke. We have some scripts that test for denial of service. And the best way we figured it out how to test for it is to deny the service. And so there are scripts that do that. So don't run intrusive scripts. Well, you know, read the documentation before you do that. And one last category is sort of a special one, the version category. Those scripts are run when you do normal nmap version detection. So I mentioned that Skype detection script. That's going to run if you just ask for version detection. Some scripts can take arguments. All you do is just give dash dash script args. Let me give you some of the examples here. Like for all the SNMP scripts, they take an argument called SNMP community. So you can set the community string. Otherwise it defaults to public. This is kind of a neat script PGL ready message for certain HP printers. This will set the message that's displayed on the little LCD screen. So you give it the script arg to whatever you want it to say. And if you're running the SNB scripts, for some of them, they can do better work if they have a username and password. So you give the SNB user SNB pass args. Again, look at the online NSC doc, and that tells you all the arguments that all the scripts can take. If you are running the SNB scripts and you don't have a username and password, don't worry, just run the SNB script first. We got started a little behind schedule, so I'm not going to show you the NSC doc for these scripts. I guess I couldn't get on the net anyway. But these are just a few that I like that I think you could start using to automate some of the network scans that you're already using. Banner, for example, just connects to a socket, sends nothing and listens, and prints out whatever it receives. Sometimes that can be useful if version detection isn't working for you. This is kind of a fun one. HTTP favicon downloads the favicon, hashes it, matches it against the database, and from that it can fingerprint some web applications. So that's a summary of NSC for users. Let's talk about NSC for developers. In your handout, it's on the back part here. It's a section labeled anatomy of a script. This is the HTTP date script, and we're going to walk through it really fast. This script is written by me. It's the first script I wrote. At the time, I was sort of embarrassed just because the script doesn't do very much, but now I'm glad I wrote it because it's almost small enough to fit on one page, and it makes a great example. And of course, it's impeccably coded. So at the top, there's a variable called description, and this, again, will go into the automatically generated documentation. This can be long. It can be several paragraphs. It can include hyperlinks, and we encourage you to be as descriptive as possible there. This square bracket syntax, that's just Lua syntax for a string. Boy, I almost forgot to mention. NSC is written in Lua. Okay. It's used by a lot of other security tools too, so there are more and more people learning how to use Lua. But I think, I mean, you can look at this. Any programmer is going to be able to understand what's going on here. Lua comments begin with two dashes. Special comments that begin with three dashes start NSC doc sections. So you see this little at output. This is going to go into the online documentation as a special output section to show you what the script looks like when you run. So for example, here is me running this against, this was probably scanned me, again, off by a few seconds, and here's me running it against my DSL router, which apparently has a date two years ago that's set when it boots. A few other variables have script metadata, author and license. If your script is under a suitable open source license, we can consider including it with the Nmap distribution. This is where we define the categories that a script belongs in, and a script can be in any number of categories. So this one's discovery just because it discovers the clock setting in the remote system and safe because it's not going to do anything. I mean, this is what web servers are designed to do. We use three external modules, HTTP, short port and standard NSC. Now, here's the real interesting part, and this is what makes NSC what makes it itself. The port rule is a function, and this function is run against every open port that Nmap finds. Script scanning is done after the port scan, so we have a list of open ports and a list of scripts that the user asks to run. Each one of those has a port rule, and that port rule is run against all the open ports. For all those ports that it returns true, the script is going to run. It sounds kind of complicated, but we have a library to hide most of that. It's called short port, and basically what this means, this function call is going to return a function that returns true whenever it's running on one of these port numbers or whenever version detection has found one of these version names. So basically, we want to run this for anything that looks like HTTP. And finally, the action function defines what the script is going to do when it runs. So the action function gets two arguments. It's a host and a port, and I mean, this is pretty simple. Anybody could figure out how to get the date from an HTTP server. We have an HTTP library. We get the root document, parse the date from it. We have a standard library function to format the difference of two times, and we return it. The action function returns a string, and then that string is what appears in the output. So it's pretty easy to use. So if you want to get started writing scripts, my recommendation is to start with an existing script and modify it. There are a few required fields. You need to have a description. You need to define categories. You need a port rule, and you need an action. And once you have all those, your script can run. But NMAP is going to complain to you if one of those is missing, so it's not like you could make a mistake there. Now, I mentioned port rules. There are also scripts that can use what's called a host rule. And these are a little bit different. These are only run once per host, and these are scripts that don't belong necessarily to a single port, but they belong to a host. So like who is is an example of that. We don't run who is against a port. We run it against a host. So who is has a host rule and not a port rule. The difference here, let's look at some examples. banner.nse is a port rule script. You see port rule. banner. We like to run for any TCP port. And the action function takes two arguments, a host and a port. ASN query, which gets ASN numbers, or sorry, gets AS numbers, has a host rule. It runs for any non-private IP address, and we have a library for defining what's a private IP address. And this is important. The action function only takes one argument. It doesn't get a part table. There's a technical thing that is useful for script writers to know. How does NSE handle parallelism? I've mentioned that NSE is good for parallelism, and it is. You have all these scripts running at once. How do you control which is running when? The way this works is your script yields control whenever it does a socket operation. So when your script does a connect, another script gets to run until that connection is completed. And as soon as that connection is completed, your script gets called back and it continues. Now this makes writing scripts really easy because to the script, it looks like a normal blocking socket call for all the scripts. Same thing when you do like a send or a receive. Your script gives up control, other scripts get to run, and then transparently your script will come back as soon as that send or receive is finished. So again, if you're writing your scanner, you don't have to worry about writing non-blocking sockets and you don't have to write a threading engine or anything like that. It's just going to happen when you use NSE. Okay, the next section down below tips for script development. There are some files in the end map source you're going to want to know about. NSE main.lua is the actual core of the scripting engine. It is itself written in Lua just like the scripts. That was one of the summer of code projects last summer, was to rewrite the scripting engine from C++ to Lua. We had a hacker named Patrick Donnelly do that. NSE lib, all these start.lua files, these are the standard library. And again, look at the online NSE doc to learn all about those libraries. If you're going to write a script that, for example, uses DNS, don't write your own DNS engine because we have a library for that. There are some libraries that are written in C++ and not in Lua. So some of those NSE.cc files are those. And if you're interested, like, for example, our open SSL library is written in C++. If you're interested in that, it's not that much harder than writing a pure Lua library. But you are going to want to consult the documentation and probably read the programming in Lua Book. And finally, there's one script in the scripts directory that is not a script, script.db. And this is just a database of what category each script belongs in so that we can load them quickly without having to actually run an interpreter on them. So, you script writers. I don't know, has anyone thought about writing an NSE script or found an application for that? When you're developing, there are a few things that I have found useful. One is to know about the data dir option and give it an argument of dot, the current directory. That's going to run scripts in the current directory and not those that are installed in the system directory.  After you install a script, you have to run script update db and that's going to update that category database. Otherwise, again, you're going to be saying, why isn't my script running? And this is super important. If you use the nmap debug option, dash d, you're going to get back traces and it's going to inform you whenever a script fails to load and that's definitely very useful for development. Okay, you've seen my talk. You all know how to write Lua and NSE now. So, you've written your script and how do you get it in the nmap distribution? Well, the way to do it is to write to our mailing list, our dev mailing list, which is nmapdev at insecure.org. Recently, we had a volunteer, Patrick Carlson, came in and wrote just a whole bunch of great scripts. He's committed, I don't know, probably about 10 scripts in just the past few months, been really prolific. And this is just an exchange that took place on the mailing list to show you kind of what you can expect when you submit a script. So, first of all, he says, I finished two scripts. I've got one that shows NFS mounts and one that shows Citric published applications.   And he said, okay, well, I had to reverse engineer some of this stuff but I've documented the packets and then, okay, we added the script and that's how it works. And now we have scripts to show NFS mounts and Citric's applications. Okay, finally, well, not finally, there's one more exciting section after this. Some resources to know about if you want to get into script scanning. If you weren't aware, there is a book on nmap. It's called nmap network scanning. It's called nmap.org slash book. And there's a chapter on NSE and that whole chapter is available online. So you've got no excuse for not reading it. Programming in Lua is the official Lua manual and it's actually decent programming text even if, you know, you're not interested in Lua. And again, it's all online. Well, not the latest edition, but one edition back is all online. Definitely the online NSE doc has got documentation for all our scripts and libraries. And finally, the nmap dev at nsecure.org mailing list is where you ask questions, report bugs, and send your script when it's finished. All right. We have a script I mentioned earlier, http-favicon, and this is part of the NSE doc. Gets the favorites icon from a webpage and matches it against the database of the icons of known web applications. If there is a match, the name of the application is printed. Otherwise, the md5 hash of the icon data is printed. We got this script submitted actually a long time ago by a guy, and I hope I pronounce his name right, Vladko Kosturyak. And we didn't accept the script for a long time. He said, okay, this is a good script. It's a simple idea. I like it. But we need a good database. There was a database that had maybe a dozen entries and we don't know how relevant the entries are. We don't know how common these things actually are. So we solved that problem as we solve all problems in the NMAP project by scanning. We said, well, let's set up a scan and start scanning web servers and downloading icons and we'll do a frequency count and then we'll just document whatever the top 50 icons or whatever. So I wrote a script, faviconsurvey.nse, and a colleague of mine, Brandon Enright, who is a super NMAP scanner. He's a guy who really knows how to make scans go fast, especially huge scans like this where we're scanning about 10 million sites, ran these scans for us, and we downloaded about 10 million icons and about 30 gigabytes of data altogether with, you know, including host lists and everything like that, and including file system overhead because file systems aren't really happy about storing 10 million tiny, tiny files. And we made a database. So if you want to look at this, you know what the most common icon on the web is? The empty file, the zero byte file. It's not very exciting. That one's commented out. That's not useful for identification. But we have this database of hashes and matched up to applications. And okay, good. The only thing is it seems like kind of a waste to get 30 gigabytes of icons and only come undone but with a one kilobyte data file, don't you think? So what would you do if you had a million tiny icons? Well, we had one idea. But the ransom notes weren't really paying off, so we changed that. We said, let's be more constructive. Let's create some art. Okay, I intended to... Can I get a volunteer? There's a couple of posters right there in the corner. Do you want to hold those up so everybody can see? I meant to hang those up earlier. So we took all of those roughly 10 million icons and we sorted them by how often they appeared and packed them semi-randomly into this graphic and created this work of art, which is, I don't know, I think it's awesome.  I'm going to have some posters here in the hall so if you can find them, come take a look, but they're pretty cool. If you want... Yeah, let's unroll that and show everybody. It turns into a pretty gigantic poster. Thanks, guys. So if you want more information about this, if you want the data files and you want to download... Oh, I should say something about the poster. You can download this graphic and there's a PDF of it. The graphic is roughly 21,000 pixels wide and 24,000 pixels tall. It's 900 megabytes. If you're thinking of having it printed, I should warn you that it's been known to commit denial of service attacks against commercial printers. I got email this week and they said, I'm sorry we can't print your poster, it keeps crashing our printer. Jodor told me this is the first time Nmap has crashed a printer without sending any packets to it. But if you want some more information, we set up a quick website for this project, nmap.org.com. Please take a look, let us know what you think. This is my name, this is my email address. Nmap is at nmap.org. Are there any questions? Okay, so if I understand the correct... The question is, has there been thought to use Nmap for more than just running after a port is found open or running after more information is found? Scripting engine does run last, so it should have... It has as much information as it's going to get besides what's known. There are ways to coordinate the running of scripts. You can say one script depends on another, so if both scripts are run, one of them will run before the other. For example, our brute force password guesser scripts run early because other scripts have the use of the passwords that they find. Do I answer your question? Okay. You can find me after, yes. I don't know, and that would be a good thing to see. The question is, let's have some... What do you think of some integration between nmap scripts and metasploit scripts? And I think there are a lot of overlaps. There are things that both of them can kind of do well, and I have to admit that I don't know much about metasploit development. So I wish I could tell you more information, but I can at least thank you for the idea. Yeah, any other questions? Yeah. The question is, are there any problems, any legal problems with using nmap in certain countries? And... I'm not a lawyer, obviously. I think there may be a problem in Germany, although I did do a talk on nmap in Germany, and there seem to be a lot of nmap users there. You might have to talk to someone who has more experience with that, and there may be some information in the man page about, like, exports to terrorism-supporting countries or something like that. I really don't know much about that. Anything else? Yes. So the question is, how intelligent is the parallelism? He gave the example of a who-is server, where you don't want to hit the who-is server for every single host, especially if all the hosts are in the same net block because they're all going to have the same who-is. So that's an excellent question. And that exact example drove part of our library. So there are ways to disable the parallelism. We use a mutex so that the first who-is script that runs gets access to the server and the others wait until it finishes, and then once it's finished, they check a cache of who-is entries, and then if the entry is there, they don't have to hit the who-is server. So that does require some intelligence on the part of the script. It has to be built into the script, but there are ways to enforce that. All right, I think maybe one more question. Yes. When your script gets, when it runs the action function and action receives a host table on the port table, the host table should contain that you need. So it's got OS scan results and it's got the DNS name and it's got the IP address and everything like that. So it really should have access to everything that Nmap has access to, and I'm sorry, the question was, do scripts have access to all of Nmap's information? And they should, and if they don't, it's a bug and we can probably fix it. In fact, I think there's a patch pending to include the MAC address in the script now. Thank you, everyone.


Valve timing isn't just about making optimal power performance and fuel economy, appropriate timing also makes sure that your engine doesn't destroy itself by smashing all its guts together. Try to remember some of the basics of CQC. What does the term interference mean when referring to an engine? The short definition is that an interference engine is one where the pistons and valves are capable of making contact with each other if the piston is at top dead center and the valves are open at the same time. A non-interference or free running engine means that the pistons and valves cannot make contact regardless of position or timing. But why does that matter? The most common and frequent case is related to the engine's timing belt or chain. If you've got an interference engine and your timing belt fails, that's the thing that keeps the pistons and the valves from having a metallic make-out session. Also, valve and piston clearance isn't the only concern. Some engines can experience a valve interference. It's basically the same problem, but instead of valves and pistons touching, the opposing exhaust and intake valves can hit each other if timing is off by now. That's why it is super important to service your belt or chain properly. ProTube! In most cases, a timing belt doesn't just randomly fail. Usually, another part related to the belt is the actual cause of the problem. So just slapping on a new belt at the right time isn't a guarantee you're safe until the next service interval. While you're in there, take a closer look at all the moving parts that interact with your timing system. You might find something that needs to be replaced and it'll save you a big headache later. And improper maintenance isn't the only way these parts can end up colliding. The OEM designed some safety measures into the ECU and the engine that can be bypassed in the process of modifying a car. So if you're not careful, there's some risk in doing so, whether that's through a big mistake in ECU tuning or an engine building. So, moral of the story, when it comes to timing related performance mods like cams, valves, custom tuning, etc. Or if you're just doing common maintenance, make sure you know what you're doing or pay somebody that actually does. Because interference might just ruin your date and make you miss the Super Bowl.


Hi everyone, Joe for jaspyscasebreaks.com coming at you with a blaster box of 2019-2020 Hoops premium stock And at the end giving away a few Mamba mixer spots checked out the details of that on jaspyscasebreaks.com. It's pretty awesome We're gonna do the break itself first and then we'll re-randomize everybody's name to the end to see who wins those mixer spots We have probably have to do a few more of those fillers plus a bunch of spots straight up But let's keep chipping away. I'm sure we'll get to that basketball mixer over the next night or two Hey, maybe even tonight if we hustle Let's roll it. Let's randomize it one and a seven name. So the break first names and teams seven times one two three four five six and Seven then final time after seven we've got Cameron and down to Simon The nest the next filler box is up already if you want to try to win some more spots One and a six seven times for the teams one Two and seven and final time after seven we got the nicks down to the nets All right, here's the first half of the list right here And there's the second half of the list right there hopes up Pelicans Jesse Grizzlies could be some surprises in this Poops break. Let's sort by column B by team. Let's box this up and let's print and Rip Blaster exclusive red prisms Let Anthony Edwards in that commercial that subway commercial a dreamer All right, here's the final print out hot off the presses as David Bertans Carson Edwards Zubac Romeo Langford Andre Drummond zero gravity Russell Westbrook No John Morant no Zines. No, that's not. All right, so nothing too crazy in this in this hoops box, but The three mixer spots were given away. Those are three monster hits. You can consider those hits All right, so once again, thanks everyone for giving this a shot three very happy people the rest unhappy But I appreciate you trying six and a four ten times four and a six ten times top three after ten one two three four five six seven eight nine and 10th and final time after ten All right, all these sad people here is sad sad sad especially the four spot. That's the worst just missing it Louie super sad But the top three super happy congrats to Cody Tony. Oh and Louie. That's not not not that sad There you go. So those three in the Mamba mixer. I'm Joe for jazzy's case breaks calm. I'll see you next time for the next break Bye-bye