Looks like we still got a few people jumping on. The meat of this will be about 5 or 10 minutes later. So, I think this will work out. And Laura, have you already started the recording? Yes, we did. All right. Perfect. All right. Good evening. Sorry. Good evening, everyone. So this is the. Public meeting for construction of Keller Hicks Road. This is specifically for Keller Hicks going from. Lorne way to 377. So, I'll go through and show you all what we're building. Show you how. Our phasing for the construction. Talk about how long we're looking for construction. Some of the. Some of the things you keep an eye out for during construction and. Go through there, then we'll open it up at the end for questions. And then I'll have my contact info at the end. And yeah, feel free to contact me via email or phone afterwards. There's no issue there and I'll, I'm the type that'll usually just rather email someone afterwards and. Talk to them then if you are a property owner along the road and haven't talked to you specifically about this construction. Feel free to contact me via email and I'll work with you on specific details. And I know there's few people I've seen jump on that we've been working with in the past and. I'll just work with you 1 on 1 on those issues. But specifically, this is Keller Hicks from Lorne way to 377 and my name is Mitch 8 and we're city foot worth and I'll be the. City project manager on this project. So our project team, it'll be myself we have. Jason Bradley on board is our inspector and we've got a whole inspection team supporting him as well. This is a joint project city of Keller and I'll show you later just. We're kind of our project splits between city of Keller and city foot worth, but. It'll all be done by 1 contractor and we're just splitting up the funds on how we pay for it. City of killer contact be Chad Barti. But feel free to just contact me if you have any specific questions and. I'll I'll work with Chad and or forward them over to him if it's a specific issue on. City killer part of the project or property. Multitex our design engineer on the project and we can contracting is our contractor. We got a really great contractor on this. We've worked with McMahon in the past and they produce a really good product and they do a really good job of working with us to keep things safe and. Basically is easy as it can be on the public. This will be a pretty difficult project to build. For the public to keep driving on, so I'll show you kind of some hurdles that we're working through on that and then. We'll keep you updated as we go along with the construction and I'll give you a heads up of what this is going to look like going in. This is funded versus a few different sources. It's kind of a different project, but. So one of our original 2018 bond projects. It's kind of grown into working with city of color. And I'll show you kind of where city killer gets involved, but they contributed to this project and then we have a few other sources. Kind of filling in the gaps to help make sure everything gets constructed. And we don't have to take any important aspects out. So the improvements you should see come in. It's a two lane asphalt road there today. So anyone who hasn't driven a road. And then it's going to a three lane concrete road. So basically one lane each direction with the center turn lane. All the drainage that you see out there getting today. Today that's in the ditch. It'll be collected in the in the curb gutter. And taken to a culvert that will be upgrading out there. The 10 foot shared use path sidewalks. So that's going to be a great improvement. I've seen some people out there walking along the ditch or the side of the road. So I know that's it's going to be well used. And I'm sure everyone's going to really appreciate that once it's built. We're going to prove the drainage collection out there is discussed. No, we had a pretty big rain of it out there or throughout the city about a month ago. I hadn't heard any issues out there on certain flooding. But there are a couple areas. There is one area where we have a culvert that'll take it out of the flood zone. So in a big rain event, this road will not have any water overtopping in the future. So it'll be a great improvement. And then we're also doing some illumination improvements out there, as well as adding a traffic signal at Katie road and killer Hicks. Also, as part of this project is we are improving the railroad crossing that goes over the tracks between Katie road and 377. And I'll talk about that more details move forward. So as part of the improvements we're talking about, go to a three lane road. So basically, we should expect to see just a normal three lane road, 12 foot lane, center turn lane. And then we'll tie back into existing pavement at Lauren Way. We do have a future project coming that is in the stages of getting final design. And we'll start moving some franchise utilities on that project that goes between Lauren Way and Park Vista. But this construction project is strictly between Lauren Way and 377. So basically we're, you've seen the past year or so, we've been moving all those overhead electric poles. You'll start seeing that on the rest of killer Hicks going forward and start seeing our contract to get out there and start building a road. So we pretty exciting. So as we get to Katie road, we'll have a couple of turn lanes. Obviously, if you've driven the road, you see how close the railroad tracks are to Katie road. So that'll be pretty short turn lane. The putting the new sidewalk out there, putting the traffic signal at Katie road, it's going to be worked in with the railroad crossing. So if you're used to seeing how signal works when the train's going, it's going to look pretty similar to that. A new feature out there. It's going to be pretty nice is the sidewalk goes across the tracks. So we have some features there of how the sidewalk crosses and that'll be a nice little improvement as well. The city killer limit. So our city limit line is kind of unique around this area. It goes like right through the middle of the intersection. So city killers paying for all our improvements going across the railroad tracks. And then we're splitting that traffic signal costs 50, 50. And then a city for worse paying for everything going to the West. But we're all building it with one contractor. And so you don't have to wait for a separate contractor to come out there and build the rest of it. This is kind of what it looks like going up and down Katie road. So some more turn lane improvements. But for the most part, we're just tying into Katie road. As soon as we end those left turn lands. And then basically as we go across the tracks, we'll be tying into the existing pavement. And that existing intersection at 377 will remain the same. So if you've seen improvements to other traffic signal crossings, which you'll expect to see on this is we'll be working with those arms that cross the road and block traffic will also be changing the grade on this. So a lot of times when we work on those railroad crossings, they were done a long time ago.  And when we go back and redo, we're basically changing the grade of the road. So it actually comes out pretty level with the railroad. So part of what you'll expect to see is that railroad crossing on both sides of the road, the road on both sides of the railroad crossing, you'll see that come up. And then you'll also see the grade change at Katie road a little bit as we have to carry that profile change and raise the level of Katie road a little bit. So as you go across the tracks in the future, when construction is all done, it should be a nice smooth crossing. So it'll be pretty nice in the end as well. Some unique parts of this that you should be aware of as we go through our phasing is there are aspects of when we work on the railroad that have to be done by their specific railroad contractor. So our contractor will be able to work on everything, up to like five feet of the railroad tracks. And then we have to coordinate some items with their contractors. So there are some phasing of this that'll be completely dependent on when their contractor is available and they have not given us a specific timeline yet. So I have some items I'll talk about of how we phase this, but just know that as we work on the railroad crossing, that'll become something that we'll get the word out and make everyone aware of it. But it's something I can't give a specific date to is at the moment. And that's just kind of something we have to work with when we work with these railroad crossings. So the phasing on this, when we were in the middle of, so when we were working on the project for a while on this, the plan was just close it down because as you've seen out there, it's a very narrow right away. It's pretty difficult to keep two lanes of traffic open while they're trying to build any of these lanes. But there's a few businesses along here that, and some other aspects that we need to keep open. So it's going to be closed at times to build the road. And then when it's open, it's going to be difficult to go through. So my advice to everyone that doesn't need to drive on Color X would be just avoid it during construction when you're able to. And then so it's going to be pretty difficult to go through when we start construction. So our first big thing that's going to impact everyone is there's a culvert, a pretty sizable culvert right in the middle of the project. So the street name at the moment, it's Buckhead intersection. If you've driven through there, it's basically that new intersection that was built for the homes on the north side of the road. There's a pretty massive culvert that we're installing along there, and we're going to need to close down Killer Hicks when we build that. And that'll be one of the first items we work on. So what we will plan on be doing is we're going to close it at that intersection. And there's just a few businesses and we're coordinating with them between the Buckhead intersection and Katie Road. So expect that to be closed in late January and expect that to take about three months. We've got a really great contractor, so if he's got ways to speed things up, he's going to be looking into doing that. But expect that to just not be able to travel on as we start construction in spring. And we'll get some advanced notice out there, so you should see a message board or some sort of sign letting y'all know when any of these closures start. And then any of y'all that have certain businesses along the road, just shoot me an email. And I will make sure you guys are all tipped up to date and I can work with you on producing anything that will help with you and your customers and clients. So expect us to do that. And then there's some points where we're going to be able to keep traffic on Killer Hicks open. And that's going to be basically after he gets our culvert bill and gets a lot of this pavement built and open to traffic. We're going to basically build the rest of Killer Hicks half and half. And the same thing with this is it's pretty limited right away. So it's just going to be one lane of traffic open. So it's going to be one lane, one way traffic. And the way we're going to phase it is it's going to be one way going westbound. So away from the railroad crossing. So it'll be one way away from the railroad crossing. And the plan on that is we don't want to send people towards the railroad crossing and have it be one way traffic and then have the railroad be caught closing down the road and people have nowhere to go. So that's basically what we're looking at on that. And then after we get a lot of the Killer Hicks road built we'll be kind of at the mercy of when the railroad lets us know of when their contractor's available. At the moment it kind of looks like it might be the summer. But he's been contacting us lately and giving us different dates. So we're kind of waiting to see a moment with them and see how this works. But when we get to the railroad it's the same issue there it's pretty narrow crossing. So we're just going to have to close down the Killer Hicks crossing. And that'll be another crossing that takes about three months to build. We might get tricky and do it a little faster. But expect at least three months. And basically what we'll be doing for any proposed detours is we'll be advising everyone to use the Golden Triangle and Timberland crossings. As well as when we do any closures on Killer Hicks we'll be detouring traffic on Golden Triangle and Timberland. Golden Triangle is the closer one but I know that one already has some pretty heavy traffic. And most of the people who live in the neighborhood won't want to take Golden Triangle. But Timberland is one of our newly opened railroad crossings and got four lanes of traffic up there. So that would be my advice is anyone that lives in the neighborhood just plan on using Timberland a lot between January and the summer. And we'll eventually get Killer Hicks back to working normal again. And it'll be a lot easier to travel up and down after we get a bill. I need any issues on Katie Road basically phasing it where we'll be able to keep one lane of traffic open but it'll be one way southbound. And same thing on that if you can avoid Katie Road at all possible at all that would be advisable. And just plan on using Park Vista or 377 to go north and south for a while until we can get to that point. But yeah it'll be a little difficult for anyone who needs to drive through this construction zone before it's all completely built. So that would be my advice is just plan on using other roads for a while. But we'll have when we're able to keep traffic open there'll be a path but it'll be very slow and it'll probably take just as much time as if you just take other roads for a while. And that's basically what we're looking at. So a lot of that pavement anything outside of working on that railroad construction I would expect a lot of pavement to be built by sometime in the summer. And then we'll see when the railroad's ready to work on that crossing that'll dictate a lot of the pavement being able to be built around there. And then so that'll be the main thing I know everyone will be interested in and when can we drive on the new pavement again. And then we'll have a lot of other items like illumination and traffic signals to install but that'll be all after the pavement's built and open the traffic again and we'll just be we'll be phasing and you know flagging y'all as needed as we build those items but it won't be as much of a hassle that's when we're trying to build the pavement because yeah we just can't keep two-way traffic on these roads while we're tearing them up and rebuilding them. And yeah that covers most of it. I know there's a lot of detailed stuff everyone will be interested in on when exactly some of these closures will happen but expect mid-to-late January to start seeing some signs being put up of the closure about to happen on Keller-Hicks and then expect about three months till we're able to open up any traffic again and then I will keep everyone updated on when that railroad crossing is going to be closed. But yeah that's pretty much the whole thing but if you have any questions start putting them in the chat box and then if you have anything specific especially if you're along the road or you have a business along the road just shoot me an email which here's my contact info at the end and anyone feel free to contact me. But yeah if you have any real specific questions on how this impacts your property or your business just let me know via email and I'll start contacting everyone individually and we'll make sure everyone's kept up to date. I'll see. So let's see first question so are the homes being built providing funds for the project? Yeah in a way it's kind of a real detailed way of how the residential construction gets added to it but yeah it's part of the impact fees that come in to help build the roads that comes from local development so yeah that's where they're adding in to help build for the road. So when will the improvements be made on 377 side of the tracks? So yeah basically that will happen as we work on the railroad crossing so it's all going to be part of the same project. We just as soon as the railroad tells me hey our contractor is ready to work on such and such date we'll get that information out to everyone but at the moment it kind of looks like it's summer until he tells us otherwise. So will color portion grade be redone? Yeah so any pavement on that color half where we're working on the railroad it's basically what we're looking at is these limits here. So yeah we'll be working on a pavement adjacent to some of those businesses but if you represent one of those businesses feel free to contact me and me and Chad with the city color we'll get back to you and talk to you about any specific details that you might be concerned with. I think he's been talking to a lot of those businesses already so if you haven't heard from us just let us know and we'll get back to you. So any plans on any plans on fixing Katie Road between Keller Hicks and Golden Triangle? So Katie Road isn't part of our master thoroughfare plan. It's not necessarily part of this project. We have the turn lanes that we're building as part of this but if there's any specific issues out there such as potholes or anything we have a new method of getting those issues out to us and let's see. So Laura, Terry you probably know this better than I do but it's the easiest way to google and find that website. You got one by FW app, Mitch? Yeah the Fort Worth app but I know there's a website that's easy to use as well but we have an app that's called the Fort Worth app that you can download to your phones you can just take a picture or upload a street light out or pothole or something and it'll it's all set up where it'll go to the right person within the city to know how to fix that and then they'll if you put in your contact info they'll get back to you on oh cool we got a contractor ready to go work on it in a couple weeks we'll get it fixed by this time and they'll follow up with you to make sure everything was addressed but yeah if there's any specific issues on Katie Road feel free to put them into that that system on the uh if you can't figure it out just shoot me an email and um I'll be on that one but it is a pretty great website that was put together that'll help report issues sorry Mitch to report issues they can either download my FW app from you know whether it's a play store or um you know the what is it iTunes store and or they can call um<PHONE_NUMBER> that's the city's number that pushes through a um the right menu to report issues so either one of those two forms and there's a Fort Worth there's the website too um always that might be it just Fort Worth report issues and I think it's the first hit and I always refer everyone to this because it's way easy so um because all you have to do is put in the name of what your but the issue is and it'll narrow it down to the the right thing and then once you get it to the right thing it's all set up to go to the right person so yeah so if there's a puddle issue or the striping is just gone or there's something else going on um y'all can always report in here and uh see uh mowing issues I always report refer everyone to here so um it doesn't look like it's been mowed in the any up months or whatever um you can always put it in here anywhere throughout the city and it'll it'll get to the right person it's a pretty nice little setup that whoever came up with it uh let's see see will the new road be better quality it seems that the cement does much better the asphalt keeps crumbling so yes uh this project will be a concrete road so any new pavement that we're putting down will be concrete there's a short little portion next to the railroad crossing that the railroad tells us to put asphalt there which is like five feet so it's not it's all about it's not a long section but uh everything that we put down for new pavement will be concrete so that's uh that's a good one because yeah once we build it and open up traffic it's uh you don't have to mess with it for quite a while you don't have to deal with potholes or anything after rain events let's see so do you expect this project to be fully completed before the future project from Lauren Way to Park Vista begins uh that's a good question yes um so this will be definitely pavement wise it's going to be all built and open to traffic and I don't expect the other project to start construction before this one ends and uh if we are having issues with this I don't see any issues with delaying this getting open to traffic but if there are any issues with delaying this project um we won't start the other one until this one's complete so uh we won't have two competing projects uh messing with uh messing with y'all out there we'll uh we'll make sure we phase them correctly so yeah will the curbs and turns be redone on the Keller side specifically the northeast corner near the sign shop where trucks have had to hop the curb to turn on to killer hicks from 377 uh let's see I might have to come back to you you on that one in specific detail uh shad policy you're on board um I don't know if you know about that specific issue but we can uh we can take a look and just make sure we're uh addressing that one before we start building it Mitch this is Chad can you hear me yes so there's no pavement improvements at 377 with this project however we'll uh I'll get with our maintenance guys and take a closer look at that specific issue okay okay yeah now I see the question so this is specifically at the intersection it's not with one of the driveways so okay uh let's see do you understand the Keller Hicks road will be completed around April so most of Keller Hicks will be paved um and open to traffic by sometime in the summer so that's what I'll expect we'll have our culvert crossing and a lot of that pavement between that intersection where the homes are on the on the north end to Katie road a lot of that will be done by April or May and then we'll phase the rest of that people go back to that so a lot of this pavement will be done and open to traffic so sometime April May um around that timeline and then the rest of it going towards Lauren Way we'll have to build it half and half so that'll take a little longer I would expect sometime into summer you'll see almost all of Keller Hicks built and open to traffic uh so it'll it'll take a little time especially when we're doing concrete just because it takes a little longer to open it back up to traffic uh when we do asphalt it's usually open the next day but like one of the questions earlier asphalt might be quicker to open to traffic but uh it just it takes a lot longer to a lot more maintenance in the end so um so that's only bit downside of the concrete is it'll take a little bit more time to open to traffic but in the end it'll be a better product for y'all to drive on but yeah back to that original question between for all the killer Hicks between Katie road and Lauren Way I would expect sometime mid to late summer a lot of that's built and open to traffic again and we'll we'll keep you updated on progress along the way so there's a website uh you just just google uh killer Hicks um see if what worth it's usually one of the first hits and uh we'll keep you updated on here so I'll be updating it at least once a month and then uh this would be the best place to just go through and kind of see what what we're looking at and then if we're looking at closing the road at all you'll you should see a message board or sign out there advising all of we have a upcoming closure on a certain date and uh so you shouldn't be any instances where you're driving on a Monday and then Tuesday you should and then the road's just suddenly closed without any worrying left something out there giving a heads up of what's coming up let's see it out to the last one Mitch yeah uh yeah it's ours going down the list let's see Rusty's put that link in there for the um addressing issues and then I'll see will Katie road be expanded to three lanes at killer Hicks as well so we pull that guy up so this will be what Katie road looks like in the end so it's just at the intersection we'll see some turn lanes added but a couple hundred feet after either direction you'll see it go back down to two lanes so that'll help things out especially when the signal goes in it'll uh help move traffic a little bit I think everyone will enjoy that um man see well the intersection at Katie road closed for three months that killer Hicks is closed so what you'll expect to see is when killer Hicks is closed between uh between Buckhead and Katie road we'll keep at least one lane of traffic open that'll just be one lane going southbound so it's still going to be pretty difficult to get in and out of there um so I would I would expect just to avoid the area when as much as possible just get kind of used to taking Timberland or Golden Triangle whatever's whatever's easiest to get across the tracks but uh we will have one lane southbound only open on Katie road while we're while we're either working on killer Hicks or we're working on uh on the railroad crossing um but yeah that's just another one where it's just too narrow to keep two lanes of traffic open while we're trying to build that intersection up because probably the part of the issue is just a horizontal issue of where do you fit two lanes of traffic while you're building other pavement and then the other issue is a vertical problem of to make that road crossing at killer Hicks not be a speed hump like it is today we have to build up the Katie road intersection so that becomes an issue of uh keeping traffic on there while we're building up the grade um so that's another issue while why it's just going to be one lane of traffic open during that timeline but like I said before we got a really great contractor on this so if there's a way to user already thrown out a million ideas to me so if there's a way to speed things up and make it easier on y'all we'll uh it'll definitely be done uh so will there be flood mitigation at killer Hicks and Katie road see you're the number seven on that uh yeah so we've been working to fix any drainage issues out there uh the this so anything like that rain event that we had about a month ago um you shouldn't see any issues with the road after that uh we we designed for a 100 year storm event and I know that went a couple weeks ago or about a month ago that was pretty significant storm so um but it wasn't 100 year so we'll uh yeah you'll see any any drainage issues you've been seeing out there today a lot of that will be gone post construction what what is the uh end date of the project the final date so a lot of it's contingent on the railroad crossing on when we can do that because they originally told us it might be a year until they're out there which would have meant next fall um but they've been kind of given hence they might be done they might be able to work on that crossing quicker than that um but overall I would expect this project to take at least a year but it'll probably bleed into the spring of uh 2025 but most of that will be a lot of uh working on any illumination or traffic signal or sidewalks or something like that I would expect a lot of that pavement to be built pretty quickly by summer 2024 and then that railroad crossing will uh we're just kind of at the mercy of the railroad of when they say you can work on it during this timeline um and that'll kind of dictate when a lot of that pavement over there can be can be done so I would I would expect this time next year a lot of this to be complete um and if we're lucky with the railroad maybe a little quicker especially with all the pavement there might just be some items outside the curb so we're that we're working on so yeah that's what we're looking at uh let's see just to confirm color hicks will be closed so we have to go uh correct so I would if I would if you're used to driving color hicks especially to cross the railroad to get to 377 I would just plan on not using that as much as possible for the next six months or so between January and the summer um I know it's a huge inconvenience but uh it's I would just plan on acting like this the road is closed well we'll technically have it open at certain times um just to make sure these businesses have are able to get in and out of their properties but for the most part this is gonna be a very difficult area to get through once the contractor starts working out there so I would just plan on using park vista 377 timberland and golden triangles as much as possible see is the width of the radaway limiting when the right lane turns um not as much as just uh having a turn lane going across the tracks isn't something they like doing as well but uh for the most part that turn lane is kind of is what it is but there is a lot of that's coming into how we work with railroad on that crossing uh I see can anyone tell the railroad to stop running during the day um the short answer no um so we've uh yeah they have their radaway to use the railroad as needed um so uh when we work on the tracks we'll be working coordinating with them on how that gets done around them but uh as we're just shutting them down for a few months and letting us work on everything that yeah we're we're not uh allowed to do that I'll see during the closure in uh and southbound only lane at katie will katie be marked closed going northbound uh yeah so we're working on the details of how that'll be signed at the moment but for the most part you'll be able to get in and out of the the gym right there but north of that gym um it's going to be closed to through traffic so you'll see some signage being put up around there and that's basically what will be advised and everyone is um and get in and out of katie to get to that gym but after that it'll be closed and again this is my contact info uh it's on that website as well stuff you don't get it here um you can always just you know google colorix city of foreworth and uh my contact info comes up there uh we'll keep this updated as we move along and feel free to contact me anytime um and yeah if y'all have one of those businesses out there or property you're concerned about that it's adjacent to the project uh just shoot me a message and we'll uh we'll get what you want on one and I'll work out any details we need to or any issues during construction and that's that's it from my end um so I'll stick around in case any more questions you get thrown into the chat but uh it looks like I think we're able to answer everyone's


It was murdered by the Nazis during World War II. An official state ceremony will immediately begin right after the siren at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, where the President, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Knesset Speaker, Supreme Court President, and several Holocaust survivors will lay wreaths. This year's theme focuses on Jewish resistance, as this year marks 80 years since the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In studio with me is Dr. Carl Janker, Senior Researcher at the Center for Study of Contemporary European Jewelry Pardon at Tel Aviv University. Thank you very much for joining me today. Thank you for having me. In a moment, the siren to murmur the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust will ring, but this year the theme is Jewish resistance. Tell us about that decision. Well, the decision in the report was to focus more on attacks against the Haradim as the main victims of physical attacks in the West, and to come up with new solutions, to promote new solutions for getting these attacks, the number of these attacks down. And that siren will be ringing in 30 seconds time. Quite an incredible moment for the Jewish state to all stand together as one car stopping in the middle of the street. It's really quite a fascinating thing to see. It's one of the more emotional moments I remember the first time I experienced it, when everything comes to a standstill to honor the victims and the heroes that fought in the Holocaust. And that siren will be beginning in just five seconds time. We will take a moment. And that was the entire country of Israel coming to a halt for two minutes for the siren that marks the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day. With me in studio still is Carl Yonker, senior researcher at the Center for Study of Contemporary European Jewelry at Tel Aviv University. Those were quite incredible images we just saw at Tel Aviv, the entire country coming to a standstill, the highway car stopping in the middle of the street to take a moment to pause to remember the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, a very powerful moment. I want to turn our attention to a special report that you were involved in. It's a report by Tel Aviv University and the Anti-Defamation League released yesterday just on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day. And the findings are quite concerning because there's a major increase in anti-Semitic attacks in the United States and in Europe in 2002 compared to the previous year, pardon, largely targeting Jews that are visibly Jewish. So we're talking about the ultra-Orthodox community. What are the main reasons for this uptick? So there's a perception that ultra-Orthodox Jews are perceived as weak and are perceived as vulnerable, that they won't fight back when they're attacked. But they're also easy to identify. And what we found in our field research and in our research that a lot of these attacks happen are not pre-planned, are not pre-meditated. It's someone who decides at that moment they identify someone as Jewish and they decide to attack whether that's spitting, knocking off someone's kippah, pushing the violence ranges. But they're perceived as a legitimate target that won't fight back unlike other groups of people. And those are live images we're seeing from Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Museum of the Ceremony taking place to mark Israel's Holocaust Memorial Day. I want to ask you about this report. What sort of educational campaigns can lead to a reduction in the number of anti-Semitic attacks and the violence against Jews? So what we found is that there's a lot of failure in education in Holocaust education or in educational programs. What we're more after right now is looking at ways that we can repair and investigate ways that we can improve on education. But what we're really after is looking at policing, that we know where these attacks are occurring in certain areas of certain cities and to increase police presence, to increase prosecutions, to make sure that even what's perceived as a small crime of maybe spitting is prosecuted to the full extent of the law so that perpetrators understand that this is unacceptable. Right, and those are images of Israeli President Isaac Herzog laying the reef. I want to ask you turning back to education of the Holocaust to younger generations. Unfortunately, Holocaust survivors are unfortunately dying. They're getting older. We're now 80 years since the end of World War II. What about Holocaust education for young generations who are now so addicted to their smartphones? We have our own phones right here in studio. Their attention span is much shorter. What sort of education programs are there specifically for the younger generation? As far as I'm aware, there's lots of efforts, you know, Yad Vashem has an excellent educational program that they've developed over the course of years. We also saw the Anne Frank Diaries down for two. The Anne Frank Diaries. Did you take talk to Instagram? Exactly. But the question is at the end of the day are these effective? What's the reach? What's the impact? There's no doubt that preserving the memory of the victims of the survivors is key and important, but we need to figure out how this makes an impact and to make it relevant to today's students. So that also includes maybe broadening the subject area to talking about threats to democracy, threats to human rights. And again, as we point out in the report, racism is racism. And so when we talk about fighting manifestations of anti-Jewish racism, we also need to talk about fighting manifestations of racism elsewhere. And so this education, I think, comes in a holistic approach. Right. And speaking of that report, you noted that Russia in the past year has had an alarming amount of anti-Semitic statements by those close to Putin's regime, along with continuous cynical use of the memory of the Holocaust on part of Putin's government. These incidents raise fear that Russian Jews could also become a scapegoat for the regime's military failure, correct? Correct. And we saw this even early on in the Ukraine War, the chief rabbi or the rabbi, the Chabad rabbi, was warning that things could get bad for Russian Jews if the war were to go badly or if things were to develop badly, that they're a ready scapegoat. And so you've seen, there's been somewhat of an exodus, there's keeping heads down. Right. And the report, as we mentioned, also marks a very big uptick in anti-Semitic incidents, both in the United States and in Europe. And happening just this week in Barcelona on the Grand Lemonade de CienaGog was vandalized just this Sunday evening with graffiti, anti-Semitic graffiti that read free Palestine from the river to the sea, a common phrase heard at pro-Palestinian rallies and demonstrations. The city also decided to sever ties with its twin city, Tel Aviv, you know, over the Jewish state's policies towards the Palestinians. How concerning is this for the Jewish community in Spain and Barcelona specifically? I mean, these, unfortunately, these events happen. If you look at the report from the last year and in previous years, you see these incidents of vandalism, whether it's drawing a swastika on a synagogue, desecrating cemeteries, things like that. Unfortunately, these are events that keep happening. You know, it's something to be concerned about, but the community needs to be vigilant, police need to be vigilant, and they need to investigate again to find these perpetrators. You mentioned earlier that in the report, you also mentioned racism and anti-Semitic, not anti-Semitic, but more racist remarks also here in Israel. Right. To walk us through that decision. So again, we believe that racism is racism, and we need to call it out wherever we see it, not just against, when it's expressed against Jews, but against any minorities or anyone. And we've had in the past year, a few months, we've had members of Knesset play the sounds of, you know, of animals on the Knesset floor during a Facebook Live doing it to Arab Knesset members.  Call Yonker, senior researcher at the Center for Study of Contemporary European Jewelry at Tel Aviv University. Thank you very much.


talk. Let me maybe announce the last talk. So the last talk will be COA secure obfuscation and applications by Ran Kaneti, Subhadev, Chakraborty, Dakshita Kurana, Nishant Kumar, Oksana Kuburinaya and Manoj Prabhakaran. And before Suvaradip will tell us about this result, Ran Kaneti would like to speak a few words about the recent and tragic passing of one of the authors of this work. Thank you. Thank you. So one of our co-authors, Nishant Kumar, died last month in a tragic accident. And I would like to say a few words in his memory with your permission. Be very short. So some of these words were written by Dakshita Kurana, which was Nishant advisor and some of my own. So Nishant was born December 2, 1994 in Ranchi, Jakobar, India. And he passed away in a tragic accident on April 10 this year in Hawaii, Illinois, in US. He was 27 years old. Nishant was a bright star in our lives. He was special in his contagious, almost childlike enthusiasm and curiosity. He was also very insightful and smart. He had the makings of a wonderful researcher, and his passing is a measurable loss to our community. Even more importantly though, he was kind, patient, humble, and a caring mentor to many others. His passionate curiosity extended to a very wide array of topics spanning both theoretical and applied cryptography. He was bearing with questions and ideas, and he loved long, deep technical conversations. He would take it upon himself to drive project forward. He wouldn't shy away from spending long hours thinking about hot questions. He was a dream student and collaborator. He spent two productive years as a research fellow with Microsoft Research India, where he worked on multi-party computation compilers for machine learning. Two of these papers titled Cryptflow and Cryptflow 2 had an important impact on the area of secure inference. At the UIUC, he worked on non-modable and very probable obfuscation, which is the work that we will talk about today, and on new ways to achieve security by exploiting the properties of quantum information, which is forthcoming work. In our joint work, he was first very tentative, but as he learned more about the work and the relevant literature, he became more confident and started catching us when we were saying something wrong or just BS-ing. Soon enough, he started owning the work and providing large parts of it. Throughout, I was very much impressed with Nishant's insightfulness and his ability to say that he does not understand, that he did not understand or just know something, but when he was saying something for sure, if he was environmentally right. Last month, in March, we were working on finally putting a full version of the paper on Eprint. I was writing a new proof for one of the theorems, and I was very proud of it. It was very nice. I thought, it was nice ideas, and it looked just fine, but I sent everybody, please take a look. The following weekly meeting last Monday, Nishant said, it's very nice, but there are two issues which I don't really understand. I knew I was in trouble, and sure enough, those two issues were deep flaws in this truth, which we spent a lot of time the entire meeting to discuss. Then, time went out, and we had to stop. We said we'll talk next week. I spent most of the week thinking about the ways to get around those issues, and I was looking forward to the next Monday's meeting to discuss it again with Nishant and the others, but then Monday morning, I opened my email to the terrible news. I would like to tell Nishant, wherever he is, that we now think we have it done, and it's in the same overly. If you can take a look, it would be great. I can just say a few in one last paragraph, saying that Nishant's beautiful smile, sincerity, energy, and cheer touched the lives of everyone around him. It is still very hard to accept that he will never come back to us, but we always keep his memories of hearts and use his life to guide our own when we move forward. Thank you. Thanks, Ran, for the obituary. Indeed, it's very hard to accept that Nishant is not with us anymore, and I would like to dedicate my talk in the memory of Nishant. This talk is about COA secure obfuscation and applications. This is joint work with Ran, Dakshita, Nishant, Oksana, and Manoj. A one-minute summary of the paper. This paper provides a framework that endows software obfuscation with proofs of well-formness. In particular, it enhances many of the existing security notions of obfuscation to provide verifiability and non-malability guarantees, and we show genetic construction satisfying our definitions. The roadmap will be, I'll start with some motivations, why we consider such an ocean followed by our new definitions and some new applications to complete CC encryption and stronger software watermarking. In the interest of time, in this talk, I'll be talking about the complete CC encryption, although the software watermarking is also one of the main applications of our paper, and I would encourage people to look up our paper for the watermarking application. And finally, I would end my talk with the construction of COA obfuscation. Good. So general purpose software obfuscation holds great promise for enhancing the security of software. In general, software can be distributed and executed without fear that the internal design secrets of the program or the keys that are hidden inside the code will be revealed. And this is great for software creators because they can use obfuscation to hide the keys, both in the code and functionality. However, ubiquitous use of obfuscation might also call for some drawbacks. In particular, it's hard to verify properties of the obfuscated program. In general, it reduces to black box testing the program. And this is highly unsatisfactory, particularly if the, for example, the creator of the obfuscated program is untrusted or unknown. So yet another pressing issue is the issue of malleability in which the adversary might create an obfuscated program that depends on the secrets that are embedded in some other obfuscated program in illegitimate ways. And when I say illegitimate, it could refer to the legitimacy condition could refer to both the structural and functional properties of the obfuscated program. So for example, obfuscation might help to facilitate software plagiarism. Imagine that I publish an obfuscated program A that hides the details that it's potentially using the mold version of some proprietary software and it's not publicly announcing it. And this is a problem even if the program B is implemented correctly because the behavior of A might depend in malicious way depending upon the behavior of B. So one might expect that the already existing notions of software obfuscation like IO gives some sort of non-malleability guarantee. And in particular, this is somewhat true if, for example, IO uses inside it some module that directly does not affect the functionality of the program. But for example, imagine that you're obfuscating a pseudo random function like a puncturable PRF with a key K so that directly affects the output of the program. So in such case, it might be possible that adversary takes such an obfuscated program and produces another program that computes the same function but on a related key, K plus one, for example. So hopefully this provides enough motivation why we should study verifiability and non-malleability for obfuscation in general. So having said that, let's see what are the challenges that arise when we try to define such an ocean of obfuscation. So since we're talking about some sort of verifiability or non-malleability, we should have a verifier that takes an obfuscated program and outputs, say, accept or reject. So let's try to define in the following way that when the verifier accepts a program, then a specific circuit is being obfuscated. Of course, this is not desirable because ideally, you'd like to hide the code of C, which ideally obfuscation should do. But if you prove that a specific circuit is being obfuscated, then you reveal all the details of the circuit. The second attempt is that you would want to say that, okay, so if the verifier accepts, there exists some circuit C, which is functionally equivalent to this obfuscated circuit. This sounds reasonable. However, this is trivial to achieve because for every obfuscated program, there exists some plaintext program corresponding to it. So let's define a class of predicate. For the simplicity, let's consider a particular public predicate phi. And now the verification algorithm also takes as input some predicate and outputs accept. So we would want to say that if the output of the verification on input an obfuscated circuit and a public predicate is accept, then there exists an underlying circuit, which is functionally equivalent to the obfuscated circuit and satisfies the predicate. Now look that what we can do is that we can define the predicate in a fine-tuned way that hides the code of the circuit C, yet attest to some of the properties that you would want to verify. So for example, it might attest to the programs of some particular functionality or some particular structure, whatever you would want. Okay, so what's the trivial way to achieve this? You obfuscate a program and attach an easy proof that there exists some circuit C and randomness that results in the obfuscated circuit and satisfies the predicate. The drawback is that it requires a trusted setup phase that is a common reference string. And the goal of this work is to construct verifiable and non-manable obfuscation in the plain model. So before going into the details, let's review some prior works. So to the best of our knowledge, the closest work that is related to this topic is the verifiable functional encryption by Badrinar and Goyal, Jain, and Sahai from Isha Group 16. So the upside of their construction is that they provide a construction for IO that's verifiable and does not require any trusted setup assumption. However, the drawback is that that technique is stellar made for IO. So their idea is to use NEMI instead of NISIX. However, if you think about it, if you use NEMI, then the NEMI only guarantees that the witness is hidden if you have some alternate witnesses. So if you just obfuscate a program, you don't have an alternate witness to prove. So what they do in their construction is basically obfuscate the same program, say three times, and then prove using NEMI that two of the programs are same or functionally equivalent. And now I can use NEMI in some way to give verifiability. And I think the main drawback of their work is that it provides a limited form of hiding that can only guarantee indistinguishability for indistinguishability for obfuscations of functional equivalent circuit for which there exists only a short proof of equivalence. Say if you obfuscate, for example, a PRF and a punctured PRF, you have such a short proof of equivalence, but in general, this is not true for general circuits. And also it does not provide any sort of guarantee against malleability attacks. So it only provides guarantee against verifiability. Okay, so there's another work by Ran and Mayank from TCC 2009 with the title on malleable obfuscation. And this gives however this considers obfuscation for point functions and related functionalities because this is a simulation-based definition. And as we know that for all cluster functions, you cannot get VVB obfuscation. So this paper considers obfuscation for point functions and multi-point functions. But if you think about it, to define non-malleability, it's natural that you would want to have a simulation-based definition that whatever the adversary could come up with a black box axis, you can also simulate. Unfortunately, it's plagued by impossibility result. So this brings us to our definition, what is COA stands for chosen obfuscation attacks. So as before, let's consider a class of circuits and some predicate phi. And you'd expect that so the obfuscation algorithm also takes some circuit C and a predicate phi and outputs the program C hat. And the verification algorithm also takes the predicate phi and it should output 1 or 0. However, it turns out that so the obfuscator can be randomized and the verifier is deterministic. So in this setting, it turns out that it's very difficult to achieve security, I mean even verifiability for a general class of circuits. So what we do is relax the notion and say that the verifier can also be randomized. And the output of the verifier is not a single bit, instead it's a circuit. So let's try to understand this notion. So the obfuscation is basically a two step process where the obfuscator takes as input some circuit C and outputs some semi-functional obfuscation. It's not yet a fully functional program, so think of it as an encoding. And the verifier then transforms this encoding into a fully functional obfuscated circuit. So what is the correctness guarantee? The correctness guarantee is that for a legitimate circuit that is a circuit which satisfies the predicate, the output of the verifier is functionally equivalent to the circuit that you obfuscated. Soundness says that for any arbitrary program intermediate program C hat, if the output of the verifier is not bottom, that is it's a circuit C tilde which is not bottom, then there exists an underlying circuit which is functionally equivalent to C and satisfies the predicate. So this means that if the verifier outputs some circuit, then there exists some explanation of the circuit in the plaintext space and such that the plaintext program is legitimate. And finally, I come to the main notion which is COA security which says that for sufficiently similar circuit C0 and C1, the obfuscation of these two circuits is indistinguishable even given access to a de-obfuscation oracle. So I'll make it more explicit in the next slide. So let's consider this game between a challenger and an adversary. So the adversary uses a sampler to sample circuit C0 C1 along with some auxiliary input set and passes it to the challenger. Now when I say that the circuits must be sufficiently similar, so what do I mean by that is that the sampler should be admissible. So in some sense, the circuit C0 and C1 should satisfy the predicate and they should be indistinguishable by black box access. Okay, so note that this is powerful enough to capture any notion of obfuscation that provides some sort of hiding guarantees. Like in case of IO, C0 and C1 are functionally equivalent and Z is just null. Or you can think of Z as C0 C1. You can also capture PIO, XIO in this notion where you can define the sampler accordingly. Now the challenger samples a random bit and obfuscates a circuit Cb and sends C hat. So note that C hat is still not the fully functional program, right? It's the intermediate program. Now the adversary can ask for de-obfuscation queries. So it gives us input to the challenger some string C hat, which is a semi-functional program. And what the challenger does is that if it is equal to the challenge intermediate program, it outputs bottom. Else it runs the randomized verifier to transform it into a fully functional obfuscated circuit, C tilde. And if C tilde is not bottom, it returns. So there is a typo here. So basically you can think of it that when C tilde is not bottom, it returns a lexicographically first circuit, which is functionally equivalent to C and satisfies the predicate. So this is how the de-obfuscation oracle is defined. So note that this holds because if the output of the verifier is not bottom, then as I said, then there exists an underlying plaintext circuit which satisfies the predicate. And in particular, there can be many such circuits. So the challenger is inefficient, of course, and it outputs the lexicographically first such circuit which satisfies the predicate. And it returns the plaintext circuit to the adversity. And the de-obfuscation circuits can, queries can be made adaptively and in arbitrary order. And for simplicity, I've assumed that the adversity in the first step gives the C0, C1, but this is not necessary. It can also ask de-obfuscation queries and then give the challenge. Okay. And finally, it outputs a bit de-prime that's a guess for which of the circuits was obfuscated. Okay. So in our work, we also provide a second definition that is more handy to work with. So in particular, this definition says that you give me any notion of obfuscation that satisfies some hiding guarantee, which is represented by the admissible sampler definition. And I can augment this obfuscated circuit to give you a COA guarantee on top of it. So we call it COA fortification. So as before, we consider a class of circuit and a predicate phi. But now, let's define O to be an obfuscation scheme, which is injective. So why do I need it to be injective? I'll later explain. But in general, you can transform any obfuscation scheme into an injective obfuscation scheme by attaching a perfectly binding commitment of the plain text program along with the obfuscated circuit. Okay. So as before, the obfuscator takes us input the circuit and the predicate outputs a semi-functional program, which is then transformed by the randomized verifier into a fully functional program. So the correctness says that for a legitimate circuit, the output of the verifier should be in the image of the obfuscator O. So in particular, C tilde can be explained as an obfuscator of C with some randomness R. Soundness says that if the output of the verifier on some arbitrary string C hat is not bottom, then there exists an underlying circuit C such that it satisfies the predicate and is in the image of the obfuscation O. And finally, COA security says that again for sufficiently similar circuit C0 and C1, given access to a de-obfuscation oracle O inverse. So this is where it becomes important why the obfuscation scheme is injective. So when I say an obfuscation scheme is injective, it means that no two plain text programs map to the same obfuscated program. So for each obfuscated circuit, there is a uniquely defined plain text program, and hence the challenger can inefficiently invert and recover the plain text program. So now the security says that if the obfuscation of the two circuits C0 and C1 are indistinguishable, I can use this distinguisher to build a distinguisher for the underlying obfuscator O. So pictorially, so this is the, it says that suppose in this world where in the left world where there is an adversary and challenger it runs this game where the adversary receives a challenge semi-functional program, which is an obfuscation of either C0 or C1. And it makes de-obfuscation queries arbitrary and adaptively. And suppose there is a distinguisher, so if the adversary can distinguish which of the two circuits was obfuscated with non-negligible advantage, then I can use this adversary to build an adversary in the right hand world where note that there are no de-obfuscation queries. So this translates to a distinguisher for the underlying obfuscator O. And it's not hard to see that this definition two for injective PIO implies our definition one. So if you have COA fortification for injective PIO for some class of samplers, so more technically X in PIO, this implies our definition in the the definition that earlier showed you. Okay, so let's jump into the application, given the definitions. So the application that I'll be talking about is a complete CCA public key encryption. So this is basically an enhancement of CCA secure public key encryption where the adversary has access to a strong decryption oracle. So normally in CCA, the adversary has access to a decryption oracle where it can feed different ciphertext and get messages, but with respect to the challenge public key. But here the adversary can submit a couple of public keys and ciphertext of his or her choice and get it decrypted. So this is a strengthening of the notion of completely non-malleable encryption which was defined by Fishlin and some later works when defined appropriately. So it turns out that this notion is too good to be achievable in the plain model. So Fishlin showed that completely non-malleable public key encryption is impossible to construct in the plain model if you're using black box reduction and if the assumption in your hand is a polynomial time falsifiable assumption. So in our work we bypass this impossibility result by using sub exponential hardness assumptions. So before going into the model we require one technical condition from the public key encryption namely unique decryptability. So what does it say? So for any public key there is a way to test whether this public key is useless. So I assume that the encryption algorithm can output a string bottom and the decryption algorithm on input such a ciphertext which is bottom outputs bottom. So I say a public key is useless when the probability that for any message the ciphertext is bottom is some negligible. And for non-useless keys there should be a unique opening for this public key. So that means there should be a secret key that decrypts the ciphertext correctly. And moreover for this unique opening there should exist a public key that is under the support of the key generation algorithm. So note that the public key pk might not be in the support of key generation. So pictorially the challenger runs the key generation and gives the public key, the challenge public key to the adversary. Now the adversary can ask for like tuples of his choice like pki ci. Now the challenger checks if pki is useless. If it is not useless it inefficiently finds the opening that is the secret key and returns the message mi which is the result of decrypting ci under the opening. And it can do it arbitrarily and as many times as it wants. And then the adversary gives two messages M0 and 1 and gets the encryption of one of them. And it can continue the strong decryption oracle phase. And at some point it outputs a guess for the bit B. So having defined this notion, let's see how to construct this strong form of public encryption. So for this we would of course be requiring our notion of COA fortification for an injective IO. So with respect to a predicate which says that the predicate attests to some program which I will shortly show. So we need zero random generator which is length doubling and two PRFs which is puncturable. So the key generation algorithm samples two keys and the public key is an obfuscation of the following circuit. So it has two PRF keys embedded inside it. It takes us input a message and a randomness and expands the randomness and uses the C1 to basically encrypt the messages like a one time pad. And C3 is basically you can think of it as like a Mac on C1 and C2. So this is basically the Sahai waters CC secure public encryption. And what we do is kind of replace the obfuscation with the COA fortification for injective IO. So the encryption algorithm. So note that the public key is not yet a fully functional obfuscated circuit. So it's the P hat is the semi functional program. So the encryption algorithm runs the verification transforms it into a fully functional program and then runs the program on input the message and some randomness and samples. And the output is basically the ciphertext from the obfuscated circuit and the decryption key is basically the two secret keys and the decryption is trivial. So why is the scheme uniquely decryptable? So it follows from the soundness of the COA fortification of IO and the injectivity of IO. So this is because if the encryption algorithm outputs some circuit P tilde, which is not bottom with that means that there exists some plain text program such that program can that program is the obfuscation of such that P tilde is the obfuscation of that program. And since we say that the program should attest to this predicate phi, which is this program P k1 k2, it means the plain text program must have this structure. So in particular, I can extract the keys k1 k2 and use it for decryption. And since the IO is injective, there exists a unique such plain text program. Okay. Right. So let's go to let's see the proof of this on a very high level. So recall this. This is the program that we're obfuscating. So broadly, the two cases might arise for each strong decryption query. First, the public key PKI that the adversary queries is equal to the challenge public key. This is an easy case because then we are basically reducing to the CCA security of Sahi waters because the challenge key has not been changed. The interesting case is when the public is changed. So the adversary queries on some P K C where P K is not equal to P K star.  And you know, and by the soundness of COA fortification, you know that there exists a plain text program, which is obfuscated by IO to get P tilde. So now you recover this plain text program by using the de obfuscation oracle. And since the secret keys of the form. So once you have the plain text program, you can read the code of the program to recover the underlying PRF keys and use it for decryption. Good. Okay, so finally, I'll go to the construction of COA obfuscation very briefly. For this, we need non interactive distributionally indistinguishable argument that was introduced by Dakshita from last year Eurocrypt. So what is a needy argument? A needy argument is defined with respect to an NP language with some relation R L such that the prover and the verifier has input the language L the prover in addition has some secret distribution D of which it can use to sample statements and witnesses from the distribution in efficient efficiently, the prover hands over to the verify one message, think of it as a sampler and the verifier can use the sampler and its randomness to verifiably sample members from the distribution. So, so in particular completeness says that the output of the verifier is in the support of the distribution on the statement soundness says that if the output of the verifier is not bottom, that means that D is in the NP language L. So think of it as the instance being in the language and privacy says that for distributions which are indistinguishable, the proof does not break the indistinguishability. So for every distribution D1 and D2, which are indistinguishable, the samplers which are output by the prover are also indistinguishable. And this paper shows that assuring sub exponential I O and one way function that exists needy for all of NP. So in our work, we need a robust version of needy which we introduce, which is a needy that guarantees similar indistinguishability but with respect to an oracle O. So as before, we have the prover and the verifier and the completeness and the soundness guarantee, but robustness in general says that the two distribution, if the two distributions are indistinguishable, maybe a couple of minutes. Then the output of the prover is also indistinguishable even if the distinguisher get access to this oracle O. And we show how to construct this robust needy by modifying the construction from the paper last year, but I won't go into the details. So for the construction, I need a CCA secure commitment scheme where the oracle O is basically the decommitment oracle and I need an obfuscation scheme that is secure against adversities that can internally store this oracle. And the obfuscation scheme is very simple. So the distribution is defined as follows. You obfuscate the circuit C with some randomness R1 and you commit to the plaintext program. So having defined this distribution, the proof is basically, the obfuscation algorithm is basically the sampler of the needy prover and the verification algorithm is just verifying the needy proof. And I won't go into the proof, but the high level idea is that in the first hybrid, I obfuscate C0 and commit to C0. And now I obfuscate using the decommitment oracle. So note that in the first game, the obfuscation was done using O inverse, but now I will obfuscate using the decommitment oracle inefficiently. And in the next hybrid, I will switch to obfuscating and committing to the other program C1, which I can show to be distinguishable based on another hybrid argument. And roughly, since we assume that all the underlying primitives are secure with respect to the decommitment oracle, in particular with respect to adversaries who can store the decommitment oracle, the proof goes through. So finally, I would conclude with some open problems. So note that the main drawback is that our definition relies on this two-step randomized process. Is it possible to construct C0 secure obfuscation for the more traditional definition where the verifier is deterministic? And secondly, can come up with more applications of C0 or obfuscation, because this seems to be, this seems that it will find more applications in other areas of cryptography. With that, I'd like to conclude and I'm open to taking questions. Right. Thank you so much. We have time for maybe one quick question. Yes. So in all most of your notions, the challenger is inefficient, right? I was wondering whether this leads to problems with the final hybrid proofs and reduction. So yeah, good question. So it does not because we assume that the underlying primitives basically are also secure with respect to sub-exponentially secure. So for example, in the last construction that I showed, the obfuscation oracle is basically inefficiently opening the commitment. So it's the decommitment oracle. So suppose that oracle is of size some capital T because it's a finite truth table. You can write it down. And if you assume that the other primitives are secure with respect to adversaries that run in that time, then it's possible to argue security. So yes, we need security of all the underlying primitives to satisfy sub-exponential hardness. So that's how we kind of cope with the inefficiency of the challenger. Okay. So this would conclude this session. I would say let's thank all the speakers again. See you after lunch break.


Well, hi there, it's Sandy Alnok here with a real-time scribble sketch for you, and I'm going to be sharing some thoughts on the year 2020, all the good stuff that happened. While I do this sketch, the sketch is using some non-waterproof ink on just a regular old cheapy sketchbook with a glass dip pen that was, I believe, gifted to me anonymously. It came in a package into my P.O. box, but it's a yellow pen, and even though it had no note, I'm just going to assume it was gift, because gifts are often yellow in my world, since that's my favorite color. Well, 2020 was quite the year, wasn't it? It wasn't all bad, so I'm going to talk about a bunch of the good things that happened and a little bit of the crazy along the way. January, I was optimistic. I was going to conquer the year, it was going to be really awesome, and I was planning on travel and teaching and just full of spreadsheets, and by February, the pandemic was starting. I was in on it early, since I live in Washington, and we had the big outbreak at a nursing home, and I started doing research, and I saw what was happening in other countries and how fast it was spreading, and I canceled all that travel, because I could see that this was going to be potentially really bad, and I wanted to wait and see what happened in the United States, and by mid-March, we were in full-on shutdowns. It was pretty bleak by then, and my birthday happens to be at the end of March, and I just have to raise a little complaint here that I did not get a Zoom birthday party, like everybody else did, because we didn't have Zoom in our bloodstream yet at that point. So I'm hoping in 2021, if you're one of my friends, you want to throw a surprise Zoom party for me, that would be awesome, because I think I deserve it after throwing parties for all of you guys, so there's that. Well come April, I was super glad I already had an online business going before 2020 had started, because everybody else who had brick and mortars was trying to figure out how to keep things going, and they were trying to transform themselves into online businesses, and trying to do that normally would be hard, trying to do that in the midst of a pandemic when you're panicked about trying to keep your employees paid, trying to keep something going, has just got to be insane. I could not feel more blessed that I was already established before all this started, and all of that then was followed by a summer of protests, into a fall of protests, into an election, and then more protests, it's just like been the year of everybody being angry, being mad at each other over everything. So I'm hoping 2021 will be the year of everybody calming back down, that would be really good, can we just calm down, it would be really nice. Now let's go from the macro picture to the micro picture like me, let's make this all about me for a while. How did 2020 go for me, personally, my art, my business, what were some of the good things that happened? Well, one of which is that I learned I could shop every three weeks and be just fine. I didn't need to do the weekly grocery shopping or the every couple days running to the store for one thing, because they have this stuff called paper, and you can write down a list of things you need, and then wait until you have a full list and then go to the store. Yeah, okay, so I learned that lesson during a pandemic, I should have learned it as an adult, but I'm just slow. So there you go. I learned that I missed my Toastmasters friends more than I expected. I meet with them every Tuesday night, and suddenly when I couldn't see them anymore, I got all excited. I've got a Zoom account and I started demanding that they meet online and have been driving it all year long, keeping them going, because I miss these folks. We get along, we know each other really well, and we've been through a lot together and I don't want to lose contact, so that's been a good thing. If you're somebody who is still looking for work, I know a lot of people are still unemployed, if you're hoping that 2021, when we start opening up that you're going to go get a great job, I want you to get that great job, I would recommend right now, go join a Toastmasters club, and you can join one online, they're probably all still virtual at this point, but you need to learn how to talk to grownups again. You've been talking to your kids, and to your cat, and to your dog, for what, nine months now, but it'll be maybe a year by the time you start looking for a job, you might want to learn how to communicate again, so go to a Toastmasters club and talk to adults, they can help you, and you can learn how to present yourself well on video, because you might be doing some video interviews, this would be really good for you, so go to Toastmasters.org, put your address information in and they'll tell you what clubs are near you, so that once they're no longer meeting online, you could meet in person with them as well. So that would be a really good thing to prepare you to go out and get that new job of your dreams. Another good thing I learned is that I could see more of my family, because we started, I guess maybe a month after the pandemic started, after the lockdowns, we started meeting every two weeks on Zoom, and that changed eventually into monthly, but I have seen more of my family in 2020 than I normally do in a year when we could just get on a plane and go see each other, so that's been a really awesome thing. I also learned that I could live a lot of my life in pajama pants. At the time, I go out to get the mail and then I come back in the studio and it's really all, I can do that in pajama pants, so I have bought a lot more of those in 2020. Some good things about my artwork, let's talk about that. I have continued making videos, I make still all year long, I've been doing three videos a week until December, which is sabbatical month, and that's its own category, but three videos a week and new classes all the time to stretch my students and help people to get better at their art and try new things, which is great. I have found, unfortunately, that YouTube still stinks. They apparently have stopped sending email notifications. I thought my thing just broke or lost its connection or something, but in 2020, I started getting emails from more people saying, hey, I used to get notifications by email that you had a video up and I'm not getting it from YouTube anymore. Well, now you have to sign up for phone notifications, apparently. I can't figure out how to get the email ones to start up again. So that might be part of why nobody's watching my videos anymore. I don't say nobody. There's a few thousand of you out there. God bless you all. But I used to get many, many, many times the number of views and it's really just bottomed out. It's quite sad. And it's not very motivational for making videos. So sign up for phone notifications and you can do what I do, which is every evening. As I settle down from the day, I check my subscriptions tab on YouTube and I just go through and watch whatever videos that I want to from my favorite creators. My Instagram, though, is still a happy story. It's still good news there, still growing in that account. I'm doing twice to three times a week videos there and they're just short videos. They're real easy to make. There's no voiceover or anything, no product linking or anything. It's just making something fun and sometimes it's cards. Sometimes it's other things and I'm getting crazy numbers of views. There's just nuts way more than I ever get on YouTube. So they're easier to do as well. And that is a super helpful thing. Another piece of good news from 2020 is I finally invested in some needed equipment. I have been saving for years to get a new camera. I knew that it was going to be needed very soon and it was finally time. So I got a new camera, I got a new mic, I got a new mixing board. And that has that combination of equipment has allowed me to do more live videos. So I did a live YouTube here earlier this month. I've done some live Facebooks and I've done some live crowdcasts for my patrons. And that's been super fun to be able to do more content for them because my patrons are my inner circle. They're my heart. They're the people who support me and I wanted to give them more for their faithfulness in helping me out and supporting my work. So that's been fantastic. And then more good news. See 2020 has good news in it. My new fine art site launched this year. I have been wanting to do this for, I can't even tell you how many years. I used to have a page on my blog with just a whole bunch of pictures in it. And that was it. There was no room for anything. There was it was just a mess. But it was the only place I had to post all my paintings and drawings and things that were not cards. And it didn't impress anybody. I didn't think that I was serious about my fine art. So developing a whole new site for that totally made a difference. In the time that that has been live, I have sold over three dozen pieces, which has been crazy wonderful. It has really helped me get through this year, the extra income from that, which has been super fantastic. I was not expecting that site to generate any income. I put some stuff in a store just to see. And I'm delighted that people wanted to invest in my art. So that's been fantastic. Also, I have gotten some commissions through that website that I wasn't expecting that either. I'm not a big fan of commissions, though. It's not my favorite thing to do because it's painting someone else's passion, not painting my passion. I'd rather teach you to paint so you could paint your passion. But I'm I'm grateful for it because it got me through the year. Anything helps at this point. So now let's talk about classes and some successes that I've had in that area. OK, well, this person may not be a full success. Alcoholics, I think I picked the wrong year to choose to get into alcoholics. In January before the pandemic started, I bought a couple bottles of isopropyl alcohol for like $1.37 each at my local CVS. And then the pandemic hit and you couldn't find any alcohol anywhere like it was gone. You can now get a bottle of it for like $9 on Amazon, but like it's $1.37. How can it be so expensive? But yeah, it's a class that will wait for you until after the pandemic dies down. And then alcohol, the isopropyl alcohol comes down to a reasonable price. So there you go. Another class that I launched this year that was wildly popular was Copic Wildflowers, and that was Copic Wildflowers one. So guess what? Very soon Copic Wildflowers two is coming your way. So stay tuned for that one. Another style that I developed this year because I was trying to find something where more people could feel successful making scenes on cards is the storybook style. And I have several classes under that category. And those I tried to create things where you don't have to be really good at drawing to be able to create them. You can make a tree shaped like a lollipop that will be really cute, but you don't have to make it look like a tree. So if you're somebody who just is afraid to draw some of the scenes that I show in a lot of my classes, this might be something for you. I also did blueprints in a similar kind of way, not trying to make them super easy, but giving you a blueprint, giving you some guidelines to help you to be able to create a great indoor scene and apply dimension to it and a little bit of perspective. And so that's another thing that I think is going to be successful going forward as well. I also did a Bible journaling class teaching people how to paint watercolor animals. And that one I'm debating whether or not to recommend that if you want to paint them on cards, that you take that class, or should I refilm it so that it's on watercolor paper and address it that way and have them as two separate classes. I'm not really sure if you have thoughts on that. Please let me know if you've taken that class as a Bible journaler. Do you think that people need to have another class on watercolor paper? I don't really know yet. I have to think about that more. Some other classes that I created that are aimed at new audiences and trying to reach out a little broader beyond card making. And one is Copic art journaling. So those techniques are great for people who love to make art journals, but they're also great techniques that you can use for card making. So they cross both different directions. I also created some fine art watercolor classes. I'm starting these as foundations for the future because I want to do a lot more in more advanced watercolor. But I wanted to lay some groundwork in these fine art watercolor foundations classes have been great at that so far. And people who are taking them are loving them and I'm really pleased about that. And then my last surprise class, I was not expecting it to be super popular, but the ink sketching class within ink sketching techniques, not the scribble technique that you're watching, but learning how to cross hatch and things and how to draw an epic scene in an accordion sketchbook. People are loving that. And I'm really glad for that because I love pens and I love that you love pens. So yay. Well, now let's talk for a minute about the plan for 2021 because I've been trying to think about what to do in the coming year. And of course, I have more fun classes coming. I have a long list growing, one of which I'll give you a tidbit about as well. Slim line scenes have been all the rage. Everybody wants to make slimline cards. And I have been designing some really beautiful slimline scene cards, both horizontal and vertical. And it's going to be an epic class. It's going to be so much fun because it's kind of taking a magical turn to it. So think unicorns and fairies and stuff. It's in that kind of mental genre. So I'm really excited about that. I just need to finish designing all the scenes and then I can start filming, hopefully, in the next couple of weeks. Another thing that I'm doing in 2021, I've started doing a little bit of it so far on my blog, but I'm doing what I'm calling inspiration posts. And what I'm doing is going back through some of my older content and re-upping it. I'm going to re-up it by kind of similar content, whether it's similar products by groupings of seasonal content. So, you know, during the Christmas season, I'll bring all of the wintery type things to the floor so that you can get some inspiration from things that you may not get to see. They kind of disappear into the back history of YouTube, never to be seen again, but they're great techniques. And I'm going to try to add to them some of the more modern stamps. You can't get the old stamps anymore. They're not available, but some ideas for some new stuff that you might be able to use the same techniques with. And so each one of those is going to come out, I think, on Saturdays. I'm going to do a Saturday inspiration post each week, at least for the time being, until I run out of things to do it with. And I hope that's going to be helpful to you in sorting through some content and trying to find some great, older ideas that you can put a modern twist on, OK? The last part of my plan for 2021 is probably not the happiest part for those of you here on YouTube, because after quarter one, I'm going to see how quarter one goes, I may cut back to two videos a week instead of June 3. That might increase the views on the two videos that I do have, but it also is going to mean I'm not spinning my wheels as much, creating content that very few people are watching. And I can spend more time creating all these other things that people are watching. And I can put my energies towards things that are having success, instead of things that are just kind of disappearing into the Internet out there. So I will see how things go. If you want to help increase my views, then by all means, share my videos with your friends and tell them to come watch and to turn on notifications so you get to see everything. All right, I have reached the end of my notes. That is all I have to say. So fortunately, this drawing is done and I'm going to go now. I will see you again very soon. Card making videos start again on January 1st and I'll see you then. Take care. Bye guys.


Gold. Gold contract down $6.50, trading at $19.39 an ounce. Silver's up $0.07, $23.69 an ounce. Light suede crude off $2.77, $0.72 a barrel, notes and bonds. The 10-year note. 10-10 ticks, trading $1.1409, the 30-year off $1100 at $129.26, and $Kingdala. $Kingdala's trying to get bottom in once again. We'll see what we get a bounce going. You're up $353, trading $102.279, Euro is at $108, Jan is at $130, and the British pound is at $123.01. You know when we take a look at the market folks, bottom line right now you're pulling back and you're pulling back with light volume. We take a look at the spy. Same, bottom line, you only have about 43 million shares out here. Now what we had, we couldn't make the higher range. The higher range inside the spy would have to get over this for a 10 area. What we did on Friday is that we get up to 408.16 and gave it up. So we'll see how this shakes out coming into the Fed. The Fed is going to be on Wednesday, I believe. And my take, it's going to be all about the Fed and the US dollar. We'll see whether the dollar can actually get the traction. Every day it looks like it's going to get it. Today it looks better than most days, though. The Q's. What do you have with the Q's? The bottom line, the Q's are failure in price and volume. With the Q's, they go over the swing point. The swing point we're talking about inside the Q's was that $296.87. It did the full ABC structure up. The price projection was $298.24. It did $298.26. Now you're backing down. You're still inside the lower range. So let's say, hey, man, it wants to go to lower price. We go to the gold contract. We take a look at the gold contract. This is the sideways move out here in the gold contract. As it's been moving the last week, week and a half, sideways move. You do have light volume. You have 131,000 contracts. So that's light volume. You're going to need a lot more volume than that in order to basically go to lower price. And then if we go take a look at the good old US dollar, what we have with the dollar out here. Come on, baby. TXY. What we have with the dollar, she's up, you know, 326 right now. You know, we'll see what the 350 takes. Well, she can stay each and every day what's happened. And this is what's going to be kind of cool coming into close today, folks. What has happened is that when you get close to the close, that's when the dollar has continued to give it up. You know, right now, though, the dollar is at its highs of the day. Stay right there, folks. I'm right back.