So, this is weaponizing the web, more attacks on user-generated content. I'm Nathan Hamill. I'm a senior consultant for ID Information Security. I'm also an associate professor at UAT, which I saw some of my students here running around at one point. I also founded the Hexagon Security Group and apparently as of a couple days ago I became a 23rd degree Mason and I'm a lava rolling enthusiast. More on that later. More later. And yeah, Sean Moyer. I work for a company called Fishnet Security. Often described as the douchebag with the microphone. In this case I'm actually the other douchebag with the microphone. So we have kind of a, you know, binaural kind of thing going on.  That's good. So yeah, just kind of an overview of sort of where we're headed. And I guess I would say kind of bear with this. Some of the things that we're talking about, I have to set up a little bit. But yeah, just kind of the first part of the talk is just kind of some overall observations about sort of what is wrong on the internet today, you know, and such. And sort of talking about user-generated content in the democratization of misinformation, right? So, you know, if you think about it like 10 years ago, you know, you could only be misinformed by your local newspaper or your TV news and now anyone has the ability to misinform somebody else, you know. So that's kind of the beauty of the internet, right? And sort of... What we're starting to see on the web is there's really not that many one-way conversations on the web anymore. So long gone are the days of visiting somebody's GeoCities page, which I don't know why you'd want to go there anyway. I believe Jason Scott has an archive. So if you really, you know, just need to have that fixed. So there's a lot of two-way communication. And in this two-way communication everything is communicating with each other and becoming this more social animal. So you end up having aggregation points and feeds and you end up integrating other people's content into your application and allowing other people to integrate your stuff into their stuff.  Actual information and content, you know. So, you know, again, so kind of the first part will be a little ranty, but then we'll kind of get to that stuff. So, you know, we're sort of talking about what we think is kind of a different approach to an old bug that's relatively well understood, which is, as most people, I think probably know it at this point, is cross-site request forgery. And we sort of are looking at some approaches to get around the typical mitigation measures that people put in place. For preventing that. So, and being the nice people we are, some of these new sorts of attacks on cross-site request forgery, we've released a nice little nifty tool that helps you do it much easier. And that, you know, that also kind of relates to some of the demos that we'll run through. Yeah, so we prove that the tool works because all the demos were done with the tool. It worked for us, yeah. It did work for us. You're doing something wrong. Yeah. And don't knock my coding skills, man. Please do. Yeah, and sort of, yeah, again, you know, some observations about sort of multi-site APIs and silly things that are out there in terms of some of the APIs that you're seeing across a lot of different sites. Yeah, imagine that. When you expose yourself, there may be vulnerabilities there. I saw that last night, somewhere. Yeah, but yeah, you kind of have to listen to the rants first. So we'll kind of run through some of that and then we'll get to the rest. So kind of, again, sort of the overall topic here is user-generated content. This is, you know, basically just the concept of sites where the content is driven by the user base. And at one point, you know, that might apply to a specific subset of sites, but what we're finding is more and more there's just sort of, you know, all of that kind of functionality across the board. But yeah, things like blogs, wikis, social networks, web communities in general. Again, increasingly kind of bolted on to older sites. And so there's sort of this kind of functionality is getting integrated sort of everywhere. And by user-generated content, the user doesn't have to be like an end user. I mean, this could be a developer as well. So in a lot of these applications, the developers are actually the users as well. So their small apps that they build are actually user-generated content. We kind of got into this a little bit. Aggregation points. So you may have, you know, accounts on multiple pages, and you want a way to aggregate those so you only update once and you aggregate too many. Who would have thought there'd be vulnerabilities there, right? Increasing client-side logic. So sharing more of that logic on the client side can lead to greater vulnerabilities, more information leakage, and we have screenshots. Yeah, so actually, you know, kind of part of what got me contemplating some of these things was Marble Cake also, the game. So I'm kind of looking around the room, and you don't have to raise your hand, but is everybody sort of familiar with that particular turn of phrase and its relevance? You know? Yes, I would think, some people here might be very familiar with it, you know, presumably. The Black Hat audience was not so sure, you know. I think we're the first people to mention Fortune. You got one woo anyway. I did get a woo. But, you know, the thing that's kind of interesting about that, so the story is, for those that don't know, is that Moot from Fortune was actually nominated for Time's Person of the Year poll that they do every year. So they do this, you know, sort of the most influential persons on the Internet or something along that line. And so that gathered the attention of that community, and so what kind of became interesting about that was, the first plan was just to have Moot win, right? Just to get him to the top. And so that was done with, you know, some auto-voting scripts and things like that, and then people decided that that wasn't challenging enough. So they decided to have all of the votes spell an acrostic in order that spelled the phrase Marble Cake also the game. For the Time Person of the Year poll. So the way that that was done was through a whole bunch of different logic that went through and prioritized different people who had the appropriate letter for their first name and watched, you know, how the score, you know, how many votes went where, and went through and set that up. And then it got kind of interesting because at one point, you know, Time Magazine tried all these different ways to circumvent, so they added CAPTCHA, and they added what they thought was a tokenization method for the voting process and all of that. And they actually ended up, all the people that were working on that found out, you know, a way around sort of everything that they put in. I think the end totals here was like 12,939,000 votes for Moot. Yeah, and then 1.6 million for Atwar Ibrahim, who just happened to have, you know, an A in the name. But yeah, the sort of the larger point of this, though, is what I thought was really nifty was that Time's response to that was, oh, well, you know, Internet polls aren't true. And so, you know, that just happens. You know, you don't need to worry about that. But, you know, they predict the, you know, presidential race, which way it's going to go from online polls and things like that. So, you know, everything on the Internet isn't true, I guess, was their answer to that. Well, it's a good thing the polls for the presidential election weren't hooked into 4chan. What about a different election there, I don't know? So, yeah, and kind of related to that, when, you know, after Michael, and some people here know this, after Michael Jackson's death, there were sort of a series of these kind of copycat hoaxes of other celebrity deaths. It was like Britney Spears and Jeff Goldbloom and some of those things.  I'm sorry. No, I think that's just wishful thinking because everybody wants Rick Astley dead. So, yeah. So, but what's kind of nifty about that is that one of the reasons that that was so successful, you know, in recent months, for that kind of misinformation to propagate it is because CNN and then, you know, as a copycat offering Fox News have created this thing called iReport and then Fox's is youReport. We decide, you report, but we decide that basically allows just random people on the Internet to, you know, post their news stories. And it's been really useful. It's also done things like break, actually the riots in Iran and all the post-election stuff and a couple of other things. But it's also been used to just, you know, seemingly believable hoaxes that have been able to propagate a lot more because of that. And so, actually, this graphic down here on this slide is the star, which is, I guess, a magazine in India that picked up the Rick Astley story and ran with it, as if it were actual information. So... What was he doing in Berlin? He wasn't Rick Rowling in Berlin. Well, his age was 43, I thought. I thought the Germans hated Rick Astley, too. Yeah, Hasselhoff, now there would be people crying in the streets. And then also just sort of another point to that, please stop Rick Rowling. Just stop. It's not funny. 18 months ago, it was funny. Okay, I mean, we said it died last year at DEF CON. So, you know, hopefully it is completely dead. And we suggest it's an alternative lava rolling. And you'll see what that is here if you're not familiar. Which I'm sure is half of you probably are. Really, the entire goal of this talk is just to propagate that. So, last year, I have... Okay, I might just have to show the picture. We were talking about... Yeah, sort of talking about last year related to social networks about people's information that gets exposed in ways that they don't expect. I was talking with my coworker and I said, hey, we're doing some hacking on social networks. And I said, hey, do you have a MySpace page? He's like, yeah. So, he gives me his MySpace page. He adds me as a friend. And, you know, I didn't even think about it. You know, I didn't go look at his pictures or anything. I mean, I see the guy every day, you know. So, about a month later, I met Sean's house and we're working through some of this stuff.  And I start looking through the pictures. And I see... Oh, his face isn't covered up. The... That animation gets me every time. It's like, oh, yeah.  And I could not quit laughing. And I'm like, oh, I'm so putting that in the presentation. And then I thought about asking him about it. And I'm like, nah, it's easier. It's better to ask for forgiveness than for permission. And I just never told him about it, right? So, I never told him. And about a month later, you know how you use MySpace. And it says... And it shows your photos. And it shows photos tagged of you. And this one came up. And as I moused over the picture, the crotch area said Nathan Hamill on it. I'm like, oh, my God.  So, I talked to him. He's like, oh, yeah. My friend said, hey, I saw that picture of you in drag. He's like, yeah, I have it on MySpace. He's like, no, I saw it at DefCon. And he's like... So, he decided to silently tag his crotch area with my name, which that kind of leads to some of the bigger things, too. I mean, tags, the correctness of data, all of that is user-generated content.  So, I had the ability to put this picture back in our presentation. So, another kind of nifty thing with aggregation and integration and things like this, I don't know if anybody's sort of familiar with this, but about maybe about three, four months ago, there was a HTML injection problem. So, HTML injection versus sort of XSS, it was like dumber than XSS. You could put any tag, anything that you wanted into a rebate form on the McAfee website because security companies rock. And so, it was actually getting used to propagate some malware, so that was awkward. But... What, McAfee didn't catch malware? What? With the next dat, they will detect it, yes, actually. And also disable Win32. Ooh, rocking. So, what was cool about that, besides McAfee looking dumb, what was cool about that was that there was this article on ReadWriteWeb, which is this sort of Web 2.0 auto-philatio website where people talk about how nifty the internet is or something. But anyway, they had a tutorial on HTML injection where they explained sort of what it was. And they had these snippets in there, and if people didn't know sort of Web stuff, if you want to put a code example or something on a Web page, you need to escape out sort of the tags. So, it's like and LT, semicolon, and stuff, right? To show that code example, but not have it actually be the code. But it's like, here's what URL injection would look like. If you were to do this, then this would happen. It would redirect you over to this site, right? So, the New York Times carried that story by syndication. So, they had an RSS feed to ReadWriteWeb. And some developers handling of, you know, some XML parser, you know, gone horribly wrong somewhere, parsed those tags and actually then the HTML injection example on the article about HTML injection did HTML injection. So, everyone who read that article, when you went to the New York Times, it then had a pop-up that went to the ReadWriteWeb story about it. So, what's kind of interesting? They probably thought it was a feature. Yeah, there was a pretty cool, you know, little pop-up ad for them. But sort of the larger point of that is, and there's been some stories about, I don't know if people know the BeTwittered application. It's like a Google gadget. I don't use that stuff. But it's a Google gadget that goes on your, like, I Google page. And there was an XSS in the app itself, right? And it didn't work on the app. So, it was like if you changed your Twitter name to script alert foo, right? It didn't work in Twitter, and it didn't work, you know, if you went to some other client site. But in iGoogle it did.  So, the point of that is all of this integration then creates the shared exposure. And sometimes the way input gets handled on one site, when it gets aggregated over, it might be handled completely differently. So, even if you're not exposed, you might still be exposing somebody else. Speaking of which, the shared exposure? Yeah. So, is everybody starting to get a good idea of just the broad scope of user-generated content? Because, typically, if you ask somebody about user-generated content, they're going to think of photos, maybe uploading some music. But it's really a much larger issue and a much larger problem. Homemade amateur porn, as well. That does qualify the record. If it's shared on the internet only. Otherwise it's not. So, what we're getting into is this big social creature called the web. We all share a bunch of information. So, the web is really becoming a collection of user-generated content. So, with many sites aggregating their functionality, it's all about attack or return on investment. So, if you have... You don't necessarily need remote code execution to attain your attack. So, if there is a goal that you have and there is a shorter distance to that goal, then it really doesn't matter if you have brilliant vulnerability that you exploit that took you 10 months in and you've just been banging away on it and then you get pissed off because somebody patches something and then you have to go back to the drawing board. So, some of this stuff is much easier than that. So, on attack or return on investment, the point of that, what I think about is if I want to propagate malware, links, URLs and stuff, that's a lot of the game. You're going to put it in a Rick Astley video? That's a good place for it. That'll teach people to Rick Roll? Only flash to the other day.  Your credentials are shared across five, six sites. That's the most efficient way to propagate links and URLs. Sort of along the same line on Twitter, they recently added the trending topics section so you can kind of see what, I don't know, Britney Spears, whatever it is that everybody else is putting a hashtag around. You're actually seeing people use that then to propagate malware and do SEO kind of things because they just ride on top of that tag knowing that a bunch of other people are going to click on that. So, it then gives them an ROI. So, we'll get into some more of the technical details of attacking APIs and what you can do since the web is becoming this more social animal, we're kind of conditioning everybody to think of legitimate software as kind of having malware tendencies. So, in the past, malware was the only stuff that kind of phoned home and stole information from you and everything else. Now, it just doesn't even ask your permission. It just says, hey, I need to go check this license file or hey, I will help you out by letting you know when there's an update. So, we're kind of conditioned to this behavior of thinking of legitimate software as taking advantage of malware tendencies. And on the web, with everything becoming more social, the kind of blended threats. So, using a social mechanism to implement a technical attack is much easier now. Oh, I guess I got a little bit of... No, that's okay. I was wondering where that slide was. It was like, I hope it's sort of right there. Yeah, sort of along that point is things like Google APIs and Amazon Web Services. Those are basically this giant JavaScript sandbox that half of the sites you visit sort of run in, which again becomes kind of interesting. You can't log in or do like half of the functionality on a lot of sites anymore without allowing, you know, GoogleAPIs.com, right? Unless you want to know how many characters you have left on your Twitter. If you've got Google APIs, you won't be able to see that. I can't unfollow anybody on Twitter, which is very important to me, unless I can get to GoogleAPIs.com, right? And the idea of that, again, is that those in the Amazon Web Services and all these other shared site APIs then become this kind of conduit through everything. It's kind of interesting. Okay, let's talk about your portal into the Web world. Browsers have become more than browsers. They're not just for browsing content anymore. Let me show you something really scary. This is Opera Unite. Has anybody ever heard of it? Does anybody here use Opera? One person, that's about what we thought. How many of those people also work for Opera? Yeah. You can't actually nominate yourself. So this is Opera Unite. And it is more than a browser.  I'm like, this is time to find some really cool vaults. Unfortunately, the damn thing wouldn't work in any operating system that I tried it on. But if you look, there's this thing called The Fridge. The Fridge, a fun place for people to leave notes on your computer. There is no fun place on my computer where you can drive by and leave me notes. Send me an email, please. So you have file sharing functionality as well, because people are really great at determining what on their system should be shared. Hence the location of Obama's safe house, ending up on LimeWire. And also, too, it has an embedded Web server, because we've never had problems with Web servers before. Yeah, so you know what this Web browser really needs is it needs some peer-to-peer file sharing in a Web server. That's probably coming in 2.0. That's the only thing it's really missing, right? And again, sort of the point of that, too, is so much of what we do is in a Web browser, and so the response to that is to build all of this other kind of functionality that's then increasing sort of attack surface, right? So how many people here use Firefox? That's about what I expected. We love you. Out of all of you people, who has heard of Jetpack? Do you work for Mozilla? Well, I know Greg does, because he's seen this talk already. So Jetpack is an addition, is something that's coming out from Mozilla Labs, is something that they're working on. And kind of in the description, it says making extensions for your browser as easy as writing HTML. So now we're going to give all of these morons that can't get it in the first place, on your browser. That's exactly the kind of thinking that gets us into problems in the first place. No word yet on whether blink tag support will exist. So you can have like blink tags that then integrate with some plug-in on your browser. Yes, and after seeing that, I saw a Twitter message come by, somebody I wasn't following, and just said, hey man, these guys are bagging on Jetpack, man. It's not even out of development yet. It doesn't have to be out of development to be scary. It can be scary in development. It's really scary in production. How many people here use Safari? You probably shouldn't, but okay. Stop it, stop it right now. If you're going to use Safari, please don't use top sites unless you may potentially want to be attacked. So this is Safari top sites, and somebody told me that it doesn't send headers. That's actually incorrect. So whenever you do a control T or whenever you open up a new browser window, what ends up happening is it sends a bunch of requests to refresh all this content, and I'm sure Apple started thinking ahead and they're like, wow, this could be really bad, so let's block Flash and let's block JavaScript. But that kind of assumes that that's in your strategy. Since it sends headers, it means it also sends off data back to the application. So as you can see, if there is a method to get a malicious page, even a social method, right, to get a malicious page on your top sites, you can have more top sites than these. So it makes you ripe for cross site request forgery, which is really bad once you see the monkey fist tool, so you might not want to do that anymore. So if you're going to use Safari, please don't use top sites until they fix the header problem, if they're going to. How many people here use adult friend finder? This is kind of an example of kind of bolting on problems. And yes, and every time I talk about this, everybody's like, wow, you know a lot about adult friend finder. Well, when you spend 10 hours a day on a website, you become really familiar with it. So it's hard to see in the screenshots, but what this is is an error message that popped up that gives you the name of the admin site, where all the admin functions come from on adult friend finder. I had to find the videos that I tried to find, I tried to find ones without people in them, because the ones, some of them were very bad. On the other side here, they had kind of bolted on this chat infrastructure. So it allowed you to do instant messaging and chatting and everything else. Well, when I started taking a closer look at it, I realized it was just jabber. So I opened up iChat, and I started trying to chat with people. And what I found was, is that you can actually run a chat bot from this. Because if you wait, it's just a jabber client, you could script your responses, and that's what a lot of people are doing. Like a lot of people are trying to get you to go different places and whatnot. And that's why they don't contact you first. They create like this profile of this smoking hot woman and they wait for you to connect to them and then they start this conversation. So moving on before this gets any more awkward for Nathan. So like the, yeah, kind of the larger point here too is again, a lot of times where these exposures come in on different sites is from bolting on kind of new functionality on top of something. There's also, I think, a live journal and a couple other sites have added chat functionality and bolted it on in some kind of way. Well, they use a flash client. Flash chat, that sounds super. Not going to have any problems there at all. Well, flash chat on an adult friend finder. What they do is they set a policy through flash that allows you to restrict how many characters and everything you use. If you just connect to the service, you can bypass all that. You can bypass all of their little security stuff. So the exposure continues and we have many different ways to expose site functionality. Everybody probably Google is the most popular right now. Yahoo has Yahoo OpenStructure or Yahoo OpenSite and there's many others. Google has some new stuff coming out that haven't really had a chance to take a look at yet, but they're kind of pushing OpenSocial to be more than just for social web applications.  Your bookmark can now friend my bookmark and that's... And that is just hot. It's awesome. Speaking of hot, this is the new way to consume services. So every site that goes up that wants to maintain any kind of popularity cannot just survive on its own anymore. It needs to have integration. It needs to allow you to be able to consume services on other pages. So pretty much every single site out there now has APIs. Oh, another thing about a lot of the way these companies are implementing APIs, they're kind of separating themselves on a different canvas, which that's not really a good idea because they're putting everybody, even though it's off the main domain, they're putting everybody in a separate subdomain, which means that if you make an application for any kind of site, it doesn't have to be a social network site. If you make an application and push it, you can call built-ins in other people's applications. So for some weird reason, somebody was setting a cookie in a social network application or any other type of application, you could just call that same value. Yeah, like I say, we've hit on this pretty hard, but anytime you're able to get into that same sandbox, by definition you can get anything else running in that sandbox, any of that functionality, with the exception really of people filter inside their APIs certain calls, but that's kind of like the input filtering game with cross-site scripting, there's always going to be some input that's been missed. So API stacking, at any given point in this structure, you can have vulnerabilities. So a lot of times, you may have an aggregator that also exposes an API, so you have to assume, if you open yourself up for an API to have your site services be consumed, you have to understand that everybody can consume those services now, because you can't really stop another site from opening up an API and then allowing them to consume your services and the endpoint be by proxy. Here's an example of kind of anonymizing an attack through APIs. So we have a lot of APIs that call functions that allow you to get past browser security restrictions. How do we know this? It's documented. So if you just read the API documentation, it'll say this function allows you to get past browser security mechanisms, because they don't let you make calls for content off of a domain. Well, there's a reason they don't do that. Gosh darn you, same origin. I'm going to find a way around you so I can make this application work. So kind of messing around as much as possible. And this is kind of an open social thing. You can call the proxy function directly with absolutely no credentials. So for as long as you can make that URL, whatever, however much length you can do, as long as it's properly encoded, it will make the call for you as long as the request is proper. So in the example of MonkeyFist, which we'll get to here in a little bit, you could put your ID on a chain of these open social proxies and go right through them, and the endpoint has no idea where the request really came from. So, continuing on the open social path, apparently nobody ever thought that filtering out 127.001 on any API proxy call might be a good idea. What this is here, this is Hi5's open social implementation, and that page right there is the homepage of the developer box. So, and this works for whatever port number you want to throw in there, and I will let your imagination fly with that one. And I wrote a tool in like 10 lines of Python to enumerate this, and that will not be coming up today. Another thing you can do with these is you can get one site to attack another site or something like that. So, there's protection mechanisms, and I talk about open social a lot because that's just kind of, I didn't have to go anywhere else to look for examples of this, they kind of had everything really needed. So, is there anybody who works for Google in here? Thank God. Oh, you're just not admitting it, that's cool. So, Google did think that it was a bad idea to continuously go redirects forever because that would be dumb, right? You'd have this big loop. So, they're like, you can't follow more than seven redirects because that would be bad. However, if you call the API itself, so if you did 127001 and then called the request again, it would just continue to go and go and go and go and go because it was a new request each time. It only followed one redirect. The same thing can be done for something like a triangle of death attack. It's a super sensational term for something that could be like, oh, that's just kind of okay. But, we've been in the security industry for a while. So, we're working on a jacking name for this. This is triangle jacking. API redirect jacking. So, you could potentially get one site to attack another site and so on and so forth and hit a redirect and start the loop all over again. So, it would look like a new request each time. So, each time it's called, it would look like a new request. You could light off the more resources you consume and so on and so forth. So, essentially, my space is API attacking High 5's API, which is then attacking LiveJournal's API. Dude, why are you attacking me, bro? Where's the love, man? Okay, and now let's break some stuff. So, how many people here are familiar with cross-site request forgery? Okay. How many people here think it's bad? How many people who don't know about it but still think it's bad? Thanks. I think people think it's super and awesome. Okay. Now, if we make cross-site request forgery even more dangerous, how many people would think that was awesome? Okay, thank you. Sorry, now we're just being good. It's early in the morning and we're trying to keep you awake. So, I mean, kind of the larger point of this, this is sort of like this old vulnerability. I mean, this has been understood since, really, actually, the Pete Watkins actually, it's just a post-debug track, but that was kind of the first person to really just nail it down on what it is and it's not actually the confused deputy and if you know what that is, that's actually about mainframe stuff, so there, because everybody always says it's that.  We don't care about history, we just want to break stuff, man. But sort of the larger point of this is kind of where we're headed with this is that it's very tough to audit for, you know, usually sort of automated applications. It's very tough to identify there, so we think it's fun because we can actually sit and find things that are new and nifty. The guys that have the talk after us, I think they have like what, like 97 CVE IDs from the last year or so, for different C-SERF bugs. So it's a lot of fun to look for. Kind of our point is that it's typically described as sort of a static attack where it's like well-known values, known parameters, and we did a lot of stuff last year. People have been doing that since the early 90s of action equals logout on some website or send funds with your PayPal account number, whatever it might be. Usually, when people think of being able to do cross-site request forgery on a per-user basis, so it's sort of something that the parameters that you're C-Surfing are specific to that individual request, that's usually something you think of as being just for the payload for an XSS. One of the classic examples of that is the SAMI worm.  People are still trying to figure out what the hell to call it, but a big part of that was it was XSS that then used the JavaScript to enumerate people's usernames that were on their top heroes list or whatever it was so that it would know where to insert itself. And so that's kind of a dynamic way of doing C-Surf. That's typically only part of cross-site scripting is the way most people sort of think of it. Yeah, it's really a silly attack. I broke a Motorola router and I never got a CVE for it because I said it was dumb, but Motorola does not have a sense of humor. Neither does AT&T. And sort of with a silly bad or really, really bad, obviously Grossman and a number of other people have spotted bugs in things like Gmail using this, the ability to reset people's passwords, disabled firewall rulesets. I think somebody here at Defconn, I don't know if it's been today or if it's yesterday about doing a talk about the two-wire modems, the AT&T modems and there was actually one of the largest sort of mass C-Surfs that happened there was a bunch of people in Mexico via phishing email that then changed their DNS settings so that they would go through malware sites and stuff like that. And again, just be a C-Serve. So anything with a web server can be attacked, whether that's the local host, local network, or websites and applications. And we're just going to go past this because we want to show you something cool. This is Newsweek.com and I'm going to go back for a second. This is Newsweek.com and this is still live so be nice, please. And we used MonkeyFist to pull this attack off and we'll talk about that in a second. I want to say one thing because I thought really hard about that, Link, and it doesn't show up in the video long enough is sort of our example scenario here is you'll see there's an article that somebody logs in a Newsweek and then clicks on it and the article title which I thought was pretty nifty. Yeah, you thought it was nifty because you wrote it. Exactly. It was funny. It was an article, Link, that went to like Bitly or IsGood or something, Link, and it said, Sarah Palin Resignation, Link to Nude Photos, question mark. So that's kind of the our bait in this scenario. So here we go. This is Newsweek.com and as you can see, we're about to log in and we have Bob logging in with a password of old password. I am so smoking on the laptop, man. Just fast. So we're going to log in and we're authenticated. So here's the link on Reddit with Palin Nude Photos and of course what? Are you watching Benny Lava? Did we just get Lava rolled? We're trying. Last time we bring it up, I promise. So what happened was there was when that was clicked on, a dynamic page was created with a hidden post. The post contained the password reset to a value of our choice and now we get to see Benny Lava walking up. Prabhu Deva actually is your guy's name. So we'll go back and try to log in again with the old password. We're going to hurry it up a little bit because we want to explain some of the more complex scenarios. But it makes no difference. As you can see, the login failed. So now we're going to log in with Epic Fail and that's full of win. So that works. So now let's talk about something called dynamic cross-site request forgery. So there's a certain amount of cross-domain referral leakage that happens, especially when you put tokens in the URL or you have these sort of disjoint tokens from sessions, right? So there's a certain amount of those things. Lots of complex examples get ignored when you're talking about standard cross-site request forgery. And we have diagrams of this. So if you're leaking what you can do is repackage that token value up into a valid payload. So something that was thought of as protected against can now be exploited again. And if you're crazy enough to think that the session ID is random, so why not use that? That's really bad because that means you can make any request on your page if you can pull the full session data. Yeah, and sort of the larger point is just there's a lot of CSERF out there that's not sort of these static values. It may not even be that there are CSERF tokens which are sort of these dynamic values that are around it. It might be things like the username as part of the request that you're trying to forge. And you can't get that without, you know, dynamically sort of constructing requests on the fly for each of these. Yeah, some things may be, you know, may require extra bits of information that an attacker may not have. And now they have the ability to get that. So typically thought of a higher bar. And for us like a big part of this was that when we would talk to developers and point out like those kind of bugs, the standard answer that people would say was, oh well, you could really only do that if you had like an XSS. Right, so that would be harder to do. How else could you do that? And sort of our point is there's a lot of other ways to obtain those values besides just via XSS. You might be able to log into the site and use the same token for different users. You might just be able to enumerate those values, like we said, from the referer if there's a link to offsite content. And so yeah, we sort of wanted to automate the process of these complicated C-SURFs that were a little tricky. And also kind of related to that if people that follow the sort of Web Security world about just a couple of weeks ago somebody did a proof of concept of brute forcing C-SURF tokens as well. We sort of think of that again as being kind of a dynamic attack. So in that case what they're doing is running a piece of JavaScript code that sort of runs through your history your browser history to try to guess your tokens and then those can then be used to replay an attack. So here's kind of a simple example of a dynamic C-SURF. It's basically a really complicated example. It could be really complicated, but basically it's one payload to rule them all. So you can do you can run one basically attack site and handle attacks for multiple domains. Go ahead. Enter monkey fist. It was never meant to be what it became, so don't beat me up too bad on the code changes. Basically it's a tool that helps you pull off dynamic C-SURF attacks and all of the scenarios that we talk about are implemented in the tool. The most complicated is the fixation attack which actually makes requests and fixates data on to a user's session and we will get to that. But it hides attacks through hidden posts redirects and it refreshes to a legitimate destination. So kind of how you saw we clicked on the link earlier and we ended up on a legitimate, you know, YouTube page. That's kind of how it works.  And Twitter's a fall for that. I fully believe Twitter. So I mean I recommend using, there's like a lot of different Firefox plugins that will do things like expand those shortened URLs. What we think is kind of a neat payload is to use a, you can use URL shorting service. We can do C-Serve in the middle of that and then again so we take you to a YouTube video or something it looks like it's performing as design and that's that one little request runs you know in, you know, one second while you're in the middle of clicking on the link and you're not, it's not typically something people are going to spot. And it's live right now so if you go to Hexhick.com for Slash Labs you'll see the stuff from Monkey Fist. And it will it will steal any session data you want it to do that may end up in the refer and repackage it into a valid payload. I'm just going to go through some of the, this is some of the options. Yeah and so essentially so you set up the site that you're going to target. You set up the destination URL you want to send to and then you can define these different values that you want to pull out. Yeah the site basically is what it's going to match where the refer is coming from so it knows which payload to pull out of the file. There's a default payload which kind of makes it a little sneaky so if you're trying to hide and attack or requesting spacer.gif and somebody gets wise and they just point their browser to your domain and ask for spacer.gif they're going to get spacer. a real spacer.gif so they may not be able to know exactly what's going on there. And that's because they're sort of the refer is the trigger for the payload so unless you see a specific refer it's just going to respond with the default. And the destination for the meta refresh so here's an example what the XML file would look like and in case there's some confusion about that I got a couple of blog posts coming up and the link's in here and you can read about how to set it up and get it going. So a couple of examples. This is a dynamic redirect attack so the user would make a request for content somewhere on whatever page they're on makes a request back to another site that is hosting MonkeyFist. It will take all of the kind of tokenization whatever data you told it to take out of the refer send back a redirect with a 302 the user's browser will then send the payload that you sent it back to the legitimate site. So it's a very simple example. They get more complicated. And really the larger point is just again these are per request forgery so each time it's sort of constructing that forgery based on data that's getting from the client request. So here's a post construct so basically in case there was some confusion about this when we talked about it before the user request content. So if you're leaking full session data in cross domain fashion like say you put J session ID in the URL that then hits something on the page which sends data to the tool. The tool says okay I have a payload that tells me to construct a post and the tool will actually construct a post request with all of the session data and send it back to the site without the user's browser interaction so that's how we can create header values. So if we wanted to add our own cookies and stuff like that we could. And actually kind of what's nifty is it's sort of a quasi same origin bypass because the tool especially like the token stealing scenario where it's going out and pulling stuff down, it doesn't really care because it's not doing JavaScript. It has you do a post with the data that it gets. The funny thing is this is exactly how the APIs that were exploited earlier were doing it. So okay so here's the dynamic page. Apparently we blabbed too long.  Like I said, and the things we're talking about have been understood by a lot of people in web security for a while but it's all the papers and everything else sort of defined it as that.  So we decided to edit the C-Surf article on Wikipedia via C-Surf so that would be kind of cool. So here we're going through Wikipedia as you can see forging requests and then you see prevention mechanisms. So we're on the page and we want to go buy a truck. So we're on Craigslist. Craigslist St. Louis in the Jefferson County section if anybody's from St. Louis, you'll know. So here we go, we're going to click on the truck and it says... $100 truck man! There's a shortened URL right there so when you click on it some magic happens and here we are at what? What? So we have some more Benny Lava to explain what happened. We'll refresh this first and show you the payload. As you can see it's been edited, there's been a new section that says other approaches to C-Surf. So we kind of figured this is the best way to add data about this. And this was also the most complex... Thanks! This is also the most complex example of using the tool because there was many things that had to happen behind the scenes so what we did was take something extremely complicated to pull off and make it really easy. Yeah, and so to explain, in the case of that C-Surf what's funny is there's a CBE ID for this. It's already out there but they sort of fixed it for authenticated users but not for anonymous ones and so the thing about it is there's all these different values in the post if you do a post to Wikipedia and you look at it there's all these different token values that you need and all this other stuff. It's mainly not there as a mechanism but it does kind of thwart some of the attacks because you have to have those values for the request to be valid. It is funny. We watched it about 80 times in the past week. So what we had to do was request that data on our own without the user's interaction and then package that up into a payload and that's kind of the problem of all these disjoined session values. Like the tokens aren't joined with the session IDs that are issued by the site. So when that happens and it happens in many different places you can go look for it yourself. You can create valid payloads by just requesting the data, getting it back parsing it, putting it into the request and sending it onto the user's browser. I just wanted to put out something kind of nifty with that is that the church of Scientology has been banned for making edits to Wikipedia because they've been inserting bias into it but the way that they did that ban was just sort of their IP ranges so essentially if they put like a little link on their website that went somewhere, they could sort of have billions of anonymous people over the internet to do their edits for them. So no consulting fee required. You can cleanse me of Tatens or something later. So here's what the payloads file looked like for that attack. We really don't have time to get into it but as you can see it by adding a couple of values it made the attack really easy which would have been really hard before. The one point we would make about that is this is how to fix it. You don't want to care about fix it. Go look it up. This is usually when everybody gets up and leaves a talk and here's how you fix the problem and then everybody just gets up and leaves. Don't worry, we're not going to bore you with fixes. But yeah, the mitigations for CSERF are well understood. Really like the things we're talking about it's not sort of a bypass that OMG we broke the internet. We'll try null string terminators in it and see if that works. The thing is that in order to mitigate for CSERF you have to do a whole bunch of stuff right and most people do like most of it but not all of it. So you look at one site and maybe they check refer. You look at another site and maybe they map tokens to one token could be reused against multiple users not mapped to sessions. It only takes once. If you leak that token in one spot it's game over. Yeah, and again if you're issuing tokens and CSERF protections in JavaScript don't assume that same origin is going to help you. Thanks for listening. Yes, and bug fixes. My blog is neohaxer.org so if you want to have some examples they'll be up soon. MonkeyFist is on Hexec.com and our talk will be uploaded there shortly. Thanks. Thank you.


Water scarcity affects more than 40% of the global population. Water scarce regions in particular struggle with crop failure, soil degradation, and if it rains, with floods. Land-based rainwater harvesting is one solution to the water scarcity problem. It entails the collection of water and subsequent storage in reservoirs or directly within the soil profile. This rainwater harvesting method can be classified into microcatchment and macrocatchment harvesting. In microcatchment rainwater harvesting, rain falls onto a small catchment area and flows directly to the adjacent cropped basin, where a single tree, bush, or row of crops is planted. The purpose of this is to store water in the root zone to provide enough water for the plants throughout the growing period. There are various ways of implementing microcatchment rainwater harvesting. One is strip catchment tillage, which consists of alternating rows of cultivated crops with rows of uncultivated grass. The grass acts as a catchment to collect rainwater and then drains it to the crops next to it. Contour or key-line barriers are constructed perpendicular to the slope. Their function is to intercept rainfall, encourage infiltration, and to reduce soil erosion. Barriers are built from vegetative material in trash lines, stones, or soil. Other cross-slope systems are swales and living terraces. Basin systems are closed diamond or square-shaped catchments, surrounded by low earth buns. Water falling into this basin is channeled to the lowest point, where ideally food trees are grown. In macrocatchment rainwater harvesting, the catchment area lies outside the application area. This means the rain is not collected where it is used. The land cover of the catchment area can be manifold, including cultivated land, roads, or settlements. Often the catchment area is located on a hill or mountain slope. To provide water in dry periods, the collected water can either be used for groundwater recharge or stored in open or closed systems like farm ponds or underground tanks. There are three broad categories of macrocatchment rainwater harvesting systems. The first are hillside systems. Here, water flowing downhill accumulates on barriers, where it is used for crop irrigation and groundwater recharge. In streambed systems, structures such as sand dams or check dams are constructed across temporarily flooded channels. They are built from upstream to downstream to reduce the force of the water flow, to infiltrate water, and to control erosion. Ephemeral stream diversion systems divert water from seasonally flooded channels to large low-lying areas, where the water infiltrates and provides enough moisture for crop growth. Land-based rainwater harvesting contributes to the reduction of soil erosion and flood occurrence, while also enhancing groundwater recharge. Where climate change and mismanagement threaten the availability of water as a resource, rainwater harvesting systems can help increase agricultural activity and thus food availability.


All right, can you all hear? Hello? Anybody here yet? Good. Okay, I'm just gonna basically wait for people to funnel in so I can make my major announcement. How do you pronounce that name? It's like, Karen's, is that it? Thank you. Yes, I also have a Mongolian flag in here. There we go. Gotta get more flags once I'm doing my travels, which I'm gonna be talking a little bit about in my announcement. We got five, seven people now. Okay, just wait about a three minute, four minutes, and then I'm gonna make the major announcement. Oh, hello. Is that how you say that? Not too good at Lithuanian. All right, see if you guys can guess in the comment, comments what my major announcement's gonna be before I make it. Let's see what you guys got. Yo, what's up? Yes, the Estonian flag is very based. Two minutes. Already got 10 people in here. That's pretty good. Yes, I am joining the mafia. That's a good observation. Too bad you found me out. All right, one minute. See how many people can come in. Why do I have the Estonian flag? One summer, I just thought it was really cool, so I decided to do it. Excuse me. Favorite YouTuber? Probably what if I'll hiss to me? Some people think he's crazy, but I don't know. I feel like what he has to say is thought-provoking and it's pretty good. All right, seconds to go now. I'm not conquering Estonia. Sorry, I'm gonna have to pin this one. This is a good question. All right, it's three o'clock, so you're ready for the major announcement. I will be taking a short break from making videos. It's gonna probably be around two months. Like, I'll be back in March, but this is for a variety of reasons. First of all, I never thought I'd actually get burnt out making videos, but I discovered that actually doing the same thing for a year and a half does kind of take its toll, but yeah, so school is getting in the way a little bit, but thankfully the semester is done and I can just relax, but it is Christmas break, so I would be taking a break anyway from making videos for the holidays, but I think just waiting two months just to kind of gain my energy back. I mean, I have some fantastic ideas, but if I don't have the drive to actually put them through, they won't be very good, but you guys will love the content that I have to create after this break, and it's not like I'm taking a, like I'm just completely ceasing work on the channel. I will be kind of, as some of you guys guessed, this is like a channel name change. There might be that just to kind of make the channel more professional. I'm also trying to kind of change the, just the thumbnails to make them look more professional as well, and kind of just not as much of a troll look, I guess, I don't know. Kind of, someone kind of told me that it looked like Life of Boris travel videos, so I mean, I think they're right, but I mean, I like the way they look, but I think they're, it is a need for an update. So what else will I be doing during this time? I'll probably be, I'm trying to learn Portuguese now, specifically Brazilian Portuguese because one of my goals for the future of the channel is also do travel videos, and I might be trying to travel to Brazil this summer. I was initially planning Ukraine or Turkey, but there are certain issues going on those countries. As you know, I just made a video about the situation in Ukraine, and Turkey has an inflation issue that could turn into political violence pretty quickly. Now Brazil might not be the safest option, but I'm always in for a little bit of danger. At least it's nothing out of the ordinary, nothing is unexpected. So yeah, so I'm sorry that I won't be able to make videos for two months, but you guys will like the videos much better after this break. And that's not to say that if I get the drive, like within this time I may post a video here and there within the next two months, but we'll see about that. So now I'm just going to start looking at these questions and start answering them for all of you. And the first one I got that I thought was very interesting was NTPs. What do you think is the annexation of Belarus by Russia possible and inventive attempted revolution? I feel like Belarus is so tied to Russia that yeah, if there was any serious revolution within the country, Russia would try to intervene. In a similar respect to the Ukrainian Revolution in 2013 at Euromaidan, there was a right after that they kind of expelled their pro-Russian leader and then subsequently there was a Russian invasion. So yeah, that is a very possible outcome I think. All right, what are my thoughts on Jordan Peterson? It's funny you say that, I was just listening to Jordan Peterson before this. I think he has some really great things to say. Once again, really gets your mind going, makes you think about different things. And yeah, he's one of my favorite philosophers like in the modern day. I mean, of course, you know, I've been learning about the ancient and medieval ones too, but in modern day, I think Jordan Peterson is able to shine a lot of truth on what's going on in our society and kind of dealing with lack of truth and all that. Do I know Brain for Breakfast? I've watched, I think all of his videos, it was sad that he died. I mean, he was, he made some great stuff and then just suddenly he was gone. Like, yeah, it's just great that I think people are continuing his legacy. Like I think Caixian's Country Balls is doing a great job of that. Shout out. All right. What am I majoring in? I'm actually still in high school. I'm a senior, but when I go into college, I might be doing law or international relations of some kind, but I'm not sure yet. Nah, bro, don't go to Brazil, you'll get murdered. No, trust me, dude, you have to know the right places. Like I'll be fine. Don't worry about it. I'll get a local guide anyway. Like, some of you guys are Brazilian, I think. Well, maybe not any of you that are on right now, but y'all will help me out. While I travel by myself, probably, I mean, I don't really know who else would want to go to the places I want to go to, but we'll see. Where will I travel? Um, as I said, Brazil is like on the top of my list. I also got Romania is really interesting. And of course, I mentioned Ukraine and Turkey. I've got a friend in Azerbaijan as well. Uzbekistan is another one. Kazakhstan, Mongolia has been a country that's been very interesting to me too. So I've been thinking about these places. Like just basically, I'm really interested in traveling basically everywhere except where everyone else goes. Like I'm not as interested in Western Europe. It's not that I won't go there, but it's like, I feel like everyone goes there and it's not very affordable. And like, I think there's a lot more to be learned from going to these places that most people don't go to. What's the most interesting region in the world right now in geopolitical terms? That's a difficult question because there are a lot of regions that are kind of building up geopolitically. I'd say East Asia is pretty interesting and the same with the Middle East, just because the dynamic of China trying to gain influence, but also within the Middle East, like Turkey is just a growing power. Even though they have this inflation problem right now, I still think that the other countries are just lagging far too behind in different, uh, in different respects, like populations declining in some of them. And also there's wars and hyperinflation in Iran as well. So, uh, but I think that in the future, the most geopolitically important region will be the Arctic because the opening of trade routes, like, like the Northwest Passage and going like sailing across Northern Russia to get cargo from Europe to East Asia, it'll just majorly change how we all think about trade and geopolitics and all that and the Arctic will become a very important region. Who will be the superpower of South America, Brazil, Argentina, or other? Well, I would say the United States already is, but within South America, Brazil would be the most likely option just because of how huge they are. They're like half the population of the continent and half the land area. They have the most potential to grow. I would definitely not say Argentina though. As big as they are, they just have so many issues and they've been kind of sliding downhill for the past 100 years. They can't really affect anything. It's such a disappointment, honestly, like they in the 1900s, they would have been like early 1900s, they would have been considered a first world country, but at this point they just slid so far down due to hyperinflation, just excessive military coups, etc. It's not a good situation. Should I be scared if Russia, or should I be scared from Russia if I'm from Finland? I mean, considering that Russia really hasn't done anything in the past like 60 years or so, 70, ever since the Winter War, I wouldn't be too concerned because, I don't know, Finland and Russia have kind of tolerated each other for a while, I feel like. I feel like Russia has more to gain from being involved in the geopolitics of, say, just like the Eastern Europe, Balkans and the Middle East and Central Asia. Northern Europe is really not a concern for Russia at this point. I mean, in the future it could be, like with the warmer Arctic, but I don't really see how the Baltic sea would become any more important than it already is, so I would not be scared from Russia if I was in Finland. Does an independent Armenia have a future, or will get absorbed into Turkey and Azerbaijan? I've made a few videos like that kind of show Turkey becoming the dominant power of the Caucasus and Azerbaijan is kind of within that sphere and they kind of gobble up Armenia. I think that they'll have to come to some sort of peaceful resolution if they're able to coexist in this manner. I don't know, it's hard to describe because I don't want to say that Armenia would get conquered, but really I don't see any chance because they're just so jammed in between Turkey and Azerbaijan that they've just kind of become a protectorate of Turkey. I mean, I think they'd still be independent, but they would have a lot less freedom to do as they wish and there would be a lot of subsequent rebellions and things like that. Thoughts on Bougainville? I don't know much about it. I know it's an island off the coast of Papua New Guinea that's trying to get independence. If they want independence, go ahead. I mean, it doesn't really matter to me and it's not like it's very geopolitically important, I think. Do you think the West should help Ukraine in the likely invasion by Russia? This is a tough question because I think that you have to draw the line somewhere because Russia may want to try to gain influence over its former de facto colonies like the Warsaw Pact nations, but then again, it's a lot of resources that Europe and America would not be willing to give up for a country that's on the edge of their sphere of influence. I still think that if people want to go ahead and help, they should, but it may be very unpopular with a large portion of the population. That's all I'm going to say. I'm on the fence about it myself. Favorite flag? Probably South Africa, actually. It's a great flag. It has the different colors on it, just representing the different peoples that live there and just like the shape and the design and everything. Do you have an Estonian flag in the background? Do you have some Estonian heritage? Maybe, but it's just about as likely as if I have any Mongolian heritage, so not.  I like flags. Love your channel. I wanted to know what you think the future of Nigeria will be like. Personally, I think it's going to collapse due to corruption, religious tension, ethnic stuff. I think that's a reasonable prediction just because the disparity between the South and the North is growing. I watched this great video, which was actually an excerpt from Thomas Sol's book, Conquest and Culture. I think it was what it's called. It's like the Igbo in the South were far more educated than the Northerners. A lot of the college-educated jobs, the Igbo were doing in the Northern states of Nigeria, but then the Northerners, the Hausa slash Fulani, they were starting to discriminate against them since they were making the most money, and then the Igbo tried to create their own state. I think it was the state of Biafra, and there was like a civil war for Nigeria for four years or something, so they've already had this ethnic violence, but it could grow as the disparity between the South and the North grows just due to development like most of the richest city in the country, Lagos is in the South, and it has much more connection with the rest of the world due to it being on the coast. While the North is kind of just isolated, it's just getting their conditions are pretty poor. Islamic terrorism is high up there, and I think the religious divisions and the ethnic divisions might pull the country to three different parts. The Yoruba and the Southwest, the Igbo and the Southeast and the Hausa Fulani in the North. Future of Islamic civilization, I think that Islamic civilizations in a good spot due to just their cross-national loyalty to each other, and just the hope to kind of promote Islam across the world. I think Southeastern Europe, due to its declining population, might end up being a prime location for the growth of Islamic civilization. Like if Turkey is able to expand its influence into the Balkans, it will probably make some kind of colonization effort if the population decline as severe as it's predicted. Some of these countries are projected to lose a third of their population by 2050, while Turkey is expected to have at least 100 million by that time. So there could be some moving around. The Caucasus could be another region where Islamic civilization grows. Same with some parts of Africa, but I'm not as familiar with the situation there because I feel like there are a lot of people on the border between the Muslim and Christian world, or Christian and Muslim Africa. They're kind of converting to Christianity within the Muslim groups. Opinions on a united Arabia? I think it seems logical. If we're talking, of course, just about Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf states like Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, Oman, and Yemen, they're in the same region.  I'd say actually Yemen would be the most different from them just to their geographic distance from the population centers of the other countries, but yeah, I'll see why that would be an issue. If you could instantly learn one language, which would it be? I don't know because there are a lot that I want to learn, but maybe like Persian or something, just it's different and it has a lot of influence across the greater Iran region of the world. So I feel like it would just be interesting to learn as well. What is your opinion on nuclear weapons and what can countries do to prevent an extinction level event? I think considering nuclear weapons have been around for 70 years in both the different like United States, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, the United Kingdom, France, North Korea, maybe even Iran these days have nuclear weapons. So countries on opposing sides, geopolitically have them. The threat of mutually assured destruction isn't really as prominent today, I think, than it was during the Cold War. Like the Cold War, there was really heightened tensions of nuclear war. At least for the major developed powers, I feel like they'll continue to kind of do away with them, but they need to keep at least some stockpile just in case something happens, I think. Like if we get rid of all our nuclear weapons, and if the United States says, and we're left defenseless in case we do get in a nuclear war, then yeah, we're in really bad shape. So we should at least keep some. But Pakistan and India, that could be a something could happen between the two of them with nuclear weapons. And that's what that's what concerns me the most. Do I think any other countries are going to get nukes? Maybe Turkey. America already has some of its nukes stationed there. And if it grows in global influence, it might start creating its own nukes or even stealing them from America. But I don't think that will happen. That's kind of out of the blue. What are your political views? Are you centrist, conservative, Democrat? You see, I consider myself a moderate. But there are lots of people who would tell me otherwise. Like, I think a lot of my views would be considered as like center right, just generally. I do gain the ire of the far left. And that's something I take great pride in, because frankly, I don't stand for radical beliefs. So I mean, yeah, just generally, I guess, I'd be considered center right. I'm not, I don't have, I'm not a conspiracy theorist or anything like that. I just take a look at the world and judge everything as I see fit. And it kind of just puts me in that category. I feel like I have many reasons for it, but I kind of want to get onto other questions as well. Have you ever considered making a podcast? Oh, yeah, I think I have. I mean, there's lots of things that I could be doing with the podcast. It would make it a lot easier because I could actually just talk about different topics instead of having to animate everything, which would make things ultimately a lot easier. I actually have done something of that nature in the past, like if the Swedish historian is here, he will, he might tell you guys a little bit more about that, but I posted it on the channel. We were just talking about whether it's a good idea for Ukraine and Georgia to go into NATO. It was like 20 minutes long, but it didn't do so well in the grand scheme of things on this channel. So maybe if I did something on Spotify, it would, it would work better. And hopefully you guys be interested in seeing stuff like that. Thoughts on Jake Tran. I don't know who Jake Tran is. I'm gonna have to look him up later. What are your, what are your thoughts on Scottish independence? I think I'd support it, honestly. I mean, I don't, I don't see any reason why the Scottish people shouldn't have independence. I mean, as a Irish person, myself, seeing the, a brother Celtic nation also receive independence from the UK would be pretty good. How old am I? I'm 18 and I have been for about two and a half months now. In my opinion, I don't think the West will interfere with the stuff that's happening in Ukraine. And you're probably correct. I mean, there's too many people within the West who just don't care about the country and don't see the greater goals behind actually helping Ukraine. But in the end, as I said, it's a very complicated situation. And I'm gonna plan to talk about that in future videos, especially with like the relations between the US and Russia. So we need to be very careful about what we do there. What is your IQ? I don't know. I mean, I've never taken a real IQ test and it seems like a lot of money for something that kind of doesn't tell you the whole picture. Do you think that South Africa will collapse? Absolutely. There's no way that the country will actually make it past like 2040. As we saw this past summer, there was major ethnic violence. And I say that because Jacob Zuma was arrested, he was the former president. He is ethnic Zulu. And as we could see most of the parts of the country that received major violence were actually in ethnic Zulu areas, like the cities of Durban, Peter Maritzburg, and Johannesburg has a large Zulu population. There was like major looting in that corridor of the state, just the southeast part where the Zulu are present. There's also growing ethnic tensions between the white and color, or the white and colors and Indians are kind of one group and then the native African population are another group and they're just kind of having their experiencing some tensions because of the wealth gap between the natives and the non-natives. And I think like the Cape, the western part of the country would become its own country. The Zulu might gain their own country and the Lesotho might expand to include its ethnic population, same with Botswana. And I don't know what will happen to the northeast. All right, see you, Karens. Let's see what other questions. Why do you think that Kaliningrad exclave is important for Russia? Well, it's an exclave that's right in the middle of the Baltic Sea, so they can kind of have more leverage than they would otherwise have. And it's in the middle of two EU states and NATO states. They can kind of keep them on edge as well. It's interestingly important, like even for how small it is, they've put a lot of military there. What do you think about Turkey in general? I think that they're experiencing some issues right now, but in the long run, their geography and their demographics will help them overcome these issues in the end, especially in respect to how poor and how much of a poor condition their neighbors are in, like the Caucasus in southeastern Europe have declining populations while the rest of their neighbors in the Middle East are either very poor or at war. So I think they'll gain a lot of influence in those parts of the world. Ever thought about making a podcast? I already said that. That's an interesting statement. I think a united Arabia would probably be an unstable country because the wars that are going on there depends what you classify as Arabia, though. I'm just classifying as the Arabian Peninsula. Like if you included Syria and Iraq in there, that would probably be very unstable and possibly Yemen too, but if it's just Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states, I don't think it'd be an issue. United Arabian clavicles in 30 seconds. Thoughts on billionaires like Bill Gates or Chuck Feeney with their philanthropy. In general, I think that people should be allowed to make enough or should be allowed to have a business where they can become billionaires. I'm a really big fan of Elon Musk, but Bill Gates, I don't know. Some of the things he does just concerns me. I don't know. Do you live in the U.S. or Estonia or somewhere else? I live in the U.S. in the state of Virginia. Probably end up moving to the south or farther south when I'm older. Once I've gotten through college and all that, but yeah, I don't plan on moving to any other country except maybe Belize, but that's for a bunch of complicated reasons. Why do you think that Turkey will make why? I think that Turkey will make Islamic civilization by invasion. What if all this also thinks that Turkey and its entire history never be made foreign policy based on Islam? I just think that is the principal power within the Islamic world. Think about this. The United States never made its religion part of its foreign policy. They just made it about certain values and they still have great influence over much of the Christian world like Europe, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, all those countries. I'm not exactly sure what Turkey will do to unite its different peoples. I think they'll obviously be able to work on the shared heritage of countries like Azerbaijan and some of the Caucasus republics like Dagestan. But in other ways, I think they can pull on the Islamic aspect, the shared Islamic aspect of many of the countries that will fall into their spirit of influence, especially if you got leaders like Erdogan these days that are much more willing to have a kind of neo-automan revival as we see like a lot of the churches are actually being transformed into mosques, especially recently. So I think Islam could be a major playing point for Turkey going forward with its world expansion. I wasn't here when you read my question about Scottish independence. I said that I would support it because it is a fellow Celtic nation and why not have a little bit more autonomy, you know what I mean? What is one part of the world you would like to know more about? That's a complicated question because there are a lot of parts that I'd like to know more about basically just all of Africa, I guess. I mean, I know some things about some countries, but I just feel like learning a bit about how African societies work can really give a shape of what might be happening in the future. And I just think that there's a lot of potential that could happen in that part of the world. So it's important to learn about it. What do you think of the British Somali land dispute? Is this between like, I don't know, can you expand upon that because I actually haven't heard about this unless of course you're talking about like Somali land and British Somali land like the colonial things, but I don't know. How did you get interested in geopolitics? I guess that's another complicated question, but I started maybe in like sixth grade and I was like 12 or something. I had a history class and we learned about World War I and World War II and I just really liked looking at the maps and then I started researching these countries and then I learned about NATO and the rest is history. Like I just started researching different parts of the world and their politics and their cultures and all that and my expansive knowledge just kind of grew over time. Now I was able to have enough knowledge. I mean, I think that I still need to learn a lot more before it can be completely professional, but I think just enough that I can create a YouTube channel and it could be serious. What's your religion? It's a complicated question once again. I mostly identify with Christianity, but I don't really buy into many of the things that like the idea that the earth is 6,000 years old or anything like that or some of these other superstitions. So I kind of have a mix of beliefs, but they're mainly founded on Christianity. Does Turkey have any natural resources in their advantage that they can use to expand their empire? I would have to research that, but their greatest asset is their mountainous geography and their access of the Bosphorus strait. Just having coastlines along the Black Sea agency and the Mediterranean there just able to have their ships be able to be maneuvered in all these different locations and also facilitate trade between the Black Sea and Mediterranean Sea. So I think just its natural positioning is its greatest strength. Thoughts on Ben Shapiro? I don't watch him a lot. I think he's had some interesting things to say, but yeah I don't watch him a ton and Bernie Sanders. In general he just seems a bit out of there, a bit out of it, but I don't know some people like him because he's like a man of the people and something like he understands a lot of the issues that young people are facing which is interesting because he's old or at least that's what they say, but I'd say slightly more negative opinion of Bernie Sanders, but I'm not really like too opinionated on him. What are your thoughts on Switzerland? Great country, a bit expensive though which is going to be an issue when I try traveling there, but I respect that they want to keep their autonomy and all that. Opinions on Turkey the bird? It's okay, but there are other meats that I like better, like I like chicken better than turkey, but on Thanksgiving ham is better than turkey in my opinion. Favorite music genre? Mongolian throat singing? Well I mean like the Who is one of my favorite bands. If you guys have not heard of the Who, you got to look them up. It's like Mongolian rock music. They have a mixture of the throat singing, their traditional instrumentation and also Western rock and metal music. It's really something that's fascinating you guys should check out, but in general I'd say just rock music. Are you going to Brazil just so you can drink alcohol? Well um not exactly, not only that reason. I mean I already do it here, so it's not that big of a deal. Yes I did see that Sad but True. They did do a remix of that song and uh I don't know. I kind of like the Mongolian version better. Opinions on India. I think they have a lot of potential considering that this like have all this coastline in the Indian Ocean, they could create a huge maritime pseudo empire and just uh they could really combat China's dominance on trade just due to this fact. Um but like I think they have a lot of potential. I mean you need to be 20 don't you? Seriously hold on a minute. Brazil drinking age 18. Ha! The consumption of alcoholic beverages in Brazil is only legally authorized to people above 18. What's your opinion on Sweden? Uh it's a good country I guess. Once again a bit too expensive. Not really a place where I'd live just because of how cold it is and I see much more opportunity in the United States in general, but I like Sweden. I like Swedish people and I'm not an Erdogan fan but I think he is being portrayed in a terrible way like Turkey's goals and founding principles is not compatible with what's being portrayed in. You see Erdogan has kind of diverted quite substantially from what Turkey initially stand for. Like I've got this book right here. It's called The Turks Today. I think I haven't really gotten into it much but it's about my senior. It's going to help with my senior thesis which is arguing that Turkey will be a regional power in the Middle East and what I know so far is I think Ataturk was talking about how he wanted to create a secular westernized country. Well Erdogan kind of wants to create a more authoritarian regime based on more Islamic principles just to use more of a populist gaining on the sentiments of the rural, more traditionalist population rather than the people more closer to Europe like in Istanbul and all that. I think he is diverting considerably from the initial goals of the Turkish Republic but we have yet to see where that goes. Is the Byzantine Empire the Roman Empire? It's a descendant state of the Roman Empire. I wouldn't say if it is the exact same thing but they definitely have their roots in Rome. I'm from Somaliland and do you think we'll have full international recognition in the future? I mean considering that the Somali government based on Mogadishu will never be powerful enough to actually take back Somaliland and considering Somaliland is just doing great on its own I feel like there will be a day when they're recognized. I don't see why they wouldn't be. What are your favorite video games? God I don't want to say this but among us in Minecraft but not Fortnite. No I'm not into Fortnite. Do you guys have any more questions? Because I was kind of planning to go to like 345 or something just to like 10 more minutes just kind of want to see what else you guys have to say. What are your goals for life? Do you want to expand your online personas over 10 million perhaps? Well I think I do want to have some kind of media presence on here. I want to expand to do other things on YouTube as well not only this channel. I might do something about South Park even like I really like that show and I think there's a lot that can be learned from it so I kind of want to analyze each episode and create a channel about that. But I also might do something that's more politically oriented to like another channel but more about American politics I'm not sure yet but this will be definitely a the first and foremost thing for my online presence but I kind of want to expand it's not only be about geopolitics but also just about travel and just experiencing the world and learning about it really is I guess the main point of this one. Has anyone found your YouTube channel in real life? Some of my first subscribers are my friends from school. They've helped me out a lot on this like I remember my math teacher last year he's also my homeroom teacher he's show my videos every week when we came back because I upload them on Sunday and Monday morning he'd show the video so it's a great way to kind of show my classmates what I've got and I respect him greatly for it. Have you played the new version of Minecraft? You talk about like 1.18 with the underground vines and stuff you know I've done I've played the snapshots it's pretty good I mean by far the best version of Minecraft so far. When do you think China will invade Taiwan if they ever do? After Biden makes a few more blunders then we can expect a some kind of build up to happen there as China loses or as the US loses global confidence China will have a much greater ability to project its power I think. How is Bill Gates sketchy in your opinion? It's complicated I couldn't really do it in this or explain it here but I will you know I might make a video on it on another channel if I end up creating it but I'll explain it to you sometime. Do you have a favorite comedian? Hmm Trey Parker and Matt Stone the creators of South Park otherwise I'm not really into stand-up comedy especially since a lot of it sucks today like I think once again South Park did a great commentary on this like we're talking about in the in the future just all comedy is so unoffensive and stale and some people somehow people aren't taking it like it's the greatest thing ever like I feel like a lot of this is already happening today like some of these comedian comedians that the media is just propagating it's just like oh watch this guy and like YouTube keeps recommending Jimmy Kimmel he's like my least favorite comedian he's just so unfunny like it's not even the political stuff it's just like he's impressed by his own ability to be full of a lot of these feminist comedians are like that too it's just embarrassing the state of comedy today at what age did you start to become knowledgeable? I always like to say that I really didn't know anything until about six months ago that's what I say all the time because I think that I know a lot but then six months back I'll realize or six months later I'll realize that at a time I really didn't know that much so it's always an ever-changing view of the world and I think that's just a great thing it's just to keep pursuing knowledge. What are your next videos? I'm planning two already three actually uh I'm gonna talk about the collective security treaty organization and the Commonwealth of Independent States and why they're different and kind of how they work with Russia's sphere of influence. Then I'm gonna talk about the important relationship between the United States and Indonesia in the future and finally a controversial one why I think that there's a great possibility that Canada won't exist by 2100. What's your opinion on universal basic income? I do not know like it seems that how are we gonna get the funds for universal basic income that's where I have a trouble with it but uh I also feel like people need to be really incentivized to work so I'm not really and I don't really have a strong opinion on it but I'd say people should really try figuring out other ways to make money then just hoping the government will give them money. You make good videos thank you. Have you watched Russell Howard? No I have not I'll have to look him up as well. I'll have to write some of these names here that you guys are telling me about. Estonia claims part of the Peskov region is received by Russia after the Soviet occupation. Most Russian live in these territories. What will happen if these territories are getting to Estonia? I seriously doubt that anything like that will happen so I'm not sure I mean the only possible way I can see this happening is if Russia just has a complete collapse. The entire country is balkanized and all that but if that happens I feel like there would just continue to um uh just severe make the uh make the ethnic tensions within Estonia already a bit more severe. I just uh tighten the divisions between the Estonians and Russians in the country. Opinions on the political compass? I think it doesn't tell a lot I mean relative to what it says the questions can relative to the bounds it has the questions can give you an accurate reading of I don't know how to describe it exactly but I just don't think that the political compass is very uh encompassing really. It uh doesn't tell the full story and because political views are much more complicated than that. If Alexander Navalny was president of Russia how do you think he would differ from Putin's rule? Oh I think that in most ways he would differ from Putin's rule. He wouldn't be quite as uh I guess dictatorial as Putin but I feel like in the country just based on the civilization that Russia is in and also the kind of geography they have kind of predisposes them to having strongman rulers and because of how weak their geography is they're not separated from separated by oceans from any threats so they kind of need to have a strong centralized state to really keep going and I think that's what the people think and that's why I don't think it would be likely for anybody like him who have more western democratic ideals to really become influential and or to really gain any serious power. Do you think Egypt will collapse? I think it's possible just because of the rising problems in the country such as the rising unemployment and poverty and also the population is booming and the Nile is getting slightly drier but I have more hope for Egypt as Ethiopia is starting to go into uh a bit of a crisis with this civil war going on. Everyone's acting against the building principles yes but there's a limit to do that in Turkey. Turkey is a democratic country. Undoubtedly I also recommend you watch Kraut's three videos about Turkey for your thesis. Thank you for the recommendation. All right this will probably be my last question. Thoughts on Trump, Biden, Obama, President's in your lifetime essentially? I don't really want to talk about Obama or Trump but I will give my opinion on Biden. I think that he I have serious doubts that he's really the one in charge of everything. He's very feeble and just considering the way he brings himself about just his rhetoric is awful. He can't he can't speak. He can't really be a true leader I think and he's just created so many blunders with the gas prices rising. The the border situation like the southern border is experiencing some major issues. Inflation is pretty high for a western country. I mean it's not like anything we've seen in like Turkey or Venezuela or Iran but it's still pretty high for a western country and just what he did in Afghanistan and they're kind of just the smug attitude of the administration.  See I have a very very negative view of Biden. I think he's an awful president and it's just unfortunate that the world has to deal with the the strongest country in the world having this kind of leadership. So okay so that'll probably be it. Thank you for all of you who showed up and probably some other people will watch after I uploaded this but yeah you'll definitely see me within the next two months or after two months. Now I'll be working fixing some different things within the channel like rebranding it maybe even a channel name change just making the thumbnails a bit different just updating the channel making it more professional and I uh might upload a video or two like within the break period like maybe my video on Canada I'll upload but yeah we'll see. Thank you for all your support and I'll see you guys relatively soon.


Honourable John Bounzina is now the new Speaker of the Tarabah State House of Assembly following the resignation of Honourable Joseph Kounini. The former Speaker made his position known through a letter deliberated on during an emergency sitting in the house presided over by the deputy Speaker Honourable Harman of July. Honourable Bounzina is the member represented Zing State constituency is the former Chairman of House Committee on Education as well as a Chief Whip of the Ninth Assembly. Humanly possible I would do my best to make sure that as a House of Assembly we perform our duty as expected so that the state does not suffer as a result of a vacuum created by the House of Assembly. So I would do my best to make sure that he is going to be a team work. I'm not going to work alone because I'm the Speaker it does not mean that I'll work alone. I will consult the past Speaker if there are still members of the House I will consult those that are in the House so that it's going to be an open door policy so that we move the state forward. That's what is going to happen. Hello hope you enjoyed the news please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.