trying to get everything arranged in here but I'm staying here is where I put my cigarettes this is where I smoke because you guys know well most of you know I don't smoke in the house so I'm staying here getting ready to put the bell on the tractor I lit a cigarette looked over in this door handle went like that there is no dog out here monkey is with her mom an hour away from here that's what it did I first I heard it I just let my cigarette so I just looked up and I seen it go like this well sorry about the wind noise behind us but fan going we got a real feel of 101 outside so it's I checked the temperature in here and it was like 97 so I got the fan on hope I hope we can over look at I cut this old belt off here I just used my issues my little nippers here wasn't much left of it now in order to get the new belt here's the new belt this is what it calls for okay that this one appears the same the same one so what we got to do we got to go around this pulley here so I got the deck all the way down that's why I've got the jack stands where they're at I know they look a little funky but it is not going anywhere so the first thing I got to do is I've got to pull this belt off here so I can so I can get the new belt over top of it because it's got to go up here so I keep calling it it's not it's not really a tractor guys it's a lawn mower you got lawn mowers you got riding mowers you've got garden tractors and lawn tractors okay so probably gonna have to do is I'm gonna pull this pulley off we're gonna need both hands to try this I may not have to pull that pulley off let me get you up here now we can get the new one on and I'll bring you back down underneath there I'll put that one on back on the same way I'll show you that but let's go ahead we may have to it's got to go around that top pulley and then the back goes around here the front goes around here okay then it goes around this one so we have to take this one off too we should be able to do the same way as we did the mower belt get you up here doesn't pretty much on your backs there so this one we're gonna go ahead and pull that nut off right there that not pulled off alright guys I got to do this again for you I didn't hit record I've got a 14 millimeter deep well on here I've got a 14 millimeter wrench up on top the inspector pulleys make sure they they're not making a grinding or howling very good really good okay now let's take this we have to take this off of here usually there's a diagram on these things somewhere if you forget where stuff goes if there's not take a picture it'll last longer but seriously take a picture and you guys can't see nothing of where things got to go okay so first we're gonna get this up in between the trans axle it doesn't want to go right up in between right where that lights coming in I'm gonna see if I can drop this down there should be a bolt up in here now a lot of times these things don't want to drop down real easy but we're gonna try it it's clear from one side to the other let me see I've actually never changed the belt on one of these before so I'm not sure what size that's gonna be got a 14 on there let's try 15 hey guys so it seems to be a 5 8 get this to drop down so I can get that belt up in there it's coming down great I just gotta slide it down enough to get this belt up in there just like that did you see that sure getting on the top one no you guys can't see a whole lot and I'm sorry but I can't see anything I'm working by feel looks like I gotta take it all the way down hit it up in here hang on a second guys I'm gonna put some anisees on this never sees and so that way it doesn't you know want to lock up if someone has to take it off again hang tight all right this is what I'm using here guys just the regular never sees also took a piece of sandpaper clean the shaft up on that engine now is this stuff guaranteed not to keep things from seasoned up absolutely not but does it help a lot yes if you don't have any of stuff use some grease it won't hurt a thing being up in there use whatever you got use a little oil you can use if you have any just whatever you got later you can use like like WD-40 but WD-40 it's not it's not gonna last you know what I mean see how I got that belt I know it's hard for you guys to see but that's why I got you so high up in here on the jackstand now we got to find the find the notch there it is that's what I do I just keep turning till it goes up on there get the seller belt back down here where now it's gonna go back up here again let me get that bolt in there I'm also gonna put a little bit on the bolt a little bit of that anisees a lot of people call it never sees also works as a lubricant to say I got some on the bolt there so let me go ahead and put this in here real quick like it goes like this then it's got to come around this I'm doing this wrong hang on guys goes up on the top pulley of that that one like this that belt looks awful freaking long down it maybe I'm doing it wrong this way you know I didn't see how it came off because it just kind of like exploded so I think I was right I was doing it right to begin with if you're in the same boat as me well that's what's gonna happen sometimes let me study this I've actually got the book on this I'm gonna get the book out I forgot I had the book let me get the book out okay guys believe it or not I didn't have to get the book out I shut the camera off I got the look and this is right so all right so now let's get this pulley pulley back on see what this does is those where the belts are those squeezed together it's got a variable speed pulley and what it was was since I had this belt off this pulley had dropped way down and it made it look like it wasn't it was way too big so my bad so let's get this other pulley on here this one that we took off here so sometimes you can take your belt and put it up there and hold that but I don't think we'll need to so let's get our boat down through here move this out away for a minute this is a battery hold down I don't know why it's like that but it is now when you put this pulley on the long side and the short side the long side goes up because it acts like a spacer okay let's get this and this does not take any washers on this one and it doesn't take a lock washer because this has this is called a night lock it's a lock nut which technically you should put new ones on the time you do this sometimes when you buy the pulley sometimes it'll come with that with a new with a new nut sometimes not all the time depends on what company you go through and all that so all right so let's get our let's get our wrench on here I see when we put our so loose that belt is when we push that pedal down up front there's a spring here attached to a cable that's what tightens that up that's what spends that pulley which spends all them so okay now I might be able to get the mowing belt down here that's a motor deck belt okay I'll bring the charger in here we want to charge the battery up how much gas we got probably don't have a whole lot because we didn't have a corner full okay so let me do that let me get the I'm gonna get this down off the jack we'll get a pulled out I'll push it out here well I gotta put some gas and then we'll jump start it we'll take it for a ride since we've got this in here let the air out of it this one's a little low but I'm gonna head because I want to see if this old thing here will work there's the ratings on it I don't know if you can see that flipped on here's switch over here that's if it'll wear this tire I'm thinking some bad hooves think that's what it is more than that okay well that's a let's check out another one I got over here okay I got it still got a leak right here and these two bolts out take this out shot some WD-40 down in it seems to be working okay now awesome okay guys so I hope that something I hoped that helped someone a couple little surprises there but not bad on one of these yard bugs does a craftsman I think it's 10 horsepower pretty simple if you know how to do some stuff like this you'll be able to do that no problem just follow it step by step if you have one of these okay guys so anyway that little air compressor works so that's cool oh here's the other one I was talking about I was going to go get but I don't have a charger for it it takes a takes a charger that's pretty cool all right guys so anyway there you go one of these little craftsman yard bugs it is a okay guys hey I'm gonna clean up some mess I really haven't got much done today so as you can see but I got that done so fun but it's like 97 I think said in the garage here so anyway it's hot thanks for watching guys appreciate it weekend's almost here one more day all right guys we'll chat at you soon enjoy the rest of your week and the upcoming weekend so she bears myth man legend gone for now bye bye guys we'll see you soon hey guys I'll show you the temperature 98 degrees in this garage that's the ambient temperature


Are you ready? We're live. Go play Spot the Fed around here. I'm not a Fed anymore. I'm out. My name's Sean Henry, and I just recently retired from the FBI just a few months ago, back at the end of March. And in my most recent position in the FBI as Executive Assistant Director, I had the honor and the privilege of leading the Critical Incident Response Group, of which the hostage rescue team, or HRT, is a part of. And when I decided to put this presentation together when I was asked to come in, I wanted to do something that I could use my experiences in the FBI and kind of convert those to what we're doing now in cybersecurity in terms of the threats that we're facing, the complexity of the issues, some of the policy issues, and some of the technical issues and the like. And how could I take what I've done in 24 years in the bureau and apply that here to this space? And I thought that using the HRT just as kind of a quick hook to get into this was a good start, because I think there are a lot of similarities. One of the things I learned in the bureau is there are more similarities between the physical world and the cyber world than many people think. And I think if we apply some of those concepts, we can be much more effective in this space. The hostage rescue team, for example, is the best trained, the best equipped, the most elite civilian tactical team anywhere in the world. And I think that with some of the threats that we're facing and some of the folks that I know that are here, some of the threats and the issues that you're facing, that you all continue to need the best tools, the best training, the best be the best equipped so that you too continue to be the most elite because some of the threats that we're facing and the adversaries that we're facing, who they are and what they're doing to us on a regular basis. And I think that the HRT is a good symbol of that. They train all the time. And I know that what's been happening here in Vegas for this last week and over into the weekend has a lot to do with training. How do we make ourselves better?  I learned that early on when I was on a tactical team in my career about 20 years ago when we had these flash bangs, we were going into a hotel. It was a training exercise. And you have a guy that lines up on the door and they do this countdown to go in and execute an arrest or a exfiltration of hostages.  And I had just gotten onto this team and I was the first guy up on the door waiting for that countdown in my ear. And I went in on one and did not heed the advice of waiting for the flash bang to go in first before you breach the door. When I got in there and I heard clink, clink, clink and I looked down. When at the time there was a violent explosion which disoriented me completely. And I can tell you, I never made that mistake again.   I think in this space, there's a lot that can happen in the private sector that we can do to train and prepare for when we meet the adversary in terms of tabletop exercises. I know many organizations have standard operating procedures. And I know in a lot of the organizations I've worked with, those things tend to sit on a shelf and they're not always exercised. And people, it's not until a real crisis emerges when people start asking questions. You know, what are we supposed to do? Who's in charge of this? How do we move this data? What do we do here? And if you can actually train and practice and do that, you're gonna be much better off when you face the real crisis. So in the FBI, we've been battling spies, terrorists, criminals for over 100 years. And let me first off say, I do not profess to say at all that the FBI has all the answers. The FBI has made lots of mistakes over the 100 years and they'll continue to make mistakes into the future. And I fully accept that and recognize that I've made mistakes in my life as most of us have. But again, I think that there are some capabilities we can talk about that will provide a opportunity to learn. After September 11th, the FBI made some pretty big changes to adapt to the physical world of terrorists. We had to change from being very reactive to being more proactive. And a lot of those techniques that were utilized to fight terrorist organizations, I took and applied to my program, which was computer intrusions. Primarily from foreign state sponsored organizations. Applied those techniques to the cyberspace on the law enforcement side. But I think that in the commercial space we can actually take a lot of those techniques and apply them here in this commercial space now. In the private sector, we can take the same techniques and some of the same tactics and apply them. So let me just talk quickly about the threat because I know that a lot of you folks have been victims, maybe even actors. People have been involved in intrusions into major organizations. I believe based on everything that I've seen in my time primarily in the last five years where I was working in the government and cyber policy and strategy, that computer network exploitation and computer network attack is the most significant threat that we face. And when I say we, I don't necessarily mean the United States of America. I mean civilized world. Other than a weapon of mass destruction, a nuclear device going off in a major city or some biomedical device that's deployed that kills hundreds of thousands or millions of people. I think that C&E and C&A is the most significant threat that we face. Everything that organizations have is maintained on their networks and it's either stored there, it's transmitted there, it's resident there, all of the IPR, all of the research and development, all of the corporate strategies, corporate communications and the like. And it's the very DNA of companies and it is all being targeted. I have said previously, I talk about the aggregate of the threat as an iceberg and that the vast majority of people are familiar with the tip of the iceberg. If you think of an iceberg in 3D, we know that that small percentage, 10 or 15% is above the water line and below the water line is that big behemoth of ice. The water line is the line of demarcation between what's unclassified and people get to hear about in the media and what's classified and what people don't typically hear about. Although there's been some more chatter about that. And what people hear about in the unclassified environment is theft of PII, personally identifiable information, somebody lost $1,500 from their bank account, website to facements, credit cards lost, 50,000 student user names and passwords were stolen. That's what people hear about. What they don't hear about is what's below that water line. And that to me is where when I talk about C and E and C and A being the most significant threat, that's the real danger for me. Because I've seen below that water line for a long time in the classified environment, intelligence that's been collected, working with international partners, working with members in the private sector who don't want to talk publicly but will talk confidentially about what they've seen, what they've suffered. And I know how difficult that is for people because I've heard people who say, hey, the government says they've got all this classified stuff and they don't wanna present it. I recognize what a challenge that is. And I think that we need to do more to reveal that and let people really understand the full scope and see the totality of that iceberg. Because I think if people really understood what that risk is, I think that they would be much more receptive to security. They'd be much more understanding of the needs of the security people that are responsible for making sure those networks are safe and they're not. I still talk to CEOs and boards of directors and corporate executives who say, why am I a threat? I don't see that I'm targeted, I don't understand why somebody would want our information. And they don't recognize that, not only do they want their information, if they don't necessarily want the information, they're using their infrastructure for something else, for some other nefarious purpose. And so there's still an awful lot of doubt in the private sector. I've seen companies that have had substantial breaches and actually gone out of business so that the very essence of that organization was taken and they couldn't function. So one example that I've used that I think resonates with people is a company that was involved in doing short-term lending. They suffered an attack over the weekend. On Friday they were in business, they lost $5 million literally out of their accounts and on Monday they were out of business. So a small example, but I've seen much greater examples than that in the classified environment. And it is really broad and deep. So talk about the adversary really quickly. I see cyber as the great equalizer and that anybody with a $500 laptop and an internet connection has the ability to target anybody else, anywhere in the world. 2.3 billion people, according to a couple of studies, have access to the network and have the ability to attack any government, any company, any organization, any person, anywhere in the world. So the pool of subjects is pretty significant and the barrier to entry is very, very low. I've seen a lot of organized crime groups, primarily operating out of Eastern Europe, but around the world who are collaborating online, who've never met each other in person, who are looking to target not just financial services sector, but really the types of information that impact everybody, health records, for example. Targeting people's most personal information and really threatening through release, through denial of service attacks to decline or deny access to those records. We've had a couple of cases in the bureau where data was encrypted, health care records, and people could not get to their health care records. So poor opsec on the administrator that they didn't have backups, that was bad. But the fact that people didn't have access to their health records, to their prescription information and those sorts of things was pretty significant. These groups are becoming much more sophisticated. They're able to defeat multi-factor authentication and they've stolen literally hundreds of millions of dollars just in the last year or two in the US financial services sector. And around the world in some of the conversations I've had with these multinational banks and multinational financial organizations, pretty substantial to them. I've also seen threats, legitimate threats by terrorist organizations who want to impact the civilized world for whatever reason, whether it be jihadi influence or sympathizing for that cause. They want to impact Western society and they're absolutely calling online for people to take cyber up as a weapon and to use it as a tool to impact Western society. And again, going back to that low barrier of entry where for 500 bucks, cheap laptop and internet connection, you can actually attack your oppressor, the group that you feel oppressed by. I'm concerned about and I've seen an increase in threats to industrial control systems where these organizations who have used kinetic attack, kinetic weapons for years to try and impact society are looking at cyber as that weapon whether it be the power grid or the water system, those sorts of things. But the very critical infrastructure that we rely on to survive day in and day out. There are people who say that's not a threat because they don't have the capability. They're talking about it but they don't really have the capability. But there are organizations and there are people now who are quietly marketing their capabilities, their skills and they're looking to give them out to the highest bidder or to loan them or lease them out to the highest bidder. And the fact that somebody might not have the capability but they've got the intent today, I don't think makes them less of a threat. I think it's something that you have to be considered of. The other group I think that I've seen a lot of is the lone wolf where we have people who have been disgruntled employees or individuals that are working on behalf of themselves who have gone in and shut down organizations. Corrupted data because they weren't happy with their organization and that has certainly been a continued increase as well. And the final group is foreign intelligence services. There are dozens of foreign intelligence services, of foreign governments who have offensive electronic espionage capabilities and have absolutely implemented programs actively to collect against businesses to steal their proprietary data. It's like playing poker with a marked deck. Organizations, companies that have set down to negotiate and an adversary opponent sitting down across from them has the plans to the negotiation strategy. They've got it in advance and we've seen that as well. We had a company just about a year and a half ago who lost somebody in the defense industry who lost $1 billion worth of research and development. They had 10 years worth of R&D in place and it was worth $1 billion, literally over just a couple of days. And of course it's not just the confidentiality of the data that's at risk because the integrity of the data is at risk and we've seen data that's been changed and altered and denial of service attacks where data is just not available at all. Defense in depth is absolutely key. I agree 100% that we have to have a more aggressive and a continued defense. But the reality of it is in everything that I've seen, the adversary's capabilities are such right now that the adversary is able to jump over the fence. So building a better firewall or building a better IDS, building a better IPS is not always the answer. We have to continue to do it. We continue to lock our doors at night but that's not the only answer. We've got to, in my opinion, I think we've got to be much more efficient and effective in using other capabilities. There's a movement to push data continually and to share it, which I understand. Companies want to use the technology that they've invested in. But I think that there's some type of data that's sensitive enough that companies got to be more restrictive. And if they're not more restrictive or they don't practice some type of compartmentation on their network, they're going to continue to suffer significant losses. I don't think that the private sector has focused enough on the threat. So I think that we've been very good focusing on the exploits and looking at the vulnerabilities. But that's, in my opinion, I think that's one piece of this. And I think it goes much more beyond that. And I think that we have to begin to focus on the threat itself. So there's the classic risk model that says that risk that you suffer is threat times vulnerability times consequences. There's three pieces to the risk that you face in anything. What's the threat that you face? What are the vulnerabilities to that threat? And what are the consequences if those vulnerabilities are exploited? And if you can reduce any one of those to zero, then you're going to be safe and secure. But I don't believe that we have the ability, using defense in depth to eliminate that and bring it down to zero. I don't think it's possible. The offense is much greater than the defense. And we've seen time and time again that really capable people are able to defeat the defenses that are in place. So I think that we've got to change this and make it a little more difficult for the adversary. In the physical world, if you were to use a physical example, and again, going back to the FBI and some of the things that I've been involved in, we require people to secure their own property, lock your doors at night, be careful when you're getting involved in some financial transaction, be aware of what you're doing. We ask people in the physical world to do that and law enforcement, whether it be the FBI or local police department will respond if you've been victimized. That's the standard course here. But that doesn't always work in this space. And what the FBI tried to do from a cyber perspective is to be more proactive in this space and identifying who that threat actor is and how do we mitigate that threat. I think that we need to do that here. You cannot make, again, physical world, cyber world. You can't make every mall, every university, everybody's home, everybody's place of business safe. You can't secure them all. We couldn't live in a society like that. I don't think anybody wants to live in a society where everything is so constricted that the physical space is safe. So because we can't do that, we've got to hunt for the adversary. Who's the adversary that's gonna walk into a school or a mall? How do you do that? How do you find the adversary and mitigate that threat so that you don't have to lock down every single physical component in our society? There needs to be a paradigm shift in how we do these things. In the FBI, we moved from a domestic law enforcement agency to a national security agency. And we moved from traditional law enforcement to Intel, Intel organization, to change the way that we do things. The old performance measures in information security have been how do we prevent an adversary from getting on the network? And I believe that you can't prevent an adversary from getting on the network in most cases and that you have to assume the adversary's there. And that the current metric needs to be how much time is it between when the adversary makes access to my network until we identify and discover them and can mitigate the threat? And can we shorten that delta? How do we do that? We know in the physical world, we're not gonna prevent every attack. We can share intelligence, we can share information that helps others prevent these attacks. How do we reduce that delta down to zero? I think that in everything we do in a security perspective, intelligence is the key component. So the first piece, strategy, identifying what the needs are. What do you need to make your organization safer? How do you do that? In a, it doesn't matter if you're going in the physical world against criminal organizations or terrorists or the like, having a better understanding of who the adversary is is gonna make you much, much better. The intelligence model in cyber is visibility into the network. How do you have better visibility into what's happening on your network? How do you get better granularity into what's happening on your network? We had an organization that shared intelligence across multiple organizations so that agencies could leverage the capability of others. Agencies that didn't have access to certain pieces of intelligence were able to share them with others to give them a much greater granularity and visibility into their network. By doing that, it gives you an opportunity to better understand who the adversary is and which enables a much more strategic response. So when you collect intelligence, you analyze it, you get a better understanding of who's who on that network. You can actually execute against that adversary. You're in a much stronger position as a defender, as a network defender, to take an action against the adversary that makes your network safer. So in the physical world, as an example, let's assume I had information that I found somewhere that there was going to be a person that was gonna bomb a warehouse, terrorists gonna bomb a warehouse. And we put that information out to all manufacturing organizations that someone's gonna bomb a warehouse. That might raise the awareness and that might cause some people to be a little more attentive. They might put an extra security guard on duty. But that information isn't all that valuable. Someone's gonna attack your place. But what if I had information or intelligence that we collected through different sources talking to other people who might have been attacked previously, information on an anonymous source. Somebody had information that there was gonna be attacked and it said, there's somebody who's gonna bomb a warehouse and it's a woman between 28 and 30 years old and she's got shoulder length black hair. She's got a tattoo on her left wrist. She wears a red dress regularly and the attack is gonna occur on a Tuesday in September and it's gonna be against an auto manufacturing plant, an auto warehouse. That's a lot more information that allows me to be much more strategic as a defender looking for a terrorist. I can be much more strategic. I've got a lot more information that I can action. I've got a lot more questions now that I can start asking. I've got a lot more questions I can start asking which is that cycle in that intelligence cycle. I can execute and I go back and start how do I change my strategy? I have to collect more information. What group does this person work for? Do we know? Yeah, we do. We know that this particular woman is sympathetic to a group that is concerned about the carbon footprint and that's why they're going after this auto manufacturing plant. So by having that type of information, it allows us in the physical world to be more strategic but I think that we can do the same thing in the cyber world. In the government, we've got very limited resources and I know you all and the organizations that you work in have limited resources which means we've gotta prioritize what we're defending against. You can't defend against everything. You've gotta be strategic in how you allocate your resources because they're limited. We've all got limited resources. By focusing on those threats that we believe are the most specific, then we can hunt for that adversary. One of the things in this physical example that I had provided, think about in a warehouse, you've got a guard sitting at a console booth right at a soccer operation center and they're watching the screens. But if they knew that somebody was already in the building, they wouldn't be sitting watching the screens, they wouldn't be watching the fences on the screens, they wouldn't be watching the front doors. They'd be walking up and down the hallways, looking in offices with a flashlight, looking at the file cabinet, seeing that there's somebody inside. They'd be patrolling constantly if they knew that somebody had made access to that network in the physical world, they certainly would. Why are we not doing that in the cyber world? We're not always doing that, we're still watching the perimeters. In the digital world, the equivalent is aggressively pursuing the adversary on our own network. So again, using some of these indicators that we're able to collect through different sources and I'll talk about those in a bit, looking on our own network, being proactive, looking for changes on the network, looking at who's accessing the network, who's downloading information off of that network, being much more vigilant and attentive to what's happening on the network every day, the changes that are being made. In the physical world, in the physical world, the law enforcement in your community and the Department of Defense are responsible for protecting your safety every day. Police officers are patrolling your neighborhood, looking for bad things. The Department of Defense is looking for ships or planes that are coming, they're looking at radar for missiles that are gonna attack. Your physical space. In the cyber realm, the Department of Homeland Security is responsible for protecting the dot-gov space. NSA is responsible and they have the authority to protect the dot-mil space. And there's no government agency that's responsible for protecting the dot-com space for a lot of reasons, which I understand, but there's nobody that's protecting it. And I think most people don't actually understand that there's nobody protecting dot-com, there's nobody watching dot-com. So I get it, right? I listened to General Alexander a little while ago and I understand the concerns that people have which are legitimate concerns and people need to be asking questions. But what that does is that requires us in the dot-com space, in the commercial space, to protect it ourselves because it's not happening by the government. The FBI will react and respond if your organization is hacked, if a company's hacked, they'll respond. The FBI certainly doesn't have the resources anywhere near the resources to do it, to meet the demand because it has significant and substantial those attacks are. It requires the private sector to provide the patrolling. It requires the private sector to personally be involved in hunting for the adversary because it's not happening by our government. Requires us all to do it. So one of the things I've talked about is us being more proactive. How do we be more proactive on the networks? And I want to be very clear, this is important, that I am absolutely not advocating that organizations hack back against attackers. I'm not advocating that. I worked for a long time in that environment. I don't really want to go to prison. I will if I have to, but I don't want to. So I'm not advocating that, but I think that there's an awful lot that net defenders can do to protect their network from the firewall end. There's a lot of actions and activities that can be taken to help make that network more secure. So whether it be honeypots or whether it be network segmentation, whether it be corrupt packets or misinformation or denial and deception, there are certain things I think that we can do to make the environment much more hostile for the adversary to operate on. Because quite frankly, if you're administering the network, you've got a home field advantage. You own that network, you know that network, you should know it better than your adversary does. And I think that there are actions that can be taken by people that are defending those networks that make it much more difficult for an adversary to operate. If an adversary spends four months and they use two zero days to get onto your network and the packets they pull back, the files they pull back are the complete opposite of the files that they're looking for, that's frustrating, that costs time, that costs money. And it does certainly make it much more difficult for them to operate. We're changing that dynamic a little bit. When I think about HRT, and you saw this with just training exercises that you saw there, but their job is to protect people and to save lives. People who've been taken by violent action oftentimes, but people who've been put in harm's way. And I see our data as hostage in a lot of cases where our data has been held hostage. HRT uses speed, surprise, and action to disorient the adversary and to keep them off their game. And I think that we can do the same thing. The lives of corporations, I believe, are at risk. I believe that the lives of corporations and organizations are at risk because of the value of that data to everybody who relies on it. HRT protects what's good and eliminates what's bad. And I think that we can do some of that here on our private networks. When I talk about intelligence and intelligence gained from proactive operations, it can help us predict what's going to happen. When you get enough visibility into what an adversary is doing, and if you can share that intelligence with others in your infrastructure or others that are in your trusted circle, because they've got a completely different visibility, a completely different optic onto what's occurring on their networks. But when you start to look at all this data in the aggregate, you get a much clearer picture of what's happening. And I think that for a long time we have been working very hard to secure our own network, our own piece of the network, and we're missing opportunities where we can be much, much, much safer. So, in the Bureau, one of the things we did was move from reacting to collecting intelligence and trying to make people safer and disseminating intelligence out to the private sector so that they could make themselves safer. There was a time five years ago when the government had, and there still are times when this happens, but when the government had information, but because they didn't want to disrupt an operation that they had, they refused to share it. That has changed where the government has tried to push data out. So, from the FBI side, intelligence that was collected on an organized crime group that was stealing money from many banks, we had very, very specific information. It was somewhat sensitive, but it was a particular vulnerability that was being exploited. And we knew that there were a host of banks that were gonna be victimized over the next week. We discovered that information in the course of an investigation. And we shared all that information with the private sector so that they could take proactive action and secure those vulnerabilities before they were exploited. And in fact, they did, and there were multiple attempts over the course of about a week period to exploit those vulnerabilities which had been fixed based solely on intelligence that was shared. So, it allows you to become predictive. And by disrupting them, I think you start to change the game. Once you're predictive, proactive helps you generate information because by being proactive, you're causing the adversary to take actions that they didn't intend to take. They expected to come into this soft shell organization and kind of walk through and maintain access on that network. And because of actions that you're taking, you're moving them off their game. They're taking actions, they're using new tools they might not have expected to use. You're getting better visibility, better clarity into what their capabilities are and what they're able to do. You're starting to see tell-tale signs of who they are, which allows you to start to predict and to start to prevent. So, by understanding the adversary's TTPs, you can take very specific actions like moving data to certain locations. We talked about serving files up, perhaps that an adversary was expecting to get but they get the wrong data. One of the other things that I learned that I think is critical for all of us is the need to operate under the law of the Constitution. Civil liberties, privacy, civil rights, which I, first of all, I swore an oath to the Constitution 24 years ago. I believe in the Constitution, I believe in people's rights and I absolutely positively believe in privacy. I believe it's absolutely critical to a civilized society for people to have the right to talk to each other and to talk in private about it and that information should not be shared. So, it's an important consideration, I think, when I'm talking about sharing of intelligence and being proactive, that there absolutely are laws and rules and regulations that must be followed. I listened to General Alexander talk earlier and he talked about privacy and he talked about the oversight that his organization has. From the executive branch, from the judicial branch and from the legislative branch, all three of those agencies or those arms of the government have authority over him monitoring him. I believe that it needs to happen and that we can never let some of these threats and challenges get us off of our basic tenets. I think we've gotta adhere to those because that really is what makes us a civilized society and I don't think we should move from that and I'm adamantly, I mean, I adamantly concur with that. Let me just talk about a couple of quick cases where I think we'll kind of highlight some of the proactive operations, proactive techniques that we were able to utilize that were of value. One of the other things that I've learned in my career and I think that we can apply to the private sector is the absolute need for partnerships. Partnerships, government to government, partnerships, private sector agency to private sector agency, government to private sector, all of us to international because this is not a US problem, this is a worldwide problem. Everybody faces this threat, it's a threat to civilized society. Just a couple of quick examples where proactive operations I think have changed things just a little bit. Corflud was a case where it was a botnet that was stealing PII from, they had about 2 million bots, PII primarily related to financial services transactions. It was an organized crime group and the FBI working with the private sector, Microsoft and a private organization actually, a consortium, went out and was able to show to a court that this organization was clearly a criminal organization and that the botnet was a weapon that was being used to perpetrate this crime. This wasn't a botnet that was being used to share positive information, but it was being used to break into other computers to spread malware to steal data. And the FBI got a civil order to take over those command and control servers and when those bots called in to the CNC, they just told it to stop, just stop running, stop running. And in that particular case, disabled the botnet. It was somewhat controversial, there was a lot of questions about it. At the end of the day, it was done lawfully, it was done in respect of privacy, but clearly it was a weapon that was being used, it was a tool that was being used to perpetrate an organized criminal enterprise. It was somewhat unique, somewhat interesting. Rogue Digital, a similar type of a case where this was a botnet of four million bots being operated by an organized group out of Estonia and they had distributed malware that caused these computers, so it wasn't a bot, caused these computers to run through their DNS server. So it was a DNS changer. And working with a private sector organization going to a court through the same type of a procedure where you've got to lay out very clearly, this is not one person in an office saying, hey, let's take over this four million node network. This is a really rigorous process that takes oftentimes months of talking to people about what the liability issues are and what are the legal issues and the privacy issues. It's a huge deliberative process. I think it's important to understand how really overwhelming it is sometimes, and I get it. You need to have control, dual control, but the bar is really high to get the authority to do something like this. They changed out the DNS server. So when those computers were running their queries, they went to the legitimate sites, as opposed to the Estonians, which were running all the DNS queries through sites that they had controlled and they were collecting all the ad revenue and they made $14 million off of that scam. And then Microsoft ran their malware removal tool and they were able to clean up those boxes on the backside. So interesting way of taking some action, being proactive, trying to impact the adversary's infrastructure and to change the game just a little bit, not just to continue to allow it to occur. I think that in the private sector, there are opportunities. I think there are ISPs who have looked at, they're aware of boxes that are being used as bots. They're aware of infrastructure that adversaries are using. I think there are some actions that they can take. Many of the ISPs have stepped up and taken more action and I think some other major organizations in the private sector have started to change quite a bit to be more proactive in this area as well. So the threat is constantly increasing. I see it regularly. I don't see it anytime changing, certainly not in my lifetime, I don't see it going away. There's more emerging threats, mobile devices as a new potential threat vector, new segments of society coming online, more people with access, more organizations pushing more data. So I don't see it going away anytime soon and I certainly think we need a paradigm shift in the way things are done. So I was thinking of a quote. I wanted to come up with a quote that would resonate with people and I looked at Sun Tzu first. Everybody refers to Sun Tzu, that Chinese war guy. And one of the things he said was if you know yourself, if you don't know yourself and you don't know your enemy, you will be imperiled in every battle. And if you know yourself but you don't know your enemy, you'll win one and you'll lose one. If you know yourself and you know your enemy, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles. That's interesting, right? We're talking about it's important to know your adversaries, not just defending what's coming at you. Those HRT guys, they don't really care if they're nine millimeters or 45s coming at them. They just wanna know who's shooting and how do I stop them from shooting at me? Know your adversary. So I saw this quote, find out where your enemy is, get at him as soon as you can, strike him as hard as you can and keep moving from another famous Chinese philosopher. So I thought it was an interesting quote. Ulysses S. Grant in the Civil War, talking about the need to strike at your adversary. I truly believe, and again, I heard General Alexander this morning and I'm glad he said what he said about the need for training, about the need for people to become more innovative, to continue to build their skills and capabilities, to continue to raise their game and to try and change the game. We have brilliant people here in this country. We've got people who've innovated and created some unbelievable technology. I think we have to continue to do that. I think we have to continue to work in that collaborative way. I've told guys, men and women that I worked with for a long time about the need for them to stand on the line that separates good and evil in this country and it's not just this country, it's good and evil around the world. It's civility and incivility, that there is a line that separates those people and that they've got a step on that line and when I talk about the line, I think about terrorists primarily. That's what I thought about when I was talking to these folks, that there are people who are trying to kill other people, really seriously, harm innocent people. That line is narrow. And when I think about the cyber world, and Jeff Moss asked a question, how do we defend when there's a million battlefields, a million battle fronts? It's not just agents and military and intelligence people that are standing on that line.  And I think that we all have an obligation and a responsibility to stand on that line together because I truly believe, and some people have said, you know, I'm being dramatic, I really believe that certain attacks and things that I've seen could leave people dead when critical infrastructure is destroyed for weeks or months on end. And I don't think that that's out of the realm of possibility. That requires everybody to step on that line and to do the right thing and have an obligation to your friends and your colleagues and your family and the next generation, if you've got kids or grandchildren, but the people that are coming up behind us, I love what DEF CON's done with Teach and Young Kids. I love what DEF CON does here by being innovative and causing people to think differently and creatively because I think that's absolutely necessary for all of us to do. And I ask all of you to step up on that line and to take this seriously. Clearly the fact that you're here, it's something that not only you're interested in, but I think you take seriously, but I think it's a responsibility for all of us. I don't think we can change the adversaries whomever they may be. Criminal organizations, lone wolves, terrorists, foreign intelligence services. I don't know that we're gonna change them. They're coming at us and they're gonna continue to come at us and if we block them at the door, they're coming through the window and if we block the window, they're coming through the ceiling, it's happening, they're coming at us. We've gotta be creative, we've gotta be innovative and we've gotta step up. So I ask all of you to step up and to change the game and to help keep civilized society much safer. Thank you very much.


Coming up on DTNS Patrick Norton talks about moving tech into a new house during a pandemic why many U.S. health agencies will not use exposure notification apps and this time Google really truly means it when they say they want a coherent messaging strategy. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday April wait no I'm just kidding May 8th 2020 in Los Angeles I'm Tom Merritt. Who even knows what day it is or month I know where I am though Studio Redwood I'm Sir Lane. I'm drawing the top tech stories in Cleveland Ohio I'm Len Pearl. I'm from somewhere outside of St. Louis I'm Patrick sorry see I finally remembered at that time it's stopped on Roger. He's Patrick Norton he's Roger Chang he produces the show we just spent a half hour reminiscing about MTV on Good Day Internet you can get that at patreon.com slash DTNS let's start with a few tech things you should know. Japan's Computer Entertainment Suppliers Association confirmed that the Tokyo Game Show scheduled to start September 24th has been canceled. The show will transition into a virtual event with more information expected later in May. Tom Moran at The Verge reports that according to sources Microsoft will integrate cursor support into Office for iPad with plans to roll out the update by fall 2020 support is expected for the unified Office for iOS app as well as two separate word excel and PowerPoint apps. Apple says it will reopen stores in Dusseldorf Frankfurt and Russenstrasse Germany and one store in Boise Idaho in the U.S. on Monday May 11th three other stores in Alabama Alaska and South Carolina will open in the week customers and employees will have their temperature checked before it entering the store and must wear masks as well. Samsung will launch a Samsung pay debit card this summer backed by a cash management account from SoFi Google is reportedly working on its own branded payment card as well and of course we all know Apple has its own credit card too. Clearview AI software performs facial recognition by comparing images to a database of photos that are scraped from the public Internet. Google, YouTube, Microsoft and Twitter have sent cease and desist letters to Clearview and response to a lawsuit in Illinois. Clearview AI now says it will voluntarily cancel quote the accounts of every customer who was not either associated with law enforcement or some other federal state or local government department office or agency. I don't know if that'll make them drop the suit but we'll see. Europe has commissioned a study of tech companies preferences for their own services. They're looking into things like Amazon operating their own retail and a marketplace businesses that they compete with third parties. Apple's app development but also having an app store that has apps that compete with Apple's own apps. Study is going to look at what would happen if rules were changed like prohibiting companies from treating their own products differently on their platforms or even separating the businesses entirely. The study will also look at requiring data to be shared with smaller rivals and data lock-in that makes it difficult for customers to switch to a competitor. A final report is due to the European Commission in five months. Alright let's talk a little more about this Facebook redesign. Oh there is one Tom. Facebook announced its redesign at F8 last year and then it was been rolled out in some waves. The company added an option to try out the new version in March at least for some accounts. I was actually one of those accounts so I've been hanging out with it for a couple months now. The redesign is official for everybody and the option to update manually if you haven't received it is there as well. The new look promises faster load times easier nav and a dark mode for the desktop which is something that a lot of people enjoy. The company is also seeking user feedback on the new look whether you like it or don't like it. I rarely go to Facebook but I did maybe a month ago I don't remember anymore and I got the new look and my reaction was like huh simpler. It's you know got a lot of white space looks nice but I haven't really been using it. Patrick have you been using it?  You know when I got I got I have you know a Facebook burner account which is a dramatic way to say that I've got more than one Facebook account but in March I got that for whatever reason that that account was got pushed out to me right away and so I had kind of my Sarah Lane account which is my real Facebook account and then this other one that I kind of used for just testing purposes and I was like huh okay well let's go back and forth and see what's like dramatically different there really isn't much different it looks different it's cleaner it's nicer a lot of more white space or I suppose when you're using dark mode a lot more dark space but right but um it doesn't I mean it's it's it takes 15 minutes to be like okay everything's everything's still where it's supposed to be the buttons are the same yeah it sounds like they they've streamlined some processes for for things uh and and and then streamlined the design but functionally it sounds like pretty much works the same so yeah it looks nicer though I'll have no fear uh adopt the new look on the desktop it was interesting they were talking about the fact that they sort of let the desktop design langer because they were so focused on mobile for so many years and they're finally get around getting around to just just cleaning it up that's probably why it's not so fundamentally different functionally because this isn't a functional change this is just kind of bringing the design into the modern era yeah and it's probably why I was like oh this just looks better like a mobile app but it's the same you know that that's exactly what they were going for India's federal government allowed for the resumption of smartphone production last month but state governments had the final say over when conditions were safe to resume and that is now finally happening at states in India Xiaomi, Vivo, Samsung, Oppo and several other ODMs have received state approval for production Xiaomi will resume some production with Foxconn in the state of Andhra Pradesh sources speaking to TechCrunch report Wistron will resume limited production for Apple in Bangalore Vivo says it's going to resume 30% production capacity while Oppo and Samsung will resume production at the Greater Noida facility with around 3,000 employees working in rotation while this is happening Nikkei Asian Review also reporting that Apple is moving about 30% of its AirPods production out of China where production has been resumed for a while into Vietnam so Apple wanting to diversify its supply chain having Wistron come back online in India helps with that moving production into Vietnam helps with that as well you know this is clearly when you you know this story is like okay we are slowly but surely getting back to some sense of normalcy however when I go okay 30% production capacity that's significantly less of what you know these companies have been used to in the past and how much is this going to be you know a lasting effect on you know quarterly earnings and people getting phones yeah we're not saying that everything's back now right it's everything is starting to come back and I think it's interesting about that Apple moving to Vietnam is that it's not going to come back the same companies have been burned a little by having their supply chains affected either because of just-in-time inventory or most parts coming from one region and when that region got shut down everything got shut down Patrick do you have any thoughts on this before we move on it seems like something if they were probably well into the process of starting before COVID hit and now they're the it's you know if I would it smells like something if they had already been working on kind of diversifying the locations and possibly in response to tariffs and other things you know I think to you know Sarah I think that what's what I'm really curious about is is where demand is you know we have so many people out of work at this point in the United States and I'm kind of curious you know what employment looks like in India and China and other places I think there's going to be a massive knock-on effect because revenues are down so far and I think it's going to take time for both demanding right I think for some things there's a huge demand like as soon as the restaurants are open it's going to be the greatest day in tips and ever hopefully if you go to a restaurant after COVID do me a favor tip heavily and tip often but or a bar or anything else but I think there's going to be a I think it's going to take time I think it's going to be a really long gradual sort of u-shaped recovery after this one these that's what smarter people tell me well speaking of recovery or here's hoping anyway google announced it would bring its collective communication products under the oversight of VP and GM of G suite Javier Soltero this now includes messages duo the phone app on android google meet google chat already part of G suite speaking to the verge soltero said there are no immediate plans to change or integrate any of google's messaging apps and that the company believes people chose google's messaging apps for specific purposes okay listen okay yeah carry on soltero if you're not familiar with him joined google back in october he was previously the co-founder of a complete and vp for microsoft's office group so I mean knows what he's doing I actually am a huge fan of a complete but but but yeah I mean this is quite an undertaking isn't it how many I mean how many names do we have for things that do lots of the same things I want to start by saying that soltero did a great job with a complete maybe he's finally the guy for the job I don't want to let that point be missed I don't want to damn Javier soltero before he's had a chance to get started but man this is not the first time google has tried they almost had it right they had it all unified under hangouts and then they just got bored and were like oh you know what like maybe we'll just bust hangouts out it's not even the first time that google has unified messaging under one person nick fox who's still at google was given this job his response was to launch google alo and actually add another product to the thing that's gone now too uh so I don't know I mean google's messaging strategy has been a mess for a long time it's not the first time they've tried to solve it I don't know Patrick maybe maybe soltero can do it right maybe he can't but it's I the best line of like the part I started like trying not to laugh out loud is there are no immediate plans to change or integrate any of google's especially because there is no plan and even if they have a plan just as soon as your business gets it fully integrated or it becomes a part of your life they end it with little notice and no reason um not well part of that is probably it being like okay soltero's gonna come and fix everything but let's not you know make people afraid that we're killing off products just yet you're not gonna make any changes to our products we're just hiring somebody who's really smart um and then you know we're gonna hear about it you know several months on the road yeah if they said they're gonna change things people would be up in arms about google killing products so I do like that Hiroshi Lockheimer who's the head of he's the svp of chrome and android and soltero's boss soltero report to him uh said that we're looking forward now in a way that has a much more coherent vision I would say maybe has a vision would be a place to start uh I don't maybe that's too harsh any vision where was the bottom yeah uh go Javier soltero I'm cheering for you wired has a headline up that says quote health officials say no thanks to contact tracing tech now that may sound odd if you've been hearing stories here on dts and elsewhere about all of the different countries adopting either a centralized app they make themselves or a decentralized app possibly based on the apple google approach all of those countries we've been talking about are not in the united states we talked about india's app that they made themselves we talked about germany going decentralized we talked about uk kind of playing it both ways right now they're making a decentralized one maybe they're also got one they're testing on the alawight the us however has no national app strategy and wired says that new york california massachusetts as well as the cities of baltimore and san francisco have all decided not to use apps for contact tracing instead they're just hiring people to do it now all of these these app efforts are also supplemented or in some ways they are supplementing manual contact tracing but these parts of the us are just doing manual massachusetts plans on hiring a thousand contact tracers new york 17 000 california 20 000 uh there's even a national plan scott got leave and added andy slavitt proposed a 12 billion dollar national plan that would need 180 000 contact tracers and we've talked about the fact that manual tracing is better uh than than apps but that apps could sort of help fill in the gaps tech is being used for these manual contact tracing uh things like health record access uh automatically texting people who are in actual quarantine we kind of use quarantine loosely but there's the people who are like no you really can't go around other people texting them information making sure they're okay tablets for the manual tracers to conduct data analysis while they're interviewing people uh getting location data from a user's phone with consent so they can see where they've been directly and start figuring out who they might need to interview and who they might need to contact new york is putting together three apps one to match test results with correct patients one to give patients an easy way to share relevant phone numbers to contact tracers so they don't make a mistake when they're writing it down uh and utah's healthy together app connects infected users with contact tracers and uses location data to rebuild timelines again saying like hey can we get the location data off your phone that might help us figure out where you've been and who you might have been in contact with uh i i i don't know uh what the conclusion here is uh because manual tracing is the better way to do it and but it seems like some of these health agencies are saying getting in on one of these apps from apple and google just isn't worth our time uh there there's better uses for technology that can help manual tracing oof pat i don't know how you feel about this um it's starting to we we got a lot of a lot of conflicting arguments about what is the best way to figure out who's sick and how the rest of us don't get sick that's why i think we should probably just put a permanent quarantine underneath all of humanity for the next decade well barring that no it's i think it's messy i think part of the problem is is certainly um most tech companies facebook uh uh other tech companies have done such a have such a horrible reputation for doing a decent job of handling you know privacy and and it's just it's a mess uh mostly i'm just kind of blown away with with the size of these offices or the size of these groups that like matt you know mass shoots a thousand okay but like 17 000 20 000 um people this is just i'm delighted with the idea of actually using people for this i just i think it's developing a mobile app is a nightmare for a well-funded organized company with world-class developers trying to put something out so i can totally see why actually having physical people and databases probably is a smarter thing it's just it's it's never as simple as anybody thinks ah you just build an app it'll be great you know and it does this and it'll access that and then we'll do this you know anonymized data thing that'll track everybody and and invariably somebody sells it to somebody and everybody gets pissed off um i may be a little ranty about this um yeah i i am very complimentary of the privacy protection to the apple google platform i think i think they're really solid i think they've done a great job on your correct but you shouldn't we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that all the health agencies agree they're we can say oh there seems to be disagreement there really is only disagreement about whether to implement an app or not there's agreement that manual tracing is the best way uh there's no disagreement about that and maybe that hasn't got through in all of these stories but manual tracing means i've talked to an individual i helped jog their memory i got solid ideas of where they spent the most time yeah they're not going to remember every single person they passed by in a grocery store but i'll know they went to the grocery store and who they talked with there like oh i remember seeing my friend jean there and manual tracing has fewer places where things can go wrong than apple google's bluetooth because bluetooth you know doesn't really know distance very well and it can it can it can be interfered with and it might not work and it might crash and so i can see where some health agencies say look it could be helpful let's let's do it uh because more data is better and i could see other health agencies saying yeah but why why waste our resources doing that when we're going to get almost all the way there with manual tracing anyway and then we want to worry about dealing with the margin of error on these apps and any privacy problems are gone now because we're just dealing with manual tracing yeah i i yeah yeah all right kind of yeah it sort of trickles off uh you know i don't know if you can hear patrick just putting up his hands but yeah i give up uh on wednesday spotify ceo daniel ek told bloomberg that apple has a long way to go before it is an open and fair platform spotify is pursuing antitrust action against apple in europe for limiting how third party music apps work on ios particularly spotify complained about the 30 revenue share on any purchase made on ios sonos co-founder john mcfarland said open twitter uh on twitter rather quote solid irony here having worked closely with both apple and spotify i would say it's more significantly significantly more difficult to work with in spotify's closed ecosystem than apples respect and appreciate both companies but open spotify is not patrick you can hear the walls and daniel the glass walls and daniel x house shattering in the middle of that like i was reading an interview and i'm like are you kidding me spotify like there's there's third party platforms that are desperate to work with spotify spotify refuses they want total control over the it's it's the fact that he said this is like half the music industry that deals with software is just pointing and laughing at him um not just you know sonos has a pretty good operating uh you know relationship with them but other companies that have tried to work with them are like yeah they have no interest they don't care please stop back as against integrate spotify because we can't um because spotify won't let us and it's uh uh yeah well and i love spotify i would normally defend spotify like look it's their platform they can decide what they want to let on i mean as a podcaster i'm glad our podcast is on spotify but when it wasn't i didn't hold it against spotify because it's like well they get to decide who they let in and who they don't but where it does break down is spotify is pointing at apple saying but they shouldn't be allowed the same thing and granted these are different situations uh what spotify is saying is the ios is a much wider platform and they shouldn't force us not to be able to charge in the way we want and that is the big issue is apple says 30 no matter what and you can't work around it in any possible way you have to either charge 30 percent or you can't charge through your app on ios at all and that's one of the big things spotify and others are upset about which is a little different than not integrating with sonos easily uh so so i get where there's a difference but there is also some overlap there yeah it's also i mean the other thing that doesn't help is that apple has developed special relationships with certain companies that have where they are not charging 30 percent so that certainly muddies up the water so that is only for video and only for very narrowly defined very large companies couldn't even keep a straight face on that one but yeah hey folks if you want to get all the reseller products if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes be sure to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com all right folks as we mentioned at the top of the show patrick norton uh moving into a new house at a very interesting time to be moving into a new house uh no i mean normally we would want you to talk about uh just all the things you're running into as you try to set up technology in a new house because that's helpful as people are always moving uh but i imagine it's it's even more interesting right now it's certainly uh you know the uh goodness i i have to fly back to where all of our household furnishings are stored so i can get them and bring them back so part of me has been like stealing myself to not go into a complete panic and hyperventilating uh on an airplane as i fly to where i am picking up you know i was laughing it's not the right word but i'll say i was laughing about that it's also interesting because you know especially millennials um are moving more often and uh or more frequently i think than uh anybody in their age bracket has in the last couple four five decades and especially in urban areas it's actually kind of shocking how fast people in the that that age bracket are moving these days um it's uh it's funny the first thing i thought about this is i was like writing down notes was like google search internet options and then the name of the town you're moving to for isp options because a lot of people don't actually know even real estate agents or landlords don't actually know what options are available uh and schedule an appointment early uh you know it's basically get the electric turned on and then make sure the internet shows up right after that and as ridiculous as that sounds in some places uh or some services they actually have a fairly hefty lag time uh and when i say fairly hefty i mean it could be a week uh after you take possession of the place which doesn't sound like forever until you're in a house for a week without internet um when you're transitioning to your house it's not a bad time to upgrade routers but do yourself a favor keep your old reliable router nearby until you verify that the new router actually works that may sound silly until you've actually had to walk over to a neighbor's house and borrow a cup of router um a lot of people don't know they exist but two gallon ziploc bags are possibly my favorite thing ever for organizing uh parts and electronics uh because they are huge they fit almost anything you can actually fit a lot of laptops inside of them with their power supplies um and you know if the more time you spend packing your stuff the less likely you are to be running around trying to figure out where the particular power supply for your router is um i actually you know like to have a box which has sort of the house network inside of it so that everything i need like okay they've connected the internet and i have my box and then my router and all of the things i need to get kind of basically everything up and running uh this all may sound obvious to people who are highly organized uh or who don't move off often but there's nothing worse than knowing like okay the router's in one of those 15 boxes kids and you can watch you know Phineas and Ferb once you found the router it's so easy to be packing and go like oh well well these cables are in the same box i'm sure it'll be easy to find them and it's like no man just put them in that ziploc bag and label that bag tape it to the router like do a couple extra things that makes your life so much easier on the other end i moved nine times before i was 12 i literally when i when i pack a box i write up what's in the box on three sides of it so that if it goes into a storage unit i can always have a side facing out with the name of what's inside of it man uh hctvs you actually should transport them vertically if you're moving yourself you know that you know the magic you know lcd juice is not going to drip out of the monitor if it's stored flat but the the panel is actually supported vertically and when you put it horizontally and then bounce it it's much more likely for you to create a stress fracture in the center of the screen which is really heartbreaking um you know keep something soft and dirt free between the screen and any furniture blankets and if you're renting furniture blankets assume that somebody is stomped on uh you know a giant pile of sand on them so get something you know fleece blankets are pretty good fresh fleece blanket you know banded around there and then store it vertically in between a couple of mattresses or the inner and outer liner of your mattress is a great way i could tell you you want to take patrick's advice on this because uh the only way that i felt safe having my dlp tv moved uh in circa you know 2005 2006 was with patrick's help he really knows what he's talking about here i've moved too many times i remember that tv um you know and on my obsession with routers and having your internet because apparently that's the most important thing in my life after my family uh and dog uh wi-fi analyzers are incredibly useful if you're on android uh you can actually get a wi-fi analyzer app on android which is a fantastically useful tool for figuring out if you've figured out the optimal placement for a router inside of your house if you have multiple mesh networks uh devices it's probably not as critical um they they don't really exist on ios which case you'll be using your laptop but wi-fi analyzer uh by abdelram and msid is an excellent inexpensive tool and you will be able to stand in corners of your house and it will tell you sort of which channel you should be using um because there's nothing more charming than discovering you can gain a healthy bump in your wi-fi speed by changing the channel of your router because everybody around you and all the other houses are all running the same channel yeah yeah no that's a good one i mean the channel won't matter so much for what i'm about to say but but the placement it's so much easier to figure that out before you've unpacked everything right because you have so many more options of where you can put that router and then you can unpack things around it so it's a good thing to do fully on you know as long as you're routed it can be problematic if you have a basement you have to cover but generally speaking for most people as high as you can get as close to the center of the house and uh if you don't have if you can keep it out of a closet you know if you can find sort of a piece of furniture to stash it on top of it can be amazing how much a little bit of elevation can do for your wi-fi performance so and uh real quickly uh when you're talking about finding internet options uh i i haven't moved in a couple of years now it's it's been a while uh but broadbandnow.com was really helpful at finding all the options uh yeah and and i think they still are good did you use them uh i literally went to six different websites uh highspeedinternet.com broadband now is actually generally the first results are going to get on google on that um you know there are some that are just terrible linkbaity sites that are trying to pick up right you gotta watch out for those for redirecting you um but uh yeah i mean it was it was i common.net is the provider i was using in alameda and they're a a startup company that that they're they're we were in their sort of test zone and i remember uh being really heartbroken because i thought we were moving and i would never be able to find an awesome internet provider again and to a certain point i was right uh because there's fiber from AT&T available on my block and i hate to complain about that but i've had such a complicated relationship with AT&T um but uh it's good to scan around because you might be shocked like common was almost half the price of what i was paying for cable but it was four times as fast and it was uncapped so it was you know search around and even if you know you're just in your house now every you know every once a year every six months search to find out if there's new provider in your area because if there is you might get a shocking improvement in your speed or a shocking reduction in your bill or as i did with common.net who is not paying me i just love them that much um it was a shocking increase in speed it was symmetrical upload and download it was a significantly less amount of money than we were paying Comcast and i got to leave Comcast so it was like a win a win a win and a win for me amazing. Hey everybody join in the conversation in our discord whether you're moving or not everybody could probably benefit from going through a few of those old boxes you just haven't opened in a few years you can join the conversation by linking to a patreon account at patreon.com slash dtns. Let's check out the mailbag. Oh let's do it we got a real nice one from GadgetSmart who wrote happy to be joining your associate producer crew after listening for free with ads for far too long. Tom, Sarah, Roger, Patrick, Scott, Justin, all of your guests had given us a wonderful show keep them coming. Oh thank you GadgetSmart. Yes super nice. That's really nice. Also shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels including Sonia Vainian, Ruchan Brantley and Pollo Jacob. Len Peralta has been illustrating the episode for us. What have you drawn today Burke Brethren of DTNS? Well you know Patrick had some great advice obviously for moving but I think the biggest pitfall of moving tech into your new home is having your smart home lock you out and here is an image of some guy trying to get into his house I don't know if it's Patrick or not but it could be and he's asking Siri, Alexa, Cortana, anyone I'm trying to move in and you've locked me out of the house so the house may be smarter than you so that's the first thing the first thing is being able to get into the house to get the tech into your house and I think that's the biggest pitfall of them all. I like that skylight though once you do get in I'm like what does it look like inside it's kind of cool. I know it's a very cool looking house. I know yeah exactly. So this is available right now at my Patreon, Patreon.com forward slash Len or of course on my online store at LenPeraltaStore.com so there you go. Thank you Len also thanks to Patrick Norton for being with us this fine Friday Patrick you are a busy man these days definitely on the move but you are still giving stuff giving people what they want and where can they find out more about that? abxl.com is a place to go I'll have some other announcements to made after the floors are finished and the house is filled and the internet is on which hopefully won't happen in that order I will be launching some other stuff a little later this spring. Very cool. Folks thank you for your support of this show directly now more than ever we really really really appreciate everybody who can support us doing so Patreon.com slash DTNS pays the bills it feeds Rogers children and Sarah and my dogs and we appreciate every single one of you however we know that not everybody is in a situation where they can afford to do that if you're still enjoying the show on the free version of the feed thank you for that just tell folks about it the biggest thing you could do to help other people discover the show is to review it on iTunes and I know you're like I don't use iTunes I use pocketcast or Dreamcast or some other thing that's fine you can review it there too but if you can review it on iTunes that is a bigger platform with bigger discovery and even just giving us stars you don't have to write anything helps us out so that's another way to support us here at Daily Tech News Show. If you've got something to get off your chest well we got an email address and we want those emails our email address is feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com if you'd like to join us live we're live Monday through Friday 4 30 p.m. Eastern that's 20 30 UTC and you can find out more at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash live back on Monday with Charlotte Henry as our guest talk to you then this show is part of the Frog Pants Network get more at FrogPants.com Bob hopes you have enjoyed this brover


During high school when I was trying to pick the university that I was going to join, I really wanted a change of environment. I went to a school or high school that was majority all people that looked like me, that thought like me and acted like me and I really wanted to go into a multicultural environment that not just only had a great education but also had a background filled with students from all over the place. I felt like I needed to build my character a bit and to build my personality a bit and grow as an individual and I felt like a U.S. was the best fit for that. I was worried a lot about how I'll fit in within the atmosphere and the program. I mean there are doubts when you think to yourself like I'm a monotone woman, like would I really fit into a civil engineering degree or a civil engineering program? And I found the program to be very, very versatile and very broad as to encompass any kind of passions that I would like or any kind of path that I want to choose to take in the future. Within my program itself there are a lot of different nationalities and backgrounds and schools of thought. My senior design group, the group in which I had my final project at A.S. with, we were four different people and when I counted all the different places that we came from there were at least nine different countries that we all came from all tallied up together which is really interesting and then that's what plays off to a great team, right? That's the diversity of thought, it's the fact that all of us had different inputs and different things to bring it to. Within A.S. there are student clubs that you can join. There are actually 74 student clubs, some are based on interest and some are based on academia. I was a part and a board member of two of these clubs planning the events and I was running the club alongside with my colleagues as well. Two of the student clubs that I was a part of were the Civil Engineering Honor Society Club and the American Society of Civil Engineering A.S. Student Chapter. The clubs not only helped me have a great time with my friends, connect more with my community, connect more with my students, civil engineering colleagues but also it really gave me a big, big window of opportunity to connect with the industries within the UAE. Plan a lot of events that have to do directly with a lot of companies that are civil engineering based not only within the UAE but also international. We networked with a lot of different universities by throwing school, university-wide competitions and also I had an opportunity to travel to the U.S. and attend a conference on behalf of my club representing A.S.C. Senior Chapter. We have a lot of students partnering up with different companies that help them within their senior design project that help them lend them the space, the materials, the tools, the testing that they need. I myself worked with Adoptek in my senior design project so they lent us all the things that we needed like the concrete materials and supplies as well as they helped us with the testing and by that I got to know a lot of people in the company and I had to, I built a lot of strong connections and I built a lot of strong ties. My university experience and my academia helped me a lot during my internships not only in terms of technicalities but also stock skills.