This module deals with the decision or the discussion that what is positive economics and what is normative economics. Under the subject matter of economics, we mostly see the same thing, but from the various lens. So, we describe the explanation of the various factors under the two types of the school of thoughts or the two lenses. One is called the positive economics and the other is called the normative economics. So, when we say the positive economics, it means it deals with what is or how an economics problem facing a society is actually solved. So, when we see that problem, it can be solved in various ways. So, but out of those various ways, one way will be actually adopted. So, certain resources, they can be utilized in various ways, but the one way will be actually in which the production will be dealt or there can be the various viable policies or certain solution of the certain problem, but which policy was actually adopted that will give the shape of the positive economics. So, this positive economics, it deals with the objective analysis of economic behavior. It will not deal with the subjective part of the thing and subjective means that what should be. And this positive economics theory was explained by the Robbins and Robbins explained that the economics was purely a positive science and economics should be neutral and economics economists, they should be silent. So, when we have to explain any part of the economy, so positive economists, they will only and only deal with the factors of production. They will deal only with the facts. They will measure the events in the form of the units. They will measure only and only in the form of the positive thinking. And they will not be the judgmental. They will not say that this thing was good for the health of people. They will not say that what should be for the society and we will not say that what can be improved. So, here it deals with the actual utilization. It deals with the actual production. It deals with the actual policies and it deals with the actual consequences and without any type of the judgmental either positivity or the negativity. And here any commodity will not be attributed with any positive or the negative feature. And its examples, when we say, I will say that Pakistan is a populated country. It means we will not say that either it is an active or the positive. It means it is highly populated. So we have to accept the fact when we say that there was a decrease in the price of the good and due to this decrease in the price of the good quantity demanded of that good increase. Or if we take any other example, so we say that there was the month of Ramzan or there was the event of the Eid. So due to the increased demand, now the price of the commodity increased. So it will relate cause and the effect in the form of the facts. It will not relate through the judgmental or any type of the recommendation or any type of the positivity or any type of the negativity. So we will say a profit maximizing firm. So when there is a profit maximizing firm, what it will set? It will set certain rules for the factors of production to purchase. It will set certain marginal revenue. It will decide through marginal benefit. So the basic decision mode, the basic decision rule through which that has to be decided that will be the facts, that will be the actual event, that will be the available data and that will be the actual outcome. On contrary, when we have to deal with the normative economics, we say that it deals with what ought to be or what should be, what can be. It is not related to that what actually was set, rather it gives that what we can do, that what were the available viable solutions for a problem. So if we say in other words, then normative economics tells us about possible avenues. Those avenues that are available today and those that we can force in the future or available technologies, available costs, instead we say that what can be possible. So positive economics will only talk about available but normative economics will only talk about what might be possible. In normative economics, Alfred Marshall and Pigo did the most work and they gave normative group of economics postulates in this regard. And that is why when we talk about what should be, we will talk about society and social structure. Rather, a producer has to produce more, okay, that is rational. A producer has to attain more profit, it is actual. But a producer should sacrifice certain production. A producer should reduce the price. So when we say that for the betterment of the society, a producer should prioritize other than its rational thinking. So that will be under the welfare economics or that will be under the normative economics. So this normative economics is that aspect of the economic thinking that gave path to the development of our welfare economics. And after this welfare economics, if we explain, this is further explained in the form of divine economics and it is also explained in the form of Islamic economics where we sometimes differ from the basic and the traditional school or the thoughts of the economic and we go again the positivity side, rather we go for the normative and should be are the viable solutions. So in this normative economics, we are not going to have any type of the reservation or the hindrance that we don't have to explain the things from the mirror or the lens of should be. We have to explain, yes, we can pass value judgment. We can say that output of the producer was more, but he should not do this because by this, he has utilized or wasted many resources that can be utilized for our future generation or any type of the consumption that a consumer has utilized for its own attainment of the utility. But in normative economics, we can say that it was not good either for the society or either for the health of the consumer. If we take an example of this, if we say that some people listen to music and feel happy, then we will say that in the form of positive economics, they are enhancing their utility. And positive economists can't judge them on that. But normative economists say, okay, the consumer is going to attain the utility, but he should not do keeping in view the welfare and the human rights of the other companion neighbors, which may be for those who are in the form of music, noise pollution. Now, when we come to examples of normative economics, we will say that government should guarantee minimum wage for every worker. Now, here we do not say against the positive, what is the actual minimum wage available? Similarly, when we say that Pakistan should reduce the amount of loan, if we say that the tax should be increased, we say that the rich people should be taxed more, so they can be able to produce more revenue for the economy. And through that revenue, government should be able to compensate certain, we can say, the migratory amount of the people or the poor setup. And the free education that is not mostly available, we can say that the free education, it should be given to the poor. So all the things that we say a producer should do, when we say a consumer should do, a consumer that who is going to utilize certain amount of the cold drink, who is going to consume certain amount of the chips, we say that okay, he is allowed to utilize, but at least he should deposit or he should drop that bottle or the empty packet in the dust bin. So he should do this to keep the environment clean. So here the social value judgment is the broader aspect that we have to deal. And it gives a beautiful picture of the future and the beautiful picture of the economy. And it provides the viable solution and the broader picture to the economy and the economic agents. Thank you.


Test your English. Bank bailouts. Step 1. Listen. You will hear a passage about an academic topic. Listen carefully and be prepared to take a short quiz afterward. Bank bailouts. Bank bailouts refer to the strategies employed by governments to rescue financial institutions that are experiencing severe financial distress. The rationale behind bank bailouts is that the failure of such institutions can lead to a serious economic crisis and negatively impact the health of the larger economy. While bank bailouts can provide temporary relief to financial institutions, they are not without controversy. Some critics argue that bailouts can re-sport irresponsible behavior and create moral hazards where banks are encouraged to undertake risky activities with the expectation of government intervention if things go wrong. Additionally, taxpayers often bear the burden of the costs associated with bank bailouts, which can erode public confidence in the financial system. Step 2. Take the quiz. Answer these questions about the passage. Number 1. Bank bailouts are government strategies aimed at helping financial institutions. A. True. B. False. You can pause the video if you'd like more time. 2. What is the purpose of bank bailouts? A. To reward irresponsible behavior. B. To prevent a serious economic crisis. C. To boost public confidence in the financial system. B. To encourage banks to undertake risky activities. 3. According to the passage, what is one consequence of bank bailouts? A. Boosting confidence in the financial system. B. Lowering the costs associated with failure. C. Bringing the economic crisis to an end. D. Rewarding irresponsible behavior. 4. Who typically bears the cost of bank bailouts? A. Taxpayers. B. Economists. C. Government. D. Financial institutions. 5. Why do critics consider bailouts to be a moral hazard? A. Financial systems are controversial. B. Government is expected to be involved. C. Banks may engage in risky behaviors. D. There is an erosion of public trust. Answer key. 1. Bank bailouts are government strategies aimed at helping financial institutions. True. 2. What is the purpose of bank bailouts? To prevent a serious economic crisis. 3. According to the passage, what is one consequence of bank bailouts? Rewarding irresponsible behavior. 4. Who typically bears the cost of bank bailouts? Taxpayers. 5. Why do critics consider bailouts to be a moral hazard? Banks may engage in risky behaviors. Step 3. Check your vocabulary. Choose the best word for the following definitions. 6. Anguish or pain caused by difficult circumstances. Critic. Severe. Distress. Hazard. Distress. 7. The logical basis for a belief, action, or decision. Controversy. Rationale. Strategy. Moral. Rationale. 8. The easing of distress, hardship, tension, or pain. Relief. Erode. Rescue. Crisis. Relief. 9. Accept responsibility to perform or complete a task. Intervene. Undertake. Impact. Risky. Undertake. 10. What does bear the burden mean? Save on cost. Encounter risks. Take responsibility. Create moral hazards. Take responsibility. How did you do? Did you get them all right? Good for you. Step 4. Read the script. I will read the script aloud and you can follow along. Bank bailouts refer to the strategies employed by governments to rescue financial institutions that are experiencing severe financial distress. The rationale behind bank bailouts is that the failure of such institutions can lead to a serious economic crisis and negatively impact the health of the larger economy. While bank bailouts can provide temporary relief to financial institutions, they are not without controversy. Some critics argue that bailouts can reward irresponsible behavior and create moral hazards, where banks are encouraged to undertake risky activities with the expectation of government intervention if things go wrong. Additionally, taxpayers often bear the burden of the costs associated with bank bailouts which can erode public confidence in the financial system. Step 5. Summarize. Write about the topic in your own words or summarize it by speaking with your friends or classmates. Use the knowledge and vocabulary that you learned from the passage. This is a great way to practice all your English skills, reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Step 6. Discussion. Have a conversation with your friends or classmates about this topic. Discuss whether you think bank bailouts are a good idea. What's your opinion on this? Go ahead. Talk with your classmates. Take as much time as you'd like for this discussion. Step 7. Some questions. Having trouble getting started? Here are some sample questions for discussion. Do you think failing banks should be bailed out? What will happen if the government doesn't intervene? Why should taxpayers bear the burden for this? Take as much time as you need for your discussion. Thanks for watching. Don't forget to subscribe to our channel so that you can get regular updates when we publish new videos. To see more videos like this, click on the link above or check out our websites for more free English learning resources eslgold.com and freeenglishstudy.com


To me, the Black Panther Party was the only group that was one addressing the needs of the community in terms of feeding children, in terms of organizing, you know, self-defense, in terms of educating, and so on. So I decided that, okay, they're the people that I need to find. So I actually went in search form and I found them. On February 13th, former Black Panther and political prisoner Marshall Eddie Conway passed away. Conway dedicated his life to the cause of Black freedom struggle and the fight against racism and inequality. He spent 44 years behind bars as a political prisoner.  And so that experience kind of told me that, you know, it was, it wasn't a fair and balanced way in which people were being treated, but I'm seeing also that we're being, you know, outnumbered and outgunned and abused in our communities, you know. Eddie was born on April 23rd, 1946 in Baltimore, Maryland in a deeply segregated city. He grew up with this awareness of racial inequality, which led him to becoming an organizer in his community. Before he joined the Black Panther Party, however, he had joined the US Army. Shortly before being deployed to Vietnam, he came to revolutionary consciousness and decided to fight against racial and capitalist exploitation at home in the US. And I opened the newspaper up and this is, you know, this is something that still haunts me. I looked at the front of the newspaper. It was the Stars and Stripes. And there in the middle of Newark, New Jersey, is a tank. And that tank has a machine gun on it. And that machine gun is pointed at 25, 30 Black women on the corner in their protest.   And it'll fall off 25, 30 rounds. All of those women would have been dead on the corner. And I looked at that and I said, Dag, my mother could be in that crowd. And so, finally it dawned on me that, okay, you're in this army and you're promoting this stuff. And they're using that same army in the Black community to do what you get me to go in the Vietnam to do. Something's wrong with this picture. I need to get out of the army and go home and see if I can help fix things. Convay was an integral part of the Baltimore chapter of the Black Panther Party. He felt compelled to join an organization working to advance rights for Black people after seeing the rebellion of Black people following the assassination of Martin Luther King. But it was scary in a sense of knowing that they had organized all around the Black communities, around the urban centers. They were this hostile white supremacist militant, Minutemen militia kind of thing that was being organized from the average white John Doe. And it was scary and it was like, God, do we realize we're cut off? And so it made me start thinking in terms of what are we doing in the Black community to protect ourselves, to look out for ourselves? What are we going to do if these nuts actually get a chance to act out? And that's what kind of drove me to look in for the Black Panther Party and to look for other militant kind of things that were going on. To me, the Black Panther Party was the only group that was one addressing the needs of the community in terms of feeding children, in terms of organizing self-defense, in terms of educating and so on. So I decided that, okay, they're the people that I need to find. So I actually went and searched for them and I found them. In 1970, Conway was convicted of murdering a Baltimore police officer and injuring another. This was one of the many frame-ups used to target Black leaders of that era. Some former Black Panthers continued to be behind bars till this day. Even in prison, Conway continued to organize and raise consciousness. He founded a prison chapter of the Black Panther Party and also played a leading role in the formation of several prisoner initiatives, such as helping form the Maryland chapter of the United Prisoners' Labor Union. And just to step back a minute to look at the prison experience, what we found was that in order for the guards to have authority, they have to continue to make efforts to dehumanize every person they see in the population. And it is nonviolent offenses that make up maybe 90% of the prison populations in America. And that's directly related to harassment. And taking into consideration that 13% of the population is Black, maybe 25% of the population is people of color, but over 75% of the people in the prison system are people of color. So it is this constant penny harassment, but it's also something else. It dehumanizes or desensitizes the police that's reinforcing that because they tend to look at the situation as if they're in enemy territory. They look at the poor communities, both white and black, as a hostile war zone. And they act accordingly and they're constantly trying to read out who might be a potential problem later on because their mandate is to protect the property and the wealth of the elite. In 2011, while still in prison, Conway published his autobiography, Martial Law, The Life and Times of a Baltimore Black Panther. He writes in the book, From the very moment that the cell door slammed shut, I knew it would be my responsibility to resist just like my enslaved ancestors in Virginia must have resisted. At times that resistance would become more important than my actual innocence for it was this determination to resist white supremacy that led to my imprisonment in the first place. Conway was finally released in 2014 after Maryland's highest court ruled that the state's juries' instructions were unconstitutional. On finally getting his freedom, Conway did not face the movement and returned to Baltimore to organize and educate against social injustice. He also joined the Progressive News outlet, The Real News Network. He also played an important role in the formation of Tubman House which, in the wake of the Baltimore uprising, seized vacant property and land for community needs. Even as his health declined, Eddie never left the struggle. He lived his life for the people.


Hi, my name is Shelly and I'm really happy that you're joining us today. I'm the manager of the Legal Services National Technology Assistance Program, and we are here today to learn a little bit more about remote access and controlling all of that. I'm going to turn it over to Michael Hernandez. He is the ringleader of this session today and he's going to introduce us to what we're going to hear today. Hello everybody, thanks for joining. Always a busy day, always lots of stuff to do and all the year-end stuff, so definitely appreciate the time. I also know hard for people to join on time. I was a minute late myself for this call. But yeah, I think a really good topic that we have today, I think even prior to COVID, one of the challenges we've had as a community is, how do we provide access to our organization's data for volunteers and interns, right? Prior to COVID, we had a lot of people coming into the office, so it was a lot easier. Hey, here's a desktop, here's credentials, log in. But now with the hybrid environment, you've got volunteers and interns working outside of the office, and how do you have equipment that you're able to provide everyone, and if you don't, how are you keeping track of that data? How are you securing that data when you're accessing email, your case management system, your file system, whichever you might be using, if it's a file server or SharePoint, OneDrive, things like that. And so how do you keep control of that data when they leave, so they provide the help, the great help that volunteers and interns do for whatever period of time, and that runs across the board, right? That could be for a couple of weeks, that could be for a couple of months, it could be for six months, it could be a year. You might have an attorney who's doing pro bono work that works one case a quarter, or they take one case at a time, and now they need access to the data, and also save the data in the organization. So I think this is a really great topic for the community. I definitely appreciate everyone joining. So we've got two different types of solutions, which this is an informative session. I think that this is great with what LSNTAP is doing with, look, this is to provide you information. It's the takeaway supposed to be to have you think about maybe even some of the challenges that you didn't necessarily think you had, or if you did have it, and you did know, here's some options that we could look into. So Veen and to your point, they're on gracefully willing to share information about their solutions and how they do things, again, but this is really informative sessions. It's just to kind of expose you to some options that are out there, and what you do with that information, whether you have more interest in them or looking up other solutions completely up to you. Again, we just want to help with informing you as a community, as what's out there. And again, I think great for LSNTAP for doing this. So I'm going to assume we'll probably get some more people on, and we'll let them in, but we're going to get started with the presentation. And so the format will be, so Veen's going to go first, Dan. And so he's going to review his solution 10, 15 minutes, and then we'll have a question and answer period specifically on that solution. If you had questions, then once that's over, we're going to hand it over to Joel at Tier Point and do the same thing. He'll review his, and then we'll have question and answers. And then at the end, if there's still some time left, we could just open it up to any additional questions. So with that, Dan, going to hand it over to you. Do a quick intro. You've got up to 15 minutes before the question and answer period. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And I've been looking forward to this meeting. Quick introduction about myself. My name is Dan Apropreto. I'm the senior and cap executive here at Veen. And on the call with me is Chris Johnson, and he's one of our senior product managers, and he's going to be helping us out with some technical questions if you have them, and you'll be walking us through a demo. And just kind of a quick background how we got here. Michael found us online for a solution for kind of the issue that he just spoke about. We had some time. We did an introduction call. He learned a little bit about us, and he thought it'd be a great opportunity to speak to some other organizations here that may be dealing with some similar problems. So I just want to say thank you to Michael who brought us in. And just a quick agenda of what I wanted to go through today. Just an introduction about Veen, who we are as an organization. I'll kind of go over kind of why Veen exists and the solution that we've recognized, or the problem that we've recognized, and how we're kind of overcoming that solution for our clients. And then I'll introduce Chris, who will kind of walk us through a quick demo. And I think it'll be a great opportunity to get a visualization about what Veen does. So Veen was created over two decades ago. And out of over 700 clients of ours, a lot of them are in highly regulatory environment. So organizations like banks, financial institutions, really any organization that has high compliance standards to either protect the data or needs to be compliant to things like PCI, HIPAA, GDPR, SOC2. So Veen was really built for security-minded organizations looking to simplify, reduce their costs around delivering a secure workspace. But without the nightmare of having to ship computers or without something like a VDI. So the conversation we have with so many of our clients is about this employee computing model that we're discussing today. And many organizations are still in the challenging model of buying and locking down PCs and insisting that people only do work on these machines. However, since the pandemic and over the terms of the last couple of years in terms of remote work, the lines between business and personal started to get blurred. And the expectation of people from a home office, a work computer, a personal computer, and respect those boundaries really starts becoming unrealistic for both the employee as well as the organization. Not to mention that a lot of our customers are hiring people in building teams in more geographically dispersed areas than ever before. So a client uses for many use cases, but it's really a big one in why this model is becoming increasingly more challenging. But at Venn, we talk a lot about BYO PC and BYOD, or building your own device. And this has been a hot topic for a lot of organizations over the last couple of years. But the thing we'd like to remind our clients is that BYOD doesn't have to be wholesale, right? Not everyone needs to bring their own computers. There's a lot of different options and ways this technology is being adopted. Really quite quickly for various types of use cases. So at Venn, we're seeing our clients leverage BYOD for independent contractors, interns, volunteers, all sorts of scenarios, mergers and acquisitions. And at Venn, what we're currently doing, we literally live and breathe our technology. I'm working for my BYOD device right now. And in some instances, we'll actually use a stipend to pay for an employee's laptop. So the organization themselves doesn't have to. But another thing to remember is that we don't need to say yes to every PC or even lock down every PC the same way. A lot of different ways this technology can plug it. The bottom line is the ability to protect your data without having to lock down a whole machine itself. So most of us here are probably familiar with MDM, whether you know it or not. So MDM is essentially what allows you to have access to company data like email on your personal phone, right? So what MDM did was it gave us the ability to containerize the application itself on a personal device. And this is what Venn is doing today for laptops, right? So almost think of us as MDM for laptops if you're familiar with that. Really what it's designed to do is to get your workspace for remote work. Protect the data without having to lock down the whole machine or having to push people into a virtual desktop and type environment. So the innovation here is a secure enclave that's going to go on the PC or the Mac. When you install that machine, it sets up the secure enclave. That's where all the applications sit. Where all the work is being done inside that blue border. And the blue border is a visual indication around those specific windows. So if it's in blue, it's in business. Everything inside that border is going to be controlled and administered by you. So for example, what applications they can run and where your data can go. That's how you're going to be able to control for some of the compliance standards your company could be held to. So everything here regarding this is to be remotely white. Everything work related on the machine can be removed. There's also a core component that's important. And that's all network traffic emanating from within the secure enclave. It may go out of secure tunnel through a gateway, an IP space that you control. Even though the network related outside the enclave, it's just going to go out to use a deep old internet connection. So how does it work? So then this is not a VDI, right? We do have some experience down that path. And some of you may be familiar with this as well, but this is different. This is a local computer and locally installed applications. There's a software-based solution that's going to put a virtual wrapper around an application that's running on the personal machine itself. So the wrapper is a blue border from the user's perspective. But from the idea of the administrative perspective, it's actually a firewall with your control of what can go in and out of an application. So can I copy and paste data? No, I think a screenshot, no. Where am I able to save that file? All that stuff becomes policy configured by you. And we'll show you what that looks like in just a minute when I turn it over to Chris to walk through the demo. But just to summarize our objective, your advanced security is our North Star, and that is what we're providing to our clients. So the company's still going to meet high compliance standards, but without the need of something like a VDI or ship and computers. You're going to be able to accomplish this now without hosting. So it's decided to be much less costly, much simpler. And I really don't need to add any additional infrastructure or data centers. We're using local computers and we're letting people work natively the way they want to work. However, we're giving you control of the applications, the data, we're really doing a higher remote session. In fact, we're not giving you control of the whole PC, we're just giving you control of the enclave. And the last thing I'll say before I turn it over to Chris, in terms of regards to deployment, it really is quite simple. It's a single install. So the employees are going to email invite as you provision a user, install hang and they're ready to start working in about five to six minutes. So I'll pause there for a second. I'll stop sharing my screen. I'm sure there'd be some questions that we have, but Chris, I'll turn over to you first to walk through the demo, sir. Sounds good. Okay, my screen should be coming up here.  This is also supported on Mac, iOS and Android. So what you're seeing here is I have a Chrome window running inside of the secure enclave and logged into a SharePoint site. I have kind of your generic sales spreadsheet here, open in Excel, and a blank Word document. So the first thing that I want to reiterate is that these applications are directly installed on the computer, right? There's not a second instance. We're leveraging the applications that are already installed here. For the end user, there's really no difference between the applications that are running inside the enclave or outside. They function exactly the same. The only thing I'll notice is that blue border surrounding them. That's going to help me really identify the context that I'm in. This is my workspace. And you can see that any application that's brought into focus, you'll see this icon up here. We call this the badge. Really the significance for me as the end user is going to tell me what I can and cannot do inside of the work environment. And these are highly configurable policies from the company level down to the user, and it's done through a SaaS-based admin console, so there's no infrastructure in far as managing the user. For this user, I'm pretty much locked all the way down. I can't upload anything in the browser. I'm not able to move or paste any data outside of the secure enclave. My network access is restricted and locked down, and that's looting to the private company gateway or that protected connection that Dan was talking about. Not able to print anything that I'm trying to download or save has to stay within the enclave. And I can only save to a location that an administrator would designate for me to save to, and I can only log into those accounts with an account that's authorized. And I'm allowed to share out my screen or take any screenshots. So really, like I mentioned, working in these applications, there's really no difference. Some in one, moving to the other, the data moves back and forth just fine. And that's really expected because all of these applications here are running inside the enclave. Now, if I were to open up another instance, which I have over here of Excel, you'll notice this one is running outside of the enclave. It doesn't have that border. If I do a right click here and try to go paste, you'll notice that it's as if there's nothing on the clipboard for read to paste. And that's because there isn't. When you're working inside the enclave, we're actually running a separate instance of that clipboard so that none of that data can be exfiltrated out. But if I'm working on something outside, need to bring it inside, no problem. That works just fine. So really the general rule for me as an end user is if it's in the blue, that's where it has to stay. Now, most users, they're not trying to do anything maliciously, but they're just trying to work in different ways that they want to. So I wasn't able to copy that. I'll go ahead and try to take a screenshot here. And you'll notice when I do that, all of these windows are completely blacked out. Now, this policy here that we're looking at is the screen sharing capture. It's very configurable, right? So we all have different personas. Some people are working with BII and you never want them to be able to share out. Maybe you have some users that never do. You can turn this off completely. Or in this case, think of this kind of persona, right? Doing presentations. But I wanna be able to explicitly only share out what it is I wanna share while I'm making sure all the other screens are protected. So I have this option here. I can go ahead and specify the reason for me doing this. And what's gonna happen when I click share window is it's going to create an audit trail for the admin to be able to look at.  And then when I try to take that same screenshot, you'll notice that only the application that I gave explicit permission to is now visible and the others remain blacked out. And that'll stay that way until I either come back to that badge, kind of stop sharing that screen. I close up the application completely or I log out of that. So there's really three components here that we're gonna be talking about. Three pillars, if you will. One is the application protection and isolation, right? So that is how we are separating and isolating the applications from other interactions with the operating system. Now the second component we're gonna discuss is how we're protecting data, meaning that we're on a local device. So I have two instances here of file explorer running side by side. The one on the right has that blue border. That's the one that's running inside of the secure enclave. What I wanna draw your attention to is you'll notice this item called Vendisk on the right. So Vendisk is our encrypted disk. Think of this as a profile store and not a file system. If you look on the left there in the other file explorer that's running out, you see that that drive doesn't appear there. This drive is completely hidden and inaccessible to anything that's running outside of the enclave. So the way this works is when a user logs in, they authenticate, they pass a series of device compliance checks that you can configure, such as making sure the operating system is up to date, antivirus is up to date, so on and so forth. We grab those decryption keys and we decrypt this drive and it becomes accessible to any application that's running only inside of the enclave. You'll notice that I have one drive here in Google Drive, the cloud file systems running inside of the secure enclave. So what we're able to do is give the admin and the ability to specify the file systems that I use, specify the account that I can use to log in with, and then we're binding those file systems that the cache from those file systems to Vendisk to ensure that anything that gets locally cached remains on this encrypted disk. Now cloud file systems are gonna operate exactly how you'd expect them to come through here and navigate, if I click on one of these files, it's gonna open the application inside of the enclave and I'm gonna save it, it's gonna sync back in real time. The other component of Vendisk which is really great when we're thinking about leveraging personal devices is traditional solutions when you need to off-order user or device is stolen, that really whole device has to be completely wiped. What we're able to do here as an admin is simply locate my device in the admin console, select wipe work data, it will remove everything that is stored on this disk and break any of those authentications into the file system without impacting the personal side at all. Now I mentioned that this was an encrypted profile store, so I'm gonna show you what that kinda looks like in real time, you'll see that I have two instances of Chrome here side by side, one of them, the one on the left is in the enclave, the one on the right is not, and you can see immediately it's a completely different themes, completely different set of bookmarks, even logged in with two separate accounts. So what's happening the first time that you're launching an application via our application launcher? So you can think of these icons here, not as real physical applications, but just representations of the applications that you're allowing me to run in the enclave. When I'm clicking an app for the first time from here, we're hooking into that application down at the very base of the operating system, down at the kernel level, we're rendering that blue border and then we're creating a brand new set of profile information for these applications on Vendis. And that allows me to customize my work environment for how I like to work and without impacting the way I use it for personal use. And finally, the third component is how we're protecting the network. Now, out of the box, each tenant comes with its own set of static and dedicated IP addresses that are only used when inside of the secure enclave. So all the traffic that's coming out of that secure enclave is going over this encrypted connection. So think of this as any of your SaaS applications, Salesforce or something like that. Now on the left, we'll go ahead and log in and you can see my IP address here. And that's one of those IP addresses of the private company gateway. So just think of this as kind of the split tunnel VPN. Now I'm going to try to go to that same website outside of the enclave on the right and you'll see I immediately get that access denied message and my IP address is different because that's using my local connection. So essentially what you're doing here is you're encrypting and tunneling all the traffic that's emanating out of secure enclave. You're respecting my user privacy, right? If I'm in my personal browser, none of that's being tracked and watched. And then you're able to leverage conditional access rules to prevent access to company resources unless they're coming from these IP addresses. So what essentially you're doing is funneling all users into Venn in order to access work. Okay. So I'm going to stop there. That is our general kind of overview of the solution and we'll pause and see if there's any questions. Thank you, Dan. Thank you, Chris. That was excellent. Really appreciate it. I'd like to open it up. If anyone has any questions, please don't be shy. You can unmute yourself or feel free to chat any questions that you might have. Okay. All right. So I'm going to ask you a couple of questions that hopefully will provoke some thought. Great. Thank you, Shelley, for that. So on the IT side, a couple of things that you think about when someone's using their personal device. So, Chris, you mentioned one, making sure that the user has endpoint security installed. Let's say the, I guess, is there with your solution, is that an absolute requirement? Or the way it's set up, yeah, it's best practice to have endpoint security set up, but if the user doesn't or they don't keep it updated, the way that it's set up, it's not a huge risk. Yeah, let's say, right? It's hard to say there's never a risk, right? Right. But, you know, is it a huge risk if the user doesn't have something that's updated? Yeah, absolutely. So that's a good point, Michael. There is no silver bullet, right? What we're doing is reducing that attack surface tremendously. And you can implement a set of device compliance checks to prevent the user from logging in if they don't meet them. And they're basic hygiene things, right? It's the, like I said, the antivirus installed. Is it running? Has it been updated? Is your operating system patched? Is your AV screaming, hey, there's an infection there? But if that was something that we didn't want to enforce on the users, yes, this solution has a number of ways that it's protecting, right? So for one, that disk is a read-only disk from the outside perspective. It's impossible for anything to write to that disk. We're protecting against common attacks like memory injection. So we're monitoring what's happening with that application because we're so far in the operating system. We're able to monitor all that and shut down anything if somebody's trying to attack the applications that way. So in effect, if that computer gets ran somewhere, I mean, that's terrible for that user, but it's not going to impact work or work data in that secure enclave. Great. Yeah, just another point on that. Even the keylogger kind of scenario, if somebody were to download, get a keylogger on their machine, okay. I mean, it's terrible. It's gonna take their banking information, but they're not able to record the keystrokes of any of the inputs, the applications that are inside the enclave. Yeah, no, great point. So you stole my question, right? Because on the IT side, that's a concern, right? Someone with a personal computer, whatever, something malicious could have already happened, and could already be on there. And the common scenario is the keylogger that's already on there. So now, you've got a computer that's compromised with the keylogger logging into our network. And now, keylogging all their, what they're typing, client information, which could include their address or security number, they're doing like intake or something like that. They're passwords. So with your solution, if that computer is already compromised with the keylogger, it's not a concern with your solution. Correct. Great. Okay, any other questions? Hopefully, my few questions made you think about some things on your end. Again, you could use the chat if that works better for you. I'll just throw out a couple of little tidbits until we see any of the chats coming in. So one of the things to consider too is that we do have some things out of the box, right? So if you don't have an identity provider, we can provide that for you. We have our own built-in identity management system. Same thing with that private company gateway. So that's there out of the box. Same with, we have a proprietary file system. Now we built this so it's extremely flexible. We know most people have best in breed. So you can actually integrate with Okta, Azure, another third-party IDP. You can leverage a different file system. You can even turn off that private company gateway and insert your VPN solution in there, right? So you have a lot of flexibility depending on how the environments are already set up. Great, great. Chris, Dan, thank you so much. This was great. I know some of these provoke thought after the webinar on your way home. You're like, oh, I should have thought of asking this, right? It's just kind of the way it is. We've got a great community and a community of people that wear multiple hats. Some have an in-house IT department. Some have an outsource. Some have an attorney that's the IT department. So we help with all different scenarios and the people on the call could be one of those scenarios and wearing that hat. So I think this was great. Thank you so much. Definitely appreciate you being on. And as Shelly chatted, this is recorded. This will be put on their YouTube channel. So they've got hundreds of organizations, a part of LSNTAP. So those that aren't able to join, but interested, they definitely have access to view this at a later time. So again, thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Great, thank you for the opportunity, Michael. We really appreciate it. And if any questions do come up on the drive home, like Michael said, or if there's someone from your team, maybe sees a recording, I'll reach out to Michael. And I'm sure you can communicate the question to us and we'd love to get it answered for you. But thank you for the opportunity to Michael and to everyone on the call. Thank you, great. Thank you. Okay, I'm just, yep, great. Thank you for that, Shelly. Okay, so I'm gonna turn it over to Joel at a tier point. Again, providing another solution, addressing an issue, right? How do you control your data when they're not using one of your devices? I mean, this is not a problem that is going to go away. I think anytime soon, especially with our community, with the need for volunteers and interns. And look, quite frankly, we have to worry about it with staff as well too, right? Especially with the hybrid. If you're in the office and your computer breaks down, chances are, you have another desktop in the office or another laptop that you could hand them. But now that you have staff at home, they have an issue with their work assigned computer. Are they gonna come to the office and get that fixed so they can continue to work? Or if you have the option, okay, while we get your computer straightened out, just if you have your own personal computer, hey, here's how you access all of your resources using your own personal computer. So though I've kind of focused a little bit more talking about volunteers and interns, this definitely helps address with staff as well. So okay, enough of me rambling. Joel, thank you so much for joining. Thanks in advance for your presentation, same scenario. You've got 15 minutes to go through your spiel and then we'll leave it for some questions after. Joel, if you are talking, you might be... Michael, yeah, there we go. Can you hear me better? Can you hear me now? I can. Yes, thank you. Yeah, okay, so let me jump into it. So yeah, Joel the Pre-Senior Director of Channels with TearPoint. Michael, thanks for inviting us to present and we are gonna, we have a little bit of a different approach, right? And so I'm gonna get into, from an agenda standpoint, who TearPoint is, will give you a high level overview of VDI and how that works and how we're accomplishing that. We talked about this too, Michael, Manage0365 fits a little bit of that, so that's another kind of angle and part of the story, including security around email and then a general security conversation as well and a product we call CleanIP that we use that help manage remote and multi-site kind of situation. So those are kind of the talking points that we'll chat through. And again, I guess we'll have questions at the end, but if anything comes up or you guys have any questions, please, please jump in. So TearPoint, again, we're a little bit different, right? So we're a very large data center company. We own 45 data centers across the country. I think we would probably be considered these days the leader when it comes to doing managed clouds, whether it's managing your AWS environment, Azure environment, we build out private clouds, we do VDI and we do a lot of this through our own data centers that we own and operate. So we're a little unique in the fact that we own and operate a ton of data centers, but then we also have this super significant managed service portfolio. So we offer a ton of services out of the data centers, not just like your traditional colo and kind of providing space. We do a lot of services and that's what kind of brings that story together. We're about a thousand employees, 5,000 customers, pretty substantial organization these days. There was a point about eight, nine years ago we went through a big acquisition spree and bought up some of the leading data center companies around the country and they were one of the larger ones out there. So there's some unique benefits to having a company that does all these managed services that actually owns and operates the data centers as well gives you kind of that next level of security from an operation standpoint. So managed virtual desktop, there's traditionally we've done this in a dedicated model, right? So when I say dedicated like a private model where we partnered with a company called Nutanix and we did dedicated virtual desktops to our customers, right? So that means you have your own private dedicated environment, which we still can do. We have recently started working at the offering some BDI stuff through the public labs through Azure specifically. So that can bring costs down and allow us to do it in a more kind of scalable model and offer it a more kind of competitive pricing standpoint. So there's a couple of different ways to kind of accomplish this. For us virtual desktop, what it means is you get to bring your own device, your computer, your applications, your files, all of that stuff has been a secure data center elsewhere, right? So you're kind of locking it all down and you don't have all the risk and exposure of having PCs out there, files and all sorts of stuff that you kind of have no control over. So again, compared to the other solution, this is a little bit more of tackling your entire IT strategy not just the single kind of solution to manage that. We empower employees to bring their own device, embrace a more kind of mobile work style, and it reduces a ton of risk when kind of rolling out a virtual desktop model. Virtual desktop also from our standpoint, we're able to design this because you have to think I have to have access to all of my files, all the different applications. So our experts design, build, understand your existing environment, your existing IT strategy, where things are. Most companies are operating in kind of a hybrid model, right? So you have some applications that are maybe in the cloud, you have some stuff that's on-prem, stuff in a lot of different places. Again, a lot of where our value comes in is being able to understand that and build out a strategy to kind of take you from where you are to where you wanna get to. It's often very hybrid and encompasses some of the things you may already have in place today. Client focus, so our VDI offering 24-7, skill technologist, right? So part of what we're offering here includes things like help desk. So you have managed help desk that can be layered into the virtual desktop offering, which is a whole nother set of issues that you may have. So you have somebody to call in, you have resources and support there. We do trending analysis and recommendations for optimization, you know, dependable SLAs. You have access to our team through a web-based portal and also phones so you can kind of manage tickets and your end users can go directly to us so you're not having to manage these virtual desktops, you know, an ongoing help desk support. So a lot of cool stuff there, you know, incident change request reports, things like that. So very client-focused. Again, the help desk layering into the virtual desktop really adds a lot of value for our clients. Security first, right? So a holistic approach. I mean, everything's built in and built on. So I'll get in a little bit around clean IP and some of the next-gen security offerings that we have as well that you can kind of layer into your VDI and O365. We also have a thing called secure workforce that I'm gonna hit with O365. But, you know, that's kind of the gist of doing a virtual desktop, right? I mean, it's part of your strategy. Again, we can do it in a very hybrid manner and we can kind of understand where you are, where your goals are and help you get there. I'm gonna jump into O365 now. Any questions, Michael? Anything you'd wanna hit on VDI? I'll save it for the question and answer. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Let's kind of fly through. Okay, and I'm doing it on the cam time, right? Yep, yep. So O365 is the other kind of component, right?  We also do manage Office 365. And that includes delivering it in a managed model for you to consume. We also offer secure workforce. So that's basically managing all the security around your O365.  So we configure the best security policies to maximize defenses against cyber threats and data loss around your O365. We also offer help desk around the O365. So again, if you don't wanna be managing support tickets around, just like with VDI, if you don't wanna be managing those support tickets, we have 24-7 US-based support team to help you manage tickets with O365 as well. We can actually do all of the help desk around all this. And then, think about this, we basically have a different route in the Microsoft. So if we gotta escalate things, a lot of these things we can handle ourselves, right? We've been through them. And then if we need to escalate to Microsoft, we have premier support and can get oftentimes better access and quicker access to resolve problems. So just kind of get kind of that premier access through us and get it delivered again in a kind of managed consumption model. Minimize licensing, right? So we can move your existing licensing over, clean all of that up, simplify migration and administration. So setting everything up, delivering it, all of those things we can take off your plate and provide you guys. And then professional services, we can extend everything for professional services. And this is across the board, right? We talked about this with VDI. If you have servers, you wanna move to the cloud, all of this gets tied together through professional services. And so again, we can help you migrate, we can set environments up, we can do assessments, manage migrations, whether the assessments are around security or infrastructure, we do all of that. So the third component is managed, we call it clean IP, but it's basically next gen firewall. So when you're kind of tying all this together, right? You're moving this infrastructure to the cloud. The key then is, okay, now I need to manage security in terms of accessing the cloud, what's happening on-prem. We do next gen firewalls where we can manage a lot of this stuff through our managed SIEM and SOC, or so basically our managed security operation centers to do all sorts of different things around managing your security when accessing applications in the data center and off-prem and especially in a hybrid environment where stuff's going back and forth and things are kind of all over the place, which is very common these days. We have a hybrid kind of next gen firewall capabilities that we can offer through clean IP.  So there's a lot of different things we can do to manage your overall security stance in these kind of hybrid environments through clean IP next gen firewall offering. So that's kind of, you know, DDoS I mentioned in the web application firewalls we do as well, that kind of rounds out, you know, the three kind of things I wanted to focus on. Again, we're a leader in, you know, managed services across the board within our own data centers.  Managing the security, doing the virtual desktop, doing manager 365, I think really enable you to have a strong kind of strategy around this ever-changing, you know, workforce where you have a lot of people that are hybrid and, you know, remote or coming into the office sometimes and, you know, bringing their own devices. I mean, this is just, that's something we can help design an entire strategy around. So, yeah, I think that kind of wraps it up. Thank you, Joel, really appreciate that.  You talk a little bit about what they're doing. Yeah, you're opening up a client on your, yeah, you're opening up a client on your desktop. And again, there's two ways we're doing it, right? So we can do it in a dedicated private deployment, right? So we have an offering called Nutanix Frame and that's basically, we go in, let's say you have 150 PCs, right? So we would go in and build out a dedicated, essentially private VDI cloud for 150 users. It can scale, but it's dedicated, right? So you might have a little bit of buffer room, you got to add to it, or we could do it in a public cloud like in Azure where it's very on demand. But yeah, either way, you're opening a client and everything, you know, again, if it's in a dedicated model, everything is happening in that private cloud that we built inside of one of our data centers, right? So the security is getting managed there, the access to the data center, all of that stuff's in our data center. And then if we do it in Azure, that's in Microsoft's cloud. But yeah, both ways you do it, you just open up an agent and you can provide that to a new user, they can open it up on their PC. And you know, that's kind of crazy because you'll get like, let's say, as long as you get connection to the cloud, right? To the VDI, then when you're on the VDI, you're banned with all of that stuff is happening out of the data center. So, you know, you might have 10 megs and then you're getting 100 megs because that's what you have out of the data center. Right, so that's a great point. Because so one of the challenges with hybrid work, right, is we have people working in areas where internet is not great, you know, it's a rural area. So what you're saying is, as long as they can make that connection to the environment, now that environment's gonna take over and the speed and the performance are based off of what you're supplying versus what they have at home. Yep, yeah. And so the bandwidth, you know, they can have a, you can, I mean, you just, you can get these almost, you know, like very base kind of terminals that, you know, don't have a lot of compute, don't have it a lot of capacity because all of that's happening on the, you know, again in the data center, right, in the cloud, right? Whether that's in a public cloud or in our dedicated private cloud offering. Great. And I appreciate you bringing up the support information. Because with some organizations, sometimes make decisions to not go a certain route because they don't have the internal IT support to be able to support a solution. So when support is available, you know, to help with, you know, not just the implementation and walk away, but the ongoing support, you know, that makes a, you know, and any solution more attractive. Again, especially for organizations where, you know, they have very limited IT staff or no real IT staff, right? It's an attorney who's wearing an IT hat for them. So that, you know, that, you know, ongoing support is definitely a good option. So I did want to open it up in case, you know, if anyone has any questions. Again, you can unmute yourself, chat in the chat box if there's any questions that you have for Joel. Joel, definitely, you know, appreciate that presentation, the overview, including some of the other, you know, security that ties into remote work that, you know, we have to sort of factor in as well. Okay. I'm just gonna say, while we're waiting for questions from the audience, I would like to know, obviously a lot of our community is in the legal aid space and in the nonprofit arena. So I wanted to hear, you know, your company's experiences in working with those type of clients. So open it up to both companies.  Yeah, specifically with the legal, I got that right, right? I mean, because it's like legal form. Yeah, legal nonprofit, yep, yep. I heard nonprofit, I'm like, okay, yeah. Yeah, no, we do, I mean, legal's been a big vertical for us, we have law firms and legal organizations of all sizes as clients.  So it makes, I mean, whether it's state and local or finance or healthcare or legal, we have tons and tons of customers across the board. But definitely there's a, you know, we have a strong, you know, legal is a big vertical for us. We work with lots of different legal organizations and have tons and tons of experience there. Thank you, Joel. Dan or Chris? Oh, you know, kind of the same, right? We're pretty much vertical, agnostic, right? We work with kind of all shapes and sizes of organizations and I'm working with a lot of legal companies, a lot of smaller ones as well, right? And specifically when it comes to organizations that are not profit, whether they're legal, financial, wherever it may be, healthcare. One thing I think we do really well as well is from a support standpoint, especially with some smaller organizations is being able to provide that additional support. There's, you know, training, onboarding, and you know, we're with you 24 seven from the first day you start with us and so you have that contract with us. So I think we're very well positioned for those nonprofit organizations that did well. Really specifically because how we kind of work with the contractors, the interns, the volunteers and whether a lot of people kind of coming in and out of the organization, you know, sometimes it doesn't make sense to have that extra hardware on board or kind of pigeonhole yourselves to just hiring in one specific location. So I do think we really help out with kind of increasing the breadth of where you're able to hire or where you're able to hire them and be able to deliver your assets securely and be confident that your data will be protected. Right. Thank you, Dan. And actually, you know, again, just to help the audience with thinking some things through, Dan, you just said something that triggered the thought, right? You know, they're contractors in addition, right? That we work with that, you know, they might just be coming in on a specific, you know, short-term project. It could be a long-term project. So they're gonna need access, you know, depending upon what the project is, your data as well. So if you've got a solution in place, right, they fall under the same category, right?   And they're like, okay, well, you know, we've got an NDA with them and different things. And yeah, they could, you know, have all the security in place, but if you've got the data locked down, it's just not something you even need to worry about.  So we've got, Cindy, question, is there a mobile app for both of these solutions? So I'll, Dan, since you just spoke, I'll just kick it back to you. Does your solution also work with mobile app, you know, mobile applications? Yes, it does. Yeah, we work with Apple, iOS, Android and sometimes we even have the ability to use that part of your two-factor off the fence with them to get into Ben's workspace. Great. Yes. Great, Dan, and Cindy, great question.  You could do it through a browser with a private cloud. I don't, with our new stuff through the public cloud, through the Azure, I'm not positive yet, it's new. If we'd have an actual app that you can download, but you can access to a browser too, right? If you want to get on a virtual desktop. Great. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, look, it just emphasizes, you know, there's so much that needs to be covered, right? You could access data from computers, from tablets, from smartphones. Now you've got, you know, smart TVs where you could be using that as well. I mean, it's really just so much out there where you could be, you know, accessing data. So, you know, it's definitely a lot of ground to cover. Thank you, Cindy, that was a great question. Thank you for bringing that up. We've got a few more minutes. I'm sure there's a few more questions out there. Don't be shy. Again, you could chat it as well.  You know, if someone's not working in the office, but they need access, right? How do we do that securely? So a lot of what's been covered today give you options to help with that. With that, and again, this is not something that's new and it's not something that's gonna go away.   So when, you know, someone needs the ability to work outside of the office, you know, how are you doing that? You know, and so these are some ways to allow you to do that.  And I think, I apologize.   I know that's a great point. And one other thing I'll kind of piggyback on top of something you just mentioned about offset computers, especially for short-term employees. You know, one thing that we do with our clients all the time is develop an ROI, right? And what that looks like, especially for nonprofits, right? That sometimes have limited capital. When we were able to kind of show the difference of, you know, our solution compared to having to buy ship, sometimes the computer does not get returned. It makes a lot of sense for our organizations and saves them, you know, pretty significant amount of money over the course of the year. And anyone that's interested in kind of learning more about that, I'm going to show you what that would look like as well since the time's offline. But that's a great point that you just made, Michael. I just want to piggyback off that a little bit. Great, thank you. Yeah, I think just, you know, another added benefit of being able to now kind of leverage BYOD and some of the things that we've encountered ourselves. I remember one of the very first users we got on the system was so excited about it because she was a gamer. She built her machine a certain way. It was very much specced out and she wasn't relegated to company-issued computers, which, you know, let's be honest, we can't buy sometimes the most top of the line, the best solution out there. So it gives some flexibility within the workforce if you're bringing on contractors that have spent a lot of time and money building up their own machine, they can leverage this in a way that it's respecting their privacy and ensuring the data is secured while they're working on their device. So a recommendation from Shelly, you know, so any last thoughts on what should be considered on this issue, you know, it's in the chat as well. Again, if you'd like to chat any thoughts there, that would be helpful. Okay, we have a quiet crowd today, which is fine. You know, look, that happens. But I definitely hope with the few minutes that we have left, you know, that you come away with some good information to, you know, think about, take back to your team, take back to your organization, take back to management. I know this is a conversation that some of you or a lot of you have had when having to do, you know, cyber insurance or, you know, reading through what funders are requesting, you know, in terms of what security you have to have in place, that's changed, right, for over the years. It's gone from, this is what we recommend to now funders saying, yeah, this is the minimum requirement to what you need to have in place. And that's just that list is going to continue to grow. This is not to scare anyone or anything like that.  So this is really not something that's gonna go away. You know, we've got a budget for it. I think funders have been more flexible with helping to cover some of this, which in the past some of them, you know, have not. So, you know, a lot of the funders are also recognizing the need for, you know, to budget for security.  Shelly, any last words? Thank you so much for hosting this. Well, I want to thank our guests, Joel, Chris and Dan, and their companies, Vin and Tier Point, for joining us today. I wanna make sure that we get all of those companies on in our TechStack database so that the community can use that when they're starting to shop for different services. So I put it in the chat, but we'll also send it up in a follow on email so that you can make sure that the information that we have in the database matches what you want to present. And thank you for all of our attendees that came out today. I hope that it was helpful. And of course, you can always view all of the past webinars on our YouTube channel. And thanks you once again, and I'm gonna let you get back to your afternoon. Have a great day. Thank you, everybody. Thank you.


Okay, we can start. It's time. So, I'm actually one of those people who is using geeks in the production environment. And the website is called genetwork.org. It's hosted by University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis. And this is a site that has been developed over the last 20 years. So, even though it's essentially a simple setup, we're running Python and MySQL to offer these services. I'm going to explain to you how it got out of hand a bit. Anyway, what is Geeks to me? It's all about sleeping at night. Yeah, I mean the last 20 years I've been managing systems. And sometimes running 40 servers or something in that order. And you would get a call in the middle of the night and somebody says, hey, you got to run to the data center. That's something I really want to avoid. I could have somebody else go now, I think. But even so, we are doing better. So, it's about control software deployment. And it's about controlling the full dependency graph. And I'll explain that in a bit. And also what you want to do as Ludo so nicely pointed out is you want your system to be deterministic. Once you deploy it, you want to really know it's the one that you actually deployed. Sorry. So, I'm going to talk about four things. One is deployment in a developing testing, staging and production environment. The second point I want to discuss is easy installation and I'll get to, yeah, that will be the longest point. Distributed workflows, I'll discuss shortly. And then orchestration of services is something we could see as the next step. So, when you talk about deployment, you know, it's essentially simple.  This slide you can find online. And I'm going to educate you a little bit what it looks like. So, this is a graph that has been produced by Geeks. You know, when you put all the dependencies together, it can show you an SVG. And I hope I can scroll it. Yeah. So, somewhere at the top, there's G network, right? So, this is actually the starting point. So, G network depends on quite a few things. And let's go sideways. See what's here. So, there's Redis. Okay. And there's RQTL, which is an R library. There's Python parallel in there. Sorry for the... Okay. So, here are some of the R packages, many of which Ricardo has made, has packaged. Yeah. So, yeah, it continues for a bit. And then, let's see. There's also somewhere... Oops. How to config? Yeah. So, fonts, cups is even there. God knows why. So, this is the Glypsy stuff. And then we're getting in XML parsing. We're getting into fonts. Some X stuff somehow. So, how is this all possible? Well, let's see what's here. I'm missing out on the Python stuff, because it's also quite huge. Anyway. LZ4 is there. Valgrind is even there. Glypsy is fortunately there. Quartet is Glyp. Anyway. So, to build a system deterministically, you know, you have the immediate dependencies, which are quite obvious. Yeah. So, yeah, maybe we're using SciPy or Rqtl, which depends on a few other R packages. But you also, you know, to get to these environments to deploy it, these packages have their own dependencies. Yeah. So, when I showed this to my professor, he said, how come Ruby's in there? Yeah. It's not supposed to be any Ruby in there. Yeah. But there's a dependency on Ruby somewhere. You know, one of these packages requires Ruby. Yeah. So, this is the stuff we're finding out. And the versioning is extremely important, right? I mean, when you want to have something deterministic, you don't want to under your, you know, to be building on shifting sand. Yeah. So, we have actually one thing I didn't show you, but there are three partons in there. There's parton 2.4, parton 2.7, and parton 3.3, I think, or 3.1, wherever they are. Yeah. So, there are packages also depending on different partons. Yeah. So, let's go back to the slides. Yeah. So, essentially, what is simple is actually not so simple. Yeah. And there's also dependencies for Open Blast and Atlas, which are kind of competing libraries. And then there's the Ruby dependency. And the number of dependencies is actually growing over time. Yeah. Any time you add a package, you'll get more dependencies in. And I've so far avoided doing the JavaScript stuff. Because the JavaScript we're loading at Hocknow, which NPM is actually great at. The Node Package Manager. But it's such a mess. It's unbelievable. What am I doing for time? So, also in development, the developers were using different systems, essentially. Right? I mean, they were doing it at Hock. So, you say, okay, I want Python. So, you install Python. Yeah. You want to install SciPy. You will get a version of SciPy. Yeah. And this raises real questions. If you find a bug, is it actually inside the codebase itself? Or is it inside the underlying dependencies? There's not a chance of reproducing these. Yeah. Unless you work on exactly the same machine. So, you know, a year ago, heroically, I started packaging this stuff in the new geeks. And basically, essentially, what I did is I took a check out of the geeks itself. Yeah. So, I took, I started from the trunk of geeks. And start building it from there. Yeah. This means that, you know, at that point in time, I sort of fixated the environment. Right? I started building exactly that version of Python. Yeah, that was already, was in geeks. The problem with geeks is that if you keep updating the geeks, the git tree of geeks itself, these packages change also. Right? So, over time, you will be hitting issues with dependencies that are not working anymore. So, I fixated it in February. And next to that, I was using the geeks package path. So, I put in my own packages. Right? Or our own packages. And in this repository, the link is here. There are now some hundred plus packages. And some of them are duplicates now with the trunk because the trunk has moved on. Yeah. And I actually did synchronize in August last year. And it was not trivial, actually, to move from February to August. Yeah. Because there were a number of packages that, you know, were duplicates, but there were also packages that somehow were broken. So, I had to revert on things. Yeah. So, switching, you know, after half a year to a new, an updated geeks tree is not trivial, actually. You know, I'm not looking forward to the next one because it's going to cost me a day, maybe two days. It will be possible. Yeah. But it's something that is worth that you're never looking forward to. So, another solution I put in is using shared profiles. So, essentially, what we do now is we have the network. We fixated the geeks tree. We fixated the geeks package path with our own packages. And then we deploy it. All right. So, we deploy it in something called user local shared GN staging. So, this is a staging branch. And then the version of the tree. All right. So, when we get to the next stage, if we want to move it to production, what I should do is I'll mount the profile on the user local shared GM production with this particular version. Yeah. So, this is how we move forward. And all the developers, they, you know, deployment people, they share the same structure. So, we know exactly at any point in time what is actually in GN network 2.0, A8, FC, FF4. Yeah. Based on the August checkout of geeks. So, geeks channels could be an improvement. And that's what I'm going to touch on in a bit. So, some discussion we have on the main list. Yeah. Geeks channels do not exist at this point, right? But the idea is that we fix, that we allow people to provide different versions of the geeks tree. Yeah. So, for example, you know, if you are, you have a product, like the network, and I want to tell somebody else, you know, please install this product at this version. I would provide him a channel, essentially. I would tell him, you know, tell geeks to use this channel. And from that point onwards, you know, he'll be installing software from that particular version of the tree. Yeah. That's ideally what I want. And you can also roll backwards.  You could actually provide a channel for that. Say, okay, I'm going to provide a Ruby 1.8.7 channel that other people can use, right? Which is disconnected from the main geeks branch, the main geeks trunk. Another thing that is a problem with, you know, geeks package path at this point is disconnected because it actually doesn't look like the geeks tree itself. Right? So if you create a package in your own geeks package path and you want to migrate it into trunk, it's actually a bit of work. Yeah. Work is not good. Yeah. So if we had a channel that, you know, which is actually a reflection of the geeks tree, it would all become much more trivial, you know, to merge patches with the main trunk. So for now, I'm the one who is juggling branches. Yeah. Because I cannot even explain to others how to do this stuff. They're not ready for it. So the second part of my talk is about installation and I gave this also yesterday for the HPC group. We also have the problem that we are running on high performance computing systems and supercomputers. Yeah. So we want to run geeks packages there and, you know, these guys and girls who manage these systems, they're highly resistant to giving you a route. Yeah. They don't want to give you administrative privileges. Yeah. So, and geeks itself, you know, requires a geeks demon to install stuff. So that's, you know, to start that, you need to administer the privileges. It's a no-go in many HPC environments.  But it's rare. It'll come over time. You know, the administrators will start to realize that we actually are saving them time and they get better environments. But anyway. So the alternative is, you know, people to circumvent this question in HPC environments. What they start to do is use stuff like brew, conda, easy build, which actually are built environments that work under a local user account. The downside of these systems, these build systems, is that they're non-reproducible while they're reproducible as long as you're using the same home directory that you're, you know, building stuff in. But also it's hard to share. You know, it's hard to share these build tools. And you need to build from scratch every time, which is a lot of work. You need to bootstrap. Yeah. Docker and container solutions in HPC environments are not an option. Yeah, there are actually HPC environments that are trying to provide them now.  So something I wrote in the last couple of months was called Relocatable Geeks. And it was based on an insight which I had with Elko Dostra, a few years back at FOSDEM, and Elko was here a few hours ago, but he left. He's the inventor of NICS. Yeah, NICS and Geeks was forked from NICS. So, you know, there are many shared similarities. And one of them is that, you know, we have a path slash new slash store, and then we have a hash value, clip C version, and then, for example, the name of the file. Right, and the key insight is that this, you know, this is, if you look into files, this is quite recognizable, right? This hash value is unique. So what about, you know, just patching these files with something new? If you look at LDC2, which is a decompiler, and you look at the shared libraries that it uses, you can see this pattern of hash values, right? All fingerprints. Yeah, some of them are shared. So the clip C ones are shared. Sorry. So how about relocating those, yeah? So replace them with something, is a target prefix. So if you have a home directory slash home slash user, yeah, we're going to replace them. And it will look like this, right? In this case, I installed it in the home directory opt LDC test, and then, you know, I've rewritten the hash value to look like this, and these are the files. So after installation of this LDC2, it's actually sitting in the home directory, slash opt, and will this resolve? An answer is yes. It will just work. Yeah, so just to reiterate, yeah, we are replacing that value with that value. And let's see. Looks like I'm skipping something, anyway. Now I did this as an experiment, and I used Ilka also created a tool called patch elf, which actually allows you to rewrite elf files. And it worked. And for textual files like Ruby, Perl and Bashkrips that have the same fingerprints, it also works to replace them.   So one night I came up with the solution and said, why don't I keep the size of this path exactly the same? So I don't have to worry about what it actually looks like inside the file, you know, whether it's zero-terminated or has some other length indicator. So that was the second insight. So if you see these two paths, you know, now they have the exact same length. I just passed it in, you know, you just slam them in. And it works. It's definitely the easy way to go. Yeah? So I replaced it in all files. There are some URLs on here where all these projects are, so you can visit them at leisure if you want. Yeah, so this is the idea. You know, in this case, I have home user opt in the first one, so I slam it in. In the second case, I tell it to install a user local share LDC 1.01. And you can see it says the exact same length. And what I do is actually I cannibalize the hash value. Yeah, so it becomes shorter in the second case because the prefix is longer. Yeah, you can cannibalize a long way. You know, I can cannibalize all the way back to it doesn't exist anymore and then I can go a bit further too. And if you add it all up, you have about 40 letters, letters you can use as a prefix. You have to come up with these unique paths. And cannibalizing the hash value is not that important in this case because in geeks, we use it to isolate, you know, all these directories. But in this case, I tell it to install it somewhere unique. Yeah, so I'm telling it to install it in this folder or in the LDC test folder over there. Yeah, so what it in the end looks like internally, it doesn't matter because we're not sharing. Okay, so for the LDC compiler, there's an example you can actually download this. It's online. It's a 40 megabyte download. You unpack it. It's about 140 megabytes. Installation of the binary takes three seconds on my laptop. So this is very different from, you know, these easy build ideas or even docker installations. You know, this is very lightweight. Yeah, the only thing I'm doing is replacing all the paths. And there's many people who've tested this now for the decompiler. So yeah, they're happy. And yeah, there's two other things that are important. One is that the shared library, that actually, you know, this package, I can call it a package now, contains the shared libraries all the way down to Glypsy and even the linux loader isn't there. Yeah, so with many systems, you have this problem that if you deploy binaries somewhere else, yeah, you will get conflicts, for example, because they want to load the underlying distributions, Glypsy or Lipsy, yeah, or LZ4 library or whatever. You know, and there can be problems. There can be mismatches. So you see a lot of internet forums, they discuss, you know, these problems about libraries not working. And that's the reason. Ten more minutes. So I also did the same thing with Ruby, SSL, NikoGiri, where NikoGiri is infamous for installation. Yeah, because it's a Ruby jam that depends on libxml2.  It just works. In some Bamba as a tool we developed, it's written in D and is used in many high sequencing, in sequencing high-performance computer centers around the world. And there was a very, very one hard to reproduce, bug. It's sacfolds occasionally, right? In some conditions, in some environments, but it's never reproduced. But we can see it pop up once in a while. So I created the binary distribution. It was deployed on a cluster in Australia. They ran it for a day. They saw some of these sacfolds. They ran the GDB debugger against it. And we found the exact location where the sacfold happened and we fixed it. So I created the binary distribution. It was deployed on a cluster in Australia. We found the exact location where the sacfold happened and we fixed it. And it's actually not in some Bamba, but it's upstream. So I'm actually doing remote debugging. Somebody else is running it and I'm helping with the debugging. And we're doing more. We're going to add more. So the potential here is also that we can actually create one click installs for binary packages. And it's something I want to discuss also in the future of geeks. There are security concerns, of course. You know, when you create a binary that's downloadable from the web and you just install it with your eyes closed. We need to work on that somehow. But I think it is really cool that we can actually use a geeks package that is well tested and has been possibly been used by already 100,000 people. And we just deploy it by rewriting the internal paths. So the third part of this talk and I hardly have time left, so it's going to be really short is about workflows. You know, we have a need for running tools in order, sequentially and in parallel on these high performance computing systems. And essentially it's called the workflow. And there's been many standards that have been developed for workflows. At the moment there's a project called the Common Workflow Language and it has a lot of momentum in our community. And it started nice. You know, it started really as a good idea because it says, you know, it started as a descriptive document of the workflow. But soon they embedded Javascript because they wanted to do more and they wanted to avoid repetition. And they also have looping now. Yeah, so deterministic it no longer is. And when you look at these workflow standards occasionally someone will pop up and create a new standard like this one and it turns out it's actually quite hard to do. Yeah, because people want to put in the kitchen sink. That's what really the problem is. So Geeks essentially is already a workflow engine, right? I mean, we can handle dependencies which is serial execution and we can also handle parallel execution in a way because of the build farm. The way the build farm has been designed. Yeah, so Ruler is going to talk about workflows at 3.30 in this room and he's been doing a lot of work in this area. I'm not saying that build farms are a great idea, but he's probably doing something else. The fourth part of the talk is orchestration. So making the rounds, visiting companies and academic institutions this is something that pops up every time. People are using tools like Puppet and Chef and likewise. And Ludo describes services which are inside a computer. But we also have services that run across computers now, right? So we have systems that depend on each other. And this is called orchestration. One service may need another service to run. How do you set up the order of these? And when the one service goes down what do the other services do? This is called orchestration and I think with the functional paradigm that we have with Geeks, we can actually move forward to make things happen here too. So this may be something for the final discussion today which is about the future of Geeks. Conclusion. Geeks allows for controlled and same software deployment with profiles and Git. The way I'm doing it and we should have channels to make it easier for me. Geeks has a relocatable binary packages now and we should continue experimenting with that and see how far it gets us. Geeks will handle workflows, I have no doubt because rule is working hard on it and orchestration should be an agenda. That's my conclusion. And I have acknowledgments for people who are working. So Rool, Ludo and Ricardo, especially the Geeks communities which one of the things that really strikes me with Geeks is that it's attracts so many really intelligent people so I'm really happy you're here. And then I want to thank Professor Robert Williams who's paying my bills. Thank you. So Chris you can set up. Have you got any questions? Yes? Yes. The source code of what? The... I missed the last bit only. If you are not afraid that somebody will ask for the source code. What do you really provide? The question is should I be afraid about the source code if somebody asks for it and it's all online? I only do open source software. Okay, well but you have special packages in the Geeks package part Okay. We do have Geeks package part but it's also online. It's out in the open. I'm highly resistant to using any type of propriety software. Yeah but also our own systems are completely in the open. It's all open source software. So the Geeks package part is just a construct and import a second Git tree into the packaging tree. Right? But the second packaging tree is just I need it because it's not on the main tree. But it is out in the open. Anyone can use it. Anyone can update it. Another question. How do you save the package previous package version? Sorry, let me just last bit again. How do you save package version in just copy and paste piece of text or Yes. How do we handle the versioning? You have to explicitly for every package say okay this is the version I want to use. Or the Git checkout or whatever. Describe in the package. Have a look at the links that are in my talk because it's all there. Yes? Okay, so the question is how do we handle Python packages in Geeks? There's really three ways to do this. To go about this. The best way is to actually write Geeks packages for Python modules. Which describe their dependencies also. And you install the package with Geeks and it pulls it in with the dependencies. To make it easy we also provide a generator. So you can, for example, the package is already in pip or pipi or whatever they're called. It can pull that information and then create the package for you automatically in Geeks. And for this I use the Geeks package path now, for example. But you're not completely delivered to Geeks because you can also Geeks actually has a package called Python virtual environment. So you can start up a virtual environment for Python and use Python from there to use pip and pipi to pull in packages. And the third option is just to use a source tree and to provide that in the Python path. And so Geeks does not force you to work in any way. You can gradually incrementally work towards the perfect solution. So... Yeah, we also have two minutes left. Oh, yes. I'm trying to steal off from you. It's alright.


Welcome to Spotlight. I'm Liz Wade. And I'm Colin Lover. Spotlight uses a special English method of broadcasting. It is easier for people to understand, no matter where in the world they live. Paris, France In April 2017, a man invaded the home of Sarah Halimi. He called her hateful names and attacked her. He threw her from a window. She died after this attack. The man wanted to hurt Halimi because she was Jewish. In January 2018, an eight-year-old boy was attacked while walking to tutoring. He was wearing a kind of Jewish hat. In recent years, many Jews like Sarah Halimi and this eight-year-old boy in France have been hurt because of who they are. French government officials say that anti-Jewish beliefs are spreading like poison there. More and more Jewish people in France are reporting experiencing crime or hateful speech because of who they are. Crimes done against people because of who they are are hate crimes. President Emmanuel Macron of France responded to these and other hate crimes. He said, Every time a citizen is attacked because of their age, their appearance or their religion, it is an attack on the whole country. Why do hate crimes like these happen? How can France and other countries deal with them? Today's spotlight program is the fifth in a series of ten programs. In this series of programs, we will look at ten ways to fight hate.  So the Southern Poverty Law Center, SPLC, has made this list of ten ways to fight hate in your community. On today's spotlight program, we will look at the fifth way to fight hate in your community. Educate yourself. How can a community understand people who do hate crimes? How can they react to such violence and hate? The SPLC says that researching the facts about hate groups and hate crimes can be one answer. They call this educating yourself. When people have the facts about a hate group, they can fight hate. Communities must know about hate groups and hate crime before they can react to them and stop them. But knowledge can also help people stop hating. Hate usually comes from fear, and understanding can defeat fear. A hate crime often starts with a bias. A bias is an opinion about someone who is different from you. A person often makes a bias because he does not understand people from another group. Often, we do not know people who belong to different religious or racial groups than ourselves. If we have never met someone from that group, we can easily form wrong opinions about them. These biases might be negative. Sometimes, they encourage prejudices and hate. Every person has biases. Often, people do not even know their own biases, but they express biases in many forms. A person can express his bias in words or actions. The SPLC calls some incidents bias incidents. For example, a racial joke is a bias incident. Bias incidents do not involve criminal acts, like beatings, starting fires, or damaging property. Hate groups try to use and encourage the biases people already feel. In fact, hate groups are usually very skilled at spreading their biases. They use propaganda. Propaganda is bias information that people use to spread a particular message. These hateful messages can appear as a painting on the side of a building, on a paper hanging in a local store, or even sometimes on television or the radio. Hate propaganda influences how people think of each other. It tries to represent groups of people as less than human. Slowly, members of a community begin to think that a particular group of people is not important or is harmful. Angry, scared individuals may attack the minority group. These criminals believe that their actions are accepted. They may even believe that they are doing good work. The SPLC says that most hate crimes are not committed by hate groups. They are committed by individuals, alone or in small groups. These individuals have listened to hate propaganda. They let their biases influence bad actions.  Any criminal act done against someone because of a bias is a hate crime.  It is a hate crime. Many areas punish hate crimes severely. But how do we stop hate crimes from happening? First, it is important to try and understand your own biases. What do you know about people who are different to you? The first step is to learn about people who are different to you. Try to understand them. Learn about them. When we understand and listen to each other, we learn to accept our differences. Continue investigating your own biases. Second, if you observe or experience a hate crime, try to find out if a hate group was involved. You can also research facts about the particular hate group you are trying to stop. What does the group want? What signs or symbols represent the group? Experts say that members of hate groups often want to divide communities. They want to separate a community into racial, ethnic or religious groups. They may want to give particular groups in the community limited rights. Many do not respect or recognize the authority of the government. And they try to harm people who oppose them and their ideas. When you know about the hate groups in your area, you are more prepared to fight against the hate they represent. If you have children, talk to them about how they should react to hate. Share information you have learned with your community. Information and education are powerful. When people have the facts, they can make better decisions. When people learn about other cultures, they do not feel threatened by them. Education helps people to understand the world and other people better. Hate and hate crimes cannot continue. Whole communities must join the fight against hate. We can all encourage tolerance and acceptance in our communities. This is the fifth program in a series of 10 programs on 10 ways to fight hate. This list is from the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Southern Poverty Law Center is a website that tracks and reports on hate groups, especially in the Southern United States. Here are their 10 ways to fight hate. Educate yourself. Create an alternative. Pressure leaders. Stay engaged. Teach acceptance. And dig deeper. Keep listening to Spotlight to hear the complete series. You can leave a comment on our website or email us at contact at spotlightenglish.com. You can also find us on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. The writers of this program were Liz Wade and Amelia Bergland. The voices you heard were from the United States and the United Kingdom. All quotes were adapted for this program and voiced by Spotlight. You can listen to this program again and read it on the internet at www.spotlightenglish.com. This program is called 10 ways to fight hate. Educate yourself. Visit our website to download our free official app for Android and Apple devices. We hope you can join us again for the next Spotlight program. Goodbye.


As Secretary of the Navy, I'm responsible for recruiting, training, and equipping almost 900,000 sailors, Marines, and civilians who spend every day working to defend the American people and our national interests. Every day, Navy ships, submarines, aircraft, and Marine Corps units are deployed worldwide to protect America. They are there around the clock, far from our shores, far from their families, far from home. They are America's away team. Today we operate in a world full of new and dawning complexities. To face that world, we must focus on developing ways to improve our systems and ensure that we are able to embrace new concepts at a pace that keeps us ahead of our potential adversaries. To help us do this, I'm forming Task Force Innovation, a group of subject matter experts and others from across the Department of the Navy. The Task Force will focus on three main areas. The first is using innovative practices to create and maintain an adaptive workforce. This isn't about teaching people to be innovative. This is about making sure our system harnesses the creative energy which our sailors, Marines, and civilians already have. Second, the Task Force will work to make sure that we are effectively viewing information as an asset. And finally, they will help emerging capabilities have a clear and quick path to the fleet. These will include new concepts like adaptive force packages, unmanned systems, non-lethal weapons, directed energy weapons, and additive manufacturing. The task force will help us use our greatest asset, the intellectual capital of our remarkable workforce, to its full potential. The Navy and Marine Corps have a long tradition of leading technological change and developing new ways of doing things. We need to press forward with emerging capabilities and our next generation weapons and operating concepts. Task Force Innovation will help us develop creative solutions to the most demanding things that lie ahead of us and maintain our legacy as innovators. We remain from the Marine Corps, Semper Fidelis, always faithful, and from the Navy, Semper Fortis, always courageous.