Okay, it looks like we are up and going. Hello, everybody. I know the title card said that I was going to be giving the closing speech and that is still true, but we have one more talk before that and that is by Ruben yet from Z coin. If you don't know Z coin, it's a coin that's not Monero. So I don't know why he's at the Monero village, but he walked in one day we took him off the street and we raised him as our own. So he's going to give a talk about Z coin and competition to Monero. So I hope everyone sticks around because it's going to be some good stuff passing it over to you Ruben. Take it away. All right. Hello everyone. My name is Ruben. I am the project steward of Z coin. And basically what that means is, you know, I'm the caretaker of the project. So first of all, it's super early for me. It's 6am for me. And yeah, so if I'm a bit slow, please forgive me. And today we are going to talk about ditching up in privacy to compete with Monero. And to be fair, I was put up to this topic. I had actually a less controversial topic to talk about. But here we go. All right. So, you know, what is exactly the privacy landscape right now? And, you know, it's pretty clear that Monero is the king, not just in market cap, but I guess in like overall privacy and the protection that it provides, you know. And it's a lonely throne, right? And we're going to take a look at why that is the case and why what we at Zcoin are trying to do.  Some may not agree with me, but as you can see, you know, Monero almost scores really highly in many of the stuff that kind of matters as a privacy coin.  And although it's kind of long in the tooth, in my personal opinion, Ring City, you know, does offer a decent amount of privacy just out of the box. But of course, because, you know, everything is on by default, you know, with stealth addressing and in a very high compliance, there is very high practical privacy level because you're mixing with, you know, lots and lots of different inputs and outputs.  It does have a recently just added, you know, network layer privacy through Dandelion, and it has very high liquidity. And this is actually also important, I guess, liquidity and also transaction volume. Right, because in privacy, you know, anonymity likes a crowd. And obviously the more people using your platform and the more people trading it, you can transfer value through it and there are more transactions to kind of hide within. So that's also actually an important metric as well, beyond just the technicals. So, you know, this is like, you know, everyone talks about Monero, and then, well, what about Zcash, why do you say that Monero is kind of alone on the throne, right? And Zcash has really interesting technology, you know, they have the highest theoretical privacy level, it's like two to the power of 32 or something like that. So they have independent research and really good researchers. I don't think they have network layer privacy and they have, you know, pretty decent liquidity in terms of exchanges and also an okay number of transactions that's happening on chain. But the practical privacy level is actually really low because very, very few people use their shared transactions. And we'll talk a little bit about that. We call it, you know, we use a kind of a different kind of a zero knowledge proofs to Zcash. I do feel that we offered theoretically a high privacy level, especially as we transition to a new privacy protocol, which we will talk a bit later. But again, because we use op-in privacy and we'll see how bad this is actually that has pan out, the practical privacy level is really low. We do have our own independent research. We have a network layer privacy through dandelion and okay, our liquidity is fair, our transactions are decent. Of course, there are all these other competitors, especially in like being green, you know, of course, whether you agree with me, it's a bit difficult to say whether they have independent research because they don't quite have cryptographers but they are implementing some unique takes on certain type of protocols. So, you know, I would say that, you know, basically the main guys are Monera and Zcash. Of course, they are like the Z to Z Fox. I think the most famous one would be something like Pirate Chain, which is using ZK Snarks with like full mandatory privacy. And although they offer very high theoretical privacy level, their practical privacy level is only probably medium only just because so few people are using them, there are so few places to actually use them, exchange them and everything that the crowd is very, very small. So the theoretical privacy is high, the liquidity is really low. And of course with Zcash and all the ZK Snarks, you have all that issue with trusted setup. And I think the best way to kind of illustrate, you know, the difference between theoretical privacy versus practical privacy is that, you know, the Zcash on paper has the best privacy technology just if you just look at the anonymity set because it's not mandatory. I don't know what's the exact percentage, but it's super low. And because of that, timing attacks and people having to be very careful about how they properly use shielded transactions or Z to Z transactions for proper privacy becomes really tough. And it was actually this fella, I think just like one month ago, just one month ago, like a couple of weeks ago, he was like saying, ah, you know, ZCash privacy is the best.  So he did give some additional information and he said, please trace which T address that I came from. And this guy just from Brian just posted this random T address within a day. And if, you know, he asked, how did you do it? And it was very simple. All he did wasn't any sort of rocket science. It's just, there's not some advanced guy like chain analysis or stuff like that. This was just some random Twitter dude just went on the explorer and was looking for a transaction that was shielding it and just guess. And that's the problem because so few people are using it. And again, secondly, using it correctly. It was very easy to kind of guess that this was the T address that actually made this, that shielded address payment. This is kind of like a really good illustration of how, you know, put low usage of the privacy technology and also the way that the setup that makes it hard for newbies to use privacy correctly. And I do think that, you know, like in my personal view, one of the things that Monero does right is that because it's privacy on by default, it's all, there's only one way to do a transaction. So like newbies have a lot of that complexity, you know, kind of abstracted out rather than having to go through several steps. You know, this is also a problem with Bitcoin and how do I use it? I go through wasabi, I go through this, I go through that, you know, privacy should be simple so that, you know, everyone can be protected. So the way for those of you who don't know what Zcoin is, the way our privacy works is kind of different than let's say Monero. And I guess the basic idea is that you can destroy coins, and then you can redeem them for brand new ones with no previous transaction history.  And at any time in the future, you, you kind of present a zero knowledge proof that you didn't burn the coins. And that allows you to redeem brand new coins with no previous transaction history. And the beauty of the zero knowledge proof is that you don't have to show the exact kind of coins you burn. This is what preserves the privacy, right? Or the rather like the source of the funds. And now with our Lelantis version two, you don't even need to redeem them for brand new coins. You can actually pass the right to redeem to someone else. Like that's I don't want to redeem and show that brand new coins I can give this like if I burn 10 coins, I can say I pass the right or redeem redemption of five cons to someone else. And they can redeem it at their pleasure or they can just pass that right to redeem to someone else again. And this is I guess almost like equivalent to a Z to Z transaction because it hides both amounts and source as well. And the wonderful thing about our zero knowledge proof technology is that there's no trusted, no trusted setup, and it's using standard cryptographic assumptions. This kind of set up is I think also quite using quite similar cryptography that is being looked at by Munera research labs in octopus and trippage. But it's just that the way that we use it with this burn and redeem mechanism is slightly different. And there's certain advantages to that. So, you know, our argument is that this is a better privacy method because, you know, we're not kind of like just we're not just kind of hiding the crowd and the way I always kind of explain it is kind of like farts in a lift or you know, sans on the beach right where if I'm the only person in the lift and I thought everyone knows that it's me with Monero you guys a bit more statistic you drag 10 other people into the lift with you and you fart so that it's not clear who's farted, you know, which among the 11 people farted, or with the really sadistic people like Mimba Wimba is kind of like dragging everyone who wants to wants to fart. And we all fart at the same time so it's not clear who's father is who, and that's I guess similar with coin joint as well. We see our technology is like going to the lift I let out a fart and I make it disappear. And it's, and then I can choose at any time in the future to make that father peer. And we feel that this is a better privacy approach because now your plausible deniability is anyone who actually ever entered that lift, rather than the people that you are in the lift together. You know, this kind of privacy mechanism I feel holds a lot of promise as well.  And we use something called zero coin before which is why we call Z coin, but we actually transition to a zero coin did have a trusted setup but Sigma does not have a trusted trusted setup and we transition to that at the end of 30th of July 2019. So it's almost been about the, about a year, a year plus, and it has been completely off in privacy. So, how has this gone, you know, this was actually kind of an experiment because previously even with zero coin, the way to do the, the privacy was kind of, was kind of cumbersome. So not many people were using it with Sigma really simplified the process you just press the number amount that you want to anonymize rather than selecting individual denominations and just go bam. It's anonymized. So we actually wanted to see, you know, whether this would encourage better use of the privacy protocol, but only 500,000 Z coin has gone through Sigma since the launch of Sigma in 30 of July 2019. And that's why I think for 4.6% of the entire circulating Z coin that has gone through the system right now. If you take a look at the figures on the left. So what means it's like how many total has meant and how many total has been redeemed spent, which is what it is. And I guess I would say that if you just look at the denominations within themselves. The anonymity set for like the set of 100 is anywhere between 217 to 4269 per transaction that when you do that spend. So it's not bad. But you know, actually the potential of this technology is also a lot higher. And so that means this is with such a low usage of Sigma transaction you can get this kind of. I guess anonymity sets. Obviously, it's still not ideal, you know, but I guess it kind of kind of illustrates the difference between what we call like burn and redeem mechanisms and decoy systems where you always constantly having to find people to mix with you because like, like in the lift example, you're constantly finding people to drag people into the lift with you. But because of we use the usage of fixed denominations, we have to burn and redeem in the fixed denominations. This is actual anonymity set may not be as large as people think of it because they are certain patterns if people burn 0.5 or 10 or 25, you know, and then next thing they redeem a 0.5 or 10 and 25. Your anonymity set is not just it's not like 121 and 25 is actually the combination of those things. So that actual anonymity set can be a lot lower than, you know, so-called just based on the statistics. So what are we doing to fix this, right? And this is where Lelantis kind of comes in. Lelantis is our new privacy protocol set to go live for the first version. Probably at the end of the, I guess the beginning of October ish, we're going to probably release the binaries around then and then have it live in a one month or so right after that. Now the beauty of Lelantis is that it can support pretty large anonymity sets. Of course, probably not in the range of Zcash, which is like 2 to the power of 380, but we're looking at sets of like 64,000, which isn't bad.  Yeah, it's no trusted setup. It uses a ZKP called a one of many proofs, which I think is also the basis for stripping. And we will be using this finally we're going to be using it privacy on by default. That means all official wallets will be using like anonymizing funds by default so that users don't really have to care too much. And, but there is still the option to opt out and we'll probably talk out a talk a bit about why we chose that mode to transition into the privacy. The crypto library was just completed this audit with a trail of bits, which was actually funded through crowdfunding using the zero coin crowdfunding system which was definitely as a fork of the Monero CCS and the cryptographic papers being audited by Dimitri Kovratilovic. And as you can see, you know, it is because, you know, some may argue that the Moneros anonymity set size isn't actually 11 because of the way things combine together. But let's just take it a face value. This is kind of, you know, I think this is a good overview of what the technology does. All right. Now, okay, we have five more minutes. So just to kind of understand like how are we actually deploying the Lantus privacy right the phase one as I said that is happening in October this year gives the ability to burn and redeem without no fixed denominations right you can burn any arbitrary amount you can redeem any arbitrary amount even like a partial amount of what you burnt right all official wallets with anonymized funds by default. There's no new address structure we still use the same address structure, but of course there's still the opt out to use transparent because right now I mean realistically, you know, we are a smaller coin. And, you know, exchanges they're not going to reinvent everything for us, or the existing integrations that we want, or the, there are certain parts of infrastructure does rely on transparent addresses transparent funds. So we cannot straight away opt out especially without a new addressing system for Lantus. And we also want to make sure that we have our mobile SDK so that you know mobile wallets can also do all these Lantus transactions as well. We actually do have a privacy on by default mobile wallet may be coming in the next few weeks for Sigma privacy not Lantus. And because there's still no second address structure, there's the requirement to redeem all the time. Some timing attacks are still possible in phase one phase two is when it gets really interesting. And that is coming, I would say maybe sometime in 2021, maybe the second quarter or first quarter maybe right and introduces introduces direct anonymous payments where as I was saying, I don't have to redeem. To redeem the coins I can pass that right to redeem to someone else, even partially amounts and sources are all hidden and I do think that the privacy offered is really really high, especially when you see how we implement anonymity sets. And we introduce a new Lantus addressing system that misses. I guess like if you have Z catch it's almost like a shielded address system and what we're going to do is that make that the default for all our official wallets. Now, we, once we have this addressing system, I think then is started. It's a good time to then actually start talking about mandatory privacy that means there's no opt out. They are still some things that we kind of need to figure out because we are being integrated into a defy.  But you know, we see value in being integrated into like, like stuff like Uniswap to be able to trustlessly do the decentralize exchanges or the use collateral if we want to make Z coin I guess more useful right. There are other things like proving times like for an individual users that's making like a transaction, you know, personal transactions a few transactions at the time the proving times of like, yep, one second two seconds isn't so bad.  Sometimes that we don't know how exchanges would react to that. There are certain improvements in the pipeline that can actually reduce proving time by an order of magnitude. We actually have a paper out for that. It's a hierarchical one of many proofs, but it has to be adapted for the land this and we also looking for instance sing solutions where, you know, I can use a ZKP to kind of get the entire state of Z coin and also the land this, like, So, you know, to improve usability to encourage the use of the land this or else will be just too cumbersome and no one would want to use it. So this is our current plan and hopefully, you know, we can finally move to privacy on by default, but there's still some open stuff, but we do want to move to privacy on by default with definitely for sure at the end of this year. I mean, October ish, and then we slowly start pushing to mandatory privacy. And we feel that's really going to be important. Now, the last thing I want to talk is about anonymity sets because I will, you know, people are saying like, well, you know, what, what do you mean by you only have anonymity set of 64,000 right. So, kind of think about the past 64,000 because of the limitations of the technology of the land this right now stuff start to take increasingly longer and longer. So that means both proving time and verification time start getting quite quite a bit more. So we kind of decided to say to cap that set of 64,000 so it does not grow so that this the performance would still be acceptable. Now, let's assume that with privacy on by default with transparency or we have a very, very low estimate of 30% of transactions that are anonymized with current transaction volume. And that will mean to hit that set of 64K would take about, you know, slightly less about like two thirds of a year. And that's assuming about 800 transactions with the obviously if the usage of Zcoin picks up, we're going to see this field a lot faster. And I guess one of the interesting things is that what happens when the set of 64,000 is few am I going to start from zero again that's obviously a really bad thing because that means for that period of time the new set the people using that new set gets very, very little anonymity right. So we do something what we call a sliding window approach which is quite clever, where we actually kind of start new anonymity sets with kind of preceded with at least 16,000 commitments that came from the previous set. And because of the nature of zero knowledge proves where is even though that you know you prove that you burn the coins, no one really knows how much of it actually has been redeemed or rather which one has been redeemed so you can always take those commitments and place it in a new one because no one has no okay from this 16,000 that I've preceding how many of them has been used. There's no idea for that. So what that means is that once the first set has been seated, or even the first 16k, the minimum anonymity set for the Lentus never falls below 16,000 so 16,000 to 64,000. So we think that's really good and kind of illustrates one of the benefits of doing this burn and redeem method, rather than compared to Munero which are just building really, really large rings. I think we've tripped this is like rings of like 100 or so, if I'm not mistaken. So yeah, this kind of like ends my brief introduction of kind of illustrating why we think that are moving into privacy on by default combined with the Lentus technology would really give, you know, rather than like kind of like, just saying that we're a privacy coin right like Zcash you know they all these amazing technology that no one is using and you're like why you know how can you call yourself a privacy coin if no one's using your privacy right. And it's not as if Munero's technology is the best it isn't you know even even I don't know if everyone would agree with that it's just more about the overall package and because everyone is using the transactions that makes it as an overall package the best. If let's say Zcoin moves towards privacy on by default and we get significant traction with our privacy protocols we made very difficult for users to mess up and to review their privacy. I do think that you know I do feel that the Lentus and together both practical and theoretical kind of come together and really can pose a challenge to Munero and I hope to see that because I do think that this space really needs better privacy protocols because you know member women doesn't cut it so yeah I'm not sure how to go about and this sharing of the screen and does anyone have any questions.


Okay, it looks like we have everybody now. Excellent. So we'll call the April 12th special select board meeting to order. We've got Flo Smith, Brad Town, John's, John Quinn and myself. I don't believe Dave's here. Any additions or changes to the agenda, Vince? No, sir. Any public comment? Hearing none. We're about to have the hearing for the community rating system. Do we have anybody here who wants to speak to that? I should have a motion to open the public hearing. Oh, okay. So that sounds like you've made a motion, Brad. Yeah. Let's see here. Motion to open the public hearing for consideration of changes to the borough and land use and development. Regulations, particular to section 2202H1G. I second that. Any discussion? All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Aye. Motion carries. We have an explanation on the FEMA community rating system from the events. Yeah, sure, certainly. So the current language of 2202.H1G is connected with electrical heating ventilation, plumbing, air conditioning equipment and other service facilities that are designed and are located so as to prevent water from entering or accumulating within the components during a flood. So basically what we're talking about, right? We participate in FEMA community rating system as a class nine municipality. Class nine status enables Berlin property owners to purchase flood insurance, a 5% discount off premiums. So the staff, most of the time is working with FEMA to upgrade Berlin to a class eight municipality which would basically double their discount on premiums to 10%. So just for rough numbers, I believe it was last year's numbers, the residents paid 7,477 with that 5% discount. So that would basically double to $14,954 for that our residents would save by going up from a class nine to a class eight. So the language change to section 2202.H1G to make class eight status possible would read as constructed with electrical heating, ventilation, plumbing, air conditioning equipment and other service facilities that are designed and or located at least one foot above the base flood elevation. So it's to prevent water from entering or accumulating within the components during a flood. So the change is the additional wording of at least one foot above the base flood elevation. So, I mean, we talked about, I do remember talking about this in our previous meetings, did what the planning commission worked on this time, was that or was it strictly you? How did we come up with this? The planning commission met a couple of Saturdays ago and held public, their own public hearing and took testimony at that time. There was nobody attended and so there was no testimony. So they forwarded to the select board their report recommending that the select board adopt the language as was read by Vince. Right. Now what, I mean, what is there any disadvantage to the municipality for this or? I don't think so. We've entered into the community rating system about six years ago in which about a 5% discount. I've heard of no issues being a participant in the CRS at a 5%, so I can't believe that getting a 10% discount would have some other things paying on it that we're not aware of. Yeah. So basically the only thing would happen is if you include this language, any construction in a flood plain or flood area would have taken something the expense of raising it that one foot above base flood. That's a FEMA requirement now Brad and that's in our zoning regulations. This spells out the electrical systems and such. Yeah. So this may be a silly question but how does that impact somebody if they're obviously they wouldn't qualify for the discount if they didn't have the option of bringing like base level base floor or LS above that, like boom, above the FEMA grade level, correct? That's correct and they wouldn't get a permit from the town of Berlin in the first place. Right. Arizona doesn't allow for construction in the flood zone at all even with flood insurance at this point. It's interesting, there's two components of the flood hazard area. The first one is the floodway which is where the actual river flows and that. So there is a very strict prohibition on development in the floodway. The one that folks are more common with familiar with is a flood plain. And so there are regulations do allow development in the flood plain but you have to build any structures so they are flood resistant being at least one foot outside of the one foot above base flood elevation. Can you give us an example of a location where that would be, where we have construction? Do you think about some of the mobile home parts in Berlin that were adversely impacted by Irene? The Weston's mobile home, for example they, any new structure there has to be have at least a one foot, it's called free board of above base flood elevation to allow the structure to be placed there. Hey, this is Mike Striesberg. I can give you a personal example, Justin because when I rebuilt my garage I'm just barely in the flood plain myself. And so I had to get an engineer to make sure that the foundation and the flood gates at the bottom of the garage and everything met that flood proofing rule. How did you feel about out of that impact your construction? It had a little bit of time because I had to get the design work done and pay the engineer. It really didn't impact me as far as the final result. I mean, the basic differences I've got a concrete knee wall around the bottom of my garage as opposed to the studs going all the way to the deck but aside from that, it's, you know, it's fine. Okay. My question actually is the change to the CRS that's proposed. I just wanted to confirm that that is new construction only. It doesn't affect existing structures. Can you confirm that? That's correct. Okay, thank you. Yeah, I couldn't imagine not being able to change that one like my building and bearings in the flood plain. So any changes to the structure? Anybody else have anything? Thank you, Mike, by the way. Yes, thanks for asking that question, Mike. That was a good one. Yes, you're certain? You bet, thank you. Does the board see all about continuing with this thing or since Mike was the only person we had for public comment, does anybody from the board have any additional comment? That's, no? I think all we need Justin now is if the board agrees, there's a motion to amend. Move to a move to amend section 2202 H1G to reconstructed with electrical heating, ventilation, plumbing, air conditioning, equipment and other service facilities that are designed and or located at least one foot above the base flood elevation. So as to prevent water from entering or accumulating within the components during flood. I second that. Thank you, Brad. Any comment? I guess just a procedural question. Don't we, are we supposed to close the public hearing and then take that up in the regular select board portion? Yeah, we would. I don't think it really matters, but. They're gonna do it right. Right, so. Not make Brad say it again. That's all right. I can read. All right, so. All right, so should we. Move to close the public hearing. Second. Any comment? Procedural question. Generally, you take that motion off the table before we do that. I don't know. Well, if you want to chime in on that, give us some input on that. Yeah, you technically would. Brad, you just withdraw your motion for the moment. Be more than happy to withdraw my motion. Okay. All right, any additional comment? Hearing none. All those in favor of. Joining the public hearing. Convenient, reconvening the select board. Say, aye. Aye. Aye. Motion carries. Brad, did you have a motion? If you didn't state my motion. Can we get a second? Second. Any comment? All those in favor say, aye. Aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you very much. From anything for round table, anybody that's on our agenda. Vincent, no thank yous. Yes. Yes. As the new highway liaison, I would like to mention that Crosstown Road is now open. Yeah, thank you. I feel like next year, if I'm on the board and we have discussion about that, I think that I've never really thought about how many people in businesses were impacted by the closure of it. So I really think we need to consider that. Trying to be able to maintain it. Anything else? No, exactly the same. So entertain a motion to adjourn. Second. Any comment? All in favor? Aye. Aye. Thank you everyone. Have a good night everyone. Thank you all. Enjoy. Yep.


And without further ado, I'd like to introduce James, who's starting off the Lighting Talks, if you come to the stage James. Hi everybody. My name's James. I run a small wordpress business called Llaziwmpress and today I'd like to talk to you about automating your business. So what this means are various different techniques that you can use to implement this yourself. So what is business automation? Well, it kind of is what it sounds like. It refers to the strategy of automating various processes within your business and this is done to save costs and by that I mean reduce the amount of time that you have to spend on said process. This is usually done using APIs so we can connect to applications together and one of the applications responds to the action of another application. With good business automation you can reduce the amount of tedious admin work you have to do as well as being more productive. So, do you need to know how to code in order to set up these API integrations? Well, no you don't. You used to but now various services exist that are designed to provide an interface to the user for setting up these API integrations and this takes away the need for any technical coding. So, one of these services is if this then that. This is an API integration service. This is more geared up for automating various aspects of your personal life rather than your business. There's also Zapier or Zapier, I'm not too sure how that's pronounced. This is more of a business automation service similar to if this then that but more geared up towards automating your business. Elastic.io and It Does It are very similar services to Zapier. There's also CloudHQ which is a little bit different. This is designed to sync various folders across applications. So, an example of that could be you might want to sync a specific folder in your Google Drive with a specific folder in your Dropbox folder. You'd be able to do that with CloudHQ. So, I'm going to show you how easy it is to make a Zap and a Zap is an API integration from Zapier. That's what they call API integrations. For this particular example, I'm going to set up a Zap that adds any new Twitter follower that I get to my CRM. That way, I can start to leverage any social media following that I get. The first thing that I'd need to do is select the trigger app. In this case, it's Twitter. I need to select the actual trigger and in this case, it's going to be a new follower. We also need to specify what Twitter account that this app is associated with as well as the username. They're my credentials. We also need to test that this connection works. As we can see here, it's worked. We then need to select the action app. I use an application called Nimble. It's a social CRM. It's pretty good. I've selected Nimble there. We need to select the actual action. I want to create a new contact for the new Twitter follower that I get. Again, we need to select what account that this is associated with, so I've selected my Nimble account. You also need to map out the fields. Zapier does take care of a lot of this, but you need to make sure that there's nothing missing and all the information is correct. By mapping out the fields, you need to make sure that the fields match up. For an example, you need to make sure that the name field from Twitter matches the name field in Nimble. You need to make sure that the description field in Twitter is being used for the description field in Nimble and so on. Then you need to test that the Zap works, and in this case it does. That's it. Once that's set up, every time I get a new Twitter follower, they're going to be added to my CRM. This means I can start to do something with my social media follower. What else can you do to automate your business? What other processes? What other things can you set up in order to automate these processes? You could tweet new blog posts, so you could create a Zap so that every time you publish a new blog post, and I think a lot of people probably blog, that can automatically get posted to Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn or any other social media that you want. You can store Twitter mentions from a specific location in a Google Sheet. Now this might be a really good marketing activity. If you're trying to target a specific location with your services or your products, if you can store or start to build up a Google Sheet of contacts of people that have mentioned you on Twitter from this particular location, they might be people that you could consider contacting. You can store recurring invoices, invoice expenses in an Evernote notebook. So if you have recurring invoices for a particular service or product that you use, you would want to keep a record of all them, you can create a Zap to automatically send any invoice that you get to your email address to Evernote. You can create toggle projects from new Trello boards, so if you use toggle to track your time, but you use Trello to organise your projects and your workload, you can set up a Zap that will automatically create a new toggle project ready for you to add time to whenever you create a new Trello board. You can also create Google Calendar events from Evernote Reminders, so if you use Google Calendar as your main calendar and you don't really use Evernote Reminders, you can make sure that you don't miss any because they'll be automatically added to your Google Calendar. So just to recap, business automation saves time and therefore money. There's no coding required and there's lots of possible ways to automate your business. There's literally thousands of possible API integrations. It's just a case of using your imagination a little bit and finding out what works best for you. And I'm going to take any questions after everybody's done the talk, so thank you. Thank you very much, James. And next, where are you hiding, Keith? We've got Keith Devon who's going to be talking about responsive images. So thank you, Keith. Hi, everybody. So my name's Keith.  Where'd the WordPress effect go? It's been cough. It's in WordPress. What happened there, Diane? So my name's Keith. As I said, that's a bit about me, but we really don't have time for that because I've only got 10 minutes. So the problem with images, what are the problems that we're currently facing with images today? First up, we're using too many of them. Secondly, the images that we're using are too big. And a more recent issue that we're having is device pixel ratios, so things like retina screens and how we handle that. So this gives you a quick example of the average web page content weight distribution. And as you can see on the average web page, 64% of the page weight is images. So there's a problem there and a big, big opportunity for optimization. So how can we fix it? Well, there's some techniques that we've been using already and there's some newer techniques coming along. Some of these are being phased out, things like image sprites, a technique that we use to save on HTTP requests, kind of being phased out replaced by things like icon fonts. There's choosing the right format for the image, so whether you're using a GIF for paying SVG or whatever. Then there's image optimization, which is to do with the size, the physical size and the compression of an image. Lazy loading and responsive images, and it's those latter three that I'm going to be talking to you about today. So first up, image optimization. What is it? It's a technique to reduce the file size of an image. There's kind of two main types of compression that you can use. There's lossy compression, which eliminates some pixel data, so this will actually change or degrade the quality of the image slightly. There's lossless compression, which actually just compresses the pixel data, so the image retains its quality and it can also lose some metadata that you don't necessarily need. There's no single best configuration when it comes to image optimization. It's all about the image that you're using and there's different ways that you can do that. And luckily there are some online tools available. So I want to give you a quick example. This is going to be a bit small for you to see probably. This is a picture of some potatoes that I took on my iPhone. The image is 4,000 by 3,000 pixels. It's 2.1 megabytes. So the first thing I did, I ran it through a lossless compressor, so like I say, that's just compressing pixel data, not losing any image quality at all. And you can see the iPhone actually does a pretty good job already because the lossless compressor only saves me 6% of the image size. Next I ran the same image through a lossy compressor, so the quality is slightly less, but you can see there's a bigger saving on the image size, so I've saved 15% in this case. My final example, I ran it through a lossy compressor, but also reduced the actual physical size, so in this particular website I've decided I don't need a 4,000 by 3,000 pixel image. I'm cutting it right down to 1,200 by 900, and I've got a 90% saving on that image, which is absolutely huge. So like I said, there are some online tools available that you can use to help you with this. A personal favourite of mine is called Kraken, so it's at kraken.io. There's free and paid versions, there's actually like a web interface that you can use, or there's an API that you can use. It has lossy and lossless options, and there is a WordPress plugin available called Kraken Image Optimizer. Now the WordPress plugin does require a paid plan, I think they give you like 5 megabytes for free, which obviously isn't much, so you'll need to be on a paid plan for that. So that's image optimisation. Next up, lazy loading, so what is it? It's a technique that loads images as they come into view. It saves on initial page weight and HTTP requests. It does rely on JavaScript, there are lots of JavaScript libraries out there to help you already, and there are also some WordPress plugins available. So this is an example of lazy loading in action, hopefully this is going to work, and the quality is not great. It's the BBC News website. When you first load the page, it loads approximately 50 images, and as you scroll down the page, you'll see that new images get loaded into view, and by the bottom of the page, it's loaded about 105 images, so it saves the initial page load of saved 50 images, so that's obviously a huge performance win for the BBC guys. Next up, responsive images. For me, this is where it gets really exciting, and I wish I had a lot, lot longer to talk to you about this. Started off with the responsive images community group. It's a group of developers who came up with this specification that actually got included into the HTML spec. It kind of comes in two flavours at the minute. One is the picture element, and the other is the source set and sizes attributes, which you add to the image tags. The source set and sizes that we're going to talk about today, mainly because there's more use cases for that. So, what are they? Well, they're used to save bandwidth by loading the appropriate image depending on the context, and by context essentially mean the viewport width or the width that the image will be loaded. In this case, it's kind of important to note that although we're giving a browser a hint as to which image to load, we're not actually making that final decision. That decision is up to the browser in the end. So, here's an example. I've got a fairly standard looking image tag there. I've got the source. I've got an alt attribute, but I've also got this source attribute in the middle. And as you can see, I've listed three image sizes of the same image, and beside each of the file names, there's the image width is also specified. So, an example one, say I have a smartphone. It's 320 CSS pixels in width. It's a slightly older phone, so it's got a pixel density of one. So, in this case, the browser is going to say I've got 320 pixels, and pixel density of one, 320 times one is 320. So, it's going to go and look for the image that is closest to 320 pixels in width, and in this case there's one sitting right there, and it's going to go and choose small.jpg. Hopefully. An example two, I've got the same size of phone, but this is a newer version, so say it's a retina display. It's got a pixel density of two. The browser is going to multiply 320 by two, come up with 640, and hopefully choose medium.jpg. But that all assumes that the images are going to be shown full width in the browser or in the viewport, which obviously isn't the case in real life. We often use layouts like this, where we want images to be displayed, say in a three column grid. In this case, we need to use a sizes attribute. And here I've just specified sizes equals 33.3 VW, VW standing for viewport width. So, you're telling the browser that when this image is displayed, it's going to be a third of the viewport width. That's easy. But then we've got another kind of real life scenario where often on mobiles we want a single column stacked view. So, how do we do that? That's kind of easy too actually. We use something that looks very much like CSS media queries. And in this case, we're saying anything with a viewport that's over 640 pixels, it's going to be in three columns. Anything under that, it's going to be in one column, so the 100% of the viewport width. So, can we use this stuff today? We can. IE is obviously doing its usual thing. But the rest of the browsers are pretty good. Opera Mini is a bit of a concern. I don't know what support is going to be like for that in the future. So, how does this apply to using responsive images in WordPress? Well, it actually started off with a plug-in from those guys that created the specifications of the responsive images community group, created a WordPress plug-in. And that actually got added to the WordPress core in WordPress 4.4. What does that do? It adds source set and sizes support to content images, so images that are added in the edit page or edit post screens whenever you click add media. Gives us a bunch of new functions to work with and a new default image size called medium-large. But there is no picture support currently because it's kind of a lesser use case and a little bit more complicated. This next slide looks like it's going to be really ugly. I thought we were 16 by 9, dear, dear. Okay, so if you can read the code, on the top line I'm getting an image from something like an advanced custom field. I'm getting the image ID, I'm getting the image source and the image meta. Sticking that all in a string which I'm calling image HTML and then I'm running that through a function called WP image add source set and sizes, which does exactly what it says on the tin and gives you something looking like this. So as you can see, the source is at the top, the source set is listing all the image sizes in WordPress and it even comes up with a sizes attribute for you. But that sizes attribute is actually a best guess and whenever you're building this into your themes you're probably going to want a little bit more control over the sizes attribute in which case you can use the WP Calculate Image Sizes filter. But even if you don't use that filter, just the default functionality is much better than nothing. So last thing, as I was doing my research for this talk, I found a plugin called WP Lazy Sizes. The data of image plugins as far as I'm concerned, in the short time I've been looking at it, handles lazy loading and responsive images, works out sizes attributes for you. It's not on the official repo but it's at that link which I will tweet out after this talk. I haven't quite used it in production yet. So download it yourselves, test it. I'd love to hear how you get on with it. So what do we learn? We have an image problem. We've got the tools to solve it.  Thank you very much. Nice one. Next we have Christof taking on the unenviable task of comparing WordPress with Drupal. Hi. So he already spoiled my first line. So I'm a Drupal guy. And I do things like this. That's Marvin, the paranoid android who's also depressed, not because he's using Drupal. So I don't know all that much about WordPress but I've been looking a lot and thinking a lot about what are the main differences between our two systems. Not so much from a feature perspective because we can go on for ages about that, but from a core strategic and underlying architecture perspective and community perspective. First I want to start off with the architectural differences because I believe that Drupal is like Lego and WordPress is like the iOS with the app store. What I mean with that is that Drupal is this graphical interface for a bunch of APIs. That's a complicated concept. What I mean is that Drupal as a developer, when you're building a website, you can, without writing code, do a lot of really crazy things and build your own stuff exactly the way you want it to be. Exactly is a lot, but much more closer to what you want it to be like. And in WordPress, the way that I see it, it's more like these vertically really well integrated plugins that are written for a very specific use case. So it's kind of like APIs versus apps. And I think that's a really important difference between the two systems. Another thing is, and that's a really big one, WordPress is backwards compatible. Drupal is not. For some cases that might be really, really cool to be backwards compatible, because it saves you a lot of trouble when you have to upgrade. In some cases, it can be not all that nice when you have to write a plugin and you have to deal with lots of different systems. And Drupal, if you have the budget to rebuild your sites every four or five years, probably Drupal is going to be more interesting because you have a cleaner slate to work from. And developers like that about Drupal a lot, you know, the underlying thing is cleaner. But both have their pros and cons. And there's also really big differences between the two ecosystems, because this is the really big one, right? According to buildwit.com, WordPress worldwide of all the sites that run a CMS has more than 50% of the sites, which is insane, right? Often, I'll go and look at that graph and get depressed. But because Drupal has like 2%, which is tiny, but if you look at the top 100,000 or top 10,000 websites, well, WordPress still dominates, but the gap is a lot smaller and it's very interesting because Drupal has like 8%, if you look at the top tier of the websites. And that has a few implications because, first of all, I think here we have a very interesting dynamic, again using iOS and the iPhone as an example. I think here Drupal is more like the iPhone and WordPress more like Android, where WordPress has a much, much bigger market share in terms of installs and a number of sites. But in terms of the budgets and the amount of money that's being invested in those sites, I think Drupal, I don't have any data to support it, but I think Drupal has the upper hand. I think that Drupal might actually have a larger overall economy than the WordPress economy. I might be wrong, this might be flipping, we might be just head-to-head, but it's very interesting to see that. And one supporting thing that I found for that is that I think WordPress has a lot more freelancers.  Okay, raise your hand if you're working in a consultancy with multiple people. Okay, it's neck to neck. I know that this is changing now and I know that there's more people working for agencies now. But I think that this is a fairly new evolve like evolution. I think that in a recent past, most people just worked on their own and were building sites. And the budgets for websites were much smaller. I know that it's changing now and I've seen some stuff with some of the really large deployments. But in Drupal, we've gone that curve a little bit earlier. Now, I started to start kind of like us versus you and Drupal versus WordPress. But I don't think that we're really competing, at least not yet. I think that we are very different and I hope that I've shown you that in these slides and that there's very different cases to use either WordPress or Drupal depending on the project that you're running. And I think that we've done a really good job to fight against our real competitors and I think our real competitors are the proprietary CMSs. And basically what both of us have been doing is doing the Japanese Gambits. It's a strategy thing that Boston Consulting came up with. It refers to when Japanese car manufacturers entered into the American market and they started with these really cheap, crappy cars that then got better and better and better until they completely flooded the really expensive cars out of the market. And you can see what it has done to Detroit even today. So I think that what we've been really successful at doing both WordPress and Drupal is kind of like raising the tides and first the smaller proprietary CMSs got flushed and now the large ones are being flushed. And it's a very interesting dynamic. And key to this, and this is, I don't know if, well, I'm kind of a big advocate for this. Key to this has been our ability to mobilize the clickers. And what I mean with clickers are, you know, the people that they need to do something complicated, they need to build a system, but they are not necessarily developers. They are able to do stuff in the UI, they are able to do really complicated things and figure it out, make content architecture, all of those important concepts they understand, but they are not writing code. And to kind of mobilize them, get them into the system and then maybe in time turn them into themeers and people that make custom templates, people that make custom codes and their own plugins. And I think that's really important again because that's constituency, they need our help because the web is changing again, it's changing massively, like nothing we've ever seen before. APIs are coming, well, they're already here, but they're coming in a really, really big way. And specialized artificial intelligence and a bunch of other things that you can do once you start amassing data and start, like really leveraging the abilities of concentration of very specialized computing is really going to change the way we do business and in a lot of different places. And these people, like right now, this is available to developers. If you can write code, you can use APIs. If you can't write code, yeah, it's not that nice, it's a lot harder. And I think what we need to do is to help those people so that we can provide them with the plugins or the modules so that they can also take advantage of this new wave of computing that's coming. And I hope that I was able to convince you that there's a case for both our systems. And I would like you to think as kind of like a final take away that, like, how can we go from this Earth versus you, this zero sum game to a win-win game? Like, how could we work better together so that we can go to the markets and help a lot more people still and like give the power of CMS to all the people. Not just the developers. Thank you. Can I ask Keith and James to join us on the stage? And we'll take some questions now from out there. Has anyone got any questions? Hold on, we just need to get the microphones sorted here. Is yours working, Theo? I'll press the thing at the bottom, I hope that didn't... Yeah, I think you need to do that. Okay. A little flick. That's one. Yeah, there's a second button. That one. Okay, so I'm seeing some hands. We'll just go for the closest one, actually. We've got one just here. Just for the moment. Hi, thanks for the speakers. When I see these speakers, it's a bit of a gamble. You don't know what's going to come in, so it's great to learn new things. I have a lot of questions. I have a lot of questions for three of them, so I might ask all of them and let the mics go around. Just on the Drupal versus WordPress and the moving forward. I really like your talk. I tried to start using Drupal, but it just got a bit frustrated and lost. The project I was trying to set up with it was just slowing down, so I just said, okay, I can set this up in WordPress in a day. I wish I did have more patience to sit down with it. But just as it's moving forward, and I think it's a great argument, do you think the way Drupal and WordPress are moving towards using REST APIs that we can start to favour each other in some way in that way are? Do you have any comments on that? It's a very interesting question. Well, the move towards REST APIs, well, I think it's a big opportunity, but it also scares me a bit. Because I care, I'm a clicker. I never became a developer, and I got people that do development now in my company, but I think that we should never forget about our roots and make sure that we keep catering also to those people that cannot develop their own team and implement a front-end that's using those functions. But probably there's possibilities to leverage each other. I think that the specialisation, I think that for me at least, WordPress is kind of the mass market thing where you get an easy way to get a lot of people to use standardised plugins that are vertical silos. And Drupal is this more legal thing. I hope that answers your question. Yeah, it was just a serious question. Okey-dokey, hands up. We've got one hand at the back there. It's another question for Christophe. So, as you know, I work with Drupal as well as WordPress. What I'd be interested to find out, building on the question of the APIs, one of the really powerful things like you said about Drupal is the fact that it is a system of APIs, effectively you've got the field API, you've got all the other APIs. Now, with eight coming out, and it completely changing the way that things are done, and it moving towards symphony when a lot of PHP developers are moving more towards Laravel, do you think there's a risk with the rest API and the increasing number of endpoints that WordPress has that we might see a migration of developers from Drupal in two directions, one going in Laravel, one going towards WordPress because of the APIs? I think what I've seen, what I've heard in the market is that actually the other way is happening, that symphony developers are starting to use Drupal because, hey, it's also symphony. So, I don't see that happening necessarily right now. There's some fatigue with doing stuff in a GUI and the hardcore developers, they rather be writing code. That's always the case. But, no, I don't see it that way. I think it's more, I think it's a different place that the changes are happening. There's a lot of change and it's sometimes a bit scary. But overall, I feel pretty good about Drupal now. Drupal 8.1.1 is awesome. Any more questions? Any hands? Wave at me if I can't see you. Yes. Hi, it's a question for Keith. Can you get responsive background images? Yes, you can. That was one way that people started using responsive style images before certain sizes came along. The main issue with that is semantics because in your HTML, you've got a div with a background image rather than an image tag. So, from an accessibility point of view, it's not brilliant. From an SEO point of view, it's not brilliant. So, yes, it can be done, but basically you don't need to do that anymore. If it's genuinely a background image and not a content image, then by all means, do that. If it's a pattern background of some kind, then yes, do that using media queries in your CSS, but otherwise I would avoid that and use the new specification. I'm not seeing any more hands. We've got one here. We've got two hands here. We've got one just here. Just on the image, thanks again for your talk because I just ran into that problem last week where we had switched the domain to HTTPS and it wasn't loading the image. When I looked into it, I saw this source set which I've never seen before and it was referencing the HTTP. Do you know why that is? It was referring to the old... No. I haven't looked into it. I just somehow turned it off. Was that images that were being loaded and using ad media in the content editor? Yeah. I'm guessing it's probably a setting in your WordPress site so it's still referencing HTTP. It could have been when the media was added. Yeah, but no. It was good to know where this whole thing was coming from but I didn't really know why they'd started using image source. The other thing which I don't know if you mentioned was CDNs. Do you have any comments on CDNs which are good? No, I'm a WP Engine customer. I take a checkbox to enable CDN with them so it makes it that easy. I don't have a lot of expertise outside of that. Good. WP Engine, get some swag over here. There's a hand up just over here. Just a quick comment to Keith, hi Keith. I'm not sure if you mentioned an important piece about source set that it's a progressive enhancement so that slide you had with the IE, not supporting it, is not an issue. You can still use it and it'll just be ignored in IE. Yeah, that's a really good point. Thank you. I'd love to give a much longer talk on response images at some point but that was basically saying if you're using source set in sizes it's progressive enhancement so older browsers will still load the original source attribute, the image that's in there so they will still see an image. It just won't necessarily be an optimised one. Thank you. Okay, and final question. Final question just down here. Hi, another question for Keith. Some of my clients are photographers and they're really precious about their images but their sites take ten minutes to load the homepage. So what is like, they want to use higher DPIs and bigger sizes. Do you have any guidance on what I should do with them? Yeah, all of those techniques will help you. The responsive images thing works out the browser will work out the device pixel ratio and load the appropriate image.  Can I tell them that 300 DPI is the wrong thing to do? No, it's not so much about DPI. It's more the physical pixel size of the image that's being loaded. So if you're using responsive images your browser will work it out and load the appropriate asset if it's done properly. So you should see big performance wins. Fantastic, can I get a round of applause for our trio of lightning talkers? Thank you guys.


Hello and welcome, my name is Johannes Erlacher and I am going to present the work I did together with Florian Mendel and Maria Eichelseda on Bounds for the Security of Scon against Linear and Differential Cryptoanalysis. I want to start off with a short note on the motivation behind our work. Over the last couple of years, designs with weak alignments have become more and more popular. We see this for example in multiple proposals for the NIST Lightweight Cryptography Project. Designs like Sudiac, Scon or ISAP all have weak alignments and larger state sizes. For designs like that, if we look at Linear or Differential Cryptoanalysis, we usually see a gap between the proven bounds and the best known characteristics. For Scon, for example, we only have bounds up to three rounds, while we have found characteristics far beyond that. This holds for a differential case, as can be seen here, but also for the Linear one. These bounds are usually proven by means of MILP, SMT, or constrained programming models, while we are searching for good characteristics using heuristic search tools. With this in mind, I want to focus on recent developments in the encoding of cryptographic primitives as pure Boolean satisfiability problems. Zunit I, for example, have proposed efficient encoding methods for cryptographic functions as part of their analysis of several designs, which is also part of this conference here. We use these encoding methods to derive linear and differential models of the S-comparmutation and were able to verify existing bounds very efficiently. Unfortunately, though, we were not able to extend those bounds to more rounds. At the same time, there are also steady developments in the implementation and design of existing Boolean satisfiability solvers. But not only that, there are also new approaches utilizing multiple solver instances in parallel. We evaluated some of those approaches, but unfortunately, that did not see any major runtime improvements there. Therefore, we started to think about a manual parallelization approach utilizing these new encoding methods, with the goal of proving new bounds for the S-comparmutation. Such an approach would need to partition the search space into many independent problems. These problems could then be tackled in parallel utilizing multiple solver instances. To keep the runtime reasonable, we further want to reduce the complexity of these individual tasks. We can do this by optimizing the approach itself, but also the underlying SUT model we are using. Before I go into more details on the approach, I want to introduce S-com, the target of our evaluations. The S-com family builds upon a permutation used in sponge or duplex constructions. This permutation is defined via a state of 320 bits consisting of 5 64-bit words, as can be seen on the slides here. This state is transformed over several rounds by two main layers. Namely, a substitution layer is applied column-wise and provides confusion, while we have a linear layer providing diffusion within each of the five words. These two layers are repeated over several rounds, where the number of rounds depends on the variant in which it is used. The most common configurations are 6, 8 and 12 rounds, with a single round configuration used within ISAP. To give you a little bit more details, the linear layer provides diffusion within each word by applying a linear function. This linear function is defined as a bitwise XOR over rotated versions of each word. The substitution layer, on the other hand, uses a 5-bit S-box, applied 64 times column-wise. This S-box has a maximum differential probability of 2 to the power of minus 2, with the same maximum linear bias. Our approach requires us to model these layers as boolean satisfiability problems. Therefore, we follow the approach from Sun et al. For us, each intermediate state bit is represented by one boolean variable. Therefore, the encoding of a layer can be seen as a boolean function with 320 input and output variables. If you look at the encoding for a substitution layer, for example, this encoding would restrict the input and output variables such that they are only allowed to represent valid entries in the DDT or LAT of the S-box respectively. Since we are interested in finding new bounds, we also need to represent the weight of the S-box transitions in some way. Therefore, we encode an additional 64 variables representing the S-box activity in each round. This set of variables can then be used to limit the total maximum active S-boxes in our model. The linear layer, on the other hand, simply constrains its input and output variables such that they represent the linear function I presented earlier. With this general overview, I want to continue with our manual parallelization approach. So in order to prove the nonexistence of any characteristic up to a certain number of active S-boxes, one needs to consider all possible characteristics within the search space. To utilize multiple solver instances, we need to derive independent subproblems from this search space. Each of these problems should then consider as many cases as possible while still being efficiently solvable. One potential idea for this is to categorize characteristics by the S-box activity. We can observe that multiple characteristics share a common S-box activity pattern within certain rounds. In order to derive a partitioning approach from this, I want to introduce the concept of the girdle pattern. The girdle pattern for us is the S-box activity within the round with the fewest active S-boxes. For example, I've included here the S-box activities for the currently best-known differential characteristic over four rounds of S-con. Round two is the girdle round with its girdle pattern for this specific characteristic. It has a total of three active S-boxes and which we refer to as the girdle weight. For this specific case and for this specific characteristic, also round three fulfills our definition of the girdle pattern. So in order to derive a partitioning from this, we would fix a specific girdle pattern in a specific round in our SUT model. If we run this model, we would simultaneously check all characteristics which fulfill, which have this specific girdle pattern in this specific round to give you a little bit more details. So the properties of this are that the girdle round for any characteristic can be in any round. So for our partitioning, we need to consider every girdle pattern in every round. The second point I want to make here is much more interesting. Since the girdle round requires all other rounds to have at least as many active S-boxes, on the other hand, we can say that there is an upper limit to how many active S-boxes the girdle round has. So we do not need to consider all possible patterns, but only up to the maximum weight of the girdle round. To give you an idea of this, let's take the example of four rounds with a bound of at most 35 active S-boxes. For this, we would need to consider all possible girdle patterns up to a weight of 8. This gives us a total of 2 to the power of 32 different patterns we have to consider. Each of those patterns would then need to be fixed in our model in all different rounds and run for each experiment separately. With this, we have achieved the partitioning of our search space, but we still have open questions. First of all, we have a huge number of individual checks we now have to make. Probably we can reduce this number. The second point is the complexity of these individual sub-problems is still relatively high because the complexity of our model grows with the number of rounds we have to encode and also the bound we have to encode. Therefore, I want to first consider rotational symmetries in the S-comparmitation. We can observe that characteristics for the S-comparmitation are actually rotational invariant. This means that rotating each word of a characteristic by a constant value gives us an equivalent valid characteristic. This property also applies to our definition of the girdle pattern. For example, if we take these internal states I've included here on the slides over one round of S-con and we shift them by 3, for example, we get an equivalent characteristic in terms of structure and weight. With this in mind, we can eliminate duplicates from our search space. And we do this by applying Necklace theory. Necklace theory can be used to enumerate all rotational unique patterns of a certain length with a given weight. For us, this length would be 64 given the Xbox activity and the weight would be defined by the different weights we have to check for each girdle pattern. Overall, this reduces the number of patterns we have to check by a factor of 2 to the power of 6 and gives us a rotational unique set of girdle necklaces which removes redundant checks from our search space. So with this, we now have, we only have to solve the last problem here which is to reduce the complexity of the individual problems. For this, we can make another observation. Given a characteristic over, for example, four rounds with a girdle pattern in the first or second round, this is the same girdle pattern here. For these characteristics, they share a common precondition, namely that they must contain a partial characteristic over three rounds with the specific girdle pattern in the first round. A similar property holds for the, for a characteristic with a girdle pattern in the third or fourth round over four rounds. With this in mind, we can, first of all, only check patterns, all the patterns over three rounds and only if this precondition holds, we will consider them for full round checks in their specific cases. This reduces the model complexity in two ways. First of all, it reduces the number of rounds we have to encode, but second of all, since the girdle round requires all other rounds to have at least as many active S-boxes, we can also reduce the bound we are checking for this reduced model by the weight of the girdle round. So now we have a partitioning without redundant checks and with this prefiltering approach, we can, first of all, check all our patterns in a reduced way with reduced complexity and also only consider certain rounds instead of all of them. Finally, I also want to mention that in our paper we describe further optimization approaches, like combining similar subtasks into one and an evaluation of different methods to encode the bound in our sub-model. I want to continue with the results we were able to acquire using this new approach, starting with a new bound for four rounds of S-con. Our goal here was to prove at least 36 active S-boxes over four rounds. We therefore need to consider all girdle necklaces with weights up to eight. This gives us a total of two to the power of 26 different patterns we have to consider. We, first of all, do our prefiltering over three rounds, checking all these patterns in the first and third round. This prefiltering is very successful because only very few patterns actually fulfill this precondition. There are around 4,000 patterns for the differential and linear case left. These patterns have an interesting difference in their distribution for the linear and differential case. In the differential case, these lower weight patterns are favored in the first round in the initial round, while the linear case favors these lower weight patterns in the last round. This makes intuitive sense, since the diffusion in the backwards direction is much larger for the linear case. These prefiled patterns are then of course rechecked over the full four rounds for the respective cases. Overall, these experiments took around 600 CPU days for the linear and differential case each. We executed those experiments in around half a week on 176 cores. The runtime is dominated by the prefiltering checks for patterns of weight eight. This makes sense, since they contribute the largest number of individual patterns. Overall, we can conclude that we did not find any satisfiable instances and therefore a single characteristic for four rounds of SCON must have at least 36 active S-boxes. With this new four-round bound we wanted to extend our approach to even more rounds and therefore target a six-round bound for SCON as well. For this we can make this observation that any characteristic with at most 53 active S-boxes over six rounds must contain a partial characteristic with less than 27 active S-boxes in its first or last three rounds, as visualized on the slides here. For this we can additionally reuse our prefiltering results from the four-round experiments, since these covered this bound of less than 27 already. The only thing we have to do is extend those prefiltering results for the second round case, since we previously only considered the first and third round. With this in mind we can do the following approach. We consider all prefiltered patterns over three rounds and check these patterns in their respective case in the first and second half over six rounds. This means, for example, a prefiltered pattern in their first round over three rounds would then be rechecked over six rounds in the first and fourth round. A similar case applies to the second and third round patterns as well. If none of these checks yield a satisfiable instance we can conclude that this bound holds as well. We did all of those experiments in around 60 CPU days for a linear and differential case each. The prefiltered patterns we had to consider were around 6000 for each case. Therefore the additional second round prefiltering results contributed around 2000 patterns to each case. In conclusion we can say that we did not find any satisfiable instances and therefore also this bound of at least 54 active S-boxes over six rounds of Scon holds. With these new bounds established I want to take a look at the implications for Scon. From our results we can derive three new interesting bounds namely a 6 and 8 and a 12 round bound. First of all let's take a look at the authenticated encryption schemes. There the initialization and finalization phases both use 12 round configurations of this permutation. Our 12 round bound which is almost certainly not tight already provides an ample security margin for 128 bit security there. The data processing on the other hand uses six and eight round configurations. There we can only make this argument that with the data limit of 2 to the power of 64 encryption blocks per key it is very unlikely with our new bounds to find pairs among those queries. But we are working towards extending the six round bound to a probability of at least two to the power of minus 128. So finally I want to mention Scon hash and Sconxoth. These are unkeyed modes and therefore hard to evaluate based on probability. We can make this intuitive argument there based on the assumption that if we have two to the power of 128 attempts utilizing all degrees of freedom the rate provides so 64 bits we would get a probability of 2 to the power of minus 192. While our 12 round bound which is almost certainly not tight already implies a probability of 2 to the power of minus 216. So this gives confidence in the resistance of those schemes against such attack vectors. With this I want to give an outlook of potential future work. So a bound of at least 40 active S-boxes over four rounds should be possible with our approach. We estimate a runtime of around 6.6 thousand CPU days which was unfortunately beyond our computational budget. Another interesting bound would be at least 64 active S-boxes over six rounds which are already mentioned. This might only be possible if we only consider constraint characteristics though. Since our bounds are almost certainly not tight we did not specifically evaluate probability bounds but the modeling techniques by Sunet Al are most certainly able to model such to derive such models as well. Finally I want to mention the application to other designs. There are other designs which share a similar structure to Scon as well as some designs having this rotational invariant property as well. So therefore our approach is generally applicable to other designs as well. So to summarize I've presented a manual parallelization approach with which we were able to derive new bounds for the S-compimitation namely a bound of at least 36 differential or linear active S-boxes over four rounds as well as at least 54 differential or linear active S-boxes over six rounds. These bounds are almost certainly not tight but they are enough to support trust in this permutation. With this I want to thank you for your attention and have a nice day!


Former Minister of Aviation, Femi Fani Kayode, switched sides. He announced his return to the all-progressive Congress yesterday. Now this comes barely two years after he described the party as darkness, which he will never associate with. Recall that in 2019, there was a speculation that he was considering joining the ruling party, to which he said, and I quote, APC is a sinking ship. He had accused the president, Major General Bohari, led regime of deceiving Nigerians with the anti-corruption war. Now that he's in the APC, he said he was just doing the right thing, and that he believed that it was time for him to cross over and join hands with the president in moving the country forward. Well, joining us to break this down is Bolaoba. He's a political analyst. Thank you very much, Mr. Oba for joining us. Pleasure to be here today. Yeah, let us examine the man, Femi Kayode, because he's a very interesting and very outspoken politician. We've seen and heard a lot from him in the past few years, and he's been very, very vocal about this government and the APC. But here we are today talking about him in the APC and somewhat taking back his words. Is Femi Kayode the poster child for the Abraid Nigerian politician, whether APC or PDP? He's the ultimate poster child of the ultimate iconic character of the opportunism that defines a political environment. To be very honest with you, any political environment where ideology is lacking, where conviction cannot be easily defined, where opportunism is the name of the game, and where the zeitgeist is wanting to be part of the shopping party. Shopping party. I guess there is no better character on the Nigerian political terrain today than defines such rabbit opportunism as Femi Kayode. But I mean, it's not that we... Yes, of course, a lot of people have put his feet to the fire, but he's not the only one who has moved to the APC. We've seen governors, we've seen senators. We even saw a member of the National Assembly, I think in the river states, move to the APC yesterday. There's been a mass movement of sorts. And it's not really new, these defections, even though most of the people who have defected at some point were badmouthing the APC. So should we even be making Femi Kayode out to look like the bad guy here? The unfortunate part of Femi Kayode is that, unlike many chieftains of state who perhaps moved to the APC to cover or to protect themselves or shield themselves from the partisanly-powered clag lights of EFCC, we know that those institutions are now literally used for partisan purposes. Many executive chieftains of state who have moved to the APC because they want to shield themselves from the investigative eyes or the partisanly-propelled investigative eyes of the EFCC, Femi Kayode is a consummate player and a seasonal master player or maestro of this kind of political opportunism when we're getting nearer. You must remember how it used to be a virulent critic, a virulent antagonist of the former president, Dr. Guglokabeli Junata. And when it was just about time, at about this season, during the last political calendar, he also jumped cheap and ultimately became the spokesperson of Dr. Guglokabeli Junata's failed election campaign. So I'm not surprised, but in his case, there are so many players, but why do we have to celebrate CR7? Cristian Ronaldo or Messi, because they're just good at what they do. Femi Kayode is the obvious face of the political maneuvering amongst Nigerian politicians. So it is. And it's actually quite disturbing and very perturbing that the president that claims to be integrity personified, that claims to be an agent of change. And someone who is consciously referred to as Mr. Integrity could be the one now that will literally open the doors of the most dignified residents in this country to a political lifer. You know, but that's the name of the game. We thought Guari was going to be different, but he's not telling us or showing us that in every material particular, he is as pedestrian as those that he was being counted to be better than. Let's go back to when the governor of Kogi State mentioned, in fact, he said it authoritatively that Femi Kayode had joined the APC. He came out and said, no, that's not possible. I mean, that he's not joined the APC again. Femi Kayode has in on joining the APC has started to wax lyrical. He's mentioned names of people he authoritatively believes are going to join the APC soon. He's mentioned one of the most thriving governors in the country, the Oyostek governor, Sheyh Makhinde, as one of those who would be joining the APC. And he's even talked about Balchi governor and Enugu governors joining the APC. He also took credit for some other people who have recently joined the APC. And I remember that particular member of the National Assembly speaking on another TV station saying that he would rather that Femi Kayode retract that statement because it's an insult on his person. So it makes us really wonder if there's any truth to what he said. I mean, about all the other people he's pointing to join the APC. The only thing that is consistent about Femi Kayode in his very short political life thus far has been his consistent inconsistency. I don't want to take anything he says with a grain of this thing. But I will say that we are somebody who is an ambassador of the age of poverty. So I am not one to who is going to be particularly taking any of these characters seriously because for Femi Kayode a couple of weeks ago was far more vehement in rejecting the proposition that he was going to join the APC than anybody's rebuttal that you are alluding to now. I would even be surprised if a former president that has been so reported although is yet to confirm it, so reported that he would be going to the APC. I wouldn't be surprised if he goes. We are dealing with men and women who lack conviction. We are dealing with men and women who can do anything to protect themselves from the incongruities that they have conducted while they are abusing the offices they own. So it's easy for them to take integrity for opportunities. We are dealing with characters. So let's be very honest with ourselves. The only startling part of it was that for a while some of us between 2014 and 2015 fully sleep-elived let me honor and apologize to Nigerians. Although I will review my support for him 2018-2019 went to me. He had defined himself as somebody whose presidency was ultimately going to fail. But between 2014 and 2015 I was one too who fully sleep-elived that it was a character that could function above his peers. Now I know it's just one of them. We have to go, unfortunately, time is not on our side. Balauba is a political analyst. Thank you so much for being part of this conversation. Thank you very much for the opportunity to be here today. All right. Okay. Well, thank you all for staying with us. We hope you enjoyed the conversations. We'll take a short break now and go through the highlights of this week and when we return, I'll be saying my goodbyes. My sister, I am equally at loss the way you are. In fact, as a person I am embarrassed by the lines of action taken by government or in the handling, in the manner in which the government is handling a lot of situations emanating from this fight against terrorism and banditry. I am at a loss. If security considered part of the, do I say, a report on which this government came into power, I expect to see far greater lines of actions that would at every point reassure the citizens that even if we are not making some impact, we have a government that cares. I really cannot understand what's happening. Frankly speaking, the UAE authorities have given us a list of 400 persons who are operators are said to be sponsors behind Boko Haram. Till now, we are still hesitant at bringing them to Boko Jesus Christ. Is it that some individuals in government know what we don't know? The management of information, I think is very, very poor in government today because we should have a focal point of somebody who is supposed to make statements when it comes to issues of security. I think the national security advisor should say something or the minister of defense, not the minister of police affairs, the minister of police affairs should be telling us about internal security and what police can do. Well, I'll tell you what the national security advisor has said lately. He has told iPop that they should stay clear of the Annambra elections. Is that the most important thing that the NSA should be discussing right now? Well, it concerns national security. It concerns national security because when we are trying to stop the political process, it's concerns national security. So, well, it's a place for him to tell them to stay away. If they are agitating for their own independence or whatever, I think there are other channels. And I think a lot of people in the south agree to this, that there should be other channels that disrupting violence is not just the answer. There was never evidence that those people at the door gates were armed. They even admitted. The military admitted, General Taiwo admitted that the protesters were not armed. Not to your question. I don't want us to be overoptimistic about what is going to be done by these findings. At the end of the day, the Judicial Commission of the Inquiry will submit its reports and make recommendations. Whether those recommendations will be implemented is a different thing entirely. But given the antecedents of this regime, I am convinced that it is very unlikely that any of those soldiers will ever be caught by the martial law put on trial. Because this is the regime that has shown itself unwilling to abide by the rule of law. A regime that has shown continuous content for human life. A regime that does not have any respect for international best practices and rules of engagement. So you don't expect that regime, a regime that has lied on record about the activities at the door gate, to now take a summer search and implement whatever finding this commission is going to make. I would say that the federal government did not also do well in some ways. Because if people are agitated at the beginning of this agitation, it will be shameful and sad if former President Donald Trump decides to join the APC out. I won't be surprised so to say, but it will be very, very sad and shameful of him to do that. Because if we go back and try to read through all the comments, all the abuses hauled at him by members of the APC that are now asking him to come and join them, as you said, are politicians suffering from dementia or something? Is there something that we're not aware of as people that the politicians are aware of? You know, because it's for me, it is completely unacceptable and does not hold water in a society that we all belong to. And that's the show for tonight and this week, of course, we will see you on Monday next week as the stories keep developing and as news breaks, we will be here talking for development. I am Mary Annicole and have a great weekend.


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Like we said last night, like that new priest said, watch out, watch out, watch out, okay? And it's not a negative thing. It's taking advantage of our opportunities, seeing it take advantage of it. Every single guy that I shook their hand with, which would be everybody in this organization did something today to help us win. I promise you, and I said, every single guy that came in here, I watched you make a play, and you make a play, and you all the way around. That's what it has to be. Nothing's more important than a team. Put the team first, give them a lot of credit. We knew it was going to be a fist fight, okay? We made some huge plays there. Okay, we'll see you back there on Wednesday. We got to get ready to get healthy, to get on the plane, and go on the West Coast, and get another win. That's all right.