Good morning. Thanks for coming out. I was going to say at 10, but at this point it's like 1020. Sorry. My name is Phillip Martin. I am the CISO at Coinbase. I've been Coinbase about three years. And, yes, and apparently I am too tall for the microphone. That's fine. What we're going to talk about today is a follow on to a blog post we released yesterday, but we're going to talk about an attack from what I think is one of the most dangerous attacker groups in cryptocurrency today. The attack specifically targeted cryptocurrency companies around about 20 different companies, including us. It leveraged two different Firefox ODAs in the execution of the attack as well as a really extensive social engineering phase that we'll get into as well. And we're going to spend the next 50 or so minutes until you kick me out of here. So we're breaking down the attack, how it went down, lessons we learned from it, indicators we took from it, what we know about the attacker, and whatever questions you could have at the end. My expectation is I'm probably going to get more than normal amount of questions at the end of this. So I'm going to try to leave like at least 10, hopefully 15 minutes. And if there's not that many questions, I'm going to talk some more. So ask questions. Let's talk about that. That's me. I do things. I've done things other places. We don't need to dwell on that. So we don't advise that like I told you when I start sort of breaking down the attack, give you a high level overview of sort of the way I'm breaking down in terms of phases. I doubt I'll just caveat this. I'm going to say it later too. Well, I'm going to break this down in terms of sort of phases of the attack. I doubt the attack, the attacker thought of it the same way. And I doubt it happened like that in terms of the actual timeline. But I'm chunking it up so we can like talk about each piece discreetly, right? So the timeline makes it look like it all happened one after the other. I doubt that's actually true in the real world. We'll talk about what our detection strategy, why we why we why and how we detected it, lessons learned a little bit about the attacker. So let's get into it. So that's the quick overview. The the super high level discussion of this. Thanks for reminding me to put my phone on silent is that an attacker attacker group. It's known in non English reporting has been from reporting in Polish and Japanese on this group that they call hide seven. We track them as crypto three. So the third in our serialization of of actors put together a list of about 200 people, all for the most part in crypto sent out a really elaborate social engineering scheme that was that was involved with Cambridge and a couple of academic prizes that they award. And like I said, we'll go into that in depth. They windowed that list of 200 down to about five that they actually wanted to exploit. They delivered a Firefox Oday to the two Firefox Odays to those to those five, which then delivered a as a malware set up that went through a traditional sort of recon pillage with with phase two being a more full featured rat. We think this is the same actor that breached coin check. We think this this actor has been active in Asia and Eastern Europe for quite a while. This actor's dropped over the course of their lifetime that we can do we can see, which goes back to about 2016. We think this attacker has dropped about six Odays of various quality.  So let's let's break this down a little bit. I was going to do a really fancy like set of I'm going to fade everything else out and make that the one bright.  So phase one recon, this is the phase we know the least about in terms of what the attacker did and what they were looking for. We know that they put together a list of about 200 people in the initial target set. We know it was it was concentrated in America and EMEA as a little bit of targeting in APAC too. We know that for the for the for the majority of the targets, they were right. They were involved in crypto. There were a few where they were just dead wrong and there had literally nothing to do with cryptocurrency. They seem more interested in IT infrastructure, security, engineering for obvious access reasons. But but we're willing to take any foothold they can get based on based on sort of actions that they took later. What do we not know? We do have no idea how they source their data zero at all. The email addresses they're they're using are personal email addresses. They weren't really using much in the way of corporate email addresses. Like I said, they got they got the list right. My my suspicion is they're using classical OSINT techniques. They were looking at names in news reports, things like that, using that to then develop further information about it and specifically dig up personally mail addresses to bypass corporate controls. But we don't actually know that for sure. We don't know how long this recon phase lasted. We don't know if they were just sitting on a portfolio of people that they wanted they wanted to breach, or if they'd got it all together. We don't know if if I might have phase one and two switched, they may have acquired the Oday before they put the list together, right? We just sort of don't know exactly how that played out because that's this is the phase we have the least visibility into. So next phase or weaponization, right? And this is this is a really, really rich topic area. And some some really, really interesting pieces here. Exploitation. This is a pretty rich, rich topic area. I've lumped into this sort of both the exploit dev as well as what I call sort of the infrastructure prep that the attacker did. And we'll go through sort of both of those things. Number. So there were two days leverage in this attack, CV 2019 11707 and 708. They're both Firefox exploits. One is a is essentially a jit exploit. And the other is a sandbox escape from like I'm stepping on a cable here. From Firefox, the net result of the two is a zero user interaction, Oday and Firefox, right? Pretty pretty awesome. So CV. So 707 was was a simultaneous discovery by a researcher at Project Zero, named Sanel Gross, and the attacker, whoever the attacker acquired this this exploit from. Sanel has a really good write up on on Twitter about the differences between his approach between like the way they discovered it, and the result and exploit that they wrote. And what the attacker wrote, the TLDR of that is that we think that that the attacker found it a very, very different way than Google did. Google found it via fuzzing. The attacker probably found it as a variant of another existing Oday, CV 2019 9810, which was disclosed in in April of this year, right? So based on the based on the similarities and those two types of bugs, what we think was happening was the attacker was looking for that that same pattern bug, potentially as potentially just a straight variant of 9810 and ran across this bug as well at about the same time. The the second bug is actually way more interesting. So so 11708 was a was a novel discovery by the attacker never before seen sandbox escape in Firefox, while the the underlying mechanism that was used in the attack has actually been in Firefox for years. The specific way this attacker chose to trigger it had only been possible since May 12. Right. So so what does that imply that that implies the attackers had about a two week discovery to weaponization cycle, which is insane. Right. If you have ever tried to write an exploit for something as complicated as a browser on a platform like Mac, two weeks is just crazy fast to be able to get that out the door. Right. And we know this because we saw the attacker starting to set up infra, setting registering domains, things like that on about made on about May 28 is when we think the attack, the attacker started to get set up in for a because they're setting up info, we're assuming that means they had the O day, or at least they were almost done with the O day. Otherwise, why go to the effort if you if you if you don't know what you're going to do with it? Sorry, I'm going a little bit faster than I'd planned to because we're a little bit tight on time. Oh, right. The the talk about the came. So the Cambridge side of stuff is really interesting too. So the attackers gained access to two accounts at the Cambridge University professors accounts. Well, more a little bit more on that a little bit later, two accounts, two email accounts, legit Cambridge domains. And they use those email addresses or those accounts in both the fishing. So we'll see examples of this later where they were sending from legit Cambridge University accounts, as well as to host pieces of the the actual exploit pages themselves. They didn't host the O day on Cambridge. I was in a separate domain, but they hosted all the lower pages, everything else. One of the things that Cambridge does for people that have accounts is you can, you know, the old school home directory, right, tilde user name right after the top level domain, they make that available when you have an account. So the attackers leverage that as part of the overall social engineering process, you'll see some of the links they used when we talk about the fishing, but it really, really, really improved their ability to fool their targets quite thoroughly. We don't know a ton about the Cambridge side of this equation. We don't know how long the attackers were in. We don't know if they used it for other attacks. We don't know. We don't know if the accounts they used were or actual user accounts, or they were just completely fake. We've done a fair bit of background on this. The LinkedIn profiles, we think are fake. So they backed these accounts with that like LinkedIn profiles and other data. There's no other results for these names like we think it's probably the attacker had enough access to create these users, but we don't know either way. So the delivery is my favorite face. It's my favorite phase because the level of effort we saw from these attackers on the social engineering side was in my experience extraordinary. We'll see this in a second. The attackers took on average 10 days to two weeks with the victims from the first contact all the way through a non-nilicious phase of social engineering until they went down the list and figured out, do we care enough about you to give you a zero day until they finally actually delivered at the far and that took about 10 days to two weeks.  It felt looking at the email threads. It felt normal. It felt like a human. It felt like an academic responding back and forth. So let's take a look at that and what that looked like. So this is what the initial outreach email was. There were two versions of this. So this one, this one references the the Adam Smith Prize, which is an economic prize, economics prize that Cambridge awards to, I think it's post postdocs, I believe, on an annual basis. And it's specifically, specifically focused on, like I said, economics, a couple of things to note about this, I'll use this example, because it's better colored that link you see right there. Number one, note that it's going to that that this user's homepage or home directory, not a top level Cambridge site. To that link is entirely benign. There's not a malicious bone in that link's body, or in the resulting web pages, nothing. It is a pure copy of the Adam Smith Prize page that you can find on Cambridge, right, pure copy, nothing, nothing changed about it. The second phase, so you respond back, you say, like, great, this is amazing. I'm going to do this. This is so cool. Well, first, I'll show you the the Adam Smith Prize variant. So different name, same pattern, right? So you follow up back up, say, great, I would love to do this sounds amazing. Thank you so much for reaching out. And you get something like this back, right? So thanks so much for your reply. There were a few variants of this that we saw. But basically, if you if you reach back and said, like, yep, this is awesome. I love math because reasons, they said this, if you if you responded back and said, like, hey, I'm in marketing, dude, like, why are you emailing me this? They ceased contact immediately. Really, any reply other than, yes, this is right down my alley is amazing. The attacker sees contact immediately and just moved on. Right. And keep in mind, of course, up to now, if if you were a normal user, and you said this, like, there's nothing suspicious here, is an email from from a Cambridge University account referencing a Cambridge University University Cambridge page. The most suspicious thing is I wonder how they got my name. Right. So far, so good in terms of obstacles, attackers. So a few days after that, what you would get is this. You would get the the the and in some cases, there were a few more back and forths based on like specific questions and answers, the attackers like engage wonderfully. You'll note throughout this entire thing, good grammar, good writing. Like, they're using reasonable punctuation. This is not what you expect on a normal sort of like low or even mid quality fishing. So this is the actual exploitation as far as it starts, right? So that that link there, that's malicious. That link is the link that hosts the that that sort of does the final checks and hosts the actual O day or links to it at least. Like I said, so from tip to tail from from this to that 10 days to two weeks, it for most for most recipients, right? So so really, really high effort, very high quality, like nothing super weird about this, right? So at this point, they're saying like, Okay, these are the specific projects we want you to review, law view it log in. This goes to that link is actually copied again from Cambridge University's actual website. It's their IDP login page that the attackers stole, right? And at that point, once we click there, we talk, we start to talk about exploitation, right? So there's two small changes to to that to the website that the attackers made. Number one, they included this, right? Which is just saying, if you're back, if you're using Firefox on Mac, you're good to go. The the bit about if you're using anything that's not a Mac, we think is, while we looked when we saw this code, we looked and said, do they have more exploits?  That'd be really cool. We don't think so. We think there was only the one exploit. We think that that was more around op sec, than it was around target selection, so that a person who visited on Windows, right, is going to see nothing really weird. The username password won't work because there's nothing hooked into the form on the back end. But it's like, Oh, that's weird. I wonder what happened, right? As opposed to if you're on Mac, now if you're on Mac, and you're on Firefox, or sorry, if you're on Mac and you're not on Firefox, what you get is this, right? Oh, so sorry, your browser is not supported. Please install Firefox and continue, right? And almost to a person, every person who actually went and installed Firefox and passed this step said some variation of, Oh, I just assumed it was a weird academic thing, right? It's a university.  That's almost to the person. That's what folks said. So you go ahead and do that, and you visit the site, and then this is the second thing they changed. They injected that script at the very, very bottom. That's the actual exploit code. Well, that's the reference to the file that contains the actual exploit code. We're not releasing the ODA yet until more and more users get on upgraded versions of Firefox and users are slow at patching. So Analogs Fit is an attacker-controlled domain. This one was registered on the 28th of May, so right before the campaign started, it does nothing but host this JavaScript file. It wasn't involved in C2, wasn't involved in anything else. It's just nothing but host this. Let's see. So sort of I'm lumping together for the exploitation installation C2. So you visited that. Your browser was exploited. It was a nice clean exploitation. We didn't we didn't observe much of the way of crashes. It seemed quite stable. What happened is your browser would shell out to curl, download stage one, right? So stage one was a variant of the Netwire family. While it is technically a full-fledged rat, the attacker seemed to use it for mostly recon, basic pillaging, and then deciding if they care enough to send stage two down the wire. Stage two is a variant of Mox. The attacker seems to use as a full-fledged rat. We see activity indicative of hands-on keyboard. So at this point, we're not talking automated exploitation. We're seeing somebody somewhere behind a computer telling this thing what to do. One of the difficulties as we advance out of this and into sort of actions on target is that it took us about, so we got our alerts essentially here, right? So when the ODE landed and the shell to curl happened, we started getting paged by our loading systems. So the attacker was only active in a place where we could see them for about 20 minutes, tip to tail in this incident. So they didn't have a lot of time to do post-exploitation activities where we could see them, pluses and minuses there. We have had some access to other systems where the attacker was there, was present longer, but we don't have real-time EDR shall logs from those. We have sort of Deadbox forensics from those things. So we don't really know everything we would hope to know about what the attacker was doing after the initial breach. But we do know a few things. Number one, we know that they went after browser stored credentials, including session tokens. They pivoted, interestingly enough, they pivoted from the endpoint into the cloud. We saw several times, right? So from the endpoint, stealing session tokens, stealing credentials, using that to go into email accounts, online file storage, other cloud-based services was a thing this attacker particularly seemed to like. We saw a bunch of other weird stuff on a few endpoints, like applications that the user didn't recognize that were suddenly installed after the attacker showed up. But again, Deadbox forensics, it's really hard for us to start talking about intent and what the attacker was actually trying to do with that. There is a fair bit of Japanese language reporting on these attackers. So we released a blog post earlier yesterday about this as well and references this. I'm going to forget the name. But the Japanese search, basically, published a really in-depth write-up that goes much more in-depth into some of the techniques that these actors are using. And it really starts, it's one of the ways where we're sort of assessing these are linked actors is all the similarities we saw in the TTPs there. I feel like I'm stepping on something that's half broken, which is why this is happening. So let's talk about the attacker a little bit. Number one, based on open source reporting, we think they've been active since about 2016. We think, in fact, we know they're not covered as a named group by any of the threat intelligence companies that we've talked to. Some cover them as like unknown or unattributed groups in some ways, but no one has sort of named coverage of this group. We think this is the same from the breached coin check. That's the Japanese language reporting I was referring to was specifically talking about the coin check breach. Overlaps include the use of academic emails as fishing, the same malware, the same kind of lures and patterns and how they were reaching out to users. We think this group, lastly, has dropped at least half a dozen O-days since 2016, which when you think about it is actually quite a few O-days in the last three years. This Firefox O-day was by far the most interesting of them. The rest were like O-days in RAR or things like that, that were used, they were much harder to operationalize. We think this is the most interesting O-day. We've seen evidence of them dropping, but what this says to me, and this is why I said at the beginning, I think this is the most dangerous attacker group in crypto today, is a well-funded organized, the skill sets we saw displayed in that exploitation chain. That's not someone somewhere alone. That's a small group between the social engineering and the infra and the O-days and packaging all together. That's a small group. My guess, like looking at the code, looking at the structure, looking at the short development timeline on the O-days is that they bought the O-days, they didn't, I don't think they developed them. I could be very wrong on that. I'd say that's like low confidence statement, but because that cycle was so fast and because when you look at the code, it's nice, it's modular, it was done by somebody who's I think used to building these things before. That makes me suspect that we're dealing with a brokered O-day as opposed to an internally developed O-day. But if that's true, that means, and these guys have done six O-days in the last three years, that's a very well-resourced organization to spin that money for those capabilities. So very, very scary attacker group and not well tracked. So response, so shock, we did not leverage Magic Cyber AI to detect this attack. There were no blockchains involved in this attack, in detection of this attack, nor was there any machine learning. This attack was detected with essentially behavioral rules, right? Shit that just shouldn't happen. It turns out Firefox should not be shelling out to curl. It turns out that files probably shouldn't be executing from temp. It turns out unknown or in this case, unsigned processes shouldn't be touching.sh.ibus.genia.pg shouldn't be touching the keychain, right? These are behavioral alerts that literally any of us can write. The other reason we detected this is because we're fanatical about visibility. We treat endpoints that don't have security tooling like endpoints that have unpatched major vulnerabilities, right? We focus heavily on 100% deployment of our visibility infrastructure and that I think pays dividends broadly. The other reason, so that's why we sort of detected it. That's how we detected it. The reason it was a 20 minutes to containment incident for us is because we're fanatical about practice, right? So the thing I tell the team all the time is if you can't do it drunk at 3am on Christmas morning, you can't do it. Flat out, right? We don't practice it like that, although there have been some proposals. But seriously, this means playbooks. This means practicing. This means knowing your tools. This means finding the edge cases, finding the bugs in practice before you find the bugs in reality. I was in the military for about a decade and the saying we had was the more you bleed in practice, the less you bleed in war, right? Same concept here, right? The more problems and bugs and just things you find in practice, the fewer you're going to find when it actually counts and it's 3am on Christmas morning and you're drunk. Because that's not when you want to find bugs, right? The last thing and really this is more in the lessons learned side is that if anyone in cryptocurrency was laboring under the impression that an O day is not actually in your threat model and I will upfront say for most organizations, O day is not probably not in the threat model. If you're in cryptocurrency, O days are in your threat model. If you're not already planning for it, you should be today and you should already have been. And this means, right? When you're talking about O days, we're talking about layered defenses. We're talking about consistency. We're talking about high quality execution, playbooks, practice, making sure that you know what to do and can do it at a moment's notice. Or you can do it when someone's on vacation or we can do it when two people are on vacation, right? Without calling that person in the beach in Hawaii and saying, Hey, can you respond to an incident? Because no one is at their best responding to an incident on a beach in Hawaii. I promise you. A couple other things I'll highlight. And I think I'm blasted through this and I'm going to not delay the rest of the stuff too much. A couple other things I will highlight is interesting here. The use of personal email was particularly interesting as what the attacker targeted. The intent was clearly to bypass controls on corporate email. Great, that makes sense. The consequence, though, was that we saw several cases where targeted individuals felt prey and downloaded everything and compromised their personal endpoints in addition to potentially corporate endpoints, right? From a corporate incident response perspective, this is a big problem for me, right? Not only do I lack visibility on those endpoints, it's not always totally clear that the user even is going to know that they're compromised, right? And for most people, not everyone has great hygiene about separating work from private life. Even if they do, that kind of access can be leveraged in follow on phishing campaigns that will be much more effective as they're coming from these personal well-known email addresses as opposed to something else, right? So that I think is an interesting thing. Again, we talk about this in red teaming a lot, right? An actual red team can't go target your personal life. An actual attacker probably prefers to, right? Because of lack of controls. With that, I'm going to leave about 10 minutes for questions. I hope it's been useful. What I've tried to do, tried to leave you guys with is sort of a view into this actor. They are an actor to watch. Go read the blog post. Reference the reporting. If you can read Japanese, that's even better. If not, I'm sure it's going to get translated at some point soon. If you're in cryptocurrency, you should be looking at this actor, and then just a few notes on practice, practice, practice. I think security is about execution or anything else, right? With that, happy to have your questions and thank you all for your attention. And sorry for the AV issues. Go ahead. So I think instead of the very, very beginning, it's hide seven, HYD7. HYDSE, the word seven, that's what the Japanese reporting calls it. We track it as, we don't use the fancy names, we use just numbers. We track it as crypto three. Which one? HYDSEV. Yep. No, it was not. There was almost no use of obfuscation, at least on the JavaScript guide in these attacks, which is nice because then we're able to do things like look at the structure of the JavaScript and like make draw conclusions or at least form opinions on that stuff. Yep. Yep. No, it is not. Yep. Um, how do you mean generalized attack? So, so I would say it's part of their, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. So, so just to clarify, they, we saw no evidence of them going after the blockchain specific accounts. It was, it was all about email file storage. It was all about that stuff. Yeah. So this is clearly part of their post exploitation TTPs. Like this is just part of their playbook. It'll be my guess. Yes. I mean, they only delivered this O day to like five people. Just to be clear, right? This they started with 200. They wintered it down in the in the in the emails and they only picked about five to deliver the O day link to this was not mass exploitation. This was highly targeted. They were not they were not after your wallet. They were after they were after my wallet. Quite frankly, in the context of Coinbase. I don't know enough about how many mask stores data, but my guess is yes. No, so it was a it was a broad broad swath of cryptocurrency companies. So about 20 different companies were involved among the 200 people. We have relatively limited visibility into into some of this stuff. So we know we know they threw them at at least one of our users. We know they threw them at other users, not not at Coinbase as well. No, absolutely not. So because they're they're looking at browser token theft, right? So they're not stealing your credentials. They're stealing your session token. Right. So you've already logged in, even if two factors in place, it depends on your two factor, right? And when what what exactly are you using? So so they're not they're not like this isn't credential phishing. This isn't something where they're trying to impersonate you per se. They're on your they're on your system. They can steal your session tokens. They can they can steal your cookies. They can impersonate you in that way. But even more than that, right? They're they're more than likely had we let this intrusion continue what we what we would have seen was internal network pivoting and seeking out internal systems documentation, like fairly standard post exploitation stuff for a group like that. Sir, I don't know. We think we think there are attacks we can we can attribute back opensource tax we can attribute back to them back to 2016 or so. We think they did the coin check breach. In this attack, my guess is if they bought that Oday, they spent between half a million dollars and a million dollars on that, depending on lots of factors. But like I said, this this group is I think under researched, and there's not enough light on them really from to have for me to be able to say, sir, in regard to traffic phillips to work with. We do. So I mean, a when this happened, we went public with it immediately, shared the hashers, actually the IPs. And and we look, I'm not I'm not Mandy, I'm not CrowdStrike. I make no money from having private threat intelligence, right? I get I derive all my benefit from sharing this intelligence as widely as humanly possible. So hence, hence this basically, and hence, hence the work we do directly with with other cryptocurrency organizations. Yeah, sir. Yeah. Well, in this attack, I don't believe I don't believe they made any money on this attack, although I could be wrong. There may have been other organizations that lost the lost funds to them in some way or shape or form. So so in this attack, they again, this is this is my guess. I'm guessing they spent between half a million and a million dollars putting this together. So this was this was a loss to them. But if they were the ones to the coin check breach, they got away with about, I think it was $500 million in NEM, the sum of which they were actually able to convert and take take with them. They've been active in cryptocurrency so long that my my assumption is they're essentially self funding at this point. And like the million dollars they lost here was like, we took a swing, we failed, we'll do it next time. Yes. Can you share any details about your run after you got the alert, how you responded to it, especially when there's so many potential things were such a good one? Yeah, so so fortunately, the attack was highly targeted, it ended up on one one endpoint, right? So that we were able to a go the general shape of that is we went we went broad and then deep, we said, okay, here are the indicators, here's the malware, here's the hashers, here's the IPs. Is this present anywhere else in our in our entire ecosystem? No, outstanding. Let's take it, let's take a much deeper look at this. So we were able then to pull the endpoint logs and say, okay, what files did these processes touch, which is which is how we can gain certainty on like what they were getting access to before we quarantine the machine. And then based on that, we said, okay, they probably got these things, we don't know if they exfiltrated the data or not before we quarantine. So it's just roll all those credits. And and move on from there. We were also able, thanks to some quick action from the incident response team, to this is how we pulled the OD code directly from the site, right before they knew we were responding, we detected and were responding, we're able to set up a pre existing VM analysis VM infrastructure with with burp sitting in front of all the connections, go pretend to get exploited, just like the same user is clicking on it from another device, basically. And it happily tried to re exploit us, we happily snagged the the zero day from there. And then report the Firefox, actually, I forgot to give Firefox a shout out, they were incredibly, incredibly great in this entire process. They got the first they got the the the the first day was patched the the the same date note the next day. The second OD was passed the same week. The first one they'd already been working on fix on the second one, they, they, they went from never before hearing of this thing to shipping a patch in under a week, right? Very, very impressive. They were they were a joy to work with. Sir, yeah, we're gonna share the slides later. And then, of course, we have, we were ripple and and us like happy to happy to share whatever else you want to you want to hear afterwards. Yep, right. I actually don't want to share that quite frankly. So so the the we do use an MSP for for tier one. We also do independent detection on that same data feed for for stuff that we feel is more targeted to us. Maybe maybe last question. Or no. Outstanding. Thank you all very much.


So, last time we had this alternate world generator maybe I can just abbreviate it this time as AWG alternate world generator and we have um let us say an input side get this out of the way here. We have an input side and an output side and on the input side we get information from let us say a tracker um let us say maybe just a head tracker head tracker if I can make that go into this AWG um maybe a game controller it does not matter what in particular I am putting in here I just want to give you kind of a high level view of the um of the system um keyboard maybe I can put a hand tracker in whatever else. So, there is information going into this the alternate world generator has to use this information to make some kind of updates to the renderers. So, for output see there could be a um let me write it first um visual renderer and then eventually this goes out to a visual display and we talked about different examples of that and it does not really matter which sense. So, we can have another one as an audio renderer audio renderer we get an audio display and I want this to continue onward for other senses. So, if you want to have a haptic renderer you can have a haptic display that gives you force feedback if you like right. So, the job of the alternate world generator is to maintain this kind of fictitious or remote or recorded whatever kind of world it is it has to kind of maintain a lot of the physics of that world a lot of the geometry and physics of that world in such a way so that you can output to these renderers which then output to the displays which then output to your sense organs which then fool your brain right. So, that is the idea. So, we have to figure out what goes into this alternate world generator has the main part of the software challenge here. So, here is another way to look at it if we had a little bit of geometry I can say imagine we are super imposing alternate and not really sure what to call the world that you are actually in. So, the alternate world and the local world maybe I will say local real world kind of emphasizing local the non alternate world all right. So, think about superimposing a. So, somehow there is an alternate world that is being generated by the alternate world generator I want this to be really geometry here. So, there is an alternate world and in this world there are you know maybe furniture around pieces of furniture around obstacles of some kind right. So, there is stuff in the world in this alternate world and then this kind of story is being maintained that is fooling your brain that you are being placed into this world. So, somewhere you appear in this world. So, you maybe have your own kind of region where you are able to move around. So, your head has been transformed into this world embedded into this alternate world. So, your head is here and you have your eyes looking out in some direction here and they are kind of like virtual cameras looking out and as you take your head here and move around there should be a kind of perfect correspondence you are moving around inside of here. This yellow zone is where there is a kind of super position or overlay between the local real world and this alternate world or kind of virtual world that you may be constructing could be virtual could be real, but it is the alternate world. So, there should be a kind of overlay here between the two and there is interesting things happen if for example, you are moving your head and all of a sudden maybe this is one of the obstacles here this should be a top down view.  If you have haptic feedback it could smack you on the head right. If you do not what is supposed to happen? It is a difficult problem. So, you have to figure these things out right or maybe you just want to grab on to the controller and move your character around move your virtual self around. If you do that what happens when you come to these? You need collision detection you need something that will tell you know you cannot go that way or maybe you want to move right through it that is the physics of this alternate world you have to decide on what the physics of this world is going to be based on your task and based on things like comfort. It might not be very comfortable to just start passing through walls all of a sudden or it may not be comfortable to just have your virtual self abruptly stop in the virtual world because there is a wall that may not be comfortable. It is difficult problem and I will help you to understand why that is as we go along. In fact, I started talking about motion.  So, you are moving around inside the virtual world, but in the physical world you are also moving around that is this yellow zone here and maybe you cannot leave the yellow zone in the physical world. If you can then you have a larger super position problem right maybe you are in an enormous region in the physical world and you can walk around in there with a headset on you are being tracked that is fine you have to deal with again this whole problem of if you can really walk around. So, this yellow region is larger then you could interact with all kinds of obstacles it ends up being an interesting challenge right maybe a better experience overall, but you have more challenges. So, I want to talk about different kinds of self motions and then we will get on to the sensation and perception part which is the final part of the bird's eye view. So, self motion is a very important concept in virtual reality called ego motion or self motion. So, there are two kinds of self motion. One the user moves and the motion is matched in the alternate world right. So, if I turn my head in the real world in this alternate world I am also turning my virtual head and the two should match perfectly right. If you do that all with zero latency there is no delays everything is very accurate everything is optically done correctly, audio is done correctly if all those things are done perfectly that should be very comfortable and very convincing to your brain. The other motion is not through an interface an example would be a game controller the user locomotes or moves it is virtual self. So, in this case you are not moving in the physical world you are just grabbing on to a controller and maybe moving a joystick. So, a little bit of motion, but then you are moving your virtual body through space perhaps very quickly. So, this case you can see is quite different right.  So, that means you are convincing your brain that you are actually accelerating moving along a different velocities and that is where the discomfort part comes from and that is where simulator sickness starts to get really bad. So, to distinguish between the two if you do faithful reproduction of the motions perfect in the local real world and match that to the alternate world you get the number one case here which is considered generally very comfortable and if you do the other case where you grab on to a controller and move then it can be quite uncomfortable and there is a lot of interesting research in how to make it comfortable because you would like to be able to sit in a chair and travel over long distances in virtual reality rather than having to walk there right. So, there is a lot of motivation, but it does cause sickness in many cases if you do not do it well and it is very difficult almost impossible to solve in many cases to make it completely comfortable. So, that is one of the things that people are struggling with. So, case number one to summarize that is where the head is moving inside of this box and case number two is when you are moving the entire box right in inside of this alternate world. Questions about that? Some examples of alternate world generators game engines are the number one example that people are using right. So, we are going to use one game engine in the lab Unity 3D unreal engine is another one. So, game engines great there is other possibilities you can make your own game engine and what if we are own simulator right you can make your own alternate world generator as just a kind of simple simulation environment right you may want to hack it up in python for example you know you do not have to do something that is as complete as a game engine and also keep in mind that if you choose to use a game engine for virtual reality you are abusing the game engine. The game engine was designed to make games on screens and there are virtual reality integrations of those, but fundamentally it took many many years to develop game engines lot of trial and error and now there is being adapted to VR. They were not optimized for VR on a screen you can do this number two motion very easily and nobody complains too much, but in virtual reality people are complaining a lot. So, it was not designed for that the entire experiences need to be redesigned what we would like to have is not a not a game engine, but a VR engine a virtual reality engine. I do not think anybody knows what that is going to look like yet, but that is what is really needed and if we have a virtual reality engine that can support the kinds of things we want to do over and over again in virtual reality experiences will be in very good shape. For the time being we are just leveraging the existence of game engines to make the software easy. So, the game engine is this AWG I talked about the alternate world generator. If you have a robot with a camera and you want to do telepresence then you do not have exactly the situation do you? You do not need a game engine what you need is some way to maintain a panoramic representation while you are out moving around. So, that is different it is not going to be a game engine you probably want to hack something special for it. So, there are a lot of different possibilities and you should really think about when you need to start from scratch or when it is best to just use a game engine. Since this is a two week course we will just use a game engine and make it easy, but if you want to for your project use something much more lower level and optimize it all yourself then I would say go for it you know and get the experience.


Russia turns the Black Sea into a battlefield. United Kingdom Defence Intelligence has reported on the deployment of the Russian modern Corvette Sergei Kotov in the Black Sea after the failure of the grain deal which may indicate an increase in the risks of violence in the Black Sea. British Defence Intelligence's data indicates that the modern Corvette Sergei Kotov has been deployed to the Southern Black Sea patrolling the shipping lane between the Bosphorus Strait and Odessa. The analysts assume that there is a possibility that this Corvette will be part of a task force to intercept commercial vessels that Russia believes are headed to Ukraine. As UK Intelligence states, the Black Sea grain deal initiative had been preventing outbreaks of hostilities in the Black Sea. However, there is now the potential for the intensity and scope of violence in the area to increase, the Defence Ministry added. The UK has been working closely with Turkey on restoring the Black Sea grain initiative, said British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. We would continue to use our role as chair of the UN Security Council to further condemn Russia's behavior, he said in a statement. Russia was increasingly looking to target merchant vessels in the Black Sea area and the UK was carefully monitoring the situation alongside our partners, he added.


A very good evening aspirants, welcome to the Hindu newspaper analysis brought to you by Shankar IAS Academy. Today's date is 13th of January 2024. Now before getting into the news article discussion, I have an important announcement for you. Shankar IAS Academy's Problems Fitness Test Series of 2024 Batch 1 is going to start on 22nd January 2024. The test will be conducted on daily basis and it will cover a total of 63 tests consisting of 37 half test, 6 revision test, 7 full test and 10 CZ test. It will also cover 3 mock test as well. You can give the test both on the online and offline modes. You can also choose to write a 50 questions test paper or a 100 questions test paper depending upon your preparation level. So enrol as soon as possible and check your progress in your problems preparation. So with this happy note, let us look into the list of articles for the day. These are the list of articles that we are going to discuss today. Aspirants, you will not get video for the next four days due to Pongal holidays, but the articles will be covered in the subsequent days. So now let's straight away get into the first news article discussion. This news article talks about the inauguration of the Mumbai Trans Harbor Link by our Prime Minister. During the inauguration address, our prime minister mentioned about the various infrastructure projects completed by the current government. So this is about the article given here. So in this news article discussion today, we'll see some points about the Mumbai Trans Harbor Link Bridge. So the official name of Mumbai Trans Harbor Link is Atal Setu Nihava Seva Sea Link. The total length of the bridge is 22 kilometers. It includes a 16.5 kilometer ceiling and it includes a bridge on land at both sides, totally having 5.5 kilometer in length. This extensive bridge is the longest over the sea in the country. It comprises a twin carriageway six lane bridge over the Tane Creek in the Arabian Sea, connecting Savry in Mumbai to Chile in Rhaigarh district. The main objective of this project is to enhance connectivity within the Mumbai metropolitan region, especially to reduce travel time between Mumbai and Navy Mumbai. Apart from reducing travel time, it also aims to decongest existing routes and thereby promoting economic development in the region. Japan International Cooperation Agency or the JICA agreed to fund 80 percentage of the project cost with a remaining portion shared by the state and the central governments. The total expenditure of the project amounts to 21,200 crore rupees of which 15,100 crore is a loan from JICA. So now let's move on to the expected benefits of this project. See the first benefit is improved connectivity as I said earlier. According to a study by MMRDA that is Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority and JICA, the empty hutshell is expected to significantly reduce travel time between Savry and Chile from 61 minutes to less than 16 minutes. It will also improve connectivity to Navy Mumbai International Airport, Mumbai Pune Expressway, Mumbai Goa Highway and Javaharlal Nehru Port. In addition to this, the project is anticipated to enhance economic integration of Navy Mumbai with Mumbai. This will benefit areas like Panvel, Alibabaup, Pune and Goa. So these are the expected advantages of the project. Now coming to the concerns regarding the project. Firstly, the common commuters might find the bridge unattractive. This is because the expected toll rate for the bridge is Rs 250 for a one-way crossing. Due to this, the common commuter might find the bridge unattractive. Also there is no clarity about the availability of public transport. The absence of announced public transport facility like dedicated buses raises questions about the accessibility and concerns and convenience of the bridge for the common public. So these are all the concerns raised regarding the project. So in this news article discussion we saw in detail about Mumbai Trans Harbor Link Bridge, then its objectives and benefits. So with these learned points, now let us move on to the next news article discussion. Take a look at this news article. The news here is that the DRDO has conducted a successful flight test of the new generation, Aakash Surface 2 Air Missile. So in this context, let us see few important points about new generation Aakash missile which is in short called as Aakash NG. See Aakash NG or Aakash New Generation is a medium range mobile surface 2 air missile defense system. It is developed by the defense research and development organization in short called as DRDO. Currently, it is being produced by Bharat Dynamics Ltd and Bharat Electronics. It serves as a successor to the Aakash and Aakash IS series. It has incorporated significant improvements for enhanced performance. Talking about its important features, some of the key important features of Aakash NG include a dual pulse solid rocket motor, canisterized launcher and an AESA multifunction targeting radar. These enhancements aims to improve its probability of kill while reducing the ground operation and logistics footprint. Here the canister launcher makes the Aakash NG easily deployable compared to its predecessors. It is designed for improved reaction time. The deployment time is less than 20 minutes between transportation and ready to fire mode. The second stage of the missile features a dual pulse solid rocket motor. This is lighter than the air breathing ramjet engine used in earlier versions. This reduces the weight of the platform. The active electronically scanned array multifunction radar enhances the missile's effectiveness against targets with low radar cross section. Finally, note that Aakash NG has a range of 70 kilometer. This is significantly high when compared to the earlier version that has a range of only 25 kilometer. So these are all certain important features of Aakash NG missile. Remember both the Indian Army and the Indian Air Force are planning to intake this missile. So these learnt points now let us move on to the next news article discussion. Take a look at this editorial article. This editorial article talks about the facts and issues in the contemporary Indian police forces. The author of the article talks about the problems like lack of technological capabilities, political biasness and etc in a detailed manner. So in this news article discussion, let us understand some of the important points given in the news article using our mains answer writing approach. Now let me read all the question for you. Discuss the need and significance of police reforms in the recent context of rise in crime. See this question can be asked in GS paper 3 under the syllabus various security forces and agencies and their mandate. Now let us see how to approach this particular question. See the only keyword in the question is discuss. So in the introduction part, you can write about the importance of the police in India. Then you can tell a shocking act about the low police stress in the country. Then you can split the body of the answer into two parts. In the first part, you can talk about the need for the police reforms and in the second part, you can write about the significance of such reforms. Then in the conclusion part, you can write about the way forward by telling the recent initiatives. So this is how we are going to approach this particular question. Now let's start with the introduction part. Here you can write that according to Crime in India for 2022 report by NCRB, there has been an increasing trend of crimes in society. There is a 4 percentage increase in the crime against women and 8.7 percentage increase against children. It also highlights new types of crimes like cyber crime, crime against senior citizens, environmental related crimes and etc. This indicates the increasing importance of police forces in the country. Apart from this, a recent survey by Lokniti and CSDS found that less than 25 percentage of Indians trust the police. Now this has become a paradox because on one side the issues are increasing but on the other side public trust is decreasing. So it is in the national interest we should bring reforms in the police to increase the public trust. In this way, let us see the need and significance of the police reform in our analysis. So this way you can give the introduction and link it to the main body of the answer. Now coming to the first part of the answer, here you have to write about the needs for police reform. Firstly, there is a low police to people ratio in the country. See the sanctioned strength of the police was around 2.8 million in 2017 but only 1.9 million police officers were employed across the country. This shows a 30 percentage vacancy rate with a limited strength. They are also forced to do orderly and other jobs as well. This deprives the police of its strength. Now this first issue should be addressed. The second important issue is the issue of corruption in the police force. Police are going to be in contact with the people on daily basis. So it is very important to address the corruption issue in the police force. Thirdly, the psychological pressure in the force. See they are having little improvements in pay scale and promotion. This is also affecting their field deprived than other departments. Apart from this, the low rank personnel, they are often verbally abused by their seniors or forced to work in inhuman conditions. This is replicated in the increasing suicides among the police forces. Fourthly, lack of technological capabilities. See one of the reason for low conviction rate in India is poor quality of investigation by police. This is because in many of the cybercrime and white collar crimes, the police lack modern technological capabilities which are necessary to perform quality investigations. Fifthly, various other issues like biasness towards political masters than infrastructural issues. These issues are hinging the need for reforms. So you can highlight these points in the first part of the body and in the second part you can talk about the significance of reforming the police force. Firstly, reforming police force will strengthen criminal justice system in the country. See the reform will increase the capabilities of the police to investigate and put up a charge sheet. This will ultimately result in the lowering of pendency of cases in the country. Secondly, it will result in the optimal utilization of human resources. See we have more educated policemen in the lower echelons than before. Though this may be due to the high rate of unemployment in India, we can tap this resources for the betterment of the nation. Thirdly, the gender sensitive police force will be a panacea for the increasing trend of attacks on the women in the country. Note that we can use the idea of 33% women reservation in police to make it more gender neutral. Fourthly, the reformed police force will lead to increased public trust and increase in compliance. This is already evident from the NCRB data which says registration of cases witnessed a 4.5% decline compared to 2021. This means people are reluctant to go to the police station and complaint. We need to reverse this phenomenon by increasing the reforms. You can write these points in the second half of the answer. Now coming to the conclusion part, here you have to write way forward by stressing the reforms which has already been done and the need for new ones. For example, you can write that we can start by implementing the recommendation of second ARC. It asks us to separate the criminal investigation from other police functions like maintenance of law and order, establishment of state police boards and etc. Secondly, we can take steps to implement the smart police force plan of the central government. This will make the police force smart that is strict and sensitive, modern and mobile, alert and accountable, reliable and responsive, especially technosavy and trained. Apart from this, timely justice depends on the capability of the police force, so we should take immediate steps to address the lacunae in the police and increase their capabilities. So this way you can conclude the answer for this question. So in this news article discussion we saw in detail about why there is a need for police reforms in the context of recent crime and then we saw about the significance of police reforms. So these learnt points and let us move on to the next news article discussion. Now take a look at this news article. According to the news article, National Investigation Agency NIA has filed a charge sheet against four members of an Islamic State in Trishur Kerala. So in this news article discussion let us understand about NIA from the exam perspective. First of all what is NIA? NIA is the National Counter Terrorism Law Enforcement Agency of India. It was created after 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. NIA was created with the enactment of the National Investigation Agency Act 2008. It functions under the Ministry of Home Affairs. The headquarters of NIA is in Delhi. It has eight branches in Hyderabad, Guwahati, Kochi, Lucknow, Mumbai, Kolkata, Rajpur and Jammu. So what are the mandates of NIA? See NIA is mandated to investigate all the offenses which are affecting the sovereignty, security and integrity of India. Apart from this if an offense affect friendly relations with foreign states then it also comes under the mandate of NIA. Apart from this NIA investigates the cases against attacks on atomic and nuclear facility, smuggling of arms, drugs and fake Indian currency and infiltration from across the borders and etc. So what are the jurisdictions of NIA? See the NIA's jurisdiction extends to the whole of India and also applies to Indian citizens outside the country. It also extends to the persons in the service of the government wherever they are posted. Thirdly it also includes persons on ships and aircrafts registered in India wherever they may be. Finally it applies to the persons who commit a scheduled offense beyond India against the Indian citizens or affecting the interest of India. Such scheduled offenses are given here you can go through it. Know that the NIA was amended in 2019. This amendment has increased the mandate of the agency to include new offenses like human trafficking, counterfeit currency, sale or manufacture of prohibited arms, cyber terrorism under its ambit. Moreover it empowers the government to designate session codes as special codes to conduct trials of scheduled offenses. So with these learnt points now let us move on to the next part of the news article discussion which is the preliminary practice question discussion. Now look at this first question on the left side infrastructure project names are given and on the right side states are given you have to find how many pass given here is or correct. See the correct answer here is option C only three except the third bar all the others are correct the Dola Sathya bridge which is also known as Bupen Hazarika Setu is located in Assam. This is a bridge built across the Lohit river the bridge is the first permanent road connection between the northern Assam and eastern Arunachal Pradesh. So here the correct answer for the question is option C only three. The second question is about NIA three statements are given and you have to find how many statements given here is all correct. First statement says NIA was created in the aftermath of parliament attack of 2001 this statement is incorrect NIA was created after the aftermath of 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. Second statement says only central government can refer the cases to NIA. This statement is also wrong because the state governments can also refer the cases to NIA. Third statement says the director general of NIA is appointed by president. See this statement is wrong the NIA is headed by director general but he is appointed by central government. His powers are similar to the powers exercisable by a director general of police in respect of the police force in a state. So here none of the statements are correct so the correct answer for the question is option D none. Moving on this question asks you to find how many of the missile names or surface to air missile. The correct answer here is only three Trishul Akash and Barak all the three or surface to air missile Astra is a air to air missile Helena is anti tank guided missile it will be launched from air so it is like a air to surface missile. So the correct answer here is option B only three. With this we came to the end of the news article discussion if you like the video hit like do comment and don't forget to subscribe to Shankara IS Academy see you on 18th January.


In this video, I'm going to show you how to enable the Ecamm Live virtual camera for Discord so that you can bring in all of your Ecamm goodness into your Discord servers or indeed anything you happen to be a member of. So let's jump straight on into it, shall we? And this is obviously, first of all, a feature of Ecamm Live with the virtual camera and virtual mic. So what I'll do is I'll just come into my live demo mode, obviously making sure that you do have this switched on. This is, by the way, a feature of the pro level of Ecamm Live. So I'll just have to mention that, but just make sure you've got your virtual camera on and also the virtual mic if you want all of your audio to feed into Discord as well. Assuming though that you have done that, then with things like Zoom and Microsoft Teams and things like that, it is simply then a case of just selecting those as your input. However, for Discord, there is one extra little step that we have to do. And that is we need to add a little bit of code into the terminal.  Don't be afraid. If you are not someone who uses the terminal, it's really quite the simple thing that we're going to do here, and there's nothing to be concerned about. First of all, I should say, what is the terminal? Well, in the good old days where things were overly complicated and you did everything by text, they had the terminal, which is basically where you could type in different text commands to do all sorts of different things. And that was, in essence, until the graphical user interface came around. That was the way to actually navigate around computers and do things with them. So this isn't going to be a terminal channel, but let me just show you what the terminal looks like. And the way you can find this, by the way, is just do a spotlight search for terminal, or you can look in your apps, and you will find terminal.app, so do a search for that. This is the terminal, and it looks something like this. Pretty boring looking, just a box for you to write some text in. And what we need to do is we need to enter a particular code snippet in here that is basically then going to enable the camera for Discord. It's a bit of a workaround. We used to have to do this in Teams, actually, until Microsoft finally updated Teams so that it was no longer required. Presumably at some point, Discord will be doing something similar. Now the code snippet that we need to enter, if you get your pen and paper ready, is this one. Did you get it? I'll leave it down in the description as well, but that is what it looks like. So it is quite a long thing. You're just really going to want to copy and paste this rather than try and write it down or anything like that. But what we want to do is we want to paste that into the terminal. So back over in the terminal, you would just literally paste that in here, just like that, and then you would hit the return key, and then it's going to say, please enter your password. So we're trying to do something at the system level here. So it's going to ask for your, this is your Mac password, so your login password. Or I should say, administrator login password. So you need to enter that. And then once you have done that, then you'll be good to go. Now I say that if you've got Discord open, you may need to restart Discord. You may even need to reboot your computer. Your mileage may vary. But certainly having Discord shut when you do this and then reopen Discord afterwards is the way to go here. Once you have done that though, then you can go into your Discord. And when I say your Discord, you may very well happen to be in my Discord with a bit of look. So if you aren't already in my Discord, in my community on Discord, then you can head over to takeonetech.io-discord to join up there. Once you are in Discord though, and if you are going to join voice channels or things like that, which also have video, I mean, they've got to get their naming convention right there. But then down at the bottom where you see your name, here you've got mute and deafened. So these are controls for actually when you're in a meeting or a call or a voice channel, whatever. But you've got this little cogwheel here, which is your settings. Click on that one, the user settings. And then from here, what we want to do is we want to come down in the user settings all the way down here to app settings and voice and video. Click on this one, and then here we've got the input devices. So input device, e-cam live virtual mic, the output device. So that is going to be the speakers or the headphones or whatever it is that you're using. And by the way, just have to mention this again, it's always better to try and use headphones rather than computers built in speakers or things like that so that you don't get any interference. That's not quite the right word.  So still as ever with Discord, as with anything else, good practice to get into the habit of using earphones. You can control the volume there, control your input volume. I haven't adjusted anything in here actually with the input volume just because I'm doing that all obviously on the e-cam side of things. You can do a mic check here. This again is for the e-cam live virtual mic. And just to recap, what that does is it not only brings your microphone through e-cam into Discord, but also any sound effects or background music or anything like that that you've got would also then come through too. Then we're going to scroll down here. And from here, you can see that we've got the camera setting. And all we do here is we set e-cam live virtual camera from the dropdown list there. And that's it. That's it. Your camera is then going to be coming in or rather your e-cam live is going to be coming into Discord. And one thing about this though is occasionally Discord will have a software update or something like that. And it's almost as if it kind of breaks that little bit of code and you have to re-enter it again. There is a little shortcut to this or a little trick rather than having to think, now where did I leave that bit of code? Let me go back and find the code snippet. If you are not really a heavy terminal user and you've literally only just used it to do this particular thing with, if you come back over to the terminal and I've just reopened the terminal window, with your cursor here, if you just press the up arrow key, just like that, it will actually just put in the very last snippet of code that you entered. And so you will actually have the code already there. So you don't need to go and actually find and hunt for it again. You can just literally press the up arrow and it will bring that in. Thanks to Doc Rock for reminding me about that. It's one of those bits of knowledge that I've completely forgotten. And then he just said, hit the up arrow, you're done. So thanks for the reminder on that. But I hope that helps you as well because it means that if you, like I say, if you're not using terminal for anything else as most people, I guess, are not, then you'll always just have that little bit of code to hunt. Just press the up arrow and then press return and you are good to go again. Now that is just one small little thing about Discord. There is still a great platform for communities. I'll just say it again, if you haven't already then head over to takeonetech.io slash discord to join my server. But there is a lot of other great stuff to learn all about with Discord. And so over in the playlist on the right, you'll find a couple of my videos, but more importantly, some more videos from Keely at Discord Creators. So go and check those out.


Hello, in this video we will discuss conditional probabilities. So I have pictured on the screen various shapes of various sizes of various colors. Now if I asked you what was the probability of getting a yellow triangle, you see I have 16 different shapes of varying colors and there's only one that's a yellow triangle so the probability would be 1 out of 16. Now what if I told you find the probability that you get a triangle given that the shape is yellow? That's what a conditional probability is, that means you're literally just going to take your sample space and restrict it to the condition, in this case that means yellow shape, I said given that the shape is yellow and then you'll calculate the probability that the shape is a triangle. Well out of the four yellow shapes, only one is a triangle, so 1 out of 4. So the official definition is the conditional probability is the likelihood that an event will occur given that another event has already occurred. So we've seen this notation a little bit, you see probability of A vertical line B, that means find the probability of event A occurring given that event B has already occurred. So the formal formula for the probability of A occurring given that the condition that B has occurred is the probability of A and B occurring divided by the probability of B and the other formula is the probability of event B occurring given that event A has occurred is the probability of A and B occurring divided by the probability of A occurring. And unless you take some sort of fancy theoretical stats class later on in the future during your future degree program, you really won't need these formulas. The intuitive approach is the conditional probability of B given A can be found by assuming that event A has occurred and then calculating the probability that event B will occur. So basically you're going to shrink the sample space, that's what conditional probability is doing. You shrink the sample space based on your condition, based on the given that condition. Shrink the sample space, I can't emphasize that enough. So there is a difference in calculating the probability of A occurring given that B occurred and finding the probability that B occurs given that A has occurred. They're both two separate events, so the fact that one occurs before the other does make a difference. Incorrectly mixing these up is called confusion of the inverse, I just wanted to tell you there is a difference. So refer to the table to find the probability that a subject actually uses drugs given that he or she had a positive test result. So given that he or she had a positive test result, that's your condition, you need to shrink the sample space. That means you only want to look at positive drug tests, so everything else is obsolete, all the other numbers are obsolete, they don't matter for this question. Your condition, your sample size is reduced to positive test results only. And calculating the probability that a subject uses drugs, given that, the vertical bar for given that, they have a positive test result. So there's what, 50 positive test results, so out of the 50 positive test results, remember that's my newly refined sample space, how many use drugs? Well that would be the 41, 41 out of 50, also known as .82. So the key is to shrink that sample space down. A couple wishes to have four children, find the probability a couple will have a boy as their fourth child, given that, there's that word for conditional probability, given that the first three are boys. Is it the same as getting all four boys? Assume boys and girls are equally likely. So I want to calculate the probability, the fourth child is a boy, given that the first three are boys. Well when a couple has four kids, my condition is that the first three are boys. So what is my refined sample space? What is my shrunk down sample space? Because there are 16 outcomes total when you have four children. Well the refined sample space is the given that the first three children are boys. So I have the first three children are boys and the fourth child could be a girl. I have the first three children are boys and the fourth child could be a boy. Those are the only items in my refined sample space. There's two items total. Refined sample space, how many are all four boys? Just one. So one out of two or .5. The question is how does this compare to getting all four boys? So without the condition, the probability of getting four boys would be, there would be 16 outcomes total.  And only one of those, if you were to list them all, would give you all four boys. So that would be one out of 16. So clearly the two probabilities are not the same. That condition does make a difference. That's why we have conditional probabilities. Well, we have a lady who has the following collection of hardcover and paperback books, both fiction and nonfiction. She randomly selects one of the books to read. Calculate the book, probability the book is hardcover. Given, there's the word given, it is fiction. So my condition here is given that it's fiction. So we need to shrink the sample space down to just fiction books. So we only care about fiction books. Nothing else matters. Don't care about any other numbers, just those that are fiction. So my notation is the probability of book is hardcover. Given that, vertical bar, it is fiction. We restricted the sample space to the 11 fiction books only. That's my sample space. So of those 11 fiction books, how many are hardcover? Just three. So the answer is three out of 11. Or 0.2727. That's the answer to the question. So conditional probability means shrink that sample space down. Make your life easier. That's all I have for now. Thanks for watching.


Once we give away our power to anything in the outside world, anything that is not within our own mind, our own emotions, our own reactions, we lose. We automatically go into victim and blaming mode. And then we take on this notion that everything is happening to us and not through us. And look, it's not to say that there aren't things in your life that have molded your mind or given you trauma, but it is your job to learn and bring that awareness in and understand those things so that you can work with them, so that you can grow from them, so that you can learn from them.


I want to state the obvious, but it's been quite a year. Yeah, it was scary, right? I was scared. I didn't know if we were at the beginning of the movie Contagion or not. So personally, at the beginning of the pandemic felt like a train hit our household because I have two young sons. My husband and my two young boys were also working from home. All of us at home having to change the internet plan because the bandwidth was not enough. What if there's an extended lockdown? Do I have the resources I need? Does my family have it? Does my community have it? Day by day, it got easier, but I vividly remember that first month just feeling like the floor kind of went under me and I wasn't sure how we were going to manage it. I learned to cook. I hated cooking before the pandemic and now I love to cook because it's like a way for me to relieve stress. The need for strong civil society organizations at the local level was more critical than ever. And the lockdown again in this part of the world means 70% of the population that relies on daily wages in terms of them going to work and these were real life issues. In some instances, life and death. It happened almost overnight. It was literally like one week we were in the office and the next week we were locked in our houses. At the early stage, I think a lot of the Japanese MPOs or NGOs were in shock. And we've all had to change the way that we work. We had to shut down the office on Friday and an on-profit called us on Monday and said, I have everything at the office. The server, the files, the emails because they were not in the cloud. Everything was at the office. Probably they were saying, yes, we'll leave the technology investments for later. Is that the pandemic came? We started with the most basics. Food. Food and security became a big issue. People are frustrated with COVID coming. It depends the poverty that was already there. COVID-19 and the subsequent damage it has heaped on us as a society and as a nation may take a few years to heal, particularly those who live on the margins. Once we had the basics covered, now we also went into supporting organizations who didn't have the technology tools making sure that they have things like airtime just to make calls, laptops because again, most of them had desktops. Because of the lockdown, they were not able to access their offices. We just had to learn in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic how to adapt to the situation. How can we keep a community running or keep a community alive when all we have is this? Our team felt overwhelmed because it's like you have to go, you have to work from home. Your lifestyle is changing and at the same time, your workload is increasing a lot. The demand for the program skyrocketed. It was like the nonprofits that we serve realized during one weekend that they needed to move to the cloud, that their technology investments were not enough before the pandemic. The ability to problem solve collaboratively was really important during the pandemic. Every decision about like a whole new ball game. And what we saw across the network happening is people just turned on everything they had for the community. You could see partners starting to engage and takes up Italy, provided the space and was able to advocate for us to get funding from one of the big funders there. Sometimes what organizations just needed to know is that they weren't in it alone. We realize that today talking about digital doesn't just mean getting a new tool or starting to do something that wasn't done before, but it really means continuing to play a fundamental role for the group. One of the things that's been really wonderful about the last year is seeing our corporate partners and our foundation supporters step up and really contribute to our TechSoup COVID Recovery Fund. The COVID Relief Fund came out of a few conversations and then within like two months we had two and a half million dollars. People were just asking, how do we help? How do we help? They came to TechSoup to say, how do we respond across the network? And we did. We've been able to use that money to get needed technology into the hands of hundreds of NGOs in 17 different countries and in collaboration with seven of our partners to this really important cause. And so that's been really inspiring to see. We never thought of ourselves as a frontline organization when disaster strikes. And this was a unique situation of which infrastructure was actually the frontline of response. Having people with different perspectives be able to dialogue together was I think an important source of support to provide the community and that the community also provided us as people working directly with them. We're trusting the intelligence and community and strength and resilience of people on the ground. And when they say they need resources, I'm not judging them because their ask wasn't like ours. And we got to spend and focus time with organizations who were doing things on the ground to really make a difference. And personally, that was really validating to me and it felt like the best use of my time. Every time I was thinking, okay, I have two kids at home, how do I justify making sure that I'm spending my time more most effectively? It felt like an easy decision. I knew that what I was doing was helping build a better place for all of us and for my children especially. Some people talk about organizations thriving. They're serving more people than they ever have before. They're doing more of this than they ever have before. This is because more people are hungry than have been before.  And there are all these students that aren't going to school, they're not thriving. They're doing what nonprofits do, which is they're showing up for their communities in all the ways that they know how. Can we pull through that and say, hey, here's some things that we learned that we want to be able to do so that we're more prepared next time?


Oh my goodness, this would be terrifying. And so this person had posted this in the group and I was like, they sold it for $1,000 and I was super excited to share it with you guys. But it looks like we got this for $2.50. Bought a new cord with lights for seven. So total $9.50 into it. Listed high, took a best offer of $574 plus 168 shipping. Hey, Bolo buddies, thanks for watching. On my little pony. Amazing, right? All right, let's get started. Hey, Bolo buddies, thanks for watching. All right, in this video, we are going to talk about big money Bolo's items to be on the lookout for items you can hopefully buy low and sell for a profit. These items come from other resellers just like us and they are all in my Facebook group. I posted this in the Facebook group. It says share your best November Bolo and they commented. So I'm going to share with you their big money Bolo's. I'm going to tell you where they got it, what they paid for it and what it sold for. This is my Bolo buddies Facebook group. If you're not in it, definitely go join. I will link it down below in the description and look for the December share post under the featured announcements section. All right, let's get started with the first Bolo. Found at the bins, which is the Goodwill outlet where you pay by pound, paid less than 50 cents. After seeing Courtney's, aka Bolo buddies, that's me share about the goodie hair clips. I picked up these just in case these could be worth something. Took about a month. So these are a vintage 1989 goodie 10 hair doodles. What's a hair doodle? Ooh, that's what they look like. So over $25 plus shipping on Mercari. So I have not heard of a hair doodle. Now, what I can tell you is the stay tight clips, the ones that look like faux tortoise shell that are three inches long, be on the lookout. Those go for big bucks. I've also sold a goodie pick. I've sold other goodie things, summer bread and butter, summer big money, but all of them are definitely worth picking up for the right price. I bought on Facebook Marketplace an entire vintage sealed Barbies from 1980s for $900. About 40 Barbies plus loose dolls, furniture, and other toys. So I would say $20 or less for vintage Barbie 1982 Barbie McDonald's sealed, Barbie McDonald's sealed, ooh. Sold for a best offer of 449 and positive feedback received, thanks a lot. This is, looks like from Canada, somebody in Canada sold this. So I don't know what that conversion is to US. Let's see. Yeah, it says 449, so I'm not sure. Does anybody know? All right, let's move on to the next one. Still a big money bowl over guard list even after the conversion, I'm sure. I found these at a barn clean out tag sale in Connecticut paid $20 and sold within 24 hours for $125.  And that's what it looks like, beautiful. I picked up this Thomas Blackshear's wings of innocent figurine off Facebook Marketplace for $6. Got it in a lot, listed for 165 and took a best offer of 150, sold within 24 hours of listing. So this is what it looks like. It is a limited edition first issue, wings of innocence. All right, got this at my local Goodwill for $1.75, sold on auction for 100, less impressive than the $1,000 comp, but not bad. Okay, so this person had posted this in the group and I was like, they sold it for $1,000 and I was super excited to share with you guys, but it looks like he put it up for auction and it only sold for 100, which is really unfortunate because in this situation, here's what I would have done. If I would have seen that this comped out at $1,000 that one sold for $1,000, I would have started my auction at $999.99 and if it didn't sell, I would have put it up for a buy it now even higher, probably at $1,500, ran my 30% off sale and sent offers to watchers and likers. But sometimes auctions are not the way to go. What I tell everyone is, if you are going to do an auction, put that auction at the lowest you are willing to take and maybe they were happy with 100. Maybe 100 is what they hope to get out of it, but if I saw comps that high, I definitely definitely would have started that auction high and that's what they said, auctions are unpredictable. I was given several totes of Beanie Babies for free and told to do what I wanted with them. Oh, the Beanie Babies. Let's talk about the Beanie Babies. This one might surprise you guys. I actually saw this in the feed and asked them to please share it up under this post because I wanna share it with you guys. I know we talk about how Beanie Babies don't have any value. There are some out there that have some value, okay? Are there a ton? No. Do you have to know what you're looking for and kind of be like an expert? Yes. This one's pretty cool. After significant research, I sent five away to True Blue Beans in Texas for authentic... Ah, can't say this word. Authentication. I can say authenticate, kinda, kinda. To get often, whatever. You guys know what I mean. Anyway, this is one of the Beanies that was all the word again. I'm authenticated. I just can't say it. I cannot say it. I'm sorry, guys. It just sold the other day. Only one remains from the five I had authenticated and listed for sale. All have sold for north of 70 apiece. It looks like this one is the Rex Beanie Baby, third generation swing slash first gen tush tag. Whatever on earth that means. See what I mean? You really have to know. But this one sold for $215. So that's pretty darn good. Are these selling for $10,000? No, but can some of them still be a bolo? Yeah, I think $215 is definitely a bolo. I just happened to stop at a sale in an industrial park. Let's see. The husband and wife had torn down homes for 30 years and she always cleared stuff out first. This was tucked on a shelf in one of the three buildings. Averaging the bulk out, it cost me 33 cents. Sold it for $95. It's a rare vintage Mattel Angel Bunny Cuttle King plush sealed in the box. This Bratz doll sold on Mercari for $120. I paid $4 at a flea market after fees I made about $90. This is what she looks like. There's no other information. So I don't know the name of the doll. You can take Google Lens and identify some of them, especially if they have on their original clothes. But yeah, some of the Bratz dolls can definitely do well. Also monster high. So. Empoli glass decanter paid $5 at a thrift store. Listed it yesterday for $425 and woke up to two offers. I took the highest offer of $395 this morning. Buyer hasn't paid yet. A couple sold over the summer for 500 plus, but mine had a chipped stopper. The bottles alone sell for 200 plus. The last one, similar to mine with a chip stop stopper sold in October for 385. Will update with, will update when if buyer pays. Buyer asked for extra time to pay. I said, okay. And they paid on Thanksgiving day. Wow, this is what it looks like. I'm gonna read off the title. Rare vintage Empoli, icy pink, hobnail, squat, genie bottle decanter with stopper. So those are some great keywords there. Oh boy, here we go with this name, this eBay store name. This is what it looks like. Booty, good joy. Did I get it right? Oh, I don't think I did. But anyway, this is her eBay store. I will link it down below. Found this deep in the Goodwill Benz, looked interesting, so I threw it in my cart, two pounds, so $1.89 a pound, so less than five bucks. Listed it at 75 and took a best offer of 70. I love all things Egyptian and this was amazing. Dirty, but amazing and still sold for 70. Southwestern, shaman, sculpture, 19 inch, copper, burlap, wrapped, rock, crystal base. That's what it looks like. I bought this vintage Raylight Electric Light Up Musical Church. It plays Silent Night at a thrift store for $1.99. It had no light cord. I picked up a light cord at this antique mall for a dollar and I sold it on Etsy for $62. The woman who cuts my hair, I always love Jerry's stories. The woman who cuts my hair knows I resell. She said she had a box of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that belonged to her kids and did they have any value? I told her they most likely did and I'd love to take a look at what she had. She said she had some other things there as well that she did not know what they were. She said, I could come to look. And when I did, the other box was totally full of Lego Bionicles. I bought the whole lot for 30. She was happy for the price. I have been selling it off and I am hundreds of dollars into the profit. This set of two Bionicles sold on Mercari for $149 plus shipping. Yeah, I have done really well with Bionicles also. If you can identify them and they are complete, some of them, the older ones, especially can be a big money Bolo. These are the ones he sold. And it looks like he's got Makuta and Takanovu. I don't know the numbers are there also. So if you have the Lego set number, that really helps as well. So awesome Bolo. Bought this at a live auction last November.  It was buried under flowers. When it came time to bid on it, I was certain there'd be a fight for it. Apparently no one else thought to dig out of the flowers because we got this for $2.50. Bought a new cord with lights for seven. So total $9.50 into it. Listed high, took a best offer of $574 plus 168 shipping. Had original box with it and just Frankenstein boxed around another, around that box. Sold in nine days. So it's a 1977 Empire blow mold Santa sleigh to reindeer from Carolina Enterprises. And it works. So I bought it at a flea market stand, running a half off sale for 15. Okay, so she got it for 15. I saw the sold comps were higher than what I listed, but the box was in rough shape and there were supposed to be little plastic stands for the birdhouses to sit on, but they were missing. So went lower with my asking price and the customer paid in full saying she had one as a kid and was going to replace it to Ching. It is a Mr. Christmas Disney Mickey's clock shop, Cuckoo Clock's movement and music tested. This sold for $279.99. And anything Mr. Christmas, definitely look it up. This one doesn't scream Mr. Christmas to me because I see Mickey's. So I more see Disney when I look at this box. So definitely look over those boxes. I picked this up at my local thrift store for $2.10. I could not find another one like it. I listed for what I thought was a high price. It sold within an hour, or I'm sorry, within a half an hour with five watchers. It sold for my full asking price of 279.99. I may have underpriced it, but I am thrilled with the profit I made. I carved a form out of styrofoam for shipping and held my breath. Oh yeah, this would be hard to ship. Thankfully it arrived intact and I received positive feedback as my buyer was thrilled. Don't pass up the glass. It takes a bit longer to pack, but it's worth it. Oh my goodness, this would be terrifying. If you guys don't know, like I do not like to ship breakables and this looks terrifying. Viking rare bleak blue. I don't know if I'm saying that right, but you can see it in the title here. Vintage glass coral tree jewelry ring holder 279.99. That is fantastic. Paid zero. Took a best offer of 55 the day after I listed. A lady gave this to my son at a garage sale and I told him we could probably sell this and I'd give him the profits. Before anyone judges me for selling something, he got for free. He is nine and he is always giving me toys and things to sell when he doesn't want them anymore. I've been reselling since he was two. It's a vintage Lisa Frank all-in-one stationary pack, cat's pen, paper and complete set. I'm guessing he probably really wasn't too interested in stationery, so there you go. It's Lisa Frank, definitely a bolo, $55. Been working on cross listing and have had this in my eBay store for a while. Cross listed this and sold it on Poshmark for full asking price within a week. Picked it up at a thrift store for five bucks and sold it for 117 plus shipping. It looks like it's new in the package and it's the Dukes of Hazard Dodge Charger. So what I do is I list my items on eBay and then I cross post them to Mercari and Poshmark with List Perfectly. If you don't know what List Perfectly is, it helps you cross post your items. It makes it so much quicker. I do have a demo video down in the description. You guys can check it out. It's kind of a how-to. It is a how-to. And if you like what you see and you wanna try it, you can use coupon referral code BOLOBUDDYS, all one word, that will get you 30% off your first month. If you're not on Mercari and Poshmark, there's also referral links down there. In the description, you'll get $10 credit to shop if you join with my Poshmark referral link and you'll get $10 if you join with my Mercari.  So those are all referral links. I appreciate if you use those, those help me out. I get money to shop on Mercari and Poshmark. Christmas is coming. We can all use free money to shop, right? So now is the time to sign up for Poshmark and Mercari. And one thing that I've told you guys before, but if you're new to my channel, Poshmark and Mercari, and eBay more recently started doing this also, have you guys got the notification on eBay where the money that's sitting in your pot to be transferred to your account that you can now spend it on eBay? That's what Poshmark and Mercari do. And I always say that that is like a huge thing and a good reason that you should sell on Poshmark and Mercari because a lot of hobby sellers sell on those platforms and they sell on those platforms so that they can use that money to buy from the platform. They use it as a credit just to purchase things. So it's people that are not going to eBay. They're not even looking on eBay. So they're not gonna find your item unless it's on Poshmark and Mercari. So that's kind of what I have to say about that. And it looks like eBay is kind of following suit with that. So what do you guys think? I know for me that money is getting transferred into my bank account.  Is anybody using this new feature? Is this out to everyone? Or is it just kind of something that they're trying out with certain sellers? Let me know down in the comments if anyone is using that. And again, that list perfectly video is down below and all of my links for things I use, okay? Stubs and Wooten, Stubs and Wooten. Never heard of that, loafers. Picked up at the Goodwill for $5.99 and the buyer paid $112 plus $8 shipping. And this is a Poshmark sale and I love how they did this photo, you guys, right here. Do you see how it shows the picture and the title? Like one time I posted a picture of a Bolo I sold on Poshmark and they're like, what is it? I'm like, what do you mean? It's right there. And then I'm like, oh, it doesn't have the title. So this is very helpful. It looks like it's some sort of needle point loafer. Picked up at the Goodwill for $1.80, $1.80, $1.80 Tater. Buyer paid $60 plus $13 shipping. It looks like, I have no idea where this sold. Is this maybe grilled? I don't know, but it's a boys vintage car heart, brown canvas, zip up fleece. If you are watching, let me know in the comments where you sold this car heart. It's a kid's car heart. So $1.80 into 60 is fantastic. Found this at a thrift store for $7. Really cute. It winds up and her leg comes out of the tub to grab the coin. Sold for $47 in about two weeks. And this comes from Champagne Taste 73 and this is her eBay store.  Here is another one that she sold. It is a coat sweater in a boat. She got it in a boutique at Virginia Beach. She said, don't remember what I paid for it as I purchased it in the 80s. She just sold it for $55 plus shipping and it is going to California. So this is what it looks like. And the title is just vintage sweater coat, 1980s oatmeal color, perfect. Sold a vintage 1995 rare Star Trek the next generation figure for $254.95. Most Star Trek figures are $10 to $20 but this one was only available for a very limited time and it's one of the rarest in the collection. My dad paid $7.99 for this when it first came out and we are splitting the profit. Not exactly sure where he bought it but probably toys are us. And it's right here, the Star Trek, the next generation redemption, Lieutenant Data red shirt, very rare. We bought this for 50 cents at a yard sale about a year and a half ago. I originally had it listed for $69. It always had several watchers. I know the price was high but mine was the only one like it at the time. It's so small and it took up no space so I wouldn't lower my price. About a week ago I saw a commercial on YouTube for tech deck fingerboards so I thought maybe they were making a comeback. So I raised my price to $75.99 plus shipping and it sold on eBay for full asking price in about a week. It is a BAM Marguera Element Techboard, Fingerboard Skateboard, $75.99 on that. All right, we've got new member here, piece of scrap on YouTube. She is also over on Instagram and her Instagram posts are great as well so follow her over there. Paid $3.75 at Goodwill, sold on Poshmark for my full asking price of $79 plus shipping. It is a Nike Windbreaker Jacket Vintage and this is what it looks like. Paid $3 on a YouTube auction from Auctions4U and you guys hear me talk about Donatella Bottolino and Auctions4U, I buy from them on their YouTube auctions. So basically what they do is they have selling events on their YouTube channels where they sell to resellers. They buy like huge wholesale lots and then they wholesale stuff out to resellers and this is a, I believe it's a record. She said, paid about $3, sold for full asking price in about six months, sold for $52.48 cents. It's the Miami Sound Machine self-titled 1980 and this is what it looks like. And that one comes from mom knows treasures and this is her YouTube channel. Definitely go and sub her up, she is fantastic. And let me know in the comments which Bolo was your favorite Bolo. And if you're new here, tell me how you found the channel and I would love for you guys to subscribe. So if you're new here and you're subscribing, go ahead and let me know down in the comments. Thanks so much for being here and thanks for watching. She paid $3.75 cents for this at the Goodwill and sold it on Poshmark for, oh my goodness, let's try this again.