Item SCP-173 is to be kept in a locked container at all times. Two persons must maintain direct eye contact with SCP-173. The object cannot move while within a direct line of sight. Object is reported to attack by snapping the neck at the base of the skull, or by strangulation. Is this thing on? Is this thing on? Okay, it's broadcasting. This is Dr. Theron Sherman. Is anybody out there? Can you read me? I'm gonna have to risk it. Okay, we are in the middle of a situation. SCP-173 has... Okay, okay. I will do this as professionally as I can. I am going to read from the revised entry for SCP-173. Now, it opens with a transcript of the inciting event. So...  John Avery, presently known as D-5933, shouted at the other D-class in the cell.  Came the reply. This worried John, as he was staring intently at SCP-173, and the other D-class was standing behind John, facing the other direction. Then John heard the worst sound any human being had ever heard. A sneeze coming from six inches behind his head. For a second, John remembered an episode of Mythbusters he had seen before being arrested, before coming here, where he tested to see if someone could sneeze with his eyes open. He never saw the end.  Fuck! John managed to get out. SCP-173, Addendum 1. On f***ing, SCP-173 appeared to multiply, producing two identical copies. Two D-class personnel were killed. It is unknown how this process occurred. Each instance of SCP-173, now labeled SCP-173-1 and SCP-173-2, is to be moved to individual cells, each following original containment procedures. SCP-173, Addendum 2. On f***ing, a second multiplication event occurred. SCP-173-1 through Dash 4 are to be contained as per original containment procedures. Objects reclassified as Keter. SCP-173, Addendum 3. Security breach occurred on f***ing. Assuming a simple geometric progression, at least 61 copies of SCP-173 are as of now unaccounted for. It is unknown how they replicated so fast, or how they replicated all. Video evidence of the containment breach shows multiple instances of SCP-173 working in unison across multiple cells to achieve the breach. Most of the instances still in captivity appear to have formed a rear guard, blocking Foundation agents from pursuing other instances. It is theorized that SCP-173 has a hive intelligence, where intelligence scales with number of nearby copies. See Revive Security Procedures for containing SCP-173 copies. Revive Special Containment Procedures. All copies of SCP-173 are to be contained in form-fitting metal containers and sent using SCP*** to the now abandoned Foundation facility on the Moon, there to be fitted with tracking collars that will detect if any of them leave the Moon. SCP-173, Addendum 4. SCP-173 has caused a breach of secrecy for the SCP Foundation. Estimates at this time are roughly 500,000 civilian deaths across North America in the last 48 hours due to SCP-173, and hundreds of thousands of sightings and pieces of video evidence. Major television news programs have obtained video of SCP-173, and are providing instructions for avoiding instant death. Dr. Phillips? No, wait, Matthews? Oh god, Clef? That s*** gears! Oh Jesus, Kentucky? Oh f***, Bright, he's in charge of the containment. SCP-173, Addendum 5. SCP-173 has besieged and destroyed four Foundation facilities near simultaneously in the last 24 hours. Each instance shows the characteristic strength exhibited in the original, and thousands working in unison are capable of ripping open concrete bunkers and compromising foot-thick steel doors. Research is ongoing to find a way to combat this threat. Personal log of Dr. Bright, date redacted. I've been killed 37 times in the last week. They can smell me, somehow, regardless of what body I'm in. The majority decision of the remaining 05s is that this is an XK, and they're going to deal with the problem, or the Russians are. They're evacuating the space, which means there won't be a single Foundation scientist anywhere in the New World. They said they're going to try to evacuate the surviving civilians, but I doubt it. There can't be more than a couple hundred people in all of North America. The only good news is that about 150 of the bastards teamed up and ripped SCP-682 apart. Brought a smile to my face. Revised Special Containment Procedures. Containment Zone X-1, formerly North and South America, is to be denied access. Following saturation nuclear bombing on f***ing, number of SCP-173 instances has been reduced. All available Foundation resources are to be redirected to monitoring the ocean to ensure the integrity of Containment Zone X-1. Foundation adjuncts from national navies are to perform around-the-clock patrols and sonar sweeps. Detected instances are to be contained and removed to SCP f***ing for transport to the lunar containment site. SCP-173 Addendum 6. Verified sighting of SCP-173 in f***ing Wales, the United Kingdom. Nuclear bombardment authorized and executed. No survivors. This concludes today's broadcast. Please like, comment, subscribe and hit the bell using your encrypted YouTube account to boost this signal. And support the broadcast at patreon.com.site42. Godspeed, everybody. Shit.


Did you like the way they portrayed you? well first of all That's their movie Got it. So it's not for me to like or not to like it's for me to support So yeah, so when you when you basically get discovered by Dr. Dre and he really liked the way you guys are vibing You end up going up to and I'm fast for going up to the West Coast And as you're on the West Coast, you know easy easy was just he wasn't even easy that he was gonna be You know what I'm saying not yet not yet, but he was still that easy eat at the streets new easy Oh, he was easy and let me ask you this before and I don't want to miss nothing But now that when it pops up my mind I have to say it like when when they portrayed you in that movie. Did you like the way they portrayed you? well first of all That's their movie Got it. So it's not for me to like or not to like it's for me to support. Okay So when I look at it do that Do that scope Like that, I loved it. Okay. The movie did well. It did. Well, I watched it I didn't help people like me to know some history Yeah, so you and you can't put a lot of people a lot of times we've talked to on this panel say this didn't get put In or that didn't get put in but you can't capture every single thing in a moment in time in a movie That's right. So, you know, I definitely like what you say when you say just to even put the story out Like she said the book on it though. Is there a book? No, because the reason why I asked that if there's a book because a lot of people always say The book always tell way more and give you more information than actual movie So that's the reason why I'm like, it's there a book that's gonna give us more information about the real story I'm gonna pull a DOC to the side and we And I'm gonna be like Pim and Keny Boosie


I'm Charles Scott King, WNEW News at 9 Minutes Past 10. Time for Sears Radio Theater. That's the theme from the Sears Radio Theater. Tonight, a program of adventure with Richard Widmark as your host. Here's a preview. You can't be thinking that it's a spaceship and a submarine. The principle is the same. If we could find where they keep those spaceships, I think we could figure out either how to fly one or how to fire its weapons, or even both if we have enough time. The Sears Radio Theater will begin after this message from your local station. Yeah, that was about two weeks after Dad had his stroke. Did he have high blood pressure? Don't know. He's going a little better now, but he can't speak too well. Has trouble walking too, doesn't it?  You have high blood pressure? I don't know. I feel okay. I'm not high strung like Dad. Whether you're high strung or low strung, whether you feel just fine or not, has nothing to do with high blood pressure. High blood pressure is a major risk factor in stroke and heart attack, but it has no obvious symptoms. It can only be detected by a simple, quick and painless test. The American Heart Association also wants you to know that black Americans as a group are more likely to have high blood pressure than whites. We don't know why, but high blood pressure can usually be controlled if it's detected. For more information, contact your American Heart Association. We're fighting for your life. This is Richard Widmark. The Vigilant is a modern surveillance ship. She's equipped with the latest and most sophisticated electronic equipment available. Her mission? To monitor all radio transmissions within an undisclosed, far eastern area for the next 60 days. The Vigilant is en route due to arrive at her assigned position in 18 hours. She carries a crew of 30, 10 officers, 5 of them women, and 20 crewmen. She is commanded by Captain Adam Bricker. This routine assignment is about to become one of the most unbelievable oddities ever told. Captain, I have something I can't quite make out. Well, let's hear what you've got. Now listen to this. It seems to be shadowing us, sir. A whale? I don't think so, sir.  Okay, keep an eye on it and let me know if it stays with us. Lieutenant, you can evasive maneuvers now. Yes, sir. Come to course 250. Coming about. It's still with us, sir, and it's beginning to close. And do you find out if there are any subs in the area? Calm one. Calm one. This is the Vigilant. We're requesting any known targets in our vicinity. Over. It's really closing fast now, sir. It'll probably surface about 10 degrees off the port bound. Calm one reports no known targets, except if we're 200 miles north of our position. The satellite shows negative as well. Sir, look. At 11 o'clock. What the? All stop. That's a spaceship. Chief, come here. Sir, what do you make of that? Biring it, sir. Is it a laser? Captain, look. The crew. They're frozen. They're disappearing. It's all blue. Everything is blue. Captain, that's only the beginning of our story. Sears Radio Theater, a new adventure in radio listening. Five nights of exceptional entertainment every week brought to you in Elliott Lewis production of The Sears Radio Theater. Our story, The Odyssey of the Vigilant by David Chomsky. Our stars, Greg Malavy and Meredith McRae. The Sears Radio Theater is brought to you by Sears Robot and Company. Sears, where America shops for value. When my brother was my age, being in style meant wearing old jeans and about a pound of dirt. But today, us guys are more sophisticated in our style. And that's why Sears has style works. A guy can pick up on the latest styles in jeans, tops, sweaters and dressier clothes like vested suits. I can depend on the style workshop at Sears for just about everything to keep me looking great. And the prices? Pretty reasonable. My folks like that. Style works. 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Available at most larger Sears retail stores in the Catalan. March 15th, the vigilant was found floating adrift with no sign of anyone. And we were no longer aboard the vigilant. Where we were, where we were going and what we were going to do were questions without answers. None that I could supply anyway. Chief Stone was the first to come out of whatever state of unconsciousness we were in. Captain Bricker, Lieutenant Cramer. Chief, are you all right? Yes, sir, I'm fine. Captain, do you have any idea where we are? I'd say we were aboard that thing we saw. A spaceship. But how? Look at this room. There are no doors or windows. It's not some kind of metal, as if we were inside a metal egg. There's no light source, but there's still light. Where's the rest of the crew? Why did they only take the three of us? They probably just separated us from the crew. Where do you think we're going? I don't know. I never believed in flying saucers before. Chief, what do you make of that noise? Chief? Chief, are you all right? I'm fine. I was just remembering it. Never mind. It's their propulsion system, I think. Where did this UFO come from? Why did it capture us? Where are we going? What are they going to do with us? Don't think about it, Eve. We'll find out when they're ready to tell us. See if you can find a sliding panel or something. There must be a way out. What? Feel this. It's warm at this spot, but cold everywhere else. You're right. What do you think? Could it be something of heating system? No, I don't think so. There's our door. That was a solid wall. It can't just disappear. Instant molecular recombination hasn't been... Captain! Captain, look at that orange glow at the end of the corridor. We're not going to learn anything by staying in here. Let's follow it. It's moving away from us. Is that the thing that brought us here? Captain, it's going into that room. I mean, should we just be following it blindly? I imagine that's what we're supposed to do. What if it's some kind of trap? You act as if we have a choice. And the floor, it's opening. I don't know. It looks like some kind of capsule. It's opening. Do not be alarmed of this vessel. I demand to know what's happened to my crew. Please, Captain Bricker, I will answer your questions. But do not take such a harsh tone. I do not appreciate it. How do you know my name? We know all about you. As for your crew, they are all here aboard this vessel, in chambers similar to the one you were in. I can assure you they are unharmed. What do you want with us? Captain, all will be explained in due time. For now, let it suffice to say that you and your crew are being taken to Albion. To participate in a war, we are waging against the imperialistic dictator of Zabor. Until we reach Albion, I must ask you to remain in your holding room. You may follow the tracker. I want to see my crew. I'm sorry, but that's not possible. Now, I have other duties which require my attention. He's gone. This is unbelievable. I think we're supposed to follow that thing. Aliens supposed to look like. Whatever it is we're supposed to do, I don't like it. Neither do I. What do you say we take a long way back? What do you mean? I mean, we try to find the rest of the crew and figure out how to get off this thing. Should we make a run for it? On three, we take off to the right, down that other corridor. Ready? Understory or how not to underplay your underwear? Sears rips away the outside layers to reveal our best 100% cotton underwear from in. We won't understate the soft comfort that our finest natural comb cotton brings, nor will we underestimate the fact that it's shrinkage controlled to help retain shape washing after washing. Shoes from V-necks, sleeveless athletic shirts, or crew-neck t-shirts plus briefs, three-to-a-package, our best 100% cotton underwear. Greet the sun this summer. 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I was wondering how long it would take before you tried to capture my vessel. I must admit it was sooner than I'd anticipated. This is fantastic. You like it, Chief Stone? Chief? Surely you must be interested to see the control bridge of a flying saucer, as you might call it. Lieutenant Kramer, you look disappointed. Oh, do I? You are wondering why I don't look different from you. Well, yes. It never ceases to amaze me. Always the same question. It's very simple. Ours is a very common life form. It's very functional. But you can rest assured that there are other alien forms of life, less familiar forms, of which you will get your fill sooner or later. But that's another matter. Where is my crew? Ah, you didn't get a chance to see them before you launched your assault on the bridge here. What courage. You have proven yourselves beyond my wildest hopes. I never would have thought you to be so resourceful. What have you done with my crew? In a moment. Stand by to jettison holding pods. Understand, Captain, we have found when dealing with your kind that after we have selected the proper team, they become easier to handle when they are permanently isolated from any unnecessary specimens we may have collected with them. Jettison the pods. Those unnecessary specimens are my crew. You can't- It's too late, Captain. The pods have been jettisoned. But those were my people. Can't you bring them back? Captain, understand something. Suppose you were doing an experiment with ants. Say you have ten ants, but you need only three for the experiment. It follows you would select the three most suited and rid yourself of the other seven. Isn't that so? But those aren't ants. They're people. To you, yes. But then it would be the same to the ants. Captain Scammy. Take stabilizer. Report on anti-magnetic interference. Damage control reports. Hit in section 2J. Sustained only moderate damage. Report if- What happened? We're under attack. S-2-Hunt-1-Style-Z-5. Reverse the angle of defection and set the cathode pods to full range mode C. Sound the code three alert. I think it would be wise if you three would find something to hold on to. This could get rough. Stand by to fire on my command. Standing by. Here they come. Fire. Celebrate for parsec transfer. A direct hit on fighter number two. Good. You may be interested to know, Captain, these are Saborian fighters. You might want to study their combat strategy. It may prove useful to you later. A direct hit to section 12B. Half our engine power is gone. Stand by for parsec transfer. Standing by. Fire one more shot at fighter number one and then on my command execute parsec transfer. Saborian fighters closing. Lock on cathode pod. Locking. He's preparing to fire. He's fired. Fire and parsec transfer. We should be arriving on all the ends shortly. If you will follow the tracker, he will take you to your quarters. In the short time we arrive at our destination, Albion is a massive planet and we had a spectacular view of it and at 16 moons as we approached. We landed at a large spaceport and as we disembarked we're astonished to see buildings at least six miles high. Lieutenant Kramer, Chief Stone and myself were led into one of them and locked inside a room that was so large it had a kind of tram which ran around the perimeter to take it from one side to the other. We had been told we'd be meeting the grand proctor of Albion. We didn't have to wait long. The grand proctor was making his entrance. At least a hundred people proceeded him into the room and knelt as he arrived. I'd never in all my life seen or imagined a more bejeweled person. The gold which covered his body, the diamonds and rubies which flashed and sparkled almost hit him from our sight. But he was so ugly. I can't describe him in any other way than to call him a creature. He looked nothing like Canarkas, who appeared to be human. This glittering apparition was indescribable. He approached us and we stood perfectly still. Although I must confess my heart was pounding so fiercely I thought it might burst. Sears Radio Theatre will return after this message from your local station. Join hatching people everywhere Each of us can do Washington is crusade for children This year people of all nations are joining hands to improve the lives of the world's needy children. Through care you can provide the families of these children with the means to grow their own food, to build medical facilities, safer water systems and schools. Tomorrow's world is in our hands. Help make it a better place for all the children. Send your check room money order to care crusade for children overseas box 576 New York 10016 This is Lucille Ball here to make a personal appeal to every American. Since the 1880s the American Red Cross has been stepping in when there's been big trouble. Like a hurricane. But nobody has to tell you the Red Cross is there when a hurricane strikes. So let's talk about the other Red Cross, your neighborhood Red Cross. They teach kids to swim. That's good Eddie. And they train about every lifeguard on every beach. It's possible to look into it. We can get in touch with a local chapter. They help veterans get on their feet. They help people relocate after fires. Are you comfortable? Okay, now relax. They collect and distribute blood. They give a hand to the older folks in your town and do scores of other jobs. It's easy to see why we've got to have Red Cross and only you can keep Red Cross ready for the little emergencies in your neighborhood. And the big ones. Help keep Red Cross ready. A planet Alvion in a huge ceremonial hall. Captain Adam Bricker records another chapter in the astonishing Odyssey of the Vigil. This glittering apparition was indescribable. He approached us and we stood perfectly still. Although I must confess my heart was pounding so fiercely I thought it might burst. Oh, please do not be afraid. I know how I looked to you. After greeting so many of your fellow humans I know what you're thinking. But in any event, welcome to Alvion. Why did you bring us here? Oh, there's no hurry. I'm certain you'd like to get settled first and then we'll have time for all of your questions. I will not wait. I want to know now. Do not take that tone with me, Captain Bricker. Or you will deeply regret it. I do respect. My crew has been jettisoned into space. I don't know if they're alive or dead and you expect me to wait?  Always in a hurry. But then I suppose that's what qualifies you for this work. Very well. We shall have our little interview now. What has happened to my crew? They are dead by now. But that is a trivial matter. Let us get to what is important. The war with the Zaborians. You've killed my crew and you consider that trivial? Then you tell me that only your war is important to you? Precisely. I couldn't care less about your war. Oh, you should care, since you're going to fight it for us. You're quite mistaken, sir. We are not fighting anybody for you. Oh, let me explain something. We have evolved far beyond fighting our own battles. After all, the taking of a life is a very serious matter. What about my crew? I was speaking about Albion lives, not human lives. Albions have not known war for 3,000 years, except for a few space pilots like Conakas, who go into unincorporated sectors of the galaxy. But you see, he's been bred to fight because sometimes differences do arise between us and some of our neighbors. When it seems that a full-scale war is the only way to settle them, we simply collect specimens from other planets and have them fight the war for us. We've used your people many times in the past, and they've always proven to be excellent warriors. That's incredible. We've caused entire planets to fight amongst themselves. In fact, we've done that on your planet at regular intervals. It keeps you aware. Or if you prefer. Vigilant. On your toes, so to speak, since we never can tell when we'll need to call upon you. You're insane. Not at all. It depends upon how you look at it. We are not going to fight for you. We shall see. You will be escorted to your quarters now. If you need anything to make yourselves ready for battle, please let me know, and it shall be provided. And now, I have other matters to attend to. We were escorted to a luxurious room where we were served an equally luxurious dinner, which we all found difficult to eat. It was hard to believe what was happening to us. Yet despite it all, I must commend both Lieutenant Eve Kramer and Chief Lyle Stone for their courage and endurance during that difficult time. Neither one showed any sign of weakness. We remain together as a team. What are you thinking, Skipper? I'm just trying to figure this whole thing out. I feel like we're pawns. Well, games are often won or lost by pawns. Why should we fight for these people? We are not going to do any fighting, Chief. Doesn't look to me like we have much choice. Of course we do. We'll just refuse to fight. No. I think what we have to do is find a way to get off this planet to escape from here. Chief, when we were on the bridge of that spaceship, did it remind you of anything? No. Eve? I don't think so. Did you ever see any submarine, Duty Chief? Two years. And that was too too many. Do you remember the control bridge? You can't be thinking that a spaceship and a submarine... The principle is the same. If we could find where they keep those spaceships, I think we could figure out either how to fly one, or how to fire its weapons, or even both if we have enough time. I don't know. A submarine is one thing. It's easy enough. But a spaceship? We have no choice. We're just going to walk out of here just like that? You don't see anyone stopping us, do you? Chief, what's the matter? You look strange. What? Oh, no, no, no. It's nothing. I was just thinking about the spaceships. Captain, listen. And that sounds like Canarkis. Let's get a little closer. That's my report in all details. Canarkis, you have done very well. Thank you, sir. From what you've told me, they should prove to win an easy victory over the Zaborians. Never before have humans scored so highly. They are extremely bright and cunning. They are of a good breed. Humans are animals and they will not fail us. What are the latest scout reports as to the Zaborian movement on the planetoid? The Zaborians have not yet arrived. However, we have had unconfirmed reports of a convoy moving away from the planet and out of the solar system. Ah, good. Then they already expect defeat. Soon we will have conquered another race. This battle will be the turning point. Victory is within our grasp. Although it was broad daylight, we figured these people were nocturnal. It was a short trip to where we had landed and there we found several unguarded spaceships sitting on the paths. We entered the first one we came to. We can't do this. It's impossible. Don't be so pessimistic, Lyle. We have to find out how to switch on the main power. This is the power panel. These switches here. Are you sure? Yes, I'm sure. Okay, go ahead. That's it. Something's flashing here.  What do you think that was? An overload or some kind of overheating. But that's definitely the power plant. Chief. We were told to stay in your quarters. Chief, throw the switches. Step away. Not going back with you. I said move away from there. Leave us alone and I'll push this red button. You'll throw up everything for a thousand miles. You leave me no choice. Men, fire! We're stunned by some sort of ray.  When we came to this evening, and we were in the Grand Proctor's chambers, he was talking about something we couldn't quite understand. Not at first, anyway. You fools! Who do you think you are to take advantage of our hospitality?  You exist because we allow you to. Do you think you can disrupt us like that? This will not be tolerated. Who do you think you are? What gives you the right?  Leaching off other people. You! He was right. What he said about you was right. Careful. I can do the same to you. See? How do you feel? I'm okay. Are you sure? Yes, really. I have no time for any more of these interruptions, so listen closely. I went to great lengths to bring you here. It was not a simple matter. We are in a desperate struggle with Zabor. And it is imperative that all be on win.  Then why don't you ask us instead of kidnapping us? Ask you?  You will fight because it is your nature and because we tell you to fight. We fight only when we want to fight and only when there's no other alternative. Ah yes, that's correct. I forgot you need a reason to fight. Very well. You are fighting to keep men free. To be able to think as you please and to defeat the imperialistic dictator of Zabor. We are not fighting your battle. You fight it. You are very stubborn. Very stubborn. Look out the window at the sky. Over there, you can see the Orion Nebula. One of the stars in that group has exploded. Once a race of people very similar to you humans lived on a planet that circled that star. They refused to do what we asked them and so we caused their sun to explode to become a supernova. The point is, unless you fight for us, we'll do the same thing to your planet. Cause your sun to explode now. Why don't you go back to your quarters and think that over? Probably. How do you feel, chief? I'm alright. My hands and feet are a little numb, but I'm okay. What do they do to us if we don't fight?  But maybe if we don't fight, the Zaborians will win and they'll help us. And maybe the Zaborians are worse. I don't think we have much choice. I, uh...  What? Because of what's happened to her. I think you'll believe me. I know that they're capable of destroying us or anyone else they wish to. I know because I was one of the space pilots who escaped from the planet that circled the sun in the Orion Nebula. The planet they destroyed. I managed to escape with 100 men, women, and children. And we landed on your planet. You are both direct descendants of my people. Descendants? It sounds incredible, I know, but it's true. And now you must help me, as it has been my duty. It is now your duty to destroy the Alvion forces and liberate the planets which the Alvions abuse. I know you. I can't believe... Are we like you? Yes. You have evolved from what I am and from what my people once were. The blood which flows in you had its beginnings in me. I have said enough. We must rest. True? At first I tried to dismiss what the chief said as some kind of delusion brought about by the torture he'd undergone. And yet something inside me kept me from discounting his fantastic story. We all had a troubled rest, fearful of a big battle that lay somewhere just ahead when we would meet the Zaborians and clash in mortal combat. I love to eat. But it takes so long to cook. That's why we both love our new Kenmore microwave oven from Sears. I can cook a five pound roast medium rare in just 30 minutes or three strips of bacon in three and a half minutes on a paper plate. Bake two potatoes in eight minutes and cook vegetables faster than boiling them in water. That means less time in the kitchen. And more with you. Vast clean, cool cooking with Sears Kenmore microwave ovens, all with automatic defrost. Choose the right model for your kitchen from the many styles available at most Sears retail stores. On guard. Effective fencing demands style and endurance. 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We were escorted to a spaceship and flown to a small planet in a distant solar system. No one spoke to us and all our questions went unanswered. We assumed we were being taken to the battlefield and we were right.  We quickly disembarked and were let a safe distance away as another ship landed. This planet looked very much like home. There were trees and grass and in the distance I could hear birds calling. It was very different from Albion, which seemed like a concrete island surrounded by sand compared to this beautiful jewel. It hardly seemed the place for a battle, but the grand proctor stepped out of the second ship and quickly put an end to that thought. I hope we are all feeling well this morning. Today is the appointed day. A day that will go down in history. And now, let us begin. First of all, I am happy to announce that we have met with the Zaborians and laid down the rules. Rules? You never used rules before. We are a very civilized people. There are always rules. As to the size of the armies, we've been allowed to use all three humans and we have allowed them to use seven Zaborian warriors. Seven? That doesn't seem fair. We gave you a battleground you are familiar with. What is it that was supposed to do? It's very simple.  The first side to eliminate the other is the victor. How are we supposed to do that? We have no weapons. We are not allowed to offer you any assistance. Both teams are restricted to weapons native to this planet. We have to build our own weapons? Yes, that is correct. And now it grows late. The Zaborians are already here. I suggest you quickly go about fashioning your weapons and remember, we will be watching you.  I sincerely hope you succeed. One proctor and his escort left. They entered this spaceship and were quickly gone. We were alone, waiting.  Yes, I have. And what do you think? I'm still not sure. You must admit it's difficult to believe. I would have thought all of this difficult to believe. Yet it's real. But to think that we are aliens. No, you are not alien. You are my descendants. You have evolved slightly and adapted slightly. But you can't run away from who and what you are. But none of that matters now. We must fight the Zaborians and defeat them. Or else they will defeat us. The chief's right. What do we do? We need weapons. That smell in the air. Are you aware of it? Yes. What is it? Could it be the enemy? Listen. Listen, what's that? Chief, we must get out of this open field. Chief, I've been hit. My leg. I've got to pull it out. Lieutenant, take off your scarf and use it as a tourniquet. Okay. Hold still. Make it and try. Here goes. It's out. Captain, over there. Look, that must be them. Come on. We've got to get out of here. Help me up. Look, Adam, there are caves up there. Give me a hand with the chief. It seems to be keeping them away. Chief, put them legs. Dogs that can make bows and shoot arrows? Instead of treating me, you should be building your weapons. Let me take care of your leg first. Lieutenant, use some of those branches for bows and see if you can find some sort of vine for the drawstring. Yes, sir. I'll do what I can. It's still bleeding. Must have clipped an artery. Let me put this tourniquet back. After we win, I'm sure the Albions will fix you up as good as new. No. The Albions believe that only the strong should survive. They have no medicine. I'm still not sure I can believe this story of yours. I've been trying to mark it up as a delusion caused by your torture. It's not any delusion. It's true. You are my children. My children's children's children. Stretching back almost 4,000 years.   If so long ago, might it be even more beautiful? It was just before the end when I learned that they were planning to destroy our son because we had become rebellious.  I don't know where all the other people are. They could even be dead, but I do know that all the Albions must be stopped. It is something we have all found. And now you must find it, too. Captain, captain, here they come. Are the weapons ready? Yes, sir. Take one. They can't get us here in the cave. Just stay down. Now, let's see how well these work. Good shot. You hit one.  Try and scare them off. It's working. It's working. They're running. They're gone. Let's go out and look at our enemy. I think they went over this way. I'm right behind you. It's not a dog, and it's not a man.  We're not going to be able to hide from them. It's so big. It's huge. Look at those teeth. We'd never win at hand to hand. Come on, let's get back to the chief. When we got back to the cave, the chief was gone. We knew he couldn't get very far, usually digging a hole. I know how to get them. What are you talking about? I know how to kill the Zaborians. We can't. You should have seen them. It doesn't matter. We'll set a trap. Let me finish this hole. It only has to be a little deeper. But what kind of trap? There are still six of them. This is just a little hole. It's going to be a land mine. A land mine? I don't understand, chief. Listen to me. Do you remember that odor we smelled before? Of course. Do you smell it now? That's the enemy. It's those dogmen. No, that's sulfur. This soil, look, it's full of potassium nitrate. I brought some coals from the fire. Chief, we have to get back to the cave. They're coming. Wait. Don't you see? That's gunpowder. You mean you're making gunpowder? That's right. Then all we have to do is pile rocks and stones on top of it. And we have a land mine. Of course. We'll have to work quickly. Start putting the stones on with this piece of coal. Wrap it in my shirt and swing it so it catches fire. When they come near it, throw the burning shirt. That should set it off. Chief, look out. Behind you. Get away! He killed one of them. My God, they're running after him. He's leading them to the mine. They're on him. Swing the shirt. Swing the shirt. Throw it now. Even better than we expected. What happens to us now? Well, that is entirely up to you. We have no further need of you.  Your choice is entirely yours. Captain? We'll stay here. Very well as you desire. I wish you well. We were happy to accept this planet with its one moon and one sun as our new home. We decided to name it after the planet which had circled the sun that all beyonds had destroyed. The planet that the chief, our ancestor, called home. We named this planet Earth. I hope it can be said someday that Adam Bricker and Eve Cramer had many children on this Earth. Oh, here I go again. It's time to rent one of those steam-type carpet cleaners. Why rent? Now Sears puts power in a carpet cleaner you can own yourself. The power spray from Sears for easy home carpet cleaning.  You can see the dirt you get out. Dirt you didn't even know was there. The power spray carpet cleaner, a convenient carpet cleaner you can own yourself. Available at most Sears retail stores. Kenmore. Solid as Sears. I've been working with furniture for 25 years so I know about quality. And that's why I recommend a Sears Benchmade Sofa for your family. There's a heavy-duty hardwood frame braced to withstand stress. The coil spring construction gives long-lasting comfort and you can choose from fabrics and attractive solids or bright prints all treated with Scotch Guard brand fabric protector. Compare the quality of a Sears Benchmade with other fine sofas and you'll be surprised. Styling, durability and comfort. Benchmade. A great place to relax. Now at most Sears retail stores. Sears Radio Theater has been brought to you by Sears Robuck & Company where our policy is satisfaction, guaranteed, or your money back. Sears. Where America shops for value. The Odyssey of the Vigilant was written by David Chomsky produced and directed by Fletcher Markle. Your host was Richard Whitmark. Our stars were Greg Malavy and Meredith McRae. Also heard were Joel Meras, Marvin Miller, Jack Krushen, Myron Kane and Vance Colby. The music for Sears Radio Theater was composed and conducted by Nelson Riddle. This is Art Gilmore speaking. Associate director of Sears Radio Theater is Ken McManus. Sound effects were created by Bud Tollison. Joanne Thompson is production supervisor. And the recording engineers are Joe Wachter and Hal MacDonald. The Elliott Lewis production of Sears Radio Theater is a presentation of CVI.


Hi everyone, I am Chetan and I am going to present our paper on tree width separators and yaw-scarbling. This is joint work with current line and this is of pH. Our main source is that for william-soccus of size S and tree width W, yaw-scarbling is adaptively indistinguishable with only a loss in CQT, which is S to the O of W. As a consequence, yaw-scarbling is adaptively indistinguishable for constant tree width circuits with only a polynomial loss in CQT. So, what is tree width? Tree width is a notion from algorithmic graph theory and it is informally a measure of how far the circuit is from a william formula or more generally how far the graph is from a tree. And it is also worth pointing out that the loss in CQT is with respect to the underlying symmetric or encryption scheme. A few remarks regarding our result is in order. Firstly, Apelbaum et al. ruled out adaptive simulatability of the yaw-scarbling and as a consequence, our result is the best possible result one could hope for. Secondly, the fagolian mix proved adaptive simulatability of a closed variant of the yaw-scarbling, which we denote by gamma prime. And we can prove adaptive simulatability of this variant in terms of tree width as well. So, our results can basically be tuned slightly to achieve adaptive simulatability of gamma prime. This is the overview of our talk. In the first off, we will just make ourselves familiar with the various notions, with the various security models and also most importantly with the yaw-scarbling. And in the second part, we will talk about our reduction. We will keep it informal and explain the things on a very high level. So, garbling was originally motivated by a secure functional evaluation. So, here we have a party Alice who holds a circuit C and another party pop who holds an input x to this circuit. The circuit is from n bits to l bits and they want to jointly evaluate the circuit C on the input x. A trivial way to do this would be for either Alice to simply send her circuit over to Bob or for Bob to send the input x to Alice. But what we would like is for the respective parties to not reveal their information that is Alice does not want to reveal her circuit C whereas Bob doesn't want to reveal his input x. So, yaw suggested the following elegant idea to carry this out. So, first Alice completes the garbling of her circuit C and sends it over to Bob. Bob then retrieves the appropriate secret information regarding this garbled circuit from Alice and then Bob evaluates the garbled circuit on the garbled input to obtain the output C of x. So, garbling as a standalone primitive was formalized much later by Belary Hong and Raghave. So, they suggested the following syntax for garbling. It consists of three algorithms, a randomized garbling circuit algorithm which takes a circuit C and outputs a garbled circuit C and a secret key K. The garbled input algorithm is also randomized. It takes the input x and the secret key K as input and outputs a garbled input x tilde. Finally, garbled evaluation is a deterministic algorithm which takes the garbled circuit and the garbled input and outputs the output y. The main motivation for such a syntax was to separate oblivious transfer from garbling. It's also about pointing out that for our setting that is yaw's garbling, the garbled input is deterministic. As for correctness, it should hold that for every security parameter lambda and every circuit C and every input x, the evaluation of a garbled circuit on the garbled input should match the output of the circuit on x. And before moving on, it's about pointing out that the garbling of the circuit is independent of the input x. One could think of the whole garbling process being split into an on-line phase and an off-line phase. In the off-line phase, one generates the garbled circuit, whereas in the off-line phase, one generates the garbled input and these are being independent of each other. What about security? Recall that our goal is to capture the security requirement that the two parties involved in the garbling and also the respective information, secret information. And this is captured by the following game, which is called adaptive simulatability. It's played between an adversary and a challenger. The adversary first sends over a circuit C of its own choice to the challenger. The challenger tosses a coin B and depending on its output either outputs the honest garbling of C as above or a simulated version of the garbling shown below. The adversary next picks an input x and as before, the challenger either gives the honest garbling or a simulated version of the garbling. So, the simulator in this case is either two algorithms, this s-circuit and s-input. Finally, the adversary guesses outputs a bit B and wins if B prime equals B. As mentioned, the advantage of the adversary is defined as the probability with which he guesses correctly bounded away from half. The source of adaptivity in this game is the ability of the adversary to pick up x after the fact that he has seen the garbling of the circuit C tilde. And in the selective version of this game, he would have to output both the circuit and the input in a single go. Adaptivity is important in some applications like one time program. A weaker notion of security that we are interested in is called adaptive indistinguishability. In this game, the adversary sends over two circuits C0 and C1 over to the challenger conditioned on the topology of the two circuits being the same. The challenger next flips a coin B and sends over the garbling of the circuit Cb to the adversary. Next, the adversary picks two inputs x0, x1, again conditioned on the task being non-trivial, which is that the evaluation of C0 on x0 and C1 on x1 should be the same. The challenger sends over the garbling of the input xb. Finally, the adversary guesses a bit B prime and wins if the guess is correct. As in the case of adaptive simulatability, the source of adaptivity in this game is the fact that the adversary can choose the inputs after he has seen the garble circuit. It can be easily shown that adaptive simulatability implies adaptive indistinguishability using the standard two-step hybrid argument. Moreover, adaptive indistinguishability suffices for certain applications like some forms of symmetric key functional encryption. Finally, we explain Yaw's garbling. Recall that Yaw's garbling is built on top of a symmetric encryption scheme. The first step in the garbling process is to associate each wire w in the circuit C to a pair of secret keys Kw0 and Kw1. Next, Alice computes the garble circuit C which consists of two components, a garbling table and an output map. The garbling table is associated with each gate of the circuit and for each gate G, the garbling table encodes the gate table of the underlying gate G. For example, let's consider the AND gate in the example above. Here, the garbling table consists of four double ciphertexts of the underlying encryption and the outer and the inner keys of this used in this encryption correspond to the incoming wires, the two incoming wires to the AND gate whereas the payload to the encryption is one of the two keys of the outgoing wire denoted by six here. And so what exactly is the payload is determined by the gate being evaluated. For example, in this case, in the case of the AND gate, in the first three cases, we encode, we encrypt case 6-0 which corresponds to the bit 0 whereas only in the last case when the outer and the inner keys correspond to the one bit that's the only case when we encrypt case 6-1. Finally, we have the output map which takes each output wire and maps it to a bit 0 or 1. The goal of this output map is to help Bob evaluate the garbled input and it accessor guide to the decoding procedure. The garbled input X tilde is simply determined by the input X and the idea is to use X to choose the subset of input wires determined by this input that is for example, if your input is 0 1 1 0 then the garbled input simply consists of the correct keys selected according to the bit of the input. So, once Bob has the garbled circuit and garbled input how does he evaluate? The basic idea is to evaluate where the encryption what we mean by this given the garbled input he proceeds in a topological order he picks like each gate and then the garbled table of this gate and then he simply decrypts all the ciphertext by the special property of the encryption scheme it is guaranteed that only one of the ciphertext will decrypt correctly and this way he learns the output wire the key is corresponding to the output wire he proceeds in a similar manner until he reaches the output gates at which point he can use the output map to decode and figure out which bits the output really are not that the online complexity of Yau's garbling is more or less optimal since it only depends on the length of the input and also the security parameter. There is a close variant of Yau's garbling which we already alluded to called gamma prime where the output map is sent in the online phase therefore the garbled circuit consists only of the garbled garbling tables where the garbled input consists of the garbled input and also the output map. The drawback of this variant is that the online complexity now grows also with the output length for example if you use gamma prime to encode to garble a PRG which maps from n bits to n to the c bits and the online complexity now grows with n to the c and moreover as we saw in the first slide such a scheme cannot be proven adaptively simulatable for the original Yau scheme. So we have seen various security models and various variants of Yau so what do we know about the security of all these schemes? The security of original Yau scheme was initiated in the seminal work of Linderland-Pinkas they showed that gamma is selectively simulatable since this is the strongest possible notion in the selective setting it automatically implies the other notions of security in the selective setting. This was followed by the work of Appelbaum et al who showed that gamma cannot be adaptively simulatable so this was a corollary of a more general theorem which they proved which said that the online complexity of a randomized encoding scheme which is secure in the adaptive, which is adaptively simulatable must exceed the output length. As we saw in the description before the online complexity of Yau it depends solely on the input and not on the output. Jaffa Goli and Vicks observed that this is not true for the variant in fact this was their motivation to come up with the variant and they proceeded to show that this variant gamma prime is actually adaptively simulatable. There are some caveats here their security actually degrades exponentially with the depth of the circuit but they still managed to prove adaptive simulatability. But the situation with adaptive and distinguishability of Yau has remained open and largely neglected and we show in this work that there are some regimes where gamma is actually adaptively indistinguishable that concludes the first part of our talk. In the second part we will focus on our reduction as mentioned earlier we will keep it on a high level and largely informal. Since we've built on the works of in the previous works on the previous works of Glendale and Pinkas and Jaffa Goli and Vicks we will spend a few slides on these security reductions. Key to all these security reductions is the notion of garbling modes. As we saw in one of the previous slides the honest garbling table of a gate G it encodes the gate table of the gate G and this is what we call the real mode. On the other hand we have the simulated mode where instead of garbling the gate G we simply garble the constant zero gate. Therefore the payload in the garbling tables is always KW0 the key corresponding to the output wire which encodes the zero bit. In between these two modes is something called the input dependent mode. Here the payload is a constant but this constant is determined by the value of the wire when we evaluate the circuit on the input X so it can be constant zero on constant one depending on the value. Now that in order to simulate this mode the knowledge of the value of the wire W is necessary unlike in the case of real or sim. We would also like to point out that in the distinguishability game the real mode will consist of two real modes real zero and real one. For example real zero will consist of the gate in the circuit C0 whereas real one will consist of the gate in circuit C1 and for the input dependent modes there would also be two modes input zero and input one. For example input one will consist of the garbling table which is the constant gate but where the value is determined by the circuit C1 run on the input X1. So let's look at the selective simulatability game and the security reduction of Lindelren pink cars. So there are two main parts in this reduction the first is the hybrid argument where we progressively replace each garbling table with simulated ones and the second is a programming step where we program the outward maps so that these changes are indistinguishable to an adversary. How does the hybrid argument works? So we proceed in a topological order with some topological order and then what we do is we progressively replace each real garbling table with an input dependent garbling table as shown in this illustration. So why is it crucial to proceed in a topological order? So the idea is to ensure that before switching some gate to input dependent mode we want to guarantee that both its parents have already been switched to input dependent mode and why do we need this? This is crucial for the security argument to go through. We want to ensure that at least one of the keys of both the parents are free and this will help us embed the challenge key of the underlying SKE into one of these gates and therefore this step it can be shown indistinguishable on the cybertext indistinguishability of the underlying SKE and we go on switching the gate to input dependent until we have switched everything and then we switch the gates from input dependent to sim in the reverse topological order. Note that unlike the first step this step is information theoretic since the keys are used in a symmetric manner in the gates. Note that if one uses the default outward map the adversary can trivially tell like the hybrids from each other since it can tell us why the evaluation of the garbled circuit. Therefore it is necessary that in each hybrid we program the output map so that it maps correctly to the output CFX. Note that this is not an issue in the selective setting since the input is already available in the off-land phase. Note that this automatically implies adaptive simulatability but with the loss which is exponential in the input length. One simply guesses the input and then applies a selective simulatability reduction and we get adaptive simulatability. The whole point of our work and also that of Jeff Rogolian mixed is to avoid this exponential loss. So what are the hurdles to adaptive security? The most obvious problem is that the input act is only available in the online phase unlike in the case of the selective game. So this manifests itself in two ways. So first we cannot program the output map in the off-land phase since the input becomes available only in the online phase. Jeff Rogolian mixed basically sidestep this issue and resorted to sending the output map in the online phase. That's why they had to change the scheme and resort to the variant gamma prime. But what then was the ability to defer the programming after they saw the input? Our solution is different. So first of all we cannot avoid to defer sending news since we want to prove the security of the original protocol. Therefore our idea is to avoid steam mode in the hybrid cell together. This is based on our observation that the requirement to program the output map is closely related to the steam mode. The second problem that we come across is now how do we simulate the input dependent gobbling tables? We call that the input dependent gates. In order to simulate them we need to know the value of the wire, the output fire of these gates since the input is only available in the online phase whereas we have to send the gobbling table in the off-land phase. We have a dilemma here. So Jaffa Woli and Vicks solved this in a very clever manner and this was their main technical contribution. So instead of using a lot of input dependent gates as in the case of Linderland Ginkus what they did was they had a more frugal approach, they minimized the number of input dependent gates and then they went on to simply guess the value of these input dependent gates. In case the number of input dependent gates is not too many the security loss that results is not too much either. But the question still remains how does one minimize the number of input dependent gates? So what Jaffa Woli and Vicks did was they looked at restricted critical classes which kind of allowed you to use a few input dependent gates. An example for this is NC1 that is loaded circuits. Since we cannot... But this approach is tightly linked to the ability to program the output map. Since we don't have this ability we need a totally different approach and what our approach is to have a more divide and conquer based approach based on tree width and separators to reiterate. Since we do not have the ability to program the output map we have to avoid the SIM mode and this means we need a totally different approach to minimizing the number of input dependent gates. We believe this is our main technical contribution. There is a notion from algorithmic graph theory. Informally it is the measure of how far a circuit is from a formula or more generally how far an undirected graph is from a tree. The exact definition is not important. As we will rely on the notion of separators more a separator for a circuit C is a subset of a gate but that removing this set of gates S and the incident wires results in the circuit C being disconnected into sub-circuits and each of the sub-circuits should not be too large. For example in the figure we have a circuit C on the left and the separator for this circuit is shown in between the dashed lines. As you can see if you remove the gates in between the dashed lines the circuit splits nicely into a circuit C1 and another circuit C2. What we crucially rely on is a classical theorem of Robertson and Seymour which says that in case the tree width of a graph is bounded by W then it also has separators which are bounded by W. We call this the tree width separator theorem and note that since the tree width is a monotonous property which means that whenever you remove gates from a circuit its tree width can only decrease. This means that it is possible to apply the tree width separator theorem recursively on smaller and smaller sub-circuits and we will use this observation crucially. We are almost there to explain our reduction. We will consider a slightly simpler indistinguishability game just for the sake of simplicity where instead of sending two inputs the adversary only sends one input our result can be easily adapted to the full case. Just to state the game now the adversary first sends two circuits C0 C1 over to the challenger. The challenger flips a bit B and sends the garbling of the circuit Cb the adversary now just picks one input X and gets back the garbling of this input X then he guesses the bit B and then see if he guesses correctly. Also to recall we will have four garbling modes two corresponding to the real modes and two corresponding to the input dependent modes. So the goal of our reduction is to switch the garbling tables all from real 0 to real 1. We call that our goal is to show that the cases where the garbling of C0 and X is sent and the garbling of C1 and X is sent are indistinguishable. This will corresponding to all the gates being either in the real 0 mode or in the real 1 mode. We also proceed via a hardware argument and our constraint in this hybrid argument is to minimize the number of gates in input 0 or input 1 mode. Our main idea is to maintain gates in input dependent modes only at the separator. Whether this bias by the property of the separator this means that the circuit is kind of split into two parts and it is possible to recurse on these two components independently of each other. Moreover if the separator is not too big this would mean that the number of gates in input dependent mode be maintained is also not too many and this would mean that we don't have to guess a lot when we try to simulate the gates in input dependent mode. This is the structure of our recursive this is the recursive structure of our hybrids. So as described we start with the all real 0 gates then what we do is we switch the gates on the separator to input dependent mode and this splits the graph the circuit into C1 and C2 and we recursively switch the two components to real 1. That's illustrated here. Finally we can switch also the separator from input dependent to real. What is the cost of this whole operation? The number of gates we maintain in input dependent mode is roughly a size of the separator times the degree times the log of the size of the circuit. Roughly speaking the dependence on log S it comes from the fact that we have to continue recursing till we reach constant size circuits. In the paper we have abstracted all these details out and we have a more formal approach which we describe using a Pable game. So our main theorem is proved using two lemmatas. In the first lemma we show a tight coupling between the Pable configurations and the hybrids. In particular we show that any two hybrids which correspond to neighboring Pable configurations they can be shown to be indistinguishable. In the second step what we show is that there exists a Pable strategy which does not use too many Pables which are of particular color. These two lemmatas will give us our main theorem and to prove this we will also use the V-square guessing framework of Schaffer-Gouli et al. With that I would like to conclude my talk and I would like to thank you for your attention. These are the references and these are the people we would like to acknowledge. Thank you.


This is Christian Buckley doing another MVP buzz chat, and I'm here with Kevin. Hey, what's going on? Going good. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me on.  Sure. My name is Kevin Bost, Microsoft MVP. I work for a professional services company, which is CodeSpeak for Consultant. We do a lot of, the company's name is Intellitec. We do a lot of work with various utilities, banking, and we kind of bounce around and do all kinds of stuff. My passion is a lot of XAML-based stuff. So I was a Xamarin-certified mobile developer before the certification went away. I absolutely love WPF. A lot of people might know me from working on the Material Design Toolkit Project out on GitHub. It's a WPF theming library to bring Google's material design to WPF, just so that you can have a nice, pretty-looking feel. Beyond that, I do a lot of Twitch streaming. A lot of it's just working on bugs and issues. A few other open source projects is the Microsoft.net command line API project. Some people may have heard it with the code name Dragonfruit, which gives you a strongly-typed main method so that you can write pretty-looking command line apps rather than the standard public static void main with the string arcs. And then one of my other passions is a lot of testability and unit testing. So the AutoMocker project for Mock is another one that I do a lot of work to and there's actually a release that's probably going out later today. That's very exciting. And so in your team, do I understand you have another MVP on staff as well? Yeah, so my boss, Mark McHales, is a MVP and regional director for Microsoft as well. He's also the author of the Essential C-Sharp series books. The 80 version is in the works and hopefully coming soon. I do not know what the date is on that, but I've also been one of the technical editors helping him out with that as well. That's very cool. Well, I had an interview last week with Jim Wilcox, who's another somebody that I've known through the SharePoint community for many years. So he's a developer technology MVP over out of the Boston area and was talking about some of the being excited about some of the changes that are happening around the .NET Core, the new .NET 5 and a lot of that activity. What else is happening in your space? What kind of things are new being talked about? Yeah, so with my area of interest, it kind of bounces all over the place. So the WPF stuff, I mean, the latest big thing was the .NET Core 3.0 support, which a lot of people get it confused thinking that it means that WPF is now cross-platform this out in the other. It's not. WPF is still definitely windows specific, but you get all of the benefits of .NET Core, all the performance gains and that sort of thing that come along with it. With all the new .NET 5 stuff, it's kind of nice seeing all of the .NET framework and .NET Core stuff kind of merging together. I think some of it's a little bit of a naming thing, just trying to point out like some people have said, oh, .NET framework's getting sunsetted. This is the next thing. I prefer to think of it as the merging of what both .NET Core and .NET framework kind of coming together and making one thing going forward, which is I think a much easier pill for a lot of people to swallow and get their head around, just because .NET framework is kind of this big monolithic thing that you take along with it. I remember in, I'm fairly young, but ye olden days when you had to make sure that the Windows machines always had the right version of .NET for whatever thing you were going to go and install and making sure that the installer package handled all of that. And a lot of those things kind of get solved with .NET Core, with the side loading, being able to effectively publish the runtime along with your app, so you don't have to worry about that. And seeing all of those things kind of come together with .NET 5 is really exciting. I look forward to the point where we stop having to have all of these weird multi-targeted projects, PCL and that standard and it is just .NET. And that's what I build for, that's what I distribute for, and everyone gets to be one big happy family. You're talking about some of the industries that you work with, what are some kinds of the projects that you're doing? So you were saying you work with some of the utilities, is that, are you? Yeah, so the local utility, I'm in Eastern Washington. The utility around here is a Vista utility. So my company does a lot of work with them. It kind of varies back and forth. We've done a bunch of different projects. Ultimately, they're looking to effectively modernize and push things out to the cloud. So we've got people on staff that do dev ops to optimize their CI CD stuff. Obviously, web developers for their web front end and also a lot of internal tools that there are people used to just monitor the grid and make sure that everything's working or when they send out a workman to effectively go and say mark your underground lines before you dig or something so that they have all of that information. So there's some interesting stuff with some GIS type technologies built into there, a lot of web stuff, a lot of automation stuff. A lot of it is just really trying to get the data into the right format and get it to the right spot so that people can do the right thing efficiently. Whereas a lot of stuff was very manual and moving things around. Just interesting. There's probably a longer conversation around this. I spent early in my career, I worked for the phone company, so formerly Pacific Bell back in the day or Pacific Telsus shared services team. So we owned all of that. Essentially, I was working with our multiple data warehouses. So the physical, going to the locations, doing server maintenance, writing, a lot of the documentation and support of the systems that we build out and working with this support organization. But prior to that, I worked for EDS and we worked with a number of utility companies and some of the projects. It's just changed a lot since the 1992 to 95 era when I was working on those pieces. It would be interesting just to go and have some conversations and dig in and just see how much things have changed. But for another time, that's exciting stuff. That makes for some just amazing video as well. Talk about it. Oh, I don't doubt it. One of my initial projects, when I, the very first job I had right out of college was actually building a WinForms app that was integrating with an Avaya phone system. And just the simplisticness of giving an operator, effectively it was bringing through some of the caller's data so that when the operator picked up the call that they had, you know, the person's information, kind of some backstory of what the interaction had been with previously and just building that out. The kind of stuff that we would do. And we would actually be integrating, I remember going in upgrading some of the GIS data so that it was just as important for a phone company if you're, for example, you're dealing with a client and you're gonna go dig up their yard looking for a line in the ground to be within three feet of accuracy versus 20 feet of accuracy. We have the latest maps and data around that. But yeah, anyway, so it's interesting when you get into some of the, it's one thing is to, in the software space where you think up interesting novel solutions and then come up with business cases that happens far too often to kind of justify the cool thing that you wanna go and build versus, hey, you know, we have people that are out in the field and these are the activities that we're doing and we need to streamline, so they get the product information, they get the customer, the site location information up there in real time, they can edit both of those things which may data live in two different systems. You start adding a little bit of complexity and the fact that somebody's in the field and what devices they're on and there's some really interesting problems that you can go in and solve to, I look at the world through the lens of productivity collaboration technology and essentially of all those things it all kind of fits into that collaboration story. A lot of the stuff that you're doing, you're just doing more of the backend of making sure that the data and the systems of the people can get the data at the right time in the right format. Exactly, and that's sort of why, I guess your comment there about backend is like the material design project, that's one of the things that I had initially just been contributing to it because we had a project where it actually involved a bit of hardware. We were building an industrial printer to print PCBs and we needed a pretty user interface for it to sort of help sell it because it wasn't just a software package, it was the whole hardware thing, like these are the printers where floor space actually matters, right? Smaller you can make it, the better. And so I had started contributing to the project just because it was one of the nicest ones I had seen out there and I wanted it to work well for our project and then ultimately the maintainer ended up running out of time and steam and offered to let me take over as maintainer. I was like, I'd love to, right? This is a fun project, like I really enjoy building out effectively dev tools and libraries. It sounds kind of weird, but I love it when I get users feedback of, hey, this is working really great for us. Like this is streamlined our process, it let us put together this beautiful app really quickly and because normally in especially enterprise stuff, enterprises where you kind of have a forced user base, there's not a lot of time spent on design. No, no, but it's a closed system. I mean, you're utilizing something that somebody else built and you can provide feedback versus this method. There's a lot of developers have that same reaction. To be able to go and build the tooling and things around there. It's like, yeah, but it's, you may not necessarily be building that because you think, hey, everybody in the world needs to do this. It may be that this year approach may fold into maybe a branch off of some other existing tool or an open source solution and you come up with a better method and fold that back in that, add to that collective product. Yeah, it definitely is one of those, enjoying seeing the feedback and getting that and building it out. I really do enjoy having that come through. Yeah, so for the developer technologies space, I don't know who some of the folks that you interact with through Microsoft through the MVP program. This was how long have you been in MVP now? This is actually my first year as an MVP. Just came up for renewal at the end of last month, I think. So I think like 11 months or something like that. Okay, well, yeah, you only get July. So you get the whole cycle. We all get renewed at this time annually, but were you able to go to the summit last year? No, I wasn't. I came in right after the summit, which was perfect timing. Yeah, that's a fortunate. Yeah, there's a few of the newer MVPs that it's unfortunate that we're not able to because it's coronavirus, of course, the whole thing got moved to virtual. It was a good experience, but it's just different. Yeah, it worked out well, especially for putting together an online conference and with that short of a timeframe at that scale, like I have to say it went about as well as one could have possibly hoped, which was pretty nice. Kind of going back to your question as far as the people I interact with most, typically on the Microsoft side of things, it's mostly been around a lot of the command line stuff. So Kathleen Dollard has been the project manager over at Microsoft, who's basically been championing this. The project started back from the .NET CLI. When they initially went through to go and build it, John Secura was the developer and they had looked at all the open source command line parsing libraries that were out there. And what they came up with is none of them, they either came up short in terms of complexity of what they wanted to be able to support and do with the .NET CLI, or they were deficient or lacking in some means. So they finally came to the conclusion of we're gonna build our own, which at a lot of times people were like, no, please don't do that, please don't do that. Like this is a problem that's been solved many times, please don't build it. And they went through and it was actually really interesting because they even pulled in, like Nate McMaster's library is a fairly popular one, trying to remember the exact name of it. But they actually pulled in Nate to the initial design sessions for this to try and make sure that they were building things out. And he actually was one of the guys that helped build out one of the initial versions of the Dragon Fruit API for the strongly typed main, which was kind of cool to have that collaboration and see all of that come together. Still not a full release NuGet package as they like a lot of it's been put it out there, let's get people using it and try and get feedback on where is this API deficient? Where does it work? Where does it doesn't work for you? But and again, it was one of those, it started as based upon what the .NET CLI was and has now effectively branched into its own project, which has been really cool. Just to plug it really quick, people here command line parsing library and the first thing they think of is taking that string array and parsing it into something. And that's only one piece of what the library does. So one, there's the strongly typed main, which is the code name Dragon Fruit. It's got a rendering API, which is still very rough, but effectively being able to draw stuff out. It's not like a full end curses level a bit, but a lot of times just writing stuff out to the screen, people want more than console write line, right? Like being able to do like table layouts or progress spinners or that kind of thing should be easy. And that's the goal of kind of the rendering one. And then the last one is actually beyond just the parsing, being able to do the invocation of it, right?  I wanna parse that into a model, but then I don't wanna have to go through and write all of the logic to figure out, okay, which command actually got executed. Just go and execute that thing for me. So that's ultimately what Dragon Fruit builds on top of is, hey, let's make that really, really easy. But if you want a more complex model, like what the .NET CLI supports, it's all there. And it's all there and works, so. I was just gonna say that when I think of command line interface, when I think of that, I think of sports cars, fast living and international espionage, but that's me. It's funny because I have a lot of dev friends and so they occasionally talk about some of the updates that are going on. It's like, of course the MVP summit when it happens, on campus, those are generally not the sessions that I gravitate towards. They happen in other buildings across campus, but I think there's a number of people that have gone cold on the topic. They've moved on to some other activities now that they're in this predominantly online or entirely online world and MVP summit online, as we all did. I was able to consume twice as much content because I was going through early morning sessions, full morning of sessions, and then they were repeating the number of topics in the evening, of course, and I was just going through a different set of topics in the evening. And so I was doing eight to 10 hours of content a day, each day for that week, consuming just a lot of this. I know there's a number of people that are doing the same thing and going, trying to catch up like, hey, this is a great opportunity for me to just kind of get back into my roots in this world. So it's been great to interview a couple of MVPs in this space and just find out, hey, there's actually a lot that's been happening. Well, Kevin, people want to get in touch with you. We've talked about your tweets, we've talked about some of your profiles, like what are the best ways to get in touch with you? People want to reach out if they got questions or just want to connect. If people want to reach out and connect, I would say find me on GitHub, so github.com, slash K-E-B-O-O. You'll find links to all of my other profiles there that will dive you into either videos or Twitch streams or YouTube or email or whatnot or whatever people want to find. Awesome. Well, thanks so much for your time today and I'll let you get back into it. I'll get back underway and hopefully we'll see each other at the event this next year. I don't know what I'm gonna get back over to your part of the world there before then, but... Hopefully next time in person and I can actually shake your hand. Yeah, well, stay safe and we'll talk to you soon. Awesome, thank you, Christian. Bye.


Check the halls with Appalachian Wireless offering you up to $850 off sunlight devices through Black Friday with no activation fee up to $850 off the latest and greatest devices. We are you. We are Appalachian Wireless. The Johnson County Trailtown Committee will be celebrating Thanksgiving with the third annual MJM Powerhouse Thanksgiving ride in Turkey toss Saturday, November 25th. This Saturday is the Thanksgiving ride with the MJM. Kelly's bottom is what we're putting it on. We've got a good ride and afterwards we've got some good food and music. And we're also doing a turkey toss game for everybody to have some fun with. The turkey toss is to throw the, see who can throw the turkey to furthest. The man will throw it probably from the shoulder and the women will throw it really however they can get it there. Then we also have a team toss where we toss the frozen turkey between each other in the moving buddies like a team thing to see who can catch it for the longest. The ride is open to the public and will conclude with live music from new autumn project at 6 p.m. This is a third annual Thanksgiving ride. Public's invited. There's no charge of the ride and everyone meets at Kelly's bottom and oil springs always have a good turnout and just want to keep it going because everyone seems to love it. A big good time. Everybody should come out and enjoy with everybody. For more information go to Johnson County Trail Town Committee on Facebook. Reporting for Mountain Top News, I'm Breanna Robinson.