Hello, everyone. My name is Kristianne Kuhn and I'm a PhD candidate at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Today, I'm happy to present to you our paper, Onion Routing with Replies. This paper is joined work together with Dennis Ruffines, Andy Rupp and Thurston Struffen. Let us first start by thinking why we need onion routing in the first place. One goal of onion routing is to provide relationship privacy, so to hide who is communicating with whom from the adversary. And this is a very important goal. Just imagine Alice contacting a web server that only offers information about a specific disease like cancer or depression. Then it is highly likely that Alice suffers from this disease and information that we much rather keep hidden from the adversary. Now, if we want to realize this goal, of course Alice cannot send a message directly to the receiver because the adversary is likely to be able to observe this. And even further, we do not trust the receiver and the receiver might be collaborating with the adversary. So instead, we need some kind of indirection. And for this, we are using onion routing. Onion routing employs multiple relays between the senders and receivers of the communication. And the message from the sender will be encrypted in multiple layers, with one layer for each relay. So that once it goes through the network, each relay will peel off one layer of this packet, which is also called onion because it consists of this many layers. Now, if the onion routing scheme is working correctly, then the adversary cannot link onions before the relay to the ones after the relay. And this ensures that as long as one of the relays is honest, the adversary does not know which sender was contacting which receiver because he does not know how the onions are linked in this case. In our example, the adversary would be able to observe that Alice is sending the gray onion, and he can even link it to the blue one because he controls the first relay. But then from the blue one, he would have no clue whether the next onion is going to be the green or the yellow one. Once the honest relay is done with the processing. So at this point, we link the senders from the receivers because of the honest relay and that the adversary cannot revert and link onions before and after the honest relay. Now, it is really important that we get this unlinking of the onions before and after the honest relay right and therefore we're interested in constructing a secure onion routing packet format. Now a packet format can only be preventing the linkings of onions that are based on the packet itself. Of course, there are more dimensions like the timing of the onions or traffic patterns that are important in practice to unlink senders and receivers, but they cannot be solved with a packet format and instead an orthogonal goal. And there are orthogonal measures that can be applied, but for now we're interested in providing a secure packet format and solving this challenge first. For this, let us look at how onion routing packet formats typically look like. And they typically consist of the header and the payload. The header contains the routing information as well as key material for the relays. But the header is encrypted in multiple layers in a clever way such that each relay only learns the information that is absolutely necessary to do this one step of the path and this one processing. The payload on the other hand is onion encrypted in the sense that well the first layer will be is therefore the first relay the second layer for the second relay and so on. So if we look at this example of the blue onion, first of all the uttermost layer of the header is encrypted with the public key of the first relay so the first relay can remove this layer and sees that the onion needs to go to the second relay. Next, and the first relay will also remove one layer of encryption from the payload. Thereby, it gets the second onion, the green onion, and now the second relay will remove one layer of encryption from the header to realize that it has to send the onion to the final receiver next and one layer from the payload. And thereby the encrypted payload finally gets sent to the receiver and the receiver can remove the last layer of encryption to see the included message. Now one interesting thing to notice about most onion routing packet formats is that they protect the integrity of the header for every hop on the path, but the payload integrity is only checked at the final receiver. And this fact that we only check the payload integrity at the very end enables dangerous attack the mulliability attack. The mulliability attack assumes that the adversary controls the first relay and the final receiver and wants to link the send letter to the receiver and thereby break relationship privacy. The idea is that the first relay will notice when the victim sends a message. In this case, Alice sends the gray message. Then the first relay notices that this onion consists of the header and the payload, but it will further modify the payload and change a bit in it. But we'll leave the header as it is and process the onion just as it would process any usual onion except that now the payload has been modified. Now the next honest relay will not notice that anything in the onion has been modified because it only checks the header and the check for the header goes through. Then this onion will be processed further until it finally is ending at the receiver. And at the receiver we can now notice that, well, the message does not look like we expected to. There is no English language or a typical pattern in there, but instead it's only random bits. Now this helps our adversarial receiver to notice that this onion must have been modified before. And of course it is highly likely that this modification indeed was the one of our adversary that just changed Alice's message in the beginning. And therefore Alice was contacting this receiver and the adversary learned who is communicating with whom, even though there is an honest relay in between. Now to prevent this attack for the case where Alice just wants to send a message to the receiver. We can simply add some protection for the payload because Alice knows the message of the payload. She can pre calculate how the payload has to look like during each part of the path. And then she can explicitly authenticate the payload with a message authentication code. And then basically to the fact that our honest relay will drop the modified onion because you can now realize that somebody tempered with the payload. And in the result, the message of the onion of Alice is not being sent forward anymore, and therefore the adversary does not learn to whom this message was actually addressed to. And this works for the case that Alice wants to send a message to the receiver. But what happens if the receiver actually also wants to reply. Therefore we first have a look at how we in general solve replying to an anonymous sender. Therefore we need to build repliable onions and repliable onions principle look like normal onions. So basically the sender will construct the header for the backward path. So the sender will pick the relays for the backward path as well as the keys that should be used during this backward communication. And then this header is included in the payload of our onion, such that the receiver then gets to retrieve it as part of the payload that he gets. So we can use the header together with the reply that he actually wants to send and just has to attach the new payload to it. So basically, the sender is already constructing a back envelope for the receiver, even though the receiver cannot read all the details of the back envelope because the information of the reply path is hidden in the header such that only each relay learns as much as it needs to learn to then forward the onion until it's back at our original sender Alice. Now, if we want to make sure that our onion routing scheme is actually also secure for replies, we do have one more requirement. We require that replies and request sign distinguishable except that the sender and receiver so any intermediate relay dealing with with an onion should have no clue whether it's a request from the sender to the receiver or reply backwards from the receiver to the sender again. This is because they might be used cases where only very few replies exist. And then of course, the set of candidates that have sent the reply is very small and having very small so called anonymity sets is dangerous for the users because then the attacker could do more attacks or use additional to exclude users from this set. So we want our requests and replies to be indistinguishable. However, we of course additionally want to protect the malleability attack. If we want to protect the malleability attack, we need to make sure that we protect the payload for requests from the sender to the receiver. Now, if we want to have this request reply indistinguishability. This means we also need to protect the payload for reply messages, but protecting the payload for reply messages is actually not as easy as for requests. Because now, well, our sender cannot precalculate any message authentication codes for it because the sender does not know how the reply will look like. So he does not know how the payload on the reply path has to look like. On the other hand, we can also not have our receiver generate such protection measures because the receiver is not trusted in this use case. So we cannot have him know how parts of the onion will look like. Once they are close at the sender again, because otherwise the receiver would just wait for Alice to send her request to him and then send his reply back and recognize his onion, even though he never modified anything, just because he added parts to this onion that he can then add the relay clues to the sender, recognize again that therefore he will know which sender sent the request and to which sender his reply just went. So we can't do this explicitly, but instead we need to find some clever way to protect the payload. And we look and therefore we look for something like implicit payload authentication. And we found two ways to do this.  And the first way to do this is by using snacks. And the idea behind this is very easy. Let us just prove that everybody does everything like they should. So the sender will prove that they actually generated the fresh onion and the intermediate relays will prove that they faithfully processed the onion and the receiver will prove that they generated a reply onion. Now, of course, on that this proof states is that the onion that we just see is either a fresh onion or a faithfully processed onion or a reply onion. Now, of course, we cannot only trust in this single step being right, but we need to make sure that we actually build an authentication chain until back at the very center. So we did not only show that the onion that we just see as the result of a faithful processing of an onion. But we will show that it is the result of the faithfully processing of a lever already faithfully processed on it or a fresh onion or a fresh reply onion so that we can always be sure that our authentication chain goes all the way back until the center in this case. Now how we actually do this and make sure that we link this proof is a bit more involved, which is why I would kindly refer you to have a look into our paper for more details. But what I want to tell you now is the second ray of how we can realize implicit payload authentication for onion routing, and it is by using update of encryption. Update of encryption originally comes from a very different setting. It's actually about databases and cloud service. So the idea is that you store your data, of course, and put that at some cloud server, and now you want to change your key. So you want to update all the source ciphertext from a node to a new key. And of course, you would like to do this in an efficient way so you don't want to really resend all the ciphertext, but instead, and this is what updated encryption does. You generate an update token such that then the cloud database can update the ciphertext on their own without learning any information about the included plain text or the used keys. And now there's one more very interesting property that is updated, that some updated encryption schemes have, and it is plain text integrity. Plain text integrity says that, well, an adversary is not able to generate a ciphertext that decrypts to a message unless he trivially knows about this before so of course he trivially knows all the ciphertext that were in the cloud server. But other than that, he cannot come up with new ciphertexts that actually decrypt to messages with a non-negligible probability. And this is really interesting for us because this means he cannot tamper with our payload. And we use this in this way for onion routing, so in a very different setting than the one it's originally been proposed for. And we use updated encryption in the sense that we applied to the payload and our payload needs to be updated with update tokens at every relay. And as soon as it was modified, the update will fail because of the plain text integrity property. So let us have a look at this in a bit more detail. First of all, our sender that we trust generates all the keys and tokens and of course knows all of them. Then she starts by encrypting her message with the first key using the updateable encryption function. And she sends this as the payload of the onion and includes the update tokens in the header of the onion, but only in a way such that each relay only gets to see one of the update tokens. So the first relay will get the first update token. The first relay will use the update function of updateable encryption and update the payload from key one to key two. Now certainly this first relay is adversarial so the adversary knows that the gray and the blue onion actually belong together. But now there's an honest relay and the honest relay also gets an update token that only this honest relay can see so the adversary does not notice token. And that's the important thing. Now the honest relay of course updates the payload again and the adversary does not know that this green onion is the outcome of the blue onion. It could also be any other onion that he observes at this relay at the same time. Because he does not know the update token that if another update token would have been used the other onion another onion would have been the outcome. Now we continue this way until the onion arrives at the receiver and for the receiver we want him to be able to decrypt the message so we have to tell him the fourth key but nothing more than this. With this he can decrypt the message and he will not notice that this key four actually also belongs to key two earlier because he does not know the second update token. Additionally, we give the first key for the reply path to the adversary so that he can use the update encryption function to encrypt his reply as well. And of course we include the update tokens for all the relays again in the backward header in a way such that the adversary does not learn them or at least not the ones of the honest relays. And again he will be sending his onion and with the payload encrypted under the first backwards key and the other onions will always update the backwards key to the other keys that Alice has chosen. But at the point of the honest relay the chain that the adversary can follow breaks again because he does not know the second update token for the backwards path. And therefore he cannot link it over this honest relay which is exactly what we wanted. Now if the adversary decides to modify the message before the honest relay pay the plain text integrity guarantees that the honest relay realizes and the updating of the payload will simply fail and the onion will be dropped at the honest relay. If he decides to modify after the honest relay, it is not much use for him anyways, because then he just does not get the request but also does not learn anything from it. Now of course we need to ensure that we did not include any other ways to link onions before and after the honest relay based on other attacks than the malleability attack. And we do this in our paper, but technically it's very similar to earlier work. So there has been earlier work that does not support replies as well as concurrent work that does support replies that does support replies, but is not secure against our malleability attack. So we indeed propose reusable security properties that now are protecting against the malleability attack and support replies. And we do this technically very similar to what has been done before by proposing an ideal functionality in the UC framework and then deriving game based properties from this functionality. And finally of course we prove that our protocols achieve these game based properties. But if you're interested in details, I would refer you to our paper. For now I want to summarize the talk. So we have learned about onion routings and the dangers of the malleability attack for the relationship privacy. We also learned that preventing the malleability attack and at the same time protecting replies in the sense that we want that replies and requests are indistinguishable is a challenging task because it requires us to find a way to implicitly authenticate the payload, which is a challenging task, but we found two ways to do this. And the first way is by using snacks and proving that every relay and every sender and receiver actually did the processing correctly. And the second way is by using the plain text integrity property of updatable encryption and thereby applying updatable encryption in a completely new setting where it hasn't been applied before. And with this, I would like to thank you for your attention. I'll cause and wait you to have a look into our paper for more details.


There is no the mempool. We use that terminology. We say it goes back into the mempool, but there isn't just one mempool. Every node has a mempool. Every node has its own queue of unconfirmed transactions that it's keeping track of. Miners use their nodes mempool to decide what to include in blocks. Wallets use their known nodes mempool to see if money has been spent but is yet unconfirmed or if there's a payment incoming but hasn't been confirmed. And to keep track of transactions that are pending, waiting in their mempool. If you were to take a snapshot of all of the different mempools out there, if that was possible, all of the decentralized mempools, almost all of them would have an overlap of better than 99.99%. So that out of maybe 10,000 transactions that are in the mempool, maybe 9,900 transactions are the same or 9,999 transactions are the same. And they only differ by a few. So even though the mempool is a decentralized structure which is held in each node, they more or less have the same stuff. And what happened in this rollback was that every node that then deprecated the 26 blocks that had previously been advertised that it was unable to confirm would then put all of those transactions back in their own mempool or would connect to the network and receive those transactions from other nodes that had kept them and repotulate its own mempool and see that a big queue had built up.


Welcome to 30 Days of Kindness. We're going to share a new kindness prompt. Every day! These will be little acts of kindness. We'll be challenging you to do. We might try these too. Yeah! We look forward to hearing how you got on. Leave a comment or a like. Today's Day 2. Writer, thank you Card for one of your presents. We hoped you liked today's prompt. We can't wait to hear how you get on. Leave a comment or a like. Comments make us smile. Good luck and see you tomorrow. Bye!


The Chairman's Senate Committee on Media and Public Affairs, Senator Ajival Abashiru, has said that there is nothing like grazing roots or grazing reserve law in the laws of the Federation of Nigeria. He said there is no federal legislation that the President can implement. Now, in his words, he says, and I quote, it is regrettable that the President has not been properly advised by his attorney general and the legal team. They need to go and check the effects. If anybody will implement any law, it is the state where those roots are applicable that can do so. And he said grazing roots law is not applicable in any state in the southern part of Nigeria. Southern Nigeria has its own law on cattle and other related matters. And of course, what's running us to have this conversation are legal practitioners, Obin Nachiku and Tunji Abdul Amid. Thank you very much, gentlemen, for joining us. Thank you for having me. Okay, great. I'll start with you, Baistalbina. Nigerians have criticized the President for plans to revive the old cattle grazing roots, where even after the governors of 17 states in the southern part of the country have put a ban on open grazing. And the federal government's excuse is that they want to help herders move freely and avoid issues with farmers. So, Baistalbina, is this the best decision for the President? What's your take on all of this? Okay. First, I think the President's statement was it wasn't really a good one, so to speak. I think that the President would have put it differently because when it has to do with land upon which the so-called grazing roots will be established. We know where the law is, where the law takes towards. We know, elementarily, we know that all lands situated in the state is in the hands of the governors who would seem untrust for the people of the state. So, I think to me the best way that the President would have done would have said that the President would have said that the federal government will consult with the respective stakeholders to see how they can create or create a grazing root so as to douse tension. Rather than come out to say that you will establish and already establish a grazing root, I think the statement wasn't supposed to be so. So, I know to me from my understanding of the land use art, I know where the statement came from. If you look at the land use art as it pertains to the Northern region, you'll see a portion or a section where the law alluded or mentioned or is simply later provides that the Northern land tenor, other than the land use art, can also be implemented. We know that within the Northern region there are roots. Maybe that's what the President was referring to. To me, I will not quarrel with that. Interesting. Let me go to Abdul Amid. The President's statement on that day during that interview on live TV seemed to align with the statement by the AGF while he was being interviewed on another TV channel who very vehemently disagreed with the Southern governors. He made it seem more political than legal. Now, and he went ahead to say that the President is not going to be or stand for a ban on open grazing. But where is the legality in what he said? Now, we're not lawyers, so help us break it down. The statement by the President does not have any legal basis. Apparently, the President was strongly advised by his legal advisor because the President was referring to a grazing, the only grazing is upload I would have that I know was out of 1964. And it's for Northern region, Northern region part of Nigeria, not for the entire nation. And that has been overtaken by the land use art, which vested the control, management and administration of the lands on the governance of each state and the local government as well. In other words, the coming into effect of the land use art eradicated all Northern region law that is outgracing or whatever because the ownership of land has been vested in the hands of what's it called, of the governance of specific states. In other words, the governance determines what the land should be used for, the control of the lands, who the lands should be given to and what to be done to the lands. So in other words, the President was not properly advised regarding that position of law. And apparently I'm not saying, from my own understanding of that statement, the President is not even asking that that law is just asking for the age to go and look for it, search for it. Because it appears the President is desperate to get a particular law that will protect the interests of the Fulani who are into grazing or the estimate. That is the way I see it. The President is doing a lot, a lot to come everywhere to find a way to support open grazing at this age and time. When the President himself is not even doing open grazing because I know Mr. President is also an elder. He has his lunches. So I don't know why the President at this age is encouraging open grazing. What the President is saying directly, if we have that what's it called, the grazing reserve law, which has been taken by effect because one of the land that I might as getting the land, I've been taken over by certain developments. So that means if that is... So you're telling me, I'm a bit confused. You're telling me that the number one law officer of this country is arguing against something that you are saying has been overtaken by other events, in fact, has been replaced in the Constitution. And you're saying that he... I mean, for a case such as this, we're expecting that an attorney general would refer to the Constitution. But both of you seem to be on the same page saying that this is something that had been jettisoned and replaced. So if the number one law officer in this country is arguing against it, where does that leave us in terms of the rule of law? We do respect the position of Minister of Justice and Commission and the Attorney General of the Constitution. He's political, short and concerned. So it's not about the best brain. We do respect. I want to refer to what you call that thing, God forbid that no one knows all the law. But God forbid that no one knows where to find the law. It appears that the Attorney General is not doing enough research to be able to know the position of law before advising him he's a president. And that's why he's a president. It's been misled to refer back to prison law that has no longer existed. The reason I was talking about was in 1964 where the land suits had came up in 778. And by that land research, no land is available for bracing. In fact, the land they have is very limited. So I don't know where they will get that. Even the case, what's it called? Prisoner's law, assist. For that law to apply now, otherwise it will be inconsistent with the life of the person. The lives that must be amended to accommodate it. That's the only way it can even be accommodated. And doing it is inconsistent. And they want to adopt that particular time. They must amend the land use act to reflect that same finding or what they want to do to create a bracing route and to allow for bracing routes in that particular law. As it is today, there is nothing in that law that empowers the federal government to declare any land for bracing route or whatever. The land in every states is being controlled and administered by the governor, especially if the land is in a party. So the land in the rural area can be administered by the local governments in the law. There is no end in place in the land use act where particular land is assigned to the federal government to be able to design how to determine what land should be used for. Let me go back to Mr. Chico. Can an executive order of sorts, maybe by the president, revive the Gazette on the old cow bracing route or make room for provisions if the presidency decides today that they want to have an executive order? Would it suffice? Okay. First, before I respond to that question, there are a few things I'd like to say. I'd like to say just to set the record, to put the record right. I do not agree with my friend when he said that the land use act, that before you can revive the old bracing route law as applicable to the Northern region that you need to amend the act. No, that's not correct. The land use act provides for a resort to the Northern tenor law. Provides for a resort to that. The land use act did not. In fact, the land use act also provides for a resort when it comes to the southern region. The land use act also provides for a resort. It's said that the land use act or a resort to the land tenor law existing before. So if you look at it, I want to say that the emboldening of the strength or the energy that the president has started in saying this, was to go through the existence of that law, the bracing route. All that needs to be checked or need to be ascertain is whether or not those bracing routes in the North were gazetted and handed over to federal government because section 49 of the land use act also restored to federal government. All lands belonging to the federal government. So lands belonging to the federal government still remains with federal government. Of course, again, the land use act also expires all other lands apart from that on the governor of the state. So all that needs to be done is to ascertain whether or not the land tenor law existing in the Northern region accommodated the bracing routes in the North and whether or not the same there was a gazette or the law permit or endows the same bracing route to the federal government. If the law endows the same bracing route to the federal government, it therefore means that those lands who qualify as federal land upon which section 49 of the land use act restored restored also to the federal government. Coming to say that the land use act is amended in order to accommodate that. No, if there's anything that needs to be looked into that needs to be amended in the land use act is that to resort to the land tenor law. Okay. All right. I think... Hello. Yes, go ahead. You want to respond to him. Go ahead. See, my colleague is missing one point. The government that was talking about has to do with Northern region. There was one person in the Northern region at that time. So you cannot say that Northern region is federal government. Four regions, how many regions are there at that time? So, regions at that time. So, you want to respond to him. Absolutely. Northern region, that region does not say particular... That's why Northern region has federal government. So, I am aware that certain lands are being erred by federal government before the land use act. I see them being erred by them. But that does not include the reserve areas that are forced within the states. The only land within the states, it is under the control and supervision of the government. What I mean to say is that I think they are now considering, I think they are now considering that they want to even adopt the grazing reserve law. What is being adopted in that particular law. I am saying, as it is today, for them to be accommodated, they most are meant to input that into the law now. They can't just go back and take that particular land and say it's not part of the law because it's not a regional law. It's not a federal government law. It's not a federal government law at that time. But it's not a federal government law at that time. We are a region. And that law was made for Northern region. Okay. We are a federation of the country. That's why I say that law, as it is, does not and will not be applicable except they are meant to be considered authority, the land use act. That's the constitution. Land use act is part of the constitution. You must comment on the constitution. We are almost out of time. So I will just ask one last question. In federal states, as it is today, 400 herdsmen have been arrested. 40 of them have been convicted. And it looks like the states are taking seriously the issue of standing by those ban on grazing, open grazing. And they're following you to the letter. But some states see it as a declaration of war against herders or people from the following extraction. And quickly, because we have just two minutes, how can we try as much as possible to clear this confusion? Because Mi'eti Allah spoke yesterday and they said the same thing, that the ban on open grazing is not just a ban on open grazing. They are reading between the lines and they say that this is also some form of a declaration of war against Fulani and herdsmen. Even though a spokesperson for the Fulani in Delta State that works with the Delta State government came out to say that this might just be a miscommunication of sorts. But how do we make sure that there's clarity in the messaging so that it doesn't seem like the South is declaring war on the North? Okay, so to me, first and foremost, it is the right of the states to make laws pertaining to grazing. Grazing is not in the exclusive list and therefore, if it makes a law, the law must be respected. And for me, I think that the best way to solve this problem will still be toing the line of or embracing political solution, political solution. That's what I think that can be done. If the president, if the president is desirous of creating grazing roots, say maybe in the North, the president must also talk, must talk with the governors, the president must have interaction, stakeholders must come together, meet and find out or fashion out a possible way outside law to resolve the problem. All right. Because we do not have time, let me just quickly get Abdulameed's position on this so we can wrap things up. We're out of time. I think the president is not happy matter. The president openly asking for grazing roots is throwing us back to the olden day. The president is to maintain neutrality. That's how I think it can solve this matter. One of the best ways to solve this problem is to ban open grazing and let everybody go to ranching. Okay. Well, thank you very much, Barista Chiku and Barista Abdulameed for being part of the conversation. We appreciate your thoughts on this particular issue. Well, for those of you who have been part of the conversation, it's been Plus Politics. I'm Marianna. Have a good evening.


Hey what's up guys, welcome to our trending reviews. So pretty excited about today's headphone review. These are the XR E5 headphones. You probably haven't heard of these, these are a Chinese manufacturers which basically design some awesome looking headphones at the greatest prices. Now this one comes in at £60 on Amazon. It is an active noise cancelling USB-C headphones with a massive battery life. So let me go ahead, give you guys an unboxing, then I'll set this up. Give you an overview of how it sounds and cover a couple of specs and let's just get straight into it. Okay so in the box you can find a few accessories. Now this is a USB-C wireless device so it comes with the USB-C charging cable. It doesn't have a 3.5mm headphone jack port on the actual headphones but you can use the USB-C to 3.5mm headphone adapter to use the wired cable on this which is actually pretty good. It also comes with an aeroplane adapter if you want to use this on flights and then you also have the user guide and warranty information there as well. Now let's have a look at the design of the headphones. I really like these earpieces, they're not completely metal although the little circle bit in the middle that is metal and then the casing around it is plastic. It has a few ridges in there, I think the design just looks really cool. Now this does come at £60 on Amazon so you're probably not going to get the highest quality metallic designs but it's very lightweight, it's very easy to carry and in fact it does look quite durable. Now it does come with these memory foam earpads which makes it really comfortable to put on your ears.  In terms of the ports, on the left earpiece there is the active noise cancellation button there and that's the only one on that side. On the right earpiece you have the power button which doubles up as a multi function button. You have the volume and the track control buttons there and then you also have the USB-C charging port. So let's go ahead and connect this to my phone, I will turn it on. Initially I'll keep the active noise cancellation off and then I'll turn it on during playback so I'll quickly pair this and then give you guys a review on how it sounds. Just before I get into playing some music on this I just wanted to let you know about the battery life. Now if you have the active noise cancellation on and the bluetooth on you're going to get an awesome 40 hours of battery life, if you have the bluetooth on and the active noise cancellation off you'll get a huge 60 hours and if you have the active noise cancellation on and you don't use the bluetooth you don't make it wireless and then you connect the wired headphones directly to your devices then you're going to get over 150 hours which will probably feel like a lifetime. So for me this is one of the highest battery powered wireless headphones that have ANC on it that I've come across in a long time. It also comes with super fast charging because it is USB-C so a quick 10 minute charge will give you 2 hours of playback and it will give you maybe 2 to 3 hours to give you a full battery on actually these headphones. So awesome job there, it's very lightweight once I'm actually holding it, I quite like that actually so it's very easy to carry. Now let me go ahead and put this on, I have it connected to my phone, just make sure I've adjusted the strap, there we go. Now it does feel quite comfortable, this is one of those headphones that completely covers the entire ear so it gives you that extra concealment. Now when I do turn on the ANC it will give me up to 85% noise cancellation from the outside world, I've seen headphones that come a lot higher than that as well I've seen some that are lower but I think 85% is a really good job because in most situations when you're in city traffic or you're in a busy office environment or you're in the gym that's way more than enough to actually cancel out the background noise, if you're on a flight then you probably still hear tiny bits about the engine and the people but for the majority of the situation you're gonna have turn the volume up you're not gonna be able to hear anything else outside. So let me go ahead and play a song, so the ANC is not on, I have my volume about 60-70% on my phone, quite a nice bass coming through on the music, okay so now I'm going to turn on active noise cancellation, okay it's pretty hard to hear myself speak now, that's done a really good job, the bass has definitely gone up after this, the treble has gone up a tiny bit as well but the overall experience in listening to that music is so much better, actually what I'm gonna do really quickly is play a Netflix video just to see how that sounds in a video playback, wow good quality I'm gonna just turn that off, so for me that is a big win now if you just have a look at the design of the headphones from the side view so this is the left side, this is how it looks, this is how it is straight on so I don't feel like it's too bulky I think it's quite a nice size, it's very lightweight like I mentioned a couple of times and it's so easy to take with you and this is how it is on the right hand side and if you want to have a look how it is from behind, this is how it looks from behind, so for me it's perfect now it's a massive win it comes in at 60 pounds on Amazon I'll have a link in the description below the amount of battery life you get, the amount of quality you get with active noise cancellation at this price you're gonna struggle to find anything better so I hope you found that useful do check out XUP they're awesome little company that creates awesome products like this so I'll leave a link for them as well otherwise if there's any other questions you have then do let me know I hope you like this video I hope you subscribe and I'll catch you guys at the next one take care


that I'm looking forward to. We have Cisco WebEx here to talk about their production workloads that they are running on OpenStack. And to present that for us this morning, we have Reinhardt Quelli. Thank you. Thank you. When everybody started asking if I was interested in doing a keynote this morning, actually it wasn't originally a keynote. It was supposed to be one of the small user sessions where I have a much smaller group. So if I'm nervous, it's because there's a lot of you out there. It's very exciting. So we are at WebEx. We actually attended the design summit, the Essex design summit in October of last year. And we were introduced kind of, my team was introduced to the community. And we were inspired by stories from CERN and Mercado Libre and some of the other teams that spoke about their experiences. And we were pretty convinced that participating in this community was a way to deliver what we needed to to support our business. And so I was pretty excited to launch into that. So when you think about Cisco, let's go forward. That's a wrong forward. Let's not repeat this. Most people, when you think about Cisco, think about this stuff, hardware, CRS routers, switches, UCS gear, all great stuff. But that's not what our team does. So at WebEx, we actually deliver and manage SAS applications. So we deliver three primary applications from our platform, WebEx, which most of you are probably familiar with, Jabber, which is an instant messaging system, and Cisco Social.  And so ultimately, we actually are one of the largest business SAS vendors in the market today. And so we're serving a lot of users from this platform. So as we looked at our platform and kind of the future of the platform, what we built, WebEx itself as a service has been around for over a decade, in fact. And so the platform that that was built on, while serving its needs well, is not the fastest platform for innovation for the future. And so ultimately, what do we need to do to get that platform to accelerate our development and move things forward? So we do deliver these services from a global footprint. So we'll hear a lot today about, we've heard a lot today about a global footprint. Just so that we're running, we actually, our services themselves are run across multiple continents themselves. So we call ourselves cloud services because from the outside world to the outside customer link at Cisco, we're a SAS vendor. We deliver a SAS application to end users directly and we're responsible for delivering that platform. But from inside Cisco, from inside to our other product teams to the other groups within Cisco, we're effectively a cloud provider. We're providing infrastructure, platform services, something we call operations as a service, which basically means that we are responsible for the entire stack of the application from the data center tiles all the way up through the running application and manage that. We work. My boss, Raj Patel, has coined the term tripod to describe how we work with the other teams. It's product management, engineering, and operations working together to deliver this application. So at Cisco, we have multiple cloud teams. And so you can't throw a stick in Cisco without hitting cloud somewhere. The group here that you'll see most around the show here is Luke Tucker's OpenStack team. This is the group that is delivering OpenStack solutions for customers. He saw some of the announcements earlier, including the OpenStack Cisco edition. We also have a group within our network management technology group that has Cisco Intelligent Automation for Clouds, an orchestration framework for the cloud. We have multiple network teams building quantum plug-ins and products to work with Cisco. Then we also have internal teams that are using OpenStack internally. Our cities team, for example, delivering services to internal users. So ultimately, within our group, we call it drinking our own champagne. We run Cisco on Cisco, so all of our WebEx services are delivered from Cisco. Networking gear and Cisco hardware, lots of Cisco software, and delivered. There's, of course, another name for that, and that's dog fooding. So we get a lot of exposure to Cisco, Cisco stuff in the future, and where we're moving from here. So one of the questions, as we look out about our deployment platform, our software platform, we have to answer, why would we do a cloud? What's so interesting about cloud, and what are we trying to accomplish? And it's really these things. In fact, Mark Zellwith-Kanakal said this yesterday. I think he hit the nail on the head, which is that ultimately it's about delivering agile operations. How quickly can I deliver applications from development to production in a consistent, dependable way? And so ultimately that's the number one task for us. In doing this, on top of a cloud platform, and you're doing things in the same manner that our peers in the public cloud community are doing, is we get to reuse all the great tooling out there. Tools like Chef and Puppet, which are commonly used, orchestration frameworks, multiple logging as a service, metrics as a service, lots of additional things that are available to us to deliver our applications. We get to reuse all that tooling and not reinvent it ourselves, which is key. We actually are very interested in multi-tenancy and the delivery of our services. Even though we're a private cloud implementation, multi-tenancy is important to us for some of these reasons. We separate between products, between product lifecycle, QA, dev production, et cetera. But then also security isolation zones, our network termination zone, or application zone, or data zones, and those are all separated in tenets within OpenStack, so we can deliver a secure service on top of this platform. And then, of course, like any SaaS provider, like anybody delivering an application to the market, we actually have to pay very, very close attention to our cost of goods zone. We do have a free tier of service in WebEx, and it costs to run that, and so we have to keep those prices as low as possible. So the Adrian Cockroft has famously talked about the private cloud not making any sense. Like if you're big enough to run a cloud, you ought to be selling cloud services, otherwise you should be running in a public cloud. We have a different opinion of that. The number one reason why a private cloud is important to us is accountability, one throat to choke. When I sell, many of you are probably WebEx customers, when your meeting goes down, it's five minutes after the top of the hour and you're trying to start a meeting. If I were in a public cloud and I had to pick up the phone and call some large cloud provider who's had a couple outages last month, who do I go to? Who do I say? What's wrong with the network? When's it going to be up? How long do I have? Well, we need to be able to answer those questions. And so that end to end accountability is very, very important to us and important to our enterprise customers. End to invisibility. Visibility is actually rather interesting. How many of you would love to be able to go to your cloud provider as an application developer or deployer and say, tell me exactly what's happening on those VMs? I know what my application is doing. I could see what my application, the metrics are off my application. But I also want to see what the VM is doing. What's the IO weight on that VM? What's the load average on that VM? Is it my application or is it the infrastructure? Well, we can answer that question. We can, in fact, expose it to our product teams. So flexibility, we actually are deploying clusters and our data centers. And we intend to deploy them out into what we call our iPops or our edge location. So we can have a common deployment framework across those entire environments. And so I'm being able to have that flexibility across the thing. And then finally, it's an analog world out there. And we connect to it. We have video transcoders. We have telephony bridges. We have all sorts of wacky stuff that have to connect to our services. And if I run my own private cloud, it's very easy for me to make those connections. Well, not easy to make connections, but it's possible to make the connections. So anyway, why open stack specifically? First of all, we're very comfortable with open source. You don't necessarily think of open source in the Cisco world as your first thing. But actually, if you look at Jabber, it came from a Cisco division, a Cisco group, the Apache traffic server we contribute to and have one of the core contributors on our time. We're actually then, of course, all of Luz team and stuff that they're doing. It's a natural way for our organization to actually do business. So there's level of comfort there. And open source, of course, has a lot of advantages that we can talk about with leverage and community building and everything else. Given also that these things are open source, when we have special needs, we can actually meet those needs immediately. We can apply engineering resources, solve our problems, not wait for that next vendor release. So that's another option. So the options for support, I think, is a self-explanatory. We have a lot of places to go where we can communicate, work with community or outside vendors, and then keeping our costs low. So as we decide to go out and say, OK, we've made a decision due to a public cloud, that's a no-brainer for us. Probably everybody in the room understands that. Why open stack? OK, we know why that's important. But how do we do this? How do we go to? And where do we start? Keeping in mind that we actually were launching our private cloud efforts, basically in October of last year, we looked out among kind of the community and decided we didn't want to go it completely alone. We needed someone to help us jump start. And we actually turned to two organizations. One is Luke Tucker's open stack at Cisco Group. And the second was Morantis. And so we've actually been partnering with Morantis and a lot of the things that we've been doing. It's been a very tight partnership. One of the key parts of every one of the people on this side that's been important is all of us are committed to keeping the work that we're doing and the extensions of we're making and the point we're doing open source. And so that's, in fact, everything that we're going to talk about today. You either can get right now or we'll be able to get soon in the open stack Cisco edition. So everything is going to be in the public. So as we started, OK, I want to build a particular cloud. And rather than try to look at some of our public cloud peers, for example, and look at their service offering and try to decide which parts of those service offerings we want to bite off, we took a more pragmatic approach. We had a single product team within our group that was actually running in a public cloud at the time. And we implemented the bare minimum it was required to get them running. And so we developed that application, brought the platform up to deliver the application, and now we're biting off the next and the next. And so it was a good approach. One thing that we got asked a lot is, are you going to support the EC2 API within your open stack environment? We made a quick call that it just wasn't necessary, wasn't interesting, paid off the customer, in this case, ported from EC2 API to RAPI about two days. It just doesn't matter. It's not meaningful. So remember, again, we started our kind of open stack journey in October of last year. By July 31, we had launched our Alpha product on top of that. That has everything to do with the strength of the product in the community. I think if everybody wants to ask, is OpenStack ready to deliver applications, you talk here about all the problems, we have an open stack, all the things that we want to do. The reality is we took this thing effectively off the shelf, deployed it in our environment, connected it to our monitoring systems, I'll talk about that in a minute, and launched an application on top of that. So absolutely, it's possible. And this is the Essex in this case. So yeah, we've had 100% uptime on that platform since that launch. So we are going beta of this particular set of services within a few weeks. I was hoping to announce it earlier, but there's always robust. So just a quick overview of what we are actually providing. So the NOVA implementation is actually stock Essex in our environment, mostly stock Essex, as we know when we deploy, and this is kind of a familiar slide to everybody, a controller node controlling us as we have compute nodes, our infrastructure is Ubuntu. We're running KVM on top of that. Standard NOVA underneath there. We don't feel like that's enough to run in a production environment. And so one of the first things that we did was add HA, active passive controllers in our environment. Now if you look at the OpenStack at Cisco work, we're heading, screaming towards an active, active controller node. We deployed this, again, back in July. And so this is the first generation of that, so our active passive environment. But we have done full failover testing and made sure that this does run. And one thing to note about us is that instead of thousands of customers or tens of thousands of customers, we have tens of customers because we're delivering to product teams effectively. So a lot of the scale questions don't necessarily apply to us immediately. So when you deploy things like this, this is where you get, right? You've got a running system. It's ready to go. You're plowing down the street. But you don't really know where you're going yet. And so one of the immediate things, one of the first things that we have to add to this environment, is monitoring and service assurance layers. So a lot of the work that our own team, internally to Cloud Services has done, is around monitoring metrics collection, alerting, that type of stuff. And so we have a full, basically a full stack of monitoring metrics collection, collectee and statsee on the metrics collection. We use flume for log forwarding into our central logging servers. Monet and Imsen for local process health and alerting. All of these things connect back to our backend, to our existing infrastructure servers, MCT and EMS, which are internal alerting and health check systems, respectively. We've also created a management console that kind of percolates up some of these things into these monitoring views. So you can kind of add a glancey or health check. The status of the cluster is hold red, green, blue, blue meaning in maintenance or act. And then, of course, metrics and monitoring. These metrics, through the work, again, Lou's team has done, can actually be exported and brought up into the horizon interface as well, if you choose not to use that single point of interface. One point I want to make on these monitoring views is that we give our tenants, our customers, access to these as well. So they can see our underlying platform as well as their applications, and we're piping the metrics from both into the same place, so that we can look at the system holistically. One of the major advantages of private cloud, frankly. So basically we did the same thing for Swift. Swift is a big part of our environment, and all the metrics and management layer. The one thing that's slightly different about Swift is that we have added an orchestration layer based on salt, in this case, that allows us to sequence things. I should have mentioned earlier that everything that you're looking at here is automatically managed and deployed through puppet scripts. And systems are booted with Cobbler, configured with Puppet, brought up. So it's hands-off deployments from plugging in a box, enter the MAC address in Cobbler, and you're done. This whole system comes up all the way up to there, including RAID configuration and everything else. So we do run, as you saw in our previous slide, we always run in multiple data centers. We live in California. The Earth shakes out here regularly. We have data centers in Texas. The tornadoes go through there regularly. To provide a seven-byte 24, 365, you have to have multiple data centers. So our approach on multiple data centers for Swift is effectively what we have today, which is two Swift clusters with container-level replication between those. We're powerfully interested in the multi-data center work that the Merantia Swift stack, our team, the community at large is working on. It's going to be very important to keeping those costs down, because this means three plus three on copies. And so we need to solve that. On the ANOVA side, however, we actually intentionally separate out those clusters. It's our belief that application availability is an application layer problem, and that the applications are designed to understand those, just as when you deploy into an environment, for example, you're explicitly talking to an Amazon East End point and Amazon West End point. That enables you, as an application developer, to make decisions about how your data is flowing, how your traffic is flowing, how your replication is flowing if you use replication. We need to expose that to our customer, which is our tenant, so that they can make intelligent decisions about that application design. Because the network does not have zero latency. It's not always up. All of the fallacies, there was a son and fellow who had a list of fallacies of network computing that you can live by. And you have to expose these things to the user. So we actually, in our NOVA environment, we do explicitly expose multiple end points. We do replicate. The only thing we replicate between the two at the infrastructure layer is, in fact, users and tenants credentials, so that they can use the same credentials across both. Anyway, so that's one of the things that, again, we deployed this originally in July. We're continuing forward. We are deployed using the standard VLAN networking model. This is a model that doesn't work particularly well for enormous, large public providers who have thousands or tens of thousands of clients. But when I've got tens of clients, the limits on VLANs are not a problem. So the number of VLANs per network, for example, is just, it's manageable for us. It does give us an interesting capability that we've actually taken advantage of in our deployments thus far. And that is the ability to drop a physical host into a customer's VLAN. So we have certain servers, for example, that run best on hardware. And there's no reason why I can't deploy those right alongside the virtual servers that it's spending up and give them direct access to each other. And so that's actually proved pretty valuable for us right now. We are, of course, very interested in quantum and the things we can do, particularly as we try to extend this model across multiple data centers. But for now, this is working out very well for us. So if you talk about that combined team and what we've done together, the first is, again, deployment monitoring. If you can't deploy reliably, repeatably, quickly, you don't have much of a cloud. You've got to be able to build that infrastructure underneath your growth reliably. And you've got to be able to monitor and watch it. So this is a big chunk of work we've been doing. The HA configuration around MySQL and RabbitMQ, all of our services, by the way, are all API end points. We, being Cisco, know a few things about load balancers. We use external load balancers to deliver traffic into all these systems. And so we use that existing infrastructure for that. And I don't try to repeat it in the client. So on Swift, we've actually done a few API extensions that are interesting for our particular use cases, specifically secure token access, where we can actually hand out, we don't have to have individual per end customer credentials to access data in Swift. We can hand out signed timed tokens that will give them access for a very brief period of time. Cryptographic hashes for some of the data we're putting in, the MD5 hashes are not strong enough for our use case. And so we actually are doing, I think, SHA-512 hashes on those to know what data we're putting in and ensure that it hasn't been tampered along the way. We're doing the ring management via puppet and salt for mode execution. And the multi-part upload, which is for handling these large objects. All those are things. And again, all these things are things that you can expect to see in the OpenStack Cisco edition. We have, again, with our partners, Morantis, we've extended the Tempest test to run full validation. So when we deploy a new data center, for example, and we're standing up a new Swift cluster, rather than just do the functional level tests or ad hoc tests, we're actually running Tempest tests that have been extended to do functional tests. So spin up VMs, ensure we can log in, tear them down, connect to the database, basically give a better exercise of the whole system. Those are intended to run in production as well, so we can continue to run them against a runtime system. And then this last one I'll talk about a little bit in more detail is that one of the interesting things about running a private cloud is workload placement becomes very interesting for you. If you're deploying into a public cloud with tens of thousands of physical nodes, random works very well for workload placement in terms of getting dispersion of your workloads so all of your front-end nodes don't go down at once, for example. If I've got handfuls of physical servers in some small data center or iPop, for example, I have to be very careful about where I place those workloads. So a lot of the things that we're looking at for the future is around the scheduler and how we manage the workloads in this environment. And one of the first things that we had was around NovaVolume. So NovaVolume, as we know, it's an iSCSI-based protocol. If you have a NovaVolume server, typically as a NovaVolume server is a separate box and exporting via iSCSI to the compute nodes, we actually thought, well, what if we could take NovaVolume and distributed across all of our compute nodes, and then when we actually create a volume, effectively anti-affinity groups to create those volumes, a group of volumes, and say, I want you to disperse yourself across all the available servers. So that works out pretty well, so you can actually create these distributed volumes. So if you think about, for example, a Cassandra or a Voldemort or a React or a whatever cluster, you want those disks in that cluster to be spread across multiple physical machines. The next step of that is actually to have a scheduler in the Nova side that's actually aware of where those volumes are and can try to get itself as close to the volume as possible. So when you spin up a VM, you say, I want you to get as adjacent to this particular volume ID as possible. So it's kind of a cool way to get local performance but still the benefits of NovaVolume. So anyway, changing gears just a little bit here. As anybody deploying a new application, a new software package, documentation is a big deal. Engineers, by and large, that's not their first thing on their mind when they're delivering features is delivering documentation for those features. And so it's always a chore to manage documentation. We've done quite a bit. This is actually a snapshot of our internal wiki page that's actually a joint Cisco wiki page across the multiple cloud teams that are doing work. But it actually doesn't stop there. Our users, in fact, when we delivered our first application, I will admit that I actually didn't point them to my own documentation. I pointed them to one of our public cloud competitors who's running OpenStack and said use their libraries and their documentation, they're ahead of us. And so that's what they did. They actually took our competitors' products and our competitors' documentation and built their application using the APIs as documented and just pointed our end point in the way it goes. So we get to use a lot of, there's a lot of stuff out there that our product teams can use that we can leverage without having to write ourselves or hire documentation people ourselves. OpenStack Foundation, local meetup groups that are active in this stuff, the public clouds including our competitors, the various web forums, fellow users in various groups. There's a lot of material out there that makes this stuff very, very approachable for customers. So, as we look towards the future, some of the things that we're gonna be doing here that are very interesting to us and there's been some discussions around this summit and we'll continue these questions. First of all is at rest encryption. We have a, again, use case and need for encrypting data in our data center for our customers. Multi-data center Swift, which I mentioned earlier. We have an internal identity system that's used across our product lines and connecting our authorization. It's actually pretty straightforward with Keystone, right? Connecting to that back end to an alternate authentication mechanism. Of course, quantum as we kind of extend our networking and our capabilities of, particularly as you go to multi-data center, these are some of the areas. Metal as a Service is the thing that's particularly interesting to us and there has been a lot of conversations in this summit about different groups actually using the OpenStack API as a front end to delivering and managing those physical servers. And ultimately the goal for us in that case is to give the application teams a common interface. They don't have to change their deployment, their methodology in order to specify a physical server versus a virtual and there's a lot of use cases for those physical servers. Things like Hadoop, for example, work best on physical, if we can manage them in the same way that we can manage our virtual infrastructure as a win for everybody. So, and then ongoing operability. So, I'm just screaming along here so I'll finish early which you guys will probably all appreciate. So, that was it. So, we are of course, hiring. Has anybody not hiring? And this is the general Cisco landing page for hiring and if you stop by the Cisco booth in the back corner we definitely have, there's some cards and you can talk to people about some of the stuff that we have there. So, that's it. Thank you. Thank you, Reinhardt. I think maybe we started something bad here with this hiring. I live in the country in East Texas and there are lots of woods and farms and ranches and a lot of times you'll drive by and you'll see on the fences signs that say posted no poaching. We're probably gonna start to see some of those out there in the sponsor areas. So, that wraps it up for our keynotes this morning. Thank you guys for coming. A lot of sessions throughout the day, checksked.org and we're gonna be doing a breakdown on this room so you can all leave now. Thank you very much.


I think we've got a pretty wide open slate for tonight in MLB DFS where there are a decent number of pitchers you could talk yourself being into as being the top armor the night there is a value play I truly don't mind so a pretty wide open slate and that's a good thing because it allows you to differentiate without being dumb it allows you to follow wherever your process leads you and I think feel pretty good about that almost regardless we're going to break down where my process leads me for today which guys I think could be good despite potentially not being the most popular plays in the slate and get you ready for a Friday night in MLB DFS welcome on into the solo shop that's right here on the Fandall podcast network and number fire dot com my name is Jim Saunas I am a senior writer and analyst for a number fire here to break down Friday's 13 game main slate with locks up for 705 p.m. Eastern for today the loan of weather note on the slate outside of smoke which I can't really track personally so hopefully no smoke issues for today but there is a chance of rain in Baltimore for the Orioles and the Royals I have interest in that game from a pitching perspective weirdly given those two teams involved but I think they should be good to go at least based on the initial read so I would check back on that game later on make sure the forecast has not changed they're good to play that game if they are we'll be talking about that game in the pitching section in just one second the first day reminder to make sure you're subscribed to the number fire daily fantasy podcast be wherever you get your podcast you can find us on Apple podcast Spotify Stitcher Google podcasts you name it you can find us there while you're there if you like what you hear leave us a five star rating as well both on Apple podcast and on Spotify we appreciate you as always have you ever started a player in your fantasy football lineup who scores three points while someone on your bench puts up 20 well with Fandals NFL best ball drafts you don't have to worry about that draft your team and each week the highest scoring lineup from your roster will be used as you battle for first place all season long leaks can be free to play or for money and range from 30 to 12 players the NFL season will be here before you know it's ahead to Fandals today and get in on the action age and location restrictions apply pitching preview for this Friday main slate we have got a again pretty fun pitching pool for today begins at the top with Christian Javier of the salary of $10,800 followed by Luis Castillo at 10 6 Garrett Cole facing the Red Sox at 10 5 Marcus Strowman out in San Francisco at 10 2 Shohio Taney facing Castillo at 10,000 Dylan Cease against Marlins 98 Tyler Wells to 97 justified I think sunny gray at 96 you Darvish at course field 95 with Logan Allen at 93 A Repair as facing the White Sox 92 then we have Anthony DeSclifani Ben Lively you say Kikuchi Adrian Houser Jordan Montgomery Tyler McGill and Josiah Gray and also Daniel Lynch as the guys at $8,000 or higher for tonight so as mentioned a lot of ways you could play the slave for today and I think the most interesting salary there is Shohio Taney because $10,000 for him on Fandal is not bad at all he's facing the Mariners and that's not the best matchup but I still want to be on him tonight. Ohtani has had some hiccups recently which may be why that salary is reduced he let a fivered runs his last time out against Houston and I used him there so that was not super enjoyable but still he did go six innings and get six strikeouts there was nothing of massive concern inside his profile. We have seen Ohtani alter his approach a bit he's been throwing more sinkers and fewer sliders as past five starts and my DFS perspective that's not a swap you want because sinkers are bad for strikeouts and sliders are good. It's still been pretty solid for Ohtani in this time he has a 3.46 skill interactive ERA strikeout rate is 28% with allowing just a 31% hard hit rate so those numbers are all still good even if they're not quite prime Ohtani and the angels do let Ohtani go super deep in games so even with more sinkers and a lowered strikeout rate Ohtani is still average 7.4 strikeouts per game in this span I haven't projected for 7.7 tonight because the Mariners are a team that is willing to strikeout so Ohtani to me is the top pitcher the night and the guy I do feel good about despite some concerns around his recent pitch mix. Number two pitcher behind Ohtani may be a bit of a surprise but it is a guy who is pitching fantastic right now and that guy is Tyler Wells I think he's well worth his salary 97 and a guy I want to be on for tonight. Wells is facing the Royals and that's a higher strikeout matchup than they used to be they have a 24% strikeout rate against righties and that's a boost for Wells for sure but I also just generally like what Wells is doing right now he said publicly he's been making a more concerted effort to get strikeouts and over his past six starts we've seen him use fewer curveballs and the curveball is actually a pretty low whiff pitch for him according to baseball's Vaughn it's actually the lowest whiff rate for him of any pitch outside of his cutter so fewer curveballs is a good swap for Wells to make in terms of strikeouts that combined with his new strikeout centric mindset has led to a spike not surprisingly in the six start sample Tyler Wells has a 32% strikeout rate with a 3.17 skill interactive ERA he has had seven plus strikeouts in five consecutive starts and he had nine last time out we've also seen Wells get a hundred plus pitches in two consecutive starts and this all aligns with the results too because those have been pretty solid which means I think he'll keep this approach going as long as those results stay good I am super high on Wells I am not sure if people will be as keen to buy into him especially on a slate where we have Otani Castillo Javier McColl all those names that pushes me towards taking the risk on Wells at 97 it's a risk because it's a small sample but I think it's worth it so to me it's Otani one Tyler Wells two and the hope for me is that people are not super into Wells given how much that salary has risen as of late the value play is actually in that exact same game if you want to spend down I like Daniel Lynch at $8,000 as my hair value for tonight this means he's facing the Orioles and I don't want to do that because they are a very tough team for a lefty to face 115 at WRC plus there but Lynch is look good coming back from a shoulder injury in two starts he has a 13% swinging strike rate he made four starts in triple A on his rehab stints his strikeout rate down there was 19.2% and this is really a return to previous form for Lynch because in the minors he always got whiffs and converted them into strikeouts he has not translated that to the majors as of yet but this year Lynch has changed the way he's throwing a slider it's either if you look at fangrass or pitch info it's a cutter baseball savannah it's still a slider but it's a harder slider so it's a distinct pitch from what he's throwing last year Velo is higher and that pitch is getting ground balls his big issue before was hard contact and I'm curious if this retooled slider will help Lynch mitigate the hard contact it has helped so far but it is also just a sample of 60 pitches but in those first two starts off the IL Lynch has six and seven strikeouts respectively both those were admittedly great matchups for a lefty and this is not bad against the Orioles so there is a lot of risk here but for $8,000 on a course field slate I'm okay taking on some risk so I like Lynch I'll give him a spin for tonight so to me the top pitchers in the stud tier Otani won a 10,000 Wells 2 at 97 and then the top value in that same game is Daniel Lynch again check back on the weather at Baltimore to make sure they are good to go there part of the incentive to spend down a bit for tonight is because we do have a course field game and it's the Padres there Padres facing Austin Gomber Gomber is struggling the Padres have hit lefty as well so I do think it's a good thing to be high all the Padres are tonight not a super bold claim given they're at a course field but still think it is worth reiterating they good we want them Gomber's ERA this year is 6.99 across the full season his expected ERA is 7.24 he's been throwing his curveball hider or harder for his past eight stars and that hasn't made a big difference his skill interactive ERA is 5.16 in that time with a 47 hard hit rates and just a 15 percent strikeout rate so even with the results at times being better for Gomber it's still looking pretty fruitful to stack against him the Padres have a 114 at WRC plus against lefties with a 190 ISO and now they good a good match up by course field I think we should just take the path of least resistance and stack them here so the Padres to me a very fine stack the confliction conflict the whatever the conflict that I have with stacking the Padres is I'm still a bit skeptical of Gary Sanchez what he's been doing he's been fantastic so far in the majors but he was not doing this in triple A for the four different triple A teams he played for he has twice as many homers in the big leagues as he did in triple A across all stops his salary is 32 that does help a lot where it means that Fandle also is not bought in yet so the salary is still pretty reasonable Sanchez likely did bad at a pretty good spot in the order so I'm skeptical but cleanup batter or guy baton fifth at course field for 32 who is hit well in the majors in the small sample you could do worse so although I'm skeptical probably will still be there for tonight out of necessity in order to make these Padres stacks a bit easier to get to from a sour perspective outside of course field the Brewers are facing the Oakland ace starting a series against them which means they are the next team to get to face that very very giving bullpen Luis Medina will start for the ace tonight and I think both aspects the Medina aspect and the bullpen aspect should put us in the Brewers for stacking Medina a rough go of it so far ERA is 8.19 is expected ERA is 6.51 and that number is high largely because his hard hit rate is 43 percent the numbers in triple A were not ideal either from Medina so I think the Brewers should be able to get to him and then there's the bullpen we've talked a lot about the bullpen here on the show but the active roster skill interactive ERA the bullpen is 4.77 which means the Brewers can score points all game long that's not true for all stacks on each slate so I think there's a lot to like in that regard I think the Brewers are a prime stack and if it weren't of course field slate I think they'd be probably number one so feeling really good about the Brewers for today and they're also getting healthier between willy adams coming back and Luis Arias coming back but also Christian Yelich slowly perking back up his iso against righties the past month is 186 which is better than it was his fly ball rate back up to 30 percent that's still lower than he'd like it to be quite a bit lower but better than it was and of course he will steal bases too I have not been super high on Yelich for a couple years now but it's getting better definitely getting better and especially now with how prevalent stolen bases are that does up his appeal too so I'm higher on Yelich now than I was before he is the highest salary guy in the stack and get Rowdy Thales for $2,900 which is super attractive so I think the Brewers do make a lot of sense not super hard to get to from a salary perspective so even with Rowdy Thales struggling right now I want to be on the Brewers personally against the A's and Luis Medina for our third stack we're gonna go to Atlanta Atlanta the Braves facing Josiah Gray who's at awesome results recently but there are some issues under the hood and I think that those allow us to stack the Braves here across his past eight starts Gray has gone back to his forcing fastball a bit more his ERA in the time is 2.78 and an eight start sample ERA is not stable yet but it's starting to get closer to where it's like okay we can't fully ignore that he hasn't let it more than four earned runs in any game so he's had great results decently large sample but the peripherals are still a bit rough and the matchups have been pretty easy in that time across that span Gray has a 5.14 skill interactive ERA his strikeout rate is 20% with a 12% walk rate he's letting up a 41% hard hit rates and he had been getting a lot better in that regard but that has slipped and that's despite plus matches because across his past four starts he has faced the Marlins the Tigers and the Royals there was a tougher start there too but those are three plus matchups so I'm curious what his peripherals would look like if he had been facing tougher teams so I'm okay betting on regression here and stacking the Braves even though Gray has had awesome results as of late and in this stack I'm okay using either righties or lefties Gray's strikeout rate is lower against righties but the ground ball rate is also higher there so lefties have not hit him well so far especially not hitting for power but I think those numbers will improve as we expand this sample so I'm not going to worry too much about where they're at right now I think both handednesses are in play when stacking against Gray with the Braves for tonight so top stacks of the day going to be the Padres at Coorsfield the Brewers against the A's and the Braves in Atlanta things to watch on this plate Dylan Cease gets a fantastic matchup at home he's facing the Marlins and I love that matchup and would love to be here but I still don't think Cease is fully back yet even in plus matchups he's had issues he's a consideration tonight due to the matchup but I'm not fully fully in on him yet I kind of want to see a bit more on Cease before I treat him as being last year's Dylan Cease once again Yusuke Kukuchi is facing the Twins he's still letting up a lot of hard contact and a lot of fly balls and I think that puts one-offs very much in play the Twins are a bit banged up which is why they're not a full stack but if Jorge Polanco can play he got banged up yesterday if he can go he hits lefties well Carlos Correa hit a bomb this week so maybe he's getting back Royce Lewis struggling so far this is all why I haven't gotten to a full stack here but I think Lewis Correa Polanco guys like that can at least be considerations for one-offs for tonight finding the Mets are facing Rich Hill who is letting up a lot of hard contact and a lot of fly balls recently so I think that puts the Mets in play for one-offs or for potentially a full stack the overall numbers for Hill have been fine but that hard contact is tough to turn down so the Mets to me a stacking consideration or a spot to turn for one-offs filling out your lineups let's finish up here the Dinger calls for today I don't think I've gotten to use Fernando Tatis Jr as a home run call yet but he's at Coors 11 bombs already so far so we'll go Tatis as a boring home run call because I feel like it for the fun one will go a lot more fun and this one is fun because I'm excited he's back in the majors John Singleton is back at the Brewers or I guess up with the Brewers now and I've always felt kind of bad for him given the trajectory after you got that huge contract in Houston I'm glad he got his money but I'm glad to see him back in the majors probably gonna bat in the bottom third of the order but salary is $2,200 he hit the ball pretty well in triple A so let's go John Singleton as they welcome back to the big leagues kind of thing home run calls for today for Nando Tatis and John Singleton with the Brewers that's all we got here for today on the main slate for Friday night if you want some thoughts on strikeout props for today we're gonna pitching Ninja Rob Friedman over on covering the spread get that by searching for covering the spread wherever you get your podcast and as with the solo shot you can also get covering the spread over on the Fandall YouTube page if you've got any questions for me I am on Twitter at Jim Sonnis J-I-M-S-A-N-N-E-S you can also follow the Fandall podcast network at Fandall podcast want to thank you all for tuning in for today good luck to you with your MLB DFS lineups we'll talk to you once again on Monday to break down that slate have a fantastic weekend this has been the solo shot right here on the Fandall podcast network