property, rights and liberty. Libertarians tend to agree on a wide array of policies and principles. Nonetheless, it is not easy to find consensus on what libertarianism's defining characteristic is, or on what distinguishes it from other political theories and systems. Various formulations abound. It is said that libertarianism is about individual rights, property rights, the free market, capitalism, justice, or the non-aggression principle. Not just any of these will do, however. Capitalism and the free market describe the catalactic conditions that arise or are permitted in a libertarian society, but do not encompass other aspects of libertarianism. And individual rights, justice and aggression collapse into property rights. As Mary Rothbard explained, individual rights are property rights, and justice is just giving someone his due, which depends on what his rights are. The non-aggression principle is also dependent on property rights, since what aggression is depends on what our property rights are. If you hit me, it is aggression because I have a property right in my body. If I take from you the apple you possess, this is trespass, aggression, only because you own the apple. One cannot identify an act of aggression without implicitly assigning a corresponding property right to the victim. So capitalism and the free market are too narrow, and justice, individual rights and aggression, all boil down to, or are defined in terms of, property rights. What of property rights then? Is this what differentiates libertarianism from other political philosophies? That we favour property rights and all others do not? Surely such a claim is untenable. After all, a property right is simply the exclusive right to control a scarce resource. Property rights specify which persons own, that is, have the right to control, various scarce resources in a given region or jurisdiction. Yet everyone and every political theory advanced some theory of property. None of the various forms of socialism deny property rights. Each version will specify an owner for every scarce resource. If the state nationalizes an industry, it is asserting ownership of these means of production. If the state taxes you, it is implicitly asserting ownership of the funds taken. If my land is transferred to a private developer by eminent domain statutes, the developer is now the owner. If the law allows a recipient of racial discrimination to sue his employer for a sum of money, he is the owner of the money. Protection of and respect for property rights is thus not unique to libertarianism. What is distinctive about libertarianism is its particular property assignment rules, its view concerning who is the owner of each contestable resource and how to determine this. Property in Bodies A system of property rights assigns a particular owner to every scarce resource. These resources obviously include natural resources such as land, fruits of trees and so on. Objects found in nature are not the only scarce resources, however. Each human actor has, controls and is identified and associated with a unique human body, which is also a scarce resource. Both human bodies and non-human scarce resources are desired for use as means by actors in the pursuit of various goals. Accordingly, any political theory or system must assign ownership rights in human bodies as well as in external things. Let us consider first the libertarian property assignment rules with respect to human bodies and the corresponding notion of aggression as it pertains to bodies. Libertarians often vigorously assert the non-aggression principle. As Ein Rand said, so long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate. Do you hear me? No man may start. The use of physical force against others. Or as Rothbard put it, the libertarian creed rests upon one central axiom that no man or group of men may aggress against the personal property of anyone else. This may be called the non-aggression axiom. Aggression is defined as the initiation of the use or threat of physical violence against the person or property of anyone else. Aggression is therefore synonymous with invasion. In other words, libertarians maintain that the only way to violate rights is by initiating force, that is, by committing aggression. Libertarianism also holds that, while the initiation of force against another person's body is impermissible, force used in response to aggression, such as defensive, restitutive, or retaliatory or punitive force, is justified. Now in the case of the body it is clear what aggression is, invading the borders of someone's body, commonly called battery, or more generally, using the body of another without his or her consent. The very notion of interpersonal aggression presupposes property rights in bodies, more particularly that each person is, at least prima facie, the owner of his body. Non-libertarian political philosophies have a different view.  Society, or the state purporting to be society's agent, has certain rights in each citizen's body too. This partial slavery is implicit in state actions and laws, such as taxation, conscription, and drug prohibitions. The libertarian says that each person is the full owner of his body. He has the right to control his body, to decide whether or not he ingests narcotics, joins an army, and so on. Those various non-libertarians who endorse any such state prohibitions, however, necessarily maintain that the state, or society, is at least a partial owner in the body of those subject to such laws, or even a complete owner in the case of conscriptees, or non-aggressor criminals incarcerated for life. Libertarians believe in self-ownership. Non-libertarians, statists, of all stripes, advocate some form of slavery. Self-ownership and conflict avoidance. Without property rights, there is always the possibility of conflict over contestable, scarce resources. By assigning an owner to each resource, legal systems make possible conflict-free use of resources, by establishing visible boundaries that non-owners can avoid. Libertarianism does not endorse just any property assignment rule, however. It favours self-ownership over other ownership, slavery. The libertarian seeks property assignment rules because he values or accepts various grunt norms, such as justice, peace, prosperity, cooperation, conflict avoidance, and civilisation. The libertarian view is that self-ownership is the only property assignment rule compatible with these grunt norms. It is implied by them. As Professor Hopper has shown, the assignment of ownership to a given resource must not be random, arbitrary, particularistic, or biased, if it is actually to be a property norm that can serve the function of conflict avoidance. Property title has to be assigned to one of the competing claimants, based on the existence of an objective, intersubjectively ascertainable link between the owner and the resource claimed. In the case of one's own body, it is the unique relationship between a person and his body, his direct and immediate control over his body, and the fact that, at least in some sense, a body is a given person and vice versa, that constitutes the objective link sufficient to give that person a claim to his body superior to typical third-party claimants. Moreover, any outsider who claims another's body cannot deny this objective link and its special status. Since the outsider also necessarily presupposes this in his own case. This is so because in seeking dominion over the other and in asserting ownership over the other's body, he has to presuppose his own ownership of his body. In so doing, the outsider demonstrates that he does place a certain significance on this link, even as, at the same time, he disregards the significance of the other's link to his own body. Libertarianism recognizes that only the self-ownership rule is universalizable and compatible with the goals of peace, cooperation and conflict avoidance. We recognize that each person is prima facie, the owner of his own body, because by virtue of his unique link to and connection with his own body, his direct and immediate control over it, he has a better claim to it than anyone else. Property in External Things Libertarians apply similar reasoning in the case of other scarce resources, namely external objects in the world that, unlike bodies, were at one point unowned. In the case of bodies, the idea of aggression being impermissible immediately implies self-ownership. In the case of external objects, however, we must identify who the owner is before we can determine what constitutes aggression. As in the case with bodies, humans need to be able to use external objects as means to achieve various ends. Because these things are scarce, there is also the potential for conflict. And, as in the case with bodies, Libertarians favor assigning property rights so as to permit the peaceful, conflict-free productive use of such resources. Thus, as in the case with bodies, property is assigned to the person with the best claim or link to a given scarce resource, with the best claim standard based on the goals of permitting peaceful, conflict-free human interaction and use of resources. Unlike human bodies, however, external objects are not part of one's identity, are not directly controlled by one's will, and significantly, they are initially unowned. Here the Libertarian realizes that the relevant objective link is appropriation, the transformation or imbordering of a previously unowned resource, Lockean homesteading, the first use or possession of the thing. Under this approach, the first prior user of a previously unowned thing has a prima facie better claim than a second later claimant, solely by virtue of his being earlier. Why is the appropriation the relevant link for determination of ownership? First, keep in mind that the question with respect to such scarce resources is, who is the resource's owner? Recall that ownership is the right to control, use or possess, while possession is actual control, the factual authority that a person exercises over a corporeal thing. The question is not who has physical possession, it is who has ownership. Thus, asking who is the owner of a resource presupposes a distinction between ownership and possession, between the right to control and actual control. And the answer has to take into account the nature of previously unowned things, namely that they must at some point become owned by a first owner. The answer must also take into account the presupposed goals of those seeking this answer, rules that permit conflict-free use of resources. For this reason, the answer cannot be whoever has the resource or whoever is able to take it is its owner. To hold such a view is to adopt a might-makes-right system where ownership collapses into possession for want of a distinction. Such a system, far from avoiding conflict, makes conflict inevitable. Instead of a might-makes-right approach, from the insight noted above, it is obvious that ownership presupposes the prior-later distinction. Whoever any given system specifies as the owner of a resource, he has a better claim than latecomers. If he does not, then he is not an owner, but merely the current user or possessor. If he is supposed an owner on the might-makes-right principle in which there is no such thing as ownership, it contradicts the presuppositions of the inquiry itself. If the first owner does not have a better claim than latecomers, then he is not an owner, but merely a possessor, and there is no such thing as ownership. More generally, latecomers' claims are inferior to those of prior possessors or claimants, who either homesteaded the resource or who can trace their title back to the homesteader or earlier owner. The crucial importance of the prior-later distinction to libertarian theory is why Professor Hopper repeatedly emphasizes it in his writing. Thus, the libertarian position on property rights is that in order to permit conflict-free productive use of scarce resources, property titles to particular resources are assigned to particular owners. As noted above, however, the title assignment must not be random, arbitrary or particularistic. Instead, it has to be assigned based on the existence of an objective, intersubjectively ascertainable link between owner and the resource claimed. As can be seen from the considerations presented above, the link is the physical transformation or in bordering of the original homesteader or a chain of title traceable by contract back to him. Consistency and Principle Not only libertarians are civilized, most people give some weight to some of the above considerations. In their eyes, a person is the owner of his own body, usually. A homesteader owns the resource he appropriates, unless the state takes it from him by operation of law. This is the principal distinction between libertarians and non-libertarians. Libertarians are consistently opposed to aggression, defined in terms of invasion of property borders, where property rights are understood to be assigned on the basis of self-ownership in the case of bodies. And in the case of other things, rights are understood on the basis of prior possession or homesteading and contractual transfer of title. This framework for rights is motivated by the libertarians' consistent and principled valuing of peaceful interaction and cooperation, in short of civilized behavior. A parallel to the Mizzeian view of human action may be illuminating here. According to Mizze, human action is aimed at alleviating some felt uneasiness. Thus, means are employed, according to the actor's understanding of causal laws, to achieve various ends, ultimately the removal of uneasiness. Civilized man feels uneasy at the prospect of violent struggles with others. On the one hand he wants, for some practical reason, to control a given scarce resource and to use violence against another person if necessary to achieve this control. On the other hand he also wants to avoid a wrongful use of force. Civilized man, for some reason, feels reluctance, uneasiness, at the prospect of violent interaction with his fellow man. Perhaps he has reluctance to violently clash with others over certain objects because he has empathy with them. Perhaps the instinct to cooperate is a result of social evolution. As Mizze noted, there are people whose only aim is to improve the condition of their own ego. There are other people with whom awareness of the troubles of their fellow men causes as much uneasiness as or even more uneasiness than their own wants. Whatever the reason, because of this uneasiness when there is the potential for violent conflict, the civilized man seeks justification for the forceful control of a scarce resource that he desires but which some other person opposes. Empathy, or whatever spurs man to adopt the libertarian grunt norms, gives rise to a certain form of uneasiness, which gives rise to ethical action. Civilized man may be defined as he who seeks justification for the use of interpersonal violence. When the inevitable need to engage in violence arises for defense of life or property, civilized man seeks justification. Naturally, since this justification seeking is done by people who are inclined to reason and peace, justification is, after all, a peaceful activity that necessarily takes place during discourse. What they seek are rules that are fair, potentially acceptable to all, grounded in the nature of things, and universalizable, and which permit conflict-free use of resources. Libertarian property rights principles emerge as the only candidate that satisfies these criteria. Thus, if civilized man is he who seeks justification for the use of violence, the libertarian is he who is serious about this endeavour. He has a deep, principled, innate opposition to violence and an equally deep commitment to peace and cooperation. For the foregoing reasons, libertarianism may be said to be the political philosophy that consistently favours social rules aimed at promoting peace, prosperity and cooperation. It recognizes that the only rules that satisfy the civilized ground norms are the self-ownership principle and the Lockean homesteading principle, applied as consistently as possible. And as I have argued elsewhere, because the state necessarily commits aggression, the consistent libertarian in opposing aggression is also an anarchist.


In the past five years, Earth observation has advanced beyond conventional space agency-based platforms to include sensing opportunities provided by CubeSats, unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs, and smartphone technologies. Space agency efforts have brought forth well-known satellites such as Landsat and Grace, with costs typically of $1 billion per satellite and concept to launch timelines of two decades for new missions. Recently, the proliferation of smartphones has helped miniaturize sensors and energy requirements, enabling advances in CubeSats that can be launched by the dozens and provide ultra-high-resolution sensing of the Earth on a daily basis. Startup companies now operate more satellites in orbit than any space agency, at costs that are a fraction of. This article was authored by M. F. McCabe, M. Roddl, D. E. Alstorf and others.


Hi, okay, can you hear me right? My name is Joval Tujiman. I work for Red Hat. I'm part of the Overt team and today I would like to talk a little bit about the kind of the reincarnation of Overt node which is probably going to be as a layered product of Fedora Chorus. So I'm going to give a little bit about a background about what Overt is. Probably everybody knows. And more specifically what Overt node is. So then we're going to go to the evolution of Overt node where we were like three years ago. What we're doing today and what we plan to go in the future. Which is kind of probably CoroS-based node. I'm going to explain how we built CoroS node with the standard CoroS tools for building this image. And then discuss some of the challenges that we had and how we solved them. And some open issues that we still have with the node itself and the OS tree and all that. So Overt. What is Overt? Overt is the open source virtualization platform. The leading open source virtualization platform and more specifically Overt node is the hypervisor that runs the VMs. So an Overt host is a hypervisor. You can just install the Overt bits on any host basically. But Overt node is something a little special. It's an image-based operating system. And it had some of different layouts from the past until today. But basically it's a minimal operating system with Overt bits installed on the image and not requiring anything externally. So like I said, there are different layouts. There was the legacy node, which was... We don't use it anymore, but it was on Overt 3.x. And the next generation node was Overt 4 or is Overt 4. And where we want to go next is something that we're looking at is the CoroS-based node. I don't know which version it is, but... So legacy node. I'm going to go really briefly about this. Basically it was live CD. It was mounted read-only. ISO and it had like a live read-write and some persistent paths. Some of the drawbacks is that... I mean, some of the benefits are that it was an image-based, right? So whatever you tested is what the customer got or user got. And it was really... It's not really kind of immutable, right? Some of the drawbacks were like the live read-write amount was that... You reboot the system and everything disappears. I see some people laughing here, but... And it's not something that you would expect from an install system. Okay, so like I said, it's image-based. It was immutable. Yeah. So the maintenance for some other drawbacks were the maintenance, you know, to create a custom installer and to whitelist some files. And like I said, the live read-write is something that is not expected from a system that you install on your hard drive. It looked like something like this, if you can see it. Yeah, good. Yeah. So there is the live read-write and some of the past there, the VAR log and the data, logging data and configuration stuff. And like I said, we're not using it anymore, so it's not really relevant. But we're talking about the evolution of what we're... You know, where we were right now. Okay, so the next generation node, NG node, is what we're using today. And it's based on LVM. So what we do is we compose on the... We compose a squashFS using Lorax. We give it a kickstart. And we deliver it... Okay, we compose a squashFS with all the over bits installed and a minimal installation of Fedora or CentOS or L. And we deliver it via YAM or DNF. So when the user does DNF update, it would get the entire image. And then the post-installation script, what it does is it would get the squashFS, extract it, create a new LV, extract it to that LV. And the LV would be read-only and then would create a snapshot which is read-write. And this is what we have mounted as our root directory. We also have some state like var should be... slash var is not something that is on the image itself, but it's common to many deployments of node. And eventually a new boot entry would be created and you can switch between two versions of running nodes. So let's say if we booted the system, the new upgrade, if we booted the new upgrade and it didn't work, we can just roll back easily to the previous one. So the benefits are almost kind of the same as before. It's image-based, so we know what we are using because it's all tested and nothing is added on top of it. We have the AAB updates, so we can switch between different versions of node. And like someone says, it just works, right? And so the drawbacks is making it just work is not really that easy. It can be sometimes very complicated. So for example, some of the issues that we have is whenever there are Z streams, new Z streams or package changes and migrating between, I mean, we're migrating slash ETC, for example, between the layers. So sometimes slash ETC changes stuff like there are simulings and stuff like that. And we need to handle these specific cases with very delicate care, let's say. Also, another thing that we can do is we can't just take the post-install scripts that we would like to run or to execute because it's basically a post-inst... I mean, it's an upgrade, right? So we would like to run those post-installation scripts in upgrade mode, but we really can't do it because we are creating a new layer and we install it like... It's kind of like a fresh installation, but RPM doesn't know that. So it's tricky. So sometimes it can get very... There is a lot of maintenance that needs to be done. And another issue that we have with Node-NG is since we are using a YAM and DNF to deliver this squashFS, after we install it to the new layer, we need to kind of do some nasty hacks to not install over and over again the image, right? So what we do is we take the image and we just hack the RPMDB and install a package on that new layer so that the next time when you boot to the new layer when you do a DNF update, it won't get the same update again. So that's the issues we have with it. It's working. I mentioned the image base and all that. And for all this work inside the Post-Install for Node-NG is driven by a package called ImageBased which is a package that women maintain. And the way it looks, the layout of the system is something like this. I have just one layer here but as you can see this is minimal partitioning, right? It doesn't have all the nest partitions so it requires approximately 15 gigs of disk space. So if you see the ImageBased layout the first LV is the read-only layer or volume and the one with the plus one is the read-write which is mounted on Slash. And then we have Slash of R and Slash of Boot which are common to all layers or to all images. So the next... So we were thinking about where we want to go with it and of course read at Acquired CoreOS so we thought... Well, CoreOS and actually it was atomic as well we're trying to solve the same problems. We're trying to do ImageBased, server side creating the image on the server side and then delivering it to the user. So it's basically the same and CoreOS is cool so why not. RPMOS tree which was kind of taken from atomic is much more modern solution than what we are doing to the ImageBased and it's much more generic than what we are doing. So over the years ImageBased became more tightly coupled to OverIt so for example if we have some special stuff that we need to do while upgrading like stopping VDSM and stuff like that VDSM is the basic component of OverIt node and then this is something that is integrated inside ImageBased which is not very nice but yeah that's the only solution that we could come up with. Another reason for using CoreOS is the large community like you know CoreOS, Silver, Blue and Atomic and so I want to talk to you a little bit about how we build and install how we build and install the OverIt node CoreOS basically we wanted to use the standard tooling from CoreOS we can take RPMOS tree and compose something on the side but that's not the right way to do it. There is a project called CoreOS Assembler or COSA that's how they call it. It's a container, you pull it from Quay and you give it the configuration repository so configuration repository will hold all the manifests and all the repo files that are needed to compose the OS tree commit from this configuration and what we do is we take the OverIt release RPM which holds all the repo files for OverIt and we take the OverIt release, we extract the repo files we install them right on the configuration directory and after taking some manifest files and some other configurations from the basic Fedora CoreOS config these two together we compose our own OS tree image RPMOS tree image so we produce the commit, RPMOS tree commit and the bare metal installer we would install it just like we would install a normal Fedora CoreOS I have a screenshot here that's what the installation ISO looks like when you boot it we did some rebranding here for OverIt so you tell it where to install the install device, the image URL for the metal image and the ignition URL it's just the same as CoreOS, it's a normal CoreOS and eventually we would add host to OverIt it would look something like this it's a little hard to see but right there on the bottom it says CoreOS preview it's an old version but this is the picture that I had and this is another screenshot after updating, when we compose the commit itself we create our own commit reference and this is what it looks like so some of the challenges we had to face we had some issues with Kdump since CoreOS installs in this it has like special boot directory, Kdump couldn't find it we send patches to Kdump to help them support RPMOS tree sorry, CoreOS correctly managing the users and groups so when you give, when we clone the Fedora CoreOS config there is groups and password files that you need to maintain on the server side before you compose and it didn't really work for us that well what we end up doing is you put like an overlay file which would be installed on the image itself for system DCS users and that would configure all those users and groups that we need for the installation some other issues we had is Podman and Docker I mean everything was working with Podman great until we moved it to RCI and everything broke because we had to switch to Docker but we solved it eventually and ignition versioning so the issue with ignition is that well the issue with CoreOS in general they're moving very fast they're closely aligned with the Fedora cadence so whenever they are, if we are working on Ovid for example for Fedora 30 they're already in Fedora 31 and trying to maintain to align the versioning of ignition for example it's kind of problematic another issue was RPM Scriblets they can't, I mean it's a mess right and permissions and yeah but we solved all these some of the open issues that we have with non-standard paths because we can't install like in slash whatever slash gizmo we have to rebuild our VDSM which has a non-standard path in it and we need to create a hook for QAMU so we would be able to migrate VMs across different types of hosts another issue is kernel arguments so Ovid uses grabby and we need to use RPMOS tree because RPMOS tree can control the kernel arguments and last but not least this is a big one oh I'm sorry one step behind it is the Ansible module for RPMOS tree so we are using Ansible to add our hosts and Ansible is not working nicely with RPMOS tree at the moment we are collaborating with the chorus team to resolve this issue that's about it if you have any questions I tested it with shared storage I don't really know yet what the future holds and now it's not GA it's working right I mean we build it we don't build it nightly it's very hard to follow like I said chorus team are moving really fast it's hard to keep up what state is it? it's kind of you know patches are welcome no well no we didn't look at it yet one thing that I forgot to mention is that the one of the reason for doing this is for you know now with the rise of CubeVirt and running VMs inside the ports people might want to you know move between Overit and CubeVirt maybe and also like kind of moving from an Overit node chorus to a normal chorus for running containers or running VMs with inside containers and maybe it's it's kind of what one of the motivations for this migrating from Overit from node in GA to node chorus is something that I didn't I didn't look at yet good question yes we had the talk we had a discussion about this with the chorus team I'm hoping that we will maybe we just had a discussion yesterday with Mikhail we were missing some stuff like ignition in CentOS right? yeah didn't get the question sorry so yes it's kind of like I mean in large deployments you would use Kickstart anyway right so kind of something like that is that the question right I mean I wasn't following okay yes okay exactly so and I would love to see the same mechanism here okay anything else nobody is asking about the nest and just kidding okay thank you


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But I think it's significant that the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has decided to hold its meetings at a hotel called the Liaison. I noticed when I arrived here tonight that there was something about there trying to brighten up their image, perhaps. To be serious, or not so, I am really honored to be part of the program tonight. I'm sorry I was not able to participate today, but I understand you had some very interesting and enlightening and lively discussions. I'm sorry that tonight we have two such shy and retiring individuals to have a conversation with, but we're going to do the best we can to try to draw them out. Let's just jump right into it, Senator Simpson and Mr. Bowles. I did that today. I need to say, really, I told Jean I apologized to him because the Committee worked for a year and a half on just those kind of people to take care of him. You're referring to Jean Sperling. Yes, and my mind snapped. I had to go to the bathroom and I was hungry. It was the first time, though. And if Erskine had been there, it would not have happened because Jean Sperling is one of his best long-time friends, and because you weren't there, it would have caused me pain. No, anyway, I told him I'm sorry that I cared as much as he did, and I think he understood. But after this is over, Erskine and I will have a little belt and we'll call him. All right. Well, I think we just made some news. I'm going to quit. All right. What I want to start out with is the Simpson-Bowles Commission issued its report in December. So here we are six, seven months later. What has happened? Erskine Bowles, I'm going to start with you. Has anything moved on the surface? It looks like there are talks going on here and talks going on there. Congress has not done very much. Where does everything stand? Well, Judy, I think we've made a lot of progress, and not just in the Sonny and Sher show here. But as you know, the President came out with his budget in February, and I think when he did, there were not many people who took that budget very seriously. And subsequently to that, there were 64 senators who wrote a letter to the President asking him to come forward with a more balanced plan that had serious bipartisan support. And it was 32 Republicans and 32 Democrats. We had, I think, every head of the CEA, the Council of Economic Advisers, since President Reagan, including Christy Romer, sent a letter to him, also encouraging him to take that step. And then we had a number of other former dignitaries, some of who are here tonight, that included most of the former Secretaries of the Treasury, including George Shultz and Jim Baker and Bob Rubin. So I think we've had a lot of outside people encourage the President to take a step, and he did. I think Paul Ryan has put a budget out there, but I don't think it surprises anybody who knows Paul. Paul is, I think, the most sincere, honest, straightforward guy I've ever had a chance to work with. He's better at numbers than anybody I know. And he's put forward a budget that's very serious, that's honest and straightforward and reflects his viewpoints and his principle, and it does have $4 trillion of deficit reduction. The President came forward with his plan. It's not a budget, but it's a budget framework. And in that framework, he said the words, $4 trillion. And that's a big deal. As you remember, when we were trying to get President Clinton to say the words balance budget, he originally said balance budget in 10 years, and then he said seven years, and then he said four years, and then we got there. And for President Obama to say $4 trillion in deficit reduction and have the left not go completely crazy. Now if you look at his budget, it's $4 trillion, not over 10 years, but over 12, and it's very heavily back in loaded, so it's really more like a $2.5 trillion budget deficit reduction plan. And it doesn't really stabilize the debt. It gets the debt to about 77% of GDP, and it also never gets to primary balance. But it has a failsafe provision in there that kicks in in 2014. So I think there's been a lot of movement there. The gang of six, which have become five guys, which hopefully could become 25 guys and gals in the not too distant future. What are you referring to there when you say it could get larger? It could get larger. I think it will get larger. They've had a group meeting, 20, 25 additional members of the Senate, bipartisan again. And basically what they've done is taken the plan that our commission came forward with. They've put it in legislative language. I think they've made it better. They've moved it marginally to the right. They're now at approximately $4.7 trillion in deficit reduction. Over what period of time? Over this decade, so over a 10-year period. So I think it's a very responsible effort, and I think it's a very balanced plan. It's still about one-quarter revenue and three-quarters spending. Does that view of a sense, Senator Simpson, that the gang of six or gang of five is promising? Is doing work that's promising right now? Pray for them. I really mean it. These guys, well, several have been with the commission since we started. So they've been thoroughly immersed. But literally, Joe Biden is a very close friend of mine and got me into this marvelous adventure. But I'll tell you, he's not going to come out of there with nothing. And when he comes out with whatever he comes out with, we don't care if it's our guideline or whatever, as long as they do, as long as they have a plan. Now you heard today- Now you're talking about, just to clarify, you're talking about the debt ceiling talks now, which are separate from the gang of six, right? Well, they are involved. The gang of six is involved with the debt and the deficit, and they're trying to keep, as Jack Blue said today, keeping it separate from the raising of the debt limit. But they won't. But it's a nice idea, but there's about a hundred and some House members who say that's what I've been waiting for. And I ain't voting for that piece of stuff unless I get my cuts in spending. And if they're not good enough or significant enough, what was said today, the bonds as Erskine said, the markets will respond. But all we have to do is do a plan, and Joe will get that done with this. I don't know what it'll be. And the reason they're not dinging on Great Britain and France and Germany right now is because even though they don't like it in their nation, it's a plan. We have no plan. And if we come out of this turmoil with no plan, those three rating agencies will do what they said. Well, help me understand something. My sense was that what the Biden group is working on is something in the short term to get us past this debt limit crisis. But what you all would have been focusing on is something much bigger than that. Yeah, it's kind of really hard to separate the two. And a lot of people don't like the fact that this debt limit crisis is coming up. I think it's actually a good thing because it forces people to act. And you need a sense of urgency, at least that's been in my experience here in Washington, to get something to really happen. And yes, they are focused on some short term reductions in spending and maybe something on the revenue side. But my best guess is they'll combine that with some long term framework that'll talk in the area of this $4 trillion, which has become the magic number. Judy, to me, it's hard as an outsider to understand why the people here in Washington wouldn't act. We've had enough warning signs. Al was talking about Moody's and Standard & Poor's. But if you look at the markets, just today, the credit default swap market, which basically talks about providing insurance against the default on the Treasury's debt, we're paying a higher premium for that insurance on U.S. debt today than they are the debt of Mexico, of Panama, of the Philippines. And it's crazy. And if you look at the work that the economists are doing today, we saw some work the other day where some very responsible economists have come forward and said, if your gross debt exceeds the size of your economy, then you're going to suffer a 1% loss in economic growth. That's real money. The USA today had an article on the front page about the $61 trillion of unfunded liabilities. We've got deficits of over a trillion dollars as far as I can see. How much more warning do we need that we've got to do something responsible? But meanwhile, Senator Simpson, you have Democrats who say, don't touch Medicare. We don't want any tangible, significant change in Medicare. You've got Republicans who say, I'm not going to have anything to do with revenue increases. So how does that get worked out? It's fortuitous, as Erskine says, that this other thing is coming up by August 3rd, 2nd, or whatever. Or before they go home for the August recess, as I think Barry said today. That'll be a date. They can't slip at this time. The economy has changed. Everything has changed. But I'll tell you, when the drop-dead moment comes, there will be revenue in that package. There will be, and I can't tell you the spread, because you can start talking with numbers, and you just say, this is the first time you've done this, but there's one number we can tell you that we are paying less in taxes now than we have since the Korean War, if I'm not mistaken, 15% of GDP, and the historical rate is 19 for 20. I guess they're going to do like Jerry Brown in California. He says, OK, no more taxes. Well, what's Plan B, like DeSoto, burn the ships when it hits the shore? And that's what we're going to do. If the people of America then realize that everything they love in discretionary spending is going to be crushed automatically by our inability to do anything with Medicare, then here we go. I'm going to begin this.  I've talked to other conservatives who say there is no way that a Republican is going to support any revenue increase and not face the wrath of God from Republican voters. And there's no way we're going to have any kind of long term, fiscally responsible plan that puts our fiscal house in order if we don't touch the entitlements. We had $450 billion of cuts in Medicare in our proposal. Medicare will go broke. We made promises we can't keep. Social security absolutely will go broke. We're going to have to make cuts in Medicare and social security, and we're going to have to have some revenue. And you can do it by doing something smart. We have the most anti-competitive, inefficient, ineffective tax code that you can imagine. If you're willing to broaden the base, simplify the code, and get rid of some of or eliminate some of these tax expenditures, which are really just spending by another name, they're $1.1 trillion of them. You could actually take rates to 8% up to $70,000, 14% to 210, and have a maximum rate of $23,000. And you could take the corporate rate to 26% and go to a territorial system that would allow you to bring all that $2 trillion worth of cash, which is an American corporation's overseas, and bring it back to this country to create jobs here. Who takes a hit under that scenario? I mean, I keep hearing that whatever happens, the pain has got to be spread broadly. It's nothing's going to happen. Well, the biggest hit if you reform the tax code goes to people like me, because I'm the one that's able to take advantage of these tax expenditures. You mean the really rich? Well, you and I itemized the deductions. So we have advantage of the mortgage interest deduction. Well, less than 23% of the people, 24% of the people, are the only ones that actually itemized. So they don't get any advantage of the mortgage interest deduction. You and I are one through to get an advantage of it. And what does a Medicare compromise look like, Senator? What about the Medicare compromise? What would that look like? Well, I tell you, there is a way to solve that. And it's a beautiful thing. And let me share it. You cut physicians and providers money. You make the beneficiary put up more co-pay. And you begin to affluence test those who receive Medicare. And you make the hospitals keep one set of books instead of two or three. And you quit the gimmickry between Medicaid and Medicaid between the states. Those are easy things. But you don't do the Paul Ryan route, is what you're saying. Well, basically what Paul did is not something that it's hard to understand. A premium support plan is basically a defined contribution plan. And lots of businesses in this country found out they couldn't afford a defined benefit plan because they couldn't control their costs. So they went to a defined contribution plan and passed the increased cost of the growing cost of the benefits onto the beneficiary. That's basically what he's proposed. If we can't with the Affordable Health Care plan and with the additional $450 billion of cuts that we've suggested in our plan, if that doesn't slow the rate of growth of health care to GDP plus 1, which is what you have to, then you're going to have to look at more drastic steps. Some of those more drastic steps would include things like block granting Medicaid. It would include raising the Medicare retirement age. I mean, eligibility age. It would include things like a premium support plan. It would include things like a robust public option. It would even include things like a single payer plan. But we have to get the cost of health care under control because you're right. You can't control this budget unless you do. I heard a senator say today that his worry, this is somebody who's on your side. That his worry, though, is that what's going to happen is there will be a short-term agreement put together by the Biden group, I don't know about the gang of five or six. And it'll be just enough to get the country through November 2012, but it won't be the long-term agreement that the two of you want. But that's his fear. That's a legitimate fear. Probably. That might well be. But all of them agree, and all of you agree, all of America agrees that won't get it done. It'll get it done so they can get through the election. It's interesting to me, the guys that came here and said, I don't care if I ever get re-elected. I'm just going to go out there and hammer them. All are having PAC meetings and fundraisers. That's really curious, I think. What are the, before I ask, I want to ask you about benchmarks along the way. But one of the arguments we're hearing now is that with the bad economic report that's come out recently about jobs, just across the board, not good news about housing, that if there are serious drastic cuts in government spending, wherever they are, it's going to be a further drag on this recovery, which is already struggling. You know, we actually took that into account. Our number one principle was that we didn't want to do anything, and it ain't stupid. And by that, we expanded upon it and said we didn't want to do anything that would disrupt a very fragile economic recovery. So the spending cuts that we recommended, we have significant spending cuts in 2012, but we don't get back to pre-crisis levels of spending until 2013 when we get back in real terms to the levels we spend in 2008. And the reason we did that is we didn't want to do anything that did disrupt what we called a very fragile economic recovery. Some people argue with us about that for some period of time. They said originally that during the early part of this year that we had factory production was going up, retail sales were going up, existing home sales were going up, banks were starting to lend a small business, investor sentiment was going up. So it looked like the recovery was going to be strong, and we had increases in employment. But Alan and I felt, and I think the members of our commission did, is yes, that's true. But we do have a fragile economic recovery. If you think about the things that are going to drive the recovery, the consumer is still 2 thirds of GDP, and the consumer is very leveraged. This consumer has about $13 trillion worth of debt, half of it's floating. That's 120% of disposable income. If interest rates start to go up since half of it's floating, that's going to have the same effect as the rising gas and food prices do. The capital markets are on strike, the corporations are, because they don't have any consensus of where the economy is going to go, what the government's going to do. The construction industry is still on its backside, and it's hard to think of a recovery when you have a construction industry in a slowdown period. And the government, the feds up here have already done everything they're going to do. State and local governments are cutting their budgets right and left. They're not spending money. So where the stimulus is going to come from, and even before these bad economic numbers that came out last month, and I don't think one Robin makes a spring or one month's numbers make a trend, but even at the old numbers that people were happy about that were the increase in the employment, it'd take till 2019 before you got back to pre-crisis levels of employment, even at that level of increase. So it is a fragile recovery. And yes, you could do the cuts in 2012 that some people call for, but we thought that was a risk you don't want to take. You don't want to bet the country. And so we took about $60 billion of a cuts in 2012, and we took the vast majority of them in 2013, not to disrupt a very fragile recovery. So Senator Simpson, nothing has happened in the health of the economy to cause you to make a material change in the recommendations. No, we really, we like the gang that learned too much. We've sat there for over a year, and to think we got a vote of five Democrats and five Republicans and one independent, and we always, the discussion that was, where is the tipping point? How far do you go? What is that? But whatever the figures were then or now, all I know is I was here for 18 years, I never saw any single prediction of any percentage that was correct in the whole 18 years, not one. Next year's GDP, let's see, next year real growth will be this, nothing ever panned out. Nothing, nothing, not one single statistic. So if you torture statistics long enough, eventually they'll confess, and I've watched that, and boy, this town is filled with people and deadlines, deadlines, you know, we'll have this done by whatever, forget deadlines, but it's just, it doesn't matter whether you use old numbers or new numbers, this is a behemoth, and we're not trying to be alarmist, and it's just, it's there, we've seen it. The Defense Department, don't touch the Defense Department, well you have to. We said, how many contractors do you have? And they said, well it's quite a range, it's between a million and 10 million. Very, very narrow range. And then one of the witnesses says, we're a told Conrad, our programs are unauditable. We have no way to determine the audit. And Ike was right about the industrial military complex, these military retirees go right into that system, and Merry Christmas. All right, I think we've only got a few more minutes. I wanna ask you both as we wrap this up. What do you look for? I mean, do you have benchmarks in your mind? Are you, I mean, we're obviously looking at the debt limit in early August, but what needs to happen in the coming weeks? Today is June the 14th, what needs to happen by the end of June? What needs to happen by the end of July in order for you to see that something is gonna come out of all this work that you've put into this? You know, Erskine and I started this, they said, why are you doing this, which meant to me at your age? But not with Erskine, look at him charming. And rested me on frayed edge. We thought we were doing it for 15 reasons, his nine grandchildren and my six. Then suddenly we realized we were doing it for our children. And now we realize that we're doing it for you people and us, that's how bad this is, this baby is here. I have a view of the tipping point that is earlier than Erskine's. We're not Greece, let's just all admit we're not Greece or Italy or Ireland and all that, but when the three credit agencies raised their head like this, that's never happened and Jack Lew tonight couldn't have been more clear, a wonderful guy to work with, as is Bill Daley's hurling all of them, I worked with him, but boy I'll tell you, if anybody can't see what's happening when, you don't do the plan, they see the turmoil and the people that hold our paper say, I want some money for this paper. It's got all sorts of things around it guilt and I want money for it. Or the other one, you do pass the debt limit and they say we saw how anguishing that was for you, so we're gonna loan you more money, but we'll want more interest. So pick your poison. If you know Judy, I'm a reader of history and the thing that scares me the most is not the 30s. But think about 1918 in the Weimar Republic. What happened? Germany fought the great war and financed it all on credit. We're fighting three wars and financing it on credit. They had deficits as far as the eye could see. We've got about a trillion dollars of deficits as far as the eye can see. You know, they manufactured money in order to bring down unemployment, QE too. And they devalued the currency. Lord knows we've done that. Now look, we've got a lot of things in this country to keep us from going off the cliff, but this is the most predictable economic crisis in history. And if we don't do something and do it relatively quickly, then what I can guarantee you is the markets will move and the markets will do it for us. I'm glad this debt ceiling is forcing some action. I'd be very disappointed if we didn't have at least $2 trillion worth of deficit reduction by August 2nd. You ought to do it quicker so there's some confidence filled up in the marketplace and businesses start to spend some money. But we better do at least that and we better set up some framework that goes in the area of $4 trillion of real deficit production. By when? I mean, agreement by when? For something larger than that? You know, my hope is that it will be part of this deal that comes out of the Biden talks when they kick it upstairs to the big boys. And they will kick it upstairs to the big boys. You can count on that. And how do you see the gang of five, the work they've done, folding into that? I hope they will come out with their plan. It will provide some bipartisan emphasis for people to have the courage to do what we all need. No, what we need to do is to put politics aside and to pull together and to put the country first. So as we leave here tonight, Senator Simpson, go ahead. We could really say something because Grover and I get into it. He doesn't like me any more than I like him. And we've proved that. We do meet. We have met together. I've ready to debate him at four in the morning or 10 at night, anywhere he wants to go. But let me tell you, this is the truth. And I use the Lincoln word, thrall. Look up the word, thrall, we use it in his, I think the second inaugural or whatever, but he used it several times, Lincoln, he liked it, thrall. It means your mind is in bondage.  And I can tell you that if America and the Congress remains in thrall to Grover, Norquist and the AARP, we ain't got a prayer. That's the period. I'd just like to add one more thing since a lot of people haven't seen it. Jim Cooper is here tonight. And Jim and Frank Wolfe, you know, wrote a letter, you know, again, another bipartisan effort in support of the work of a gang of six. And we need more Republicans and more Democrats to decide we're gonna work together and to push the needs of the country forward. There is such a thing as principle compromise. And I think that's what we need today if we're really gonna have a chance to have our physical house really put back in the working hand. So the two of you will continue to work on this? As hard as we can. Let me tell you, we go everywhere in the US where we can and you give us 50 minutes with any group and questions and answers and we'll get a standing ovation. I'm not saying that about our ego. It's the fact we don't BS them. We don't give them much. Small ideas have no power to inspire.  They said, well, you wouldn't do that. And as we toughened the report, toughened it up, more guys came aboard. Now that's how it worked. Whether the amazing part of it was toughening it and more people came and you tell people the tough stuff because they understand one thing.    It's kind of interesting, Judy. You know, Al's right, the tougher we made it, the more support we got. And it's really not so hard to understand.  You know, we've defended the country. But if you tell them that everybody is gonna have some sacrifice, you know, but everybody's gonna be in this, that we've got an enormous problem and we all have to do our part. And they say, okay, I'm in there. And that's what we gotta do. We all gotta give up something. There is no easy solution. You know, this problem is real and all of the solutions are really painful. There is a political will question. That's what we'll see. A little one. All right, thank you. Senator Simpson, Erskine. Thank you. Thank you.


So, now we will discuss under the main health risk, one of them is environmental threat. The lives of all children are existentially threatened by greenhouse gas emissions, leading to climate change. Children's lives today and future existence are at risk from rising sea levels, extreme weather, events, water and food insecurity, heat stress, emerging infectious diseases and large-scale population migration. We think that the most threatened for children and the most difficult for them to survive are environmental threats. First of all, the greenhouse gas emissions are the same as before. When there will be a lot of pollution in the world, due to the industry, due to the vehicles, and there are many such breaches, of course, it is also done by the brain. So, our health care system, our health care system, has been damaged due to which the dangerous diseases have begun to stop in the air. And for all children, there are allergies, skin problems, and they also have issues with their breathing. These are all because of greenhouse emissions. Then, the weather is getting extreme. You are seeing that the heat is already more than before. The cold is already more than before. Then, the effect is that when the glaciers are falling on your mountains, then there is a lot of snowfall. So, the whole environmental stage has changed you. In such a situation, when the families or residential areas have issues, then first of all, most of us are vulnerable children, because they are delicate and their welfare system is less than others, then they are more affected. Then, of course, as we are saying, in our Pakistan and all over the world, the developing countries or underdeveloped countries, where children do not have safe water. There are many such areas in our country, where you have to bring water from a very far distance, and still children cannot drink safe and clean water. Then, apart from this, a few years have passed that infectious diseases have come into the world very much. Now, that infectious disease becomes a whole mbm, in which big and small children are all victims of it. Since the welfare system of small children is less than the older generation, then these threats are more dangerous for them. Then, as we were saying, when there is a sky disaster in one area or a land disaster, then families leave there and migrate to other areas. So, basically, when someone's home is taken care of, they go to new places, where there are not many arrangements like in their homes, then children also travel there. So, essentially, urgent action is needed to reduce carbon emissions in order to keep warming below 1.5 centigrade and implement the provisions of the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change. Now, there was an agreement in Paris that the whole world will work for climate change. For example, they will make their industries responsible for not leaving too much poisonous smoke or gases. And then, vehicles should be prepared or those who are currently walking, should be controlled that they should not leave too much smoke, dangerous or carbon monoxide and such poisonous gases. Then, you have seen that there is a lot of waste material in our world that is thrown into fresh water, rivers, or oceans. So, the people in the oceans or in the oceans take advantage of the damage caused by them. Many of the river and sea animals get destroyed or get sick. But for them to eat, the seafood that is available to children or adults in the world also gets contemplated and poisonous. Then, due to these diseases, the infectious diseases that we have talked about, the meat sources of your food such as chicken, mutton, beef, these are the sources of protein in our food. There are animals there. So, obviously, when the conditions change, changes occur in the environment, they are also victims of that. So, these things are becoming more and more dangerous than before for the children. Obviously, for how long will they face this dangerous system? So, this is what we had discussed in Paris, the people of the world and many of its signatories, that all the sources of pollution should be destroyed or controlled. Especially, as smoke spreads in our area, especially in the big cities. So, at least a few vehicles are running for the smoke and at least a few people are coming out. So that the smoke does not spread. A lot of the diseases of breath, allergy spread. So, for the protection of the future generations, these environmental changes must be controlled. Not completely, but we must try our best to reduce them, so that some of the conditions are better.


Thank you for the introduction. So this is joint work with Tsvika Parkevsky and Christina Buska. And when you're talking about statistically secure obfuscation with approximate correctness, the first obvious question is, what is statistically secure obfuscation? And it's a very short reminder. An obfuscator is basically just a program that gets its input a circuit C and probably some randomness, and it outputs another circuit C prime. And what you would usually want is perfect correctness. Meaning that the output circuit should be functionally equivalent to the input circuit. However, we can sometimes get away with much weaker definitions. What we are going with is approximate correctness. Approximate correctness basically means that for a random input, the output circuit must agree with the input circuit with probability at least 1 minus epsilon for some function epsilon that basically describes the approximation error of the obfuscator. The second thing we want from our obfuscator is, of course, that it's secure. And what you would usually go with is inextinguishability obfuscation. And in the statistical sense, inextinguishability obfuscation simply means that if you have two circuits that are functionally equivalent and have the same size, then the statistical distance of the obfuscations must be negligible. However, we can also weaken this definition to something that we know paper call correlation obfuscation. And there, the difference is that we no longer want that the statistical distance is necessarily bounded by a negligible function. Instead, it's enough that we know some function delta that bounds the statistical distance. For the main part of my talk, I will actually focus on indistinguishability obfuscators simply to keep things a bit simpler. But I will mention how our result also applies to correlation obfuscators. So the next obvious question might be why we even care about approximate correctness. Because an approximately correct obfuscator might seem like a relatively useful thing. It does not even guarantee that it is correct on any fixed input. However, it turns out that it is, in fact, still useful. In particular, it was observed by Mahmoudi, Mohamed, Nematihachi, Parse, and Shilat that you can still construct public key encryption from one-way functions if you have statistically secure I.O., approximate I.O. And this is basically done by just applying the construction of the high-end waters that usually constructs public key encryption from one-way functions and I.O. to an approximate I.O. And then you get something that you can amplify using an amplification technique due to Hohenstein to a full public key encryption scheme. And in our paper we show with the careful analysis that this is not only true for statistically secure approximate I.O., but this is even true for correlation obfuscation for everything, all the parameters basically in this blue area here. So that means that even correlation obfuscation is still an interesting primitive. And it's a very interesting question to ask whether it might exist, especially in this region, with statistical security, because it would lead to a major breakthrough in crypto giving you public key encryption from one-way functions. And our answer to that question is mainly negative. What we show is that if statistically secure, approximately correct I.O. would exist, then either one-way functions do not exist or the polynomial hierarchy collapses. And since we do not believe that either one-way functions do not exist or the polynomial hierarchy collapses, probably statistically secure approximate I.O. does not exist. Our actual proof is more general in that it also applies to correlation obfuscation and it basically gives us a lower bound on the possible parameters for statistically correct, statistically secure, approximately correct correlation obfuscation. However, for correlation obfuscation, we also have a positive result where we can for very weak parameters give a trivial construction. And this gives us this landscape of correlation obfuscation where in the upper right we have a large area that where we actually know a trivial construction. However, the construction is actually so trivial that we are pretty certain that it is completely useless. On the other hand, we have down here the red range. In this range, we cannot construct correlation obfuscation with statistical security. Unless the polynomial hierarchy collapses or one-way functions still don't exist. However, I need to mention that we cannot rule out the full range of parameters that are actually useful for the transformation to public key encryption. So how does our proof work? Basically, the starting point for our proof is a previous proof by Goldwasser and Rotbloom. And what they showed was the impossibility of statistically secure IO with perfect correctness. And they also rely on the assumption that the polynomial hierarchy does not collapse. And what they do is basically show how a statistically secure obfuscator would help you in solving SAT. So the SAT problem is that you are given a formula, it's either unsatisfiable or satisfiable and you have to decide which one it is. And to be able to use an obfuscator to do that, we look at another formula, the formula zero is some canonical unsatisfiable formula. Doesn't matter what it is, just we know this formula is unsatisfiable. And now we obfuscate all of these formulae. And what we get is that because the two unsatisfiable formulae are functionally equivalent, the security of the obfuscator guarantees us that the output distributions must be negligible close. On the other hand, if we have a satisfiable formula, then by definition, this formula is not functionally equivalent to a zero circuit because there exists at least one point on which it actually outputs one. And because you have perfect correctness in the obfuscator, this means that the output distributions are actually completely disjoint. And now it turns out that the problem of deciding whether two distributions are either very close, statistically, or very far, this is called the gap statistical distance problem. And it was proven by Zahaian Waddan that this problem is actually in AM intersect coAM, which would mean that we can decide SAT in AM intersect coAM, which would imply a collapse of the polynomial hierarchy. So the next obvious question is of course, can we just use exactly the same approach in the approximate case? And the answer is no. And to see why, just consider that we have a satisfiable formula that has very few satisfying assignments. Let's say it only has a single satisfying assignment, then it actually disagrees with the zero circuit only on a single point. And because we only have an approximate obfuscator, the obfuscator can just ignore that point, obfuscate this satisfiable formula to a zero circuit, and therefore we no longer have the guarantee that there will be a large statistical distance. So how do we solve this problem? Our approach is basically to obfuscate more complicated circuits. And for this, we construct two different circuits. We construct a reference circuit CY and a circuit CX that's indexed with a PRF key and a formula psi. And we construct these circuits in such a way that if the formula psi is unsatisfiable, then the two circuits are function equivalent and the output distributions are once again negligibly close. On the other hand, if psi is satisfiable, then the two circuits are almost functionally equivalent. However, there exists a point we call X zero on which they disagree. Now this may seem confusing because I just spent some time arguing that if you have two circuits that only disagree on a single point, an obfuscator might choose to ignore that point. And that is why we basically have to hide whether this point exists or not. So to do this, to do this, we introduce another circuit C and this circuit is constructed in such a way that it is function equivalent to the reference circuit. However, the obfuscator cannot actually distinguish between the circuit CX and the circuit C and this allows us to ensure that while the distributions are no longer completely disjoint, that the statistical distance is large. And to be able to do this, we leverage the fact that the obfuscator is actually an efficient algorithm, even though it must be statistically secure, it must itself be an efficient algorithm to be useful. And so we leverage here our assumption that one-way functions exist. And this assumption is leveraged in the form of punctual-sur-rendum functions and punctual-sur-rendum functions were shown by Bonnier Waters, Boyle, Goldwasser, Ivan, and Kiyayas, Papartopoulos, Triadopoulos, and Zaharias, basically concurrently to be existentially equivalent to one-way functions. And we use a very simple notion of punctual-PRFs here, where we have two algorithms. We have a PRF algorithm that on input a key and an input value outputs a single bit. And we have a puncture algorithm that on input a key and a value x zero outputs a punctured key. And we want two things from a punctual-PRF. First of all, functionality should be preserved under puncturing, meaning that for all inputs that are not x zero, it makes no difference whether you use the punctured key or the normal key. Second thing is of course, security. And security for punctual-PRF is defined as follows. You have the attacker. The attacker may choose a point x zero on which we should puncture the key. We choose a key K, we puncture that key on x zero, and then we have two cases. Either we give the attacker the punctured key and the actual PRF value on x zero, or we give the attacker the punctured key and a random bit B. And the security states that the two cases should be indistinguishable. So how can we use this to ensure that two circuits that only differ on a single point are obfuscated in such a way that the statistic distance is large? And to see this, we first look at this circuit. This circuit is for now not indexed by a formula. Instead we have a punctured key K star here, a value x zero on which the key is punctured and a bit B. And what the circuit does is on x zero, it simply outputs B on all other values, it outputs the PRF circuit, the PRF value. And we can see that if B is not the PRF value, so our PRF only outputs a single bit, so this means it's simply the PRF value x of one, then this circuit disagrees with the PRF circuit on exactly a single point, on exactly x zero. And what we want to show is that the obfuscation of this circuit is nevertheless statistically far from an obfuscation of the PRF circuit. And to do this, we look at the other case, we look at the case where B is actually the PRF value. In this case, we have that this circuit is function equivalent to the PRF circuit and this has an interesting implication because if we obfuscate the PRF circuit, then we're guaranteed by the approximate correctness that on x zero, the obfuscated circuit will output B because B is the actual PRF value. And it will output this with probability at least one minus epsilon. However, because the two circuits are function equivalent, we have basically this bound carries over to this case minus some negligible loss. And now we can leverage the fact that the attacker, the obfuscator is actually an efficient algorithm and use the PRF security because the obfuscator is actually not able to distinguish between the two different cases because this is exactly the security of the punctual PRF. So this bound also minus again some negligible loss carries over to this case. And this means what we have is that if we would obfuscate the PRF circuit, then the PRF circuit outputs the correct PRF value on x zero with probability at least one minus epsilon. Whereas the obfuscated circuit C disagrees with the PRF circuit on x zero with probability roughly one minus epsilon, giving us a statistical distance of roughly one minus two epsilon. And therefore we have enforced a large statistical distance even though the two circuits disagree only on a single point. Now of course what's missing here is still that we have to somehow put our formula into this. And to be able to do this, we actually have to restrict our attention to unique SAT. So unique SAT is exactly the same thing as SAT except that you're guaranteed that any satisfiable formula has only a single satisfying assignment. Now unique SAT was shown to be NP-hard by Valiant and Vasirani, however only via a randomized reduction. And that's a problem because we can't use the exact same approach as Goldwasser and Rotblum because if we would show that unique SAT is in AM intersect coAM, this would not directly imply that SAT is also in AM intersect coAM. However, we can combine previous results due to Mamoudi and Xiao and Bogdanov and Li to show that it's enough to prove that unique SAT can be solved if we are given a gap statistical distance oracle. Then this implies that SAT is in AM intersect coAM and the polynomial hierarchy collapses. So this is what we're doing. We are showing that unique SAT can be decided if we have a gap statistical distance oracle. So to do this, we are looking at this circuit here. This circuit CX is indexed with a key K, a random value S and a formula psi. And what it does is it simply checks whether the input value X or S satisfies the formula and if it does it outputs the opposite of the PRF value and otherwise it simply evaluates the PRF. Now there are obviously two cases here. Either psi is uniquely satisfiable or psi is unsatisfiable. Now if psi is unsatisfiable, then this circuit is functionally equivalent to the PRF because, well this is simply never true because there is no satisfying assignment. And on the other hand, in the uniquely satisfiable case, what we have is that CX is actually functionally equivalent to the circuit C we saw on the previous slide, 4X0 being the satisfying assignment of the formula X or S. And this is where the S is important because we need that this value X0 is uniformly distributed, otherwise the approximate correctness of the obfuscation scheme does not apply. And of course B is here not the PRF value, but the opposite. And what that means is that if we define these two distributions here, that basically only differ in that one distribution obfuscates the circuit CX and the other one obfuscates the PRF circuit, then in the unsatisfiable case, we have that the two circuits are functionally equivalent, meaning that the statistical distance between their obfuscations is negligible. On the other hand, in the uniquely satisfiable case, this circuit as I said is functionally equivalent to the circuit C we saw on the previous slide. And what that means is that our bound basically carries over again to this case minus again some negligible loss, meaning that we can bound this statistical distance with roughly one minus two epsilon. And this gives us a gap between the two cases. And this means, and this gap is large enough that we can decide in which case we're in given a gap statistical distance oracle. And that means that if SAIO and one-way functions both exist, then the polynomial hierarchy collapses. And this concludes our proof. And if we apply exactly the same proof and are very careful to correlation obfuscation, then we basically end up with this lower bound that I showed before. And I can leave you with the interesting open question where this bound can actually be extended to also rule out this interesting region here, or if there's a reason why we can't rule out this region, because maybe an obfuscator in this region actually exists, which would, as I said, lead to a major breakthrough in crypto. And with that, I'd like to thank you. And if there are any questions, I'd be happy to answer them.


I am Dali Wajodef by NAMG. I am from Cameroon, Central Africa, but based in Missouri, Colombia, in the USA, actually, pressuring my PhD under the Fulbright Scholarship. I will be an engineering for change fellow in 2021, advancing sustainable development goals to zero hunger and also sustainable cities and communities. I'm really excited about this fellowship because I will be learning from experts upon new skills and competencies in solving global challenges related to sustainable development goals. And I will also meet talented leaders tackling similar challenges in their own countries. I will be working with the University of Missouri to identify the needs and opportunities in foods and nutrition insecure in West Africa. I will also work with Penn State University on resilience housing in East Africa. Through this fellowship, I hope to get new competencies in solving challenges related to sustainable development goals so that I can empower my communities back home, especially women and girls, to reach their full potential through engagement in their communities economy development plan, which really helps to contribute in building vibrant gender balance communities where everyone has the opportunities to live peacefully.


My name is Andrea with Foodimentary Adventures in Food.  On our channel, you'll find simple and tasty dinners using everyday ingredients. So today was one of those days that I just felt like cooking. You ever have those days?  So I made some fried cabbage and some homemade mashed potatoes. In my freezer, I had some dressing that my mom made. I think she made it at Thanksgiving and then she froze some and brought it to me. So I just doctored up a little bit and baked it. And then some macaroni and cheese. I just doctored up a box of mac and cheese. It's, you just use a deluxe mac and cheese. Then I added in a little bit of sour cream and some cheddar cheese and I baked it and it changes the flavor. I'll link the recipe in the description box. And then I tried a new recipe for smothered turkey thighs. So the original recipe was for turkey wings. Howard and I don't really care for turkey wings. We do like thighs. And so that's what I made. It was a new recipe and I'll link it in the description box as well. Here in Texas, in my area of Texas, you can buy turkey thighs just like you can buy chicken thighs. And so I have four thighs in here and I really could have gotten away with making two because I forgot how big they are. So let me fix our plates and I'll show you how everything turned out. So here is Howard's plate. He's got cabbage, mashed potatoes, mac and cheese in the turkey. And the turkey is super tender. We're not huge turkey people, but we both love turkey thighs and these are super tender. And here is my plate. I have the same thing except I have dressing and Howard is not a big fan of dressing. So anyway, this is what we are having for dinner tonight and we will see y'all next time. So for dinner tonight, we are having Motor City Pizza. Of course, this was in my freezer. It was a twin pack that I picked up from Costco. So this is what the box looks like. I threw the box away a while back ago to make room in my freezer, but this is it and we really like Motor City Pizza. It is so good. And you cook it in its own little pan pizza tray and then you're supposed to take it out of the tray before you cut it. And also I added some red onions on top.  So anyway, this is what we are having for dinner tonight and we will see y'all next time. So for dinner tonight, we are having this chili mix from my pantry. I've had it for quite a while. Let me flip it over on the back here. And so you just need to add ground chicken or turkey or shredded chicken. And I had some ground chicken in my freezer so that is what I used. And you're also supposed to add some green chilies, chicken broth and cannellini beans and I used pinto beans. So it's a little bit more watery than I would like it to be. That's because the instruction said to rinse and drain the beans. I should have just dumped the whole can in there and then the beans would have thickened it up because it's really more like a soup and not a chili. So with it, we are going to actually, I'm gonna have Fritos. Howard doesn't like Fritos in his chili. So I'm having some Fritos and then we also have some Monterey Jack cheese that I had in the fridge. I had a block and I just shredded it up. So this is what we are having for dinner tonight and we will see y'all next time. So I wanted to show you all what I'm making tonight using pantry ingredients. It's a new recipe. It's called chicken noodle casserole. So right over here, I've got some spaghetti noodles boiling. I have some chopped chicken that was in my freezer. And then in this skillet, I've got some fresh mushrooms and onions and butter, salt and then I've got some cheddar cheese here, sour cream and then I have two cans of cream of chicken. One is unsalted and one is salted. So I'm basically just gonna combine everything together except the cheese and then I'm going to put it in a casserole dish, pop it in the, I'm sorry, add the cheese on top, put it in the oven and bake it. So I will be back. Okay, so here is the casserole. I baked it for 30 minutes and it's pretty tasty. And with it, I am serving this garlic nom from Trader Joe's. I do not have any garlic bread, I've been out for a while. So we are eating this and I just added some butter on top. So this is what we are having for dinner tonight and we will see y'all next time. So for dinner tonight, I am using this dirty rice mix from my pantry. It is from Aldi. It says to add meat. It actually specifies ground beef but I have a ton of pork sausage. So that is what I'm using.  And then I decided to add some peppers to it. And this is a frozen pepper blend also from Aldi. So I added probably about a third of the back in here. So I'm gonna cook all of that up together and then I'm going to add some green onions to it as well. I'm gonna chop them up and add them in. So I will be back. Okay, so here's our dinner and I actually do like the dirty rice. I do think that it did need to be doctored up. I think if you just used plain ground beef, it would probably be pretty bland. But the peppers and the green onion and the spicy breakfast sausage really made a difference, pretty tasty. And then we had some leftover cabbage in the fridge from the turkey dinner. So we're just finishing that up. So this is what we are having for dinner tonight and we will see y'all next time.


And in class A, section 5, Pine River back is taking on Onamia, taking to the third. Third set, Tigers proved defense certainly wins games. Here's Emma Mills and Maya Hansen on the upper right keeping the ball off their side of the court. Then it was Alyssa and Annie Semler on the same side here keeping the ball away from Tiger Territory, but of course there was power involved and Hansen definitely brought the heat with this spike here for a kill. Again, Hansen strong on the left side again and another spike to get the final point. The third set and the Tigers take this one and the three-nothing lead over Onamia. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.