Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we have with us Mr. Prabir Purkayas, the chief editor of NewsClick and he's also associated with the free software movement. Thank you for joining us. Prabir, we have something to talk about regarding the UIDAI Asia Times had a recent article considering, I mean, dealing with the whole client-based enrollment. So, can you please tell us something about what's the difference? I mean, what exactly is a client-based enrollment procedure? Before we do that, I think the important issue which Asia Times article is brought out and also another article which has appeared in a website called Medium. Both of these are focused on the security issues inside the UIDAI Aadhar program. This is something we have been raising for quite some time. This is not new. We have raised it time again saying that the issue is not that the biometric data is safe, which is what the UIDAI authority keeps on saying. But more important than that is our personal data safe, which is linked to the biometric. In this case, what we're really talking about is even if the biometric data is safe, if our identity gets stolen and tagged onto the wrong biometric data, or if somebody is able to link their personal information to the biometric data, this mapping between the biometric data and the individual's personal data, if that mapping can be corrupted in some way or hacked in some way, what we have lost is essential or identity in the digital world. I think that's the key problem which has been raised a number of times. In this specific issue, what the Asian Times article brings out, Saikandata's article, is that a number of people have raised this issue with the UIDI authority, that there is a big problem that they see in which the enrollment software that is used, that seems to be easy to hack into, causing the possibility of this identity theft. Now, why is the software vulnerable? This is the argument that the Medium Anand's article in Medium gives, is that they have used what is called a client-based architecture, which means the software that is used to enroll the person, which is the one which does the mapping, finally, with the biometric data and the person concerned. This is done using a software which is downloaded in the EKYC computer, which is at the EKYC Kendra. And if that happens, then it's a software which is resident on that machine. This is different from a web-based service in which the software resides on the central facility itself. And therefore, that's relatively more difficult to tamper with, because you can see the intrusions are not there. You can protect that server much more effectively than you can. The millions of copies of the software that have been downloaded in the EKYC. Once it is downloaded into the laptop of these systems, then there are two things that happen. One is it is possible to hack into that software more easily, because it's there. You can study it. You can what is called disassemble it. You can, even if it's machine code, it can be put into what are called disassemblers. You can see what the original code was, and then you can see the flaws that may be there. And let's face it, anybody who writes software knows that there are software security holes that need either to be patched continuously, updated continuously, or needs to be rewritten. This is a given in the software world that there is no software which is error-free, or in which there is no security hole. In this particular case, the question is, do people update their software regularly? Are the patches carried out regularly? Are the patches there in the operating system as that updated regularly? After all, the application just doesn't work by itself. It also works with the computer, with its own operating system. Therefore, there are more holes in the system than just the front-end that you have downloaded. All of this means that a client-based architecture is much more vulnerable to being hacked than if it's a web-based service. In this particular case, the client-based architecture was chosen because of the poor connectivity, and therefore it has felt an asynchronous enrollment by which you sort of get all the information, and then you do a sort of one time per day or eight hours you update the data, and that's a much better way of doing it under conditions where electricity may be missing for two hours, your internet connectivity may not be there, and so many other factors. So in order to facilitate easy enrollment, this was the objective of the UID authority, what they've done is created a security hole within the system through which it appears that the system can be hacked. This, in essence, was also what was called the Tribune hack, whether this was the hack done, whether it was something else, we don't know. But the point is this seems to have created a big security hole through which it's possible to get access to the personal information which any EKYC Kendra can have, and also the possibility of changing it. So considering the possibility of changing it, I mean, take for example, some unscrupulous element has gone ahead and downloaded this client and then prepared his own patches and made himself see an administrator and then starts enrolling people, what is the potential harm that this could result in? I mean, would a client-based system be able to generate, say, Aadhar numbers? Well, we have to see what the whole system actually is. Then we come back to this question. You have what is called the biometric database at the top, which is finally where our fingerprints and our iris scans really go into. It goes in from the bottom with this EKYC Kendra that you see at the bottom and they are the AUS or KUS who are essentially the ones who tie up to what are called the ASAs. ASAs are the one which are the Aadhar service agencies. The AUS and the KUS who are tied up to the ASAs. The ASAs are not very many. In fact, are about, I think, 12 to 13 who are supposed to be very, very high-end people who have direct connection to the UID database. The rest of the people really connect through them. We are assuming the ASA to UID infrastructure is secure. Let us assume that for the time being. What happens if the EKYC and the ASAs and these are the AUS who are very, very much larger in number? So any Aadhar service agency which verifies the Aadhar number for you and connects to various services that you may want to link through Aadhar, all of them in fact are the ones who have access through the AUS software to finally the biometric database, but it is a limited access. One must understand this access is only for the purpose of verification. But the point that is there is both the AUS and the KUS, because they have the ability to change your personal data which is not supposed to be the core part of the data which the central depository holds. Therefore, it may be possible depending on the kind of software security protection that has been built into it. It is theoretically possible a hack at that level could lead to, as you said, the software declaring itself to the admin and then making changes to the personal database which means the mapping between your biometric data and you as a person, your other identity which is not your iris, which is not your fingerprint could be changed. Essentially, therefore, your biometrics could belong to somebody else or somebody else's biometric could belong to you if I can hack into this database. And that seems that you have happened because a number of people have complained about it. There are EKYC, Kendra operators who have said this is the problem that they think that is happening. So, a lot of number of warnings seem to have been given in the last two to three months and this is what the Asian Times report indicates. And as you saw earlier, we had a tribute case which reported that this kind of access was available. They didn't talk about changing the personal properties. They didn't talk about changing the personal data, but they did talk about a level of access which should not have been available except to the top other officials in Punjab. So, given that, I think what we are seeing is what we have always argued that linking data in this particular way opens the security holes much more. The more you link to a database, the more possibilities you have to interfere also in the database. In this particular case, poor security system, poor security architecture based on the fact our systems are not really real-time secure in the sense that it cannot work all the time without electricity, without internet. This is a problem. But given that, what has happened is the ecosystem built up around other seems to be a very leaky and a weak security system. It would not have been a problem if it wasn't supposed to link everything to it and if it was not supposed to be providing your authenticity as a person. And this is really the problem. The original Aadhar Act and the original Aadhar system envisaged that all the verification will be through biometrics. What has now started happening is you are arguing that the Aadhar card and the Aadhar number is your verification of you as you. Now this is as good as Anand has said it is the biometrics. This is as good as you giving a self declaration that you are you because behind this the entire system is really leaky and I think that is the biggest problem that is hitting today. It's compounded by one significant issue. The significant issue is Aadhar authority refuses to accept. The government refuses to accept they have a huge problem. More money they put into a leaky system the more things they want to connect to the leaky system without getting into the issues of privacy. Without getting into it the more you do it the more you open yourself to identity thefts of the people. So I think what we are seeing is Aadhar system's capacity for malicious use is going to grow exponentially because A it's a leaky system. It is a huge number of security holes in it as it's becoming more and more clear with all the examples in these two articles. And the third that the more connectivity you build into it more access is being given to the AUS that the huge number of new AUS who are being used today for gas, for mobile, for bank accounts for even I'm told for getting a RFID tag for your ability to go on the highways all of this are being linked to Aadhar. Each one of them is a link to the Aadhar system. Each one of them is using software which could provide theoretically a route to hacking of your personal data. I still agree that the biometric data may be safe but the point is these are the issues that still happen. Our personal data if it is stolen and mapped to something else it really doesn't matter whether biometric data is safe or not. I'm not really concerned about the worlds in my fingers whether they are safe or not. I'm really worried about my identity being still written as mine. And I must tell you the last issue which again has been raised in one of these articles is that it appears that the unique identity system that means only one copy of your biometric information being attached to one person even that is not being maintained in the UID database and that's really a cause for concern because somebody has said how come my son or my daughter could be given an Aadhar card based on my fingerprints I thought the biometric data was unique. So how can two other numbers be associated with the same biometric signatures? I don't know whether this is true or not but if it is then the other issue that also comes up is how unique is our unique identity how is the UID part of it is also unique. I think that also we need to see. Thank you Prabir for sharing with us your thoughts on this matter and thank you for watching NewsClick.


So, we'll get started right now. It looks like we have a full TSE Jeff, Jeff Brewer here. Yeah, he's here. Cool. Nine out of nine. Perfect. Yes, I'm here. Awesome. Cool. We'll get started. We have a fairly, you know, somewhat packed agenda today. We're going to be welcoming some new TSE members, and we're going to be welcoming some new TSE members. We have a full TSE roster. We'll discuss kind of the project presentation meetings that happened last week and how that went. Talk a little bit about CNCF SIGs. We have a annual review presentation from the Spiffy. Community since it's about a year since they entered the sandbox. And then we'll kind of open it up for any community discussions, backlog, et cetera, et cetera. Let's get going. Next slide, Taylor. So just a little heads up on some new projects that have entered the sandbox, both brigade and Cubedge came in. So great to see those come in. I kicked off the vote for Creo to enter incubation this morning, and we're still waiting on a little bit more due diligence on OPA before moving to an incubation vote. So I think we're waiting on Mr. Brendan Burns to put in his due diligence there, and anyone in the community is welcome to provide input there if they have had success using OPA or have any critical feedback. Yeah, I'll be ready with that next week. Okay. The next meeting. Okay, sounds good, Brendan. Who else was talking at the same time? This Joe, is it Creo or Cryo? That's a good question. I would like to clear this up. As far as. Cryo. Cryo is the preferred nomenclature. All right. Good to know. Cryo. Okay. That's going to take me a while. All right. Yeah. And then thanks, Brendan. And you know, anyone in the community is kind of welcome to comment on OPA too. So as, as the due diligence is going on, especially if you're using it in production or have any critical feedback. Cool. Next slide. Most important news. So we have two new TOC members that have joined us today. So. Liz Rice has come on board and has taken. Kelsey's slot after he stepped down. Due to commitments. And then Michelle Noralee has taken the TOC selected. Slot. So I'm super excited to welcome them both. And I've been really thank both Kelsey and Quinton for all the kind of amazing work they've done. And I've added them to the emeritus thing. So with Liz and Michelle on the call, you're welcome to say hi or say anything in terms of your thoughts of being on the TOC. Thanks, Chris. Yeah. Hi, I am. This is Liz. I am super excited to be part of this. I, because I've inherited Kelsey's chair, I have somewhat less than a year. And I'm quite keen to make sure that, you know, things have happened in that slightly less than a year. So yeah, I hope that with the rest of the amazingly smart people on this team, we can make some things happen as far as the TOC is concerned. I'm also really excited to be here. So yeah, thank you everyone for the opportunity. I've been hanging out around doing CNCF stuff for a few years now. And so I just feel really grateful to be a part of this particular group of people. And I think I'm most looking forward to the CNCF SIGs and that being formed, I think that's going to provide a great menu for a lot of really interesting conversations around cloud native SAC. So just really pumped. Thanks. Awesome. Glad to have you both. Just in order of kind of governance related things. We are seeking nominations for the TOC chair, which will close at the end of this week. And then we'll do the formal election. I believe Liz and Mr. Joe Beta has volunteered. So if there's any other TOC members that are interested in that slot, I'm going to make a comment on the issue posted below. Cool. Next slide. Just reminders on our wonderful cube cons coming up. So Barcelona is the one that's kind of the immediate on attention that everyone should look at. We publish the schedule, which is great. Thanks for your patience on there. I know it was a little bit delayed, but it's packed. Some sponsorships are available towards the end of this week and now in terms of attendance, we're tracking for probably somewhere around a little over 10,000 folks attending, which is a little bit wild. We had about 3000 or so signed up before the schedule was even live. So after that, we have China and North America coming up. So if you're very interested, feel free to reach out and we're happy to have a conversation around any of these bets. Next slide. We have a kind of shameless final call for summer code. If you're interested in mentoring projects, we have an amazing kind of set of ideas already there. But if you're interested, feel free to reach out to me or me or anyone. That's part of the GSOC admin list. Slide. So yeah, project presentations. So we've recently moved to this model where every second Tuesday of the month, we're kind of going through the backlog last week. We had a three project presentations, which kind of worked pretty well. I don't know how people feel about it, but I think it kind of went pretty well. We're going to continue to do this. If there are particular projects that the TOC wants to see slotted for the next one around next month. Let me know since you essentially get the control. Well, the schedule for that one, but any other feedback from the TOC or community on, this particular method of going through the backlog. Yeah, Chris, I was just wondering, I think we originally planned to do this every other week. So all the in-between weeks between the TOC meetings, my thinking is that we've got a ton of existing projects up for annual review. And then we've got an additional backlog of, you know, projects wanting to come in. So I think we probably need two of these a month, not one. I don't know what the general consensus is. I don't want to overload everyone with presentations either. I think we're going to end up with this never ending backlog again. If you don't get rid of some of them. I actually had a similar question, which was, is there a, or what, what is the annual review schedule? Is that part of that backlog? Is there a separate list of? Yeah. You could build that basically from, if you go to the GitHub repo for the CNCF TOC. And if you look through basically all the sandbox projects and their entry date, you could kind of see when they're, when they're due. I don't, I don't think we're too crazy for the next few months. Maybe it may be a couple, but I'll see if I could kind of go build out that, that list. And a personal thing is I don't think we need another meeting a month right now. At least I'm not feeling like we do, but I'm happy to oblige of, I have people on one. Yeah. I guess the question is if we do three a month, you know, how long does the backlog last in months? And my guess is it's many, many months. And I guess that's too much. Do we need presentations? No, not for everyone. So it's, it's basically you kind of request what you want for graduated projects. Yes. There's a hard requirement. Yeah. My feeling is that if we, if we do a bunch of presentations where we're just never going to get to any of the other work that we would like to do. So I think my personal preference would be to try to do the, the project stuff, probably async, like, is it possible that we could look through GitHub PRs and different docs and then if people feel that we, that we need a presentation and we could do one. Yeah. It works. If you link off that project board, we should kind of see what's, what's due. I mean, we have to fill up next month's meeting anyway. So. So is that saying essentially before we do a presentation with kind of have a, free presentation, I mean, essentially a step where we say, do we want to spend time on the presentation? Yeah. I mean, that's, that's, that's my feeling is that I think if, if people would have presented previously, we could just ask them to send us collateral, whether that be slides or a doc or a, or a GitHub PR. And then I think maybe there could be some, some reasonable review period where we look at everything. And then, you know, we can just do a, you know, a little bit of a review period. So that seems like we want a presentation. We could ask for one. I'll just try. I get what Quentin is saying. I just think that maybe for the time being, we should continue with one meeting a month since, I mean, for me, I'm still getting on board. And I know there are several other new members on the TOC. So I would love to revisit this idea. Now I agree with you there, Michelle. I think changing the process before we've got used to the current process. Yeah. Unless we think that there have been presentations that perhaps we shouldn't have had. Yes. Sorry. I, I wasn't necessarily suggesting that we cancel the presentation meeting. I was mostly responding to having a second presentation meeting. So I'm just trying to avoid us spending a ton of time in presentation meetings. Yeah. I actually, I was just going to second maps idea because I think when we faced a similar situation in the steering committee with charter, this sort of dividing conqueror approach worked pretty effectively for burning down the backlog of big charters. And, you know, yes, we won't get a presentation from every project, but that's, it's probably better that we don't have that. And we cover the backlog that we wait for nine months to cover the backlog. The other thing too is that I mean, my feeling is that hopefully once the six startup, I mean, shouldn't we be pushing, you know, the first tier of reviews to, to them, right? So I think that would also help. Absolutely. Yes. If I could chime in, I think it's really important though that we're communicating to these projects. Just because I've had a couple of projects that have been in the queue. Close to nine months and they're reaching out weekly every two weeks, wondering what is going on. And I don't think that's a good spot to put a lot of these projects in and this weird, what are we waiting for? We're on the backlog. Are we ever going to get scheduled? You know, I think it's only fair that if we don't feel like some of these projects are going to be reviewed, that we're prompt about letting those people know we're asking them, you know, for more information upfront and trying to get them on a schedule so they understand where they stand. Cause that's just been my feedback I've gotten from a couple of different projects is they feel like they're kind of just hanging out waiting and they don't know what's going on. So maybe we could improve our communication out to those people. Yeah. Just one last very brief comment. Cause I was the one who put the proposal forward to, to have these meetings. The intention is not that they'd be mandatory for all TOC members or anything like that. That they're just a forum where if people want to find out about a project that is wanting to get into the CNCF, there is a place they happen. If the TOC member or anyone else in the community is interested, they attend that meeting and if not, they don't. And obviously if there's a TOC member who would really like to find out and interact with the team, they, they can just, you know, request that that, that presentation be postponed until some date when, when they're able to attend. So, so yeah, don't think of this as extra workload. It's, it's additional optional information available to everyone and they're all recorded. So you can watch them afterwards as well. Can you point me to the recordings for these? Yeah, I'm trying to find it right now and it's not obvious. It should be on the CNCF YouTube channel, but all. Okay. Okay, cool. I'll send you some stuff offline. Cool. Okey-dokey. Let's move on on this topic. CNCF six, just a reminder that the vote is out. Really looking forward to kind of getting this improved and just a reminder that we'll be bootstrapping this process with kind of the governance security focus who's kind of been a great kind of beta slash pilot kind of customer for this. So vote is out to check out the CNCF TOC mailing list for it. So keep going. Going. All right. Now we have the annual review for one of our sandbox projects. Spiffy slash buyer community. So I'll hand it off to either Sunil or Andrew who will be giving the presentation. Oh, hello. Hey, everybody. Can you hear me? Yeah. We hear you now. Oh, Jesus. Star six. Hey, everybody. I'm the car. I'm driving like that. I'm happy to talk to. Talk to the slides and give you guys all a quick update on, on the Spiffy inspire project. I'm going to talk to you guys. I'm going to talk to you guys. I'm going to talk to you guys. I'm going to talk to you guys. I'm going to talk to you guys. All right. So we'll go ahead and give you guys a quick update on the Spiffy inspire project. I can't see the slide. So I can go by slide number because I remember the slide numbers. I swing by on slide 16, which is the overuse side. And I'll start from there. So as a reminder for those of you who are new to the CNTF. We're having the same thing. Attention to the world of authentication and security and Scantip. and staff that are designed to effectively provide and promote a way to securely identify software services in increasingly dynamic and heterogeneous environments. Spiffy, just to level that across the board, is really a set of specifications, right? And it's encapsulated within three elements. First is something that allows you to find, you know, how a service mutual identity identify yourself, you call that as a GID. Second is a way to encode those GIDs into some sort of graphically verifiable document. We have two forms of that. First, we started with X509. We also have the chase on the token format as well. And third, but not least, is ETI specification that allows for applications that in perspective to get these experts as part of their runtime. I mean, that's the role of the whole. Spire is the, one of the implementations of Siffy basically allows us to take those three standards and let you actually do something with those in an environment without having to do too much, too much heavy lifting per se. Some of the use cases that come up around Spire primarily been around the areas of secure authentication amongst services. Another one that's shown up over the last years. I think we lost Sunil unless I'm going a little crazy. Yeah, I think we lost him. It shows a no phone. Oh, there we go. I'm here guys. Sorry about that. I don't know if I should. No worries. Oh, it looks like it cut out again. Maybe come back to Sunil when he's got a better connection. Yeah, that's completely a reasonable option. Everybody, can you hear me again? Yeah, you're back. All right, well, I dial back in. Hopefully this will be stable. I'll make this quick so we can move on to somebody's stable location here. Yeah, so let me go to slide 17, which is the timeline slide. So if you remember from the time that we brought this project in, I mean, the history of Siffy Inspire, it can be rooted back to almost 2002 going back to some of the work that was happening inside of Plan 9, which was in Bell Labs. A lot of the learnings that I think the community has, thanks to work by Joe Beta and others, stems from the initial implementation we learned about at Google back in 2005 towards loss infrastructure. And since then, we've made some really great progress, not only getting Siffy Inspire deployed and launched at CoopCon North America 2017, but then having this project welcomed in since then in April of 2018 as well, which was last year. And I think that's the conference where Andrew and others were able to spit in the keynote and talk a little bit more about the project as a whole. If you go to the next slide, you'll see that since that time, we've had a truly interesting uptake in terms of our Oldwell community. We've got 432 participants in the Slack channel. Not all of them are actively participating day in and day out, but we are seeing the slow and steady up and to the right, both in terms of active participants as well as active messaging across the board. Our community, our conversation happens in Slack. We have a variety of mailing lists that we use to accode documents or to communicate thanks to people at, just because that's the way we do things, but most of the day is happening inside of Slack. And we're pretty excited and particularly by the most recent uptake in activity. So if you go to slide 19, you'll see that across the board, and this is just a representation of some of the companies that have really been jumping in here, including Square, VMware, Uber in particular, Tullio, Pinterest and a few others, who've all showed up and have been spending time with the project trying to understand how can they actually align their use cases with what these building blocks allow for them to do inside their organization as a whole. Some organizations like Pinterest are very much of the mindset to be able to sterilize around SPFY and the SPFY identity format itself. They already have the machinery and the equipment to be able to do secure authentication based on the technology that they've already been working on for the last number of years. Other organizations like Square and Uber are looking at being able to replace the existing forms of service and system authentication across the infrastructure a whole lot. And so what that's translating into is just a myriad of capabilities that are finding its way into both the standards and SPFY as well as within the open source code base itself that inspires a whole. The numbers of these projects in terms of stars and commits and contributors, these are nice, these are interesting, we're working very hard as a community to continue to drive that. We've become fairly disciplined, we've always been fairly disciplined in terms of how we engage our community. We have regular community days, one supporter now, we bring the community in together, the next one's happening in May. And so being able to use that as a way to continue to promote not only SPFY and SPIRE but to promote the adjacent ecosystem of technologies, whether it's in policy or anything else in between TOF and notary and things of that sort. And so we've been pretty excited by kind of a pull from other communities caught into learning more about SPFY and SPIRE as a whole. If you go to the next slide, slide number 20, you'll see here some of the features that we've been working on as a community. So on the left side, what we consider to be some of the core building blocks of SPIRE from the code base. As I mentioned before, John as a transport mechanism is something that came about very early on. A lot of folks said that we needed a mechanism, aside from X509, that allowed for these specific attendees to find their way through some sort of a middleware device where there was an HIK way or a load balancer or something on those lines. So we very quickly heard that to move forward and build out a SPAC as well as implementation support within SPIRE's infrastructure as a whole. Workboard API work continues to develop. We're working with a number of participants on that. One of the ones to highlight on the call is Google. So we've been spending time re-engaging with Google and the Istio team around trying to identify ways in which we can kind of align our thinking, our resources, and our story around the value of multi-factor authentication for services, which is how we define SPIRE. And then being able to talk about the value that brings not only to folks that are in an on-mesh world talking to Kubernetes, folks that are talking to off-fashion infrastructure as well, which is a large chunk of the Fortune 2000 as a whole. So we're pretty excited about some of the work that we've seen as well as some of the foundational engagement from our partners like Google, from ThoughtWorks, who has a consultancy who's bringing a lot of companies into this hold and teaching them about what the value of SPIRE is. And there's a lot more down the path as well that we worked on too. On the left, on the right-hand side, you'll find basically a listing, a snapshot from our website about the number of plugins. So as you'll remember, one of the key features of SPIRE is the fact that we've built a fairly accessible, fairly easy to consume plugin framework that allows for people using SPIRE to write their own plugins. So if you want to be able to do node access patient, if you want to be able to use your own upstream CAs, if you want to use your own key management systems, or if you want to use your own back-end data store, we have a plugin framework that has been fairly well exercised by a number of folks, and we expect to see more of these coming forward over the coming year. If you go to the next slide, it'll take you to some of the integrations we've had. So customers and folks that are using this I think are looking at us and the community of open source technologies as well as commercial vendors to showcase how these technologies can be used together. And so over that time, we've had a number of great opportunities to engage in folks across both the issuing side, such as those that issue specific identities, as well as those that consume specific identities. And I'm not going to read this slide to you, but you can get a sense of who those stakeholders are and the kind of work that we've been doing along the board there. I expect to see more happening on the world of CAs in particular. I expect to see more happening in the world of more traditional identity and access management systems as well. We've had a number of folks in the community asking us about our ability to plug into technologies like Venify and CyberArt and Okta and others along those lines that I think are already embedded within the large enterprises as a whole. So we expect to see more work coming with those communities over the coming year as a whole. If you go to the next slide, this is the last slide, we're just really kind of focusing on our roadmap over the next year. You can read this slide for yourself and I won't share the details there, but this is going to be a very great year for us. Let's start starting with Kupkan Barcelona, which is happening in just a few months. We have, I believe, five presentations from side channels and from other community members including Uber and others talking about the work that we're going to be doing around SPIRE. Some of that work is going to be highlighted around things like high availability. We've already got HAA built in the terms of being able to run multiple SPIRE servers to have bill over, but we're looking at beyond that. We're looking at load testing. We're looking at kind of integrations with systems like this too as well. We're also looking at trying to make SPIRE just a hand of a lot more turnkey with Kubernetes. We had quite a bit of feedback in Q4 last year about the fact that our documentation, our examples, our libraries were really not well built for somebody who was starting with Kubernetes and wants to get started with CP Inspire. We took that as a challenge and over the last two and a half months, but turned through and really done a 180 in terms of our footprint and telling the story of how to help people use Kubernetes Inspire as whole. I expect more work to happen there over the coming months. I expect more work to stop it around making this stuff accessible to people. The early adopters really have a burning pain or they have a really good understanding of PKI at scale. Most folks don't and most folks shouldn't really have to. I think what we're really hoping to do is work with the community to build more examples, to build more case studies, to build more webinars, and to continue to drive and showcase why this support not only for their infrastructure, but as they move towards a cloud native world. With that, I'll put myself on pause and happen to take any questions anybody might have. So hey, Sunil, this is Brian. Inspire 1.0 production ready. Is that when you expect to have users starting to use Spire in production or do you have some already? So right now, Brian, I hope you can hear me right now. The production users that we have closest to this, yes, we expect two people, two organizations by, actually three organizations by Q3 this year, to be moving into production. I won't share those names quite yet because I don't want to set those expectations for them when we don't have the clearance to share those names yet, but two of them already are in staging, they're in the middle of roll-on, they're kind of a production into their infrastructure and they're in the middle of driving some requirements around load testing and some of the additional security, obviously they're going to be doing against the load based as a whole. We have a third that's going to be spinning up their exploration in their staging environments in Q3 and we think there's probably another two or three more beyond that as well. I think by the end of this year, when we get to coupon North America, whenever that might be, is when I expect for us to be able to talk about having at least three, four, or five production services, production companies, or sorry production implementations of Spire being deployed out there, but we're not at that point yet. So I'm not here to tell you guys that we're all ready to go and that Spire and Spiffy are ready to make their move forward, we're not. When we're still building our community, it is nice to see the progression, it is nice to see the engagement. We still have a lot more work to do to get this into the hands of more production environments as a whole. Are there any other, one thing that is being discussed is what projects need, are there any other services that CNCF could provide to you that would help your project? I think the only service that comes about, and this might be a broader conversation with other projects that are not necessarily backed by a larger enterprise, a larger enterprise splitting, is there's always more around how do you make this content accessible to audiences, right? And so part of it for us is getting the opportunities to work with great technical writers, getting to work with great content producers, whether it's video or audio, and just trying to promote more of the story through better storytelling as a whole. Storytelling is hard and it's expensive for the best ones out there. And so opportunities where we're able to tap into the CNCF collectively. I know there's a service that has a lot of great features which we have been taking advantage of, but particularly around the storytelling natures, around comms and marketing, the project in a material way would be helpful. Now I understand that we're a sandbox project and there's a sandbox project. I don't think sandbox projects are pervy and have access to those types of services that they're available at this point, but that would always be helpful. Enload that site file as one of the sponsors will continue to drive that initiative forward as best as it can. So the people you'd be trying to communicate with would be additional contributors or some early adopter users that you could get feedback from? I think some of the feedback that we're looking for is if we're trying to build interconnectedness between the CNCF project, at least as one set of organizations, then really being able to showcase and have engagement with more of the broader swath of Kubernetes users. Now we might have a bit of a mismatch, right? The Kubernetes user base might be different than those that are looking at Spitfire or Opa specifically, right? But I think being able to have different vantage points through which people can give us feedback on Spitfire and its accessibility. What does Spitfire mean to me as a Kubernetes user? What does it mean to me as a GRPC user? What does it mean to me as a top or notary user? I think being able to have perspective from different communities into the project is always helpful. But then again, we're one of multiple projects in here, and so I'm not going to say here that we have the time to be able to work with all of them, but Kubernetes as a community, as a first class community amongst the others in this ecosystem, I think it's one where we're looking to actively engage way, way more because I've been part of the work with John over the last quarter as a community, but also because we think there's a lot more to go beyond that as well. So that would be one area, Brian. I think that would be great to get some engagement. Have you connected with SigAuth subgroup in the Kubernetes projects at all? We have, yeah. So in 2018, we spent quite a bit of time working in concert with what was happening in SigAuth around trying to identify mechanisms around workload identity that was going to be needed to not only Kubernetes, but also useful to Istio and useful off of Kubernetes as a whole. I think that there's wiggle room and space for different ideas to exist in there as there should be, but it seems as though, much like with our project, we've had to focus much on really kind of driving where a lot of the interest had been, which for the most part of 2018, until we started hearing about this in the back half of 2018, had really been coming off of Kubernetes. And so that's where a lot of our effort and time was spent really optimizing around what Stiffy was and what Spire needed to be able to deliver 4%. That said, though, I think it's a great opportunity for us to reengage that group. I think there might be some learnings there and some learnings both ways. Even with Istio, for example, I think we went down to Google about a month ago or so, and we had a great conversation. I think both of us were heads down working on our projects, and we picked our heads up for an hour and a half, and we're like, gosh, you guys are doing this, and you guys are doing this, and there's just so much more overlap in terms of the world, and rather than create competing ideas, especially when we're trying to promote same concepts to the same users, I'd like for us to try to find more time and opportunities to engage and align, especially because we're part of the same community as a whole. So a lot more work for Sightail and others in our community to do to make that happen. Okay, thanks. First of all, I really enjoyed your presentation. I feel like you're saying all the right things and focusing on really awesome things like working on community building and making your docs more approachable and going in depth and having these conversations with potential end users and kind of seeing what features that they need, that all sounds great. I'm just really curious. I actually talked to some of the HashiCorp people about how and why they ended up using, I think it's just a spiffy, but I'm curious to know what kind of teams are you talking to or who do you end up talking to at other companies like Pinterest and Uber, like what teams, how does that conversation start? Do they reach out to y'all or do you kind of target a particular group of people? Yeah, sorry, this is Michelle. I can't see faces. I'm assuming this is Michelle. Hey, Michelle, it's nice to meet you. By the way, we never met before, but it's nice to meet you. The communities that we have engaging with us, the personas inside organizations that show up and I'm curious about something to inspire, let me give you one way of looking at segmentation. We have a lot of organizations that a lot of startups probably are not finding their way too spiffy per se. I think that for many folks, spiffy as a concept is particularly valuable and particularly useful when you are a hybrid cloud adopter of some form or fashion. If you're born in Amazon or if you're born in Google, if you're born in Azure, the tooling, the security constructs for the most part are good enough, I think for a lot of folks. We're not seeing that kind of engagement, just in terms of community transparency. We're not seeing that kind of engagement with those sorts of teams because this isn't a higher order bit for them to worry about. Where we do have engagement is in, let's call it two classes of large enterprise. One is I'll call Nuvo Enterprise. Organizations that are less than 15, 20 years old, something along those lines, don't have nearly the kind of technical debt and heterogeneity as you might find in a prototypical Fortune 100 that's been around for 30, 40 or 50 years, but recognize that as their infrastructure starts to age, as their infrastructure starts to expand beyond their existing footprints and as their personnel start to turn over, some of these foundational technologies like Pinterest or Square or other places like that that have been built by security engineering teams or in some cases, identity and access management engineering teams start to show their wear and tear a little bit. We oftentimes will find ourselves engaging with folks that are in those two types of organizations to actually explain to them how we look at Spiffy and Spire as a potential next step in your journey as you become a cognitive organization as a whole. Now you brought up HashiCorp which is in all of these organizations that we're talking to, it's a great company, it's a great piece of technology around ball specifically here, but I think one of the things that we hear from folks is this idea that we want to evolve beyond the model of utilizing some sort of a secret. You recognize that secrets are important and they are the way in which we do business today, but I think when people look at PKI they look at it as a black box and look at it as a dark art that is completely inaccessible and you know could never possibly utilize the thing at scale and I think when they look at Spiffy and Spire they think they realize that there is a lot here to offer, there's a lot in terms of being able to use Spiffy and Spire in conjunction with Valk today, to be able to deliver value for near-term use cases and long-term use cases that they move to the cloud. The other set of customers that we have are the Fortune 5000 core security engineering teams that have been building out their own Kerberos based authentication infrastructure and look at this as a successor to a lot of the work that they've been doing there as well. So in some ways it warms their heart that these constructs and ideas are not too dissimilar from things that they've worked on for almost 30 years going back to the Athena project at MIT going back to 1981 and so we're re-engaging with those folks as well. The last thing I'll say is that we also have a set of stakeholders in enterprise architecture. So the number of enterprise architects in lines of business across the prototypical Fortune 500 enterprises that show up and say we have a mandate to move x percent of our infrastructure into Microsoft Azure and some percentage of that is going to run on Kubernetes. How are we going to make that happen? They find their way down to the security layer of this project that they're into and they start to realize that they're going to be beholden to processes and methodologies around authentication that oftentimes require days if not weeks of workflow time to engage with the security team to get the right set of credentials before they can actually turn the button on and launch an instance of whatever they have building in the cloud. So oftentimes they will find about Stiffy and then they will bring us Sightail into their community and into the security team to teach their security organization about what's happening there. So we're getting pulled in by various stakeholders. Does that answer your question Michelle? Yeah it does. I definitely got a good sense of what kinds of people and teams are reaching out to you to talk about these kinds of things and why. So thank you. Are there any big challenges? Like this is a lot of stuff you're working on.  I know Brian already asked this question and you mentioned technical writing is an area that you'd like some help with but is there anything else that's concerning? Well I think it's probably I mean to answer your question Sightail as a company is three or five people. We're destroyed around the United States around the world. It could always be bigger like any company could be but I think we're we do really good work with the size that we have. We also have a really engaged community. There's a set of individuals that are probably on this call and beyond that are really really passionate about being able to breathe life into these kinds of constructs to be useful in Kubernetes off Kubernetes and worlds beyond that as well. I think one of the things that we always worry about and maybe this is just the nature of being an early stage project like this is is we always worry about missing out on perspective on missing out on use cases missing out and not seeing something the way somebody else sees that because they've been living it they've been breeding it for the last 20 years and they have something to share there and you know I worry that you know we don't we're not doing enough to make sure that there are forms or mechanisms to people to participate not only in the code but in the design right we're still in the design phase of some of these you know aspects of both the code base and the specifications as well so you know making sure that it's not just Sightail's perspective that's that's represented here trying to be intellectually honest about the fact that we're not necessarily the owners of a project with the stewards of a project and we have some perspective but there's a heck of a lot more that's out there so I did find ways of getting more feedback earlier on the design process I think is something that we're always always degrading to see but aside from that you know you know we've got roadmap items we've got work to get done we've got code to get built you know I don't think that there's much there that that you know is beyond the grasp um that we can't handle at this point awesome thank you so much I appreciate the perspective I won't take more time but I think this brings up really interesting points and threads we can talk more about great thanks Michelle any other questions for me okay well thank you for the time and I appreciate the opportunities to connect with you guys we'll we'll see you in Barcelona thanks Neil thank you all right moving on I think we're pretty much towards the end of the call today so unless anyone has any other discussion topics or things to bring up we could give people about 10 minutes 10 minutes back in their day all righty cool all right take care everyone thanks for showing up and it's great to have some new TSE members we'll do the TSE chair election next week take care bye


So are the neurons linear or non-linear? Last week, I told you that neurons are somewhat linear. But keep in mind what we did. We just focused on part of the neural responses, namely those two positive currents. Now, is the leaky integrate and fire neuron linear? Analyze the linearity of the integrate and fire neuron.


Andreas please come up to the stage can you hear me well very good Bitcoin is dead Bitcoin is just a silly idea it clearly can't possibly work it won't scale it will fail it has failed it is dead the true innovation at the heart of this technology the blockchain is the technology that matters and this technology will create new opportunities in fintech for banking and financial services companies across the world even while Bitcoin won't be able to succeed further blockchain is a joke blockchain doesn't actually work Bitcoin is the only thing that matters Bitcoin will completely change banking it will make banking obsolete all central banks will be destroyed in the path of Bitcoin and within just a decade every currency in the world will be dominated by Bitcoin both of these positions are ridiculous simple-minded pure isle and fundamentally wrong for every complex question there is one very simple solution and it is wrong this is a very nuanced space it is a space that is brand-new it is a space that has existed for only seven years and yes it does represent something truly revolutionary a fundamental change in our understanding of trust a change in the way we organize authority and trust from hierarchical systems to network centric flat systems a reimagining of what it means to have currency how currency derives its value a new system for disintermediating intermediaries a rebalancing of world affairs all of these things are true but we don't really know how this is going to play out which is the most exciting part of my job Bitcoin is one of the few spaces and one of the few experiences I've ever had in my life where I feel that I am sitting on the front rows of history observing history in the making history is not the past history is how we change the present to affect the future and we are doing this right now worldwide and by we I don't just mean Bitcoin I mean the much broader space so before we go to a very simplistic answer what is called in some spaces Bitcoin maximalism or to the opposite extreme where we discount Bitcoin as an unruly rag tag and our co-capitalist dream that is silly on its face and clearly serious people scientists people with PhDs have said that this will soon die before we go to these extreme two positions we really need to understand the nuance what is Bitcoin what is the blockchain what do these things have at the very core that gives them the characteristics they have how do you tell them apart what are the differences between the systems and what applications do they have and so my goal today is to really try to answer these questions so what is Bitcoin Bitcoin is the first blockchain Bitcoin is the largest open global blockchain that exists today Bitcoin is the first borderless transnational open system of access for financial payments and trust that enables innovation without permission with high resistance to censorship coercion and geopolitical manipulation Bitcoin is a mathematical proof system that is fundamentally neutral to participants it exhibits a principle that on the internet we call net neutrality and brings that to finance which of course terrifies people finance without concern for source destination or amount neutral routing of transactions equal for everyone that idea is terrifying where does authority come from where does trust come from it's almost as if suddenly we no longer pay attention to the New York Times and instead anyone can publish their opinion without an editor what will the world come to what the internet did for communication Bitcoin is doing for finance it is introducing a fundamentally different network centric and flat system that allows us to do transactions without recourse to authority or intermediaries and that derives trust from the collaboration and computation of thousands of nodes it uses a blockchain blockchain is one of several components that make Bitcoin work and if you focus too much on blockchain you may miss the point what is the most important technology of the internet what is the really important invention that makes the internet work TCP IP packet switching TLS but to take the internet and consider it only as a packet switching network means that the internet and an intranet the internet and your local area network are equivalent are they really was the real opportunity to be able to do packet switch networks or is the real power of the internet the fact that it is open global transnational borderless censorship resistant open access and anyone can innovate without permission this is the crucial issue where does the value of Bitcoin derive from yes it is a blockchain but it is a very special blockchain it is a blockchain that uses as its fundamental consensus mechanism proof of work and proof of work gives it certain characteristics that they're unattainable so far as we know with other consensus mechanisms Bitcoin is fundamentally open borderless transactional transnational censorship resistance etc etc etc all of these characteristics they are both what it is and what makes it powerful and ironically there are also the things that most critics of Bitcoin point to as its greatest weaknesses it cannot be allowed to exist if it is borderless and open to access if it has no ability to be controlled it cannot be allowed to exist and yet it exists Bitcoin forgot to ask for permission so out of this experiment this grand experiment that has lasted seven years we now have this really disruptive force that is forcing us to reimagine what it means to do a payments network and out of that we come up with the most brilliant marketing campaign in the history of disruptive technologies imagine if you've invented the new disruptive technology and you manage within four or five years to completely distract the incumbent by persuading them to follow in your footsteps and to adopt the central premise of your technology in order to disrupt their own business from the inside out if the Bitcoin community had presented banks with the idea of blockchain as we did and said here put a billion dollars into training people on how to do things our way and work in our space I mean someone should have gotten the Nobel Prize of marketing the Oscar of disruptive distraction but the truth is that the financial services environment seized on blockchain because they saw within it the possibility of using some elements of Bitcoin without being disrupted but blockchain is not the only thing that makes Bitcoin tick and so in this effort we see many similarities to the early internet in the early days of the internet when companies saw the internet and they saw that it had no editorial control no centralized security mechanism no barriers to access this represented a terrifying departure from the model of it and so as a result most companies resisted they built intranets using TCP IP and they put heavy firewalls all around to separate those intranets keep them controlled give them editorial access and control and tame the system they ended up with these islands of stagnant innovation that gradually became less and less secure and then we had the second wave of the internet where many of the most effective disruptive companies in the space took their internal IT infrastructure turned it inside out face the world put everything on the internet and fully harnessed the collaborative potential of keeping an open accessible system we no longer live in a world of Oracle and IBM we no longer live in a world of dominance through enterprise computing and enterprise software Apple is driving your IT faster than Oracle your systems are inside out or they are stagnant collaboration is the name of the game the most robust and secure systems are the ones that are on the internet subject to attack every single day subject to competitive disruption every single day and through that process they become robust ironic that 15 20 years later we're repeating this conversation with a blockchain so the question is if TCP IP isn't the magic sauce but the really interesting thing is the open access collaborative global network does that mean that intranets are useless does that mean that TCP IP on your LAN or your data center has no value of course not these are still very powerful technologies these are still very useful models of adopting however the best thing you can do with an intranet is interconnected to other intranets and for that you need the internet Bitcoin is the intranet of money Bitcoin is the de facto money of the internet does that mean that Bitcoin will always be the internet of money no does that mean that Bitcoin will always be the de facto money of the internet no what is special about Bitcoin is that it represents the open blockchain the blockchain that offers anonymity censorship resistance open access and innovation without permission that engine creates an explosion of innovative potential it connects the vast number of underbanked unbanked people around the world some four billion people who could become connected through a simple Android phone or even a simple Nokia text messaging phone to the global financial network the open blockchain will change this world and today there is one open blockchain that matters and that is Bitcoin I can't predict that it will always be the only open blockchain that matters or the dominant one why because it's not the best but in technology very often best is not what wins TCP IP wasn't the best in fact we now realize it had fundamental problems in scaling in addressing in routing technology and many other things and yet TCP IP was good enough at scale with network effect so fast that it became irreplaceable in fact it has now become unupgradable TCP IP is so embedded into global networking that it resists its upgrades to IPv6 and has resisted its own upgrade for almost 20 years IPv6 is coming IPv6 has been coming since 1995 any day now but clearly IPv4 is dead and the internet can't possibly scale beyond use net can't possibly scale beyond email can't possibly scale beyond attachments can't possibly scale to voice can't possibly scale to video can't possibly scale to HD video can't possibly scale to Oculus VR 3d 4k capabilities of course I can't it doesn't for a while until it does and then we shift the goal of what scaling means and Bitcoin can't scale to visa until it does Bitcoin can't scale to a global transactional network until it does but I can tell you what Bitcoin can scale to Bitcoin can scale to a seven to ten billion dollars secure transnational network that remains up and running 24 hours a day 365 days for seven years running without a single successful attack against the core protocol not because there have been no attempts but because Bitcoin has been under attack from day one 24 hours a day by some of the most sophisticated adversaries the world has seen why because Bitcoin has a seven billion dollar security bounty for breaking it it is a system that is on the internet and lives right there in the dirt in the war zone of internet security and it survives and as it survives it gets stronger every day so now if that's what Bitcoin is maybe maybe this will be the one that becomes the internet of money I can't predict that what I can tell you without any uncertainty is that the world of finance will forever be dominated within less than two decades by open global transnational censorship resistant largely anonymous fully encrypted and privacy protected payments networks based on the exact model of Bitcoin with optimizations and maybe that thing will be Bitcoin with optimizations maybe it will be something unrecognizable that we still call Bitcoin because hey the brand works or maybe we'll call it something else I remember how when I was an IT people kept telling me that Ethernet would not scale beyond one megabit ten megabits hundred megabits one gigabit it could never scale and so today we're running ten gig Ethernet over fiber but think about it for a second what part of that is still Ethernet the brand the frame size the switching algorithm nope the physical address maybe distribution mechanism no the network topology no none of that is the same none of that is the same what survived is the brand we still call Ethernet what we have today and so therefore the question is did Ethernet scale sure did as long as you keep changing what you call Ethernet can Bitcoin scale what depends what are the characteristics that are Bitcoin unalterably 21 million coin limited issuance with predictable issuance rate that is Bitcoin you cannot change that proof-of-work algorithm that is decentralized with anonymous participants that is Bitcoin you cannot change that everything else is up for negotiation we're going to maintain anonymity and privacy we're going to empower the world we're going to distribute these powerful tools of finance to everyone who has a smartphone and when you think about this we're not talking about everyone who has a smartphone having a bank account on their phone we're talking about everyone who has a smartphone having a bank on their phone of which they are the CEO a bank with the possibility of international wiring and settlement equity settlement market-making loan origination and termination liquidity generation and many other capabilities that today even many banks don't have in a single system and one day a decade from now a six-year-old will be able to open a bank on their phone and become a banker perhaps even issue their own currency and become a central banker that sounds insane but that is absolutely the world in which we now live the possibility of any individual on this planet issuing an unforgible global secure instantaneous currency is now within the reach of anyone the recipe exists will it be Bitcoin or will it be something else I don't know but it will be an open global private censorship persistent transactional and transnational network and so then the question becomes what are we going to do with blockchain and what's going to happen to the banks well some of the banks will adapt and blockchain will have some very interesting applications blockchain has certain useful characteristics as a technology blockchain in general is not an answer if you say I have a blockchain what that prompts me to do is start asking you questions it opens many questions for example what is the consensus algorithm what is the control structure and governance structure what is the model for currency generation or token generation what is the authority for issuance and what are the characteristics for security and so if you start asking those questions you can decide okay what type of blockchain is this is it open is it closed does it use proof of work or does it use a different consensus algorithm are we talking about a proof of authority signing instead of mining centralized network that is a consensus consortium between five or six banks for example with a closed permission-based access for specific participants maybe that's what we're talking about but when you're talking about that you need to understand what are the limitations of that technology what does it do and what does it not do just because it's blockchain doesn't mean it will do everything that you think it will do if I take a formula one car that is beautifully designed for running on a circuit I could say this car can go 250 miles an hour fantastic on what road because if I take it into downtown Milan my average speed will be 15 miles an hour because of traffic and if for what miraculous reason the road ahead of me opened up and I tried to hit 250 the car would disintegrate because of the road surface condition and so just because it's a powerful vehicle doesn't mean that if you put it in a different context it can operate it has to be suited for the purpose so let's examine some of the nuances first of all immutability one of the things that people suggest that block chains have as an inherent characteristic is immutability the fact that you can record something on that ledger and once you record it on the ledger it cannot be changed immutability is not a characteristic of block chains immutability is an artifact of a proof of work consensus system the blockchain the open blockchain bitcoin has immutability because even if you control 100% of the mining power you cannot recreate an alternative version of history by rewriting the blockchain without presenting valid proof of work that needs to be computed you can affect with the most immense amount of computation hundreds of hexahashes per second computation that doesn't currently exist on the planet let's say you did have that you could now affect hundreds of blocks you could rewrite the history of this afternoon but not yesterday and certainly not last week and most certainly not last year even if you controlled all the hashing in the world that is impossible to recreate the proof of work on the bitcoin blockchain even two days in the past the amount of computation is unfathomable also you've got to wait for everybody else to stop doing what they're doing while you recalculate the past because they continue moving into the future creating a longer blockchain while you're wasting your resources rewriting history immutability is a characteristic of proof of work not block chains that has some very serious implications censorship resistance and coercion resistance are a representative fact of the anonymity of mining the decentralized nature of mining if you combine those two facts you come up with some weird characteristics let's say you have a consortium consensus mechanism that controls banking I don't know why you'd apply that but let's say you built a blockchain that uses six banks that sign transactions in a round-robin fashion or Paxos Byzantine sophisticated consensus model that you bought at great expense from a very expensive consultant what happens when you are served with a judicial order to rewrite the history of the last year and make the balance of the bank account of WikiLeaks go to zero what happens if you're not served with a judicial order but simply blackmailed through market pressure by a regulator to do that not that that would ever happen I mean in a democracy we don't just cut off the finances of WikiLeaks without any judicial process do we so the problem is that you can actually coerce the participants in the system to rewrite the financial history of transactions that represents a moral hazard of extreme proportions the next question is why would you use such a thing for a settlement system and this is something that mystifies me okay swift is an antiquated pain in the butt it's expensive it's slow it's mired in geopolitical control the equity clearing systems are not as bad but they're still expensive and slow and certainly you're directing a lot of profit why not just implement a banking consortium that does settlement internally well I have an idea you know one of the things about having a centralized clearing house apart from the fact that they have maximum transactional efficiency they can operate at billions of transactions per second no problem right and a blockchain really can't replicate that level of efficiency there's no way you can do it physically it is impossible but let's say you get around that so what you're saying is you're going to replace a party that has no fiduciary interest in the equities that they're clearing in the instruments that they're clearing that is not a market maker and participant in this market that is completely independent by design and that gives you a guarantee of neutrality through separation of concerns and duties with a consortium of five banks that they themselves are market participants market makers and have enormous conflict of interest so until now at least the brokerage game is gained front running algorithmic trading dark pools the futures game is rigged the foreign exchange game is rigged but at least a settlement game isn't so you're going to give that to a consortium of banks to do without any oversight and you're going to do this with a blockchain that has what full encryption complete anonymity well that's a double-edged sword but if you make it fully transparent then the first time anonymous gets into that market and leaks that blockchain oh wow forget Panama papers this is Panama terabytes every transaction ever made I would love to see the black budgets of some governments come out when the blockchain leaks and how do you protect the keys how do you protect the keys that are used to sign this consensus algorithm you're creating an enormous concentration of risk there from a security perspective because if those keys are stolen even just as a denial of service attack they will lead to disastrous consequences but that's okay right because banks know how to keep information secret oh wait not even the NSA can do that there is no system in the world that we can design that can keep secret information secret forever bitcoins answer is to decentralize the power so massively or as much as possible that there is no place to press the button to pull the lever to exert control to force the system the whole point is decentralization now blockchains can effectively decentralize big parts of the financial system they will absolutely generate cost savings for banks they will affect the margins they will increase efficiency like intranets they will be very useful tools in fact I think you should implement an overlay blockchain on top of Bitcoin for settlement and replace swift swiftly but in the end it doesn't matter I'm not critical of blockchains because I am morally or ideologically opposed to banks continuing to do business I think banks have bigger problems than Bitcoin I have some questions about the practicability and applicability of blockchains without proof of work blockchains without decentralization blockchains that are closed and not open to access and blockchains that don't have permissionless innovation I don't think those things really deliver on the promise but more importantly in the end I don't care I really don't care I'm not interested in the 1% marginal decrease in cost of a settlement platform for interbank this that or the other I don't care for billion people are under banked and with an open blockchain we can change that and that's the team I'm on thank you thank you thank you thank you for your compelling view on the relationship between Bitcoin blockchain the future of our central banks we have a representative from the Bank of Italy the payment systems the currency we have in our wallet our financial institution clients and also on us as consultants so thank you before we go to the next speaker as you are so knowledgeable about Bitcoin I have a question on a comp I would say on the compelling story of the day who do you think is Satoshi Nakamoto do you know I have to inform you that we have journalists I don't know I don't care it doesn't matter Bitcoin is not a system of proof by authority or reference to authority it is a system of independent and neutral mathematical proof what that means is that it stands on its own without appeal to its author or creator I have no idea who Euclid was or even if Euclid existed Euclidean geometry is part of my daily life whether Euclid existed or not whether Euclid was a group of people or an individual whether Euclid was a nasty malicious pervert or saint it doesn't matter now some people will say yes but Satoshi Nakamoto has a million Bitcoin what happens if Satoshi Nakamoto sells all one million Bitcoin in one moment I'm a bit more worried about what happens if the Chinese central bank sells all of their dollars in one moment which percentage wise is a bigger problem about what happens if Saudi Arabia decides to change the fundamental supply characteristics of oil in one moment or even what happens if the Walmart family decides that the yuan is a better investment than the dollar and they exit market fundamentals mean that these things don't matter Bitcoin survives regardless and the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto the only thing it is guaranteed to deliver is sensationalist articles that give us more appeal to authority but in the end Bitcoin is not governed by Satoshi Nakamoto Bitcoin is governed by algorithms we have many questions coming from from the audience so as there are so many and time is passing quickly I would like maybe you to read one of them and maybe we we we answer these questions and send you know the name to the audience later on because otherwise we we wouldn't have time for the next speakers so is there any question you would like to answer let me see just a second I think the will the successive blockchain be defined by a push factor from the market or a pull factor from the audience as is happening now I'd like to shift that to tiny bits and talk about the open blockchain the global open blockchain Bitcoin as it exists today I said we forgot to ask for permission but we also don't need support this is not a system that is going to work better if banks support it and back it it is not a system that is going to have an increase in trust if we add intermediaries it it is not a system that will become better if we add identity and reputation systems thereby replicating the problems of the past and it is not a system that intends to replace visa as an experience for a developed nation consumer buying a cup of coffee at Starbucks that is not the point it is not a system that will replace national currencies Bitcoin will affect import export businesses international remittances in sourcing and outsourcing and cross-border transactions where the friction is greatest and it will serve those who are not being served by banks and therefore Bitcoin is irrelevant to banks because they cannot use it and they cannot use it because banks are fundamentally imprisoned within a regulatory system that does not permit them to use systems without identity and outside of that prison are four billion people who don't have identity to be part of that system and they can use Bitcoin and they don't care about banking and banking doesn't care about them thank you


Sticking with girls basketball, Bemidji hosting 3A6th ranked Grand Rapids. Early second half Thunder Talks in transition, Heaven Hamling misses the pull-up J, but Mira Begley is there for the put-back Rapids down two. But from there, the Jacks will start to pull away a little bit. Lindsay Hildenbrand knocks down the three. Bemidji goes up seven. Then, Jacks on the fast break. Rumor Flatness drives in for two of her team high 22. Bemidji goes up 11. Thunder Talks would try to climb back late. Heaven Hamling three cuts it to five. She had a game high 30, but Bemidji wins it by eight. 73 to 65. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.


What's going on everyone Sam here with late in sports cards, and this time I'm doing a 2021 Bowman Chrome Baseball Sapphire Edition break for Michael B. So good luck Michael take two. We got the right box for you. I Stopped myself before I opened it. So we're good Here we go. Bowman Chrome Sapphire that man. We got orange sac vine. There you go Michael nice one there 21 out of 75 Appeal but do Starlin Aguilar Aguilar Joey Gallo Tyler Freeman Rookie yearman Mercedes Malcolm Nunez first Austin Hayes Brennan Davis Joe Jose Garcia Shailen Palanco first there you go one of the guys you're looking for Andrew Vaughn rookie. We got teal Missy all your beena. That is nine out of 99 Nice hit there in order another sterling box You had your 2022 top sterling with the Hank in the the other one the Hank in the poohalls and then your three inceptions Got Garrett crochet and Jefferson Cuero nice one there. Yeah, that was the sterling frosty 2022 top sterling Torbi Tori B. Oh Alonzo Kirk nice Ian Anderson rookie first Julio Carreras Missy all your beena green Nicoladolo. That is in nine out of 125 nice hit there Brady singer rookie and Blaze Jordan. Yeah, I'd already ripped. Yeah, you hit the Hank Aaron one-of-one Jersey Patch in the poohalls out of five patch auto that was taught that was top sterling and yeah, that ripped with your three inception boxes as well Dalton Varshio Victor Acosta you honey Oswarez Jason Dominguez Oh, yeah You're in chat when it was going on Keeper Ruiz got yellow Casey Maier gold 25 out of 50 Casey Maize rookie nice hit there Whitmerfields and CJ Abrams. That'll do it for your box there Michael. Congrats on all the hits. We'll get them right out to you, buddy Thanks again


Systems innovation can be seen to be based upon the premise that the system we are interested in is not functioning on a foundational level, or a vision of how the whole system could be better. When we extrapolate this out, we can recognize that many of the systems in our society and economy are not functioning as they could. We often hear the word broken, associated with healthcare or educational systems. There is widespread recognition to the unsustainability of many systems, such as how we do food production, to how we manufacture, retail, and use consumer goods. This leads us to the conclusion that maybe there's something not quite right about this whole set of systems that make up our economies. Once one comes to this insight, one is then invariably driven to make some inquiry about why and what might be done about it. A superficial inquiry would lead us to the conclusion that whoever is managing these systems is just doing a bad job, and if we could just replace those people and get the good guys in charge, then all would be fine again. But a more prolonged and sustained inquiry would lead us to question the structure of the system these actors are within. If we sustain our inquiry even farther, we may come to the recognition that how we design and manage these systems is, of course, a product of the models we hold about the way the world is, and more broadly, our processes of reasoning that go into the decisions we make. This is the conclusion that systems thinkers typically come to, that the way we organize our world is a product of the models that we use, and if there is something fundamentally dysfunctional with our organizations, then it is unlikely to be out there, but instead a product of our reasoning and modeling. The imbalances in the world are typically traced back to imbalances in our reasoning. The position that an excess of a particular mode of reasoning, called analytical reductionism, has resulted in an imbalance to how we understand, design, and manage our world. Indy Johar, serial co-founder of Social Ventures, describes this well when he says, A lot of the economic and organizational model that we live in was born in the Enlightenment. And how it was born was we decided that we could understand the world by treating everything in vitro, putting in glass. We could understand the world by isolating science from art, understand chemistry from biology. We suddenly took the world and we could fragment everything out, and that world allowed us to perceive the world almost like it was infinite, because we could see everything through its definiteness, and that world has been amazing. It's allowed us to do incredible things, but actually what it's also started to do is bring into crisis issues like climate change. And none of the individuals in vitro analysis works because actually it's all about the interactions. Suddenly the cost of interactions, those things that we don't care about or aren't designed to care about, are coming back to haunt us. Systems thinking recognizes two broad and qualitatively different processes of reasoning that guide our decisions and the actions we take. What is called synthetic wholism and analytical reductionism. It is important to understand these two modes of reasoning, as much of what is talked about in systems and complexity theory follow from them. Analytical reductionism is a process of reasoning where we try to understand something by removing it from its environment, decomposing it into individual parts, studying the properties of those parts and then putting them back together, so as to derive an account of the whole as some combination of these individual building blocks. It is based upon the assumption that the system is nothing more than the sum of its parts and that the system is relatively closed. In contrast, synthetic wholism is a process of reasoning where we try to understand something by looking at it in relation to the whole system or environment that it forms part of, its interaction with other systems and how it is shaped by those interactions and the overall context. For example, given the job of trying to understand a tree in a forest, each method would take a different approach that would lead to a very different vision of the tree, whereas reductionism would isolate one tree and study its internal components while assuming all other trees are similar to that and that the forest is just an additive summation of all those similar trees. Synthetic wholism would look at the whole forest and try to understand why the tree is the way it is because of its interaction with other creatures and the whole system. It would see each tree as different because it was shaped by its local nexus of interactions. Synthesis and analysis are very fundamental paradigms of reasoning and thus lead to very different ways of viewing, acting and organizing our world. Both are equally valid, but both are equally incomplete without the other. The system's thinking perspective posits that we need a balance in our reasoning between these two paradigms. This insight leads systems thinkers to identify an imbalance in our reasoning, as the source of the major systems level challenges we face today, and some form of correction to that imbalance as critical to reimagining our world and moving forwards. This perspective sees a massive proliferation of a single mode of analytical reasoning beginning with the rise of the modern era and the scientific revolution and traces it through to the world we live in today. As a reductionist form of science became the conceptual backbone of our modern understanding of the world, finding expression in our new engineering and management methods with the end result being the industrial economic model that we inherit today. For systems thinkers, the fundamental issue that we face today is not any of the problems we usually think of, it is instead traced back to an over-dependence in excess of a particular analytical vision of the world. From this perspective, a transformation beyond the current industrial model needs to start with a rebalancing of our way of thinking, incorporating synthetic wholism as an equally valid mode of reasoning, to counterbalance the excesses of a reductionist approach. With analysis, we perform differentiation, which means looking at the difference between things. We break systems down, we divide them up, and look at what makes them separate. The result is that we end up in a world of little atomic units. An excess of this mode of reasoning can leave us in a fractured, compartmentalized world without the capacity to integrate and overcome differences. We start thinking that the environment and economy are two separate things and that we have to make trade-offs between them. A society or organization that has become too differentiated may have exceptional specialized capabilities but it will lack the capacity to overcome its divides and integrate as a whole organization when necessary. The analytical approach downplays the importance of the relations between things. It sees the world as fundamentally a set of parts that can simply be moved around and recombined without taking account of the specific forms of relations between those parts that might alter how they behave. In reality, the way things are interconnected into whole systems has a very strong influence on how they operate and behave. We often do not understand the complexities of that. Based upon the assumptions of reductionism, we assume that it is the properties of the parts that matter and that all we have to do is find some cause that will affect a change in the part and we can manage the system through those linear cause and effect interactions. When we go in the opposite direction, we are trying to integrate things. We look for what connects them and is common to both. An excess of this form of reasoning blinds us to the details. Organizing starts to become one. We lose the benefits of the division of labor and specialization. In our organization or society, the parts start to become subordinate to the whole and become homogenous, lacking individuality. Organizations inevitably go through different stages in their development of integration and differentiation, but if you want a functioning system, this is one that has achieved a balance between the two paradigms. It is the health system that has many different capacities, but is able to bring them together and integrate them as one around the end user's needs. It is the person that has many different interests, but is able to integrate them and bring them together in the work that they do. It is the political system that contains many different opinions, but is able to focus and synthesize them into balanced and acceptable policies. Although the reductionist approach has brought a specialization with the many great achievements that have followed from that, it has also resulted in excessive compartmentalization. If we look at the issues we face with many of our systems today, from health to governance to finance, we will see that they have become overbearingly fractured, compartmentalized, and complicated, rendering them inert in the face of much needed change. This is a consequence of reductionism. The solution to that is integration, connecting horizontally across those subsystems to integrate them into a whole that is a very different dynamic to what we have been doing for the past centuries, and it requires a different mode of thinking, systems thinking, to look at how the parts interconnect into a whole.


Hi, my name is Darren Winnerton. I work for ST-Microelectronics and today I want to do a video on getting started with our VL53L1X. This is the evaluation board that you would order. It's called a P-nucleo VL53L1A1 and it comes with two packages, one which is a Nucleo board for the STM32 and the second is our main expansion board for the VL53L1X. Plus it comes with two satellites and it comes with two different types of cover glass and some spacers to change the air gap for the cover glass. So let's go ahead and open it up and we'll start putting it together. We'll start with the STM32 Nucleo board and it has a standard Arduino connector, the actual adapter board itself. So on it, it has a VL53L1. Please note that it's got a sticker placed over the top of the part. This sticker must be removed. It's just protection to make sure dust doesn't get in to the laser or the receiver device, but just peel off the tape and then you'll expose the part where the pin one side is the laser pixel and the left side is the receiver.  So now the board is ready to be plugged in. As I said, there are a few extra accessories put in here. We have some standard cover glass, which fits the cover glass holder put on the board. So you can do some crosstalk testing of with our cover glass or whatever material you'll be using in your final product. So at this point before we plug in the board, we want to go to the PC. To download the GUI, let's go to the web page called www.st.com slash time of flight. So on here, scroll down to the 53L1X and click on it. And on here, it's going to offer you many different things. We're going to go to tools and software. On this page, we're going to scroll down. So we're going to click on the PNucleo 53L1A1. Scroll down again under tools and software. And here we see the image STSW dash IMG008. This is the GUI for the 53L1X. So we're going to click on it. And again, we scroll down to the very bottom this time and we say get software. At this time, it's going to ask for license agreement. And then if you've already have an account, you can just log on and register. If you don't have account, you can just type in your name and email address and register to log in. So I'm going to go ahead and log in. So now we're on the page and it should automatically start downloading the software. And you can see down here in the corner it has. It's a 90 meg file, so I'll take it a little bit to download. So now that we've downloaded the software, let's open the zip file that we downloaded. Inside, you'll see a users menu and a setup.exe. When running this, make sure to run it as administrator. This is very important to make sure that it'll work. And it will install all the necessary applications needed for this program to run on the PC. So we just keep clicking next and install. Next, finish. Accept all license agreements and finish and finish. Now that we've completely installed the program, we can go ahead and run it. And the first time it comes up, the actual firmware will not be installed on the board. So what we want to do is click on the about button and you can click on the flash framer. What you should see is the red light blinks green while it's actually installing the software on the board. At this point, it should come back and brings me to this screen, which is the screen for us to go ahead and start ranging on the board. All you have to do is click on the start button and put your hand in front of the device and you can see that we're easily ranging my hand. And this can range up to 2.1 meters as it's seen in the ceiling right now. If you have any questions on the GUI itself, if you go back to the about tab, there's a software users menu. You can click on this and it loads the PDF file of the actual operation and what all the different buttons mean for the GUI. So you can run that at any time just to to know what other features the board can do. If you haven't have any other questions, please do not hesitate to go to www.st.com time of flight or contact your local sales representative. Have a great day!