Hi, everybody. Thanks to be here for this talk. I'm Nicolas Frankel. I've been a developer for like 17 years. And a couple of years ago, I've decided to become a developer advocate. The reason I proposed this talk is, well, there are so many ways to access Kubernetes ports that I also wanted to understand. And when I try to understand something in general, I dig a little deeper. And then I try to transmit what I learned. This is a back-to-basics talk. I won't talk about deep networking stuff, no IP tables, no nothing. I want to tell about stuff that actually you can use in your day-to-day life. If you were expecting all the nitty-gritty details, just leave now, because you will be super disappointed. So I assume that everybody is using Kubernetes and that you probably know what a pod is. Just the thing most people think about a pod as being like a container, a pod-connem, multiple containers. Just in this talk, it's not necessary. But the mapping one-to-one is not really right. I will try to demo everything, what I'm telling you. So I've created a Kubernetes cluster. I always avoid using cloud stuff, because it can be pretty. Oh, you don't see anything. That's interesting. And I need to switch very, very fast. I switch too fast. And display settings. And then I want mirroring. And I cannot use it. That's really fine. Help. And how did you solve it? Yeah, OK. Let's try it. Perfect. OK, mirror. Amazing. Thanks a lot. You earned chocolate. I'm not kidding. Swiss chocolate. OK, perfect. Thanks. Anyway, so now I have it. So what I already did is I created a kind cluster. Then I uploaded the image I will use throughout this presentation. And then if I get the nodes. So I also aliased kubectl2k, because I'm like super lazy. So we can see the control plane and the two nodes. That will be my starting points. And so the next step is actually to who-who like crazily amazing stuff. No, I already went through this. Deploy a pod. I guess that everybody knows how to do it. I will do it through a deployment. Yeah, I have my script. I'm sorry, this is supposed to be life coding. But at some point, I don't want to waste your time. And then I get the pods. And I can watch the pods being deployed. And they are already deployed. That's cool. I've deployed one pod. Who-who, that's amazing. At this point, the question is, well, what's the IP of this pod? So we can ask about its IP. So here everybody sees it, or I should make it a bit bigger. A bit bigger. Let's do it a bit bigger. Yeah, you're welcome. So here I'm getting its IP. And amazing, I've got the IP. So if I try to ping the IP, of course, as you can imagine, it won't work because it's an internal IP. We can also ask. So here what we did is we got through Kubernetes to get the IP. But we can also ask the pod itself to get its own IP through the host name. So we can go on the pod and ask, hey, host name. So of course, we've got the same IP. That's normal. Still, we cannot access it. The thing is, it's an internal IP, and it's inaccessible outside the cluster. So the next step is to realize that the internal IPs, they are not stable. So even if we found a way to get those IPs, we cannot get them. So let's try a little experiment. Let's kill the pods and create a new one. Not us, but since it's a deployment. So I didn't get the deployment. So there is a deployment. So the pod is attached to the deployment.  So this pod, we can kill it. And we can Kubernetes will create a new one. And now, Presto, we've got a new pod running. And the fun part at this point is it has a different IP. So before the IP was 1.2, and now the IP is 2.2. So even if we got hold of its IP, then it's not really interesting because, well, pods will come and go. As you know, like pods, they are ephemeral. If there is a resource contention, if they are not responding, whatever Kubernetes kills them. And if they are attached to a deployment or a set, then it will respond new ones, but with different IPs. So the next step is actually to create a service. The service is the way to access a stable interface over pods. So the idea is then you have a stable IP, then you can do whatever you want with it. If a pod goes and it's replaced, and it's part of a deployment, whatever, then the service still points to it. So the mapping logic between a stable interface and a pod, you don't need to write it yourself. Kubernetes handles it. Let's do that. I will expose it through a service, and I will use a cluster IP. So now if I have my script, I should fold those scripts. Otherwise, I will get lost. I need to make it big. OK, and now I have my cluster IP. So here, this URL is stable. If I kill the pods, I can still access the pod through this URL. Guess what? This URL is still internal. So if I try to ping this IP, it still doesn't work. Also here, I'm using a Mac, which means that even if everything runs as expected, I have an additional abstraction layer between the cluster and myself, probably on Linux, you would have less problem. OK, so now I have my service. What should I do is do a not port. So finally, at this point, we can access it through a not port. So this is the stuff. We make a request to any nodes. That's the point. And then we will be able to get through the service, which has an external IP, and the service will point to the pod. So how do we do it? I will delete everything, and I will now go and go to the not ports. And I have created a deployment for that, because now it will be easier not to go through the command line, but to use a dedicated manifest. So I have a deployment, which is exactly what I did before. We have one end. Oh yeah, thanks. Thanks a lot. Don't apologize. That's good feedback. Again, good enough, big enough. OK, perfect. So that's exactly what I did before. I have a deployment with one replica. It's the same NGINX image. The only thing I'll be adding is a configuration, so that the configuration tells its hostname and server address. And then I have this service, and now it's not a cluster IP. It's not port. So service not port is the most basic brick in how you can access a pod through Kubernetes. So let's apply it. OK, apply F deployment. OK, get pods. It's super fast. OK, magnificence. Now we can get the services. And here I have the not ports. Fun ports. As I mentioned, I have a layer between the cluster and my OS. So as I created kinds in the first place, I had to be a bit smart, and I had to actually export the ports from my container port to the OS ports. If you are using a standard Linux distribution, it shouldn't happen. So now I can finally curl localhost 3800. And I access my pods. Amazing. I feel you are not amazed. We finally got to the pods. Well, that's nice and good. But let's deploy a new pod. So we will just increase the size of our deployment just to see what happens when we've got two pods. Because the Kubernetes semantics is not that great in some regards. I will directly do this. Thanks. I think after 50 minutes I will get it right. OK, so now I have my two pods running. And we can try to do a couple of requests. And as you can see, if we repeatedly curl, then I have load balancing between my two pods, which is funny because the next object I will talk a bit about is called load balancer. So you don't need the load balancer to do load balancing from port. So for me, that's a very strange object. Because actually, as I mentioned, you don't need it to load balancing. I think the name is really badly chosen. But you use the load balancer object when, at least at the time when you needed to do additional stuff. And in general, you use it on cloud providers. So it's just an empty object. You use your load balancer object on the cloud provider. You provide whatever service you want and perfect. Fun part, you cannot obviously use it like bare metal. But there is an implementation called Metal LB that's supposed to work. And because of my Mac or my poor networking skills, I couldn't make it work. So I won't demo anything. Just know that there is this load balancer object that you can use when you are going to cloud providers, but you don't need them to do load balancing, obviously. Historically, getaways, because we are talking about some first load balancing and then routing, that's exactly the idea of API getaways.  So load balancing is between nodes of the same type and routing is between nodes of different types. So here is another break where we evolve, and now we say, hey, we want some routing. So we want to route some requests to some pods and some other requests to some other pods. And here is, again, an object that is an abstraction, and you have many, many, many different implementation. So load balancing, you don't need the load balancer object, but for routing, you need the ingress object or something that we show you afterwards. At this point, as I mentioned, it's an abstraction, and you've got different implementation. Here, I've mentioned a few that are like you can use. Just a few words. I work on the Apache API6 project. So basically, it's an API getaway. It's an Apache project. It's managed by the Apache Foundation. It's built on a very simple architecture. So everything is open source, here, yes, here. It's built on NGINX, OpenResty, and then you've got a couple out of the box, Lua plugins. You can write your own. So this is a bit different. You need to do the routing. You need ingress. So at this point, it becomes much, much more complex. I will have two pods, one called left, one called right. Here, I only show you the left part, but because otherwise, it would be too complicated. But basically, it would be the same. You will enter the nodes. The nodes will direct you to the API getaway. Here, in this case, the API6 getaway. Then it will direct you to the right part. Then you will go to the right service. And again, you will go to the left part. So you will have the service and the pod of your ingress plus the service and the pod of your own software. Let's see how it works. Any question, feel free to ask. So I delete everything. I don't need them anymore. I will advance a bit further. And now, I have additional objects. I have, sorry, I will install API6. So here are the values that I will need. Again, at this point, this is like proprietary stuff. Every ingress has their own stuff. Here, I will be using API6. If you use another ingress, you will need another one. Nginx has one, blah, blah, blah. OK, so I will help install it because I'm like lazy. And this is the fun part. We need to wait a bit because it takes some time. Perfect. We can get, again, I will follow the script less issues. So let's see the services in all namespaces. It's too big. But you see that I've created a new namespace, an ingress API6 namespace. Then you've got the getaway itself. So basically, it's Apache API6. Apache API6 relies on a couple of, on the storage. So there must be a couple of nodes. Etcd is the one that is used. So Etcd is the same key storage value as Kubernetes uses. And then you've got the ingress controller. The ingress controller is meant to reconcile what you want with the reality or the other way around. So basically, you say what you want. And API6 ingress controller will check the state. It will say, oh, that's not what you want. And then we'll issue the commands to make what you want. At this point, normally, yes, of course, and it's ingress API6. So I need to wait a bit. I hope it's working. But as you can see here, Etcd is not working yet. So we need to wait until Etcd is initialized. It has three pods, because three is the magical number. There should always be a number of, I always miss between even and old in English, but one, three, five, whatever. And one is not enough, because if it dies, well, it's not very safe. So three is the new magic number. I hope it works now. No. That's the fun part of demos. So let's see. K describe pods. Oops. K logs. Nope. Yeah, of course. Uh-oh. Container API6 in pod is waiting to start pod initializing. So I hope that. So here we can see that Etcd is not starting, which is not super great for the rest of my demos. You want to play with fire. You get burned, of course. K get logs and namespace ingress API6. OK, it just takes a bit of time until all Etcd nodes as pods have started, then they see each other, then they create the cluster.  What do I want to tell you next? Nothing. Oh yeah, I can tell you that. So once I've created the ingress, I need to create the routes. The problem is the routes are not objects. So the routes are actually parts of the ingress itself, or they are like dedicated objects of a different type. So there are two ways to create ingresses. The first is like below the ingress object, which I find here. Nope, where do I find it? Yeah, sorry, I didn't create it this way. I created this way. Or the other way is to use, in that case, the property stuff, which is API6 root, under its dedicated namespace. And if you need to migrate to another provider, you will need to change everything. So that's the idea behind the next subject that I want to show you. But before, I just want to make sure that it works. Yes, ingress controller has started. API6 has started. So now I think that everything is working. Yes. So now I can apply my deployment, OK, apply F deployment, OK. And normally get parts. I have one left part, one right part. Let's curl each in turn, which, again, I should follow the script. So if I curl at the root, the route has not been defined. So of course, API6 itself tells me, hey, no route defined. But if I use left, then it directs me to the left. And if I use right, it directs me to the right, which is exactly what I wanted. There is a slide bug at the moment that I found when I was preparing. So API6 route is an object itself. We can see something. The bug is here, the URI is only slash left. I want to see slash right and slash left. I see only slash left. So it might be slightly misleading. We can check the configuration itself. The configuration is correct. We have both. Actually, what my colleague told me, I asked the developer. He told me, hey, at the moment, the Kubernetes API is lacking something. We need to wait, so it's not on our port. Just be careful when you ask for some information. Sometimes it doesn't exactly translate to the reality. So just make sure you have the right query at hand. So as I mentioned, the routes, either they are under the ingress object or they are proprietary objects. So we can do better. And that's the point of the new key on the block, which is the gateway API. So with the gateway API, the CNCF tries, or the Kubernetes people try to actually make a clean separation between the object abstraction and their implementation. So we can have proper routes that are abstractions for everybody, and then we have implementation. And migration should be easier. Also, routing, as I've shown you, is basically like for path prefix with the ingress. But you might want to do routing based on something else. For example, header. And that's not possible actually with the abstraction. It might be possible with the implementation, but again, it's proprietary. So we want this kind of stuff. So now let's install the ingress object. And let's remove everything. So the routes and the API6 routes. And let's uninstall the charts. And now I want to use the gateway API. So now I've got the new thing. I will first deploy. Sorry, I will first install the CRDs. So I have standard CRDs for ingress that are part of the Kubernetes distribution. At the moment, the gateway API is experimental, so I need to install those objects explicitly. And you can see those are like Kubernetes experimental objects. They are not proprietary. Then I will install API6 to serve as the gateway API. Then I can explain everything because it will take some time like before. So now what I'm doing is I will say, A, enable gateway API equals true. So that's pretty nice. And then the gateway itself, as you can see, uses like for the moment experimental namespace, but part of Kubernetes, soon there will be like not experimental anymore. We first defined what gateway we shall be using. So that's the role of the gateway class. We rely on the controller name. So that's what we are deploying right now. And then at this point, we say, so this is once per cluster. So you defined this once per cluster. I didn't show it, but for ingress, you can do the exact same stuff. Now I will create a gateway object instance. Here, I will create the API6 gateway and it references this one. So basically you say, hey, I will create this object gateway and it will use this implementation. At this point, you can create routes and again, those routes are under like a standard namespace that has nothing to do with Apache API6. And then I have the exact same stuff that I defined before. Like I have one HTTP route for left, one HTTP route for right, exact same stuff. Perhaps now I can check if it worked. So K get pods, all namespace, ingress API6 would be better. Yep, it's still one is missing, but it should be good. So now I can apply my pods, apply F deployments and my routes and everything. So K get HTTP routes. Yeah, of course. I will follow the script. Script is always better to follow.  So I'm a bit too fast perhaps, pod initializing. Again, sorry for that. Okay, now perhaps it should be good. I will apply again just to be sure. And too fast. What is not working? K get pods, K, K get pods, namespace ingress API6, this is working, this is running. K logs, it might be the case, everything is possible. So I deployed the deployment. Hey, I forgot the gateway. Who said that? Thanks a lot. I forgot to apply the gateway. Thanks much better. Of course, it's much, much better this way. Well, let's see if it's much, much better. Yes, it's much, much better. Come afterwards. You also get chocolate. So again, it's the exact same results. At the roots, we define nothing, so right now found. We define the left, it goes to the left. We define the right, it goes to the right. But it's not only that. As I mentioned, we can do much better. So now instead of like having the past prefix, we would try to do something that's not possible with the ingress, which is actually like dispatching on the header. So let's apply it. K apply, F get away. And now we have changed the header so that if we curl the roots. So here I'm saying, hey, like go to the left. Sorry, goes to the right. But if you have a match with a header too, with value left, goes to left. So let's try it. Curl local hosts. Okay, but then if we pass the header, with, as I mentioned, value two, left, then it goes to the left. That's not possible with the ingress at the moment. Well, with the ingress abstraction, again, in the implementation, it depends. And I think that's the end. So thanks for your attention. You can follow me on Twitter. If you're interested about the blog post behind it, there is something and I forgot to add the GitHub URL. So I will do it just afterwards. I will upload my slides, but I can do it right now. Config, and it's this one. Kate's access, done. So if you're interested to like redo the same step as I, everything will be on this GitHub repo. So you've got the first article about access Kubernetes pods, then I have another article about getaway API, and then you have everything in the same repo. Is there any question? If there are questions, you need to step up in front of the mic, which can be very intimidating. I know, but don't worry, everything will be fine. I'm always afraid when I have no questions, because either it was a really, really bad talk, you don't want to like shame me in public, or it was very good talk and nobody has any questions. So I never know. Of course I would prefer to be the second, but no question, really. So I hope it the second. I have some stickers. So come to me, I will give the stickers and for the gentleman in the back, and my friend here, you can come for the Swiss chocolate. Thanks a lot.


This study demonstrated that UAV hyperspectral technology can be used to accurately map soil organic matter, SOM, at a 1M resolution in typical lower-leaf black soil areas of northeast China. The study found that the UAV hyperspectral technology can provide accurate predictions of SOM when a small number of samples are used. Furthermore, the study showed that the UAV hyperspectral technology can provide both spectral and spatial information simultaneously, making it more efficient than other methods such as proximal sensing. This article was authored by Yang Yan, Jia Jian, Bao Guoli, and others.


Hello everybody. Welcome to this afternoon session about intellectual property rights on the hypergrid and in the metaverse in general. My name is Maria Korolev. I'm the editor and publisher of Hyperprogrid Business. And here I was today at the founder of a major commercial grid and the founder of our biggest online content sharing site for OpenSim. Intellectual property rights are subject to a lot of discussion and have been talked about in other panels, both today and yesterday. Is there enough content protection for virtual content in OpenSim? Too much, not enough. One thing that everyone can agree on, however, is that OpenSim users need and deserve a wide variety of useful and engaging content. So here to talk first is Vanish, who's been living in second life since 2007 and then OpenSim since 2009. He creates items, writes tutorials, does talks, manages communities and runs his own grids. And he's, to me, he's most famous for OpenSim creations, a site where anybody can upload content, original content and distribute it under a creative commons license for the general public to use on any grid. He's also a singer, guitarist and songwriter. He's been writing songs for 15 years and has released four albums. Vanish, would you like to start off this discussion by talking about your take on intellectual property and content rights? I would like to. How much time do I have? Not enough, not enough. Basically, I would say, I don't like the word content to start with, because that kind of looks at it from the perspective of the people who benefit from it. And that's usually not the artist. I prefer to speak about creations. And I followed OpenSim creations with the premise that creations for OpenSim users should be easily available. They should be downloadable and they should be able to be imported into any grid, including people's own stand-alones that they run at home or wherever they want to. So to make access to creations easy, free and convenient, that's pretty much the premise. Okay. And so where do you stand on the whole? Is there enough or is there too much protection for content right now in OpenSim? I'm a pirate. No, I'm serious. So for me, there is, well, I don't care about protection really, because things can get copied anyway. So much protection, little protection really doesn't matter. If things want to get copied, then they will get copied. Okay. So to talk from a very different perspective is Melanie Thielker. She's the founder of Avination, a commercial grid. She's also an OpenSim core developer and has been one of the more active contributors to virtual world software in general and OpenSim in particular. She's a long-time second life resident and has been involved in a number of virtual projects and has created her own spin of the OpenSim software. Most recently, she has produced a new content and permission for OpenSim and export permission, which eventually will make it a safer for content creators to distribute their content on hybrid-enabled grids while deciding for themselves whether the content can travel further or not. And Melanie, can you talk about your background, especially in how you feel about the content protection issue? Yes. As a matter of fact, even though you may think that I'm completely diametrically opposed to vanish, that's not so. I believe that such content as what he's outlined needs to exist. It must exist. Otherwise, we would be looking very bare. However, I don't believe that all content should be free because vanish may have spoken from the standpoint of somebody who creates content as a hobby or who distributes content out of the goodness of his heart. That's all fine and well, but there are those of us who live off the creation of content, the intellectual property. Now, vanish rejects the term content. A lot of people also reject the term intellectual property believing that all ideas are free and that essentially all virtual objects are ideas. I can't subscribe to that. Virtual objects represent a certain amount of time that's been invested in creating them and such time is worth money. So I believe that protection for the creators of such objects is something that is very much needed even though it may be optional. It can be optional on the grid level. A grid can declare that it only allows free content and that anybody who imports content into that grid agrees that the content will be free and freely copyable. A grid can do the opposite like Avination did and say we protect content creators' rights, we protect intellectual property, we proactively prevent or remove copies, we educate, we help. Of course, that places a bit of a burden on us, but that's one that we shoulder gladly. We've designed the permission system that is as secure as we could make it. Then we created the long talked about, but never done, export permission bit. The way that came about was that I made contact with the developer group, the Singularity viewer, and in a process that took quite a while to accomplish, became a part of the team and able to make contributions to that viewer and have them accepted and put into the viewer. To discuss the export permission and the need for open sim worlds, especially HyperGrid enabled worlds to have such a bit, so we created it. We created it in such a way that it's as flexible as open sim itself. We love options. We really love options. We got hundreds of them, literally. Read open sim defaults for a nice laugh. So for content creators, there needs to be a way to make sure that their content is not copied illegally. Now, you're saying content will be copied if it wants to be copied, and yes, you are right. That's actually true. There is no way to stop a determined, technically savvy person from copying something. Absolutely no way to do that. Anything that can be seen, displayed, downloaded can be copied. However, there is a lot of what I call casual copying. This is copying by people who do not know the exact legal situation. People who believe that if they bought something in SL, for instance, they're allowed to export it because it's their property. It's like if you buy a piece of furniture and when you move, you have to leave it because you only bought a license for that furniture in that apartment and people don't understand that. So they actually copy the item believing that they are allowed to do so because they consider it to be physical property because it looks like physical property. I'm hearing here that there's no audio. I have a question for you that I'm hearing a lot about and that there's no content protection and open sim at all. Could either of you briefly outline how content protection open sim differs from other virtual worlds, like say second life, and what tools are available for content creators and how they differ? Open sim is not a single place. There's actually different grids. Can one of you talk about that? Yes, it's been shown in a different session and also at the keynote that people often equate open sim with OS Grid. That is a common misconception. That is because OS Grid is the official testing place for open sim. One has to see that open sim is a software that has a nearly infinite configurability. So a grid can choose to load a permission module or no permission module. Open sim can be configured to be as secure as second life, which is just the same level of security as you have for, say, World of Warcraft content, which means the only way you can download it is by making an effort investing criminal energy. It's not something that is possible for the average user if things are configured to be airtight. However, it is possible. Anyone can download anything that can be seen, as I said already. But some open sim installations have configured the system to have no permissions. Either that everyone is a guard or that there's just no concept of next owner permissions. Everything is full permanent stays that way. Now enter the hyper grid. When you go to a sim that has permissions enabled, you take an item and hyper grid somewhere where there is no permissions enabled. You can then make copies. You can set the next owner permissions as you like. Take the item and hyper grid back to where it came from. You will have that item with full permissions to do with as you please. That is the danger of the hyper grid, which is what the export bid is for to prevent. Content creators in grids that have object security can now elect to not have the item exportable to prevent people to jump to other sims and change permissions on it. If the item is not exportable in the final version of this, it will not be able to put it in a suitcase. They will not be able to download it using viewer tools. Obviously, they will not be able to have it in IAR or OAR files at the discretion of the region owner. For instance, in a grid like Avination, and if Avination were already hyper grid enabled and you were asking for an IAR of your inventory, then things that are not export enabled would not be part of that IAR. If you put them in the suitcase, they would not go in. If you try to download them using the viewer tools export, they will not export. Any other thing that has the export set would do all three of these things. The word grid God and grid God powers comes up regularly. Is this something that anyone in OpenSim can do? Or can you talk about the times when someone can give themselves God powers and reset permissions and do these other kinds of things? OpenSim has several settings pertaining to God powers. First off, in the stand-alone or hyper grid stand-alone, the owner is implicitly a God and they can set it up so that even parcel owners are implicitly God's or they can turn off permissions altogether. In a gridded environment, no matter whether hyper grid enabled or not, there's additionally the concept of grid God's that it comes on top of these other concepts, which means that the grid owner and operator can designate certain people as God's and they will be God's on all regions, unless the region system is federated, like OSGrid or I believe MetropolisGrid, where everybody can operate their own regions and then of course they can set allow grid God's to false in the config file if they don't want the grid operators to determine who has God mode in SM. Regardless of that permissions and God mode, while they are linked, they're not the same thing. You can configure SM not to have permissions enforced without anyone being God. You can configure SM so that everyone is God, but you still have permissions enforced. It sounds really complicated. Yes, we love options. Some people including some of our audience members are suggesting that maybe it should be easier to purchase content than to copy it. For example, the iTunes or the Amazon DRM free model where you can buy music without DRM because hackers are going to hack anyway and the only thing DRM hurts is legitimate customers. Where do you stand at this? Do you think this is a direction that eventually virtual worlds will move to as well? Well, there is one problem with that. First of all, let me say it's a great concept. I use iTunes for those things that iTunes has. Obviously, most of the things I buy are DJ mixes that I have to buy from other sites. But where iTunes has it, yes, it is easier to use iTunes to buy something than it is to go and try find a torrent. I'm generally against pirating music, but I have seen how difficult it can be to find something that's actually clean and how easy it is to buy something on iTunes for just pennies. So yes, the concept is great and it does work. iTunes actually makes pirating music harder than buying it and it makes it so cheap that there's no reason not to. But in virtual worlds, this doesn't work yet for lack of mass. Even 80,000 concurrent users, even 8 million registered users will not all buy the same item. Now, there are people who have made lots of money. Thousands of US dollars per month on virtual content have had the pleasure to know a few of those. They would not make that kind of money by pricing their items that low. Because of that, the iTunes model will not yet work. But once the 3D internet really takes hold and this is going to be used by not 8 million SL users but by 200 million internet users. By 800 million internet users, if we have people like Facebook has people, then that concept will work and it will come to pass. I can pretty much guarantee that. At the moment, though, we have a situation where that's not the case and content creators need to charge more money to amortize the amount of work that they put in. Because of that, the casual copying, the, oh, you like this? You have a copy without thinking about it, has to be suppressed. I know DRM is not a total solution. I know DRM can be circumvented and will be circumvented. It does eliminate a lot of that casual passing around of objects. Can I comment on that? Yes. I don't agree. I have, in fact, I mean, open sim creations for those who don't know it is similar in that it makes downloading and importing items for open sim easy. I would argue easier than trying to get them through the hypergrid, but that's arguable. I don't know if there's a market or not, but I do, I have always encouraged anyone who wants to try to set up their own shop on the internet and sell their stuff as a download for open sim. I have actually written a tutorial on how to do this using WordPress and a little plug-in for WordPress. It's really not hard to do. For those who still don't want to do it themselves, I have set up a site called opensim-shops.org where you can set up your shop using my server. I don't charge anything for it. It's just for you to try and sell your own stuff if you want. Can you post a link to that in local chat? We're in local chat. Open sim-shops.org. I have a question about that. If you make a store, you have your content that you probably exported using a viewer's export function or whatever, or you have just textures on there, and you put that up for sale. Somebody comes and buys it, imports it into, for instance, Second Life, or Avination, a grid that has a closed permission system. It makes them full-perm owners and creators of the object. They can then put it in the store on that grid and resell it, possibly at a huge profit to people who don't know your website or where that comes from. They may be in violation of license terms attached to the item, of course, but they could do that. Is there any way that any steps you're taking to prevent that and protect the rights of the actual creator to that money which they will not receive? I find it always interesting that we who are in Second Life or OpenSim live in this little bubble where we always think about permissions and have to use the permission system to prevent people, because it seems like the general assumption is that people are evil and you have to prevent them from doing evil stuff with your stuff.  I don't think that is necessarily true. It works in general terms as well. If you buy something on iTunes, who is going to stop you from selling the album that you bought on iTunes? If you bought something from TurboSquid, who is going to stop you from importing the mesh into a Second Life and selling it there? Nobody is. Yes, the legal system. Yes, and the same legal system applies to OpenSim in Second Life. Unfortunately, it doesn't apply because an item that costs less than one cent you cannot go and sue for damages of $2,000 US over this item. Like a song in iTunes. They will be laughed out of court. The song is different. The music industry is different. They have a ton of money. Same for the movie industry, but OpenSim creators and cell creators, they don't have that. They do not have the financial breath to pull through a process in court that will cost them $2,000 even though they may yield $3,000 at the end. They just don't have the kind of money to sue. So that's where DRM comes in. It prevents them from having to sue too many people. I'm getting several questions in about people looking for content in OpenSim. Sean Emerald asks, my world is essentially empty because I'm not a builder. No one will sell me stuff. I don't like to copy stuff found elsewhere because I might be copy-botted. I'd love to buy stuff. Tanya Souther asked, ever since I first got on OpenSim, I've been looking for a Tigris avatar. I've never been able to. I've spoken to Avatar creators and the universal answer is the same. Why should they make stuff for OpenSim if they'll simply get ripped off and passed around? Realize against the idea all you want, but the creators are the ones you have to convince and they're not buying. How would you guys address this? Should I start? Yes, go ahead. Yes, probably. I think it's actually more than me. Okay. First of all, OpenSim Creations has currently... Oh, I don't even know. More than a thousand items for Virtual World.  Likewise, we have a forum there where people regularly post stuff that they would like to have made and somebody else might see it and actually do it just for fun. So if you want a Tigris, go there, ask for a Tigris. The question for the quality comes up all the time. Quality is all over the place, just in Second Live as well as in OpenSim Creations. If you don't like something, don't download it. Well, but what about selling it to the creators? You say you have a thousand items, but I'm asking you this, how many of those people who sell items to your website are people whose real-life living is made creating Virtual Content? I don't really know. I don't know much about the people who post stuff on OpenSim Creations. I'm not really interested in their real life. I know at least a couple of them do make some income with actually selling stuff for OpenSim. Making some income is one thing, but having that be your principal income as possible in Second Life and other closed schools. I don't know why the assumption is that only if you can make an income from it, you do create quality stuff that is not the case. No, it's not the case. I agree. Other people make quality stuff too. But obviously, those people who do it full-time, they have more experience and invest more time, and they expect a certain return. I do not think that they can get that if they sell it on a website to download it imported to the world individually. I believe the markets for those are still in closed grids, and that's primarily a sale. Well, okay. As you said, it's a marketplace. I guess everybody needs to find a niche and we'll see where the marketplace goes. One of our audience requires that content protection is in place. It needs DRM as an option. No, I don't think so. There is no evidence to support that, and there are lots of websites or lots of marketplaces who do just fine without any kind of DRM in place. Yes, but there are products that can be prosecuted in real-life courts if they are stolen, and that's not true for virtual clothing items, for instance, or primed geometries that make up furniture. Well, so you mean you cannot, like, extend a DMCA notice to every nation if you see something that you think is stolen from you? Of course, but that's because we do have DRM in support copyrights. That means if we get a DMCA, then we take it down. However, the person who has sent the DMCA is not entitled to damages, and they don't have the money to sue the person who imported it for damages either, because it takes money to sue people. Well, I can count on one hand the number of times that the music industry actually sued people here, in my case in Germany, and in the most cases, there aren't any damages being paid. Well, I know about the software industry, for instance. They did sue someone who I know, and they did so successfully. Yes, it happens, but it's just nothing that's feasible for a subset of content. Okay. Somebody in our audience mentioned the reverse problem of content being acquired in OpenSim and sold in the Second Life Marketplace because in Second Life Marketplace is where you have the users with the money who are buying stuff. Could either one of you address that issue? It's just a scenario that I put to vanish when I said somebody downloads stuff there and puts it for sale in Second Life or I have a nation to make money with it. I've seen that happen. I've seen people actually download stuff from OpenSim Creations and sell it in Second Life, and I've seen people download my own stuff and sell it in Second Life. Personally, I don't really care. The licenses I use for my items are such that they actually are legally able to download my stuff and sell it anywhere for any price they can. If they can really compete with me putting it on the web for free, then they deserve every dollar they get. The same applies to a lot of other OpenSim Creations users. They choose licenses that are for commercial use as well. Commercial use means you can use this item and sell it. Or they say, please don't sell it without really having any way to prevent you from selling it. I guess it's a trust system. Some people break trust, and that's the world we live in. Most people break trust. Most of them do it unwittingly. They don't know that they should not do things. People log into Avination. They go and get a bit of money so they can upload. The first thing they do is upload the Second Life appearance. We see them change. We see skins appear for redgrave or whatever. We ask them, where did you get that skin? They say, I uploaded it. I said, where did you get it from? You know it's illegal. No, why did you upload it here? Because it's mine, I bought it. When you have to start explaining, you have to educate them about copyright and about the license that they bought for the content that MSL doesn't transfer to Avination. You have to delete this stuff and make sure that their promise is not to do it again. You have to keep more on the watchlist to see if they do it again. What if they come from a country that might be legal in that country without even our service? Okay. It's part of our terms of service. So if somebody breaks our terms of service and is educated, then that's it again. They're no longer one of the people we desire on our grid and we will remove them. Well, okay. You can end on your duty whatever you wish, but that doesn't mean they don't do it once somewhere else. Of course, but that's why I'm saying it needs to be prevented everywhere. I don't think you have that. If a creator does not want the items to be free for all, they need to have a means to enforce that. Since the legal system doesn't give us any recourse, here we need to have DRM. DRM, by the way, I saw that question fly by in chat, a service site. It's based in a server code. It's not based on the item. So unlike un-CDs, many of you may know what an un-CD is, the DRM does not adhere to the object. It's part of the grid and the object does not become unusable just because DRM is up updated. Like for instance, the export permission doesn't make existing items unusable. They're just not exportable because we choose to have not exportable by default. But it doesn't make them unusable. It's different than CD protection. Okay. Douglas Maxwell asks if he runs a big grid for the Department of Defense, for those of us who use open-sync for serious business, we need an ability to acquire content cost effectively. We cannot just wait for some kind sold to accommodate us. And I'd like to weigh in personally on this because I became an unwitting pirate when I got a plant from a reputable freebie store. The freebie store took the plant down when they realized it was infringing. So they did the right thing. I still had a copy of the plant in my inventory, put it up online in my grid, posted a picture of it online, and it created a lot of bad press for me and for my company. So even though I did the right thing all the way through, like some of our audience members are saying, I have become extremely nervous about using content that's generally available on open-sync. Can you guys address this issue? Well, the situation is this. First of all, the good faith doctrine applies. Meaning if you bought something in good faith and you had no reason to suspect that the item is infringing and you have not been aware specifically that the item is infringing and has a good reputation, then you have acted in good faith and you are not required to do anything but take the item down and delete it once you do get the knowledge of it being infringing. Of course, the press is a different story and being thrown about on the blogs as a copy-botter is not a nice thing. But that is something that neither the creators nor the grids nor the affected persons have any control over. Bloggers will blog. Generally speaking buying something from a freebie store like in SL, it is not legal to export it. Even if it's a freebie, even if it's full-perm, it's not legal to export it because the SL2OS forbid it. So it's only open-sync creations and sites like that where you can legally buy these things and I encourage you to do that and it will be legal and it will be okay because it's the actual creators uploading things there. You can buy it in a freebie store on some grid and then export it. Buy it from somewhere where it's actually licensed legally so you can use it. First of all, you cannot buy anything and open some creations. Everything is free. But that was just a side note. I think the use case that is being discussed here is somebody it's work for hire. That's the term that's used for that. When you pay for someone to make something for you and that is actually pretty clear cut case.  I think DRM has nothing to do with the process of work for hire and delivery of those items. DRM has everything to do in protecting those items from then getting stolen by the parties. Several people are asking about DRM and real licenses. What about using licenses instead of DRM and again can you guys talk about that? Well, licenses can override those things that are otherwise statutory limits meaning content is proprietary unless licensed more openly. If you license something to be CC for instance or if you license something to be BSD share like also such licenses then legally you are allowed to export that content in ported elsewhere use it any way you have to give attribution when the license says you do otherwise you do not. You can sell the content if the license allows you to do that or not. However if you're using a privately owned service the TOS of that service governs the transactions that you have for that service. So if somebody has something uploaded to SSL that is a CC and the SLTOS says you are not allowed to download things you did not make then the SLTOS governs it still is not illegal to download it you may get banned though and they would have just cause. I am fully behind using real life licenses instead of DRM that is what we are using in OpenSim Creations that was how I set up OpenSim shops. I have personally also uploaded stuff from other people on to OpenSim Creations because these other creators either made it publicly available and with the license that allows you to export to copy it and share it somewhere else or because they just told me to do that to do that. So the licensing thing in my experience works much better than DRM which are very unspecific and well as Melanie said is only limited to the grid that the item is on. Lani Global who runs the science fiction themed role playing region Lani on OS grid says so those of us who are content creators in OpenSim really don't have an expensive unauthorized copy enforcement. This is the same situation as images on a website. The best enforcement I found is a listing in Second Life Marketplace. Simply list your product there as soon as you release it in OpenSim then you are first to file for intellectual property purposes in a prime commercial market and their takedown system is inexpensive free for that market. I can't control the copying of my products however I can't get takedowns and I do this by listing them in the commercial markets when I release them. Is this a solution that you recommend for other OpenSim based content creators? It's definitely something that they can do listing the item in a Second Life Marketplace even if they don't intend to actually sell it in Second Life or don't expect there to be a market in Second Life. Yes, if the item is stolen from an OpenSim grid and subsequently import it into Second Life that doesn't make it infringing. Yes, the first to file rule does apply for copyright and that means that they can prove that they have to create the item first. Put it into Second Life first and they can get a takedown on these items that is correct. The same thing goes for Avination only. It's not that you'd have to list it on a Marketplace because we don't have one by choice. We prefer to have live malls rather than dead websites. However, if you bring the item into the world and have it for sale somewhere then you also first to file with us and then you can send us a takedown notice. Now we're not subject to the DMCA but we usually act according to it because it's the way of least persistence and it helps the content and creators the most. Other grids may be similar but this is a grid specific thing. Okay, I'm curious now. You say you're not subject to the DMCA. First question is what are you subject to and the second is why do you follow the DMCA if you're subject to copyright law? Regular international copyright law being UK based and the DMCA what's usually called the DMCA is actually a specific provision the so-called DMCA. They save harbour provision. The safe harbour provision is only a spelling out of something that has always been part of copyright which is the aforementioned good faith doctrine meaning unless we know that there's something infringed we are not guilty as long as once we find out we take action. That's basically the same procedure. We get sent DMCA requests on DMCA forms because people are not aware, US people are not aware that we may not be subject to that particular law and we don't have to work with that particular form. However the form has all the data we need so we just go and process it as if you were aware. We also honour formless requests we also honour requests that specifically cite British law. We honour all requests basically as long as we can see that the creator is actually the legit creator we are always on the side of the creator never on the side of the thief. How do you see that someone is a legit creator? Usually what we do is if the item is on SL, on the SL marketplace we can determine how old it is in SL. We use that as the indication of prior filing. Otherwise we see when the item was created by the original creator versus when the item was created by the person who allegedly copied it. We also check other sources if the complainant can name them. Okay, thanks. One of our audience members has suggested and I've heard this repeated multiple times this weekend is that the problem is you drive away the high-end creatives that could grow the use of this technology by not respecting their rights. This kind of stuff is killing the potential world potential for future use. The flip side of it is that the World Wide Web had no built-in protection for copyright creations, still really doesn't for images, for text and for many different file types and this did not hinder its growth. It's fully pretty much licensed based as opposed to DRM based. How do you guys address this growth potential question? It's already been addressed twice actually, saying that the internet and generally the real world is indeed licensed based. But licenses need to be enforced. Licenses are enforceable to the courts, which means that a certain value has to be attached to an item. If you have an image, for instance, you can attach a value of $2,000 for it, then you can ensue someone who infringes that for $50,000 based on the supposed number of people who may have seen the image on their website and you will get that award maybe $20,000 but we're talking about amounts of money that are sufficiently large that you can pay the lawyer out of the award. This is not so for virtual worlds because it's the low price of virtual items which is generally seen as being the official low price because that's the sale price of the item. It means that anything that you do in terms of lawsuits about virtual items can happen only in small claims court. Small claims court limits the awards to amounts that may not make it possible to pay the high powered lawyers that are needed to win such a case. Those would be landmark rulings and they may need to go up to the instances and that is just not going to happen for a 0.012 pair of virtual pants. The question was about the quality of the items and driving away the people that make the good stuff, right? Well, you're not driving away the people who make the good stuff by protecting their rights. I think that's quite an arrogant stance to say that I'm a creator and I'm better than the ones who make free stuff. What we've seen on the internet is that people voluntarily create much, much, much more stuff than we had pre-internet from all those so-called professionals who did it for pay. YouTube is the biggest TV channel I guess that we've ever had on the planet and people make videos for it for free. I don't think this is going to change I don't think it's going to be any different in open sim. Have you ever posted a YouTube video? I have. Monetization options the ad options that you have when you post them you choose not to use them doesn't mean that other people don't. Most people monetize their videos as soon as they get popular. If the people don't monetize it then YouTube will. But this way it's business and it's big business don't be mistaken. It's not all nice people making all free stuff for everyone. YouTube's big business and yes YouTube also has copyright protection. There are so many music videos from YouTube that are not allowed to be there for some countries that's been negotiated that they can be shown but for instance one country that's been very, very obstinate against allowing internet distribution content is Germany when I'm in Germany and I open YouTube 80% of the time when I'm looking for music video I get this video is being blocked in Germany for gamer purposes whereas when I'm in the UK I can open the video just fine. So you see DRM comes into it and so does business. That's not really DRM is it? Of course it's DRM if they don't play it in a country where it's not licensed and they use technical means to prevent that that's DRM, that's exactly what DRM is. You're talking about DRM as in terms of DRM being embedded in music files of watermarking and things like that but that is just one sub-aspect of DRM. Fair enough. Yesterday we heard a presentation about a kindly multi grid marketplace and there are several other multi grid marketplaces as well. Do you see this as another potential solution for content creators looking for a centralized place to post copies for legal for legal purchases that people can get to and also as a way to prove their authorship of the content. There are two technical approaches to the multi grid market place. There's the one that's used by Kylie and some others where it's delivered into one of the worlds where you can go pick it up then you can take it elsewhere via hyper grid. Expert permission is a vital part of that and the system is definitely something that is viable. The other one is a content delivery system that's called Double the Dutch and it's done by Spot on 3D. Apparently they are based in such a way that you upload the content to each grid individually and then have magic boxes there and just a central go-to place. I believe there may also be Karayama who try to do something similar. I don't know if they're still around but in that case again the DRM protection and protections of the grids where the stuff is uploaded to apply. So those market places are a good place to find things but if somebody uploads something that is stolen there or somebody steals something that is uploaded there and brings it to another grid or re-uploads it to another marketplace you still have the infringing problem you still have the problem of content that is illegal and needs to be taken down you still have the whole shebang it's not like it makes things any easier or different, it's just different ways of the distribution. If I sell a CD in a store and the CD has no DRM and I make a copy of the CD to give it to my friend it's not fundamentally different from me downloading a file off of iTunes that has no DRM putting it on a memory stick and giving it to a friend is a different point of sale but it doesn't change the facts we are not the only fresh approach that I have seen is actually Vanish's website which is a place that I would call a safe place to get stuff to import into grids and not get into hot water and we don't have DRM or the DMCA that's quite an achievement Somebody asked about reverse engineering if you can't buy a particular content but wishes as you could if he just observes what it looks like and reverse engineers it from scratch is that legal? There are legal requirements as to how close or how far away the result has to be definitely first of all many people go and duplicate the primed geometry that's of course just as illegal as using a viewer tool or another ripping tool to also duplicate the geometry those people who can make significant changes to the textures so that they become work in their own right rather than being a derivative or straight out plagiarism those people usually are better at creating things than they need to be to make the item themselves without copying someone else's design on the other hand Samsung versus Apple go figure It's always easy to copy something then invent something from scratch That is actually how creativity works nobody really creates something out of thin air we always stand on the shoulders of giants Alright we're getting close to the end point for this talk Are there any other questions I haven't asked oh yes there's one that's sitting around top one of our in world listeners asked what about people who are investing their own money in creating their own web server and setting up a commercial grid and renting out land they have to get money to at least cover their costs and in world of course marketplaces are a great way to rent land to merchants and this can be really hard to do if content protection isn't in place can you address that I don't understand what the actual question is here as a creator it's really not in my business to tell you how to get back the investment that you put into your grid and that's not my problem sorry I saw a much more interesting thing that I would like to mention scrolling by me this was studies Maxwell again asking about certificates this is something that is actually it's been looked into and it's not been discarded it's just been determined and it's too complex to do for the current technological level but certificate based authentication for the hyper grid is something that I'm definitely looking at and doing the same thing for content would then also be possible that would allow content to be digitally signed and it would also allow content to be fit with an ACL that allows where to take it where not at least with participating grids that would give an extra level of security both for the buyer who would know that his item is authentic or who can be sure that the item cannot be copy-botted without it being clearly visible okay and we're coming to the end of our lot of time Vanish and Melanie would you like to give any final statements before we close this out go forth and prosper Melanie I believe everything has said so I'm just hoping that everybody here has taken something away from this it seems quite heated the discussion and I wish you all a good evening morning or day or whatever way you are well thank you very much both of you for coming and talking about this this sometimes contentious issue and thank you everyone in our audience here and streaming audience on the web for coming and listening and asking your questions coming up next in this same presentation area I will be giving a talk about the numbers about the growth of the hyper grid the growth of open sim and then later on tonight we're going to have some social activities check out the conference website for all the details and locations and again thank you very much and this concludes this panel thank you


The Ministry of Finance, Budget and Economic Planning has presented the Federal Executive Council, the first three of the project's light house, which has to do with the digital infrastructure for voluntary assets declaration schemes. It needs to enhance the debt recovery strategy initiative, sustainable long-term gains for the government and build on additional capabilities in the debt recovery system. The aim of this project, Lighthouse Phase 3, is to enhance the debt recovery strategy and initiatives, sustainable long-term gains for the government, building on additional capabilities in the system, and ensure that reliable data sets are mind-generated and aggregated through inter-agency collaboration. The update on the project Lighthouse application is on the debt recovery module, the corporate profiling engine as a government gateway, and then the project Lighthouse website, Federal Government Revenue Performance Management Module and Capacity Building. FEC also approved two major memoranda from the Ministry of Works and Housing on the uptake by the private sector in response to the tax credits programme, which was initiated in 2019 through a design of the Executive Order 7. Works and Housing Minister Barbara Twinde-Fashella said this programme allows the private sector to finance public infrastructure in using tax credits. Four major critical roads were today awarded with a total contract sum of over 100,000. One of those policy initiatives is the tax credit policy, which was signed as an executive order in 2019. Now we're in 2022, and what you will see now is that the appetite for private sector investment is increasing. We can see offtake by the dangotech group on major roads like the Lecky Seaport Road, the Papalanthor Road, the Carduna Western Bypass, and one or two other roads now that I can recall from memory. We can see offtake by the dangotech group on major roads like the Lecky Seaport Road, the Papalanthor Road, the Carduna Western Bypass, and one or two other roads now that I can recall from memory that they are going to construct using the tax credit scheme. They've already been approved. Also today, FEC approved the award of contracts for the establishment and deployment of the Advanced Reports Generation Utility Engine in the total sum of 553 million Naira. This technology is to aid the operations of the Accident Investigation Bureau to be able to develop advanced reports generation in the aviation sector. This technology is going to aid the Accident Investigation Bureau to be able to establish and develop the advanced reports generation system. This system has tremendous benefits to both authorities and the recipients of the information. Meanwhile, the Executive Council has approved the National Agriculture Technology Innovative Policy as presented by the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development. This is to create better synergy and alignment with the ministry's departments and agencies to overcome inadequate coordination.


When we last met here a year ago, since then there's been a series of global developments that have accounted for the use of much of our time and energy and your resources. Let me just enumerate a few of them. We now have eight level three humanitarian emergencies, the highest emergency level of the UN, and an all-time record number. This includes IOM's role in Bangladesh in response to the Rohingya refugee crisis, the collar outbreak in Yemen, and nine armed conflicts from West Africa to the Himalayas.


Okay, here we are it's Wednesday three o'clock and guess what is the economy in you and guess what that's Chris Leatham This is his show, but I am a reciprocating host today. My name is Jay Fiedel. I like Chris and I like the economy in you and Today we're gonna talk about his favorite thing, which is computer programming. Welcome to your own show Chris Well, thank you Jay. Thank you for having on my own show. You know, one of the things that we talked about was You know, this is think tech right, so it's about technology. Tech is our middle name. Tech is our that's right So if we're gonna talk about technology, you know One of the things that we talk about in what we can be doing to grow our economy is bring in more technology So I thought well, you know, what are the topics of technology is moving away from spreadsheets It's sort of traditional flat file databases that people's often use and I've seen them throughout Yeah, it's the it's the corner of the realm for most businesses. Yes, it's visible right in front of you Uh-huh easy to use relatively speaking. Well, it's WYSIWYG, right? What you see is what you get Yeah Now the thing is the problem with database or spreadsheets as a database is their flat file They don't they're not it sort of run out of efficiency at some point so, you know, you don't get to store you store data in a flat file structure and Eventually what happens is it no longer works efficiently for you Yeah, you got to duplicate the data in various flat files and that's why we're calling this show Relational databases are the best. That's right because we all know we all love our relations Well databases love their one big happy family, yeah, well, it's an imperative So when we talk about database design, you know, a lot of people go well What's the difference like in Microsoft office in the Microsoft office week? There's a program called Microsoft access Microsoft access is a desktop database platform Much like your favorite database program, which is Filemaker actually I get to give you my history on okay I started out with something called debase two and PS. There was no debase one It was a gag Then it was debase three and then that well, I never got the four I mean there was a four then I went to Clipper Clipper with a compiled language instead of an interpretive language This is in the 80s and Clipper really opened it up for me But then I saw ASP net Microsoft and Microsoft use sequel, you know So it's ASP net running the sequel, you know search language and that was really something So I started getting into that and I wrote a lot of programs using that And I'm you know for some years anyway And I'm familiar with access because access is kind of you know, the younger brother if you will of all that stuff with ASP net and sequel And I forget what's another database language in there and the framework thing. Do you remember? No well Within the within today what we have as a language called link which is language integrated query anyway So at the end of my story is For a lot of reasons I got out of that back in the early 90s Maybe the middle 90s and I do remember how powerful it is and I do remember that relational databases were all the rage And I do remember that access was their flagship What do I call it? It's really consumer level because it's you get dragged and dropped you can make it happen That's right drag and drop. That's right, and you've been programming in that So this is very valuable to discuss exactly what is the condition? You know in terms of public acceptance professional acceptance of the Microsoft access program today and ps Microsoft stock has doubled in the past couple of months. So there must be something good happening there Well, the thing is is that when when people started talking about How to sort of track data? The spreadsheet only got you so far and I started working with Microsoft access live well interesting like what while I was living in Indonesia We had started an investment company called Pacific Financial Services And we needed a way to get people their monthly reports Well, we were using Excel spreadsheets initially which meant the girls who were doing the data entry had to enter in all The data for every client for every security they had and it took them days to do this work So by setting up an access database We could plug in the values of the the stocks that they held in the portfolio and generate the reports and it took minutes Instead of hours was made it was an amazing improvement and in the ability for us to get work Accomplished you haven't put in the time to program it because you didn't have any time at all with a spreadsheet It was right there was he would yes except of course then you had to key in all that data over and over and over again Which of course became and it could be different than a second or third or fourth time That's the problem. Yeah, and it wasn't accurate, you know It depended on somebody carefully and inputting it the right way each time each time And so by by developing a database application where we could track the history of its stock price and then Identifying a purchase a sale You know when this purchase the stock was purchased and the stock was sold We could then it was easy for us to figure out how much money the client made And that gains or losses on that stock much much less work And so because we could download that information into the database and then simply apply our clients trade Suck it up from this from these spreadsheet into access Yes, and that's really powerful to be able to do that. Yeah, they have to re-enter it again Yet again. Yeah, and then you remove that redundant data entry process, which is of course One of the things that I still see in government offices today Well, you'll see somebody come in and they'll enter in the data off of a off of a document enter and then turn around Reach over to another computer and rekey in the same data all over again into another system Yeah So these are some of the challenges that we face when we're trying to develop efficient data models and efficient processes So why why a database? So why relational database? Well It allows you to logically relate to ask, but what is a relational thing a relational database is a collection device Don't that allows you to collect logically related data That's what a relational database is So you can store data in two-dimensional tables that look like spreadsheets Except instead of having columns and rows you have records and fields now Now the thing is is is when you have a table, which looks like a spreadsheet the columns in a table have Specific data types. Okay, so one of the key things that you look at is what's the nature of the data? Spreadsheets just look at it is okay. I put something in it's there. Okay, usually numbers numbers But in a relational database You're gonna store data based on its data type simply if it's a way to mean example Well, for example a date, okay a date or a time that would be a date time Data type that field and that data table. Yeah is only for either text or a date or some kind of structured Type for data. Yeah, so you could have text fields which store, you know things like our names You can have text fields also store things like numbers that aren't calculated values such as our social security number It's really just a text field. It's just a text field. It's just a text field, right? Yeah Now you can store numbers you can store all kinds of numbers You can start very large numbers or very small numbers in databases And you can have numbers that are real numbers or integers or or fractional numbers or decimal point numbers currency values all these things sort of fall under the category of number because they're Numbers means that you could perform addition subtraction multiplication and so on so you were getting to the point of trying to Tell me about the relations between the tables, right in a database which has related tables Well, yeah, and then the way that works is you have something called a key So one of the keys that databases use By our government to keep track of us as taxpayers as our social security number or a taxpayer ID number that becomes a key And any data that that correlates or to us as an individual can get stored at separate tables Based on that key. Well, there's a parent and a child here, right? There's a parent. What is the parent? Which one is the child? Well, the primary we called well, you might call it a primary or foreign You have primary or foreign keys, right? Exactly. The parent is the child is the child, right? So when you have for example, when you go to the store and you buy something and then this is sort of a common analogy of why we use relational databases and how stores use databases is that when you go into shop for something and you Have ten items Okay, so you come in you're the the customer and then you have the ten items that you're purchasing Okay, but you also had a transaction so the transaction of purchasing ten items that gets stored in a relational table and You as the individual gets stored into that table as the child or the foreign key in other words Let's say for example your social security number They've got or they've got an identifier number for you in system every time you come into the store and you buy new goods It tracks the transaction so you have the sort of the invoice that yeah, that's just a master here That's the parent the parent with the with the key right and then you have two children You're describing two foreign keys one one is the products, right? The various price and go into the invoice so to speak and the other is me as a customer, right? I have to be linked to the invoice. That's right. So what you have is you have you You have the transaction and then you have the individual items within the transaction each Table has its own unique primary key or for our primary key But the individual for example you as a transaction would be stored in the transaction table But then that transaction also has its unique identifier and usually these numbers in most databases today are sequential So there's a sequential number assigned to that I got a graphically you can see this stuff graphically, right? Yes, you can actually you have to establish it graphically if you're using access They give you these Graphical representations of the tables and all the fields and then you you know physically go from one table to another table And you know draw your mouse to in order in order to make a line between the one and the other So to connect them up well when you're designing data tables when you're designing now Here's the thing about when you when you talk right and the reason that this is an imperative is because When you build a database you're building it based on your business model However, it is that you do business Okay, so for example if you are a company that makes surfboards Okay, town and country surf is an example of a company that makes surfboards Okay, there's certain information that they need to track for example If there's a custom board being designed for a customer, you know for a new customer Surfer who wants specific features these board well all that comes into the order Okay, now what happens is is you have different people working on different parts of that order So as that surfboard moves from one and one part of the factory to another part of the factory You need a way to effectively keep track of who did what how much you're paying him to do the work Because you may have negotiated different rates with different people and then where the board is in the in the Board the the board as it moves through that's the you know building the board parent So to speak right and then the foreign keys the children are all the people out there and the things they're doing So you could have a bunch of children and only the one parent, which is the board moving down the assembly line That's right. That's right. So and then I agree with you It's like different you have to look at the business process in that company in that enterprise Yes in order to understand first you have to understand the relationships Exactly what is happening and that's a mind-blower so much so that we're gonna take a break so we can you know relax our minds But just one second and get off the hot seat over here and then we'll come back will be refreshed That's Chris lethem the economy and you talking about relational data business. They are the best Aloha, this is Reg Baker with business in Hawaii We're a show that broadcasts every Thursday at 2 o'clock We would love to hear from you and you can reach us in several different ways We have a hotline that you can call in at<PHONE_NUMBER> Or you can email us at think tech Hawaii comm or you can tweet us at think tech H I Looking forward to hearing from you and seeing you on our next show Aloha Hey everybody my name is David Chang and I am a new host for the show the art of thinking smart I'm really excited to be able to share with you how to get the smart edge in life We're gonna have awesome guests in the military business political nonprofit world So no matter what background you're from we have something for you Please join us every other Thursday at 10 a.m. At think tech Hawaii comm or on the art of thinking smart comm I look forward to seeing you Aloha everyone, I'm Maria Mera and I'm here to invite you to my bilingual so Viva Hawaii every other Monday at 3 p.m We are here to show you news issues and events local and around the world join me This is Steve Katz I'm a marriage and family therapist and I do shrink wrap which is now going to every other Week all during the summer and maybe forever after take care of your mental health this summer Have a good time do what's fun and take good care of yourself. Bye. Bye Aloha I'm Kirsten Baumgart Turner host of sustainable Hawaii. Thanks for watching think tech this summer We have a lot of terrific shows of great importance And I hope you'll watch my show too every Tuesday at noon as we address sustainability issues for Hawaii They're really pertinent as the World Conservation Congress approaches in September and the World Youth Congress that's focusing on sustainability Next year as well. Have a great summer and tune in at noon every Tuesday Okay, so when I do this it means that I don't have when I do relational tables It means that I don't have to enter the data, you know multiple times. That's right Parent will find it in the child table. That's right. That's right. So when you want to generate so Why go through all this headache of designing a database in the first place? So you have your primary key and you have your foreign keys. Why is this the thing is this? Why do people if you're in business? Why do you want to build a database to track all this data? Well, if you're the ABC store for example And you want to know which products are selling which products are selling at what price point? So if you have different prices going on in different stores, you know at what price point you're going to get the most sales So you're able to track all that information in your database and writing reports against your data is one of the key Benefits of using a database platform. So if you have relational tables Yes, then the language that you use to extract that information to make those reports to answer all your questions Would be in the Microsoft world. It would be sequel sequel structured query language Yeah, now that really is powerful stuff That's been around a long time and it's the coin of the realm isn't it it is and you know Here's the thing when people get into databases, they think that databases are really complicated and they're not You know, there's only four four commands with working with the data They're either select update insert, which is inserting a new record or delete There's just four commands. It's not that hard to learn One of the reasons I was compelled to do this show is I think a lot of people they look at databases It's from going from Excel to a database and they get sort of There's a sort of terror that runs through them that oh my god I've got to learn this thing that's really really difficult and it's and it's just not so You know, you know, it sounds like it's like one of these things where years ago, maybe 20 30 years People were terrified of spreadsheets. Yes Make a formula on a spreadsheet. Are you kidding me? Yeah, okay, but now over that period of time We have new generations. We have new requirements put on people in companies. You know, you got to do this This is part of the job, you know, and I suggest that You know, although you got to say that spreadsheets are much more complex more powerful more sophisticated than they were Even have macros that sound a lot like program language. Yes, but but a relational database That's where the action is and so maybe it won't be right now, but it'll be soon ten years Maybe everybody will have to know about these things and the programs will get more powerful and this brings me to the competition for for Debates to for Clipper for ASP net and ultimately for your your precious access You're a Microsoft access program. Yeah, and what is that competition? There's two programs out there that are drag-and-drop. I've looked at both one is quick base quick base is is a is a subsidiary of the Intuit company and It's a drag-and-drop database. You can make relational tables and all that and the other one is my favorite the one I picked ultimately which is file maker. Okay. Now. Tell me why those programs aren't the future well, I think there they just as well could be the future just like I think Accesses is used ubiquitously for people who understand and use that desktop databases now The challenge that you have with any of these desktop database platforms is today. We want things web enabled So you bet yeah now quick basis is software as a service program. It lives on the web Yeah, you don't have to have anything but a browser to use that program pretty interesting Can't do that with access actually you can today if you have a SharePoint server You can use access have to have a server you have to have a SharePoint in the case of quick base They have the server. Yes to worry about that's right And it's all in the cloud Yeah So the the beauty of of course when you're working with database applications where you have a drag-and-drop environment It's very easy to get your data connect connected up and working But now you have to be a little bit careful when you start working with databases because you can set up your hierarchies or your relationships incorrectly which could Create problems for you down the road So it's always good if you have somebody that you can go to to have and take a look at your database design and see if it Actually works consistent with your business. Yeah, you got to look at what you're doing in the business That's right It takes it really does take some skill and some what you call it business perception Yeah to walk into a business and figure out exactly. What are they doing here? What what how does this table relate to that table? This is not so easy, but you know, I want to add this that I have seen I'm not using it But I have seen programs that actually help you figure it out And that's where this is all going programs that make the relations for you. Yes. Yes Well, there's you know when you work with relational databases and you're looking at your business model It's really great to have somebody sit down with you who maybe understands Databases because databases can go in a relational databases can also use hierarchical components for example and the For example, you may have a table that is exclusive like an animal table And then there may be other tables that sort of are sort of higher up the food chain such as a dog a cat or And so on okay So you can have hierarchical structures within a relational database and sometimes those are important components to establish in your database Because it allows you to manage data more efficiently, especially when you start dealing with millions and millions of records Millions is no big deal now right Millions of records, you know guy walks in he says this is gonna involve millions of records. Yeah, right sure Well the benefit of having computers that have more memory and more power Are more poor of more powerful processors that is that they can manage millions of records easily Instantly and the search capability and the sort capability mind-blowing yeah current databases They're much they're much better And so when you're gonna work with databases when you're when you're ready to get it started The great thing is there are websites like Linda.com L. Y. L Y NDA moment for a shout-out to Linda L-Y-N-D-A.com that is like, you know software University anything you want to learn you can learn on Linda It's amazing, but it's not the only one if there are others to you know There was a time when it was only Linda and Linda was and there is a Linda there's a real person There was a time when Linda was alone and you couldn't find anybody even compare to compare But now it's a lot of people who emulate Linda Well, there's a company called plural site for example, which is because I'm a Microsoft developer and I developed in SQL server and and dot-net There is there a company that provides all kinds of training and there's quite a bit of use stuff available to on YouTube now So that people don't necessarily feel like they're they're going down a slippery slope here learning databases Is something that you can learn Without having to learn all the other programming languages because An access database for example will create the forms for you That you can use to enter in your data now The thing is when you start working with a database you usually have an interface That does not look like a spreadsheet for entering in the information You usually have some sort of a form that has fields and drop-down controls and most of us today have used web-based forms To enter in data, you know But there's a contact form request information or you're entering information for credit card processing or a E-commerce solution and you get that with with when you're working with a program like access or file maker pro Yeah, I mean it's it's forms. Yes, you make a form. It has the fields on it You fill in the fields that data goes into the table. Yes, and now you have Some question you want to ask about what's what's in that table right related to other tables So you now you have a search a search form right or some way of generating a report And so there's not a lot of you know graphic images here. It's a form in It's maybe you look at the table if you're curious how it actually looks it looks like a spreadsheet actually Yeah, okay, and then a form out So, you know, it's not that much to it. It's just that the relations are the other center More than and the sequel commands right to find things well And also one of the great things about using forms is is let's not let's not forget that you have drop-down lists That you pick from so you don't have to key all the information by hand so exam for example Yeah, that's right. You don't pick a state, you know a range of numbers You know something like that so they were validation techniques Well, yes, I want to put a phone number in it's got to be seven or ten digits It can't be 27 digits. It's gonna it's gonna argue and complain with you if you try that that's right That's right, and that and that's of course again goes back to having a platform That's more powerful than a spreadsheet because of the built-in error checking capability of the program when you're inputting the information And you can make that as sophisticated or as simple as as necessary But the value of all of this is that we are moving away And we need to move away from just trying to use spreadsheets to solve In business in business and I remember the valuable thing about access anyway My recollection of it is that any yonkel if he put his mind on it could develop an access program Drag-and-drop is our mental won't go 20 years ago drag-and-drop And and do these reports and learn a lot about his business and he can do it without a lot of equipment All he needed was to download and otherwise have available the access and I think the future It's all gonna be software as a service. It's all gonna be because because the public doesn't want to be involved with servers Or downloading they want it right there And I think all these companies are gonna be migrating to software as a service And that means by the way that it's on the web.  Don't you think and and as a result. It's hard for a given say employee a financial organization To say I don't want to do it. It's too easy. Yeah, he's got to do it Yeah, yeah, and here's the other the other thing now This is by putting things into a web or into a an environment where you have multiple users using your program Or contributing to a program is if one programmer or one person leaves Okay, that doesn't mean that all the programs that he might have developed while you while he was working there You know, there's there's somebody else there who is familiar with what's already been developed Well, that's the problem in development. Yeah, you've got to make it bulletproof. I'm sure this is big part of your work Yeah, you got to make it bulletproof. So when one guy's leaves the other guy can just sit in his chair and it's gonna be Understandable. It's not gonna break. It's gonna be documented. So he knows what it's doing This is really the challenge and this is the value added you can provide Well, this is one of the problems I've had Historically coming in to for example when I worked for the University of California in San Francisco Is there was somebody had been working on on programs privately by himself writing code for eight years and there was no documentation in the code So I asked the guy, eight years of code. I said, well, where's your documentation? He said my code is my documentation No, no, no, that doesn't Well, it was job security for me for a while. I'm sure it was and it would have been for him, too Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, so So what are the imperatives is if you're going to design a database that you you work, you know And here's one of the the key things about designing databases and let's owners take back ownership of their company Yes, yeah, when people are doing things on spreadsheets and as an owner of a company, I don't know what they're doing Okay, and I don't understand what they're doing. I so you sort of get hijacked, you know That employee now sort of has you right she has you by the spreadsheet Yes, she does she has you by the spreadsheet and so, you know One of the great things about databases is what you set up a database and it's something that's being used throughout the company You sort of take back ownership of your business So there's real value to in having databases that are designed to manage the process of your company Let me let me add this though, which I have found true in every circumstance And that is when you get about the business of building a common Piece of software for a company whether it be a website that reaches into exactly what you do I mean in terms of function in terms of your business function, right or building a database Which kind of looks at the same thing but in much greater detail and much greater power much greater Capability for calculation, you know, yeah, you are actually evaluating your company from a fresh point of view You're rationalizing the thought that goes into what people do in the workflow and all that and ultimately when you build it You're changing the company because now you have learned some stuff that you wind up reapplying back By developing the software, you know as somebody developed software for 20 years for for a variety of companies Is that it's interesting when you start to build out an application? That there are people in the company that will tell you that such and such a thing is true And then in the management level and then you go talk to the people are doing the actual work And they'll tell you it's not always true And then you start to bear it out to all the the logic or the lack of logic or Miscommunication that goes on within an organization. So part of the work of a good programmer is to be an investigator That is the imperative off to people that is the find out find out and we are gonna find out We're gonna find this out over time We're gonna learn so much about this and we're gonna share it with you Chris and me Chris Lethem the economy and you big part of the economy as it should be here on think tech. We'll be back soon Thanks for watching. Say something nice. See you next week folks and they won't stay Stay tuned for more on software. I knew we'd say that. Yeah


Hello, my name is Aristea Binyam and I will talk to you about a recent article in Human Mutation with the title functional polymorphism affecting meat binding within the promoter of the program Death Cell Domain IV is associated with severe asthma in children. Our study combined genetic analysis and functional assays and it identified a mechanism exclusive for severe asthma in children. Initially we followed the result of a genome-wide association study conducted in childhood asthma and this was the first study that reported the highly significant association between 70q21 locus and severe asthma in children. We selected from these results the 10 top hits to genotype them in independent groups of severe asthmatic children and adults and controls. These first results showed that there was a significant association between only severe asthma in children and a polymorphism within the program Death Cell Domain IV. The next step included fine mapping analysis in which we selected a number of polymorphisms within the region of PDCD IV to genotype them in severe cases and controls and also a panel of family trios with an asthmatic probant. We additionally used data from the 1958 birth cohort study from Great Britain as controls to our study. So we selected five additional SNPs, two of them in the promoter of PDCD IV, two of them in entrance and one of them in action V. From all these SNPs, three of them were significantly associated with severe asthma in children, in the case control analysis and in the family trios analysis. The results remained significant after correcting for multiple testing. Now these results were replicated also in an independent population of asthmatic children and controls from Germany. In particular, polymorphism RS 65-85-018 was significantly associated with total IgE levels. The final step of our study included the functional validation of these findings. First, we performed bioinformatics prediction analysis and electromobility shift assays. These results showed that RS 65-85-018 has the ability to disrupt the binding of MEAP transcriptional user. Reporter RS's results confirmed these findings and showed that that polymorphism has a regulatory role affecting the transcription of the gene. Overall, our mechanism proposed a functional SNP within the promoter of PDCD IV gene to have the ability to influence the binding of MEAP, in particular when AALIL is present in the promoter. MEAP can bind, resulting in increased transcription of PDCD IV. When GAALIL is present, the mechanism is absent, resulting in a reduced transcription of PDCD IV. So we propose that the mechanism is important in asthmatic inflammatory responses and PDCD IV molecule a target for future therapeutic interventions. Thank you very much for your attention. We're looking forward to your comments.