It's working. It's working Hello everyone and welcome back to the channel today I want to discuss some thoughts I have around how productivity works And I want to mix things up with talking about how you can balance productivity and not fall into the extremes And I want to do that by talking about all the up doll and as this video is going to be about speed consumption I'll have time stamps for everything in the description down below. So let's jump into the video All right, so let's talk about all the up doll for those of you who do not know who he is The guy is essentially a doctor working in Cambridge and he's also a youtuber blogger Podcaster what else he has a company as well as far as I know he started his YouTube career by producing Educational content essentially teaching people how to learn and slowly and gradually he got himself into the YouTube meta game from scratch Using hard work using dedication using accuracy and also using speed and while this might seem like a fanboy type of video It is really not and the reason he created like a large spike in the YouTube meta game is not because of his ability to juggle Multiple balls at the same time like again creating high quality content three four times per week And being a blogger or a podcaster owning a company and also being a doctor but also thanks to his transparency doing his live streams And interviews and so on and sometimes I think that the guy is a superhuman I mean by looking at the way he's producing content once again combining aesthetics with with accuracy and research It's truly an inspiration. Okay, so now that I'm done with the fanboy thing I'm going to jump into the content consumption thing. All right So while people are generally enthusiastic about Ali's content and methods in the past few weeks He produced a few videos that are related to the speed of his content consumption For example, you can oftentimes hear him talk about the way he listens to audiobooks by doubling the speed of narration And as a matter of fact, he created a full video on this as well called one simple habit that changed my life And overall the value that I've derived from the increase in content Just being able to consume more stuff has been so much greater than the value I would have derived from listening to half as much stuff But at 1x speed or maybe slightly higher than 1x speed now throughout his videos You'll often hear him talk about why you should improve your typing speed when using a computer and also learn keyboard shortcuts Now this is one of his things, right? He kind of sounds like he's preaching time and by looking through the comments section for the past videos that are related again to the speed of his content consumption and also the why behind listening to podcasts at 10x speed or watching a YouTube tutorial at 100x speed. I generally saw a barrier and disagreement You have the camp filled with people who are not agreeing with the methods like speed listening or speed reading And then you have the camp of productivity grease monkeys who are chewing up every time Ali releases a new video And as a matter of fact in one of his latest videos that is called how I watch TV Productively the like to dislike ratio is pretty bad as I'm currently making this video and again We have both camps in there as well We have people saying like I actually disagree with you on this one being productive is being productive having fun And then we have people quoting Garnstein who was kind of living a regular life and he was not very fond of the extremes So they say then adding test line to the equation Who was famous for sleeping something like three to five hours per night? And now I want to express my thoughts and content consumption and also about the speed on which you consume content in general like books Audi books movies TV series and so on all right So Ali is essentially looking at productive ways to do things, right? We can all agree on that that is a oversimplified version of what he's trying to convey But one thing we must consider is that he's not trying to push that in our lives He's simply expressing what oftentimes people are asking for true questions like how can I be more productive now? About one of his latest videos where he's explaining how he watches TV Productively using a chromatin to increase speed the first thing I want to say is that he's not actually talking about real TV Like the conventional TV filled with the news and late night shows and stuff, but more about watching TV series, right? I believe that he should have titled the video like how to watch Netflix Productively or something along those lines So again in this video he is explaining how he started watching the series called Hunter x Hunter While also using a chromatin to frequently increase the speed of the episode and so what I'm pressing is I'm pressing D To speed up the video by 0.2 times each time and just pressing D Did quite a lot and I'm pressing S to slow it down when it gets to an interesting point And then if it gets to like a really interesting point and then I need to reset it. I just press the R button So at the moment, this is really fast And then I press R and then it goes back to normal And that's like really cool and then people jumped in the comments section saying that again This is not a healthy habit that he should stop and smell the roses And I sort of want to digress just a bit and I want to sort of ask you to ask yourself Who is maintaining the roses? Well, people started a huge war in the comments section essentially outlining why Speed watching TV is a bad for your for your health or your mental well-being and so on and that productivity is productivity and essentially Relaxation is relaxation, right? So the general view is that we should aim for that balance But my view is that this is not only about being productive and as I see it Ali Wants to absorb information and knowledge and also have fun while doing it, right? So you can see from the video that he's pretty excited about this this this method he found, right? And this again goes for audiobooks and YouTube videos and podcasts and so on and of course I do agree with the people who are saying that you should aim for a balanced life But what we must not forget is that we are all different what works for me might not work for you I oftentimes I'm guilty of skipping parts of movies and the reason I'm doing that is a kind of contrarian I believe that the movies we are seeing right now the the movies that are being released like their quality has Sort of hit a plateau and also our expectations have increased And we are pretty much adjusted with the storyline and the plot and you know even the characters and most of the Times we care about only getting to that drop to that end point and for most of the videos out there We again subconsciously know the plot even though we cannot remember in which movie we saw a particular scene And the truth is that we have quite a lot of instances when we are saying I've seen that before like when a friend is showing you a meme or a quote or recommending a movie or a book This is why people are adding timestamps in the videos and this is why we are reading book summaries and also Ingesting small codes. It's it's all about compression. It's all about fast learning It's all about keeping up with the digital Joneses sort of speak and we can of course debate the role of technology and social media in all of this Essentially hijacking our brains to desire more instant gratification type of thing But the world is accelerating and we as individuals have learned how to filter the on Important so if I'm speed reading through an article online or reading a book at double X speed The reason I'm doing that is not only because I want to be productive But also because I've subconsciously know that I've read that before in fact Alex Becker another youtuber has a video called books are slow and stupid do this instead And he's making a point on why most books on business are almost exactly the same And why you should go and listen to CEO interviews instead on YouTube So I'll provide a link in the description for that, but this is to some degree true I mean most business books are Recycling the same content over and over again and you know wrapping it up in different layers and posting and serving the book Once again to market that I believe that this is true for movies as well and for online articles and YouTube videos as well And sometimes we are all guilty of doing that as well So don't feel bad, but I think that if someone is able to recognize that about himself Sort of like recognizing his true power I think that that particular someone has the right to increase the speed of his consumption and also change the outlet of the Consumption factory sort of speak but that is because that someone is operating on a different level and it's all cool Again, we are not all at the same level and we do not need to be the same. I mean without diversity. There would be no Scarcity don't quote me on that and I'm sure that a particular someone who is Operating on a speedy level will notice something that you know catches his attention that particular someone will stop and enjoy That particular rose but what we must understand is that again the person is operating on a new level and that new level might be his New default so he's not able to go back and just consume content the same speed and going back to Ali Abda I believe that the reason why he's using speed consumption is because he spends his days most of the times in front of the computer and On the internet as well So he's pretty much well adjusted with the content out there with the memes and with you know Productivity stuff and he developed this filtering system where his mind is primed to come on Let's speed things up as I already know this stuff and again most people in the comments section are against this which is okay But I believe that there's more complexity to it and there's no binary way of looking at it as well And there's one more thing I found relevant by watching his video on why video games are good for you And talk a little bit about the enjoyment people get from these games as well and compare it with the topic of speed Consumption so if you take an example where you are playing a game like World of Warcraft Classic Where more than 50% of the time you are running from one point to another or ideally flying Sure I agree that if you just started playing the game you can use the time to enjoy the content to explore the forests and the Cabins and the lakes and the music but if you already play the game and you know most of the content in the story You are now actually aiming for high utility in terms of gameplay and trying to be better by Minimaxing how you do stuff and finding new tactics and strategies you can use to make the boarding parts which already explored More enjoyable and this is human progress I mean our brains are adaptable and they want to find faster ways of doing things and if this type of progress is Leading us to the right direction. I'm not sure. I mean this is a topic for another video But ideally we should not hate on people who are trying to speed things up again I believe that Ali is really excited about this new way of consuming content, which is cool I mean we don't have to be the same and don't hate on the guy And I want to finish up the video with a quote I have Progress appears to be caused at least simply by an attitude of progress of people competing to be innovative and Of simply looking at age old things and going but why do we do it that way?


Good afternoon. Let's get started. Hello. We have a couple more people coming in. My name is Mike Russell, and I'm here to talk about trust, confidential computing and supply chain stuff. If that's not what you're expecting, feel free to leave now. I won't be too hurt. Oh, someone just has. That's always worrying. So here's kind of the agenda. A bit about me, a bit about trust, a bit about confidential computing, hopefully some interesting stuff about supply chain, and a bit about the confidential computing consortium. Oh, and some memes. I promised some memes when I did the thing. So I put some memes in, and I apologize to the M&M quotes at the beginning of the abstract. You have to get people's attention somehow. I'm not going to be doing any M&M. You're safe with that. Who am I? So I'm that most dangerous of creatures, a techie in a management position. I have been an architect, engineer, product manager, startup CEO, open source project founder, and now I'm an executive director of a Linux foundation project. I'm also the author of a book called Trust in Computing Systems in the Cloud, published by Wiley in 2021. The fact that I always have to remind myself what it's called suggests that it hasn't sold as many as it should have done, but hey, I like tea. That's a mug of tea there. So let's start a bit with talking about trust. Because it's kind of foundational to what I want to talk about. Just to give you a little bit of a heads up, I'm going to be saying that secure supply chain isn't secure. It's just not. So that's kind of my starting point. If you think it is perfectly secure, again, feel free to heckle and we can have a discussion later on. But here's my book's definition of what trust is. Trust is the assurance that one entity holds that another will perform particular actions according to a specific expectation. One of the problems we have when we talk about trust, zero trust, or I trust my bank, or I trust my brother, or I trust my computer system, is that we don't really say what we're trusting it to do. And this is a good start, but we need three colors. First one is trust is always contextual. So I trust you, or I trust this computer to do what in what context? What's it about? Is it in the context of IO? Is it in the context of authentication? Is it in the context of whatever it may be? Second one is one of those contexts for trust is always time. So your trust may decay over time. It may grow over time depending on what your expectations of the other entity were. And when you're thinking about how to build a system which holds a trust relationship to another system, you need to think about that. And the other one is that trust relationships are not symmetrical. So just because I trust my brother, who happens to be a doctor, to perform CPR on me doesn't mean he'd necessarily trust me to do that. As it happens, I'm trained in CPR and done it, so I can. But it's all those sorts of things, right? So my book says that I trust my brother and my sister with my life, but my sister was a diving instructor and my brother's a doctor and there's a very different set of trust relationships. And we can think about trust in computer systems in the same sorts of ways. So should I trust you is kind of the big question. It's a meme, right? I promised you memes, future armor, I believe. Okay, so here's why this is relevant to people who attend in this conference and hopefully to you people in this room and people who are watching this. The cloud is just somebody else's computer. We know this, right? So supply chain security is arguably all about trust. Who do you trust early in the supply chain to have done what things? So that means we need to decide, based on the definition I gave you before, who we trust to do what and when. And if we can't even elucidate, if we can't clarify what those things are, we can't even begin to build an understanding of the security of the supply chain because we don't know which bits are trusted to do what. Okay, so this is kind of me. If in doubt I default to not trust in people, which makes life a bit difficult, but it's kind of the safest thing. So let's talk a bit about confidential computing and then we'll bring it all together into why this is relevant and interesting. So as I said, I'm the executive director of the confidential computer consortium, which you'll talk about in a little bit. It's a Linux Foundation project with currently seven, soon to be granted, 10, 12 open source projects associated with it. It protects confidential computing, protects data in use by performing computation in a hardware-based and a tested trusted execution environment. The ones you've probably heard of are SGX and TDX from Intel, AMD's, SEV, SNP, ARM, CCA Realms. There are a couple of the risk is doing some stuff as well and some other bits and places from IBM, but those are the ones that are most widely deployed. But they're all chip-based technologies, hence the hardware-based thing. A test that is important, we might talk about that in a little bit. But basically, you need to make sure that if you say to me, please run this thing and I say, yeah, I'm doing it securely, you're going to say, no, the whole point I've asked you to do it securely is I don't trust you. Why don't I trust you to tell me it's right? So the attestation is the cryptographic process to allow you to make decisions about whether to trust what I've just told you. So how does it work? Well, let's think of a, this is a very simplified, but hopefully everyone recognizes this picture, a basic sort of cloud CSP or remote host. And it's got, the red dotted line is the extent, the physical extent of it. We've got the host aware supervised container management, all of the flim flammy stuff, the infrastructure that runs stuff, which I'm uninterested in. Fine if you are. But that's all the stuff that's making everything run. And that's in the little red box. And then we've got a couple of workloads. Okay. And the one on the right is the one that we care about, because that's our workload. The other workload could be from somebody completely different. And I don't own any of these pieces, right? I want to, I want the workload to be associated with me. I want to be able to trust it to do what I want it to do. That might be managing patient data. It might be using cryptographic keys. It might be doing AI training. It could be pretty much anything you want. So we usually call trust execution environments, which are basically the CPU created sets of memory pages, which are protected by encrypting the workload in such a way that even the host OS hypervisor, all that sort of gubbins, English word, rubbish stuff at the bottom, can't look into, can't mess with the workload. So it's integrity and confidentiality are protected. And when you do this with attestation, that allows us, and I'm not going to go into the details, it's not particularly germane to this topic, but allows us to say, you know what, I can be sure that what is in there is what I think is in there. And that the owner, the administrator, the compromiser, the owner of that machine, can't look inside it. My workload is protected. Now, they could, of course, do resource starvation. Not much we can do about that. So if the CIA tried, we can only really be sure of C and I, but we do get those. And that allows us to start doing some really quite interesting stuff. So how is this relevant to supply chain management? I'm going to try and leave lots of time at the end for questions. But if you do have questions in the middle, I'm absolutely happy for people to put their hands up and ask questions because I've really skipped over quite a lot of detail here. And if it's stuff that people want to know more about, very happy to stop or to go back if anyone likes. So does everyone recognize this much overused picture? I suspect one of the people in this room possibly wrote, oh, we've got a question at the front. Excellent. What can I do for you, sir? Oh, well, I've lost it. There we are. That one, yeah. That one. That's not a definition of trust. That's a definition of confidential computing. So the great question. So the question was, I say it protects data in use. What about the actual application? What about the code? How do you know that that's performing the right operations? That's a great question. So the official definition of confidential computing doesn't, we talk about code and we talk about data. Okay. And I need to get this right around. Integrity is protected for data and confidentiality is protected for data by the definition. The integrity of the code is also protected by the definition, but the integrity of the confidentiality out of the code is protected only in certain implementations. So the integrity of the code can be checked. So you can be sure that what is running is what you think. This is obviously a fairly short definition. If you go to the confidentialcomputing.io, you'll find a lot more detail and white papers and stuff as well. But the integrity of the code is also protected. And the confidentiality of the code can also be protected depending on the implementation. So a very, very important point. Because, you know, sometimes the, well, almost always you care about the integrity of what's running it because data in and out is rubbish if you're not getting, it's not be protected in terms of the integrity of the running thing. But sometimes the confidentiality of the code is also important. If you're a bank running risk calculations or deciding what to build or buy or if you're doing, I don't know, pharmaceutical work, actually the algorithm itself may be worth protecting. So great question. Does that answer? Okay. Anything else I'll carry on otherwise? Thank you. Right. So I'm saying, I hope everyone recognizes this picture. Again, probably one of you created the original picture. This is the other problem, right? In that you break all of it if you break one of these because it's a chain, right? That's the weakest length in the chain. And if you can hit one of these, you can't trust what comes out at the end. Makes sense for everyone? Which means, of course, that there, you see, it's amazing what you get when you search for trust in a meme. So we need to fix this, right? So we've got some source code. Let's say that we're happy that the source code is what we think it is and it's come from where we think it is. But we need to build something. We need to make sure that what is built is what we think is being built with the tools we think it is building. We've got a bunch of dependencies. We want to make sure that the dependencies are the things that we think they are. When we do the packaging, we want to make sure that what has come out of the build and the packaging is what we think it is. And then when we use it, we want to be doing that as well. So how can we start thinking about it? Oh, the first we could sign the package and all of our problems are over. Thank you for laughing. I appreciate that. That is the correct answer. If we have time, I might go into a bit of a rant about signing later on, but I'll do that later on. But, okay, who's protecting that key? The very, you know, just the operation of signing is an extremely sensitive operation, right? And if we're doing that on that machine is compromised, well, the rest of it is useless, right? That's the last step before you're using it.   So we have at least some hope that we're not having things messed around with on the wire, right? But what are we going to do? Well, oh, yeah. But even if that's right, we need to protect the stuff that's been built, right? Because otherwise you're nowhere. Okay. And arguably, right? So this is kind of interesting. I'll get into the complexity just on the blue boxes. I think I'm going to have time to have a rant about it in a bit. But what can we do about this? Well, this is the first thing we could do, right? We could say the process of building and signing, assuming it's done by the same entity, and there's another whole set of questions, but the process of doing that could be protected with its integrity and its confidentiality, which means that when we get the stuff out of there, we're pretty sure that it has actually happened, as we think. If we check that the packaging software is the software we thought it was going to be, the integrity is correct, it's the right version, it's got the right hash on it and all that sorts of things, then we've got a decent chance that when we sign it with a key which has been protected from whoever runs that machine, that what we get out is going to be some use, right? So that means that if we do this set of operations in a confidential computing environment, we have at least a chance of getting something out that's useful, right? Okay. A chance. Maybe we should do the same for these as well, right? And the reason these are in different colors is because they're likely to be different sets of people, different entities who are controlling this. Okay. Now, there's some interesting stuff here. Remember I talked a little bit about attestation, right? The attestation is the cryptographic proof that when we built that environment, the green box or the sort of purple box or the blue box, that it was built in the way we expected it and is protected from the person who owns that box, right? Now, one thing we can do is given that we have a certificate or other cryptographic artifact from that attestation, we can add that to the signature. We can add that to what's coming out so that the user can say, you know what? Not only do I believe that it was packaged correctly, but I can believe that it was packaged in such a way that it was protected as it happened. We can do the same with the other pieces as well. And because we can change certificates, we can actually add that there. Is this in any specs at the moment? Not that I'm aware. Is it something that might be useful? Oh, I think so. So this is how confidential computing and a very, very simple level can help you with supply chain stuff. So there's the next question. Maybe when you're actually running the thing you've created, you probably want to think about running it in a confidential computing environment as well. I'm not even going to start on the source, right? Because source is kind of interesting too. But I think that's an interesting thing to think about too. So I've gone very quickly. Let me just stop for a minute and ask if there are any more questions. You got a question? Okay, so the question is, how can you be sure of the correctness of what's running there as well, right? Can you trust the hardware? So you have to trust something. Because something has to be doing the work. The smaller your TCB, and I absolutely include the hardware in your TCB, the better, right? And so confidential computing is basically the CPU or the GPU and none of the rest of the motherboard, right? So it's not your RAM, it's not your buses, it's not those. There's some firmware in there and some bits and pieces are registered. But that's all part of the attestation that's checked. So it all should hopefully be good. Can you guarantee correctness? It's very, very difficult at the hardware level, and that's a problem for greater minds than me. And it's outside the scope of confidential computing. Basically, you say that one of the units of trust has to be the hardware and the associated cryptographic materials with that is associated with that. Were there some more questions? I thought I saw another at the back, green. Oh, yeah, no, no, you'd need to go all the way back. No, of course you need to do that. Everything needs to be signed, everything needs to be running in these sorts of ways. I can only put so many boxes on the screen, but you're quite right, of course you are. Yeah, Carol. Yeah, so again, I don't think there's been work done in formalising that, but it is absolutely, whenever you're thinking about these sorts of operations and trust operations, you need to be thinking about chaining. Now, there's at least one chapter in the book about transitive trust and distributive trust and how you can, the extent to which those are additive, or sometimes the opposite. There's some very complicated stuff. And also I have, well, I think it's one of the most interesting bits in the book is around how open source trust works within the community and distributive trust and all those sorts of things, particularly in the area of security. And was there another question? Because if not, I'm going to start off on a rant. Right, okay, it's rant time. Okay, so let's say that the thing we're building, or one of the dependencies, whichever bit really doesn't matter, is a cryptographic library that we're going to be using. Yeah, so it's a useful thing to know. And part of the, well, we'll say the building bit. We have a maintainer who has a cryptographic key which they protect well. We'll just take that as an assumption. So, you know, got to start somewhere. When in, let's say an S-bomb, for example, that maintainer signs that built piece of code, what does that mean? Okay, tell me. Oh, we've got so many transitive trust relationships in there already. Okay, so the code should do what I think it should do. Okay, well, we'll unpack that a little bit. Okay, is the maintainer a cryptographer? One, are they a compiler expert? Two, have they checked every single line of code, looked for emergent behavior based on different combinations of these things? Are they, have they checked all of the people who are putting code in to make sure that they're the people they say they are? The problem is that when you sign something, it is entirely unclear at the moment what that means. And that is why supply chain security is broken at the sort of lowest level.  That's kind of interesting, let's do this. And nobody really knows because it's not defined. And I think the kind of your answer is it's best effort, right?  But some people would say that this is much safer and much easier in a proprietary world because it's the, it's the single, this is not, we don't have any AV folks, we'll get them hopefully coming back. Oh, there it is, it's fine, it's fine, it's okay, no problem. Because, you know, they can put their reputation by and they've got all the right people. I just don't believe it, right? Apparently in the open source world, at least, don't get me wrong, many eyes or bug shallows are lie unless you have the right eyes looking at it, right? But at least we can apply those eyes, at least there are enough eyes available to be applied rather than maybe two or three security people of sufficient depth and experience and understanding within any particular company. However big that may be who can actually look at this stuff and do with it. So, you know, I think that, I don't think this fixes the problem. For me, this is a necessary but not sufficient start to think about it because if you don't do this, you can't address any of the other things because all the other stuff is worthless because a signature and a certificate is worthless because you don't know that it's a real one. So, yeah, no, absolutely, you're, you're certain that someone's done it, you're not making any assertions about their capabilities and their knowledge, and that also needs to be part of the context of assigning. A certificate says one thing, which is either the owner or the person with control over a particular signing certificate or private key has the ability to create a certificate and attach it to them. That's all it says. It is, there's no other context associated with it. And the problem is that there are far too few people and a lot of them hopefully in this room who understand that that is what it means. And the problem is particularly when you're taking, and you know, people begin to realize this about open source software supply chain, excellent, but by saying in proprietary case, you're safe, you're just avoiding the problem. Right. So, I'm going to carry on a bit and we may have some time for some questions, but I don't want to run on too long. So, let's see if I can make this one. Okay, so a little bit about confidential computing consortium. So, this is what we are. We're an LF project. We've been around for four years next month. And it's about basically trying to get more people thinking about using, adopting confidential computing. Part of Lynch's foundation, coming to open source software, open source is best. Again, I'm preaching to the choir here for security, for trust, and for auditability. And auditability is absolutely vital here because not only do you need to audit all of the stuff in your supply chain and all the build pieces and all the packaging pieces, but you need to audit the stuff that made those colored boxes. Right. Because if you can't audit that, you have nothing you can do. So, things like, we're encouraging all the hardware manufacturers to make all of their firmware open. It'd be nice if they made their hardware open. No, maybe we'll get there. Arm is out there. Risk is out there as well. So, there's a number of folks doing this stuff. Oh, it's, yeah, open source is just best. Right. These are the current CCC projects. The first one is the one which I was the founder of, a bit quiet at the moment, because the company I was doing didn't work out. But there we go. A bunch of other stuff, and it's worth looking at them. And if you have any interest, please get in touch or just get in touch with the projects. How can you get involved? Well, firstly, you know, use and contribute to those projects at 10 meetings. You can come to any of the technical advisory council or outreach slash marketing meetings. You don't need to be a member. I should probably not say that, given I suppose to recruit people, but it's true. And we encourage people to come along and contribute. And we have these different boards here, have a particular SIG on attestation, a particular one on governance, risk management, that sort of stuff, compliance. And, yeah, if you are here and interested, then your organization should probably think about joining the CCC, right? It's the next foundation projects, not too expensive. It's a large, if it's a, you know, if you're a small company, and we have a couple of different levels as well. Oh, and yeah, if you're interested in this sort of stuff, and you think it's cool or fascinating or scary or bad, I don't pretend to have all the answers. This is about trying to get people talking about these things and understanding and giving us a framework to talk about trust. I literally wrote it because I went to a conference talk about trust and the person had no clue what they were talking about. And we had no shared framework to discuss it. So I wrote this in the hopes that we could at least have some sort of framework. And I could be told I was wrong about stuff. It really doesn't bother me particularly. Well, obviously it does. So that's me. We have five, ten minutes to talk about whatever we want. That can be to do with this or it can be to do with whatever we want. I mean, the weather's here. It's lovely in Bilbao. But if you have any questions, please far away. I will give the best I can. So the question was, in this picture, is all of this supposed to be done in a trusted execution environment? To which my answer is, I would like to see each of these different coloured boxes being a separate trusted execution environment or set of trusted execution environments. So, again, I would generally expect the entity who controls, let's say the packaging and the signing and all of that, to do all of that in a set of trusted execution environments in their own trust domain. And I'm using the term in the technical term that's discussed in the book. So it might be you might have a bunch of these, but they're collaborating together. You control them. They're mutually attested. You're happy that the integrity of all of those is what you expect. Yeah? So the question is, go into the confidence. Could you think it sounds like a lot of gymnastics when you could just be running your own hardware? To which the answer is, yes. I'm really glad that you trust your own hardware. And yes, there may be times where you want to keep a separate build machine where you have special images that you know and you audit every one and all those sorts of things. And that is certainly an option, right? And one of the interesting things about confidential computing, depending on how you do it, and there are a number of different approaches, is that you can actually have a much smaller TCB, software TCB and hardware TCB than you would otherwise, right? So if you can be sure that you don't need to worry about the rest of the OS, for instance, and you can just have a library-based equivalent VM, right? Those sorts of things. That's one way to control it. But yeah, there are times you want to do that. There are times you want to use an HSM, frankly, but HSMs are complex and they're expensive and they're difficult to manage. But this happens on the cloud now all the time, and that's not going to change, right? I'd like it to change for some stuff, but we have to admit that this is where it's happening. And also, can you trust your own hardware and the people who are access to the hardware, et cetera? And it's all very well if you're doing a single build once a month. But if you're doing CI CD, you need to be able to deploy stuff in a way that works. Is it gymnastics? Yes. Is it complex? It's becoming less so. And the more people who are involved, the less complex it will become. So I'm going to summarize the gentleman's question. He said, I would presumably prefer it that people didn't have to work out their own thing and that the industry provided tooling to make it easier. Yes. However, it's important that that tooling provides the visibility into the processes and what's what's happening so that those who are expert enough in a field can do it. And that as we move into making it more mainstream, that good monitoring software and all those sorts of things allow people to be alerted about things they need to worry about. So yes, absolutely needs to get there. If you're interested in the complexities about monitoring and debugging trusted execution environments, there's a blog on the Confidential Computing Consortium article, which I wrote about that. It's horrific. But kind of interesting because the whole point about debugging stuff is that you look at stuff that's going on, but you can't look at stuff that's same with logging. Right. So kind of interesting. Anyone else before this gentleman? He has another one. Okay. Go for it. Yeah. Who is you and who is the user in that question? So the question was, I put a question mark above that. Is there a way for you to trust that the user is using the thing you think they should be using? So I talk quite a lot about trust relationships and understanding who you is is kind of important here. So is there a way for the, let's say, the initiator of that process to be sure. Yay. Thank you. Thank you. Do that again. Is there a way for the initiator of that process to be sure that the person with access to that process, the person they can, it should do? The answer is yes. There's some really interesting and complex ways of doing that. And there are also ways of ensuring that the person initiated it is not the person who has access to it and to do things like shared multi-party compute and to prove that even though I started it, I can't change it and you can trust what's going on in it by using nice crypto and stuff like that. And yeah, there's a whole bunch of stuff around there. So the answer is yes and absolutely no. Which is my kind of favorite type of answer, really. Anyone else? I'm having fun. Yeah, please. Yes, there's a very famous story by, is it Thompson? Yeah, that one. It's in the book. Yeah, it's a great question and a very important one. And yes and no. It's not good enough to go just back to the compiler just so you need to look at the chips too. But yes, thank you whoever it was who referenced that. Yeah, it's in the book. It's a well-known story and yeah, you can't trust the compiler there. There is an open source project called bootstrapable builds which is trying to solve this problem, that problem. I hope it uses this stuff because if it doesn't, I don't trust it. I'm not sure I trust it anyway, but I don't trust many things. But people are looking at this sort of thing and they're quite right. They should. We need to look at all of this stuff because most people take this stuff. They're the people who click through all the cookies, right? None of you do that, do you? No, okay. But we need to help those people because they're not in a position to do it and we are. We have to build this stuff right because critical infrastructure, banking, pharmaceutical, medical stuff, your energy supply, all of this stuff matters and it all uses this stuff and government thinks that the stuff they've put out there now sorts it and it doesn't. We need to expose this stuff and make it happen. If you've got any other questions, find me. I'll be at the booth for a while. This has been great. Thanks for your attention.


Well, I'm a firm believer in planning and particularly medium-term planning so that we break out of this short-term cycle where we're focusing only, you know, like at the electoral level and that political cycle. The stakeholder engagement for updating St. Lucia's medium-term development strategy, MTDS 2021-2026 got off to an encouraging start with stakeholders from the public and private sectors, NGOs and civil society organizations. Puminent secretary in the Department of Economic Development, Claudia Simmanuel, said due to significant changes in the socio-economic landscape, locally, regionally and internationally, and taking into consideration the priorities of the new administration, it has become necessary to update and strengthen the MTDS over a longer period. Resilience to climate change, resilience from a financial point of view, very, very important imperatives as we look at making the country competitive. As we know, as a small island developing state, we are vulnerable. And so to the extent that we can adapt and mitigate, it would read down to our robustness as a country going forward. Because within the context of COVID and what's happening globally, the Ukraine war, for example, we are getting negative impulses in terms of rising prices. So it's important that we ensure that the necessary fiscal space is being safeguarded and that we remain competitive. Restrategizing to get St. Lucia on a sustainable path of recovery is at the core of the MTDS. Stakeholders representing areas such as education, productivity and agriculture highlighted their importance at the planning table in the formulation of an updated MTDS. Education is actually absolutely critical. In fact, education policy is innovation policy because without the requisite human resources with the right training, the right background, the right perspective, you cannot implement any of the plans. The national competitiveness and productivity unit is very important to this process. Because when you speak of medium-term development strategy for St. Lucia, productivity and competitiveness is a cross-cutting issue, which affects all sectors. It's very important. The agriculture industry supports the food industry. So it's very important for the Ministry of Agriculture and the agricultural sector to work with the government of the day to ensure that one day food security means available, but also to ensure it's affordable. Areas such as infrastructure, health, social protection and citizen security will continue to remain a dominant feature of the MTDS. Well infrastructure is very important to the economic development of any society or any country because infrastructure is what speaks to your roads, your bridges, your means of communication and if your means of communication are not maintained, if they're not upgraded as needs be with economic development, then essentially the economic fabric of your country, of your society crumbles. Health really affects all sectors. If you don't have a healthy workforce, your economic sector will suffer. So even when we look at our social protection, if we need healthy people, social protection spans all of our other sectors within the economy. It is not a standalone sector that the Ministry of Equity has to deal with, but rather something that is cross-cutting. So we want everyone to understand that we are in this together. We want everyone, society and the law enforcement agencies as well, to know that it is only together that we can accomplish and ensure that Senucia is safer. The medium-term development strategy 2021-2026 is scheduled to be presented to policymakers in November 2022 and will replace the 2020-2023 version for the National Competitiveness and Productivity Council, Glenn Simon reporting.


Dear fellows, dear guests, I'm delighted to contribute to the 2015-16 series of the Society with a lecture on the archaeology of the ignatia. I'm Jurit Sidior Cantelli, Marie Curie Senior Research Fellow, and my work in the past two years is on a very significant European cultural route, which is very much understanding. Today we are going to explore the rediscovery of this route by some early modern pioneers who ventured off the beaten track and recorded antiquities and remarked on the connection between people and monuments. But first things first, the story of the Ignatian route began in the 4th century BC when King Philip II of Macedon embarked on an ambitious project to unite independent Greek city-states under his name and to conquer new and important north-lands, north-eastern-west of the heartland of his kingdom. The Vasilikio dos, the royal route, was a necessary route to lead his expansionary policy. The route extended from roughly the area of Philippi in eastern Macedonia, which is the modern-day Republic of Macedonia. The route united important centres of mineral and land resources that carried huge economic and military potential. On the side of Grinides, on the foot of Mount Pangaeon, Philip founded Philippi, a city which became synonymous with silver and golden mines that fuelled his military campaigns. Neapolis, and this is one of his status, which was made possible because of the golden mines of Pangaeon, Neapolis, a Thessian colony and member of the Delian League was taken over by Philip in 350 BC and was used as the harbour of the city of Philippi. In 42 BC Neapolis became the base of the navy of the republican leaders Brutus and Cassius and in 49 AD it was the first city in Europe visited by St Paul. Amphipolis, a prosperous Athenian colony on the Strimon estuary, contested very often by Athens and Sparta, was taken over by Philip in 357 BC and was to become the power base for his navy. Here you can see the latest archaeological discovery in Amphipolis which also became very controversial in Greece. This is a major barrier, we don't know who commissioned this tool, LNA is trying to fix it, but this is the most important and expensive tool created for a personality someone probably from the royal court or from the entourage of Alexander. So further to the west, we're going to see eventually Thessaloniki on the plain of the thermite gulf, Cassander, son in law Philip II, founded Thessaloniki which was to become one of the most important Mediterranean harbours. And further to the west we have Pella which was a seat of government and birthplace of Philip, so Philip was of course very much interested in connecting Pella with the east and west, so here is Amphipolis with a melee of different architectural styles and you can see the sphinx, you can see the chorus guarding the tomb and the identity of a person we don't know who he is or she is. In Thessaloniki recent archaeological discoveries have made life for subsequent Greek governments and nightmares because five metres below the modern egnatia of those, my fellow archaeologists have uncovered this amazing hub of commercial activity from the Roman all the way to the middle Byzantine period. In Pella, the birthplace of Philip, this stunning mosaic floor records the life and habits and pastimes of the Macedonian courts. And further to the west Edessa, a city not often visited, preserves these amazing fortifications, the Agora and its life stretches from the Hellenistic all the way to the Ottoman period. Now Edessa controlled the area of Upper Macedonia and through the royal route it led to Heraklia Lingistis, now in the Republic of Macedonia and here two kilometres south of modern-day Bitola, a visitor, if you are up to this, can come across these incredible sites next to a cemetery, next to a dumping place, you come across a city with an amphitheater, lots of administrative buildings, basilicas and the most stunning mosaics in the Balkans. And further to the west we come across the Hellenistic and Roman city of Ohrid of Lichnidos and here it's part of the amphitheater of a look in the lake, this was the border of the Macedonian kingdom, this was the end of the royal route. What happens next is that in the 1st century BC the Romans expanded on what Philip had created and this was a major feat of civil engineering. So the V.A. Ignacia connected Dairachium on the Adriatic Sea, all the way to Thessaloniki, all the way to Philippi, then Kipsela and then Byzantium and Constantinople. The milestone of Ignacia preserved this one in the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, preserves even the name of the person who commissioned the work or who was responsible for the construction of Ignacia. In the 1st century AD Ignacia becomes interwined with the travels of St. Paul and from 330 AD with a political and cultural trajectory of Byzantium. Today the V.A. Ignacia and its connecting routes are being shared by Albania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, the Republic of Macedonia and Turkey, which makes things very complicated for the preservation of cultural heritage. Three sites along Ignacia, Thessaloniki, Pela, Vergina, Ochrit, sorry Vergina and Ochrit are UNESCO sites and Philippi has just entered UNESCO's provisionalist. The name of the ancient route resurfaced in 1994, thanks to the construction of the Ignatia Odos, another mammoth construction project, which aimed to connect the Ionian Sea with the Evers River that is the Greek-Turkish border. The construction of this route has inevitably prompted rescue excavations that have resulted in very important new finds, but has failed to address issues regarding preservation of heritage and unification of the archaeological sites. This is a challenge my project tries to address, providing the first study of the route in its entirety and using this study as a platform for regional collaboration so that players in the Balkans can put forward a credible portfolio for the route's accreditation as a European cultural route. I just wanted to go backward to explain what I mean by cultural route. You can see here that it commones definition of a cultural route is a land, water, mixed or other type of route, which has its own specific and historic dynamics and functionality. In contrast to the tourist routes, cultural routes are neither invented nor designed. And the Via Ignatia meets all these criteria. This is one of Europe's oldest artes, covers a distance of 696 miles and links Constantinople Istanbul in the eastern volcals to Dairachium du Rez on the Adriatic Sea. The connection the route has been providing over time and space to communities, ideas, languages and religious practices have resulted in a wealth of tangible and intangible heritage. Today we are exploring aspects of this heritage with the help of a group of pioneers who from the mid 15th all the way to the 18th century chose to venture in defiance or often impossible travel logistics in order to observe, record and decipher Ignatia's archaeology. In 1430, 23 years before the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans, Siriaco of Ancona traveled along parts of the route by then unsafe and contested by Turks, Byzantines and Serbs. And he recorded antiquities and inscriptions. In 1461, the Venetian Giovanni Maria Angiolelo followed the stretch of Ignatia from Thessaloniki to Silinfria as prisoner of war. In the 16th century, Lorenzo Bernardo appears to have traveled along the entire course of Ignatia and later Pierre Belon, a naturalist and antiquarian, describes the section of the road between Thessaloniki and the Evros River. In the 17th century, Father de Dres, the chaplain of the French ambassador in Constantinople, covered parts of the route and in 1704, Paul Lucas, also a naturalist and antiquarian, managed to travel along the eastern part of the road. In their exploration and rediscovery of Ignatia, our travelers came across an inhabited space where multiple layers of habitation, destruction, spoliation, reuse and reconfiguration of space and building material could be found in just one spot. Of course, this was not a phenomenon pertinent for the 15th, 16th, 17th and 18th century. Byzantines, Serbs, Bulgarians, they lived among ruins and were able to understand what was the heritage of the area. The problem is that although Ignatia's Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine legacy informed the everyday life of medieval people there, that legacy was rarely graced with a reference in official Byzantine, Western or Eastern medieval sources. So the writings related to the life and travels of Syriac of Ancona, humanist antiquarian, imagined and occasional spy, are the first to break that rule, offering us priceless insight into Ignatia's fast-disappearing antique and medieval landscape. So let me start with Syriac. In 1430, Syriac of Ancona set out on a journey to the Levant armed with his appreciation for antiquity, his keen eye for observation, and loaded with lots of ancient Greek and Roman literary works, he carried with him and he purchased along the way. The landscape of Ignatia's were very, very difficult to navigate. Throughout his travels he recorded activities and conveyed his view on the connection or disconnection between Ignatia's inhabitants and their heritage. The purchases he was making, for instance, from an orthodox monk on the island of Rhodes, of three recently excavated antiquities, illustrate the profusion of Greco-Roman works of art, effectively turning up in people's backyard, and being used in this case as a source of income. Other purchases, such as the one Syriac homemade of a number of Greek manuscripts planted by the Turks from Salonica, document the pivotal moment in the story of Ignatia when Byzantine heritage became itself part of Ignatia's antiquities. These most recent antiquities, dispersable as poise of war and collectible for their value, in this case literary value, offered their new owner multiple associations with Christendom's fabled Easter Roman Empire and its classical tradition. Syriacos comments on the monuments and sites of Philippi, Thessaloniki, and Enos, to mention a few, further conveyed the importance he placed on interacting with the physical remains of antiquity rather than reading about them in books, a quality that has justifiably associated him with the birth of archeology. In Philippi, Syriaco encountered an archeological site strung with fine monuments, a theater, inscriptions, tombs of illustrious men, and the remains of one's mighty fortification. But he was particularly drawn to an imposing monolithic structure outside the eastern city walls. And this is the structure. And we had to circle the modern village of Crinides last summer, and I have excavated in Philippi for five years, so same on me. But this is just a great example of how we don't use great signage to point to people to these monuments. So this first century monument of some four meters high once marked the stretch of the ignatia between Neapolis and Philippi and can still be seen two kilometers from the archeological site. The name of the location known among the locals with the Turkish name Dikilitas, and the Greek name is Orthopetra, which means upright stone, obviously refers to the imposing structure. Two of the four sides of the monument bear an inscription partly surviving that details the career of a certain Caius Vibius Quartus from the fifth legion of Macedonia and commander of the third regiment of Syriaca in the service of Emperor Augustus. As the end of the inscription has been destroyed, there is no indication as to whether a grave lies underneath or whether it was something erected in honor of this guy. He was clearly a megalomaniac or the city was trying to impress him. Either way, the size of the structure and related expenditure encapsulates the importance and visibility of the Roman military in the civic life of first century Philippi. At the time of Syriaco's visit, the Greek-speaking population referred to it as the major of Alexander's horse Busephalus and revered this stone for its association with the life of Alexander. As in the case of other sites along Ignatia, the story behind Caius Vibius monuments was retold by generations of locals to express the pre-Roman face of Philippi. The name major of Alexander's horse used in this case says a lot about the way its colors process the history of the landscape they inhabited and evaluate its multiple face of human activity. In the second half of the 19th century, the French archaeologist Leon Euse and Honoré Dome recorded Caius Vibius monument, and this is a drawing from their book, and this monument was still standing now next to an Ottoman inn for travelers. They came these guys face to face with a locus persisting reverence of what effectively had become a sacred landscape linked in all probability to the memory of Alexander, and they noted, a superstition attaches to the white powder that is obtained by scratching the marble of Dikili Tams, so they were scratching it. The locals think that the marble has the ability to give milk to nursing mothers. It has been devoured by the knives of villages. Over half of the inscription has been destroyed in this way. Syriacos, second exploration, took him in the eastern part of Egnatia, and it's amazing that he couldn't actually travel over land, but he was hopping from place to place by sailing. So it shows that the road was very, very dangerous by that time. From Silivria, he managed to go to Iraclia perinthos aboard a fishing boat, and there he wandered and looked at the town's fortifications, most of them in a state of collapse. He identified the remains of the ancient walls and of numerous relatively modern defensive walls and towers, and he understood that the Byzantine emperor Heraclius was behind this construction. Scattered stones, some of them in second use as part of the Byzantine walls and churches, charted the historical and cultural trajectory of perinthos, especially the period following the extension of Egnatia by Emperor Trajan, and the subsequent rise in importance of urban centers along the stretch of the route Neapolis that is Cavalla to Constantinople. Inscriptions mentioned in Greeks and Latins, Pagans and Christians, cities and areas stretching from North Africa, Asia Minor, and Lesbos to Pannonia, spoke to Syriacos of a long gone cosmopolitan community. Melancholy and a sense of loss for the once splendid city sum up Syriacos feeling for the places and communities along Egnatia on the eve of the Ottoman conquest. Perinthos' beautiful ruins in a way stand for the ruins of every city he came across. All those places were experiencing increased disconnection caused by the breakdown of communications and great uncertainty in the face of the Ottoman advance. Syriacos' apprehension about what might become of those ancient and glorious places mirrors contemporary disquiet in Western Europe for what people perceived as the impending end of times. In Syriacos' channels that excite in a high symbolic gesture he made to his good friend and fellow spy Rafaela Castiglione. So what he does, he gives a coin to Rafaela and this coin comes from his private collection. The coin I made it up that is this coin of a Spacian but to give you an idea how it might have looked like. So we don't know whether Syriacos found it, purchased it or he just carried it. I think he must have found close to Perinthos. And the Spacian of course is an emperor who holds a very special place in Christian rhetoric and the story of the early church. What is interesting is that Syriacos creates this inflated and highly favorable picture about the Spacian trying to luring Rafaela Castiglione and saying by looking at the ancient coin he really hoped that his friend would reverence and recall again and again undoubtedly the mortal danger not only Byzantium but also western Christendom was facing as a whole. Following Ignatius' fall to the Ottomans, libraries and works of art made their journey to the west. Their displacement was to become Western Europe's gain familiarizing the 16th century scholarly communities in France, Italy and Germany with the wealth of ancient Byzantine culture and allowing for a more nuanced understanding of Byzantium now as a past empire and focus itself on antiquarian interest. Here you can see the leitmotif Macedonia. This is let's say at the center of the Egnatia the country that once rules the word is unfortunately subject to the vile Turks to whom it has become tributary as observant and this is an idolized improbable picture of a landscape of Macedonia and in this atmosphere we have two very interesting personalities we have André Tevé who writes the Cosmographie du Levant and we have Le Singularité a book by Pierre Belon both were composed in the creative atmosphere of rediscovery of the East literary traditions. Yet the interest of those early modern travelers in ancient and Byzantine monuments and sites and their distaste for their Ottomans came hand in hand with feelings of mistrust, religious prejudice and ambivalence as to what Byzantium represented. Those travelers mostly Frenchmen their presence was linked to their country's political and cultural agenda in the east. They were favorable conditions created by the capitulations France had signed and renewed with the Ottoman port and if André Tevé was making highly wildly and you know surprising comments about the sites he never visited Montagne comments about our guy Pierre Belon that he was a true topographer. He sense experience evident in the meticulous description of roots he took, fauna and flora he saw and skillfully drew in his travel journals and the towns and people he encountered. Among his itineraries the eastern section of Egnatia from Thessaloniki to Constantinople is one of the most memorable ones for the wealth of information it offers on travel logistics land resources, archaeology and the built environment. What becomes apparent is that the past informs every single page of Pierre Belon work helping him to understand the landscapes he encountered. This past was dominated by antique Greece and Rome and illustrated by ancient historians, poets, doctors and philosophers to whom Belon makes regular reference with the occasional sleep. The ancient kings of Macedon and in particular Alexander the Great and Philip II provide an overarching platform for his narrative and are credited for most of the important works along Egnatia. It doesn't matter if these works were executed by the Byzantines or the Serbs or the Vargarians everything has to do with Philip and Alexander. So what about Balkans Byzantine or otherwise referred to as Christian past? This appears elusive and blurring inhabiting the fringes of Belon's narrative and open to misattributions. But what he gets right is of course the things about the mineral resources of Egnatia and if you want to write a book about the mines and mines along the Egnatian route it's very important that you read Pierre Belon who makes a very detailed account of what is found in Thassos of the Egnatia and Mount Wangheon. Three successive editions of his book in just three years demonstrate its immense popularity. The book was dedicated to cardinal François de Tournault from the Abbey of Saint-Germain in Paris, patron of scholars and this is the audience Belon wanted to impress and you can see in this edition the Paris edition he chooses not to have this kind of premier in Latin but in Greek and it's a very wonderful prose and it looks like the premier of Ulysses Ithaca and this description gives way to the another edition to an elaborate sonnet in French by Aubert which was originally written for TV and tweaked to suit Belon's profile. I prefer this one because it's so funny and says a lot about Belon. In the course of the 17th century a new wave of western travelers ventured along Egnatia. Their journeys were made possible thanks to effort by François de Tournault to renegotiate capitulations with the Ottoman port in the hope to regain some of its economic power which has seriously been compromised by the opening of new trade routes and the flooding of silver from Mexico and Bolivia to the coffers of the Spanish crown. In the context of those early modern French Ottoman encounters travelers such as father Robert de Dreux, a monk of the Abbey of Saint-Jacques in Paris visited part of Egnatia as members of French embassies others such as de Lacroix and Paul Lucas ventured into Ottoman territories to collect works of art for the king of France precisely because these new favorable conditions were in place. From those early modern encounters travel narratives became in France a very popular literary genre resulting in the publication by 1690 of some 1300 titles. Those narratives called interchangeably and relation de voyage truly change literary taste eclipsing even novency in popularity. Travel accounts of the east familiarize the large body of readership with distant lands increasingly within western Europe's reach and in the context of diplomacy commerce, religious missionaries, antiquarian interest, aesthetics and quest for learning. But exactly where did the orient start in European perception and what kind of travel accounts did the récit and relation de voyage constitute? There has been, I'm sure you know, most of it a large body of literature debating the idea of the orient, the oriental other and orientalism as a trend. But for the purpose of this lecture I would like just to borrow 17th century French voices that describe the orient. The term could mean vast expanses of land egnatia is one of them in one of the four corners of the world where the sun rises and groups of people inhabiting those lands united by geography, ethnicity, religion and cultural behaviors markedly different from those in western Europe. The orient could also refer to the levan a geographical term defined as the countries and places east of France from smirna to Aleppo and the eastern Mediterranean otherwise known as la mer de levon. The ancient via egnatia admired by those 17th century travelers as the great route that people used in the past when traveling from Rome to Constantinople was part of an oriental landscape replete with excitement peppered with a certain frisson of potential danger and there were plenty of dangers and with promises for important observations and discoveries relevant to botany, zoology and archaeology. In this landscape the past served as a looking glass through which the Ottoman dominated Balkans scored a most unfavorable reflection. Cultural norms and adjectives such as the totally bastardized people of Greece unworthy inhabitants of an ancient and glorious country now in ruins. I think this reminds me you know 21st century rhetoric right which they displayed ignorance became the subject of early socio-cultural anthropological observations. Some travelants linked the destruction and absence of books and manuscripts in Greece to what they described as ignorance and militant hostility displayed by high orthodox church officials and patriarchs to any non-theological literature. That approach which conveniently ignored Byzantium's role in the transmission of classical tradition and knowledge through the preservation and copy of ancient manuscripts legitimized if not encouraged the collection of antiquities for Western European cabinet curiosity and collections.  And the Western travelers approached the Muslim population along Egnatia is equally illuminating of the often conflicting political agendas of early modern Europe vis-a-vis the Ottoman Empire. The 1571 Battle of Lepanto the 1683 Battle of Vienna were reminders of just how close for comfort the Islamic Orient was at Western Europe's doorstep. That Orient was both menacing and alluring. Menace was related to the vast religious gap but that same attribute rendered the Ottomans rather alluring. Those inhabitants represented the exotic other vastly different and difficult to understand. One of the travelers who was able to comment on this relation between the the Ottomans and their landscape is of course the reverend Robert de Dre. He had the chance to immerse himself during his travel in a word as far removed from Paris as possible. From Constantinople to Smyrna and from Edirne to Thessaloniki, Larissa and Athens. The monuments, sites and their inhabitants he encountered are vignettes of archaeological interest. His discoveries along via Egnatia started shortly after leaving Constantinople's gate and after crossing the Evros or Merritt River Robert de Dre's companions arrived at Vera, Vera on the western bank of the Evros River. If you visit Vera these days you will see this is a hamlet at the Greek-Turkish border completely forgotten by the Greek administration but it preserves one of the most stunning examples of Byzantine architecture and interior decoration. Vera studied as a monastery founded by the black sheep of the imperial family, Isaacios Kominos and eventually he created a monastery and then a fortress and from there a small town. Now what you see in the in 2014 during our visit is also what Robert de Dre saw in the 17th century in the middle of the 17th century. The landscape is completely unchanged. So he couldn't sleep during his day so he wandered around and he observed the remains of what he describes as ancient fortifications and the Pretty Mosque. Of course the Pretty Mosque is no other than the Catholicon of the Virgin Cosmosotia. What is exciting is that the Mosque's Imam became de Dre's eager guide. She wanted to point to de Dre the tombs with epitaphs that reflected the former identity of the place as a church and de Dre was able to take in the remains of the Byzantine fortifications and the expansive use over the vast Euras Valley. He also saw the converted religious space and tombstones all from a distant past. They only voked a 17th century landscape both changed and timeless. So the 17th century Imam features in the RSI of de Dre as the new guardian of a sacred landscape where memories of Byzantium were preserved in the funerary inscriptions and the shape of the church and the mosque even if the splendid frescoes of its interior lay beneath layers of whitewash. Memories of Byzantium and this permissive climate of religious tolerance I'll go to this one, yes. Permade also the travel accounts by Evliya Celebi. This is our Ottoman 17th century traveler, administrator and tireless storyteller who crisscrossed the Balkans on official business always. Celebi's encounter with Egnatia's heritage is quite different from de Dre's viewpoint. Filtered through the Ottoman perspectives, spiced with outrageous stories about Alexander, Philip and Prophet and the Prophet Muhammad. But despite his often fanciful historical associations, Celebi is not a fool and even though he doesn't get everything right, his reading of inscriptions and architectural remains are of great value. From his account I would like to share with you his view of Ochrit. The city called the Jerusalem of the Balkans because of the sheer number of its churches was at the time of Celebi's visit a very well-established independent St. Jack in the administrative unit of Rumelia. Its income was something like 235,000 silver coins an astounding sum that reflects the breadth of economic activities that took place in the city and the importance of Lake Ochrit as a major revenue source. So Celebi describes the Acropolis as a pentagonal fortress, correct, solidly built, correct. Of course he exaggerates about the height of the citadel. He says it's something like 30 meters high, this is not true. But exaggeration aside, Ochrit Acropolis remains, especially after its restoration in 2003, an imposing monument of civil engineering with layers from the type of Philip of the Romans of Byzantium and of the Bulgarian Tsar Samuel. Excavations led by the Institute and Museum in Ochrit in 2004 uncovered the remains of what is believed to be the first fortification built by Philip II. Now the churches, we have many, many churches in Ochrit and several of them were at the time of Celebi's visit in Christian hands, but the largest and most important one the Cathedral of Saint Sophia was not. So what happened is that this church became a congregational mosque and it was a political movement. They didn't need the space but they wanted to make a point to the inhabitants. So he mentions that this church, the congregational mosque, was bigger and more important than the ones in Thessaloniki Trepizond and even the Church of Saint Sergius and Bacchus in Constantinople. But there was a problem. This congregational mosque was stuck in a Christian neighborhood. So there were no people coming for the Friday prayers and a handful of guards performed the prayers as the soul worshippers and guardians of the mosque. So the most touching indication of the affection and devotion of the Christian population recorded by Celebi was their effort to pay secret visits to their former church and now a forbidden and crumbling Muslim prayer hall by bribing the Muslim doorkeepers. This light motif of religious accommodation and tolerance along Ignatius landscapes comes again and again also in the 18th century travel accounts. What also becomes obvious in those later accounts are the systematic efforts by Western European agents to collect and ship large numbers of works of art away from Ottoman Ignatia to Western Europe. And with this I come to a last traveler that is Paul Lucas. In his Prohibion of his 1712 book Paul Lucas makes an effort to say that I dedicate this book to the King of France and I want to write about the priceless antiquities I have collected for you, my king, in order to contextualize these purchases. Those antiquities, coins, reliefs and manuscripts, whereby 1712 part of the bibliothèque du Roi and its cabinet, renamed in 1795 the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the cabinet de Medaille et des Antiquités, that's both Dr Benet and myself have visited lots of times. Paul Lucas exploration of Ignatius antiquities began in the summer when he left Constantinople and covers the section of the route between Philippi and Thessaloniki. When he approached the city of drama, his strained eye recognized the splendor and size of the ancient sites through the many architectural remains. He refers to the castle, to the castle and the inscriptions and here you can see the transcription of some of drama's inscriptions. But also he describes an encounter, he had a very peculiar one, with a very difficult fellow.  I mean the tower was his residence and this was an old Roman and Byzantine tower. The Turk harbored the hope that the tower contained an ancient treasure and that the keys to the treasure were the inscriptions he could not read. Needless to say he refused Lucas access to the building for fear that Lucas could decipher the inscription and discover the treasure. Despite all the grief that very unwelcoming fellow gave to Lucas, the Frenchman had the chance to buy ancient coins from the locals and admire structures that he describes in his book as an amphitheater, gymnasium and basins. And if you visit now the city of drama you will see that not very much has remained. We have the remains of some Byzantine fortifications and everything is a model. So these very early modern accounts allow us to understand there is more than what we encounter now in the 21st century. Lucas de Contrama also offered glimpses of the complex relation between an Ottoman townscape, its people and its ruins. Muslims and Christians offer inhabited spaces whose use and building material would go back hundreds if not thousands of years. They regularly came across pieces from a distant past such as inscriptions they couldn't not read or comprehend and portable antiquities they could sell to passing collectors and antiquarians. Illiteracy meant that inscriptions were revered for their undecipherable messages and sees the collective imagination about ancient treasures and the elusive in the case of drama philosopher stone. Despite the rather model sense of the past those same people were able to alert Lucas that he was not far away from the remains of the ancient city of Philippi. When he arrives in Thessaloniki the picture is very different. People not only know their monuments but also know their monuments with their Christian names despite the fact that many of them were by then converted into mosques. Among the stunning examples of Byzantine architecture Lucas admired I would like to focus on Rotunda. So Lucas when he talks about Rotunda talks of an almost spiritual experience he had in a building he deems equal in splendor to Roman pantheon and of course this is a Roman structure which was converted into a Christian place of worship and then in the Ottoman period it was converted into a mosque. His experience in Rotunda was facilitated by the presence of a steep staircase sculpted on the thick walls of the building and almost invisible to the viewers underneath. This staircase allowed him to walk the perimeter of the dome and to come face to face with stunning mosaics of the first zone which were not covered. His close encounter with life-size figures of martyrs and saints standing in front of these monuments comes at stark contrast to a modern viewer's experience of the Rotunda which following if you have ever visited Thessaloniki we had an earthquake in 1978 and until now they're still scaffolding and it's impossible to visit the dome so he was luckier than us. The same close-up viewing of the mosaics of the first zone was still possible during Cousinerie and Louis-François-Sébastien Favel visit of the monument in 1781-82. From the number of sketches Favel has left us and there's an incredible number of sketches in pies. We assume that Favel was also able to climb the same steep stairwell and adopt the same viewpoint as Lucas. The mosaics of the vault were still pretty much in view in 1856 when the American novelist and poet Herman Melvin visited Thessalonica in his grand tour of the Near East. From that visit he carried not only fond memories of the city but he managed to carry also some fallen tesser from Rotunda's mosaic decoration. Back to 1707 Lucas referenced to several subterranean structures whose entrances at the time of his visit had become blocked with rubble and rubbish reflects an interesting pattern in the use of religious base along Ottoman Ignatia. We are talking about a great Christian monument formerly a Roman mausoleum converted into a mosque which had retained its Christian figural decoration and appears underused. Was the Rotunda space used as a mosque after all or was its conversion, as in the case of Saint Sophia in Ohrid was more of a political statement by the Ottoman authorities devoid of religious zeal and purpose. All those accounts are particularly important for understanding of the reception of Ignatia's ancient medieval heritage in particular Byzantine in the early modern east and west. The period during which those travelers composed their work was comfortably removed from the immediate trauma of Ignatia's fall to the Ottomans. Some of the sites they traveled and they visited were in ruinous states. Others such as Thessaloniki and Kavala had recovered and were bestowed with new buildings commissioned by the Ottoman administration. A recurrent phenomenon is unsurprisingly the conversion of important place of Christian worship into mosques. An equally important site not altogether expected by western travelers was the religious tolerance displayed by the Ottoman administration in many aspects of public life. Igor Imams showed their western visitors around. They pointed to pieces from the places Christian and ancient past and in the case of Saint Demetrius in Thessaloniki they even offered Agiasma, holy water. From the attitude displayed by Ottomans officials and their Ottoman subjects, the picture that emerges about Ignatia's ancient and Byzantine past is fascinating. Between ignorance vis-a-vis the past and reverence towards select sites and monuments, in particular those connected to the memory of Alexander and Philip, the inhabitants of Ottoman Ignatia display an array of feelings and understanding of their heritage. What is obvious is that the past was never a foreign land removed from people's daily practices and rituals. The silent understanding between Saint Sophia's doorkeepers in Ohrid and the Christian inhabitants that the ancient church was accessible in exchange for a few coins. The appellation of former Christian monuments in Thessaloniki with their Christian rather than Islamic name more than two centuries after their conversion are just snapshots of the landscape where religious tolerance and coexistence were a reality. In that landscape of beautiful ruins, glorious and painful memories and fables, the ancient word and Byzantium were always within reach inhabiting people's consciousness and space, both private and public ones. The ignorant Turk, even, that Paul Lucas, encountering drama, lived after all in a Byzantine tower whose value was not prepared to share with his literate stranger. As for the stranger, indeed the strangers we talked about this evening, their travels and accounts paved the way in the 19th century for Esprit Cousinerie, Leon Euseuil and Edward Lear. And here I would like to end with this beautiful view of Thessaloniki from the Monastery of La Tadon by Edward Lear, now in the Hoddon Library. And of course it led to the rediscovery of Ignatius heritage in a more systematic way. In the early 20th century, the presence of the Entente Cordial in Macedonia led to the first excavations by soldiers of the Allied armies in Thessaloniki and Afipolis and to the first systematic excavation at Philippi, conducted by the French School of Athens. The finds, related publications and exhibitions have seen shaped and continue to shape the archaeological map of Ignatius. Thank you.


My name is Molly Ye, and I live on a sugar beet farm outside of Grand Forks, North Dakota. Grand Forks is a small town in between Fargo and Canada, and I claim to fame is that sometimes our restaurant critic Marilyn Hagerty reviews restaurants like the Olive Garden, and sometimes they go viral. I write a food blog, which is called My Name is Ye. I've had it for six years, and it's basically a life diary with recipes and photos and bits about my life around the farm. I'm originally from Chicago, and I moved to New York to study classical percussion at Juilliard. And while I was in New York, I discovered the food scene here, and I fell in love with it, and I found myself ending my practice days early to go find New York's best burger and pizza, and so I graduated, and I applied to work at a little site called The Kitchen. I didn't even get an interview because I guess playing the xylophone doesn't really qualify you to be a food writer. It's okay. But I had my blog, and so I sort of forged my own way to write about food on my blog. This is what my blog looked like when I first started. It was a lot about restaurants, a lot about schnitzel. I won a free month of schnitzel from the schnitzel and things truck here. I really like schnitzel. And then two and a half years ago, my then boyfriend and I moved to his family's farm where they grow sugar beets. I didn't know what a sugar beet was when I moved there, but this is a sugar beet, and it's processed to become table sugar, so as a cake baker I use a lot of it. And it's a really cold place. It looks like this for half the year, and what I discovered when I moved there was that I really thrive under these conditions. I do really well when I don't have anything else to do, and when I moved there I didn't have any friends. So I just begs all day. I worked on my photos, which was basically the first thing that I tackled about my blog because when I started my blog my photos looked like this. So I just trapped myself inside, or the snow trapped me inside, and I worked on my photos, and so I started using Pinterest, and I drove traffic to my blog through Pinterest and Taste Binding and Food Gawker, and I was able to start having a food blog as a job. And so I do sponsored content, and I contribute recipes to sites like the kitchen, and I also got a cookbook deal, so I'm working on a cookbook right now. These are donuts. But so I realized that I really took to the Midwest like a fish to water, so I decided that I'd better stay there. So I got married. That's our backyard. That was our wedding, which was a year ago. John Snow wasn't there. He's our neighbor, though, and so began my life as a Midwest farmwife, which includes a lot of really long days of being inside while my husband drives tractors and other large pieces of machinery that I haven't really learned the names of is my kitchen. But basically I started blogging not just as a way to do something, but also to connect with my new surroundings, and so I learned about Midwest food like laffsa, which is a really thin potato pancake, and Sam Siston from the New York Times came and learned how to make laffsa in my kitchen. So I learned that with him, and then I learned about hot dish. This is my version of a hot dish. I said the punch line. I learned that salads don't really need vegetables, because Midwest salads are just jello and cookies and whipped cream. So I started to basically do updated versions of that, and we also live outside the line of restaurant delivery, so luckily I'm half Chinese, so if we ever want Chinese, would I just make it? So that's like, that's actually really big influence for my recipes on my blog is my heritage. So I'm half Chinese and I'm Jewish. So I love traveling to Israel and bringing the flavors of Israel and the Middle East back to my new friends there and teaching Midwesterners how to pronounce Zatar and Hala and stuff like that. So I really love using these flavors to keep my heritage alive on the farm. And then also, as a kid of the 90s, I found Fettikake and Dunkaroos and Lunchables all really made impacts on me, so now that I live on a farm in the middle of nowhere, I have the time to make these things from scratch. So I've been working on this bologna recipe for a Lunchable, and it's kind of a disaster. Hopefully it'll be worth it one day. These are my kids. I guess, I mean, I live like five hours from the closest to whole foods, so it's really difficult to get really fancy ingredients, but the idea of the farm life and having chickens right out my back door who are about to start laying eggs any day now are really big influences for me. Here they are now. They're all grown up. So that's a little bit about me. If you would have told me five years ago that I today would be living on a farm with chickens named Macaroni, I probably would have laughed at you, but I wouldn't trade it for all the pizza in New York.


Everybody forced here we've been 20 20 Bowman baseball jumbo four box number five random team style I'm gonna show the results on screen here find these anytime late sports cards calm gotcha Lincoln chat Results quick link is at the bottom of the home page if you ever need to find it Late 20s, I think not sure what dilemmas trying to say you start off with an auto top 100 bowman scouts auto It's a 50 Joey bar giants Lou Bob Kawar Dominguez chrome, let's see what kind of craziness we can pull out of these come on now Ricky to your favorites you want an Alvarez? Ashrow's insert purple paper Ethan Hank into 250 guardians refractor Tim Kate the 499 nationals all right two to go on the Elite court contenders mixer coming up in just a bit everybody we got a couple of baseball breaks after this one that are sold out We do have more baseball later on see him club chrome random divisions full case 16 box full case It'll be going later Last group big of the night see him club chrome Aqua Marco Luciano to 125 Giants First bowman refractor auto Jacob Amaya Dodgers. There you go to 499 Bobby with junior all in the paper Got an atomic coming up and It's Philly's Spencer Howard to 150 and the throwback Designed there. I don't know what Donnie's doing over here. Don't worry about so two more episodes of Mandalorian Is it two more episodes of Mandalorian will be Wednesday? Three more as of right now What was the last one you watched the one before last week? Not the last one. Oh, it's to me. Yeah, you'll be at 2 No, I mean like how many more oh As I mean All right, we're going to chapter this one. What was chapter 21 was the last one? Yeah Two more episodes left as of right now crap.  Alrighty box to everybody. Thanks. You're filling this up. I hope we can pull something big here You got a gold paper rookie Bobby Bradley guardians to 50 Dominguez first light blue paper Danna Berg to 499 Nationals Jarski speckle Grant Levine to 299 Rockies There's nothing to do nothing on offense either Bobby would junior paper for the Royals Dominguez chrome again Chicken fries Donnie. That's your that's your stuff. Dude those chicken fries are amazing First woman auto Connor Cannon Giants Canon Connor Cannon it sounds like a comic book name No, Donnie does it You know what sounds like a comic book name though Spider-Man No Whoa, we're not Crazy Should make that thing. No, that sounds dumb. It would never it would never get popular What a guy is like a spider. Yeah Yeah, just don't ever come to you with a bad idea again.  What? Oh, yeah, oh, yeah, that was me Volpe chrome Let's go Red Sox. Come on now 21st Jack Robinson day First woman base auto Quinn cotton for the Reds Yordon on the insert there was Zardo O'Neill Cruz poor Neil Cruz, dude Yeah, that's important. It's weird. He has a not even really a slide. I didn't really see the thing It was like not even a slide. It was weird. He just coming to the base wrong or like Just going to home plate. He just like, I don't know. He looked like he was gonna slide. I was like, oh, I'm not gonna Oh, maybe I'll try slide and then it yeah, like fell onto the Like just dropped right into the catcher. So he tried to like can you pick it? We just messed it up. Yeah, Bob you a junior. Come on. Come on. Do you score? No, oh, I'm sorry. Do you score? Did you score a point? It's a gold auto Roachman 45 of 50 Big card Orioles Was not expecting an Adley not at all That is his first product after his first bowman. So that's still an awesome hit I mean any gold Adley's a huge hit doesn't matter if it's first moment or not Zack s with the Orioles fire. He's so freaking good, dude. So good So good so good so good. All right two more boxes It's called rep slider Shortstop Like the first base in the third base like coaches tell the players like what Leak court contenders is sold out 16 to go on the next break with spots up six box NBA makes your time was hobby prison draft hobby and choice Which instead of the the one Don Ross box guys, we only had one left. So there's gonna be two elite boxes in there So up in the value quite a bit in that break just an FYI for 16 spots left No queue on drip as well for personal. So if you guys looking for personals, Kenzie's got no queue over on drip is keep it going here We'll be a little behind here So he's starting that next break right about now, but these take a bit of time and can't really rush through them Blue paper first so we can see you to 150 Padres Volpe paper God the Minga is Jillian Beaks Yellow first woman auto just sealed a la Cruz braves a 75 Minga is inserts In the six box NBA mixer instead of two boxes of Donner's hobby. There's one box of Donner's hobby plus two Donner's elite boxes So that's actually a seven box mixer with two elite in place of one of the Donner's Same price though first woman refractors Sam Huff nice one there Rangers the 499 Patrick.  Astros who which one is it rookie purple Abraham Toro to 250 on Paper for the Astros Pena Blue Chrome auto Lindsey Delgado the 150 White Sox true blue AJ Puck Yeah, Luis Garcia, that's it tastes like 25 steps come on now supper Mars Red Sox talent pipeline Pena Chrome Nice a plus on the 125 first moment shimmer for the A's It's weird not having that name Is it weird a little bit Everyone's just afraid of the name now. It's so startling.  Like you should go hey Cooper John Cooper Johnson based out of Tigers, I don't know what it's gonna happen. Oh Man All right, one more box here. I think it's like I don't know what products he's in off the top of my head So like I don't know when to expect it. I'm just always wait for that or a Or that or the French sounding one Confidant Yeah, you're a little confident on all right seven to go on and see sure Balazzo Vic by blue paper Mount Castle of 499 Orioles Come on now. Come on chrome cards work with me here. Show us something big Big card. 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First moment auto Anthony Volpe Big hit yanks had a sweat of the bit, but got him in the last boxing grads Yankees Hey, what's up sin? This is Yeah, paying your first paper Pool-sizer Nico pool-sizer Yeah, that's right. That is Don Lace's B. Crumb you here. That is him. He's asking. Oh, it's Invicta. Yes, son I joined a break to the day and use the name Don Lace's B. Crumb Well, Sam was breaking. I think they need that Nope like a man Ray This is your wallet This is your ID. Yep. This is your address. This must be your wallet Blue rookie auto Logan Allen to 150 guardians Yeah, the guy who named you. Oh, that's true Forgot about that may sound weird. This is the this is the person who named you Donnie. Oh boy No boy and a speckle on the back of Ali Roger because why not it's a 299 Orioles No one actually calls Donnie Don Lace's B. Crumb either. I Will every now and then but Cortes calls Donnie Donathan. Yeah, Sam and I call him Daniel Yeah, Ortiz calls him Donathan though. It's only Don Lace's if we're opening star. That's true That's a good point really drew. That's pretty good. That's pretty good Auto insert auto Joey Bart giants. You got Stephen Paulini Cooper Johnson Quinn cotton Connor Cannon Bryce Hall Jacob Amaya refractor true blue Logan Allen and Lindsey Delgado yellow She has sealed a la Cruz Anthony Volpe first woman auto in a gold Adley Richmond. It's a 50 prospect auto Thanks again, everybody. We're moving on