The signal oil program The whistler that whistle is your signal for the signal oil program The whistler I am the whistler and I know many things for I walk by night I know many strange tales hidden in the hearts of men and women who have stepped into the shadows Yes, I know the nameless terrors of which they dare not speak Yes friends it's time for the signal oil program the whistler Rated by independent research the most popular West Coast program in gasoline, you know it takes extra quality to go farther and Signal is the famous go farther gasoline So look for the signal circle sign in yellow and black that identifies signal service stations from Canada to Mexico And now the whistler strange story weak sister Vertilda stood at the window looking apprehensively at the old burying ground at the foot of the hill a Little group of people from the village down the road stood in twos and threes around the open grave of Captain Ethan Haskell Vertilda always liked to stand at the window like this watching through the dingy lace curtain Yes today especially with Captain Ethan being laid away There was a strange Fascination in her timid little face a look of morbid curiosity in her pale blue eyes She didn't hear her older sister Amanda come up behind her Vertilda Mandy frightened me till the sterling pulled down that window. It's beginning to rain Landshakes you think after all these years you'd have enough sense to be careful Right Amanda now, I'm not going to be able to see the hearse when it comes Oh, if you ain't the limit Bertie you said you didn't want to go to Captain Ethan funeral. I like funeral But they always frighten me so when the body has lived 50 years overlooking a graveyard. It appears to me They ought to be used to it Yeah, let me look careful with the curtains. They'll see you we got a right to look out of our windows Hmm Look at that They'll get soaked to the skin all of them Just like Captain Ethan to be late for his own burial Talk about the day nonsense Bertie Look at the sheriff down there The doctor too they wasn't particularly friendly with the Captain Bertie What do you suppose they're doing down there at the burial, huh?  That's not what give me the chill sheriff Yeah, I know what you mean. Don't turn round Keep you back to the house. I can feel them watching us through that dining room window. They're like queer pair 30 years ago. I told him sheriff move out of that gloomy old house mix of people for it's too late Still might be hard to believe she'd poison a man duck If you'd stop this funeral nonsense, I'd had proof for you But now had to wait for any cask or to authorize the autopsy But with him being the brother of the deceased only live in relative funerals are wasted time anyway Recommend you don't fill in over the coffin Only going to have them to dig him up again. You don't suppose men they'll show up.  She doesn't show up Yes, me. I think she's fixing to come down right now Manderstern and what you're doing with that umbrella? You're not going out into the rain I'm going down to the burial ground Decided one of us ought to pay last respects to Ethan Haskell. You'll catch your desert cold Probably will look queer if I didn't go though The wonder his brother in it didn't come back to town today Seems you ought to be here for the very end.  Oh sense to it of course you can watch from the window Be careful, Mander the rain Oh there comes the casket now pretty one with silver trim and I'm moving back to make way for it all Morning Amanda too I Wonder what they'd say if they knew she fed him those poison preserves I Wonder With the prologue of weak sister the signal oil company brings you another strange tale By the whistler Pardon me, mr. Miller. Oh Marvin to you beautiful Well, then pardon me Marvin But a few weeks ago you mentioned that the speedometer on a car can tell you the quality of the gasoline you're using That's right gorgeous. Well my speedometer shows how fast I'm going and how far I've gone But what I want you to tell me Marvin is how can my speedometer show the quality of the gasoline I'm using? Oh nothing would give me more pleasure sugar After all isn't it only logical that to get more mileage a gasoline must help your motor run more efficiently And you also know that signal is the famous go farther gasoline well net So putting two and two together the thing which makes the good mileage in today's signal gasoline possible is the extra Performance it gets from your motor. It's quicker starting It's faster pickup and quieter higher anti-knock for after all it takes extra quality to go farther Oh, I see and the better the gasoline is the more mileage I guess right you are baby Which explains why so many drivers are switching to signal the famous go farther gasoline That clear my dear. Oh who could help being convinced by the great Marvin Miller brother And now as you always say Marvin back to the whistler It's the fascinating thing to watch isn't it Bertie this burial service for Captain Ethan there in the graveyard at the foot of the hill You hardly notice the wind and rain coming in the open window as you stand there Because your mind is somewhere else on The dinner a man to serve the three of you a few nights ago in this very house of The special peach preserves he served the captain of the telephone call in the middle of the night and The news that he had been found dead in the road where he'd fallen on his way home from the dinner and You can see her down there now Piously mourning the captain's passing Yeah That does make it more interesting The mourners finally dispersed the night settles over the graveyard You're alone a few minutes more and then Amanda return here. Take my umbrella. I want to make a telephone call You stayed so long Shall I light a fire Amanda a good idea seems as though this place is never really warm We should have sold it when father died What are you waiting for nothing man dad I know what you're after you just want to hear what I'm Operator will you please call the sheriff Luella anything the matter man? I haven't time to stand here gabbing Luella just ring Sheriff Harris and don't bother to listen in well. I never Always makes me feel better to say a thing straight out. No, you've beaten around the bush Sheriff Harris speaking yes, this is Amanda sterling. I want to put in a complaint about that grave digger Ed Parker What's wrong man day that grave still open out there?  Goodbye All the impudent man Is the grave really? Oh, yes, it's open I ought to go down and teach him a thing or two about manners. What did they say?  Now where'd you put my umbrella there in the corner? Well, I'm not going to worry about it some folks like the sheriff always has something in pregnant to say Yeah Look what I tucked inside my umbrella the flower Lily yes, I Picked it up from the grave when the rest had gone Pretty isn't it? Any water in the bays and the mantel man. You've got to take it back now. I don't be silly But you must man did it belongs to the dead.   It's high time someone showed you how ridiculous it is to be afraid of such things Trattered storm body can't see 10 Put the flashlight on what do you think I've been trying to do it won't work Nothing to be afraid of Somebody's over there by the grave if you're going to start imagining things.  Oh my goodness the flashlight flashlight if I could ah there we are Who's there who's there? Oh It's you Pretty pretty look it's only in it's pretty it's Captain Ethan's brother Pretty yeah, well, what's the matter who scared the life out of her?   Why that's nonsense and you know it Might be but it's a funny time for the two of you to be wandering around here, ain't it? I took this flower home from the services Bertie made me bring it back and What might you be doing here in a castle? I was taking a shortcut to your house thought I'd tell you the sheriff wants to see you Amanda And in case you're wondering there's no body over there in the grave post mortem, you know When does the sheriff want to see me right now Amanda right now?  She knows she's going to have trouble explaining it to the sheriff and you wish you could go with her in Instead of remaining home alone locked in the old house It should be quite a battle the sheriff is a very persistent man I'll get right to the point Amanda you and I grew up together in this town But this here's an official matter above personal feelings. Hope you understand go ahead sheriff Don't need to tell you how this town loves a scandal Mander There's nothing scandalous about us and Captain Ethan as far as I can see maybe not only duck thinks there's more Ethan's death than meets the eye for instance, what it was poison kill Captain Ethan Their kind of poison found in home can goods preserves for instance Ethan ate his last meal at your house Mander hit him on the way home Hello, we need to have a chair Thanks Sheriff. I'll stand no mender about the preserves About the preserves why Ethan always said he loved your spiced peaches Mander What if he did there's nothing wrong with my sliced peaches? I eat him a self all the time I'd consider the fever Mende if you let me have a jar of those spiced peaches for the ductane lays what? You're going to give her a chance like this Fred. I've got nothing to hide in a caskel Maybe not and then again what you mean in it And I can't forget that look on her face down in the graveyard when she thought I was Ethan I think they're wrong known her all my life. She wouldn't harm a fly. No Well, I think she killed my brother give me 30 seconds with that weak-kneed sister of hers Keep away from Bertie if you know what's good for you. Why Mander? Why? You're afraid she might spill something Is that it? She don't know anything about don't get riled Mander factory means Ethan died from poison and he ate his last meal with you now That can I have him mean some of the fruit spoiled that he accidentally got something on his plate or what?  Huh weak heart. Sorry Mander if duck finds poison in them peaches I'm afraid we'll have to talk to her Now if you don't mind the nick. There's something I want to talk over with Mander in private Please come back and finish your supper getting cold And I've been rushed so today Here's some cake and you spiced peaches only enough out there for one helping you are dear I Rather have the cake commander You always were fond of spiced peaches, but yeah, I don't feel like tonight Just the cake when a how our bodies taste can change you didn't want them the night the captain was here either Please man, I just give me the cake You said you had to hurry back to the sheriff. What does he want to see you about nothing Bertie just a few formalities about Ethan I Think maybe you'd better have some peaches Good for you. You know and I don't want them. Please. I don't you want him Bertie. Why is something wrong? Eat those peaches Bertie right now Oh all right all right the children What you're going to do now nothing Nothing I can do I guess Sorry man. Sorry about what?  You always have that's a clear thing to say, but it didn't matter all these years just hating me now.    That's why you sit there long after Amanda has left on her mysterious errand Still stunned by her bewildering decision to eat the fruit she knew was poisoned It's almost an hour now since she left and your heart is still pounding The whole thing the whole nightmarish day has been almost more than you could stand Amanda will die now just as captain Ethan did Somewhere out on the road an hour or so after finishing dinner At 9 30 the storm hits again harder than ever You stagger weekly into the hallway to lock the front door He's only been gone an hour now Yet there's a new feel to the loneliness of the quiet house It's terrible to be alone like this. Isn't it Bertie? You almost wish Amanda would come back somehow Just to stay here in the house with you until this awful night is over Take it easy Mustn't go too fast Hello Sheriff Harris Bertie Yes Sheriff pointing what happened to men More than an hour Sheriff Why did you want to see her about that poison fruit poison fruit there was no use Nothing Sheriff I Think you have to search the road for Amanda. Oh, nothing to get worried about a wrecking. She's probably no sheriff Please Go out and look for her right now. You worried I think Sheriff I Think Amanda is dead The whistler will return in just a moment with the strange ending of tonight's story Meantime in place of the usual message about signal gasoline My sponsor the signal oil company has asked me to take this time to talk with you about the community chest drive Frankly, I'm sure there's very little that needs saying the fighting war is over. Yes But the war against misery and sickness and juvenile delinquency must go on with ever greater force and That is where the community chest comes in Four out of ten people benefit through community chest services such as clinics hospitals maternity homes and day nurseries Children's aid boy and girls scouts campfire girls YMCA and YWCA Also aid to the handicapped homes for the agent the Salvation Army and many other worthy institutions too numerous to mention here and Who pays for all these services? Everyone who is fortunate enough to have a penny or a dime or a dollar to spare for those who are less fortunate And you know, there's a wonderful thing about money that you share in this way Money that you spend on yourself brings happiness to only one person But money that you share with the needy brings happiness to so many Including yourself Now back to the whistler So Amanda is dead Bertie at long last after 30 years living together Amanda is dead and you're free You leave the phone and walk slowly toward the cellar stairs. Yes, there are things to be done Bertie The doctor and the sheriff know about the poison preserves now and they'll be here soon You're sorry about Amanda in a way. It's too bad.  She didn't die the night captain Ethan came for supper the night She graciously gave the captain her dish if preserved simply because she didn't want them While you sat across the table from them both Paralyzed with horror at the awful mistake unable to say anything Yes, Bertie, it's too bad Amanda didn't die and the night you planned to kill her Down into the cellar now. Yes Over to the preserve cabinet Bertie To the bottom shelf and the two jars of fruit you put a special mark on the day you found they were poisoned And now to the sink You smash the jars with a hammer and start to pour the fruit down the drain your hand slips A sharp piece of glass cuts deep into your wrist and a stream of blood rolls down your arm You drop everything in the sink and run up the steps to find a bandage The sight of the blood has made you weak and dizzy Remember the napkins the napkins on the dining room table quickly Bertie Then There's a tap on the window You raise your eyes and there's a cold icy feeling around your heart and darkness and then not even darkness Just nothing an emptiness and space Nothing we can do now Checked her. What is it doc? Right? Her heart probably gave out when Amanda walked up to that window. I had forgotten my key That was just like her to lock herself in that way Amanda at least she did your last kindness without meaning to of course. What's that doc? She cleared Manda of any implication in Ethan's death Birdie got that gash on a wrist while she was trying to get rid of the poisoned jars down in the cellar I I still can't believe she could have done it and no man It was just as hard for me Known how much she cared about her. There was only one way to convince you your sister Bertie was a murderous To show you she knew that fruit was poisoned all the time Even before she tried to give it to you the night kept me thin came for dinner She was right and uh, don't you see that's why we ask you to switch a good jar for the bad one Now turn the pantry and try her out on it. If you took it. She'd be innocent if you turned it down But it wasn't fair She must have thought I was trying to kill don't you see mandate wasn't for her sake. We did it was for you It was so weak so But it was the easy way Manda the easier way for her Let that whistle be your signal for the signal oil program the whistler each Monday at 9 Brought to you by the signal oil company who have asked me to remind you to get the most driving pleasure Drive at sensible speed be courteous and obey traffic regulation It may save a life possibly your own Featured in tonight's story where Martha Wentworth and Peggy Weber The whistler was produced by George W. Allen with story by Jack Kelsey Music by Wilbur hatch and was transmitted to our troops overseas by the armed forces radio service This is Marvin Miller speaking for the signal oil company. This is CBS the Columbia Broadcasting System


It's better walking around than that. Have you seen that cheerio video? You know that scene misses? The beach. That scene real misses in the video. It's done it. It's on it. I'm going to make sure. Thank you. You do? I'm going to make sure. You do? I'm going to be fine with the therapist. Come on. That's it. That's it. She is. All right, man. The man, the man. The sickness. Oh, man. That was from my mother. My mother. Oh, oh. Okay. It's time we keep the right knee hooked to the chest. And we exhale.  Contrast your head more with me. Try to relax. Now we come back to the center. And now we can relax. Massage in our face. Inhale. Lift up the torso.  And the knee. Relax. Rest. Stay. Stay. I love it. Go, go. My foot, no. Okay. Very good. I can speed ahead. So now we're going to inhale, hands up. As we exhale, forward, forward, from your head. Come back. Feet parallel. Feel your body connected to the mala head. Energy. And you allow the energy to go inside your body.  Exhale, yourself using to the music. Yes. And then go. Yes, hold on. Okay. In, hold on.  That's it, that's it, we're gonna go up. Okay. Yes, now. Come on now. It's possible. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Come on. That's it. Right now we take our body and we sit down in our heels. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you too. Bye bye, gracias.


We're going to get started today with Bill Woodcock talking about the Internet's role in sanctions enforcement and Russia, Ukraine, and the future. So let's give him a warm welcome up here on the DEF CON stage. Howdy. I'm not the world's most organized speaker, and this is going to be my first time running through these slides. Oh. Okay. Can you guys hear me? All right. I was just saying I'm not the world's most organized speaker, and this is my first time running through these slides. So I may not balance out the amount of talking per slide terribly well, but we'll try and get through this and leave enough time for a little bit of Q&A at the end. So what I'm here to talk about is the question of what the Internet's role is in sanctions enforcement. So you're probably all at least a little bit familiar with what sanctions are. Governments impose sanctions on some party, and then banks, for instance, in the country of the government that's imposed the sanctions, have to not do business with that party. Sanctions more generally apply to things not just banks, and the Internet is a thing, and they're Internet service providers. So there's this question of what Internet service providers should do with sanctions when they're imposed. That was kind of brought to a head in March of this year, because when Russia invaded Ukraine, Ukraine asked ICANN and RIPE, which is the IP and Autonomous System Number Allocation Authority for Europe, essentially to cut Russia off the Internet. To deactivate root name servers in Russia, to revoke Russia's use of IP addresses and domain names. Both RIPE and ICANN refused that request, which was the right thing to do, but these are Internet governance organizations, and they refused to request summarily. They did not engage their Internet governance process. They didn't talk with their constituency about this. They just said no as a sort of executive and legal matter rather than an Internet governance matter. So as a result of that request, the Internet community never got engaged to discuss this. Obviously, from ICANN's point of view and from RIPE's point of view, this is a pain in the ass, and they'd rather not be asked something like that. And having been asked, they don't really want to have a discussion about it. They just want the whole thing to go away. So each of them very quickly said no. But their responses were pretty brief and to the point, and didn't really help Ukraine as a country figure out what they could have asked instead, like, okay, so the answer to that question is no, but you are a beleaguered country under attack, and it's perfectly reasonable for you to be looking at your options and trying to figure out what you can do. So Vince Cerf and Steve Crocker and I and about 70 other people who are routinely involved with Internet governance got together, and we spent 10 days hammering out a letter that provided a more in-depth response. So the answer was still no, but it pointed out why, and it said what other options there were, what things they could have asked for that might have been easier for somebody to say yes to, or specifically easier for the Internet governance community to say yes to. So that in turn led to an engagement of the Internet governance community with this issue of sanctions and, you know, what would that look like? So let me run through a little bit of kind of the basics of what sanctions are. So sanctions are things that governments do. If you decide that you don't want to do business with somebody, that's a boycott. So if it's private, it's boycott. If it's public, it's a sanction. Sanctions don't actually require any Internet governance engagement because they're just a matter of law, and you decide whether you're going to follow the law or not follow the law. It's not really a matter for third parties to sort of have policy discussions about, and the parties that need to decide whether they're going to follow the law are Internet service providers, people who are carrying Internet traffic that may be either bound for a sanctioned entity or coming from a sanctioned entity. Internet service providers are incorporated and do business in specific countries. Those countries have governments. Those governments may be doing sanctions. Not every government defines sanctions. A lot of them just default to the United Nations and say, well, whatever the United Nations sanctions will go along with. You will enforce that, but we're not going to define new ones of our own. But the U.S., Canada, U.K., Australia, New Zealand, all of the European Union, the African Union, Switzerland, Sweden, these are all countries and intergovernmental organizations that do sanctions over and above what happened in the United Nations. It's a little bit hard to get consensus in the U.N. on sanctioning anybody because the U.N. is big and there are a lot of folks who can say no. So where there are problems for Internet service providers with sanctions are not if you're in a country and you need to follow a law. That's pretty simple. It's when you've got operations in multiple countries and you need to follow multiple laws that are not in agreement with each other. Now if you're working in the U.S. and the U.K., and the U.S. says sanction party A, and the U.K. says sanction party B, you can sanction both parties A and B, and that's not in conflict. But sometimes there are laws that say that you can't mess with something. So that's when you get a conflict. Russia, for instance, has passed domestic laws in Russia saying that you can't sanction Russian or that internationally imposed sanctions cannot be enforced inside Russia by a party that's doing business inside Russia. And those are recently passed laws and you can guess why. So sanctions are a punitive measure, it's a punishment, but they're de-escalatory relative to launching a missile. In theory of armed conflict, this idea of de-escalatory measures is an important one. If you're trying to get out of a conflict, the notion is that you should respond in kind but in a de-escalatory manner, so respond but not as much as the other person did and that signals that you want the conflict to go away.  There are these two different terms that are important to distinguish between cyber sanctions and internet sanctions. This is a completely artificial contrived distinction, it's two labels that are being used to denote two different concepts. Cyber sanctions denotes a sanction of any kind that is imposed because you didn't like something somebody did in cyberspace. Somebody does a cyber attack against you, steals your intellectual property and publishes it online and you block their bank accounts, that's a cyber sanction. Internet sanctions are sanctions imposed via internet means in response to whatever, anything, doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the internet.  The other big distinction that is worth understanding is between comprehensive sanctions and targeted sanctions. Comprehensive sanctions are we're sanctioning Russia, we're sanctioning Iran, we're sanctioning Cuba. Targeted sanctions are we're sanctioning this specific military unit, we're sanctioning this particular business, we're sanctioning this aircraft. Targeted sanctions are what everybody does now. Comprehensive sanctions, 50 years ago, yeah that was a thing, it's just not anymore. Governments have by and large really gotten past doing that but in the public perception of sanctions, that's what a lot of people imagine, they imagine Russia invaded Ukraine therefore Russia is going to get sanctioned, therefore I can't do business with anybody in Russia but that's really not how it works. In fact, you could go and you could download a list of all the sanctioned entities in Russia and it would be, depending what country you're in, about a thousand entities but those entities are going to be like the St. Petersburg Troll Farm, Wagner, the mercenary company, a few ships, yachts belonging to oligarchs right, these are going to be the sanctioned entities and so blocking all of Russia is over blocking, that's over compliance with the sanction, that's doing more than what government actually wants you to do. So over blocking, over sanctioning is one of the primary problems that happens with sanctions. A government says, well we've got a problem, we're going to do this very targeted intervention to try to fix the problem and then somebody says, oh well I'll just block the whole country and that has a pretty bad effect right, we don't really want to block all of Russia and make it difficult for regular people to get access to international news, for instance. So real world targeted sanctions are what people need to comply with and so understanding what those sanctions are and who the entities that have been sanctioned are is kind of the most pressing problem if you're trying to be compliant. So if you talk with governmental folks who do sanctions, what they'll tell you is that there are three purposes to sanctions, signaling, constraint and coercion. Signaling is basically just saying to the whole world, we really don't like what these people are doing. So we're sanctioning them in order to tell the rest of you that we don't approve of this. That's easy to do and tends to be very successful in the sense that if you sanction somebody and you communicate what you're doing, the rest of the world will understand that you disapprove of something. Constraint is using the sanction to try to stop the sanction party from doing something, shutting down their bank accounts so that they can't use those bank accounts to continue to conduct business or conduct a war or whatever. Constraint is rarely an all or nothing thing. If we talk about internet sanctions and talk about blocking Russian domain names or blocking Iranian IP addresses or something, it's not going to kick them off the internet. It's not going to keep them from using the internet. It may make it more difficult and more expensive for them. Just like a financial sanction where you shut down their bank account isn't going to keep them from using money, it's just going to make it a lot more difficult for them. They're going to have to use more cash, they're going to have to set up other accounts under other names. They're going to have to use their grandmother's bank account instead of their own, whatever. The constraint thing is, again, it's not an absolute. It's more about creating friction that makes things more expensive. One is where you're trying to get the person to stop doing the thing that you don't like. This is enough that they actually will change their behavior. It's not just a constraint to keep them from doing something involuntarily but actually changing their mind. That's a tough one. If you talk with governmental policy people who do sanctions, what they'll tell you is that going down from the top, a really good success rate on constraint or coercion is like 10% or 20% success. Since sanctions cost governments very little to implement, it's worth doing. It's not a big deal. It may not have a huge effect but it's also not expensive and the signaling part is important for a lot of folks so why not? So sanctions are a thing. Governments have been using sanctions for thousands of years at this point so there's plenty of buildup expertise inside government about what works, what doesn't work, so forth. We've got realistic expectations about what they should expect of the sanction in terms of success. They don't think that sanctioning something is just going to immediately stop the behavior that they don't want. They understand sanctions with respect to the movement of money fairly well. Governments have a lot of internal expertise around tracking the movement of money and so if a sanction is not being enforced, they can tell. They don't really have that kind of internal expertise around networking, around the internet, internet service providers, telecoms. So they don't really know what's going to work, they don't really know what's appropriate, they don't really know what degree of compliance they're getting. So this is an area where things could improve. Internet service providers, network operators could communicate more with government, educate them about what's possible and what's feasible, and also communicate more about what they're actually doing. Governments also don't really have any expertise at identifying what could be sanctioned associated with sanctioned entities. So if we look at the St. Petersburg troll farm and you ask a government person, okay, how do we sanction this? They're going to say, I don't know, cut them off the internet. Don't know what that means. But if you talk with an internet service provider, they're like, okay, well, we'll stop routing their IP addresses. How do we do that? Well, we're going to look in the RAR who is and see what IP addresses they have. We're going to see what autonomous system number they're using to originate that. We're going to see what other IP address blocks are being originated from the same AS. We're going to see who their upstream transit providers are. We're going to go have a chat with those folks. We'll see if they're multi-homed, and so forth. On the domain name side, look and see what the name servers are, what the contact information for the registration is, who the registrar is, all those things. We'll build up a little set of the domain names that we think this party is using. We'll look to see what email addresses they have used on things, who their email providers are. All of these are things that, from the internet perspective, we're very used to doing in association with abuse. So if somebody is spamming, if somebody is running a bot net, we've got a lot of experience with tracking these things down, doing the detective work, figuring out what the associated resources are, and shutting them down. This is no different. It's exactly the same problem set. It's just a different definition of badness. It's not our internet definition of badness. It's a general human rights and international law definition of badness. As we got into all of this, what we discovered is that the thing that governments are really bad at is publishing their list of sanctioned entities. You'd think that would be kind of basic, but the way governments handle this is like, hey you, take a memo, put it on top of the stack of other memos from other sanctions that we published before. Trying to get this electronically on the internet is really, really tough. The only government that publishes their sanctions list in a machine-readable format is the UK, and that's been down for the last four months. So normally it works, but just not recently. So they actually have JSON files at a known URL. Everybody else is like, oh well, we can fax those to you, or let us scan them and publish the PDF. So that needs to be fixed. Internet service providers want to be compliant with the law. They don't want to be in trouble with the governments of the countries that they do business in. But they're mostly unregulated. This is completely different than banks. Banks have to deal with a ton of regulation, and government regulators who understand their business, know what's going on, ISPs don't have that connection with government because they're not regulated in most places. They also don't have know-your-customer laws that apply to them. If you're an ISP, you don't have to sit your customer down, interview them, understand their business, take lots of records about them, and hold those records, and then check back in them with them once a year to see if they're still doing the same business they used to be, whereas in a lot of countries, know-your-customer applies to pretty much any financial service. So that doesn't really prepare ISPs for dealing with sanctions enforcement stuff. But at the same time, ISPs face all kinds of risks. So their fines and criminal prosecution possible for overcompliance, undercompliance, non-compliance, miscompliance, getting it wrong has liability. But then there are also the secondary effects. So if you have customers and the customer gets sanctioned and you don't sanction them, but their bank does, suddenly they're not going to be able to pay you for the service that they've used. So if you look at the Russia-Ukraine conflict, this is actually what wound up happening.  They were saying, well, it's March 3, and we bill monthly net 30. So at the end of March, we're going to send out a bill from March, and it's going to be due at the end of April. So 60 days from now, will some of my customers have been sanctioned and have their accounts frozen and unable to pay me? Don't know. Let's just get rid of that risk. 60 days from now, will Russia as a whole be having trouble paying bills because the rubble will collapse because of banking sanctions? Don't know. Okay, well, let's preemptively get rid of those customers. So we saw this kind of wave of over-compliance back at the beginning of March of internet service providers not knowing what they should do and doing too much. Some of them. Others didn't do anything at all. And one, notably, said that, well, nobody can tell them who to do business with. They were going to keep on selling services to Wagner and the troll farm, and then they lobbied the U.S. government to get the U.S. government to put in an exemption for them to sell internet services to sanctioned entities in Russia. I have no idea why the U.S. government went along with that and all the sanctions people in other countries like looking at the U.S. and wondering what the hell happened there. Anyway, so there's also a problem that we discovered with network operators. There's a kind of libertarian streak that comes from how the internet kind of got set up, switched from being a U.S. governmental project to a private sector thing, 1992.com bubble. A lot of people sort of in this, you know, this isn't a government project anymore mode. And there were also a lot of people who are very into privacy. And so you get some people running internet service providers who feel like they really need to defend their customers against their government. Like if we're going to choose sides here, we're always going to choose our customer side. Now, in principle, that's fine, but if out of your 100,000 customers, two of them are really awful human rights violators and they get sanctioned, maybe those aren't the two that you choose to go to bat for. So there's been a bit of a conflict there and also this sort of notion of the internet should be open and we shouldn't judge people based on their content. And fine, if your customer is a furry, don't judge them on their content, right? But if, you know, they're killing lots of civilians, maybe judging that is okay. Internet network operators are also really, really good at blocking stuff. Lots of practice at blocking things. So again, this is really just a question of matching up the sanctions with the already existing skills of blocking. So the German internet service providers went to their regulator and said, we'd like some guidance here. Please tell us more about what you want us to do. And the German regulator came back with a pretty clear statement that basically said, well, you do too much, you do too little, you're either going to get prosecuted or hauled into court, your choice. So maybe you want to just figure out what we want and do it. So the Germans, anyway, were pretty clear. But that's probably representative of the response that any other government would give. You go asking governments whether you need to follow the law or not and the answer is usually going to be yes. So we got this project going, you know, internet style, just a bunch of folks, volunteers doing their thing to try to work through this and figure out how to get internet service providers and governments into alignment on this because they both want to be, right? The internet service providers want to be in compliance with the law. They don't want to get prosecuted or sued. Governments want to be able to define a sanction and have it enacted by the private sector as intended, not overdone or underdone or whatever. So everybody wants to meet in the middle. There's a lot of goodwill. Now it's just kind of a question of, you know, since March, we've been working through the specifics and figuring out where the problems are. And like I said, the number one biggest problem is getting governments to publish the list of who has been sanctioned in a way that we can consume electronically. So this organization, we've got five working groups, policy, intelligence, oversight, operations and research. The policy group is sort of trying to figure out who's been sanctioned. The intelligence group then tries to figure out what internet resources are associated with sanctioned entities. The oversight board then looks at the result, does a last sanity check before handing it off to operations who publish the resources of the sanctioned entities as a real-time feed using RPZ and BGP. So RPZ for the domain names, BGP for the routes and autonomous systems, or the IP addresses and autonomous systems. And then the research group is there to sort of track how all this is going, collect statistics, you know, run the beacon, so forth. So where do things stand right now? The main thing that's going on right now is we've had a lot of talk in the European Union among a lot of governments about this. Everybody is happy with the idea. Now it's this question of working through the specifics. And the OECD seems like the good place to do that. And so there's been a work program going for three, four months now. Well, since the beginning of April in the OECD. So the OECD is like the civilian counterpart to NATO. After World War II, there was the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe. The OECD, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is the civilian side of that. NATO is the military side. So for dealing with economic stuff, the OECD is the place to get standards and best practices harmonized and published for the member countries, which is the 38 sort of largest free market democracies. And so the thing that we're trying to get standardized is how the list gets published because different countries have different lists. And right now it's a huge mess. I'll get into the details of that in a little. We also need governments to be really clear that if a network operator uses this mechanism to enact a sanction, that that is not over or under compliance, that that is sufficient compliance. Right now all the technical mechanisms of doing this are proven out and we're not putting anything into the feeds yet. And all of these working groups are up except the intelligence group. We didn't want to have a bunch of frustrated detectives trying to detect things if there wasn't yet sort of a clean feed of data coming in from governments. So I mentioned this earlier, I just wanted to have a slide about it. Do sanctions disconnect anybody from the Internet?  And the answer is no. Just like if you shut down their bank accounts it doesn't prevent them from using money, it just makes it more difficult. So then there's sort of this question, well, you know, not exactly by what right, but there are people on the sort of libertarian side on the one hand and people on the sort of extreme human right side on the other hand who think that because communication is a defined human right, that messing with people's communications is a really bad idea. So if it were the case that sanctioning somebody's Internet communications would cut them off the Internet, that would be a valid point. But since it's really just a matter of increasing friction for them, their human right to communicate has not been violated. So then there's this question about what does this friction mean? Like we're not opening up their bank account and taking money out. So what's happening there? Internet communications is all about collaboration, right? Internet service providers get together at Internet exchange points, they collaboratively operate them. The bandwidth is produced in the exchange points, the ISPs take it and deliver it to end users and all of that happens through cooperation. When we cooperate we get efficiencies. If we work together on something, that efficiency makes something more valuable to us or cheaper for us. If we choose not to cooperate with someone, their costs go up because their efficiencies get worse. So what's happening if we stop routing IP addresses on behalf of a sanctioned entity is not that we're cutting them off the Internet, but we're saying we're no longer going to cooperate with you to make things more efficient for you. So your costs are your costs, whatever those might be, not my problem. So that's the mechanism that's happening there. There are a few other problems that we ran into that there aren't necessarily good answers to. Let's say that the troll farm goes and finds the public school next door and gets on their Wi-Fi and routes all their traffic through a public school. We got two choices. One choice is okay now we block that public school also or we say well we were trying to sanction the troll farm but I guess we're not going to do this one. Neither of those is a great answer. If you decide to block the school the answer that sanctions people have come up with is well yes that harms them but we're not the ones causing the harm or the proximate cause but we're not the ultimate cause of that harm. It's the party that used them to try and circumvent the sanction that's causing that harm. That's not an answer that's going to satisfy everybody. We've got another problem specific to domain names which is if we block a domain name then somebody creates a subdomain of that. Should that also be blocked or are subdomains fair game? Again there's the risk of over compliance here if we block the domain and everything below it that may catch other parties who knows might take a little bit more detective work. We've also got conflicts with privacy and antitrust law. In a lot of countries the information needed to identify a sanctioned entity is going to be PII right it's going to be protected personal information and there are going to be a lot of rights that they have around that and so if government wants us to take that information and use it not for their not for the users benefit but for the government's benefit and public benefit then we need to carve out in law saying that that's okay. Likewise if we're going to work together with other internet operators to block somebody we need an exemption under law from antitrust that would allow us to talk about that. And now we're sort of getting into the trivia and I'm going to blow through a lot of this but I'm leaving it in the slides so if you guys are interested and want to look at the details of how all this works it's in the slide deck. The beacon is sort of an artificial set of domain names, networks and autonomous system numbers that are getting sanctioned artificially not by an actual government but as part of this process so that researchers can check and see how far the effects of this mechanism are propagating and it was important to get this up and running sort of on day zero so that you know the baseline would start at zero for the effectiveness. Number one problem we're having with the data is transliteration. All these governments decide that it's simpler for them to use their local character set than the character set used by the language of the place where the sanctioned entity is so you get Cyrillic and Arabic transliterated into Roman characters and everybody does that differently so here we've got two examples the first one Anatoli common enough name three different common transliterations of it into Roman characters and that problem is just rampant right like every single sanctioned entity sanctioned in three different countries they're going to spell it three different ways so Unicode is our friend right Unicode solves this problem take the official name of the entity as defined by their own government in their own documents use that in Unicode as our primary label and then sure have transliterations but mark them as not the canonical data likewise we've got all kinds of things that get abbreviated a zillion different ways so open joint stock company gets abbreviated a zillion different ways that is just a property it's a property of the other name that can be tokenized and then it can be represented that token can be represented in local language wherever a lot of these problems get solved by having the right database schema and defining the data types in the schema in a sensible way and I'm going to blow through slides explaining all the different things that we think we've learned about how to do that database schema but you go to the sanctions dot net website it's a wiki your contributions and thoughts are very very welcome okay so folks are questions about this stuff sir yeah thank you for that talk it seems to me the problem with transliteration that you're just talking about artificial intelligence natural language processing could go old standardizing that could go a long way in solving that problem so looking into that so all right I don't know if everybody was able to hear the question clearly question is around natural language processing and artificial intelligence and machine learning could those help in identifying I think the problem here is that machine learning if you've got millions and millions of things to train it on sure this is more like you know the no fly list where you know everybody named Muhammad is suddenly no longer allowed on an airplane it's pretty easy to get wrong if you get it wrong it has pretty bad consequences for somebody specific there aren't a lot of you know cases to train on and you know knowing when you've gotten it right when you've gotten it wrong is not necessarily easy and it's not like the answer is unknowable knowing what somebody's name is as spelled in Arabic it's their name it's on their passport it's on a zillion documents if we can identify the person at all probably we can't identify them in their native language is that name going to be unique not necessarily but put together with a bunch of other things like if it's a person you know their height their date of birth you know identifying characteristics right you put enough of those things together and you've got a unique identity defined this kind of thing yeah there is a lot of technology for I mean you know we've spent the last 20 years developing machine learning so that we can identify consumers uniquely and make absolutely sure that we can sell everything to the right person sure we know how to identify people there are ways in which machine learning can help but you know the name part is not that that big a deal and doesn't need giant firepower it just needs like government people to understand what Unicode is sir Bill can hear me first off I think you did a great job so this beginning thing about not doing necessarily good communication I thought you did an excellent job it's number one number two could you expand or give your opinion on the registrars the registrars the registrars of the who host these domains and then forward or you know integrate them into everything you were saying using using that as an example please okay so question regarding the integration into all this of the domain name registrars so with domain names we've got the registrant who is the ultimate end user of the domain name or the party that bought it we've got the registrar who is the party that sold it to them we've got the registry which is where the unique records of who controls what are the registry almost never has a direct relationship with the registrant the registrars always sit in the middle it's sort of like you buy a car you're not buying it from forward or GM you're buying it from a dealership and so your relationship is with dealership that analogy is going to seem really dated in about ten years probably but there you go so if we're going to engage parties that the issue is that once the car has been sold the dealership is not involved anymore so once a domain name has been registered the registrar isn't really involved unless there's some registrant initiated change so if the registrant says I want to change my domain name servers or I want to change my address or something then the registrar gets involved by sending those changes up to the registry but the there's a protocol called EPP extensible provisioning protocol that runs between registrar and registry that's all automated and so the registrar's job is basically just feed information into EPP that's a one directional thing it goes into the registry there's nothing comes back so there isn't really much to do with the registrar the registrant is the problematic party in the first place so we can't really deal with them directly the registry can remove a domain name at the registry level and that is exactly the right point to do that blocking most effectively but that's a hundred percent blocking of that domain name so there are going to be people who are going to say that that's overkill having looked through the list of who gets sanctioned I would disagree right the people who get sanctioned by and large are pretty bad folks and I am perfectly happy with having them not be on my internet but you know there's question of how much fight you want to get into with libertarian folks and internet freedoms folks and so forth so the other place that you can do that is at the DNS recursive resolver level so quad nine and cloud flare and Google between the three of them right there that's like half the world's DNS resolution so three organizations could pretty effectively do this all right I think that's it for our time thank you all very much and I'll be here for you know like over there somewhere if anybody has further follow-up questions. Thanks a lot.


لا تو السلام على أشرف الأنبياء والمرسلين حبيبي إله العالمين بالقاسم المصطفى محمد وعلى أهل بيته الطيبين الطاهرين الذين أذهب الله عنهم الرجسة وتهرهم تطهيرا قال الله تعالى في كتابه الكريم بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم ومن الناس من يشتري له والحديث ليظل عن سبيل الله بغير علم ويتخذها هزواً أولئك لهم عذاب مهين أهل بيته الطيبين والمرسلين السلام عليكم ورحمة الله وبركاته إن شاء الله will be continuing the discussion and the commentary of Surat Luqman chapter 31 in the Quran and after pointing out who are the ones who are worthy of receiving receiving the guidance and the mercy of Allah سبحانه وتعالى in the Quran and those are the victorious ones the ones who pray the ones who give alms and the ones who believe in the afterlife the verses move on to discuss a segment in society who go after speech that is only for amusement and this brings up a very important topic since we're talking about the story of Luqman Luqman who was a wise man and these verses teach us that if we want to be wise if we want to have the wisdom that Luqman had we have to be very careful in what we consume a lot of us when we talk about consumption we think of food, we think of what we're eating and we're very careful with what we eat we're very careful what we place in our bodies the food that we eat we make sure it's clean we make sure sometimes it's organic and we have very strict requirements for the food that we consume well there are other things that we consume that are not food and الله سبحانه وتعالى wants to bring that to our attention one thing is in this verse in this verse 6 of Surah Luqman الله سبحانه وتعالى brings to our attention what we consume with regards to hearing what are we taking in? what are we listening to? this is a very important subject what are we taking in and listening to in our daily life a lot of us we're very careful when it comes to food but we're not very careful when it comes to what we listen to with what we look at and these are very important things that have an impact on our lives الله سبحانه وتعالى tells us in the Quran that we are going to be held accountable for everything that we see, that we do, that we hear, that we say الله says in the Quran ولا تقف ما ليس لك به علم إن السمعة والبصر والفؤاد كل أولئك كان عنه مسؤولا be very careful and do not say what you don't have knowledge of because إن السمعة والبصر والفؤاد كل أولئك كان عنه مسؤولا your hearing and your sight and your heart الله سبحانه وتعالى is going to hold you accountable for this is why when we fast in the month of Ramadan a lot of us we think that we're only fasting from food we don't eat but that's not only fasting fasting is when you have to control all of your organs you control all of your desires this is why the hadith says إذا صمت فليصم سمعك سمعك وبصرك when you fast let your hearing fast with you and let your eyesight fast with you what does that mean? that means just as you have to control what you put in your stomach the food that you eat you also have to control what goes into your ears what you listen to and what you look at what you allow yourself to look at to look at this is very important when it comes to what we're listening to throughout our whole lives we're constantly listening to things we're constantly being fed information we're constantly hearing things all around us you go outside you turn on the TV wherever you're at school wherever you go you're constantly listening to things a lot of the things that we listen to are perhaps not healthy for us perhaps they have a negative impact on our lives Allah says إن القرآن فلينظر الإنسان إلى طعامه every insan every human should look at their طعام should look at their food one of the companions of Imam الباقر عليه السلام the fifth Imam of أهل البيت he tells the Imam what is it that we should look for so the Imam عليه السلام the fifth Imam of أهل البيت so the Imam عليه السلام he gives a تفسير he gives an interpretation a deeper interpretation of the verse in the قرآن he says every person should look at their knowledge and where they take their knowledge from we have food for thought and we have the food for our stomach the food for thought can influence you and impact you either in a positive way or in a negative way so this is why we have to be very careful what are your sources of information and where you're getting it from just two days ago Donald Trump he casually suggested that people could consume hand sanitizers and Clorox and these cleaning agents and as a result of that as a result of people listening and hearing things without filtering without using their intellect to filter a lot of people are hospitalized there are people that are hospitalized because they're consuming cleaning agents they're consuming Clorox so this verse in the قرآن it brings to our attention the fact and the importance of paying attention to what we allow our ears to consume and the information that we are consuming so Allah says in the قرآن ومن الناس ومن الناس من يشتري له والحديث ليظل عن سبيل الله and there are from amongst the people who buy يشتري who buy or who who subscribe to له والحديث حديث that is له that is wasting time that is distracting from الله صبحانه و تعالى ومن الناس من يشتري له والحديث ليظل عن سبيل الله the purpose of it is to distract themselves from Allah صبحانه و تعالى and distract themselves from the قرآن بغير علم without having knowledge without knowing the consequences of actions some people they go and they listen to things that are harmful for them ويتخذها هزوا أولائك لهم عذاب مهين and they make a mockery of the remembrance of Allah and the قرآن those are people that will have a severe punishment by Allah صبحانه و تعالى إمام الباقر عليه السلام في حديث في تفسير القمم و it is also narrated by others he says that a merchant who was living in Makkah by the name of This man was a merchant and he was a traveler so he used to go and travel to other empires he used to go and travel to the Persian empire and when he comes to Makkah he sees that رسول الله صلى الله عليه و عليه is reciting the Quran and in the Quran there are some stories Allah صبحانه و تعالى talks about the people of the people of the the people of the prophets there are some stories in the Quran but of course the stories in the Quran their purpose is not for storytelling and entertainment the stories in the Quran their purpose is for us to learn lessons to learn from and to be inspired by so this man he sees رسول الله is telling stories and our رسول الله is reciting the Quran and within the Quran there are some stories so in order to distract people from the Quran what would he do he would go and he would sit and he would tell them let me tell you the stories of this empire and that empire and his whole purpose his all aim was to distract people from the Quran and some people they're easily amused some people easily they'll leave the Quran they'll put the Quran which has the best of stories الله says in the Quran and Surah Yusuf نحن نقص عليك أحسن القصص the best stories are in the Quran because these stories have lessons of morality lessons in our lives they have values principles which make us live better lives but some people they leave these and they go and they'll read a fiction they'll go and they'll read a story that will not help them and they're easily distracted and they go to these له له is something that distracts you away from الله سبحانه وتعالى ومن الناس من يشتري له والحديث ليظل عن سبيل الله بغير علم ويتخذها حزوًا أولائك لهم عذاب مهين and they do it بغير علم they do it without knowledge this refers to both the one who's telling the story they say stories that have no foundation because as we mentioned previously yesterday we mentioned that the stories and whatever the Quran mentions it's all wisdom the Quran does not say anything that is not truth everything that the Quran says is absolute truth and it will remain to be truth and this is the sign of a wise person but someone who's not wise they'll talk gibberish they'll say things that have no meaning they'll say stories that are made up and this is without علم without knowledge and this also refers to the ones who consume knowledge some people they're being fooled some people they see someone talking and they'll go and they'll listen to this person without having knowledge that they're being misled without having knowledge that they're being fooled and then Allah says in the Quran وإذا تتلع عليه آياتنا ولا مستكبرا كأن لم يسمعها كأن في أذنه وقرا فبشره بعذاب أليم and when our verses when our signs when our verses are recited to him he turns away see sometimes someone does not listen to the Quran but it's not because of arrogance maybe they're distracted but there are some individuals that arrogantly because of their pride they refuse to listen to the Quran and they act as if they have not heard the verses of the Quran they act as if their ears are deaf this is what the people of the prophets used to do the people of prophet Nuh the people of other prophets they used to pass by the prophets and they used to put their hands their fingers and their ears so that they don't listen to the معظة to the admonishment of the prophets similarly the people of Quraish whenever someone would come to Mecca someone who's new coming to Mecca رسول الله would be by the Ka'bah reciting the Quran and they would tell the people they would tell the people cover your ears don't listen to what this man is saying and they don't want people to hear what the prophet is saying so they start making up they start ridiculing like this man he goes and he ridicules and he makes a joke and he starts telling other stories they say that Abu Jahl he used to also ridicule the prophet he used to tell the prophet he used to tell the people and trying to mislead people away from the prophet so Allah says in the Quran the one who does that give this person glad tidings because the person is joking the person is laughing so now in a laughing way come and tell him you're going to be punished as a result of your arrogance as a result of what you're doing now this is now this verse has several interpretations and as we mentioned there is no problem with the Quran having more than one meaning the Quran is an eternal book the Quran is a book that is alive until today the meanings of the Quran and the precise exegesis of the Quran is not confined to 1400 years ago the Quran is always alive it's always relevant so this is why the Quran could have more than one meaning it could have layers of meanings so one of the one of the ways that we can understand this today at that time that man was telling stories today how are we wasting our time today we see so many people wasting their time on social media what are we getting out of social media of course I'm not denying that there's a lot of good in social media but there's also a lot of bad you go and you look at the accounts on youtube on instagram on twitter whatever it is most of them the ones that have the most following they're all based on entertainment now I'm not saying that all entertainment is wrong entertainment is not bad there's nothing wrong with being entertained however if that entertainment is going to distract you away from Allah then it becomes problematic then we need to check our sources of information then we need to check what are we listening to what are we giving our ears to our attention to some people they sit for hours and hours these youtubers who are pulling pranks who are doing things that are wasting time what are you going to benefit from this what are you going to get out of this if you're sitting after an hour or two hours or three hours after those three hours are over what did you accomplish did you accomplish something for this dunya if you did then that's good did you accomplish something for the akhirah if you did then that's even better and not the akhirah so that's when it becomes problematic now as we mentioned the تفسير of the Quran the exegesis could have more than one meaning so one of the meanings of this verse is something that is very relevant in our communities and it's something that distracts many people until today it was something that existed at the time of the prophet during the times of the imams and it exists until today and that is the amusement speech what type of amusement speech what is something that people listen to and it's easily people get distracted very easily from it that is music music is everywhere you turn on the tv you hear music you go out wherever you are now there are types of music the majority of the types of music are considered to be حرام are considered to be لحو الحديث because it distracts you away from Allah and the narration another narration it says that this verse ومن الناس من يشتري لحو الحديث ليظل عن سبيل الله and this is accepted by sunni it says that a man from during the time of he purchased a slave who used to sing for him a lady slave who used to at that time people used to purchase slaves so he purchased a slave who used to sing for him and as a result of that that would distract him away from Allah so we have many narrations we have multiple narrations from رسول الله which define لحو الحديث as a general meaning any type of talk that distracts you away from Allah any type of amusement speech that will bring you away from Allah and specifically one definition of that is music and singing and this is from the حديث of the أهل البيت and رسول الله صلى الله عليه وسلم حديث from إمام صادق لا ينظر الله إلى أهله سطيق في سطيق where there is music being played this is a session where Allah سبحانه وتعالى will not look at the people who are sitting how will Allah not look at them with his mercy meaning Allah سبحانه وتعالى these people they will be stripped of the mercy of Allah سبحانه وتعالى and then the Imam he continues he says ما قال الله عز وجل ومن الناس من يشتري لهو الحديث ليضل عن سبيل الله then the Imam he talks about and singing and that type of session and then he says this is the session that Allah سبحانه وتعالى refers to it as from those who يشتري لهو الحديث who buy or subscribe to talk that is only amusement and that distracts them from Allah سبحانه وتعالى so with this verse we understand there are two meanings anything that distracts you away from Allah is specifically music and singing and these types of sessions now someone might ask and a lot of people they find this really difficult to comprehend why because music is such an integral part of communities of cultures and some people they say how could Islam the religion of Islam why why would it come and stand against music why is it haram what is the proof that it's haram and are all types of music haram these are questions that people ask and I don't blame people because people are you're living in a society when something becomes accepted when something is encouraged you start saying that it's okay after a while after a while you start seeing that it's totally okay this is something that we have to be careful of because we have our own principles we have our own faith we have our own teachings we should not fall in the traps of what society is doing because not everything that's going on in society is correct رسول الله صلى الله عليه وسلم says there will come a time where people will see the what's bad as good and they will see what's good as bad so there's a lot of things that go on in societies today that they were bad they're originally bad and people look at them as good and things that are good people consider them to be bad so we have we have some حديث we have some narrations which talk about music and the تفسير of these verses in the Quran from رسول الله and from the أهل البيت from the correct channels that we're supposed to take our information from they come and they tell us to abstain from anything that distracts you away from الله سبحانه وتعالى the first proof is Surat Luqman speaking about verse 6 the verse that we're speaking about ومن الناس من يشتري له الحديث the تفسير of the imams in the Sunni and the Shi'a they say that the amusement speech is music in another verse in the Quran الله سبحانه وتعالى mentions قول الزور الله says in Surat Al-Hajj Chapter 22 verse 30 وشتنبوا الرجسة من الأوثان وشتنبوا قول الزور and refrain and be away from the uncleanliness of idols and avoid false statements وثان is an idol and قول الزور is false statements now as we mentioned the Quran can have multiple meanings because the Quran is still relevant in our lives so Imam حدق عليه السلام the sixth Imam of Ahl al-Bayt he says that the the Outhan they were idols at the pre-islamic time when Rasulullah was bringing down the Quran and revealing the Quran to the people the Quran was telling people stay away from idols but now that everyone is a Muslim the Quran does it make sense for the Quran to tell Muslims stay away from idols no here the Imam he says there's something else he says فشتنبوا الرجسة من الأوثان the Imam عليه السلام he says this is chess playing chess and then he says وشتنبوا قول الزور and refrain from قول الزور false statements the Imam عليه السلام he says قول الزور هو الغناء it is singing and music so this is one hadith from the Imam and this is a hadith that is accepted by the scholars now yes regarding chess some scholars they come and they say at that time chess used to be a tool for gambling that's why it was Haram now because it's not considered for gambling there are some scholars that consider it Halal however قول الزور قول الزور غناء we have as if a consensus amongst the scholars especially the Shi'a and many of the Sunni scholars with the exception of some small groups here and there maybe the Sufis or others where where music is allowed but the majority of Muslims they come and they say music is not allowed and it goes back to the Quran and the hadith of Rasool Allah and the Ahl al Bayt and another verse another proof is Surat al-Furqan Chapter 25 verse 72 الله سبحانه وتعالى says in the Quran واللذين لا يشهدون الزور وإذا مروا باللغوي مروا كراما and they are those referring to the believers the mu'minin they are those who do not testify they don't listen to they're not watching they're not listening to falsehood and when they pass near ill speech they pass with dignity here the Imam عليه السلام says الزور قول الزور is singing and in addition to the Tafseer of the Quran in addition to the verses of the Quran we have narrations from Rasool Allah and from the Ahl al Bayt Rasool Allah he says and you find a lot of these narrations in our books of hadith in أصول الكافي and also in وسائل الشيعة you could find them because أول من تغنى the first one who began to sing was Iblis شيطان in another hadith وجاء في حديث آخر عن الإمام الصادق عليه السلام حديث من إمام الصادق he says بيت الغناء لا تؤمن فيه الفجيع ولا تجاب فيه الدعوة ولا يتخلوه الملك he says لا تؤمن فيه الفجيع a catastrophe will fall upon this house ولا تجاب فيه الدعوة and the dua the supplication is not answered in that house in that place where music is constantly being played ولا يتخلوه الملك and the angels will not enter it now what does this mean does this mean that if there is music being played in the house a catastrophe will fall upon this house ولا تجاب فيه الدعوة and the dua the supplication is not answered in that house when there is music being played in the house a catastrophe will fall someone is going to get injured there is going to be an accident no what this verse is referring to and what this حديث is referring to لا تؤمن فيه الفجيع is the fagia when it comes to faith the fagia the calamity in faith not the calamity in your body your body nothing might happen to it but in your connection with God and with your relationship with God that is where there is going to be a calamity because when there is music there is going to be dancing there is going to be mixed gender gatherings there is going to be lyrics that are inappropriate there is going to be a lot of things that bring you away from Allah so it's a place where people are distracted from Allah ولا تستجاب فيه الدعوة and therefore when you are distracted from Allah when God is not in your mind then naturally your dua is not going to be answered and ولا يدخلوه الملك the angels will not enter in a place like that because the angels they are pure the angels they are tahr and they only enter somewhere that is clean somewhere that is pure and that is cleansed so this is what the Imam is talking about a catastrophe will fall a catastrophe in your religion in your faith that is the worst type of catastrophe that is the calamity the greatest calamity that could fall upon someone in another حديث the Imam says the Imam says singing it brings about hypocrisy it will create a sense of hypocrisy and it will bring poverty now also here when someone might ask how is it that if I am listening to music I am going to be a hypocrite where is the correlation between listening to music and becoming a hypocrite I am a truthful person I am honest with people I don't lie to people this is not the hypocrisy that we are talking about here also we have to understand in order to analyze and understand this حديث we have to see my purpose in life my purpose is to reach Allah Allah says we have a goal we have a purpose in life and that is to get closer this is whether we accept that this is our goal or we don't we are all going to Allah we are all headed to Allah Allah says you are striving to your lord until you will eventually meet your lord eventually you are going to meet your lord so if you are going to meet your lord then doesn't that mean that you have to be ready doesn't that mean that you have to be prepared in order to meet your lord yes we have to be prepared this is why we pray this is why we cleanse our souls this is why we have to purify our hearts this is why we have to prepare ourselves for the afterlife now I ask you a question when you listen to music does music help you prepare for the afterlife does music help you fulfill your purpose and your goal in life and that is to get closer to God unfortunately most types of music the amusement music does not do that the amusement music distracts you away from your purpose it brings you away from your goal and therefore that will create a sense of hypocrisy where your soul is begging it's yearning for something and your actions are giving it something else your actions are doing something else so here there is a a type of inconsistency a type of hypocrisy that is going on so this is why when the Imam says ألغنا music يورث النفاق it brings hypocrisy this is what the Imam is talking about it's going to make you go away from your purpose your purpose is to get closer to Allah your purpose is to connect with God your purpose is to prepare yourself for the afterlife but music does not do that music all that it's talking about is this life this dunya loving cars bling bling here and there this is what's music this is in the lyrics the lyrics are many times inappropriate many times only centered on this dunya and only focused on the entertainment and the enjoyment of this dunya a lot of selfish reasons and the way that it's sung science has proven today that music when it's being sung or a song it has a psychological impact on your brain has an impact on your soul you kind of start getting connected with whatever's being recited with whatever's being said so when that happens then a person will be taken away from their mission and taken away from their goals now is all music haram here some scholars the scholars they say the majority of the music is considered haram as long as it has tarab it has that feeling where it brings you away from Allah and that feeling of entertainment which distracts you away from God this would be considered له الحديث it would be considered قول الزور it would be considered talk that distracts you away from Allah سبحانه وتعالى now some people ask what about classical music things that are soft things that do not bring us away there are some scholars they come and they say classical music or music that fulfills a purpose a type of music which is not considered music anymore it fulfills a purpose of bringing you closer to Allah سبحانه وتعالى there's nothing wrong with reciting with a beautiful voice there's nothing wrong with finding entertainment through a means that brings you closer to Allah سبحانه وتعالى some people they say but I can't live my life like that I need to listen to something yes you need to listen to something there's so many things you could listen to you could listen to the Quran the Quran it's recommended the Quran it's recommended to recite it in the most beautiful voice so we have to recite it in a beautiful voice and that is something that you just have to get yourself used to reciting listening to reciting in a beautiful voice there's so many things that you could be listening to a lot of people when they're listening in the car going back and forth from work to home back in the days when people used to leave their house now everyone is at home that is hours and hours spent that you could utilize for something that will make you a better person something that will be productive but some people hours they're listening to music listen to something that will help you this is what Allah سبحانه وتعالى is telling us Allah is going to hold you accountable what were you looking at meaning giving it to look at what were you giving your what were you consuming you have to be very careful with that we have to filter what comes in but we allow to enter in our thought process and music is something that is dangerous so we have to abstain from it because it is and we have to refrain from any talk that distracts us and brings us away from Allah and then Allah سبحانه وتعالى says in the Quran خالدين فيها وعد الله حقا وهو العزيز الحكيم الله says those who believe those who have iman they will they will immediately accept what Allah سبحانه وتعالى even something that might not make sense to me I will accept it because I know that Allah سبحانه وتعالى has in store for me something that is much greater in the afterlife and we ask Allah سبحانه وتعالى to protect us to protect you all والحمد لله رب العالمين وصلى الله على محمد وعلى آله الطاهرين نسألك اللهما وندعوك بسمك العظيم الأعظم الأعز الأجل الأكرم يا الله يا الله يا رحمان يا رحيم يا مقلب القلوب ثبت قلوبنا على دينك اللهم أغفر للمؤمنين والمؤمنات الأحياء منهم والأموات تابع لهم بيننا وبينهم بالخيرات إنك مجيب الدعوات إنك غافر الخطيئات إنك على كل شيء قدير اللهم أدخل على أهل القبور السرور اللهم أغني كل فقير اللهم أشبه اللهم أشبع كل جائع اللهم أكسو كل عريان اللهم أقضي دينا كل مدين اللهم أفرج عن كل مكروب اللهم أردا كل غريب اللهم أفكا كل أسير اللهم أصلح كل فاسد من أمور المسلمين اللهم أشفي كل مريض اللهم سد فقرنا بغناك اللهم غير سوء حالنا بحسني حالك اللهم أقضي عن الدين اللهم أقضي عن الدين وغننا من الفاق إنك على كل شيء قدير نهدي ثواب الفاتح مع الصلوات اللهم صلى الله عليه وسلم محمد وآله محمد