Hi everyone welcome and thank you so much for joining me. My name is Julie Smithson and today I'm going to be talking about the creative design process for 3D and I'm going to be using our Metaverse Engine as a demonstration tool to be showing through my presentation and I'm really excited to be able to introduce the concept of 3D as well as our Metaverse Engine to help you understand a creator tool and the creative design process for 3D. So a little bit about myself again my name is Julie Smithson and I'm the chief learning officer at Metaverse. I also co-founded XR Ignite and I'm the producer of XR Collaboration. I also am a VRA member and education student co-chair as well as an XR camp advisory member and educators and VR member so I'm very heavily involved in the education space as well as understanding how this technology works with enterprise and business organizations. A little bit about our Metaverse family we have our Metaverse company which started about four or five years ago and we started with strategy and consulting, doing projects, everything from augmented reality 360 video, virtual reality, teleportals, web AR. We kind of doubled in all of it just to make sure that we understood where this industry was going and how business was going to be interpreted and how the technology would unfold within the future of work. We also have our Metaverse Engine which I'll get into a little bit more about that. We also have XR Ignite where we actually started this company to help startups understand how to work with business organizations and through that we also built out some resources that we host on xrcollaboration.com and I'll touch base a little bit later in my presentation about that. We also have our podcast. I actually host the XR for learning podcast and it's through there that we talk about the different ways that you learn and you teach. My partner and husband also has XR for business podcast and that's where if you want to learn about what all of these big companies are doing out there with this technology, Alan really gets into the nitty gritty of understanding even more about the business applications of XR. So that's our Metaverse family. Let's get into a little bit about my story and where I came from back in 2010. My partner, husband Alan and I, we actually created the emulator. The emulator was the world's first touchscreen DJ controller back in 2010 and Dragonstone. That was kind of my pathway into technology and understanding the potential of even touchscreen and it was from there that we were introduced into the VR world and technology world where obviously I'm here today understanding the potential and use cases of how we're going to use this technology. This is my daughter and right after we had the emulator company, we actually ended up inspiring our daughter to create a shoe company and it was within this time of her life. She was nine at this time and today she's 16 years old. But for a few years, she actually produced 2000 pairs of shoes and sold them. And the idea was the love sandal that left a heart shaped hand line on the top of your foot. It was through this entrepreneurial experience that we understood how much education needed to change and change for the better. And then our personal mission, we actually started to build out the unlimited awesome account. And it's from, you know, creative problem solving and teamwork, responsibility for your finances and economics and having that social impact through sustainability of the environment, of course, perseverance. And it was through this mission that we decided we would we wanted to focus on democratizing education by 2040 in the next generation to think and act in an economically socially and environmentally sustainable way. And do that we would leverage the most advanced immersive technologies in the world. And here I am standing at the stage today in a virtual space. So just overview of the immersive technologies. You know, we have the 2D view in our smartphones. We can also look at 360 360 degrees. We also have augmented reality, virtual reality and mixed realities. All together, extended realities is where we are in this space and, you know, using them on a daily basis for starting to integrate these technologies more and more into into our lives. So let's talk about 3D enabled devices.  And that people are using that we can start to introduce the concept of three dimensional objects and spatial objects that need to that are used inside of these technologies like virtual and augmented reality experiences that are used for different purposes. So this is kind of why we're we're talking about 3D now, you know, why XR, why now, you know, for years, we've had the personal computer and then mobile took over and, you know, as of 2020, XR is starting to take over and all of these different technologies. So right now we're in this upswing of how of the investments that are being made in this space. So it's really important that we understand how this technology will impact everything we're doing on a daily basis. A little bit of reality ever since COVID, you know, invaded our lives, it forced us apart, but this technology has made it possible for us to learn and interact with one another while remaining physically distant. And, you know, being here today on the next prize stage is certainly an example of coming together and being able to use this technology to to continue conversations and collaboration. And this quote actually came from XR collaboration in our mission to build out those resources. So a little bit of reality in this COVID acceleration and how fast things are going. Coming right from Nike, they originally targeted 35% of their sales for 2020 to be made online. And they're already reaching that 50% overall sales. And now for the foreseeable future will be made online. So already the trend of purchasing online and digitally interacting to purchase items like Nike are taking place. And, and this is actually, you know, a pivotal move in in how humans are behaving with this technology and how how trustworthy they are in even their purchase decisions. So a little bit about the ROI on on the investment in this space, and we're already seeing everything between commerce marketing and training, the numbers of sales conversions going up, marketing click through rates are going up, the increase of retention rates are already going up.  So already the benefits are starting to play out in how it's implemented into the business world. The many use cases of immersive technology can be used from retail and marketing, of course, with face filters and e commerce transactions, but also through education and product design, out of visualization, education and training from healthcare and medical, industrial design and training manuals are are starting to be implemented and use using augmented reality. And then of course, entertainment always plays a big part in actually being as much as immersed as possible through all the sensory through all the sensory avenues to to immerse you into those experiences. So immersive technology is already playing a part in many different industries. And through mixed reality, they're also solving big, huge enterprise problems like remote assistance and collaborative visualization and access to to certain data that businesses make decisions moving forward. So all of these different companies and enterprises already starting to use this technology, which is really important. And companies like IKEA placing furniture in your space or modifies using AR for face filters, companies, restaurants are using their menus to augment what those meals look like and, you know, placing activities within the menus and restaurants, being able to see some of these retail items through your devices and being able to interact with them obviously leads you down that purchasing decision a lot quicker. GPS tracking through stores to help you find things and interaction with characters from certain TV shows, using AR, all of these play out into a maze to interact with others and that engaging experience to understand whether it's the product or or the situation better. And the best business and education and training applications are really the ones that are expensive or rare, impossible, that they're really dangerous or even counterproductive, you know, everything from body swapping and time travel, taking field trips to places where, you know, you really can have access to, or you don't even have the money to go there. You know, being able to put students inside these experiences and having them go wherever they need to go or, you know, studying what the behaviors of others are like, this technology allows all of these different possibilities to to become real and for us to experience them. And it does take the development side to be able to create these things. So I guess, first of all, I'd like to just acknowledge the stage that we're on here today with X Prize. And, you know, we have an environment and we also have a lot of different things going on. You know, we have animations above us and different signs. You know, there's cabling ribbon through the floors or through. So all of these things obviously design process to create environment that we're here in today. So, you know, what does that look like for XR and really the creative design process build XR requires you to think spatially and in dimensions. So for us to walk around the stage, we obviously know that there's something above us, below us, each side behind us. There's so many different things. I have this podium here and I can look around it and I can actually move around it as well. I can move all around this room and it's because I understand that we are in the spatial room, this 360 degree space where our entire our entire being is inspired by all of these different assets that are in our environment. So thinking spatially, thinking the ability that things are around you is the first step designing in 3D. So 3D actually stimulates the real thing. It builds connections and it invites interactivity. It sparks curiosity and it makes learning fun. We have access to over 7 billion devices. So it's really that next step to understanding why and how we need to build an augmented reality virtual and the mixed realities. It's that stepping stone. Understanding three dimensions and understanding things spatially is where things all begin. So last year I did a talk or I did a I wrote an article on 3D learning and how to, you know, introduce and it's really introducing and thinking more in voxels now instead of pixels. We're moving from 2D into 3D. So how do we start to think spatially? Start to think in voxels and how we build things and that spaceship on the back there of the stage is a perfect example of, you know, just building blocks and how you need to start to think in a spatial way. So this feeds us to degrees of freedom, which is used in a virtual setting when you have a headset on. Being able to see things in a three degree of freedom, just looking around and seeing your space. But six degrees of freedom obviously allows you to interact and move within your space. And that's where the immersive really steps into it and, you know, being able to go sideways up and down and forward and pitch and move around allows you to interact and become more immersed into the scene that you're in. So this is kind of the definition of the degrees of freedom inside the space. So the first step in designing in 3D is really just understanding more about depth and dimension and that spatial understanding of multiple different perspectives. And when you're considering building XR, you have to think of a lot of different things. You know, you can start to think about security and logins and that sort of thing. And that's all very important. And that's part of that process when you're building an XR. But there's also, you know, understanding the natural interactions and being contextually aware about the things that are around you. And if you have an avatar beside you that you're speaking to, that you understand their space or you understand where the podium is in your world, there's a lot of other things like collaborating in real time and managing your assets inside of the space or even just in the designer mode of the digital assets. Being able to manage all of these things is part of building an XR. But we're going to get back to 3D and how we can use that to creatively design for XR. And a little bit about the Metaverse Engine because I'm going to be using this to show you examples and give you instruction on how the design process works. Our Metaverse Engine, we just recently released at AWE in June. We're really excited that we could pull forward our development a lot sooner than planned. We were expected to release at CES in 2021. And due to COVID, we pulled up our delivery date and we're really excited that we're able to launch 3D for the web and AR as well, based on our one app solution. And we're working towards building out the virtual and the virtual support for our system. So that'll be delivered in Q4. But let's take it back to 3D and that stepping stone that we need to take in order to understand more about immersive technologies. 3D, remember, represents, can represent content and data visually. And you can also use it to interact and learn and collaborate, presenting a story, a timeline or a visualization. And it can be used for marketing, commerce, training, and education. So let's talk about 3D for a moment and what it takes to become an asset. And once you have your object that you would like to place in this space, it basically starts off with a layer of mesh. And this mesh comes with polygons and these polygons all really start to invite the different perspective and the customization of the object itself. So when we talk about mesh and we talk about polygons, each asset has its own package of how it needs to be entered into a system, augmented or virtual reality, just like these items here in this space, they were an asset that was dropped into this virtual world. So throughout my presentation, if you do see a QR code like this one, you're welcome to take a screenshot of it or if you're on a desktop, you can actually pull out your smartphone. The QR code will take you to some of our live experiences that you can also take a look at on our metaverse.com page page. And these are some examples of 3D, which unfortunately I can't show you the live animated version here in this space, but I hope you do go and try them out. This is an example of our shoe configurator where you can go in and design your own pair of shoes. And the shoes show up in your space, whether they be augmented or just in 3D in your device. And you're able to interact with that shoe and change the colors, the tongue, the laces, the sole, you're able to change all of it. And it's through our engine that you can simply make this experience and build the configurator out to be able to look at the different perspectives. To give you an example of spatial design again, Lowe's has it right with using a device to be able to show the layout of the architecture of the space that you're willing to build. And that's the same thing when it comes back to 3D models and 3D assets being able to visualize your space. So when you're creating 3D models, you always have to create your own assets. Sometimes they're already made for you. But just so you know where to go to be able to make your 3D models, these are some of the softwares that are out there where you can build out the models to your liking, you can use photogrammetry or upload CAD files and that sort of thing. And these are some of the softwares that support that. So once you've created your model and if you get it at one of these stores, CD Traders, Skeptfab, Turgalose, these locations, they all have a library of 3D assets where some of them have 3D models and some of them are actually you have to pay for depending on the intricacy or the amount of detail that are in the actual asset itself. So there's a lot of places that you can go to get your 3D models and they do come in different formats. And these are the most common ones. Our engine automatically uses OBJ and FBX. And then within the next four weeks, we're releasing the support for USEZ and GLTF. So we're starting to support a lot of CAD files as well that can be uploaded into our engine for access to be able to manipulate and work with them. A little bit about our engine in comparison with Lydian Real and Unreal, the two other engines that are out there. Metaverse was built to be that introductory 3D engine for anybody to use. It really does take the relief of coding off of anybody who is wishing to design in 3D. Our engine is actually low code and no code. And we use JavaScript on the back end too. And you're actually able to enter any JavaScript in our system to add further animations or environments and that sort of thing. But we did build out code snippets that allow you to drag and drop certain things that make it easy like a configurator or adding a button to your an interactive button to your scene. This is where the code snippets come in. The average learning curve for engine is actually two to four weeks compared to some of the other longer times in Unity and Unreal. Last week, I proved myself in the fact that I did a presentation in the same day that I fully learned our engine and was able to present it to others. It really took me six hours to gain the understanding of our engine. And then I sent it to 180 university students the same presentation and was able to have that confidence to understand everything about the engine. The development time to be able to develop anything can be as little as an hour to hours to one to two weeks, depending on the complexity of the program or the experience that you're building compared to months of development time in the other engines. Now, the other engines, they obviously have their purposes. They're, you know, a lot more detailed especially in the gaming or more intricate in experiences. And you do need that those engines to be able to create graphics detail that's required for them. But they are applications and you need an app to be able to access them and download that. Metaverse Engine, we are web enabled, and it's released automatically and published automatically right to the options of iOS or Android or QR code or an embed code for your website. And we've made it extremely easy. I'd love to introduce you to our metaverse engine video intro. You can take a look at it on our website. There's the QR code that'll take you right there. So a little bit about the metaverse engine and the benefits of it. The rapid prototyping is really key, especially during this time of rapid innovation and the need for our for enterprise and business to be able to quickly solve the problems that they need to in their business or organization. So already we're seeing design time reduction when it comes to rapid prototyping. And I think this is really key in our engine today is just trying to figure out what to do, what to use and be able to quickly flip that over into something that can be presented or decided, you know, quickly, whether the the actual object is going to work or or not, where the process is going to work. So the engine also, as I said before with the shoe, being able to design your preference and, you know, have what to, you know, use it in your marketing campaigns, being able to custom design things obviously increases your sales conversion. And we're already seeing that in some of the examples that we're building. The product configuration of being able to see whether you like a car one way or one color or another, the interior design, being able to see if you see your driveway and it in a parking spot or a parking garage. That obviously closes the sale of these these products a lot faster. And that's that's one of the benefits about our engine and designing in 3D. Products showcasing things in three dimensions is really important.  This can also be applied to virtual events or to to any kind of new design framework and being able to design it to see if it works before you actually physically make all of the changes to your household or space that you're working with. Virtual showrooms, same thing if you could see what the bathtub could look like in your new in your new bathroom or vanity sink which marble color you like being able to visualize that space before you actually implement it is possible and being able to see it in three dimensions and alternate between those different colors or styles is really important to to be able to have that user immersed in that experience to see what it would really like if it was this way or from this different perspective. Remote training and education this is I think one of the biggest potentials for our engine and being able to explain things being able to place images in in the space to be able to show the user what it something is really like or explain something. This experience here we have on our website is about the solar system. And when you go in and you take a look at your the solar system you can actually see all of the planets moving in real time and in the pace that they're moving around the sun. You can place this in your space in an augmented way so you can see the the planets in you know in a field and you between them and how you know what the distance is you can even just have it on your phone and play around with it in 3D taking a look at the earth's inner core comparing the the planets Mercury to Saturn and how big they are this type of interaction and being able to showcase this to another user where they can be immersed into that experience and learn for themselves. You know taking a closer look up to the sun or where those rings you know the rings around Saturn just to see what you know what they look up like up close. So this is just one example of how education and training can reduce that training time and increase the retention rates and the interest level of just being able to learn about that subject. 3D instructions and manuals this is where I believe there is a massive potential and actually one of those first steps to how education and business will start to introduce 3D or augmented reality into into their workplace or their learning space. It really using 3D technology is already bringing 97% less time to gain that information gain access to that information. So this still photo here of our of a blood machine is something that we worked on to build a user manual being placed in augmented reality right over top of the blood machine itself. So what we did is we took a CAD drawing a CAD diagram drawing of the blood machine itself and you can physically place that blood machine in front of you with the user manual overlaid on top to understand how to insert the syringe of blood where to push the buttons on the screen and you know going into the back end you know changing out the spark plugs or replacing certain cartridges the entire 32 page and 32 step manual on how this product can be modeled was then built into our engine and distributed through one link published that anybody could access from their team and they could do that remotely thus by pulling it up on their device and placing that blood machine in their space or beside the blood machine itself. So it really has shown that impact of how 3D manuals and instruction manuals play a huge part of usability and accessibility being remote and not having to use paper anymore. And if you think about how we use it in a blood machine manual imagine what we could do for textbooks and schools being able to overlay more instructions or insert assets into a storyline that could help the user understand more about that topic or subject. So our engine also does connect with IoT sensors and I think this was one of the biggest surprises about our engine that we were not really sure that it would work but it actually did and we have a use case out there from Sikhar Keda from Oracle Oracle's XR Lab where they took our engine and then connected the engine with one of their monitoring stations with a sensor and pulled out data and put it into a presentation model in 3D within our engine. And this was a huge stepping stone to be able to understand how our engine could work with IoT sensors and I think this is a huge benefit in building out solutions for innovation whether it be both business or education or innovating a global solution that could be connected to an environmental problem being able to monitor soil erosion or monitoring equipment in their performance or even just reporting back the conversion rates in design. So being able to report back real-time analytics use cases and the choices of the user or the monitoring of that system and being able to display that in a direct and relevant manner for that's very simplified to use is one of the greatest benefits I think of our engine and being able to introduce the reporting of 3D. So our engine is and browser agnostic and we wanted to make sure that our engine was accessible for everyone on every single device and making things as easy as possible just like adding code snippets which you can actually break it out and code yourself in JavaScript but the code snippets allow you to drag and drop those more complicated coding sections that provide a little bit more intricacy to the experience of health like nations and configurations. This is a picture of our dashboard and it really is very similar to some of the other development engines out there but it is all drag and drop and being able to quickly access all of the different features of the mesh in the mesh inspector just on the right-hand side and having your assets right within your framework. So let's go back to a little bit of the spatial design and the design process and the first thing I want to address is the world or a scene and just like you're in this space here the world and the scene that we're in has a background and there's a stage. This is our world and this is part of how you need to build and think about what the background looks like in these virtual worlds and the metaverse editor actually provides grid lines around your assets so you can understand the XY access and what position it is located in within the space that you're building and this thing right in the middle here is called the give and you're able to manipulate and use that to move it up down or to the side and position it within the world itself and when you are adding something to your world or your scene it's also called the skybox and as an example here this cube that I built in our engine I added a skybox from Toronto that you can see here and it really does provide an environment around the space that already experienced building. Spatial design also includes textures and this is really important and something that we've never really learned before is that everything that is inside of a 3D space we're using 3D is textures to make it look as real as possible and that's the goal is the realism and what does that look like so that it looks like it is as real as it is in the virtual world as it is in the real one. So the first thing that I wanna take a look at the albedo textures which is the base color and this is where you can replace something and make it green or blue or red but you can also add a texture as an image maybe it's a logo or maybe there's we've just added the feature of adding video so you can actually add a video to a cube or to a sign that's in that 3D space. Textures that are emissive provide shine and light to something so if you think something should be a little bit shiny or have a little bit of light on a certain edge this is where you would adjust your emissive textures. Roughness on something, is something made of sandpaper or is it the sidewalk or maybe smooth and there is no roughness on your 3D object and your assets. So this is where you would adjust that reflection on the occlusion is really important when it comes to lighting and shadows and understanding how things that are within a shadow are not seen or they have a different type of reflection. Understanding where things are placed within a spatial environment and what shadows over something or replaces something is really important to understand that more about the 3D object. The metalness texture is also really important is raspy and dull or does it have a shiny metalness to it and this is where you can adjust those different levels. Normal kind of that last addition onto a 3D object and you would really understand what that looked like until you actually added it and it really just gives it that little bit of depth and dimension and surface texture to an object that makes it look as real as possible. For me when I'm creating now in my engine I really use those normals in that last moment to just give it that touch of realism. Spatial design also includes lighting and it can come from everywhere especially when you're in a 360 degree space. You can actually have lights in front of you, behind you to the back, left, right, up, bottom and you can change the color of lights. So when you're in a 360 degree environment or you have a 3D object and you wish that object had a little bit of red tinge to it and you can change your lighting on the right-hand side to red and have that object reflect the new lighting. Spatial design can also include configurator options and that means choices and perspectives and this is where you can add that difference or perspective to your 3D model to see what does something look like? Do you prefer the gold one or the blue one? You know, and being able to innovate and design and think of different things that could happen to a particular object or an animation if you prefer it to go to the left or the right or does the architecture or the innovation of an engine happen to work this way or that way and this is where configurators really offer that different perspective to make a decision quickly and that is adding a configurator in our space. So going back to our dashboard and having this cube in the middle, once you publish the cube itself it's that you've built, you come to a published page that looks like this and you can actually take this URL in the published space and drop that into a particular experience or show somebody if you want to. You can actually show them experience through the QR code or you can actually enter in the code for Android and pull up the code for Android, iOS or the web and it'll give you the embed code for you to implement that into your site or into an app that you're working with. Really it's being able to publish and see your 3D object as soon as possible and immediately so that you can make a decision whether you like it or not and you can also share these with anybody around the world and they can pull up the same 3D object in their space and in real time and take a look at it. So building 3D for business and education, where to start, what are your ideas to make change? Really adding grid models, a digital hybrid model to current systems is the best way to start to engage in 3D and take those 3D steps. So taking a look at manuals or textbooks and adding 3D onto them, whether it be like a user manual or adding a tiger to a page and having a 3D object of a tiger sitting right beside you in that textbook. This is where our engine makes it possible or 3D makes it possible for that impraction of learning to be more immersive. Placing 3D models into your space to learn about them is one of the best ways of this technology to be able to introduce new ways of education and using different design perspectives with configurators and being able to change out different models is also a great way to engage in 3D and immersive applications into business and education. Visualizations data, for example, bringing in information from IoT sensors or simply just using visualizations from math or sciences is where the engine can provide and 3D can display a more immersive experience. So your takeaway today, what problem in the world could be better understood with 3D? And how does 3D offer solutions for business and education? And this is where the next generation, you could help us come up with some of these solutions using 3D to solve some of the world's biggest problems or maybe it's some of the community's problems or maybe your backyard problem, your school problem. We want to inspire innovation and using 3D to start to use that in immersive experiences for explanations, for lessons, for operations, for procedures. 3D is really that gateway into all of the technologies that are out there to become more immersed and to utilize and have a spatial understanding of how those objects reflect in the space. So will you create? I would love for everybody to take a look at our website and take a look at these different experiences. You can actually go to our showcase page, metaverse.com slash showcase and put that couch in your space and see what it looks like and then think about how 3D objects into your space. What could you do? What problem could you solve? And learning as much as you can right now about how these applications work within the space and the different business models and industries and how they're using it. Here's a list of resources. I've put our podcast right at the top there. The XR for Business podcast by Alan Smithson really provides a foundational understanding of every single industry out there and how you're using it in their space. And the XR for Learning podcast, I'm addressing all the different ways that we're teaching and learning differently and using 3D to immerse those experiences. So a little bit just to close off in collaboration tools that are out there and the reasons why this circle here represents a directory of over 70 different collaboration platforms that are out there that are hosting meetings and classrooms and places of learning, interaction and communication and collaboration engaged today as we are here. They are representing this space of being able to promote a place of collaboration to remotely learn and work and encourage you to take a look in our directory where you can go through the search filters and figure out what kind of assets and configurations do you need in your space to be able to collaboratively work with your team or your class. And the directory provides you with a narrowed down version of some of the companies that are out there. And the reason why I'm showing you this is because there are so many opportunities out there to become involved in the XR space and so many jobs and skill sets that are starting to evolve from designing all of these things. Everything from a 3D modeler to a creative technologist, data, cyber security, there's so many opportunities out there to become involved and to learn and understand all of these roles and how they'll play a role in the future of work for and of stand learning. So, you know, learn as much as you can, but remember that your most powerful skill is the unique ability to be creative and using technology like 3D to engage in any kind of experiences is really where it's at and the key is you. The key is you to create these solutions and to come up with innovative designs. So we look forward to seeing what you create and I thank you so much from the XPRIZE stage here and engage on the creative design process. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. And we look forward to seeing how you become involved in this 3D immersive world of ours. Thank you very much.


Aloha. I'm Marsha Joyner, and I am here from the Democratic Party of Hawaii, and we as a party are supporting statehood for Washington, D.C. It is, what can I say, it's been a hundred years that people have been trying to get statehood for D.C. The League of Women Voters wrote their first letter in support of statehood. Last year, the Democrats in the House supported statehood. It passed this House, but it did not pass the Senate. And that is because the district was to become a state that would give two more senators for the Democrats, which would give them a plus or the majority. And of course, the Republicans last year, the president, Trump, said, No, ask them, please don't, because that would give, again, they were in the majority then, but that would give the Democrats the majority. So now that that is real, and that's been the problem for a hundred years now, we are trying very hard. We want you to support the District of Columbia to become state. Now, if we look at the picture, you can see this is the District of Columbia, this little bitty space here in the capital was built. This land out here was the state or still is the state of Maryland. And they donated this part to build the capital. And this part was donated by Virginia in 1847, or they called it seating to the land within here is the federal area where all where the capital and the White House here, the White House is here. And all of this is the capital area over here is Maryland on this part. And this part is really which has been given back to Virginia. So where the airport is and you hear a lot about Arlington and Alexandria. This is on this side of the Potomac. So this little bitty piece is what we're asking for, that it has its own boundaries. This year, because they were not a state, they didn't get the amount of money that all the other states got for vaccines or COVID. And they pay a lot of tax, as you can see, taxation without representation. So they have a one member in the house, but she doesn't get the vote kind of crazy that this day and age that we would have a place that does not have voting rights. The people do not have they can't vote for president. It's amazing that we are now at this point. So we are asking you, like everybody else to write to DC to the mayor of DC and support statehood for Washington DC. The new president Biden is supporting statehood for DC and most of the big organizations like the League of Women Voters, they have been supporting forever. The NAACP is supporting lots and lots of big organizations are supporting statehood for DC. I'm asking you to join us and write to the mayor and your congressional district, write to them, tell them to support statehood for DC. Okay. Thank you so much. And remember your own congressman, write to them, tell them you want to support statehood for DC. And I thank you so much for spending this time with me and we'll see you next time.


Thank you to DataCamp for sponsoring this video. Due to the pandemic, many people like myself have been working from home. And as a matter of fact, I've been working from home the past 226 days. I have to admit that at first it was difficult transitioning from being an officer on my co-workers and friends, collaborating with each other, going on snack runs and coffee runs, aka fake Starbucks is what we like to call it. But now our means of communication is through a virtual chat or conference call. It was difficult at first, but I'm extremely blessed to have the ability to do my job anywhere as long as I have access to my laptop and wifi. So Python used to be my favorite programming language when it came to doing coding challenges and, you know, technical interviews. The reason being is because it's really easy to set up. You could just run a Python script and start practicing just like that through the terminal. Also, Python is dynamically typed so you don't have to worry about any annotations. Basically, it was just easier to code and work on those, you know, coding challenge questions and get to get some practice underneath my belt. The thing is, I haven't used Python in over like two years, like basically since college, which is why I'm happy to be working with Data Camp. Data Camp is an interactive experience that makes it easy for you to build your data science and analytical skill sets at your own pace with expert instruction and over 330 interactive courses combined through videos and hands-on exercises. You can learn programming languages and software development tools like Python, R, SQL, Pandas, and more. Data Camp's lessons are byte size so you can learn in a way that fits your schedule along with using any device. It also conveniently tracks your courses so you can find what fits your needs at a glance. The best way to learn is to apply what you've learned and then through practice. Using the interactive practice, it can help you refresh your memory and brush up on skill sets that you've had in a past or new skill sets. I personally started the introduction to Python course and done some interactive practice, which was a really nice experience and a quick way to brush up all my skill sets. As a front-end developer, I greatly appreciate the user experience of Data Camp's platform. One thing you don't want to do while you're learning something new is struggling, trying to find courses, or navigating a platform. But with Data Camp, you don't have to worry about that at all. It's really easy to navigate. You can find all the courses you need at a glance. Also, be sure to master your new skill sets with real-world projects and daily practice. I encourage you to sign up for Data Camp using this personalized link that will also be in the description box. Subscriptions start at $25 a month with unlimited access to the courses both on desktop and mobile. You also will have unlimited access to assessment tests that will guide you through starting to learn those new skill sets or new programming languages or software development tools. I think this is a great deal, especially for those of you all who are interested in data analytics, data science, and backend development. Once again, thank you to Data Camp for sponsoring this video. A routine is something that's never really excited me. As a matter of fact, if you ask any of my friends or my wife, they tell you, I'm free-flowing, spontaneous, I don't really like scheduling or planning things, that really drains me. I prefer having an open schedule and just going with the rhythm of how my day flows. However, I started getting into the routine of making coffee, and I'm not the most avid coffee drinker. I don't drink it every day because, one, I just get jittery, but also don't want my body to rely, want anything in order to wake up or feel motivated. Needless to say, the process of making coffee daily is part of my routine because, one, I've thoroughly enjoyed the pour over routine. The room is filled with the aroma of a fresh cup, which smells amazing, and most importantly, it makes my wife smile. Over these past 226 days, I've learned that routines are healthy. They give me something to look forward to, and the specific routines I'll try to stick to, doing at least one today, is working out, whether that's simply taking a walk, a peloton hit workout, or strength training along with the process of making a good cup of pour over coffee. During this very unpredictable and quite stressful time, you can lower stress levels by having a healthy routine. It's one thing I definitely recommend. It doesn't drain you, it definitely energizes you. Throughout this extended work from home experience, I've adapted and learned some new ways to keep a healthy work environment, along with staying inspired and motivated to be the best version of myself. So I decided to share these four tips with you. If you've been following my channel the past years, so I've made a handful of videos dedicated to my workspace. One, because it's so fun making that type of content and, you know, switching up my workspace. Also, it's something that we really hold dearly as developers because we're always at our desks. But it's really important to have a designated workspace for your home to work. So you can start working more effectively along with easily stepping away from your work and not having an unhealthy work or study life balance where you're working and studying all over the house, building an unhealthy routine, not dedicating a space to relax and spend time with those you love or doing what you love. Also over extended periods of time, ergonomics of your workspace become more and more important because those hours of bad posture or an uncomfortable setup can have a negative impact on your body, along with the overall quality of your work. Communication is something that I've personally been working on because as a software developer, it's really easy to get into your own little world and in the weeds of programming without really communicating with your coworkers. For one, communication with your coworkers, professors, peers and friends, be it teams, Zoom or whatever conference calling capable app you use is a great way to have a better sense of community, along with feeling more a part of the overall goal your team is trying to accomplish. Along with that, you also feel this sense of positively contributing to your team or department. Also, it's great for your mental health to communicate with others, whether you're talking about work or having a Zoom lunch meeting or a simple study session with the homies. Simply asking someone how their day is going can also really make a difference, especially during times like these. Last but not least, fitness. A fitness routine is something I really can't live without. Honestly, moving your body is something you absolutely need, especially in the circumstance where you're not as active as you used to be because you're quarantining or working from home. We no longer get a chance to be a little active at work where we walk across the building or down the hallway to go to our next meeting. We now just hit a button and we're there. I personally have had a lot of fun riding my bike around the city and exploring nearby parks, along with using the Peloton app to work out with my wife and one of my friends. The workouts actually really challenge me and you don't have to leave the comfort of your home because there are a ton of body weight workouts, so there's no excuse not to work out. Also, you might notice that you can get some of your best ideas while working out. You can also get out of whatever, you know, fun or unmotivated slump by simply challenging your body through fitness. You'll also notice that sitting at a computer screen all day, you know, banging your head against this problem that you just can't figure out can be less effective than having, you know, dedicated slots to work and dedicated slots to go, you know, get some sort of exercise and releasing those endorphins. And you might even solve that problem by doing a burpee or going on a jog. Okay, maybe not a burpee, probably something like a jog or a walk. So this concludes my video. I hope this was helpful. Comment down below some of your tips for working and studying from home. Subscribe to the channel if you haven't already. I love for you all to become a part of this fam and as always, have a blessed rest of your week. Peace.


This is Social Confidential, where Adweek's social media editors take a look behind the logo to find out who's tweeting and sharing from major brands. Today, I'm here with the minds behind the long boy gang, Slim Jim's mind-bogglingly engaged fan army. With me to discuss the brand's social media strategy are Evan Weisbrot, president of agency 180 New York, and Amy Morgan, brand communications manager at Conagra Brands. Back in 2018, the Slim Jim Instagram account had fewer than 10,000 followers. Could you tell me the story of how you found the pre-existing online community and translated that into over a million followers on Instagram and a rising number on Twitter? Slim Jim has a long-standing history of being bold, of being in your face, and we found people that were very eager to make fun of Slim Jim and more parroting the brand as it currently existed, and we thought those are the kind of people we want to recruit into our team. The minute that we saw someone reference a long boy as a product named for Slim Jim or a surrogate for a Slim Jim, we were like, that's what we are going to become. We are going to double down on long boy. So instead of the narrative being dictated by the brand, the narrative was now shared with this audience, and that's what created that groundswell of not only engagement but desire to be a part of something that was bigger than the brand itself. It was theirs. It requires a good deal of mutual trust, I think, to have a relationship like this. Can you tell me a little bit about that dynamic and where Conagra stands? What has really helped is just laying the groundwork with obviously the right people. The process is in place. We've got the guardrails in place, all the guidelines, you know, so that we really can say, all right, we trust that there's the judgment here to do what is expected from this community because it has to come from the community. You primarily focused on Instagram initially. This year, it really started amping up Twitter. How have you been activating and accelerating this new audience? The interesting place for Slim Jim to play on Twitter was finding a pocket of culture that I think was underserved by brands. Our interest is meet memes and community, and you look at the meme side and the community side, no one's got it better than Dogecoin. And we felt like if Slim Jim just showed up the right way, kind of started throwing the memes out there, doing all the super engagement stuff that we do, some amazing stuff could happen. We definitely attribute a lot of the Twitter success to the way that community has embraced us, but it works both ways. We are really trying to show love to a community that loves us back. And I don't know if any other better way than to kind of just do only good every day and to act as they do and to behave as they do. During this year's March Addness competition, Slim Jim managed to beat Oreo despite having only half the number of followers at the time. Can you explain how you pulled that off? We're audience marketers, right? We are community marketers and we're community builders. And so there's a difference between a community powered brand versus a top down kind of brand. And that really plays out in social media. I think that at the end of the day, it was just a combination of a lot of the fun that we've been having and a lot of the support that we've shown that they were very happy to receive. If you could give one piece of advice to social media managers, what would it be? I think there's a lot to be said for being prepared. When you have that foundation laid, I think it gives you the permission to feel comfortable with taking some risks, being able to act as quickly as you can because you can focus on the activation, build a team that you totally trust and you love working with. My piece of advice would lean into empathy above all else. Be way more human whenever you can. Know your brand to the point where it becomes a reflex, but know your audience even better so that you can be agile and adaptable. Amy, Evan, thank you for joining me. Thank you for having us. I'm Jessica Ferris. See you next time on Adweek's Social Confidential.


Hello guys, this is Andro from Onyx International. We are here at CES Convention in Las Vegas 2020, one more year again and this time we're introducing, very quick, I'm gonna show you the new in-phone 5.8 inches that we are introducing at CES. It still is a demo but already functioning. It has a CM card inside. We can call to different phones and already has the same Android 9.0 that all our other products has and very quick as you can see you can have several applications. The screen refresh is very fast. You have four modes of refresh. If you want to scroll on the browser internet or just reading and it's gonna be great. I mean this product is gonna be ready for the market around end of Q1 or beginning of Q2 2020 so stay tuned and check it out. Thank you. So how's it going at the CES? CES is being fantastic. For me it's the third year in a row and it's going really good because at this point we have new partners worldwide or new possible partners for the future so we are here hoping to close some deals and to start cooperating with some companies to develop the US market. So there's big potential in US? 300 million people? It's huge. We have the information that we got from our Amazon sales and everything indicates that the US market is very big and that most importantly that the American people love our products and they see the potential and they see how these products can be useful for them in their daily tasks. Alright and what's the other news around here? So basically as you have reviewed in your videos previously this one is the Note 2. The Note 2 if I'm not wrong you already reviewed it in Hong Kong which is already the latest 10.3 version which includes fingerprint recognition, a strong and robust hardware which includes 4GB RAM and an octa-core processor. At the same time we have improved a little bit the software now. You can take notes on top of up to 8 different files like PDF, EPUB, MOBI, DOC, HTML etc. So we are keeping improving our products. Also as you may remember we also have a handwriting recognition to digital text and also voice to speech software. So basically people will use this device for working and studying. So the momentum is going up, more and more people getting into this market? Yes because this of course is a process. Everyone in the very beginning compared this product with a regular 6-inch e-reader which of course has a technology as reference and also the function of reading but these big sizes go beyond that and also allow other features that as I said are good for working and studying. Once our brand is every time more known then of course we have more users, more followers and at the same time more business partners are willing to work with us. Right and here at CES you also have a colleague, an American colleague? Yes, Jason. Jason is our associate in the US and he's helping us to develop different niche markets. He's a professional of the American football and other sports and he's bringing our solution to different niche markets. So here at CES what's been the response from people and what do you usually show them? When you talk about American football is there a solution about this? Yes I think the use of the e-ing screen allows for the use out in the sunlight and so if I get a pen there. So by using the e-ing screen the thing that would be very useful to the outside world is I could be diagramming some plays. I could say here's some players here and I'm going to block this guy you're going to block him, block him and then we're going to run you're going to go fill here and I can show this the key is out in the sunlight I can be way far away from the athletes and the players. It's impossible to do with an iPad. It's impossible to do with an iPad because of the glare because of the glass screen but with the e-ing screen you're able to do this outside. It's one of the major benefits of this and so that's what I'm trying to use out in the real world out in the applications you know those markets obviously there's a lot of sports that are done outside where you can draw and reuse imagine a coach could also diagram these up go to the next play these things are saved you know with all the storage on this I can review this with my players at a later time using some film using my diagrams to help my athletes get better help my coaches be better strategists. Alright so at CES there's lots of interactions right? Yes everybody wants to come up they want to touch it they want to write on it they want to see what it's like writing mostly heard just all pauses about the writing experience it feels like paper you know writing whether you know you're writing research documents you're taking notes in the in your meetings just all these types of these things that are going on with business professionals you know this is made for business professionals and then the ease of jumping from a note taking device to the library where the PDFs can then be used and so now on a PDF you know I just have simple text here but you can thumb through any kind of PDF it changes then I can write right on it you know so if I'm doing some study doing some things like this I can change the way I view this a split screen you know most professionals are not used to the split view where they're going to have a PDF on one side of the e-ink screen and then taking like I said taking some notes on the other side So how big is the potential in the US market? Oh I think I mean there's business professionals all over the world there's athletes all over the world there's coaches you know the sky's the limit I think and one of the things is just educating our consumers about the benefits of this you know I don't know about you but I like reading on e-ink screens compared to a backlight monitor screen and I think in that aspect in the education world there's a lot of applications for that Alright cool so what's next also with Onyx? Well I don't know if you saw already the e-ink phone Yeah? Yeah so if you can Well the Android operating system is increasing Ah because now it's charging Now it's charging but I think you saw it you saw it before our CEO Kim showed it to the camera so basically we understand there is a huge market I mean everyone there is a million of people using smartphones every day 6 to 8 hours in front of the screen it is demonstrated that LCD screens and TFT screens damage the eyes so for that reason we mix e-ink technology with a smartphone solution and we have a device which you can use with the basic functions as a smartphone to call everyone and at the same time you can read all your e-books or news or messages in an eye-friendly screen so it's going to be, it's still not released we don't have yet a retail price neither nor a release date however it's going to be I guess around the end of Q1 maybe early Q2 2020 and well we hope it's going to be a success and this market is growing so this market you see more and more sales to compare to previous year in general you mean for your product yeah yeah of course of course as I said previously so in the very beginning the brand needs some time for people to know and also to know the products for us also it's some time to be improving our products in terms of software and also providing a robust hardware and at this point we already have a quite mature product but of course software has always room for improvement and of course we are everyday working to improve that and here at CES 2020 Hi Hi so here you have an e-ink phone looks phone how big is the screen 5.8 5.8 inch e-ink you can show the Android just stand and enjoy so looks nice is this coming to the market yes it's coming to the market it's not our first e-ink mobile phone actually it's the second you did one like six years ago right yeah you follow it yeah it was a big story everywhere it was the first one yeah that's the second and now do you mean that maybe now the hardware the CPU the screen is ready for big market you think of course we do it not only maybe we sell to some niche vertical market but also we only show to the market we can use it in our e-book reader in our e-ink tablet so it's great for reading books any books you want this is how it looks with the fingerprint sensor camera everything standard type C type C all right this is 5.7 and great for reading on the subway and you can turn off the front light you have front light yes we have right there's a way to do with the front light no problem right here this is a 5.7 and next to the 13.3 how's it going with max 3? max 3 is good good selling people love it which is a big market for this is it education is it a professional education and business and professional right lawyers and entrepreneurs and also some engineering people designers they like it where's the best market for you where are you selling more? we sell all around the world every country you sell a lot in China right? comparably in China those smaller have a better selling and in Europe and USA a lot of people like to take one they love a bigger one and here you have a keyboard you can use any bluetooth keyboard with all the devices bluetooth right? the onyx product have rich imaginations it's really cool and the price is still 800 800 something to some business partner we have some special policy to them if they make a big order you mean? not really just strategically we support those B2B partners to help them to have a vertical market to have more applications and when we look at this phone for example I saw that another company Heissens is doing something what do you think about that? yeah there's many people doing it many people are doing it and I think it's a good starting for them but for onyx we are experienced that people for using ink first of all they need to have a good reader so that's onyx good end and the Heissens is a color color is a prototype we have our color one four years ago in education for bigger size it's all the technology is it a color future? it's a color future it's not real color but if the technology gradually matured we will think about it how do you do the color? what's your technology about the color? the technology I think it's more suitable for children and we do it in our educational tablet four years before and there's also one you're talking about on this one it's called the poke where's the poke? sorry I can't find the poke yeah so you were saying something about a poke device also? yeah let me show you some interesting things my favorite is it ready for shipping? yeah very tiny very slight and the battery power consumption is very good so it's a how big? 6 inch 6 inch alright


What's up everybody, Jason here for jaspyscagebrace.com, 2022 Panini VIP National Exclusive, Golden Silver Pack break number 16 just sold out. Four random teams each, so again this is 25 gold packs, 20 silver packs from the national, and again these packs are super loaded guys. 21 total spots, we're going to quadruple up your names, so there's 84 total teams and just remember we're going by college rules. So non-pro uniforms, that's college rules, so actively going to the team they're currently on, retired players will go to the team that they played for the longest. And again there should be some hits as all others not on this list, there could be all NASCAR racing, etc, etc, so just remember that. So we quadrupled up your names, and then there are the numbers, or teams I should say. So let's click roll, we got ourselves a 6 and a 3 for 9 times, good luck. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Boom, nine times, six, three, nine, Brett down to brepping. Alright so there you go, nine times, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Falcons down to the Steelers. So basically this in Brett pretty much has the majority of these, I'm just going to alphabetize it by customer name and show you the other two customers what they got, and then the rest will be Brett. Or I should say Brett, these are the only teams you don't have, which Howard has the Nationals, Dolphins, Cowboys, and Colts, and then Jan you have my Eagles, you have the Chargers, Cavs, and Grizzlies. The rest goes all to Brett, so you basically just don't have those Brett, everything else you do have. So you have the rest right here buddy. And we do have enough for a couple more guys like I mentioned, but we are running out, so I'll post the number 17. Alright well I'm assuming also there won't be any trades right, I mean I'd assume not, so let's just keep it at that. I'll print this out for the shipping team. Let's just close the trade window and start guys. Alright guys, so again 25 gold, 20 silver, so 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20. And I'm just going to do these pack by pack. Maybe a little easier. Haley Deegan. The car has any towns. That's an orange number 299. Jen Suggs with a Brett Favre, number 250. Scotty Barnes for the Raptors. That's $1199. Joey Logano, number 299. Andre Franco, Juan Soto for Washington. Christian Pulsik to 25. Walter Payton for the Bears. Bobby Wood Jr. to 99. Kate Gunningham with a nice Tom Brady to 199. Colleen Kershaw, Jamison Williams to 199. Bryce Harper to 50. And a splash right, Patrick Mahomes. Kansas City. I think that should be Brett, right? Since I think Chiefs. Yes, there you go, Brett. Kansas City Chiefs. Lamello Ball. And a Tatum, 4 out of 5. Autograph, wow. Boston Celtics, also one of Brett Bain. Look at that. 5 out of 5 for the Celtics. Great Silverpacks here. Hey, Manny. Josh Allen Purple, which had a 25. Ronald Acunha Jr. and Cooper Cup. All right, so there you go. That's all the Silverpacks. And I must say besides getting the numbered cards, getting a splash super short print and a Tatum out of 5. It's not a bad Silverpack run right there. Now here we go for the Goldpacks. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, and 25. Here we go. All right, first one, Adley Retron, number 299. Tilo, Casey Meyes, little snakeskin. And an Emanuel Quickly, to 15. Dan the Manorino Hyper. And a George Brett, little Camel Pandora, number 25. And a Jeff Gordon Tiger Stripe, each a real hyper. Mac Daddy Jones, Magic Johnson, Pay Manny. Shaquille O'Neal. Adley Retron. And an Anthony Davis snakeskin for the Lakers. John Morant, Gold Wave. Look at that. 10 of 10. And Grizzlies, I think, was one of the teams that Brett didn't get. And yes, that's going to Jan. There you go, man. Justin Herbert. We have a Lionel Messi. We're going down to the wire, guys. Mookie, little ice. Brett Favre, Jerry Rice. David Beckham, to 99. Ooh, we've got some thickies here. Here we go. Devin Booker to 10. Gold for the Phoenix Suns. And Phoenix Suns. That is Brett. And Lamar Jackson to 10. Nice patch there for the Baltimore Ravens. Another one there for Brett. A out of five Kyle Pitts. Two-color patch. Atlanta Falcons. Who has the Falcons? I think that might be Brett. Yes, Las Con Mojo, Brett, too. One out of five. And last one here. I'm going to pick one here. At a 25, Trevor Lawrence. For the Jacksonville Jaguars, going to Brett. Silver Packs and Gold Packs for you guys tonight. That's for sure. There you go, guys.  Last four right there. John Marengold. A little snake skin. Tiger Striped Snake Skin. Jason Tatum to five. And a little splash. Patrick Mahomes there. 18 to 25. So, I appreciate you guys. Number 17 is in the store. Jasby'sCaseBrace.com. Thank you.


Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I'm really really excited for this session And I know it's the I am the only thing between you and some nice cold beers at the end of the days So I'm gonna try my best to entertain you, but you let me know at the end you be the judge So this is the hitchhiker's guide to pod security. I Have gone through the galaxies of pod security and condensed all the learnings.  Oops. We're gonna take you through that guidebook And I have a couple of goals for you in the next 35 minutes. We're gonna learn together So my hope is that everybody leave this session You go back to your lives and you turn on pod security in your clusters And you report back if my learnings actually helped you with your journey to pod security But I would love to see more secure kubernetes clusters out there So what you're gonna learn today is how to use some features in kubernetes to achieve that so I hope Hold me to this and let me know at the end that you'll feel comfortable Going back and turning this on if you don't please ask me for more. I'm happy to give it to you so our journey today has a few pit stops and Hopefully do we have any hitchhikers go to the galaxy fans in the room? I'll make a few puns I'll make a few puns. So you see the emojis up there. There's already a few and I I should have brought my hand towel up on A stage as well, but I forgot it. We're gonna go over the pod security concepts. We're gonna see it in action I have recorded demos. I'm not cool enough to do them live because I've seen the internet here today But you're gonna be able to see them after the fact And you're gonna be able to take them with you and then I'm gonna share some next steps How to turn it on how to get comfortable and how to use it in your environment and be successful with it? So we will go through all this and more, but I guess you want to know who you're talking to Who's talking to you about this? My name is Locky Evenson Lachlan Evenson. I listen to both You can call me. Hey mate or whatever I'm a product manager at Azure on the upstream team where we work in cloud native ecosystem tooling To help make folks successful in the community. You'll see me around In this space. I'm a CNCF ambassador. I'm on the governing board. I've served on kubernetes steering I built a kubernetes release that hopefully didn't ruin your life 1.16 if it did please give me that feedback I love travel language hiking and experiencing different cultures I'd like to learn seven languages while i'm here on earth I know three currently if you don't count australian and english as two different languages Okay, good now, you know who's talking to you we can get on with that. Thank you very much Okay, so let's get into the concepts. Let's get into What we're here to talk about Before I get into all the details I want to go over what is pod security and you might have heard pod security or pod security administration pod security is a built-in So I have everything bouldered admission controller. It is built in you don't need any extra software to run this It is there and you can use it in kubernetes today Yeah, what does it do? It evaluates pod specifications against a predefined set of pod security standards. Don't worry about that I'll tell you exactly what they are, but they're super important They are applied at the namespace level So you apply policy to each namespace you would like pod security or apply to And they are action when pods are created In those namespaces It is currently in beta or beta for you americans And uh as of kubernetes 1.23 which is now Not the current release the one behind so we're on release in and it is planned If you all give it a thumbs up after this To go to stable in 1.25, which is the next release. I've got some links down there. Just follow along here I'll post the deck later so you can grab the links and whatnot Excellent Why I think it's important to say why am I telling you about this? Why would you I want to know this? So what we want to do again is level up the security of your kubernetes clusters and the workload specifically that are running on them So the pod This provides policy standards to restrict pod privileges Why would we want to restrict pod privileges to make our workloads more secure if they are ever compromised? We're reducing the surface area of attacks and therefore making your cluster more secure by doing so as well They are simple and easy to use that was written on the cap for this feature They have to be super super simple. Hopefully I can illustrate that they are indeed super simple Predefined so you don't have to go make up some magic standards There is a set that already exist and you simply can refer to them by name It supports and encourages kubernetes security best practices So if you use these you will be in line with pod security best practices out of the box You don't have to do much and it performs validation only we'll cover this a little bit later But you might be thinking can I change resources? The answer is you cannot And we'll talk about some different options for doing that What about The elephant in the room or maybe the fish in the room the babble fish in the room What about pod security policy? You may have heard of this or have used it and been terribly disappointed when you heard it was deprecated It is going to be removed in kubernetes 1.25. So if you're still using it today Don't worry. I'm going to go over how you can migrate to this so that you won't be broken in the next release The difference is however, it does not have a feature parity with pod security policy So there are some gotchas which are a call out specifically It does not support mutation and mutation is the ability to change kubernetes resources server side when you're creating them Okay Moving right along here. I'm going to cover the migration story So if you're in this path, I'm not going to go into terrible detail But there is a migration plan. It is well documented on the kubernetes docs So you can go from pod security policy today, which is deprecated and being removed in three months four months To pod security, which we're talking about today. There is a link to do it. There is a Well-defined process of how to do it and hopefully if you follow along I know a lot of time and effort has gone into that if you're in that situation. You should be okay Okay, everybody following along so fast So far cool so far. Okay, excellent Other secret other similar ecosystem tooling So I'd be remiss to mention that there is an ecosystem of tooling out there You may have heard of some of these different tools But pod security is designed to provide a built-in set of capabilities that include the security of your workloads It's not supposed to be the only thing So it's complementary and composable that last point So there are other projects out there if you want to do more complex things I'm going to name two there on the screen there kivono and gatekeeper if you're interested in more complex pod security use cases Pod security use cases and This is designed to be composable. So this is complementary. You can use this and others as well And again, these aren't all of them. I just list two there for the interest of showing you some others All right, now we're going to get into the elements of of Pod security we have a built-in admission controller It may be run as a standalone webhook So if you are running earlier versions, then the version this became beta in which was 1.22 You can actually deploy this in earlier versions using a webhook admission Admission controller won't go into the details. You just need to know that exists There are three different security of three different policy levels known as pod security standards That range from permissive, which means you can do everything to restrictive Which means it removes all the things that you shouldn't be doing that are known to be Areas that cause security threats The policies are applied with a specific mode of per namespace We'll go into these modes and you can apply multiple modes to a namespace That'll be critical. We'll go over that as well with different policy levels And we'll go over why you might want to do that at the same time They're the elements you need to know lost the monitor And we're back That was very dramatic I didn't record that this isn't recorded That I know of okay, so let's take a look at the Pod security standards. These are the levels that you will be using And they are predefined levels privilege, which is open and unrestricted as I mentioned baseline This covers the no one privilege escalations while minimizing restrictions So this is where you want to get to for a start if you have nothing And have never looked at this before the goal state you want to get to is baseline for starters And then restricted is the highly restricted if you have really high security interests This takes out the most security prone pieces of pod Specification and make sure that you're in the most restricted mode, but be warned it may cause compatibility issues So it's up to you to decide I think a great goal would be that every kubernetes cluster and every namespace has baseline Pod security standards applied to them. I think that would be a cool goal to have Okay, but what about these specific standards? What are in these standards? So they are well documented the link is down the bottom. I'm not going to go over every Piece of the pod specification that is indeed restricted by these different pod security standards But here are some example of different fields. So speck dot security contest assist calls speck dot host network. They are covered There is a wide range of Different pieces of the spot pod specification that are defined in that link down the bottom So too many to list But you can go and have a look at the different pieces and I'll show you them in action So don't worry about writing them down again applied per namespace Which allows you to have granular or different levels different levels of security standards Based on your needs per namespace You may not want to apply restricted to cube system namespace for example, but you may want to do it to your default workload namespace Okay elements of pod security So these things are applied in a specific mode And there are three different modes and they can be set on a namespace And you can have different policy levels per namespace as well. The three modes are in force Which says I will not allow this it'll Strictly block it audit it will post something in the audit log and warn. It will actually fire a warning message back to the user Stating that hey, this is in violation of this policy And you might want to do something about it, but it will allow it to be created So you can actually get user feedback if you define a non-compliant resource within force You'll actually get an error message back via cube ctl that says this policy has been violated Okay, so just remember those three Sorry Water break Okay Okay in addition and I'll show you how to do this with labels on a namespace you can pin policy So for each version of kubernetes, there will be Changes to the pod security standards. Why is this important? Because if it changes over time and you're not familiar with those changes and you upgrade kubernetes You might break your workload. So this allows you to pin much like everybody pins all their version dependencies and software, right? Oh bad joke. Sorry too soon too soon But you can pin the specific versions pin the specific versions allows you to have consistent behavior. You can say Baseline colon latest you can say baseline colon v1.22 and that will apply Because remember this is built into kubernetes. So you can strictly version pin Okay, so let's get on to enabling pod security and how we might go about doing that. So 123 it's enabled by default because beta features are actually enabled by default So you can use this on any 1.23 cluster out of the box If you're on 1.22, you'll need to set a feature flag on the api server to actually allow this feature to be created Um, so if you don't have access to the flags that get run on the api server, you might have to wait You could also take the option down the bottom which the third bullet which is you can deploy a webhook admission admission controller Mouthful for me at this time of the day And you can deploy that on versions one dot lower than 1.22 if you want to test this out Now I had to put the disclaimer here as we're going through the galaxy. Don't test this in production. No, no, no You might get uh, unexpected uh outcomes So get familiar with it in a development setting a lab cluster spin it up on kind Start seeing how it works before you turn it on. I don't want anybody calling me saying locky You tell me to do this and I blew up prod. Don't want to hear it. Okay, you've been warned okay Configuring so these are the two labels that you need to apply to a namespace So you have the pod-security dot kubernetes.io slash mode What are the three modes? Excellent. Yeah, you got them all and force One and audit they are the three modes. So That is required specifically to enable it. The second one there is version pinning, which is completely optional There is so if you say hey locky, I don't want our users defining pod security policies or labels on namespaces No, no, no, I can't have that. There is an admission configuration Uh way that you can do it by setting a config file and actually having the api server pick it up So that users don't configure anything So there is a way to do that and there's a way to do regexing excluding namespaces Um, so you can do that. Um, so as I've got the star down there at the bottom So possible modes there again and force audit worn These are important. Okay configuring So The specific version can be applied for the enforcement mode. Why would we do this? We have remember worn audit Um, and uh, what's the other one? Enforce exactly. Thank you. So you usually start with worn give the users back warning Um, and then you move on from worn to enforce So, uh, this is you might be able to warn on one level and enforce on another for example You might want to move from Privileged to baseline so privileged to baseline so you might enforce on privileged But worn on baseline so that you can actually help the workloads that are currently deployed Move up so the users will actually get a warning message The workloads will still be deployed But you can say hey, you're not in compliance fix it so you don't get this warning message the actionable I'll show you and then you can move from Privileged up to baseline and then even subsequently up to restricted We're good so far everyone up in the rafters Good see thumbs up excellent Okay, we're going to go into some demos in a minute. So, uh, what I wanted to show you is What actually an audit piece looks like without filtering through an audit log So if you have audit logging on your cluster You will see a message that looks like this So this one says allow privilege escalation does not equal false for the container busy box It must be set in the security context allow privilege escalation each false Unrestricted capabilities. So there's a bunch of areas there You can put them in audit logs and people looking at audit logs can actually see where things have been fired I will also show you that we publish a set of metrics That you could scrape with Prometheus to see which policies are indeed Being hit how often they're being hit so that you can see from your monitoring tool how it's operating as well So I'll show you that Okay from here We're going to show you it in action and by the way, I got all these images from the free and public nasa images site They have wonderful images of space. That is the Hubble telescope, which is fantastic. Okay So we're going to take a look at how this works. So I'm going to walk through some different examples here with you And what I'm going to do is demonstrate don't worry about this There is a blog specifically where you can reconstruct these whole demos by yourself all the commands are published So you'll be able to take this from a kubernetes blog and run the exact same thing So for this first demo, we're going to confirm specifically that pod security is enabled because You want to make sure if you're going through all this work that you're actually doing it on a cluster That's has the feature enabled. So I'm going to kick this off here Let's see if it if it does on my click. There we go. Okay So I kind of walk through the demo here in the top half of my vs code I have the script that I'm going to run with some comments about what you should see and down the bottom half I have a live and running cluster. So I'm just going to show you that I indeed have a 1.23.5 cluster here That's up and running. So there's no, you know, I'm not pulling a rabbit out of a hat It's all up and running And you're going to see that there are some nodes on that cluster as well In the blog, we actually show you how to Run this up with kind. So I'm actually using a kind cluster if you don't know kind check it out It's a great tool for testing out these features and running with them Okay, so what I'm going to do in this to check that if it's enabled I'm actually going to check the api server flags if you do not have access to the api server flags You cannot run this this will not work, but you can run this command and specifically I'll go and highlight it in that big list Of different admission controllers that pod security is indeed present in that list That means pod security is indeed enabled on this cluster and that I can use this feature Now I'm going to quickly quickly show you a Quick dry run where you can actually test if it's working as well So what we're going to do is we're going to create a namespace The reason why you'd run this is if you don't have access to the api server flags I'm going to go through this We created a namespace. What do we have to do with the namespace to turn this on anybody? Label it I'm going to label it So here I'm going to label it with enforce equals restricted So I'm running that command now and then I'm going to actually just show you the yaml of that specific namespace called verify dash pod dash security Just to prove that that label is indeed there I'll go and highlight it and you can see it there in the list that that is applied to that specific namespace So what we're going to do here is Actually do an interesting command. So if you don't know this one, it's a fun one to test. We're going to do A run So we're going to run test with the image busybox, but we're actually going to do a dash dash dry run equals server So I'm going to try to apply this And it violates the policy and I actually get an error back that it's forbidden because it violates pod security policy restricted colon latest So because of these reasons, so there are many reasons there in that list that this workload Violates that policy, but that's just a great way for you to test that it's running You apply a restricted to a test namespace and then actually try to dry run Create a workload on the cluster so dry Dry run server is something I use all the time to test the capabilities without actually having to run a workload Okay, so that's the end of this first demo I just wanted to make sure that everybody was on the same page about checking that it was indeed on in their cluster Because I know not everybody is running 1.24 if is there anybody running 1.24 Yes, I've got a prize for you Okay. Yeah. No, excellent. So I know it's relatively modern 1.23 1.24 So you need to check that it's indeed Enabled now we're actually going to go through what it looks like To apply some policy then create a workload that violates that policy then try to bring it into compliance. Okay sound good Excellent. Thank you All right. I'll kick this one off. So we're going to apply create a privileged level Uh enforce on privileged and create a workload. So again, I'm going to create the namespace Verify dash pod dash security that's indeed created Gonna label the namespace with the dash dash overwrite Because I didn't clean up the labels from last time on this test cluster And we're going to enforce on restricted and we're going to audit on restricted Okay So we're getting the hang of this now, right? Everybody knows what we need to do to turn this on And now we're going to take our privileged workload And deploy it to the namespace We expect this to be forbidden. Why do we expect this to be forbidden? Because I have in this pod security context allow privileged escalation equals true And that violates the restricted policy So we're going to go and use this pod specification and apply it to the kubernetes cluster And what we should expect is an error back And indeed we get an error for the pod busy box privilege forbidden violates Allow privilege escalation does not equal false So again a useful error message for your users. They can understand that they can see exactly what they need to do to fix that But that will not be created because we're enforcing on restricted Okay, I'm going to go ahead and actually update it to say we're enforcing on privileged We're warning on baseline as I said and auditing on baseline So we actually have mixed mode there across enforce warn and audit And as I said, this is a great way to enforce and make our users move help users move to baseline Okay, so I'm going to deploy this privileged workload And then we're going to check if it's running. So do we all think it'll run this time? Yes, okay. Let's see. Let's see Cue the jeopardy music Okay, it is indeed created because we actually Set the privileged policy. So we're allowed to have privilege escalation is privilege escalation great in pods No, it's not Okay, so I'm going to run some cleanup here and now we're going to work through more complex on restricted Workload so that you can see exactly how you might be able to clean them up and Look at them. You can see that it's running even though in the brackets at the top I say that it will not be running on the node, but you can see the pods running because um, you can actually schedule to the control plane node on on kind by default Okay, so I've cleaned up That's a privileged level workload. Now we're going to move on to a restricted level and workload So let's take a look at this one and then we go and have a look at some metrics Okay, so again create the namespace Okay, now we apply the labels to the namespace. What we're doing this time is enforcing on restricted last time We enforced on privileged that we're enforcing on restricted and auditing on restricted So we're going to deploy a restricted workload in this namespace and you're going to see a little different behavior this time Which is is really interesting Okay, so here's our Restricted pod and we actually have a security context with a loud privilege escalation false and we add a capability Net bind service, which if you look up in the pod security standards, I should be able to do that Under the restricted pod security standard. So I expect that to be okay, but let's let's see what happens Okay, it is forbidden. Why is it forbidden? Unrestricted capabilities. What does unrestricted capabilities mean? You actually have to explicitly set fields in the pod Specification when using the restricted you cannot infer that default values are compliant So you have to explicitly set in this case that error I need to drop all the capabilities if I don't explicitly put that in my pod Specification, I will not be compliant. So here I am. I'm dropping all the capabilities All specifically and adding the net bind. So again, I think I've addressed this as as a user But this is interesting with restricted policy It does not allow you to use default values that a computed server side It wants them to be upfront. So that is indeed created And we are great there now. I want to go through one other use case here, which I think is really interesting Check out the pod the pod is stuck in container create config error What's going on it passed the policy? I thought we were good. I don't know what's going on So what I'm going to do is go and describe the pod in my normal cube control Debug we have a really interesting error message here that we can take a look error container has non run as non root An image as root So only when we execute the container do we actually see that it wants to run as root And we can't have any containers running as root, right? No, no, no So now that we've seen that we can actually go and fix this up And what we need to do is actually set in the pod specification that the pod cannot run as root again This is getting these pod security best practices out there and allowing you to have a safer Operating environment for your workload. So I'm specifically setting to the runner's user 65 534 Um, so this pod will now not be executed as root In the container namespace Or the pod namespace I should say So again, we're going to go ahead and create this now that I've set it to run as a non root user It's created and I'll go check. I'll do a Get pod and make sure the pod is running Hopefully it's running this time excellent So there we can actually see it'll actually be blocked as the pod's trying to execute because it's Violates the policy by running as root. Okay, we're going to clean up there one more demo quickly This is how I'm going to show you the metric end points so that you can go grab them. I'm actually using cube Uh, cube control get dash dash raw slash metrics But you could have Prometheus scrape these metrics endpoints and we're going to grab pod underscore security underscore evaluations underscore total Now why this is important is you can light this up and you're monitoring dashboard and actually see Hey, what have I got? I've got a mode of enforce Set uh policy level set to privilege latest on this specific namespace and we can see that's been hit 17 times So you can actually light this up in your Prometheus or any of your monitoring dashboards and know Where all your violations are happening or where all the uh allows are happening So this is just a great way to light it up and you can actually see externally without trawling through audit logs Exactly what's going on here Okay That good you feel confident Cool, that's that sounds pretty confident to me Okay next steps. So as I said, what are you going to walk away with here as we round up Okay, go experiment. I want everybody to start playing with this understand it. It's not scary It wasn't scary for me and hopefully it's not scary for you Use warn and audit on existing namespaces And there is a really really cool trick. You might say to me. Hey, lucky. I have clusters everywhere. There is stuff everywhere How could I possibly turn this on that sub point you can use dry run To evaluate all the violations of all the workloads that are currently In a namespace when you apply the label and force So when you do label and force on a namespace that has a bunch of pods You will actually get an evaluation and say all these pods violate that policy If you run dry run, it's not going to action it You're not going to apply the label But you have a list that you can burn down On a specific namespace to bring all those workloads back into compliance So this isn't just something you turn on in a brand new cluster and figure it out You actually have some tools to go and introspect and safely use it on clusters that already have a bunch of workloads to deploy Okay, I always say, you know general set warn to the same level as a force Because that helps you get some user user feedback And make a goal so you want to you want to start at privileged and you want to work to baseline You want to make sure that all your namespaces are at least a baseline And then selectively figure out which workloads could run to it restricted Think you got it Okay, I feel like I'm leaving everybody in good hands This time next year, I don't want to see a talk at kubecon saying how pod security ruined my life and lucky ruin my life But if it is I'll sit in the front row and listen Okay, I just want to say thank you for coming on this journey through pod security with me So now it's handed over to you so long and thanks for all the fish and I do want to thank our bridget Tim and jim for their review. Thank you very much Enjoy your kubecon booth roll I'll be hanging around outside here. If anybody has any specific questions I'd be happy to talk to you and answer them, but uh, you can come find me. I'll be here all week. Thank you


The Crow Wing Soil and Water Conservation District is in the middle of its annual plant and tree sale. Today, they held their open house event to promote the sale and to teach people the importance of planting trees. At the open house, several different conservation efforts were promoting tree planting, explaining the connection between water quality and vegetation. The seeds for sale are all natives and people can order their plants online until the end of the month. The goal for the Crow Wing Soil and Water Conservation District is to see 1 million trees planted this year. Places that don't have vegetation like trees or plants, they're a lot more likely to erode and that's kind of what degrades the water quality to is all that sediment going into the lake. If there's no trees in the ground, it's not habitat, it's not doing any water quality benefits. If it's not getting planted, it's not doing any good. So make sure to get them in the ground. Seed pickup is scheduled for May 2nd and 3rd at the Crow Wing County Fairgrounds.