Hi everyone. My name is Nick Roy, and this is OSINT and the Hermit Kingdom, learning more about the world's most secretive nation. So just a quick introduction about myself. I've been in security for a little over eight, nine years now. I've worked for automation companies. I've done some app development, vulnerability management. I'm based out of Boston. I'm online as SuperDuctos, and I always think all good presentations need to start off with a picture of cats. So this is a picture of my cat Frank, and generally the look he gives me whenever I'm working on something. So let's get right into it. What is OSINT? I'm sure everyone here is familiar with this. So just a brief introduction. It's really data collected from any kind of publicly available sources. It's not related to any kind of open source software or collective intelligence. And really there's a lot of paid services out there, but today we're going to be looking at what's free and what can be found from the comfort of sitting on our own couch. So one of the benefits of OSINT is less risky. We're just going out and essentially doing some really creative searches to find some different pieces of information that we might be looking for. It is cost effective. I think the grand total that I've spent on all of this has been about $20 over the last probably two years, two and a half years it took to put all of this together. It is pretty easy to gather. I did all of this from the comfort of my couch while watching the Stanley Cup playoffs. And certainly I am not a lawyer by any means, but everything's already online that we're looking for. Now some of the challenges of OSINT that we might run into, this is something that I'm sure everyone is faced at one point or another. There is a lot of data out there, especially if we're not really sure what we're looking for. A lot of the times when I started this they really didn't have anything in mind for something specific I was looking for. It was really just kind of doing some general searches to get an idea of what was out there and what I could find. And then I could start to narrow it down from there. But I never really started out with any kind of plan or any kind of hypothesis that I wanted to prove. So there is a lot of data out there. Sometimes reliability is something we need to worry about. Again, this isn't data that we're actually going out and creating ourselves. We're gathering this from available sources. And then certainly revealing all this data can be a challenge. I still have tons of data related to this project that I just haven't had a chance to get through yet. It's pretty easy to automatically gather this data. The kind of piecing things together and making sense of it is where we can start to run into some challenges. Now I'm North Korea. This is a question that's come up a couple of times since I've done this talk now.  But really it started probably about 10 years ago. I saw a video on YouTube, the Vice Gads North Korea. And I thought it was interesting, fairly from the perspective of they went on a tour and you got to see a little bit of just day-to-day lives of everyone there. So this is really not anything related to any kind of APT activity. This isn't related to anything malware or political. This is really just looking to see what can we learn about the internet in North Korea sitting on our own couch. So let's start to gather some information and see what we can find. There's a couple of ways that we can start to gather this data. Today we're going to focus on really the first two items here, passive and semi-passive data. Passive is anything that we can find online. Semi-passive is where maybe I'm going to go out and use a website to go scan a target for me. But I'm still keeping that site between myself and whatever I'm researching. And we really want to avoid active. I don't want to just run an AdMap scan and do all of my discovery that way. I want to rely on what's publicly available. And today what we want to start to identify, we want to see what's on the North Korean IP space. We want to start to define what the North Korean IP base is. What kind of services are running there? What kind of operating systems can we find? And we'll start to branch out from there and see what else we can learn. As we do, start to find more and more pieces of data that we can work with. So to start off, we need to define our scope. And this one's pretty easy. There is four Class C networks that are assigned to North Korea. We can see it here, 17545.176 to 179. This is really what we're going to focus on today. There are a couple of other IP address ranges that we can see. There's never really been anything too interesting on them. And quite honestly, there's always a little bit of a debate about whether or not they're actually used by North Korea. So we're really just going to focus on what we know is actively used and maintained by North Korea. But what do we do if there's not a Wikipedia article? Well, there's a couple of things we can do. We can pick a domain that we know about. In this case, I'm looking at Apple.com as an example. We can use the dig command. That's going to give me the IP addresses for this server that's responding. And then I can do a who is lookup here where I can get the ASN or the Autonomous System number. This is how we essentially register IP addresses to an organization. I can look up ASN 714. I can see that it is owned by Apple and all the IP ranges that they own. And this is something we can easily do for our North Korean ranges. So even if we think that someone might have edited the Wikipedia article, we can still go in and validate this information. And we can confirm that those four Class C networks are where we want to start looking and see what we can find. So how many servers are online? This is what we want to start to answer next. What's actually active out of these 1024 IP addresses? Now, this was something I found from back in 2010. This was the earliest example I could find of anyone actually scanning North Korea's IP space. At the time, it looks like they had about 12 servers online. So we have a little bit of a starting point, but we want to start to understand what's changed over the years, what's online now, and there's a couple of places we can turn to. One of my favorite places to search because you can find a lot of interesting information there. Is searching GitHub. So this is where I found actually a number of people who are scanning North Korea. And they're publishing all their results online. So they're running Nmap scans. They have nice repo set up where you can easily search through these. So there's a lot of different projects out there that are actually just scanning the Internet and interesting targets and making it available on GitHub. And we'll talk about GitHub again. There's a couple of other fun things that I found on there as well related to North Korea. But you can find all sorts of things on GitHub that maybe people aren't actually putting that on purpose. I found company API keys. I've reported them. I've seen entire dev repos just deleted because of things that were left there accidentally. There's a lot of good information that you can find on GitHub. Now there's a couple of other places that you can check. Shodan, the Internet-wide scanning project is a great place to check. If you do have your Black Friday key or if you haven't purchased that yet, it's the best $5 I've ever spent. I think I've bought it a few times now. But this is a way where we can start to just see what Shodan knows about these various devices. We can find if there's a number of them reporting here. And again, we want to try to just validate our data as much as possible. We have some end map scans. We have Shodan data. Census is another Internet-wide scanning project that we can look at. So between all of these different services, there's information that we can find online. We can generally get a good idea of what's available online anytime and the North Korean IP space. So this is my very crude drawing that I did. But we can see that there's really three subnets that are in use. 176 subnet is where most of the activity is happening, where most of these servers are deployed. 77 and 78, there's a couple of things here and there. Sometimes these numbers fluctuate a little bit. 79 really don't see anything happening there too much ever. If you do ever see traffic connecting to there, usually it's not a good thing. There's been a couple of reports for various pieces of malware that are connecting back to that 179 space. But this at least starts to narrow down what we're looking at. And now we have a pretty decent idea of where we're starting. So now that we know what's alive, we've narrowed down our 1,024 IP addresses to just 20 to 30 different hosts depending on what's online and what's resolving that day. So the next thing we want to do is we want to start to get a better understanding of what's actually running on these devices. And this is one of the only times we'll actually go ahead and do any kind of active probing. We're just going to put that IP address into our browser. And we can see some interesting information here. We see that it's running Apache 480. But we can see that the operating system is RedStar 4.0. Now if you're not familiar with the RedStar operating system, this is a state-sponsored operating system developed in North Korea. There's two different versions of it. There's a desktop and a server version. There's a couple guys in Germany that did some great work really digging into the desktop version. They found all sorts of nasty things in there. One that deletes files if there are certain strings of text in there. Those get deleted automatically. Another one that actually watermarks files in the background. The watermarks actually stack so you can see who made changes and who had ownership of a file at any time as it's being changed and shared. So they have a great GitHub repo. If you do want to take a look at some of their research, some of the tools that they've published for disabling a lot of these malicious components, you can find that online. They have a great talk about it as well. But if you haven't seen what RedStar looks like, version one had the nice Windows XP theme to it. Version two changed it up a little bit. A little more of the traditional Linux flavor to the desktop. Version three was an interesting change because around this time, we started seeing pictures come out from North Korea where they actually had Apple computers in the country. So naturally the operating system needed to change to reflect that. Now we know that version four is available inside of North Korea. If you do want to try versions two or three, you can find them online. You can find them on archive.org. It's pretty easy to download them and get them going. We know version four is available. One because, well, we saw it reported when we browsed to that IP address. But again, even if we don't want to trust that, maybe we don't trust the banner that we're looking at. This is from a magazine called Foreign Trade of the DPRK. They published this magazine online on one of their commerce websites. And if you're looking for some really interesting things that you might be interested in buying, a lot of interesting things in here. But there was an article in there a couple of months ago about how Red Star 4.0 was developed and released in the country. How great it is, how many people love it in the country. So we do know that it is generally in use. It's being put to use inside the country. It hasn't made its way outside yet. But we do know that it exists. And typically development does seem to be something that's in development and worked on pretty frequently. I did mention that there's two different versions of Red Star. There's the desktop version, then there's the server version. I haven't seen a lot of people really look at the server version too closely. So I started digging into it a little bit. I haven't had a lot of time yet. As far as I can tell, there really isn't the same kind of monitoring or surveillance tools available on here. But there are some interesting things that you can find on here. Beam and RSS mom, which we'll talk about in a minute. SE tools, which is a nice graphical interface for managing SE Linux.  And this was something that really caused me some headaches for a while. I knew that I was the root user. But when I started trying to dig through the file system, I was still getting permission denied errors. I was still getting these messages popping up asking for a password. What I learned was it's actually using the Bell Lepageval model for enforcing access control. If you're not familiar with this, essentially the concept is you have various classification for different files and directories on your system so you can have secret, top secret. And that's similar styles enforcing who has access to things. And essentially this is applied here. So even though I was the root user, I still didn't have enough permissions to access certain things on the operating system. So this is where we need to find a way that we can essentially escalate our privileges from here. How do we elevate this? I wasn't too familiar with Bell Lepageval. But what I found here was I started Googling, this is actually Red Star in Russian. Sometimes if you Google another languages, you get some cool things that you can find. So this was from a Russian forum. I found people were sharing pictures and DVDs that they were buying on vacation in North Korea and putting them online. I actually found all of the OS manuals for Red Star on there. Now everything is in Korean. I do not speak Korean. Google translate is very great though. But what I found was the actual steps for how to modify my permissions for my root user. Everything was nicely documented in there. It's about three manuals long actually. And it does have some guides in there similar to the CIS benchmarks if you want to harden your Red Star server. Still working my way through these to see what else I can find in here. But at this point I did have full access to everything. So I started digging through a lot of the files on here. Starts to talk about the differences between DevRandom and DevUrandom for generating random numbers on the system. They wrote their own method for blocking users. So instead of using something like fail2ban, there's actually some code in there that will actually just block you if you fail the password a certain amount of times. And really all of this code as I started digging through it, I was able to start getting some of these applications running as well. This is from the program called BEAM. Once I was able to get this set up now, essentially it's just a graphical interface for managing your Red Star deployment. So this is where you can start to configure all of your services. You can create and modify your users on here. It's actually a really nice kind of setup interface to use. It's pretty easy to configure your server from here. And it really made it nice and easy to get things going once I had access to this. But the other thing I found, I did find a vulnerability in here where you can actually steal session information from other users. So this was just my site where I was trying to post my request to, webhook.site. And my session ID from another user that I created there that I was able to post off to the site. And I do have a website where I keep track of a lot of this, try to update it a number of times a year. I get one comment maybe every five years on here. I posted that screenshot and I got a comment about 30 minutes later that they were interested in the issue. They wanted more details. They even sent me an email with one of the most suspicious email addresses I've ever seen. And I still haven't actually replied to this one. But I thought it was a little curious to see this come in when I posted that image. So that's a little bit of a sidetrack about what the Red Star operating system is. But now what we want to do is we want to start to see how many domains we can find that are in use by North Korea. So now that we know there's however many servers online at any given time, again roughly 20 to 30, depending on what's accessible at the time. But now we want to start to enumerate some of these North Korean domains. Maybe we can find something outside of that IP space. And really we just want to see what we can find. Now a couple of years ago we learned that there were just 28 websites registered to North Korea. Their top level domain is .kp. There was a misconfiguration on one of their DNS servers that allowed global zone transfers. And so this is where someone found this and published the entire list of all the North Korean websites. So since that day, I've tried to keep a list up to date. We now know that there are 32 websites that are publicly accessible. There's 34 different domains. Two of them are essentially duplicates. But again we want to start to enumerate all of these domains because we want to see what else can we learn? What else can we find about this infrastructure? Can we find anything outside of this IP space? And this is another great way where we can use some of these various sources of open source intelligence. This screenshot here is from Air Corio, which is the national airline of North Korea. And if you look on there, the flight status on any given day, everything is always on time or ahead of schedule. But if you look at something like a flight radar, for example, a lot of times it's a little bit different. Some of these flights aren't exactly always on time or even running that day. But what do we do if we don't have something, a nice article where we know all of the domains? Well, there's a couple of sources of data we can turn to. We can take the who is data and start to search off of that. We can do reverse DNS lookups based off of IP addresses. Again, if I look at something like apple.com where I can use domains at apple.com, using that to look up my who is data and doing some reverse DNS lookups, we can find all sorts of interesting domains that are owned by Apple. My favorite in there is animoji.datf. A lot of these last I checked didn't really seem to be in use. But again, it gives us a good way now where we can start to maybe find some different sites, maybe some dev instances that maybe shouldn't be accessible anymore or things that have been long forgotten. So we can really use this data to start to further map out our target we're looking at. We can also look at things like passive DNS data. There's a number of services out there that provide this for free for limited searching. And again, this is where now we can start to search different IP addresses and just see what kind of domains that are known to resolve to them as well based off of all these DNS requests that are being made by users around the globe. And then we can also start to look at things like the certificates for our websites. Census is a great tool that we can use. You can take the fingerprint of a certificate and you can search it there to see if it was reused anywhere. You can also just actually read the certificates in the case of North Korea. We can see down the bottom here they actually list out where the certificate is being used under the alt names. So I found some of the domains listed in there. I haven't found anything new this way in a long time. But it still is a nice way to make sure that we are aware of what's there and maybe what's not being used anymore. And then one of my favorite things that was published, this was published about maybe two and a half, three years ago. This is the website dprkportal.kp. I'm always convinced that this was published in response to just trying to stay on top of all the active domains. This was published by North Korea where they actually publish a list of all of their websites. And any time there is something new published, the last new site published with the top level North Korean domain was in December 2020. So this was the first time I've ever actually seen it updated with a new site. So it seems like they are keeping it up to date here. For the most part, for anything that they want to be publicly accessible and known about. So we have a list of these domains now. We know what's actually active inside of this IP space. We know what kind of operating systems are running on these various devices. The last thing we want to understand is what's actually running on these devices. So in our case, again, there's a number of different ways that we can gather this data. This is one of the Internet-wide scanning sites. This is one that actually scans from China. But we can see there, the banner from their DNS servers reporting that it is running on Red Hat. We can find some other fun things on there as well. I've seen things like VMware pop-up from time to time. I've seen media streaming servers pop-up on there. There is a Cisco device that always seems to be present in the North Korean IP space. And again, if there is something that maybe just doesn't make sense to us or maybe it's something we think this is maybe wrong, we want to try to validate this data as much as possible. So yes, they can reference this through a couple of different sites. People who are scanning the Internet can verify that everyone is reporting this as a Cisco iOS device. So I feel pretty confident that this is correct. We can mark this off as something that maybe isn't as suspicious as we thought it was originally. So to recap a little bit of what we found, what's actually running on all of these hosts, we're not going to go through everything. But there's a couple of different web servers out there. Your standard DNS, NTP, SMTP servers, VMware server, there's an FTP server. And then a mix of Red Hat and Red Star devices. A couple of Windows servers. We have our one Cisco device. And then I left it at the very bottom on the left-hand side. There's 20 services running on port 8080. They actually have no idea what this is. Within the last couple of weeks, most of these actually seem to have gone away. They were always open for a couple of years, but for whatever reason, they're not in use anymore. I will talk about those in a minute about trying to see if we can find some more information. But really, why do we want to identify this information? Again, just looking at some of this banner information, maybe it's not the most reliable information. But it still gives us really good starting point for understanding what's on these targets and what's inside this environment. So like I mentioned, most of what we're going to do is all passive gathering. A couple of things. We do want to gather semi-passive. This is where we're going to use some different websites to actually go out and maybe gather a bit of information for us. This is something that someone sent me last year. One of these websites used for actually testing your mail server to find any misconfigurations. They ran this against a North Korean mail server, and they found out that it was actually operating as an open SMTP relay. Apparently, you could only send emails to any of the other top-level.kp domains, but this was something that was publicly accessible for a while. Another website we can use, Proxy Checker. It seemed like a good way to see maybe 48080 on some of these systems was functioning as a proxy in some way. In this case, it didn't seem like that was the case. I still don't have any idea of what it is. Looking through the manuals, they do talk about Tom Catalog and using 48080 for management. So my new guess is it's something to do with that. Unfortunately, those services don't seem to be online anymore. So it's kind of hard to tell exactly what they were. And then we can start to turn some other unusual tools as well. We can use things like SEO tools to go out and gather information about our site. This will tell us what the site was built with. It'll follow links, tell us what's broken, what's valid. One of the things that it found that I thought was pretty interesting on one of the North Korean websites, we can see it here down in the developer view. There was a broken link that was pointing to a 172.200 address. A couple of slides will talk about why that's kind of exciting to see. But there's a lot of different tools we can use. We don't have to think about our traditional security tools. We can get a little creative and use some other things to find out some of this information that we might be looking for. So we spent some time talking about what's running on this North Korean public IP space. I kind of wanted to flip this around though as I was working on this, and I wanted to know can we find any activity of North Korea online anywhere? And if you're not familiar with the internet in North Korea, it started in 2001. It was really just an email relay between North Korea and China. But inside of North Korea there are essentially two different networks. There's the intranet, which is what most people have access to. And then there's the official kind of internet for high-ranking party members. College students do have access to it inside of North Korea. And this is access to the full internet. This picture here on the right is taken from an internet cafe in North Korea where we can see screenshots of some of the internal only North Korean websites. Looking through Flickr for tour groups to North Korea is a hobby of mine. This is actually where I found this on a Flickr page where someone had taken this picture. I cropped it a little bit to make it a little bit easier to see. But there's, again, a lot of different places we can turn to to find some of this information that maybe we don't always have access to. Now, some of the domains, they do actually come up from time to time if you are researching North Korea domains. A couple of them here are on the left-hand side. None of them are publicly accessible. But I've talked to a few people where they seem to think that they are used internally for email. One of them is the portal used inside the hotel for accessing the internet. And then the other third one seems to be a social network of some kind inside of North Korea as well. And really, one of the other things that kind of prompted this idea of can we find North Korea online or any kind of activity? This is a map steam published a number of years ago showing where all of their users were connecting from. If you look really closely there in the circle, you'll see one dot inside of North Korea. So I was really curious to see can we find any North Korean activity online. So one of the first things they did was just using some of these different Google Dorks to search for different things. This one's actually pretty simple. We're just searching for any of the log files that Google might have indexed. Just searching for different IP addresses. So this was on a Russian oil website. I found some North Korean IP addresses that were browsing this site. I'm sure everyone knows about public paste. Paste in any of these sites where we can search information. This was, it looked like it's from a Minecraft server, but there was a user that was connecting from an IP address inside of North Korea. You can also search Wikipedia, especially since I've talked about it a lot. If you don't have an account, it'll record your IP address. So we can see where there were some changes made to different books. Some of them were for content management system. There's actually a lot of changes coming out of North Korea. They seem to have stopped about four years ago, maybe five years ago at this point. But we can see some activity there from North Korean IP addresses making some changes to these different Wikipedia articles. And again, we want to get creative with our searching. This is a website called IKnowwhatyoudownload.com where they're essentially just monitoring all of these torrent trackers and all of the IP addresses that are connecting. They have a nice interface that you can use to kind of search this data. So these were some of the top movies in North Korea. Modern family is actually really popular there. But one of the things they did was they wrote a script to just query IKnowwhatyoudownload to find any North Korean IP addresses that were active in torrenting. And then I went in and started searching based off of these. Again, what's interesting is we see a lot of it coming out of the 177 and 178 networks. But what I thought was even more interesting was looking into not just the movies and TV shows being downloaded, but things like device drivers. We can see different graphics cards in there, devices for cameras, and different types of laptops. So it's a good way where we can maybe get an idea of some of the other devices inside the country that maybe we don't have first-hand access to see from different pictures or things like that being published. And then since I had a list of all of the North Korean domains, I got the idea of what happens if, since most of them are .com.kp or .org.kp, what happens if I bought just the .com version. So I found two North Korean domains that were available. I bought those. I found one that was in the OS manual that was listed in there that was available. And then one of them kept popping up in different thread intel feeds from a couple of years ago, and it actually just became available. So I bought that as well. I don't want to say what I bought, but just threw some Google Analytics on it just to see if I would get anyone connecting to it. And I did get some traffic over the last year, year and a half. No traffic from North Korea. And these domains aren't something that you can accidentally just type in. I'm assuming you would have to really go here on purpose. So it was interesting to see some of the connections that were coming in to these domains that I bought. And then lastly, as we are trying to understand, can we find North Korea online? This was an article I saw last year about LinkedIn becoming a social media of choice for North Korea's elite. I haven't gotten any friend requests on there as far as I know. But we can find a lot of things on social media that maybe we shouldn't be posting. I've found things like People's Badge and their schedule and information that they post. Hashtag New Job is a great way to find information about different companies. Hashtag Visitor Badge is another fun one. I guess people are really excited about that. They post their visitor badges from different companies when they go to visit. So what can we find about North Korea? Well, there was a brewery inside of North Korea. Apparently they're working on mini kegs. This was a manual inside of the North Korean hotel that I always just giggled when I read the title. I found things like visas, long-term stay cards for people going to visit on tours. And then one of my favorite ones, the Palace of the Sun, if you go on a tour of North Korea, this is somewhere that they'll take you and they stress that you're not allowed to take pictures or that you have to take your shoes off.  But it's actually geotagged on Instagram. Someone's taken some sneaky pictures in there. So again, even in a country like North Korea where cameras aren't allowed in certain places, we can still find some information and get an idea of what's there. But we can also look at things like what's running on their computers. If you look in the background, you see that Windows XP is still very popular inside of North Korea. And again, we want to verify our information as much as possible. This comes from the official North Korean media website. And other pictures look just a little too perfect in the background. So we can use a website like Photoforensics, which we'll try to highlight. Anything that's essentially any kind of errors in the picture. So it seems like a lot of times pictures are just posted onto that generic background to make it look a little more bright and blue skies and sunshine for a lot of these outdoor pictures. And we can also start to turn to some different places as well. Strava is a fitness tracker similar to Fitbit. They actually publish all of their data online. So if you want to find new places to run or hike is the idea. When I found out about this, I immediately started browsing through North Korea. We can actually see some of the actual lines on here where assuming people are going on tours in the country. And if you really zoom in, you can start to see individual buildings that they're going into. The next thing I want to do is start to overlay this with something like Google Maps to see if we can get an idea but one of the things I also noticed was in the north there's two very faint lines in these mountains and I was really curious to know what these were. So I switched over to Google using these coordinates. Looks like it's some kind of ski lodge here but the interesting thing is it's not the one that's shown in most of the official North Korean media which is this. Looks like it's a different one. So you haven't found too much information about that but again, just differently it's where we can find some of these new things that we can investigate further. And then as we start to wrap this up, Silly Vaccine is another one that's interesting. This is a North Korean anti-virus program. Checkpoint did a great paper on this. But one of the things that I found was we looked back to GitHub, the Shadow Brokers League, the CIA tools, a lot of people married these tools to GitHub and the source for them but as they started searching some of the Silly Vaccine strings I found that they are actually in use in the Shadow Brokers League as well. So some of these tools are actually scanning the endpoint to see what kind of protections running on there. So it appears that whoever is building these tools is aware of Silly Vaccine inside of North Korea and actually checking for that to see if it's present before executing the next step of their programs. I've also found some other fun things. This is on the North Korean website looking at the source. We can start to find just different fonts being used. When I googled those I found out they are North Korean fonts developed inside the country. But I've also found different sandboxes where those fonts are available and I really just always love this comment, no idea what it is. I found it on my laptop. I haven't looked into it more personally of no idea if it is anything related to North Korea or if they are just using that font. But again, different ways where we can start to maybe find some new things to investigate. And as we are looking at this different pieces of software a lot of times sandboxes, different things like that a lot of people aren't aware that this information is publicly searchable. So this is how I found a lot of North Korean software online so I'm just searching the name then I have a hash and more information about it gives me all sorts of new rabbit holes to go down to try to find a lot of this software. But just starting with some basic information we can really start to get a lot more information about what this software is. So I want to start to wrap this up here a little bit. A lot of people ask what I use for tools. Ocentframework.com is a nice tree that we can use to really search all this data. I have a website nknternet.wordpress.com I try to keep it sort of up to date as I find new things. And one last thing I want to end on here this is a website that I found a couple of years ago. I found it early in the Sunday morning I was looking at this it seems pretty interesting signature of this detection system in the top command and control server and as I was looking at this I got a phone call the number was 000 I picked up said hello and nobody was there. Granted it was six in the morning at the time when I was looking at this. So I put my phone down phone rings again a few minutes later same number no one's on the end of the line I start thinking that I need to pack up my house I need to wake up my wife we need to move outside the country as I'm pacing the room a little bit trying to figure out if these phone calls and if this website is related I get a third phone call from the same number 000 I pick up they say hello hello someone says Mr. Roy Yes I said Mr. Roy this is Steve from Enterprise sorry our phone system isn't working they've been trying to call you and tell you that your ransom car is ready Thanks Steve for the heart attack Again always interesting things that you can find it did actually reach out because there was a certificate to see if they had any information they told me that they're not a software company could be a whole conspiracy theory still not too sure on that but again always keeps me up at night wondering what this was it's not online anymore but thank you everyone for listening had a great time presenting certainly any questions feel free to reach out or always happy to talk more about this and share any other kind of data or information that I have so thank you very much


Hi everyone, in this video I'm going to be doing something quite different, well I haven't done it for nine years. Since Flo was born I'm going to go beach casting. It'll be interesting to see whether I can still cast with these things. I just hope they don't blow up on my first cast. I never really used to catch much and when I bought a kayak there was no looking back. I'm going to be targeting Sol Fingers Cross because it's late August.  So first things first I'm going to tie a flapper rig, three hook flapper rig, small hooks and then head down there. Right so the plan is to fish black lug, a little section of rag on the end, cambers and B9 4 O's in a size 4 that's what I'm going to be using and I'll be clipping three of those down. So for the rig body I'm going to use greased weasel, 10 pound breaking strain for every ounce of lead but I'll be casting four ounce of lead so that's fine. Somewhere I've got some bits that I can make some use out. I'm going to use these things to clip down the snoots and as you can see a little bit of metal sticking out there which I'll twist back with a pair of pliers but I'll get this whole rig set up and then show you in its entirety. That's one done and obviously I've twisted that up to stop it from being pulled out. It's a size 4 hook tied onto 20 pound amnesia I've gone for red. We've got the sequin as a stop and as a bait stop I'm just going to get a little snip of silicon tubing and it needs to be about three or four millimetres long.  There's a sliding rubber. I can set it about that far away from the hook so the worm bait will be up the line like that. Right so there's the rigging its fall entirety. We've got a swivel at the top to go to onto the shock leader. We've got a swivel trap twin two beads crimped in beads and a short snood followed by a stop, a sequin and the hook and that stowed on the clip down and then spaced out about two foot down. Here's our second one they're all identical and then our third one. You can see the length of the rig it's long with a seven foot rig. It just means that the baits are nicely spread out once they're cast out hence the short snoods really. The more you can spread the baits out the more chances of you actually getting the bait in the right spot but you'll see I've bent the wires out and that's just because it's a big tide just bending the tips over like this gives you a lot more grip and you can get away with lighter leads. So that's that. We've arrived at Cogdon. It's absolutely rammed because it's 8 August all car parks are full up they managed to find somewhere to park and we've got a long walk down to the beach which isn't such a bad thing as it puts off the amateurs doesn't it? Since getting the kayak I haven't really looked back but I'm really glad I came because it's just beautiful. That cool. I have to be honest it's slightly nerve-wracking having to recast this after nine years so my excuse for chucking out a few macro feathers really just see if I can get back into the swing of it. I'm really nervous I expect it to blow up on my first cast but we'll see. So the idea of this is two-fold firstly to get a grip with this thing I can't believe I used to fish with the reels on the left hand just for that extra length of rod to do the work. These are handy such as thumbs from getting ripped up it's a bit of a bike tube just strapped on put it over the shock leader not socks your thumb from getting ripped up. I'm probably only hitting about 80 to 100 yards but to be honest that's a good thing that's fine that'll do me. So I'm using my fingers as opposed to using a line guide excuse my fingers to put the line back on the reel evenly. Fishing a pop-up seems to fish a lot better than feathers down here I don't know why and in recent years the mackerel have got bigger and bigger and fewer and fewer largely because of the commercial fishing it does bring back really good memories coming down here I've been coming down here since I was a kid but it is sad to see the mackerel population becoming depleted whoever would have thought that would be possible. And off that swivel we've got a stripper mackerel just on a long trace with two floating beads popped up behind it and then a nice long drop down to the next swivel with the same thing they're just crimped into place those floating beads and if you're lucky you do pick up bass like that as well or if you scale down you pick up garfish too. I'll pop this one out but just getting to that point of the evening where I'll start thinking about getting some bottom baits out just a baiting needle in just to make it rigid and literally just had a small square rag worm on at the bottom to give a bit of scent. There you go that's one bait done. This rod went over. The bottom mackerel ain't half pulled hard. Yeah this must be a mackerel but it pulled the rod over.  So in fact none of it took the rod over. I did have a pouting I didn't bother recording it because pouting is a pouting. We also just had a strapped conger let's go and have a look. I'm walking by. It's not in the sails. Oh that's a drop back. So from wiggly worms on the hook to wiggly congers on the line and that's what it's just coughed up. I imagine I hooked that fish first. And the conger's taking it afterwards. They're cool fish. Brilliant. Right let's have a look at them getting back in. I've got really mixed feelings about that session. It's brought back loads of nostalgic memories of the days when I used to go beach fishing all the time. It was a stark reminder as to just how tough it can be in terms of the fishing. You don't catch anything like as much as you do on the kayak. It was lovely to catch up with old friends. Thank goodness I caught that big mackerel because that paid for my night's accommodation with my mum. Keeps her happy. I bought loads of bait because I wanted to have a secret agenda of going out fishing the next day because the rest of my family are coming down to visit but I've got to use the bait up right. So I'm down at Fairy Bridge and I'm going to pop into the local tackle shop and just pick up a bit of squid and hopefully pick up some garnard and some bream. Perhaps a bass if I'm lucky. What a top bloke in that tackle shop. Ouch. That's new. It's a shame because on the big tides the water used to deter people from crossing. So after a good walk I found myself a section of beach that tied to myself. It's completely flat because there's an 11 mile per hour northerly wind and it's a 4.1 meter tide and it's a neap. If you ever wonder what a neap tide is, a neap tide just means that the tides are gradually getting smaller with the moon as opposed to the spring where they get slightly bigger each time. Yeah so I've got a whole place to myself. I think I might have a... no let's just get on the fish. Riot baits so good the fish will fight over it. Please take your litter home. Good point. Well I hope they're right otherwise I'll be asking for a refund. So I'm going to start off with a slightly exploratory rig. I've got a little bit of squid at the top for any bream that are feeding high up in the water. A ragworm on the middle bait. Tipped with a little bit of squid. Well not cotton bait. I have got a little bit of mackerel flesh because garnard can't resist a little bit of mackerel flesh. I picked these up from the tackle shop. £4.50 for a rig. That's expensive but to be honest with you if it saves me having to make rigs on the beach then that's money well spent and it's a it looks like a good quality rig actually. I'm just going to change the hook sober. I do believe I have a bite after two and a half hours of fishing on the right hand rod. After two hours of waiting I've got a little bream on the squid on the tip so I'll probably just switch all to squid. Saves a blank. About half past four or five o'clock. Ties to start to come back in again. Things have picked up a little bit again if your little rattle's on the right hand rod. It's biker. Got a bit of a cup of garnard on squid. Which is great. It's like beautiful markings. Listen to them croaking. Kicking myself for not switching to squid earlier. I've used the worms so I bought the worms so I need to use them up but the point is if you're not going to catch anything on them. Cool. Just tiny little bits of squid. Three of those strapped on with elastic. My brother's just phoned me on whatsapp and he's asked what this is all about. Well the answer to that is that when the sun's out I can do this right and I can actually see my rod tips. Which is great. So there you are. Top tip. Oh. The bites are really quite subtle actually for the Bremander garnard. Even that double shot. So I better check that out. It's slightly bigger. Minimum size limits 24 centimetres and I think this would be pushing it. But I'd make a nice lunch. That's why it's so important to use small hooks. Taking that one in. Even size fours are a bit too big. Long way mate. There he goes. Ciao. Last casts of the day. I actually said last cast. Three of those going to be my last cast. On the lure I thought I hit a mackerel. It certainly didn't feel like a bass. Both the other rods packed away and I got hit on a sand eel. That's the best garnard that I've had today. It's been absolutely dead the last well for the last couple of hours on the bottom baits. That is so cool. I'm so pleased to catch something on the lure. Wicked. Wicked.


he city council allocates subject to voter approval, 1% of the amount associated with every transportation bond proposition, and we just had a bond election passing last month, and 2% of every bond proposition associated with parks and various kinds of public facilities. The council also approves a long range master plan for public art, and an annual work plan for public art, and individual contracts for the design and fabrication of artworks. And finally, the council approves the appointment of Fort Worth residents to serve on the Fort Worth Art Commission, which works directly with the public art staff and selected artists on the design of that artwork. And those relationships are depicted in the organization chart that you see on the screen. You see that we have a professional services agreement between the city and Arts Fort Worth, and the heart of the work occurs in the Fort Worth Art Commission, which is currently chaired by Mr. Estrus Tucker, and includes various public art experts as well as community leaders who can contribute a valuable grassroots perspective to decisions that are made by the Art Commission. The public art program has enjoyed many successes over the past 20 years, but the council and others have pointed out, and I think it's a valid concern, that we need to do a better job of delivering our public art projects in a timely way. And I think you can see evidence that that need in this table that shows you the status of what we're calling legacy funded projects, projects that were funded with the 2014 bond program and even further back, as far back as the bond program of 2004. We have completed within those four debt programs a total of 60 projects, but there are 27 additional projects that are not yet complete. They're still in progress. You can see the different stages of progress all the way from planning to fabrication installation. There are actually four projects on hold. Three of those projects we'd like to take and reallocate or reprogram their funds for underfunded projects in the same council districts. And so Martha Peters from Arts for Worth will be seeking meetings with the affected district council members to discuss opportunities to reprogram those funds. The fourth project, which we're not recommending to have funds reprogrammed is associated with the convention center expansion. And that public art project will be ready to go as soon as we're ready to proceed with the convention center project. We were delayed as you know, by COVID and are getting ready to resume that work in the months ahead. And so I'd like to introduce or reintroduce to you the director of public art for Arts for Worth, Martha Peters, who has worked with us since the very inception of this program. I think most of you know Martha well. And she's prepared to outline for us a strategy to accelerate the delivery of public art projects in Fort Worth. Martha. Good afternoon, mayor and council. Before I begin, I'd like to introduce Karen Wiley, president, CEO of Arts for Worth, our incoming managing director and president of Wesley Gentle and our board chair, Jared Sloan. I believe Estrus Tucker was planning to join us. He may not yet be here, but anyway, I wanted to acknowledge them. So on November 30th of 2001, Mayor Parker presented a proclamation celebrating the 20th anniversary of the public art program. Currently the Fort Worth Public Art Commission collection includes 93 artworks throughout the city that celebrate our diversity, our history, honors our connection with nature and reflects who we aspire to be in the 21st century. These images are representing all the 10 projects that were completed this last fiscal year. While the public art program has enjoyed much success and some national recognition, we know that we have fallen short in timeliness on some of our projects and certainly on several of these legacy funded projects. We value being entrusted with the management of this program and we appreciate the opportunity to have reviewed our processes, look for ways we can be more efficient and get our projects moving more quickly. So we're gonna share some of the challenges we faced, but also the ways we've identified where our process can be improved. So Arts Fort Worth, and we are legally still the Arts Council of Fort Worth and Tarran County Inc, but this is our new name. We offer professional management services to the city and really the public art program is a multifaceted program. It includes program planning, including big picture planning and bond, a package planning, project management and our staff each is managing probably between 12 or more projects at any given time. We also do a lot of planning with the community and of course our artist selection panels. Project management really is like being a ring leader in the three ring circus because you're working with artists, the community, the city, project architects and engineers and of course the art commission. And I want you to know that I meet weekly as with very few exceptions with each of the project managers to see how we're doing on each of their projects and help them with any issues they're dealing with. We also work through city processes, the funding for public art stays in the bank of the city and those projects, the funding is only released through contracts with the artists. So we do work through the city's budgeting system and of course the law department. We also handle collection management of 151 artworks that includes our legacy collection, which are pieces that were previously owned by the city before this program began as well as donations of artwork since then. Community engagement, artist engagement is a huge part of what we do. It's what really makes the artworks connect and then we also serve as liaison to the Fort Worth Art Commission that you appoint. So just as in a nutshell, our organization began in 1963. We did work with, our predecessors worked with the city to help establish the public art program and our current staff has, believe this or not, 70 plus years in this very specialized field. Public art project management has been something we've done for the city under contracts since 2002. This fiscal year we're managing 43 projects in all council districts. And I kind of mentioned some of these items but I would also mention that we do report to Mark McAvoy under planning and data analytics of course is under Fernando Costa. So I was asked to look at other nonprofit organizations that manage public art programs that are city or county in the country. There are only a few. Most cities have their own staff with this arts expertise to manage their public art programs. But it was very interesting to touch base with these organizations. The first being the Arts and Science Council that manages the city of Charlotte's public art program for culture, which is in King County, Washington in the Seattle area, they manage a county program. And then the Regional Arts and Culture Council of Portland, Oregon, also managing a city program. And you can see their structure is a little different. They're under contract with the government entity but the public art funds go to them. They actually enter into the contracts with the artists and then once the artwork is completed they convey the artwork back to the governmental entity. So very different model than we use here. Closer to home, the Houston Arts Alliance is a little more like us. They also are like the others where they do have some independence. However, their funding is only sort of moved over to their accounts as needed to pay artist contracts. City staff reviews and approves project plans. They don't involve their city council, which I think is really interesting. But they also contact directly with artists and then they convey art to the city of Houston when they're finished. But they recently went through a process review program looking at how they could improve performance. And I thought it was interesting some of the ideas that they came up with. One is they do, although Houston Arts Alliance has the public art team, the city actually has a mayor's office of cultural affairs and it's just a one or two person office. And their director is now having weekly meetings with the public art manager. And this is really important and helpful because there are a lot of issues that need that high level attention. And then also they decided to hire two temporary project managers to address their project backlog. And then they developed some general project timelines for commissions, acquisitions and conservations with a caveat that sometimes those standard timelines may need to be adjusted under certain circumstances. So here in Fort Worth, the public art program managing it is really a collaborative partnership between the city of Fort Worth and Arts Fort Worth. To my page here. And while public art itself is a very highly collaborative effort and so is our management. Both entities have certain tasks that they're responsible for in order to move a project forward. So my staff and I have to give a shout out to Ann Allen, Alida Lobby, Jenny Kahn, Michelle Richardson who all helped really analyze each step of our project to understand where are there places we could be more efficient. So on this particular slide, you can see this column is showing the phases of a project and the tasks underneath. And then up above you're seeing all the folks who play a part. Of course our staff, city staff, the city's project consultant meaning the architect or engineer for the project, the council member and whose district the project is located. Their appointed project core team which is a group of stakeholders that helps us vision the project and follows it through from beginning to end. The artist selection panel which includes some project core team members and art expertise from the area. The artist that's selected of course in the art commission and then I added Fernando the ACM. So you can see as an example if you look under project core team formation we are staff, city staff especially the community engagement office and the council member all have a role in identifying potential people to serve on that core team. If you look under artist selection an artist selection involves just about everybody so you can see how that works. On the next slide is the continuation of the process. So here we have the final design phase and the commission phase which is when the artwork is actually built and installed and so forth. And here we also see for instance a contract review needed by the law department, purchase orders and payment requests so all those kinds of things are handled by city staff. So we of course work closely with project managers in the city departments but I did reach out to each of them to ask them well what is your standard timeframe for your projects? So we could really think about doing the same for public art. And for facilities basically architectural projects 36 months for park improvement projects 36 months arterial streets 48 to 60 months after a right away acquisition. So ideally a public art project runs concurrently with the larger capital project of which it's associated and that's our goal and that's the ideal. So we are adopting these as our standard guidelines going forward for our capital projects so that the artwork is finished concurrently with the project wherever possible. I will say that sometimes we're not really they're not ready for us till they have to get done before we get done particularly street for instance but in most cases we should be able to adopt this timeline. So looking at some of the challenges and solutions to timely project delivery we first have to look at some unique aspects of public art. One is that we have you involved which is wonderful and it's great but it's unlike any other capital project and we really find that it's very much a benefit to our projects. We also have robust community engagement the advent of project core teams with the master plan update of 2017 really amp that up and it's been very helpful but as you can imagine we have lots of people to convene sometimes scheduling can be difficult but it's well worth it and Zoom is helping a lot these days we're kind of continuing on that way. We also have the unique aspect is that artists are commissioned to create one of a kind original works of art. So we have artists who they're very qualified they're very knowledgeable but they may be doing a project that's unlike any other project they've ever done but it's worth it because then the city has an asset like nobody else's so that's a unique aspect. Also artists are responsible for everything design, fabrication and installation even if in many cases they subcontract out some of that work or much of it the fabrication and installation. So they are dealing with subcontractors and we have seen sometimes that can be challenging and then of course finally that our artists works are copyrighted. So if we have an issue with an artist and we have to let them go that usually means we gotta start over with a new artist. So there's some examples of delays that are beyond our control the city's control and that might be an artist who has an injury or a serious illness fabricator backs out they have to find another one. Of course the recent cost spikes and supply chain issues everyone's facing we're seeing. And other issues that have come up including unknown site conditions even aspects of a site that the city wasn't aware of and then also review time frames for instance if we have a project associated with Text. Some examples of things that we may be able to control better are things such as contract negotiations. Artists not maybe making the public art project their priority. Staff turn around times for their tasks and of course there's sometimes capital projects that need to be delayed to find a new site. And sometimes council members might have a request that impacts the schedule. So here are the solutions we come up with or at least some things we think will help with general project delivery and we're excited we're already starting to implement some of them. And we've been talking with course Fernando and Mark McAvoy about some of these ideas and I believe we have their concurrence. But one is if we run into a project with a delay or any kind of budget change that we would request the assistant city manager to sign off on that. So it's crystal clear what's going on and then of course communicate those issues with the council members. And we do try to keep our council members involved but I think this will add another layer of information and transparency. Also if we have an artist who's just been a little slow or just not making the project a priority to have the city attorney send out a letter of non-compliance if they're missing a deadline. Because there is a termination for cause clause in their contracts and that might wake them up if our staff isn't able to get them to move forward. And then we're also working on a new kind of public art contract that's basically a base contract for preliminary design with a denda for final design and commission so that we don't go through a contract negotiation three times. We have a one kind of a three in one contract which we think will help expedite negotiations. Re-establish weekly meetings with the assistant city manager or department director to prove our communications. And then ask that our city try to our city staff partners try to turn things around within five business days if possible. One issue that we and the arts Fort Worth have experienced in the last couple of years is a reduction in our staff capacity. One reason is that one of our most experienced project managers started getting involved with helping clean up some ERP and capital budget matters during that switch over to that new system. And she's found herself doing more and more sort of internal capital budget work that's taken her away from project management. And then also in 2021 we took a budget hit or a decrease during COVID-19 and that decreased the state level now for two years and that has had an impact on our staffing. So to show good faith and our firm desire of doing a better job, getting those older projects out the door and meeting the kind of expectations we know you have. Arts Fort Worth, the board and the president authorized hiring a part-time project manager at arts Fort Worth's expense. So that's what we have done and we were able to hire a former employee who used to be a project manager for us and so we're hopeful that will make a difference. I know you saw a chart at the beginning with the status of old projects and I wanted to show you this as the 16 or 14 or so projects that we believe will be complete by the end of this calendar year and into next calendar year. As you can see, these are all pieces in fabrication or final design. So these are a priority for us and we'll look forward to having them all installed. So just to wrap up, I just wanna share with you as Arts Fort Worth representing our management of your public art program that our commitment is to prioritize the completion of legacy funded projects, work with city staff to implement some of these new process improvements, really all of them if we can, commit to a standard timeframe for public art projects moving forward and to report back to you on our progress in September when we share with you an annual work plan for 2023 as well as the art commission's public art plan for the 2022 bond program. And that's all I have. Thank you, Martha. Any questions, council? No? Okay. All right. Thank you very much. I appreciate you. Council, I think that's the last of our presentations. We're not doing budget today. Any future agenda items or reports, requests for city management? Go ahead, Michael. Jeanette, most of us got an email today from Jeanette about a liquor licenses process. Jeanette, I thank you for sending that out, but the real issue is that we have an ability at some points under certain licenses to protest those licenses. So getting it after it's already been signed and approved by us doesn't really help us. So I'm not sure if this is an IR, but we need to put a process in place where we're notified so we at least might, and this stems from liquor license that was issued in Como. I don't know that in that particular instance, I do know that we couldn't have protested it, but it would have been nice to know about it in process because there probably could have been some other things that we've done. There's some, I've met with state rep Charlie Garan, state rep Ramiro, they were part of this conversation. There are some things that need to be done on the state level, but where we can control on the city level, I'd like to try and do that if it's going in the neighborhoods where it shouldn't. Any other items, council? Yeah, I have one. I don't really know if this is a future agenda item, but I want to put it on the hearts of us. Mentioning to David, also to Christina Brooks about us partnering with the Juneteenth and doing a debriefing of all the excitement that happened over the weekend. I think that's important. So visit forward Christina Brooks office, city staff, so that we can be prepared for next year or whatever. Whatever we need to do to bring a more partnership together. So that's that. So I don't know who can put that together, but I think that's very important. The other thing is I just got a text message about people complaining about being have access to watching us Facebook, but they talked about, I guess, the way it's done now, it's not available until a day after on the city website. I don't know, yeah, live stream, but they missed half of the meeting. When can they go back and watch it? So it's kind of getting a little bit. Yeah, and Renee, I know is looking at this immediately. So then we talked about with him last week. Because I did ask him about the Facebook when you weren't here. Okay, so that's my two future agenda items. And I have one for Deanna probably, and we can just can wait until August, but I know we have a six week family leave policy. I want us to kind of get an update on how that's worked so far for city employees and do a little exploration and probably deep dive with best place for working parents on the push to maybe go to 12 weeks and think about that as a future agenda item. There's no rush on that.  Yeah, so we have several small historic cemeteries within the city. And so I'd like to get an IR on where those are, what involvement the city has in maintaining those and what our historical preservation staff can do, and we can do as a community to make sure that we're preserving those. And that really comes from a conversation from a potential encroachment to Pioneer's Rest Cemetery. And that has some of our founding leaders in the city. So it's important that we're making sure we take care of those. Anybody else? Go ahead, Jared. I'll do one. We met with the parks department, which I'm really grateful for at Crow Spake Park. And I know that parks does everything they can in terms of dredging ponds. I know that there may be a need in this upcoming budget cycle to look at, is that budget sufficient? So I'd love to maybe get informed and report on the need for dredging in district six, but I'm sure that applies to other districts too. Anybody else? Going once, going twice. That's it. We're adjourned and we're gonna go into executive session. The city council will now convene into executive session on the following matters. The city council will conduct a closed meeting or to discuss.


Kamala Harris may be a phenomenal debater and fantastic orator overall But that doesn't necessarily mean that she's a good candidate because the amount of times that she's flip-flopped on just one issue throughout the course of her campaign It's baffling like she's giving me whiplash and you all know the issue I'm talking about Medicare for all because she just can't seem to make up her mind whether or not she does or doesn't want to get rid of Private insurance companies now if you'll recall at the very first CNN Town Hall that she did she said yes We should get rid of private insurance companies. Let's eliminate all of that Let's move on and less than 24 hours later. She walked back that claim once insurance companies through a tantrum however at the first Democratic Party primary debate when the candidates were asked whether or not they would abolish the private health insurance that Millions of Americans currently have she raised her hand indicating again that she wants to get rid of private insurance Although less than 24 hours later. She once again walked back that claim So once and for all do you believe that private insurance should be eliminated in this country? No, you don't know I raised your hand like the question was would you give up your private insurance? No, it wasn't so do you understand flip flop flip flop I mean if you want people to take you seriously Then you need to stop doing things like this and actually take a stand once and for all and it seems like she's done that But here's a problem with her and why this isn't a good look if you're going to say that you support Medicare for all But simultaneously you're cosponsoring Bernie Sanders bill which does in fact effectively eliminate private insurance Then people think that you either a or a bullshitter or two You don't know what's in the bill that you cosponsored because Bernie Sanders bill does just that it's designed to get rid of private Insurance and that's a good thing because we don't need them trying to water down our public health care system Just so they can keep making profits We don't need to carve out a space for them so they can continue to exist for purposes of Ripping people off.  She's not with us. She's with the private insurance companies So what did she decide to do well? She proposed a shittier version of Medicare for all that keeps private insurance companies That's just genuinely sad How embarrassing How embarrassing and one of the key differences is that instead of having a four-year rollout like Bernie Sanders bill does hers would have a 10-year Rollout now I need you to understand that the four-year rollout that Bernie Sanders has that in and of itself is problematic like Pramila Jayapals bill actually has a two-year rollout and Medicare for all experts and activists have has been saying Bernie You need to make your bill reach parity with Jayapals because a two-year rollout is preferable And look part of the reason I think why Bernie Sanders does have a four-year rollout is because he allowed Kirsten Gillibrand to write that portion So maybe he let her write a shittier version just to get support for it But if he actually becomes president we need to ditch that and actually Bring his bill to parity with Jayapals and make it a two-year rollout But I mean that's beyond the point Kamala is proposing a 10-year rollout Which gives private insurance companies which she's leaving intact ample time to completely water down Her Medicare proposal This is embarrassing and furthermore if Republicans wanted to This wouldn't kick in until after she's out of office assuming she serves two terms So they can fully repeal this before it even goes into effect before the American people know the benefits of this plan This is just bad policy. This is embarrassing It's clear that she doesn't actually care about the people She cares about making sure that she appeases private health insurance companies This is shameful now for more on this plan We go to Dan Diamond and Christopher Catalago of Politico who write Harris's new plan breaks with her rivals who occupy the opposite polls of the debate By effectively proposing Medicare Advantage for all Permitting private insurers to continue selling plans Akin to the two decade old offshoot of Medicare in addition to letting Americans immediately buy into the traditional Medicare program and Adding new benefits like more mental health services as a result Americans would be able to choose between the public plan and Certified private Medicare plans Harris also said she would immediately enroll newborns and the uninsured an Effort to quickly get to universal coverage if elected Harris's ten-year timetable invites Uncertainty given that a term-limited Harris would be out of office and a future administration could reverse her plan in her medium post Harris partially addressed the long-standing funding questions She praised Sanders financing suggestions for his Medicare for all proposal saying he'd presented good options Particularly making the nation's highest earners and corporations pay more through more progressive income Payroll and estate taxes, but she took aim at her rival's potential tax on households making more than $29,000 per year saying it hits the middle class too hard and instead called to exempt households making less than $100,000 as well as some middle-class families in high-cost areas So what she's doing here is she's now lying about the plan that she once Supported because this doesn't hit middle-class families too hard I showed you the graph of data from Gerald Friedman that was presented by Andrea witty of connect the dots USA Even if we raise taxes just Eliminating that monthly health insurance premium co-pays deductibles Most Americans will save thousands of dollars per year and furthermore the reason why she can now exempt households making less than $100,000 per year is because she watered down Medicare for all to the point where less people need to pay for it It's essentially being propped up in a way by private insurance companies So this is basically a glorified public option as the article put it This is Medicare Advantage for all and a key to its success as David Serota points out is it aims to expand Medicare Advantage style plans run by for-profit insurance corporations now some of the issues with these plans is One they're accused of denying claims in order to boost profits And they're also massively overbilling the government to the tune of billions of dollars now The reason why these Medicare Advantage plans exist in the first place is because our current Medicare system even if it's popular It still has its issues. There are gaps in our existing Medicare program But a key goal of Medicare for all is to improve Medicare for all before we expand it Because it's not currently adequate enough to be expanded to everyone in its current form But what it seems like Kamala Harris is trying to do is expand Medicare to everyone without Improving it in order to let private health insurance companies come in and offer these Medicare Advantage programs to fill the gaps I mean, this is absurd She's literally watering down Medicare for all in order to preserve a role for private for-profit health insurance companies Whose goal is not to take care of patients. It's to look out for their own profits Now as Dan Diamond puts it the fact that her plan relies on Medicare Advantage will in fact open her up to criticism from progressives But simultaneously it's going to insulate her a little bit from criticism from Donald Trump because Trump's administration is also a huge Champion of growing Medicare Advantage plans now I don't even agree that this will insulate her too much from criticism from Donald Trump because Donald Trump will just lie about Whatever plan she's saying or she's proposing and say mine is better Now furthermore, this is just insulting. This is absolutely insulting Because she's trying to convince everyone that keeping this for-profit middleman is actually better for everyone that she Is taking a plan that is best suited to get us to universal health care And she's calling it Medicare for all and trying to convince us that it's in our best interest when really this is just a plan that's in the interest of the private insurance Companies and she had the nerve to retweet this image from the SEI you where it says people over profit next to her image No You are literally putting profit over people here because you're going out of your way to create a pseudo Medicare for all bill at the behest of health insurance companies. It's disgusting. What a liar This is what gas lighting looks like she's saying no actually I am proposing my own Medicare for all plan even if it's not really Medicare for all It's a heavily watered-down version of Medicare for all But you're just expanding Medicare for all with the gaps that it currently have has and you're saying alright for-profit companies How about it? There's still gonna be a role for you. This is just embarrassing and disgusting quite frankly because it shows that She is more worried about the profits of private health insurance companies and whatever scrutiny She may face from them and Donald Trump then she is about just constructing good public policy that would save lives Embarrassing the people are saying we want Medicare for all We want it to be free at the point of service and we're perfectly fine If you get rid of our private health insurance if that means we could still keep our doctor in hospitals But because she's too afraid to speak truth to power and challenge the status quo.  I mean They're gonna make a lot of money these companies that offer Medicare Advantage are going to profit heavily from this So this is not a plan that is in the interest of the people This is not a politician who's looking out for the people She's looking out for the profits of the health insurance companies and maybe it's because she's corrupt Maybe it's because she's just too afraid to stand up to them either way. It's despicable.


Good afternoon and welcome back to day three of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon, here in the Windy City, Chicago, Illinois. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined by my favorite sidekick, John Furrier. Thanks for having me. Hey, I'll always have you at your own table. Thanks for creating this show so that we could have this conversation. Not a great event. This is one of my favorite events of the year. As you know, I love KubeCon. I post a video on it. Well, it's just authentic and the people are good. It's a mix of all kinds of great people. Startup founders, hyperscalers, big companies, open source contributors, and innovators all in one place, end user customers. It's really the perfect melting pot of innovation and the people involved, so it's always fun. Well, it is always fun and we're fans, even if we didn't have CNCF sitting at the table with us. Taylor, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much, yeah. Two's a party, three's a cube. Yeah, yeah. That's what I'm talking about. Have you been thinking about that one while we were getting ready here? Yeah, yeah. The magician never tells his secrets.  Yeah. Okay, we're going to have to do some magic tricks.  Well, you run the CNCF ecosystem, so you're in charge of the ecosystem, I should say. The people run it, we're all here. This must be your favorite time of the year. Is this like your Christmas to a degree? Absolutely, yeah. No, most folks that focus on the NFL get the Super Bowl. It's like having two of those every single year. So really, really exciting to get to see everybody. All right, Matt, and I bet you've got a lot of friends milling around. What conversations have you been having the most of? What are some of the themes, topics? I think what's been really strange is that people have been talking about AI a lot at this conference. We haven't talked about it at all. I can just about spell it, so that's good, platform engineering, security, and then just, yeah, lots of other threads and features and things within the ecosystem, but I think those are the top three, is AI, security, platform engineering. Little bit of developer experience overall encompassing a lot of that too, which I love because that's kind of like the culture of code. We saw record numbers in Amsterdam. We were there just this past year. I think there was 10,000 capacity, 12,000 actually got in, waiting list in Europe, which is a good sign. We had predicted that we'd have the same vibe here. Again, smashing results here. Congratulations. Thank you, thank you. Give us some of the numbers. What's going on? What's some of the highlights from this year that you can share with folks watching? Yeah, so some of the highlights I think have been, for me, is really, again, just the people, the hallway track, but unfortunately, we don't stream that on YouTube just yet. Once we figure that out, it'll be different story. I think one of my favorite things was Tim Hawkin talking this morning about what the future of Kubernetes looks like. And the one quote that really stood out to me from his presentation was, inference is the new web app. And so I was just like, ooh, yeah, I gotta write that one down, put that on a Christmas card or something like that. But it was just a lot to rethink about how we actually balance those things out, deal with GPUs, all of the conversations that I've had with people too, it's where in the stack are we focused on? And so just that alone, it's clear that we need like a mall map or something like that. Like level three GPU, level one, this is apps. So that's been cool. And then, yeah, so many other sessions that have been going on too, people illustrating out security roles and like mock playing through that. Whitney Lee, one of my friends, was that had a really cool, engaged type of talk. And then other things are just a little bit more like research focus that I'm curious to check out later. We had our analyst session yesterday and one of the questions I threw out to the group, we were all kind of chiming in on was trying to synthesize what market is this? Like cause cloud native obviously is the focus. KubeCon may even, you know, Kubernetes is becoming boring, which is a good thing. And we talk about that all the time. But we look out on the landscape here in the ecosystem, we were trying to like, what market is this? It's not IaaS, it's not infrastructure as a service, it's not platform as a service, it's not just cloud middleware or API control playing whatever or just running Kubernetes. There's also apps. So again, people are just building and deploying workloads. What market is it? Is it software? I hope it's still ours is software, but then you got infrastructure. How do you describe this? And the result came was that we said, it's a new thing. How do you look at that? Because you have the view of the ecosystem. What, how would you describe this market that CNCF is focused on? Obviously cloud native, but you can't really put it in a bucket. What's your vision on this? Yeah, yeah, cloud native bucket maybe, but even then it'd be hard to replicate. I think it is really difficult to quantify. Yeah, it really has fallen into this asterisk kind of category, but we, it's, I've talked with a lot of folks focusing on different aspects of the stack. I think when it comes to this group of people, it's mostly infrastructure folks, but then when it comes down to some of the implementations, there have been like the app stack and everything else. We're starting to see more developers kind of come into the fray, wanting to understand things, especially when it comes to platform engineering. And then starting to see some folks more from the hardware side too, with all of the AI stuff, GPUs, how do we, how do we all put this together and stitch together our wonderful tapestry of things? So it's, I think that's the answer is D, all the above, right? It's a new thing. And it's what's exciting is that the platform engineering conversation is like now broader, it's not niche SRE kind of DevOps. It's like all of the new modern, I hate to use the word IT because it's really not IT. It's more of stuff that's running stuff. Right, like, yeah, that like ML ops, AI ops, SRE platform engineering, we're starting to see all these new roles termed at the same time too. I think, I think we're, well, and these terms are all kind of building on top of Kubernetes, which is awesome. We've been chatting on the show all week. It feels like we've gotten to a point of maturity. Yeah. Would you agree? Are you seeing that across all the projects? Definitely. I think that one of the things I've liked that Kelsey, Kelsey Hightower has constantly said is like, you'll know Kubernetes day of success when it starts to disappear into the background. And we're really seeing that. I think with, I work mostly with end users too, like Intuit, Mercedes-Benz, the people taking these technologies and projects and applying them within their businesses and seeing the contributions in Kubernetes do the little whoop, you know, and then it start to go down a little bit and that's not because there isn't interest in it. It's because you're seeing people start to shift away and put their focus on other aspects, like GitOps, continuous delivery, security things, platform tools, end users especially, just really specific kinds of workloads that they really want to figure out and then vendors coming in and picking up the rest with things like open telemetry and other stuff that people want to really focus on. What's really exciting to me is in looking at how open source has evolved such in a great way is that the contributions get fresher and bigger. You look at backstage for instance, you look at mentioned Intuit and Argo, right? So these are like massive contributions and people are digging it, they're Intuit and it moves the needle. And so now you have constant innovation from the end user side, the companies are now participating in a big way, not just kind of hanging out. That's a real power dynamic here. Exactly, and if you take a look at the anatomy of our projects, of those contributions, you'll see a lot of equal slices of pizza. It's not dominated by one specific company or organization, especially in those end user projects. Like Argo, it's really well mixed up with all those levels of focus. So that I think is, that's a very specific to end user projects. Did you bring up pizza because you're in Chicago? My mind of. Yeah, you're more just cool puns. Like I said, I love to dish. Yeah, let's talk. He's dishing it out. I got to ask you, I got to ask for people watching who may not have the fluency in ecosystems. We, it's super important for this community. Obviously, how do you look at that nurturing aspect of it? How do you nurture the community and ecosystem in a way that's not too overbearing, but also not too light enough? How do you have that iron hand velvet glove approach? What's the secret sauce of managing this ecosystem? Because one, it's growing, it's diverse. It's like we just said, it's kind of multi-dimensional global. What's the secret? What's the vision? How do you, how do you nurture this? Honestly, it's the, it's everything needs to have a home. And I think understanding the core values of the CNCF, we've been asking that a lot this year as we've seen things go on within our ecosystem, outside of our ecosystem. It's been a lot to navigate. I got to talk with Emily, our, the TOC chairperson yesterday about this, like, hey, if we have some people that want to get together and create a new, brand new, net new project, can we, can they do that within the confines of the CNCF and as a safe place of vendor neutral space? And she was saying, it would really help to get folks involved in tech, the tags and working groups and really these places that already exist. We already have these paved roads ready to go, but that's the most difficult thing for us to solve is that information proliferation and bringing, you know, awareness to what's already going on.  It's like, no, no, but that's not what I want. It's like, yeah, that's what we should have, come on. Yeah. You got a lot of mouths to feed in this ecosystem. Talking about dinner at home and this people, I mean, how demanding is the ecosystem from your standpoint? Do you have it on autopilot? What's, it was some of the inside baseball. Chris, Chris Anacheck, our CTO and Emily were presenting yesterday to the board and Chris showed the diff, you know, talking about our values. Chris showed the diff of here's what was in scope back when we started. Everything in blue was just a couple boxes and then he fast-forwarded to today, the whole image was just stark blue. And so it's like, we've expanded a lot and so that's what we're really trying to think through as well. Just the secret being just constant conversation and listening to the community. If we're making decisions and not including them into that mix, it's just gonna be a bad time. So really focusing on the culture and the values of what we actually stand for and constantly re-evaluating that with the community. And how fast is the cycles you're iterating on because you've got Paris coming up, right around the corner, you've got the content catalog. Yeah, please don't remind me. Yeah. We're all, you're the only one who would say that the rest of us are very excited about Paris. The AI wave happens so fast. Remember when you were in Amsterdam, a lot of the tracks, people were at the hallway was dominated with AI now it's front and center. The changes are really rapid right now and it must be a huge challenge from a content standpoint. How do you stay on top of it? Is that a triggering question? Don't answer if you don't want to. It's funny because one of our community members made a KubeCon countdown and it's like a little ASCII art person like holding a sign saying this many days till KubeCon. I used to love that not working for the CNC. I was like, yeah, KubeCon's coming up. Now I'm like, I only have a week to get this done. So yeah, it's like, actually that never happens. Everything's completely planned well. Yeah. Of course. You're already ready for Paris. Exactly. What are you even, what are you talking about? I've known about that for 10 years. Vincent Rappi is so easy. Come on. The good news is that the CFPs and things like that coming in by the community, I think that typically goes well, but it is, yeah, it's, this one's coming up really quick at the end of March. So already starting to have conversations and I was taken aback by, even before Chicago kicking off, people asking like, hey, is this specific event that is in Chicago going to be in Paris? And I was like, oh my gosh, yeah, we have a lot of work to do. But I imagine that conversation will continue and then we just spun up our end user technical advisory board to bring more awareness and checks and balances within our ecosystem. So end users, we constantly say those are the three pillars of the CNCF, the governing board, technical oversight committee, and our end users. And so bringing our end users and creating a body for them to really give this feedback and act as checks and balances is really exciting to see. We will have tons more news once we hit Paris on things that they do, reference architectures and other areas of concern that they kick off. I love that. And working groups aren't just about technical stuff. There's also the deaf and hard of hearing working group. We just had them on the show. So cool to see what they've been able to accomplish and come together in just a few months. I mean, it was deeply inspiring. And moving to get to chat and think about the deaf coders who now get to be empowered by this community. It's just super special. That's the thing I think is a lot of folks when you're driving like corporate change or working in an enterprise, it can be difficult to start to push something forward. And that's the thing that always catches me off guard in the best way possible within our community is, hey, I see a problem. I'd like to fix that. We're like, let's do it. People are like, whoa, this fast. And find my friends who are also going to, you know, find some friends and we'll build it. Yeah, it's just like, you care about this too? Yeah. Let's go. Yeah, yeah, which is really cool. Actually, let's stay there for a second. Curious, I mean, there's lots of projects within the CNCF ecosystem, but what are some of the trends you're seeing in some of the earlier stage projects right now? Good question. What's next? I think earlier projects, I think that they're, so graduated, obviously, like you said, just really well-defined, clear paths to engagement. Some of the other projects, it's interesting conversation because they're asking for best practices on how to run those things. And I think personally, I think that's what, you know, when you look at companies, organizations, foundations, what's the product? And I think ours is culture. And it's really about how do we embody that and then how do we keep that? And that's what I love about the job. That's what truly has, I feel at home working in this role because of that. And so that's the focus for giving those projects a safe space and then some guidance on, and you get to see these like big brother, big sister projects coaching some of the younger projects like, oh, I remember when that happened in our community, here's some things to think about and you just see this, you know, cross concern. It's not like I work in this, I mean, Project Red, I'll never talk to Project Blue. That's not the case at all. It's everybody sharing best practices in that way and a lot of coaching across the community. We're stronger and we're better together. I think that's a really important point. And I think that's actually the core tenement of this community. You see the collaboration between enterprise and small projects. We've got contributors at every level. It's really magical. I can tell how much you love your job just by your radiating enthusiasm. I'm not sure the viewers at home can feel that, but it's real. It's genuine. It's genuine. Absolutely, absolutely. How long have you been a part of the community before you were? Oh, it's way back. I think early days for me was Docker. I was working in Cleveland, Ohio at the hospital. Focused on HIPAA and really, really interesting stuff in the cloud to get approved, all of that stuff. Yeah, yeah. And then, yeah, I think the demo that did it for me was seeing some early Kelsey Hightower talks and things, but what really changed it for me was a local meetup when somebody showed me WordPress and when one of the persistent volume claims, the hard drive went away and came back, I was like, this is magic. And so that was what did it for me. I started getting involved like 2016, 2017, and then while working at Disney, flew out to the West Coast, worked for Disney Studios and that's where the ball really started to roll, started contributing, got to lead a release, worked with a couple of groups there. And then just the community just pulled me right in. It truly was the magic. So I'm really happy to be here. Yeah, I mean, the community is what pulled me in. It's why you've been going since the beginning. Yeah, I mean, it's the community's great. And the innovation, the conversations are great, the people are great, but there's progress every year. There's material progress and the needle moves. The target's raised, yeah, totally. And you can see it. And what's great now is you see people who are startups now growing up, they actually got funding, they're growing, and then the end users again, to me that's the big magic, is when you got into it and Spotify and Lyft with Envoy, I mean, some of the major advancements have come from enterprises. Not like the old school, but like companies that grew up, hyperscalers, built their own stuff and said, hey, I'll donate it back to the community or give it back. And that's killer, because those things are needle moving. So, and again, I just love the startups too. We saw David earlier, he was at Google Azure, he's doing a really cool edge, Kubernetes kind of light thing for IoT devices, okay? Kubeberg, probably going to be a huge project when VMware gets bought by Broadcom. You're going to see a lot of people looking at open source alternatives to what might feel like a future that's going to be a lot different. So, again, across the board, this is the action. It really blows my mind, just that and even the amount of projects going on within this space. One fun thing, I do have to post about it on LinkedIn, but Chris Anacheck just recently launched a landscape two. So, it might still be memeable after that, there's still a lot of projects, but so that's being enhanced and then the taxonomy's going to be a little bit better too. The landscape's so big, it's like 0.4 font to get everything in there. It's like, I keep asking my eye doctor if they can replace that with the CNCF landscape, but they keep saying no, yeah.  Is there any chance we can see some magic on the show? I hadn't asked you to do this before. I'm pretty good at sleight of hands, but yeah, we might have, but yeah, no, I need to up my practice, yeah. Okay, well the next time you sit with us in Paris, maybe we should have a little bit of a magic segment. I'll get my demos ready. Yep, perfect, fantastic. All right, way to go. Taylor, thank you so much for being here with us. You are the energy I think everyone needs at the end of day three. I know I'm certainly thriving in it and it's so fun to hear your hot take. John, thanks for your insights, for your commentary, for bringing the magic as usual, and thank all of you for tuning in to KubeCon, Cloud DativCon here, live from Chicago. My name's Savannah Peterson, you're watching theCUBE, the leading source for technology news.