Hello and good evening to this talk tonight in English. Lorax and Theo are presenting you about how they create and run the own secure leaking platform that actually works. I'm very interested in what they will present us. And I wish you a nice evening with the two of them. Hello, welcome to our talk, Making Leaks Flow on a Budget. I'd like to introduce myself. What's that? Introduce yourself. Hi, I'm Lorax. I'm a writer, journalist, editor at Distributed Denial Secrets. d.secrets.com. My name is Theo and I'm a privacy engineer. So this is a talk for those of us who care about making the leaks, continuing to flow, telling the truth, even if it makes the sky fall, even if it sets the world on fire. So let's begin with a little context where you think this is an important subject to talk about here. And I'm going to start with a little history lesson. So once upon a time, there was this website called WikiLeaks and things were good, leaks got published. Some had quite a revolutionary impact at the time. Then in 2019, some guy gets arrested, blah, blah, blah. Everybody here already knows the story. But let's talk about the current state of WikiLeaks. So if you go to WikiLeaks.org right now, you will see that the last thing they published was the Intolerance Network in August 2021, which was a dataset from Spanish Red Wing Catholic organizations, but this was actually an old dataset that was already out there since at least 2017. You could actually find the unredacted version of this dataset elsewhere when WikiLeaks published on the unredacted version in 2021. And if you actually try to view this data on WikiLeaks.org, your browser will prompt you to log in, so it's not even available from WikiLeaks anymore. So the last original release from WikiLeaks was the first short fails in November 2019, so almost four years ago at this point. And as for the overall state of WikiLeaks.org, the website has been slowly falling apart for the last two years, going to search that WikiLeaks.org gives you a 403 forbidden error, making many valuable datasets like the hacking team emails no longer searchable. If you wanted to mirror yourself the past WikiLeaks releases using the tarnestly publish, mirrors that WikiLeaks.org is also down with a 502 by gateway this time. And if you try to make a submission to WikiLeaks since the end of 2021 for the month of 2022, you would get an onion site, not found error. The error page is telling us to contact the onion site administrator. If we go to talk to WikiLeaks at WikiLeaks.org slash talk, the page is currently being rebuilt and it has been this way for quite some time. So while preparing this talk, I actually found that WikiLeaks is a new submission portal that actually sort of seems to work. Although if you try pushing any data through this form in the past four years, you would find it about as effective as piping the data into no response, no publishing. But meanwhile, the donation portal, at least we still be working with the Wahon Foundation still processing donations and we have WikiLeaks. There is only managed to raise $52 million through the sale of an NFT for Asanji's defense. So here is an easy way to make $52 million. Anyway, the money was supposed to be managed by the centralized autonomous organization which bought the artwork. But all of the voting power was quickly transferred to Asanji's brother with the Wahon Foundation task of converting it from the internet monopoly money. If you watch the transparency report that they've given at Easter Egg this year, you would find out that they decided to pay themselves up to 85 euros an hour for managing this fund. And from the confidential and the internal documents which you can see on the screen behind me right now, we know that they've been having quite a bit of trouble finding a crypto exchange willing to work with them. But eventually they managed to find one in Switzerland. Most of their assets are still stuck in EFA and you can view the documents at this URL. Yeah, if you're interested. Anyway, I guess defining an international extradition case takes a lot of money and resources, too much to also keep our website up at the same time, even when you have $52 million. And well, personally, I don't believe anybody deserves to be in prison. Let's get back to our main topic because this is a talk for people who care about making the leaks. So since 2019, there has been this other group called distributed denial of secrets. There has been quite successful publishing leaks and keeping them online. Since it's exception, they archive approximately 100 terabytes of data just from some of the most recent releases. We have six terabytes of email from Mexican Department of Defense. Hundreds of news stories generated by this leak alone. Internal documents from the Russian censorship machine, Roscoe Lanzar, the TSA in off-line list, the American College of Pediatricians, a US-American right-wing anti-trans, anti-LGBTQ, an anti-abortion K group. And also, the latest part of Wikileaks's last release, official files, that just came out. Now I distributed denial of secrets. What recently, they've been having some financial trouble. They're basically running out of money and might have to stop publishing new data soon. So if you have too much money burning, how many pockets I would highly encourage you to go to this website and throw some money to deal with the secrets of the charity. Otherwise, the next leaking publishing platform could have to be you. And initially, when I was planning to do this talk, I was going to do like a technical overview of how to set up media wiki, how to register the main name, but I was expecting a technical audience here. So instead, I'm going to hand over to my friend Lorax to talk more about how to establish the relationship with journalists as a new leaking organization. Thank you. Yeah, so when we started distributed denial of secrets, I was on the advisory board in 2018 and 2019 became more full-time. And the idea was never to be the only leaks site on the internet. I come from a background in journalism. Competition is good. It's nice to have someone else in the space to keep you honest. And we thought of ourselves as providing competition and we would also love for newer ideas and newer platforms to come along. What Theo was saying is true. We are very shoestring. We may run out of money. We may not be around forever. So I wanted to talk a little bit about how I see the work, hopefully to encourage others to take it on. It's not that hard to talk to journalists. It is daunting. They do have a lot of questions. I come from a background in journalism. I went to journalism school. Most of my career has been in journalism. I've worked in newsrooms in Ecuador, Canada. I've worked as a freelancer most of the time. Journalists really don't like to be told that they don't know something. Publishing leaks. You are often knocking on their door and offering them a big chunk of knowledge that they don't already have. So they are sometimes apprehensive to take it on. Things that I think are important for the work. You don't have to call yourself a journalism organization but it does help. You can publish leaks as an art collective or as an academic group. There are different ethical considerations for different industries. So just learn as much as possible about the label that you want to apply to yourself if you are publishing journalistically. Read a lot of ethics of journalism books. Read the New York Times style guide latest edition. It will teach you how they think and what they look for when journalists are considering sources and source materials and conversations with other journalism entities. So another thing that I think is important is to set up redundancies in your organization. I liked that DDoS Secrets was a collective from the start. We had a lot of people who could veto each other and could argue and disagree. This also creates redundancies. So if one note is taken offline, there are other people who can pick up the slack. I think that that's important for having a longevity and longevity is something that journalists will look for if they're gonna use your archive of leaks. They don't want to include a link in their story that's gonna be dead next year. So try to make yourself as versatile and redundant and just long-living as possible because this inspires confidence in the media when you wanna work with them and provide them data. Da-da-da. Yeah, another thing to keep in mind about journalists is that they're very competitive with each other. You can sometimes use this to your advantage if one journalist isn't collaborative or isn't helpful to your cause, go to their direct competition and talk to them and form a better relationship with them. This will make the other journalists get some FOMO and maybe start to work with you. But it's also just good to keep competition active in the space. There's more and more journalism networks forming up. There's new ones all the time. They all have slightly different philosophies and you can learn about the differences between them by starting to work with them, thinking of the ICIJ, the OCCRP, Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. The ICIJ is the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. There's one in Europe called the European Investigative Collaborations. They all have slightly different policies and internal rules and yeah, you can go to one and the other. When we were starting out distributed denial of secrets, there was a source who went first to the ICIJ and then to, sorry, his other way around, went to the EIC and then the ICIJ with different data sets, sort of burned bridges at both and yeah, distributed denial of secrets I think creates a bit of a safety mechanism for sources to prevent them from making some of these mistakes that journalists that turn them off working with leaks. How are we doing for time? Should we take questions? We've got 10 minutes left. So just what Larak's was talking, I was a bit busy on my laptop as you could see in the background and I managed to package up a leak. Just to sort of prove that the technical bit is really easy and like most of us could do it it's just that nobody wants to put themselves in these shoes. We should support the people who try to do it. And like, so here we have a torrent for a release that was originally published on the blog of the ransomware group play and it's a surveillance and biometrics vendor for the Swiss and German police. There are some interesting documents in there. For example, a trial of a smart border control system at the Frankfurt International Airport reports about that. So just in the span of 12 minutes I was able to do what Wikileaks hasn't been able to do in the last four years. Yeah, for those who are unfamiliar with like ransomware groups, there are a lot of them and a few years ago part of the tactics that they've taken on has been to publish their own leak sites on the Tor Network. So Dita Secrets started archiving certain leaks that were more newsworthy from ransomware blogs. At this point, there's just so many that we don't download everything that's new on a ransomware blog.  So this one sort of falls into one of our other categories of interest which is data from police. This isn't on Dita Secrets yet because we just did it like for the talk but maybe someday. It is on the play ransomware blog but there's now a torrent, so have at it. Start your own leak site. Can't be fun. I guess we can take questions now. And I'm sure there are some questions, yes. This is more for like a technical question. It would be, you say it's really easy. Do you have like some documentation of how you run Dita Secrets? Anywhere? Like if someone else wants to spin it up, then who's there? Dita Secrets is a media wiki website and we publish public data sets via torrent. So for packaging torrents and making sure that they have small enough parts that people can download them, there are tutorials out there. The other thing that Dita Secrets does is we run some search engines. We run Aleph, which is a free software by the organized crime and corruption reporting project. It has docs.aleph.occrp or docs.aleph.occrp or something like that. But it's pretty useful. A lot of groups run an Aleph instance to help search leaks. Ours is currently locked to users, logged in users. We used to have a public Aleph, but it was too expensive to run and it attracted a lot of negative attention. So now our copy of Aleph called hunter.ditasecrets.com is for requesters. Yeah, another thing that we do is we have like a public category of leaks and then we also have a less public collection that's available upon request. We use this less public category to store datasets with a lot of PII in them so that we're not mass publishing people's private information because this also attracts negative legal attention. But yeah, there isn't a tutorial written about how to do that. It's sort of, it's an editorial policy and other groups may have different editorial policies. And people might argue. In fact, people do argue a lot with our decisions about what we put in the limited distribution category and what we put in public. But yeah, we're a really small group so we do our best to learn what we can. Publishing leaks about certain entities has proven to be dangerous for all included people multiple times for sources as well as editors or journalists and even the technical staff of some sites. What are the risks I put myself in when hosting a new leak site? How fast do these risks become relevant to me and how could I avoid some of these risks or mitigate them? For us, what has worked has been having like a global network of members and advisors and we have journalists, we have technical staff, we have academics, we have volunteers who are none of the above, but they have large archiving capacities and so there's, as I was talking about redundancies that discourage like, yeah, law enforcement from encouraging like strice and effect. We have had some attempts to censor us, quite a few, but as long as you keep publishing then more people will find you and the act of publishing sort of protects you in the long run. It teaches also the entities that would try to censor you what your values are and who your allies are. We've been adding supporters over the years as we continue to exist and more people find use in the archive. These sorts of voices are valuable when your data goes into a research paper or like a huge ICIJ investigation. Law enforcement sort of backs off because they don't want the negative attention. Definitely like journalists have varying levels of comfort of working with leaks and you can realize pretty quickly like who's going to be an ally and who's going to be a problem. Yeah, do you have anything to add? I think it's also easier to be anonymous on the internet than ever before. Like we have funny internet money that lets you pay for things without using a real identity.  Yeah, there is a new leaks site called inlasehaktivista.org that's all anonymous editors and volunteers and they've been publishing leaks for a few years.  Can you repeat that? How you would deal with takedown and other legal requests, what do you throw them in the bin? Yeah, you have to have a good host that throws them in the bin but lets you know that this happened. We've had, we've changed hosts a few times. There are, you had a site at one point that was like privacy friendly web hosts but they're pretty easy to figure out. FlokiNet is great. Greenhost is useful. There's more and more every day. You have to study your jurisdictions, figure out which ones are more likely to notify you. If you do get a takedown request, we were sued in Russia, never found out about it. Our domain is now blocked in Russia. We decided not to appeal because we figured our website was probably illegal in Russia. Our logo is a pride flag. So not much worth arguing with in the courts there but yeah, does that answer your question? Next. So I know that a lot of journalists are a bit not so happy working with leaked data or they just lack the technical capabilities to do so. How can you make it easier for journalists to work with the data and maybe where is the line between making it easier for them to work with the data and tampering with the data? And like throwing away maybe interesting things. And also how do you select the journalists to approach? Okay, so the journalists really like to have exclusives and the way that we approach this philosophy, I mean, some newsrooms are more old fashioned than others and request data sets that they wouldn't have exclusive access to. A lot of newsrooms have shrinking budgets for investigations they don't like to invest three months of research time into a data set if they think that the story that they're going to publish by the end of it would come out before they're done working with the data set. I do think that attitudes are changing and that newsrooms are becoming more willing to work with data that other newsrooms have. In Germany maybe that's not the case but internationally I know of more and more newsrooms that will work with a data set even if another newsroom has it. And how to select journalists to give maybe embargo or like early access to? We have some parameters that we look for in the outlets we really like working with outlets that don't have paywalls because a lot of our readers wouldn't be able to access stories that are behind a paywall. You can also look for other impact that a newsroom would have to determine whether you will work with that outlet or with that journalist. It's not always like the newsroom that's useful. It's sometimes just one reporter in a newsroom who is able to push stories through and convince editors that they're worthwhile. There is value to walking journalists through a data set a little bit and telling them what's in there, like what dates it covers or which, yeah, basically which time period it covers and what the keywords might be that they could throw at it. We don't do a lot of pre-processing of the data sets. We have this limited distribution category because we like for the partner organizations to do more of the work themselves, journalists really don't like to be told what to do, and yeah, they like to find things for themselves a lot of the time, so it's a balance to find that middle ground where you're helping them to get into a data set but you're not directing them to what the story is. So yeah, that's the end of this very interesting talk for today. Maybe you might be able to reach out to them afterwards. Thank you very much for the insights and also thank you very much for your work, and have a nice evening. Thanks everyone.


Netflix must face a defamation law suit by former prosecutor Linda Friestain over her portrayal as a racist and unethical villain in the series when they see us. A U.S. district judge in New York has ruled that Friestain had plausible alleged defamation as to five sins. They include depictions that should withheld evidence, coerced confessions and directed a racially discriminatory police round-up of young men. When they see us is a 2019 series about the Central Park Five case in which young African American boys were unjustly convicted of murder.


Now the Baltimore Ravens could have even worse injury news First JK Dobbins they lost him for the season to a torn Achilles and now Marcus Williams who also got hurt in the same game. It is feared that He tore his peck. Let's just read the report from Ian rapper boy says Raven standout Db Marcus Williams is feared to have torn his peck in today's game So it said he'll have an MRI to confirm another major injury for Baltimore. So It's like they just keep piling up. They keep piling up We talked about JK Dobbins earlier, of course, we brought up Ronnie Stanley There was Tyler Linderbaum too, but Marcus Williams and he was somebody that I remember last year They first signed him. I loved the signing and then when he played I loved how he played even more So it justified the signing and then he missed a chunk of games with a broken wrist He came back. You did his thing. So this year. I'm like, all right. He plays the whole season. Oh, yeah It's gonna be real good. It's gonna be nice And now he might be out Possibly for the whole season. We'll see hopefully again. Hopefully what they fear it doesn't end up Happening doesn't end up going down, but It's like man These dudes can't catch a break. I really do not know or understand what it is Like this doesn't make any kind of sense to me whatsoever, man Like I know every team deals with injuries. I get that is football. It's an extremely physical sport I get it, but it seems like Ravens when it comes to injuries, they're like on another level from so many other teams, man their injuries not only Pile up, but the significance of the injuries that their guys suffer so consistently. It's crazy It is really crazy and something has got to give I know over the past couple of years They've been talking about they were gonna look at all these different What they doing as far as training as far as conditioning as far as this that in a third when it comes to their players health But this is like crazy, man This is really crazy, and I do not get it. I Don't get it. Could it just be unfortunate circumstances. It could be But we're right. It's been like a lot of Unfortunate circumstances year after year after year after year after year And I just don't know why I don't get it. It is the craziest thing So with Marcus Williams, hopefully he'll be straight, but I'm not like Holding it. We hold it out a little bit of hope But it feel like we ain't really got that much left as far as these injuries, man Not saying the season is over. So don't don't get it twisted because I don't believe that not one bit But as far as like hearing about a guy old the Ravens fear. He may have this injury It's like yeah, we hope that feel be wrong, but He really got that much hope that it will be wrong So it's like man like What is it I don't get it Ian Rappaport did a follow-up and said that Marcus Williams has full movement and the pain is limited But it's very swollen. So I said the MRI will tell the story. So look man We we ain't gonna trip too much about this even though it ain't looking good, but um, we'll just wait and see We'll wait and see like we've got to do really with anything But we'll wait and see and then I guess Ravens will go from there and plan accordingly and whatnot and see but man This this sucks this really really sucks, but hopefully Marcus Williams end up being okay because that like Man, and we even got in my eyes on Ronnie Stanley and Tyler Linda bomb yet We only on the we didn't even get the second in my we only got the first MRI yet That took JK Dobbins out for the season now Waiting on second 30s and four. So we'll see what happens when we get there


Let's bring in Mark Bailey over at FIG Securities and I suppose looking at the picture that is the US economy at the moment, some arguably weak data out of the US on Friday, obviously pointing to that retail sales numbers, your thoughts on what we saw on Friday and how it fits into the commentary that we're getting from various members like the Chicago Fed presidents. Yeah, good morning, James. I think, you know, the Chicago Fed presidents kind of pretty much on the ball in terms of the CPI. We saw a headline in the States coming in at 0.2% in line with consensus, but the underlying CPI was actually below consensus at 0.1 versus 0.2, so you did see a bit of softness there. And as we've seen in Australia, I mean, as you were talking about Orison Group before we came on, you know, the retail sales in the States were soft and they expected both the headline and also the underlying excluding energy and food as well. So, you know, it's weakness coming through there in the retail sales. You did see a bit of repricing as mentioned in terms of the Fed hike for June that dropped down to 67% chance if you look at the Fed future funds from around about 78% prior to the data. And also you saw a pretty significant move as well in US Treasuries. You saw that 10-year yield dropping down around about six basis points to close it around about 233. And that was exactly at the same time as you saw that weaker CPI print and also retail sales. In addition, you did see a bit of interesting moves in the curves. You did see a bit of steepening as that short end, the short end kind of repricing lower on the expectation that maybe actually June is not locked in certainty as much as it was probably two or three weeks ago. And also maybe September is looking potentially a more likely chance for a hike there. But you saw a bit of curve steepening as well. So quite significant moves there in the US market. And I think that's right. I think we got too much focus and too much money flowing on that June hike. And I don't think that's locked in. And if we continue to see some mediocre economic news out of the States, I'm not sure whether the Fed will move in June. I think the Fed will continue to position the market for that potential of a hike. But as we've always said, it's always data dependent. I think Janet Yellen will continue to play that card. If they don't hike in June, do we need to start seriously revising the probability of two hikes this year if they don't move in June? Yeah, I think so, James. I think it's going to be really difficult for them to do that second one, you know, both in the second half of the year. So whether it's September and December, I think probably if you're looking at June, you know, and you don't hike there, then you're probably looking at September for the next one. And then I think December is probably maybe going to be a bit too soon. So you're going to see a very gradual path, which the Fed has already talked about. But I don't think we're going to see, you know, two or three potentially hikes, which some of the more hawkish regional feds have continued to say, look, we think almost two is baked in. And we may even see three future hikes this year. And I'm not sure we're there yet in terms of the data if it continues to be, you know, kind of mixed and soft as it was on Friday. We talk China briefly, Mark, as well. Some interesting comments from President Xi over the weekend as he meets with some big global leaders, Italy's, Turkey's and Russia's presidents and prime ministers, but $124 billion in terms of infrastructure on the Silk Road, describing it as the project of the century.  We talk about $75 billion here in Australia over 10 years. It dwarfs us somewhat. Yeah, look, I think, you know, the Chinese regulatory authorities and the government will continue to support that growth target of, you know, six to six and a half percent. And, you know, fiscal spend and infrastructure spends is a good way to do that as any. Interestingly, in terms of what we're actually seeing in the bond markets and the reaction to some of the weaker data, and maybe some of the, I guess, probably more hawkish monetary policy actions, we haven't seen any kind of fiscal easing at all, where, you know, I think the markets were certainly expecting some slight changes there. We've actually seen, you know, the Chinese government bond market sell off now for eight weeks in a row, and that's the longest run of declines that we've seen since the fourth quarter of 2013.  But again, you know, this fiscal spend will probably help to appease those nerves and, you know, kind of give credence to the view that, you know, whether it's the government or the regulatory authorities, they've got their financial firepower to make sure that you do manage your way to a more market-based rational allocation of capital and more market-based economy through a soft landing than a hard landing. And they've got that, you know, the firepower to make sure that happens. Staying overseas and looking at Europe, obviously a lot of interest in the political situation there. Merkel, she's doing well ahead of the big general elections. Yeah, absolutely. She looks like she's won the state election for only the second time in 50 years, and that's in the most popular state in Germany that's got one-fifth of the population there, you know, kind of beat her rival. So that's going to give her a big positive boost with the national elections, you know, only four months away there. So again, you know, I think you'll probably see a bit of a boost to the euro, probably see a bit of a rally in terms of the government bond yields in Europe as well in the core states and member states there, as, you know, a bit of risk is again taken off, added to the table, you know, the risk appetite is certainly probably stronger given that result and the positive boost for Merkel, given what we've seen as well in France as well, kind of getting rid of the Le Pen threat as well, you know, maybe we see a bit more stability. Although, you know, I see in the news as well, Greece is still negotiating and trying to sort out what kind of write-downs will happen there and is palatable for both the IMF and the ECB as well and the European Union more broadly and also Italy is never far off the table in terms of potential risks in that area. And look, flagged a little bit earlier, big week of data here in Australia, of course, we've got some job numbers and wages numbers.  Yeah, look, I think both those data points are pretty key. My big focus is probably on wages because that is the one that will potentially feed through into the CPI. So I think we're expecting kind of 1.9% print on wages. Anything either side of that would have the potential to move both the government bond markets and the currency market. My expectation is you're still going to see fairly constrained wage growth. I don't think you're seeing a particularly robust jobs market, you know, as you say, kind of retailers do seem to be really struggling in Australia. And more broadly, I still don't see, you know, companies doing particularly well. You know, it's not dire, but I think it's a real struggle for retailers and the more broader economy to try and generate the growth that's needed to really start to see some significant hiring coming through. And in actual fact, I've probably seen more kind of companies announcing layoffs and redundancies than I have on hiring, but that's always the case in the press. So we'll actually wait until the official numbers. And I think the consensus at the moment is expecting around about 5,000 jobs to be created in the month. Again, you know, there's fairly swing big swing potentials there as well with any job numbers. So I guess we'll have to wait and see when the data comes. But again, my expectation is that we're going to see a fairly tough jobs market, no wage inflation coming through. And again, that will probably, you know, put the RBA maybe on a slightly back foot and maybe look towards having an easing bias further down the line. Obviously not yet, but if that softness continues, I certainly expect to see that coming back. All right, Mark Bailey, appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks, James. Have a good day. You too.


I'm Dr. Charlie Stoltenall. I'm the Extension Veterinarian here at NDSU, located in Fargo. John asked me today to talk a little bit about calf health. What can we do to help these little guys once they hit the ground? What can we do to chime off and get them going? What are some other programs that we can do now that ensure that they get off to a fast start? We'll try and answer some of those questions and start a little dialogue. Thanks for stopping by today. Have a look around. Take care. The single greatest cause of calf death is dystocia or that difficult birth. It can't be said enough that we really have to take care of what we do before these calves even get to the ground. A case in point is you don't want to wait when you're having a difficult birth out there. Don't wait too long. Get help. This website below is an interview done by a Bismarck station when Bob Mortimer from Colorado State was up here in December for our calving school or dystocia school. He's got some really good points to offer us. So if you can, click on that and listen to that. The biggest loss of calf health or loss of death is actually dystocia. Cubs are pretty resilient, but they do need some help. And where we start off is the environment. Where we calve out these calves, we need to keep it clean or we have to have it set up so that the minimal contamination or bedding is left. I'm just a stickler that sick animals do not belong in a calving environment. Calving is stressful enough and we really don't need to be putting sick animals back in that environment. Also remember, older calves infect younger calves. We've got calves out there that might be two, three weeks old and they might be healthy themselves, but they're going to be spreading all different types of pathogens.  Any animal that gets sick and they're damn, if they get sick, we put them in a treatment area, not the calving area. We get them well and then we put them in an area what we call convalescent. And they might be well and they stay there. We do not want to take these animals that were once sick, put them back into the general population. That's where we get scours outbreaks. I know. It means that we have to have a lot more pens in maybe geographical areas where we keep these animals, but that's how we keep our animals from getting sick. We have to practice better biosecurity. Well, you'll probably ask them, Doc, when can I put them back together? The rule of thumb is when it's bright sunshine and you're going to kick them back out on the pasture, that's when you can combing them. We need to use the sun, the heat, the warm weather to get rid of these pathogens. So my view is we never want to put a sick animal into the calving area. We really don't want to put sick animals back in with our general population. It just leads to problems later on. Again, to stress, when we have calves hitting the ground out there, depending on what time of the year you're doing it, but if you're in the early part of the year, February, March, calves need bedding. They need bedding or a dry place. They need to be able to get out of the wind. And so shelters, open-faced calving or pole bonds are good. And above all, I shouldn't say above all else, but another really important consideration is calving areas and where these calves need drainage. I've been called out to too many farms to look at them, and the calving area is actually situated below a backgrounding lot or a feed lot or where we have older animals and the runoff is running right through the calving pen, the calving areas. This is a big mistake because all that runoff is going to have some type of pathogen in it and these calves are really susceptible. So we really need to think about what we're doing out there. How do I have it designed? Where is the drainage going? Because the last thing we need to do is offer these newborn calves contaminated area. So once the calf is out of the animal, hopefully we didn't have to pull it, we're there. We watch things go on normally. Then what do we do? One of the things we can do is we can remove any mucus from the calf's mouth and nose with a clean finger. There's another area. Optimistic producers out there, they don't really take the time to wash their hands. Take the time. A little cleanliness on your part goes a long ways. Wash your hands, be clean. You don't need to do any other Herculean events. Some producers out there know that they'll hang calves upside down because all this food comes out. That's just food out of a calf's stomach. All we're doing is stressing that animal out. How would you like someone to hang you by your ankles and see how well you breathe and swing you around in the air? That's not helping. So the practice of hanging calves upside down doesn't really help us in this area. If we have a calf that we don't think is breathing like it should, we can use a clean straw or a clean soft pervertube that's typically inside the nose. What they'll try and do is exhale, try and blow that out and that can help stimulate the breathing. Another way is to rub the calf vigorously with a warm towel or towel.  Rub them, get them gone so they can breathe. And if the cow or calf wants to take that calf's letter, that's the best stimulation that calf can have because if it's damp, it starts licking on it. Another area I'm often asked about is, what about doing even an artificial respirator out there for these calves? I don't know how to answer that question. In large herds, it might be beneficial depending on how many you have, but really the cause of calves that aren't breathing is that they've been in there inside the dam too long so they're starting to get asphyxiated. And so it's important that we do get air to them. If you're going to do this and have an artificial respirator around, be prepared, get one ahead of time. There are commercial respirators, resuscitators available. One of the things you have to be aware of when you use one of these is you have to hold off the esophagus to prevent air from filling the room under the stomach. Now, the following, I'm going to show you some pictures of a commercial type of resuscitator out there. And I'll try and explain how to do that. Here's a picture of a resuscitator that's on the market out there or there are others like this. It has a plastic portion, and that's just an expandable tube to be able to pump air, and then it has a clear little nose cone that fits over the mouth and nose of the calf. And these can be reused. They should be cleaned up and kept in a clean area and all those things, but they can be reused. So here we place the resuscitator over the calf's nose, notice how it's placed, and we just, what we'll do is we'll pull that plunger out and you'll see it in its fully extended position in the next slide, and then we'll just push that air into the lungs of that calf. Here's a picture with that tube fully extended. So what it's done is it's pulled that volume of air into the plunger. And so now next, what we're going to do is push that plunger in and that air will be forced into the nose, the neres, and the mouth of the calf. But before you do that, there's one important thing you have to do, and this is on the next slide. Notice where his hand is. Actually it'd be his left hand. It's over on the calf's neck, and notice the calf is down on its right side. And what he's done is he's pushing down on that esophagus, trying to pinch that off there. So when he pushes that air in with the plunger, he doesn't feel the ruin or the stomach full of air. So that air that's pushed in actually goes down the trachea into the lungs. This is not hard to do, but you have to be aware of this. Otherwise you'll spend all your time inflating the rumin and wondering why the calf still keeps turning blue.