What are smart contracts? Don't be surprised, but smart contracts are not smart and are not necessarily contracts. So what are they then? Well, rather than smart, they are deterministic, as they are rule-based if A then B algorithms. If you meet certain conditions, for instance, if you insulate your house, then you receive a subsidy. In cyberspace world, this is also referred to as Code is Law, which basically means that rules are enforced by algorithmic code that is automatically executed. As a matter of fact, however, a smart contract does not need underlying blockchain technology, nor does it even have to be executed in a distributed manner. The notion of smart contract was coined by Nick Szabo back in the middle of the 90s when blockchain did not yet exist. Nevertheless, if one nowadays talks about smart contracts, it generally refers to blockchain-based smart contracts. Blockchain-based smart contract technology enables these if A then B rules to be automatically executed and collectively validated by a distributed network without the need of an intervention of a trusted intermediary. This enables a secure, automated, distributed execution of three types of actions which would otherwise require a trusted third party. First of all, registering facts, for instance, tracking information about the food supply chain from production to delivery. Secondly, enforcing rules, for instance, the automatic payment of fines or taxes. Thirdly, transferring value, or at least a representation thereof via a so-called token. In practice, a blockchain application usually deploys a combination of these actions. These possibilities enormously increase the potential of blockchain applications. With regard to transferring value, all assets that are registered on the blockchain, which is also called tokenization, can be received, blocked, and transferred by smart contract technology. Think, for instance, about the transfer of copyrights, domain names, diamonds, or houses. Moreover, there are so-called non-fungible tokens, representing unique, not interchangeable digital items such as art, audio, video, or other forms of creative work. Additionally, smart contracts also do not necessarily imply the conclusion or execution of legal contracts. They can also constitute, for example, unilateral legal acts such as a gift or will, unilateral decisions of administrative authorities such as granting subsidies, means of evidence, for instance, registered facts in a police file, the automatic execution of processes, for instance, an automatic delivery order of cans when the soda machine is almost empty. We already know that smart contracts are not smart but deterministic. Well, they are also deaf and blind, as a smart contract has no knowledge other than its own status. It cannot easily know the status of other smart contracts, nor does it have access to data from the real world or elsewhere on the internet. Nonetheless, a so-called oracle can provide information that exists outside of the network into the smart contract. For instance, oracles can be used for smart locks based on a fingerprint, or for the award of automatic compensation in case of flight delays. Data, such as the proof of ownership of a house, must in certain cases be provided by an entity that must be trusted, such as a notary, a judge, or an administrative authority. Despite the promise of blockchain that trust in intermediaries would no longer be necessary, trust is still needed. For example, one must trust that the software does not contain programming errors, bugs, or that the input provided by the oracle is correct. Incorrect or false input into the smart contract leads to unintended results.  In conclusion, blockchain-based smart contracts are if A then B algorithms that enable an automatic execution of three actions that would otherwise require a trusted third party. Registering facts, transferring value, and enforcing rules.


Tryna go natural Hi, everyone. Welcome to my channel. I'm coming on to do a quick video I wasn't gonna do it, but then I was like I can't leave you guys hanging I can't know about this and not let you guys know so here I am To talk about in a see naturals So I got just two products from them last black Friday tried it out Saturday today's Monday So this is like a day three But yeah, I tried it recently and I had the most moisturizing wash there I've had in a while So I don't know what it was, you know, how sometimes your hair just decides to act right I don't know if that's it if the seasons change like I don't know what it was I can't even tell you what it was. I did do a couple things different too I'm usually the time go with conditioner then shampoo I did that but I started from the top because the top for me is the driest part So started here and then when here so the other way around so maybe that's how something to do with it They slip and disclaimer, but just in case it was emaci and to give you guys a chance to get on it I'm coming on to let you guys know so I got these two products the tropical escape cleansing co-wash The aloha biscuits leaving off with the co-wash. That's what you do, right? It was more of a moisturizing co-wash, but it was super moisturizing So it had great slip and great moisture But it didn't foam and I didn't cleanse my scalp as much as I would have wanted a co-wash to do for me You guys love super moisturizing no foam mildly dirty only type co-wash is definitely give it a try Because I didn't think that it worked great as a product It just didn't do what I like my co-washers to do which means I like my co-washers to clean a bit more But it set me up for like a really moisturizing wash day. Both of them have a similar Floral slightly sweet kind of scent and the light creamy texture. So this is a co-wash So you can see it's like a nice light creamy texture After I rinse this out, I applied this product currently deconditioner, which we're really here to talk about But I'm just giving you all the full disclosure of what I did Yeah So this was great. It was moisturized from the beginning to end anyway It was moisturized after this co-wash. It was moisturized after this and then I want to say this is the star of the show This hibiscus leaving. This is the one that I want to repurchase because This slip was amazing like I had just put it on and even I came out of the shower Which means that my hair is getting drier and more tangled everything everything I put this on and it was like if I had been detangling for half an hour like my hands were just sliding right through So the slip was amazing moisture was amazing and definition was amazing So I definitely love this leaving at least my first impression after everything I mentioned before this leaving was just awesome Excuse my eyes my wash day eyes and my sick voice, but this is still even pretty moisturizing wash day so far as you can see So because I already pop it in everything, but I do think I like this leaving as well. So let us apply it So I like the consistency. It's just a perfect light creamy Guess the nice floral scent Love the slip as well I mean this is live. I just put it on and you can see it's going through So this is the definition with the leaving Definitely liking it You can see like it's a really nice light creamy texture I will see really well my hands needed right now because my hands are dry But it worked in pretty much instantly and I just felt really silky and everything So if you're still looking for a leaving I only want to be wild and you want so much to any wash day Maybe you could try all three. Maybe you could try to leave in since the day three I use my DIY gel but my hair just feels really moisturized and you guys can see how you know Shiny and everything it is. So yeah, I only got these two things. I'm gonna be looking out for getting more A few of my instagram followers told me about hey, I'm late and I see it's awesome So if you have been using an assi and I'm late, but you're interested in trying definitely Let's try about it down below as well. Try it and I see for yourself. See you in the next one. Bye


I was thinking about it and I was like you know what girl if you're thinking about it you should probably just do it. So, here we are. I took a Y7 class this morning and it was so fun. I ended up running into a friend who also teaches yoga with me at Core Power. So it was nice to see her in the morning and it's always nice to just get up and like move your body if you know what I mean. It is 9.20. Then it took me about 15 minutes to walk over there and my class starts at 10 o'clock. So I did want to be like a little early just to make sure that I could you know get myself situated when it comes to wifi and stuff. I've never been to a squabbleshop before so I feel like I definitely need a few moments just to get settled and maybe order a coffee. I might actually just make myself like a little yogurt bowl and put some protein in it so maybe that can hold me over until lunch or at least until after class. I'm probably gonna have to come back as soon as my class is over because I already know I'm gonna be starving. One day I'm going to like master time which is also like an illusion anyway. But one day I'm going to master time and you guys are not going to even recognize me. I'm gonna be in here and I'm gonna be like guys I'm running so early I have so much time. But I did want to talk to you guys oh wait hi my name is Nika. I'm 28 years old and I live in New York City. I'm currently a graduate student at Columbia University. If you're new here make sure you subscribe. I'm really trying to get monetized as soon as possible so trying to get to a thousand followers. We are at like I want to say 645 the time of recording this. I'll pop what number we're at when I edit this but I have faith and I just need your help. So if you will subscribe I would very much appreciate it. Let's go to the coffee shop. It's like 75 degrees and sunny. I already uploaded the YouTube video but I actually like back in SEO stuff and I think I can honestly do that in the park. Just with like my phone and maybe my laptop probably my laptop. But yeah I think I can get a lot of work done in the park so I'm gonna pack us a little bag and then we're gonna go there. But first I have to work. I need to read. So we're gonna do that. Why do I feel like I'm forgetting something? I just posted a vlog. I'm super part of it. I feel like I'm getting better at video editing. And my last video was honestly I'm just so proud of it. Like I'm gonna be loving it. Hopefully this video is amazing too and I feel just as proud when I publish it. But anyway I'm rambling. Let's go to what park? Should we go to Domino Park or McCarran Park? Actually I think we should go to McCarran because I need to make a return. Well not really a return. Urban. I walked by it yesterday and I saw they had an additional 40% off of sale. And I bought something on sale like last week but just for the sale price.  So I'm gonna see if they can do a price match. Anyway that was very long winded. Let's go. There's these really cute dogs. Okay I'm gonna bring extra cheese for any stray dogs. I wish I would have got a clip on it. They were so cute but I was just being present in the moment. Probably going to have some ramen and end the vlog here because other videos tomorrow. Cute coffee shop vibes. Cute Y7 workout.  Also I am so full from that free. Oh my god. Down talking videos. My friend in the evening. So maybe I'll vlog again on Friday. Who knows. But yeah I love you so much. Please please please subscribe to my YouTube channel. I am at 647 subscribers at the time of recording this. So hopefully you can make it 648. That was it guys. I'm really trying to get monetized so if you can help me out your girl would love it. And I'll see you in the next video. Love you so much.


The clove extract reduced Fe3 plus to magnetite, while the G-coffee extract reduced Fe3 plus to both magnetite and hematite. The maximum CD2 plus adsorption capacity was 78 mg per G for iron nanoparticles prepared using clove extract, while it was 74 mg per G for those prepared using G-coffee extract. The adsorption of CD2 plus and Ni2 plus on the iron oxide surface was found to be heterogeneous, and the mechanism of chemisorption is involved in the determination of the rate. The correlation coefficient are two and error functions like RMSE, MES and MAE were used to evaluate the best fit models to the experimental adsorption data. The adsorption mechanism was explored using FDIR analysis. Antimicrobial study showed broad-spectrum antibacterial activity of the tested nanomaterials against both gram-positive, Staphylococcus aureus 25923, and gram-negative, Escharichocoli 25913, bacteria with increased activity against gram-positive bacteria than gram-negative one. This article was authored by Abdulrahman Muhammad, RR Ata, RMA Acoct and others. We are article.tv, links in the description below.


Hey everyone, welcome to this CUBE conversation featuring Vanta. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Today excited to be joined by Christina Castiopo, the CEO and founder of Vanta. Christina, thanks so much for joining us today, looking forward to this conversation. Thank you for having me. Tell me back in 2018 where you came up with the idea for Vanta. What were some of the things going on in the market that just made it the right time? Yeah, so back in 2018 to try to take you back there, this was an era where there was a lot of security companies and it was kind of clear that there would be more and more security scrutiny, more regulation, GDPR was about to come into effect. But one thing we noticed was most startups did not actually do a lot for security and they felt they knew they should, they felt badly about it. But when kind of push came to shove, they ended up prioritizing features that customers wanted and that would grow their revenue versus features that maybe might make them more secure and might head off something in the future. And that tradeoff kind of made sense in a lot of ways.  And what had happened is they had just signed a contract with one of the largest tech companies or it's like one of the top three large tech companies. And as part of that contract and getting that revenue, the large company had sent over a questionnaire and said, hey, small startup, do you have this practice in place? Do you do this? Do you have this policy? Is your cloud infrastructure set up in a certain way? The answer roughly was no, the startup had none of those things in place. But they didn't want to tell their new customer this. And so they said, yes, we do all those things. And then immediately turned around and did them all. And that was this kind of aha moment of being able to couple compliance or the idea of proving or verifying your security to actually doing it and having security not be something you feel guilty about not doing or risk mitigation for someone's future point, but something that drove revenue for your business in that moment. And to dug deeper, you get to questionnaires, you get to compliance, you get to a lot of work there, but it really informed Vanta and honestly the company's mission, which is secure the internet and protect consumer data. And when we think about that, we think about Vanta. A lot of what we think about is how do we help companies build out their security programs and then get credit for that by showing off all the work they did, demonstrating their security and building trust with their customers. That trust is currency these days. It's so, it can't be understated the importance. But do you talk about Christina, why SOC2 and other security compliance frameworks are so important for companies to focus on earlier in their journey? It's been really impressive because again, taking it back to 2018, small companies, and by small I mean under 400 person company would not get SOC2 or come on because it was too hard. It was too onerous. But what we saw was once they kind of, they'd always get stuck in sales. They'd have to do a lot of CTO time and just spend a bunch of effort because they didn't have a SOC2. And what we thought of is like, wow, if there's like easier way for these companies to get real, valid, high quality SOC2s, everyone would go do this. And that was sort of the thesis underlying Vanta. It's been amazing how quickly that has happened. I think probably at the time, I thought it would be a five year journey turned out to be about 18 months. It was just much faster. But to your question, I think companies knew this is because there's just software is truly eating the world. But as that happens and as there's more and more data and businesses have more data, there's also more risk and there's more breaches. And it's just very clear that if no company wants to have a breach, right? And if one of your vendors or suppliers breaches your data, like your customer doesn't clear care of somebody else's fault, right? As far as they know, they gave you the data. And SOC2 is just kind of was and has become the sort of industry standard way to say, hey, I follow a bunch of reasonable practices. And not just I'm telling you that, but a rigorous third party came in and checked and said, I do all these things. You don't just have to trust me, right? You can trust this third party where I have baseline reasonable practices at least. I do reasonable things. You can trust me with your customer data, too. That verification by a third party is probably music to a lot of companies ears. But I imagine just from a challenge customer challenge perspective, those customers that either weren't on the SOC2 journey or were somehow in it, but it was very convoluted, they're missing revenue generating opportunities by not being able to verify or prove their security practice. Are you finding that most of your target audience customers have started the SOC2 journey or had they just been like, there's so much complexity here and cost, we don't know what to do? Where are they on that? Yeah. Yeah, it's actually Jenna, it's changing over time. So for the past couple years, it was very much somebody who hadn't gone through the process yet, maybe didn't even know what they needed to do. Just knew there was a ton of work that and they needed the end results, right? So they had to figure it out somehow, but they didn't really know much more about what they had to do. That's still a big portion of the business today, but actually increasingly as a product has matured and gotten ready for more just a kind of larger companies, savvier audiences in various ways. We now see a lot of companies that have been doing, running these compliance processes or GRC programs in manual spreadsheet, path tracker driven ways, moving over to automation and continuous monitoring. So that's been very heartening to see as well. Big opportunities there. When you're in customer conversations, Christina, which I imagine you are a lot every week, every month, every quarter, what are some of the major challenges that they articulate to you that they're looking to van to the comments? I just wipe this off the plate for us. Yeah, so I think at the first level, often our first touch point is getting an initial certification. It might be a SOC2 for an American company, it might be a ISO 2701 certification for a European company or Asian company, but there's something there of just, hey, I'm trying to take a new product to market, trying to sell to companies that are bigger than I am, because most definitionally, everyone is bigger than you are in the early days. And as part of that, I need to prove my trust and show that I'm trustworthy. And so I need to go get this compliance certification. And that'll mature over time though, right? Because the company is getting more complex, it has new security workflows. Probably often the company they're finding, they get their compliance certification, but there still can be a round of questionnaires where automation can be helpful there. And so the needs kind of stuck, but if I had to bucket them or try to explain them crisply, I think there's a whole group around building out a security program to even what that means and how it changes and matures over time, right? And then getting credit with your customers for all that work. So that's proving your practices, demonstrating trust, again, sort of the external demonstration of all of that internal security work you've been doing. I'm just curious, in terms of time to value, how, what can prospects expect if they sign up with Vanta to be able to prove to their prospective customers everything is copacetic here? Are we talking months? Are we talking weeks? Yes, the way we talk about it, and truly think that to bear out is for a company that's called under 20 employees, it's about 40 hours of work all in. And so we've certainly had the canonical two founders who sit down on a couch on Friday night and are done by Monday morning. This is not the standard, right? But many companies will spread the 40 hours over, call it a month or two. And it's kind of, of that, probably 20 hours or technically, you probably want an engineer or someone fluent in engineering to do. The other 20 or more administrative, sort of someone who's kind of a strong project manager, is great to take helm of. But that's kind of the guidance we give for a small and nimble, but like a upstart. So that time to value is very real for organizations. So we talked about the folks that maybe haven't started on that SOC2 journey. But for startups or any company who may already have SOC2, talk about what Vanta's trust management platform provides to them. Yeah, it's quite neat. And again, it's just been really gratifying. We've kind of talked about serving these sort of customers for years, but are really, have been upgrading the product so that we can. So what that looks like is often, you know, these customers have security programs, they have compliance programs, they have a set of controls they're used to. What they can now do in Vanta's trust management platform is, you know, we can take that set of controls, we can monitor for it. So they still get all the monitoring, the alerting, the dashboarding, their controls, right, which is just often again, almost revolutionary for a team that used to working out of spreadsheets or out of a task tracker to have just real time up-to-date information on everything. So there's that piece, right? But often that team is responsible for more than just, you know, getting a SOC2. They're running quarterly or monthly access reviews. They're continuously evaluating new vendor requests for the company. They're running a vulnerability management program. And so the trust management platform is our way of kind of encompassing all of this work into a single pane of class for these security and compliance professionals. Speaking of those security and compliance professionals, what's your favorite customer story, Vanta customer story that really you think shines the spotlight on the value proposition that you're delivering, whether it's a startup that didn't have SOC2 and you help them get there or a furniture company? What do you think is your favorite story to go to? Yeah, there's about a, this is kind of a quickly growing IT services company. They were probably about 10 people and they started using Vanta. Now I think they're about 250 people today, so we, you know, much larger.  But they recently started using our trust reports and trust reports, you can think of the like real time security monitoring sort of a security status page, right? If you go to status.vanta.com, you see our uptime and it's kind of monitoring. This is monitoring for your security status, which I think is a very core to Vanta. What we're trying to do is get people to build out their security program, show it off. Anyway, so this IT company started was brave enough to like proactively show off their security posture. And what they found is that actually they lead with it in their enterprise sales cycles. It does seem to close deals faster because it is such a strong statement and kind of confidence and trust. All the information is right there. It is all buttoned up. You have again real time security status of the company available to the customer. There's just so much trust building there that it's it's really rewarding that it's, you know, not to, you know, just to talk to you or just, you know, I so start but it's really been able to accelerate this company sales cycles and move them into the enterprise faster than it would be otherwise. What a great story and that's exactly what what companies want is that accelerant. Now, speaking of accelerants, we have to talk about AI. It's the probably the one of the hottest topics of the moment globally. How Christina, are you thinking about AI and Vanta and leveraging it for your customers to get secure compliant maybe faster? Yeah, we're very excited about this because I think if you're just going to zoom out a little bit and think about what LLM these large language models are good at, right? It's taking a bunch of information that might be structured and understanding it and putting it in another format. And there's a lot of the compliance process that is that and it tends not to be people's favorite part because it sort of feels like work about work, right? I know this information here. I need to put it in the spreadsheet. I need to put it in a long-term document. I need to, you know, do something like that. So we we have some announcements that are coming, but I think are quite exciting around a couple pieces. But a lot of it, a lot of the initial thoughts will be, you know, a person can read an 80 page document and summarize it in language models. You can do both, right? We're not going to, you know, just go into, you know, just trust the language model. But there's some stuff there. There's, again, a bunch of document generation is just a key part of this. And so, you know, rough drafting there where folks can then edit around the edges, but they don't, you know, they're not responsible for, again, writing a 10 page document to describe their company because that even other founder of it, you know, would not be my favorite activity, certainly. I can understand that. So take us out, Christina, with your vision for Vanta as it continues to grow and develop. And you've done so much since just 2018. And what is that vision that crystal ball look like? Yeah, what we're really trying to do writ large, like across the software industry, is have folks think about security and trust and displaying their security in this continuous way, not as point in time checks. So, look, evidently, companies think about security continuously inside the company, right? The security team for operating a continuous way. But when we think about security verification, right, showing off your security to customers or partners, that tends to be point in time. It's annual audits, it's manual spreadsheets, it's once a year, you know, get on the phone and say all the big words in the right way. And so that the customer will trust you. And we're just almost trying to turn that into an engineering process or turn this into a continuous process. So we don't have incidents like equal facts where, right, like everything was kind of done by the book when the auditor came in, but three months later, all bets were off. Our thing is you can get this to be continuous and use the customer pressure and customer demand for trust. You're going to ultimately build a more secure internet. Definitely, that continuity is critical. Christina, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It's been great to hear the Vanta story, really what was behind it, the catalyst, what you're enabling organizations, young organizations, mature organizations to achieve from a security and compliance perspective that really helps them drive revenue with their customers. We really appreciate you spending the time on theCUBE today. Thank you. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. We want to thank you for watching and remind you that you can find all of our CUBE on-demand content on thecube.net, editorialsiliconangle.com. But keep it right here on theCUBE, your leader in hybrid tech event coverage.


Okay, I will demonstrate now the buffer overflow attack and we will discuss the defences against this attack. We here have a simple program containing a main function and the second function called serve which is called from main with a pointer, so everybody just look at this program. Now the second function is called, is being called from the main function from here with the pointer buffer one passed. Now the main, in the main program, main program declares a character buffer and initializes it with the string hello world and the serve function it receives a pointer to character and copies the contents of that the pointer into a local buffer which is declared with size 12 bytes and with the help of the string copy function. Now there are some print statements in the program which show the contents of the buffer in the sub function before calling the string copy function we display the contents of buffer 2 and after returning back from the string copy function. We will first execute and see the output of this program. Now I am compiling the program with some flags, we will see what these flags mean while discussing about the defences. Now this is the output of the program when the buffer 1 in the main is initialized with the hello world string, actually this string is being copied into the buffer 2 in main function using string copy. Now the output in the first statement printed is inside main function and the content of the buffer 1 is hello world. Now when the inside when the program control goes into the sub function it trains the contents of buffer 2 declared here locally which is initialized with all a's as we can see here and after the string copy function it changes to hello world and when the function sub returns completes its execution it comes back to the main function and there is print indicating it has returned to the main. Now are there any questions about this? So there is a main program which is calling a sub routine so Parmeshwar has added quite a few statements over there to make things clear. As you can see in the sub routine you first print out the content of buffer 2 which is all a's it's initialized to all a's then you do the string copy so this is the so where is the vulnerability this is the vulnerable function this is what you shouldn't have used this string copy function because it doesn't check for array bounds. So it's copying from buffer 2 or it's copying to buffer 2 from buffer 1. So buffer 1 has been initialized with hello world in this particular program and so it's copying so you can see when he executes this thing that initially buffer 2 has all a's and then it has hello world. So up to here things are clear we're going to get a little bit more and more complicated to proceed. Now keeping everything same if I initialize buffer 1 in main program with the string that is shown at the bottom which is a carefully crafted string to exploit the vulnerability in this program. Now what he's going to do is in buffer 1 he's going to load it with this particular string. Does anybody have any feel for what is going on inside this string? What does it contain? Code. Code. You mean assembly code? Machine code? Yeah. For which language?  The guy crafts that buffer something like this it is going to contain what? X codes. X code but which language? Assembly code for what? Assembly code for. Which is the most obvious assembly code for the spark machine? 86. 86. So X86 assembly code and there's some interesting things that you see about this code. You see 1990, 1990 what on earth is this 90 you make a guess what do you think is that is that an instruction or is that some data or what? That thing is going to change the return address. So the question is it data? Is it machine code? Is it the address? The three different things. It is an address. Return address is 1990, 1990. There must be some weird thing going on over there right why do I have 1990, 1990 data what is 19 in ASCII is that really so ASCII of a is 90 make a guess anybody could guess what is this machine code what instruction again and again I'm doing the same thing what is it XOR something or something like that just look at how much effort the worm writer has to spend in crafting these things you don't want to put 00 inside this you know why that is the termination of a string the null character so if there is 00 in the machine code you will substitute for an XOR instruction for instance XOR a register with itself is 0 all sorts of little things have to be carefully considered so believe it or not I'm going to tell you the answer you tell me why this is so 90 is machine code in X86 for the NOOP instruction why do I have so many NOOPs just one NOOP and repeated again and again 90 is one NOOP and I'm repeating it again and again and again and then I've got some other instructions over there presumably it's no operation yeah I'm not you know no operation so why do I have this after the that means after cycles cycles it has to execute to steal that is to just pass time time pass that is the buffer that is I'm sorry and that code wants to override that return our address the code wants to override the return address the return address will be overwritten but by what by rest of the instructions not by this you want to override the address by instructions or you want to override the address by some other address so these these no operation hex byte will occupy those many bytes to come to that byte which contains the written address okay fine but why couldn't I put the return address to point to the first instruction why do this time pass and NOOPs the return address of the main function will be at that location it is a stack frame that is that actually in the buffer the first are allotted to the particular buffer it should work though that is it should match with the correct return address should be stored so I have to calculate carefully carefully yeah definitely one thing I have to calculate carefully where is the return address addresses wherever I see the return address on that stack frame there I have to plant something else that something is going to be the address of the malware now the malware in this case is simple malware you can again do a Google search and find actual malware that creates a shell it's called shell code do a Google search on shell code we're not doing shell code over here but what we do is that return address has to point to something that is going to execute that execution is done that thing that executes is also part of this thing okay and that executable is just basically a system called as permission will explain now where is the return address and what is the code he's going to talk about in a second okay first we'll see the output of this program when the buffer one is initialized with this thing will compile the program if you see at the output in the main function but the content of buffer one is some is the characters corresponding to the hex code that is present in our attack string and inside the sub function the content inside sub function at the bottom before calling the string copy function the contents of buffer 2 is all initialized with all a's and now after calling the string copy function the contents will be changed to the one that is present in buffer 1 the contents of buffer 1 is copied into the buffer 2 and we see that the size of buffer 2 is actually only 12 bytes but the string being copied is for large in size so and also when the function sub completes its execution it is not coming back to the main as we can see because the return to main that statement is not being executed we will see as to why this is happening by looking at the contents of stack just before the string copy function is being called and after the string copy function is called means in the sub function at line 8 we will see the contents of stack on line 8 and on line 10 just once again to clarify what is saying is that that print statement in main you don't see it right now that print statement being returned to main that doesn't execute what does that suggest did the sub routine return back to the main program if it returned back then you would have seen that return to main string printed out but it was not printed out so where did this sub routine go what has happened exactly now he'll tell you look at the stack on the left the stack on the left represents the content of contents of the stack before calling the string copy function and to the right the contents after the string copy function is called now the stack is growing in the upward direction and memory addresses are growing in the downward direction the shaded portion on the stack is the stack frame for sub function when it is called from main buffer one is pushed on the stack which is pointing to the buffer one which is pointing to buffer one which is present in the main which which contains hello world string initialized and then after the buffer one it pushes return address where to come back after execution of sub function where to return back in the main function it is the return address is pushed and when the sub function starts execution it will first push the frame pointer of the previous of the calling function in this case the main function frame pointer of the main function is pushed and a canary value which we will look into when we will discuss the defenses you used and above the canary value sub function allocate space for buffer 2 it starts from here and first it initializes with all a's and after the string copy function is called it will start copying the contents of buffer 1 into buffer 2 and we can see the result to the right on this here now the contents of buffer 2 is changed it is in the first case when the string being copied is less than the size of the buffer 2 it is less than 12 bytes so it is successfully copied and the fields below it will not be disturbed so in the second case when I initialize buffer 1 with the attack string which is which is very large than this the large than the size that buffer 2 can hold rest of the things remain same only buffer 1 is very large and we can see after the string copy function is called it will start copying buffer 1 into buffer 2 here it will start from here actually it should have stopped here after 12 bytes but it will it will go on copying the this attack string and it will it will stop only after it has completely copied buffer 1 into buffer 2 so now the result being that the return address has been now overwritten and it is now pointing to the start of buffer 2 so after the the function sub function completes execution of all its instruction and is about to return back to the main now it will now the return address has been changed so the execution will start from here from this address so this code is actually the the compiled hex binary where equivalent of the instructions which we which are invoked to which are executed to invoke exit system call so actually from here point point from this point on the exit system call will be invoked so the program is exiting from this that is why the program is not coming back to the main everybody knows what is a system call right system calls are the way to get into the operating system you want to read a file open a file etc you make a system call you get into the kernel at that point you ask the kernel for services the same thing over here what he's talking about is a system call by the name of exit you exit naturally without creating any problems and that is why you do not return to the main program so what he has done he has put the machine code x86 machine call code for executing the exit system call where you exit naturally without a problem that's why it is not coming back returning to the main function now we will look at the contents of the string the attack string that in the initial part of the string there are no op instructions the hex code for no op instruction is 90 and the rest of the instructions in this table are used to invoke the exit system call now the now the hex code for XOR instruction we can see here 3 1 DB which is here 2 bytes long and the in the part of the string that is highlighted with red color is actually the return is the new return address which is pointing to the start of the buffer to now the defense is used to counter the buffer overflow attack one thing is we can use the canary values when a function is called that function will save a canary value a random value after after the after up at the end of the buffer and while when it is about to exit the from the program when about to exit from the function call it will check if the same value is present if it is same then it is okay it will return return normally otherwise it will it will raise an exception so what is this defense exactly canary defense who's doing all this let us ask ourselves the question who's doing these things when a function has to be called who is pushing the arguments on the stack the calling program who's pushing the return address on the stack the hardware as part of the call instruction who is pushing this frame pointer this is the frame point of the calling program which was in a register which has to be saved so that it can be used by the calling program when it returns to the calling program who is doing this thing the called program or the sub routine who is doing this thing putting a canary value and what is this canary value let us see how it works look at the idea who's putting this canary value on the stack it is the compiler the compiler when he compiles this code for the sub routine has instructions to put a random value this is the critical point a random value so the hacker will not know what is this value a random value on the stack and then when the sub routine returns there'll be a part of that sub routine again inserted by the compiler to check whether the canary value is the same random value that it inserted there so at the start of that sub routine after the function the called function the sub routine sorry the sub routine pushes the frame pointer then the compiler pushes this canary value the compiler actually introduces that so this canary value is pushed on the stack this is a random value now watch what happens when the sub routine returns that canary value is checked to see whether it is still the same value is still on the stack if it is that means the buffer has not been overflown and if that value changes as you can see that is after the buffer here the value in this case the value is being it will change initially whatever the value is present it is being overwritten for the purpose of this demonstration I have disabled the all the defenses against stack this overflow attack that is why the program is working is not raising any exceptions so if if I enable the this canary protection and see the output I have enabled the canary protection and I will execute the program now it is it it it will not execute and it shows a message like this stack smashing detected here that is the one defense and the second defense against this overflow attack could be means by default it is it is the case that all the stack is non-executable for the for for this demonstration I have made the stack executable that's why the program is working if I if I make stack non-executable the default is the stack is non-executable now I will make I will return change the settings to default and execute so it gives me a segmentation fault that is because the stack is now non-executable and the CPU is trying to load instructions from there and execute that that's why it is giving segmentation fault now the third defense is to is to randomize the memory layout when each time the the program executes the stack is loaded to a different location the base address of the stack stacks starts from every time we execute it starts on a different location that's why in in in this case I have used a hard-coded address to jam to if every time if every time the stack is located is loaded to a different location then it will not work so this this defense is referred to as ASLR ASLR stands for address space layout randomization so basically what that is everybody knows that in virtual memory you've got multiple segments you got a code segment a stack segment etc etc now the base of the stack segment if I keep changing all the time then what will happen is I don't know exactly where is a return address those addresses are all virtual addresses so I don't know it might be this today it might be something tomorrow execute the same program that return address will be different so this is one other defense ASLR which is an operating system based defense the making the stack non executable is another defense operating system based defense the canary business is another defense but it is a compiler based defense and finally the use of safe string functions that is a programmer based defense don't use those vulnerable functions but use safe functions instead if you want to implement it in your content just look at all these different flags because you would be surprised if you try this program without putting the proper flags if you compile it without the proper flags the overflow will not work so make sure you put all these three flags by default all these three things are enabled which three things the canary option the stack made non executable and the ALSR thing so you have to specifically disable them for your buffer overflow attack to work anybody has some questions understood like what is buffer overflow I mean problem but how to get this I mean how to execute how to use this vulnerability okay suppose I do I in my system I don't have GCC suppose I am using CC only I'm sorry you're using see yeah I mean this is all these defensive mechanism is part of the compiler right well some operating system based some are compiler based yeah suppose I don't use any patches so think that the CC compiler or whatever whatever the architecture or the hardware has a buffer over problem how to exploit it exploit it okay so the first thing I do as a worm writer so I'm playing I'm using the hat of the worm writer the first thing is I figure out which subroutines have this buffer overflow problem so that's what was done in the case of the Microsoft IS they said that these subroutines have it and let us patch it so I first figure out which subroutines have the buffer overflow problem then I ask myself where did that thing where was that buffer populated from ultimately that thing has to come from user input from somewhere outside in the case of I in case of code read that outside thing was through an HTTP message so through the HTTP message all that stuff ultimately has to enter your computer it's got to be buffered somewhere that buffer was translated was transferred to this buffer in this subroutine and this subroutine had the buffer overflow problem so that's what I noticed I noticed that the HTTP request and the payload was being loaded into this buffer and then there was a subroutine that used those contents and that subroutine was carelessly written it didn't take care of buffer overflow and this 4k payload came and that thing was let's say 100 bytes it overflowed the entire thing completely and the mal code and everything the malicious code which is called shell code was actually on the stack so this is before the stack was made non executable and so on and so forth now with these defenses in place it is much harder to perform an exploit but still there are examples of this thing it's one of the most common exploits so there is some external payload some input from somewhere in this case from the network through an HTTP message when the HTTP message comes that payload is put into some buffer at some point in time the system takes that buffer and puts it somewhere else to process it that processing software has a buffer overflow vulnerability so this is what I noticed I reported it to Microsoft Microsoft delivered a patch most of the system administrators didn't take action problem so whatever code you have shown that is related to the standalone system yes but whatever buffer flow attack is there that will be coming from outside the network yes it has to come right this is input just think about it this is input crafted very carefully like he has done crafted by the worm writer yeah yes how you write the patch wherever you've got that subroutine you put a call another program and that program doesn't use string copy that string and copy or something which is which checks for a rebounds so instead of using string copy just use string and copy that is the subroutine of that is the function call that actually checks for a rebounds so can we have those compiling options to deactivate those one or three flags again can we have the compiler option to those we are those that fellow was providing in compiling option to deactivate those one or three flags yes yes so can we have to actually when you're compiling the program you have to you don't say you don't do anything you just compile it normally normal compilers these days will automatically enable those three defenses no if I want to deactivate them and I want to yes yes so he'll show you do you want to see them so while compiling I provide this first option is to disable stack protection if I've been FNO I've been stacked and protector everybody please notice this if you're trying to implement it in your college for a demo you better do this otherwise it will not work in front of the audience the other thing I just want to mention is the case with windows be a little careful there are these three things we told you these three defenses there are some there is some software in windows some modules in windows that actually use code on the stack to execute so you can't make this tax like for example signals you can't make the stack totally non executable on windows systems but you can do the other two things how to do it is a good question I don't think my student my students typically use Linux for this but I'm sure you can do that these demos can be only executed on Linux I would imagine they could be done in windows we have not done it as yet but I'm sure if we try we can yeah if we keep changing the memory layout how the operating system will remember where the return address is stored how will it know all these return addresses are typically displacements with respect to some base pointer okay so these all virtual addresses that will be translated to physical addresses so in virtual space I can put the base of that stack segment anywhere I want and just change the register the base register everything will automatically change thereafter second question is when we use canary values to cross check the again with the values and how does it remember it well the compiler stores it somewhere right so there is that code is written there is some special code injected by the compiler when that subroutine begins so I generate a random number I insert it over there on the stack and then just before I'm about to exit I checked that random number to see whether the same thing is retained or whether it's been changed if it's been changed then I have the error message stack smashing attack sir suppose we keep static space to each function in a program stack then can we prevent from this attack if we keep static space what do you mean by static space that means suppose fix space during main function we call that serve function so suppose we are locate some static space to only that serve function that means suppose 100 bytes in stack then can we prevent from this you mean static space to each subroutine yeah typically the amount of stack space the size of the stack frame to a subroutine would vary for because of different things one is the size of each of those arguments that is passed to that function one is the automatic variables so in general some for some subroutines the stack will be small some it will be much larger and so on so in general you cannot do that so that's the thing that's where the knobs come in the picture see in this particular attack what you're doing is the return address points to if you see all those that entire string the attack string the end of the attack string is the return address so that return address is supposed to start supposed to point to the beginning of the string but there might be some alignment problems and so on and so forth I'm not very sure that that address is exactly the correct address or it's off by four or off by eight and so on you know these things have an alignment problem they many of these variables that are pushed on the stack align at 8 bit 8 byte boundaries or 4 byte boundaries and so on because of this it might be off by 4 or by 8 and so on that is why I point to a safe place I'm not very sure you know where the thing actually begins the code actually begins so that is why I point to a bunch of no ops and the code will follow those no ops in case of canary value can we overflow the buffer in such a manner that canary value is retained very interesting question what is the answer to that so the question again is can we overflow the buffer in such a way that the canary value is retained if you could then the attacker would be very happy can you do that if you know it in advance the canary value that's exactly why I said that the canary value is a random value I as a worm writer don't know what that value is it could be five six nine three four seven six today it could be something completely different tomorrow and so on and so forth and also the other see a lot of different things are happening out here so the canary value so when you override that buffer the buffer grows in this direction which is in the opposite direction to the stack so you are bound to overwrite that on the way to the return address on the way to the return address there is that canary value so you will overwrite the frame pointer you'll override the return address and of course as you can see the canary is before that so you will override the canary value so there is no way to retain that value unless I could guess it we know the position of canary value right yeah so we can bypass it right when if we know the how to bypass just think about what you said how to bypass it when I start to overflow this buffer I obviously start populating the buffer from the start of the buffer whenever I do a string copy into this buffer it starts at this point right because memory is growing in the opposite direction the stack is growing upwards the memory is growing downwards in this picture so I start to populate in this direction on and on and on and it has to go one after the other that's the way addresses are arranged over here and then the next thing I do is this canary value is overwritten then this is overwritten because I have to override the return address there's no option that is one of the main funders in this overwriting overwriting the return address so the canary value has to be overwritten so in the afternoon session we are going to look at some tools like nmap and nessus and snot I just wanted to get a feel for how many people in the audience knows at least one of these three tools or is at least as use them in some form or the other please raise your hand how many people have used them in some form or the other so I think this is one of the important things that you should take off from this course because that's very much a part of security is how to install these tools and how to use them and how to make your students use them so we cannot actually have you use them in the lab because these tools generate a great deal of traffic and there are 250 participants the network will go down so what we're going to do is we're going to have demos of each of these three things today and a demo of metasploit tomorrow so metasploit is a framework for figuring out what are the vulnerabilities and even exploiting the vulnerabilities that's why it's called metasploit so stay tuned for this and when you go back to your centers and in July when you host 50 other people please make sure that all of them go back to their colleges able to install you know nmap and nessus and snot and so on and make sure their students learn to use some of these things that's an important part of the lab for this course and of course via shark okay if there are no more questions I think we'll break over here for lunch


The study aimed to identify factors that sustain FGM in Bacou municipality and Pusiga district despite its illegality, using a descriptive qualitative design based on grounded theory. Historical traditions and religious rights preserve FGM, while older women and peers provide support for the practice through pressure exerted on younger women slash girls. The easy movement of women across borders perpetuates the practice, as does the belief that FGM will preserve virginity and reduce promiscuity. Male dominance and lack of female autonomy also contribute to its continuation. To eradicate the practice, interventions targeting border towns, religious leaders and their followers, older men and women, and younger men and women are needed. This article was authored by Evelyn Sacchia, Cornelius de Perre, Raymond Acoir-Aborrigo, and others.


Have you ever pondered the mysterious dance between the cosmos and our existence? The celestial synchronicity conjecture proposes that celestial events like eclipses and planetary alignments influence our collective consciousness. It suggests a profound connection beyond mere coincidence, intertwining science and spirituality in a cosmic harmony. As we gaze at the stars, let's contemplate the profound impact of these celestial occurrences on our human experiences. Perhaps there's more to the universe than meets the eye.


New new new new. So okay. We finally have some of these bar displays in long thin tft displays These are like 320 ish by 900 ish pixels they are Really nice bar displays that you can control with one of our qualia boards They just came in like at 4 p.m. Today, so I'm a demo maybe next time. I'll set up a demo to show you guys, but They are rgbtl. So you can't control them with any Arduino. You need something that's designed for rgb 666 Display control, but they've got lots of pixels and they're like nice long and thin It's rare to see like such thin displays. They're thinner than a phone And like I think they would be used for like a heads up displays Yeah, well some fun demos Sushi conveyor belts and such but they're finally in stock. So if you've been waiting for these pick them up Next we've got an update for our 8 by 16 um led Backpacks, um, we've been solely redesigning all of our led backpack boards to have stem iqt For connectors on the back and this one has two of them. So you can easily chain together multiple Backpack boards or connect other sensors and devices Um, so this is the latest round in our big redesign push We've got many many redesigned. So all of them will eventually have stem iqt ports right now only the red one does but we'll do the rest of the colors so Next up also had a redesign for this rtd hdmi driver that's for Uh, a five inch display If you go back, I'll show you what changed what changed is it used to have a separate cable for usb now It has a micro usb port right on there It's a little bit more compact And uh, it comes like pre-programmed now it doesn't have the Various select for source it just does hdmi in automatically So you don't you don't have to worry about accidentally selecting a separate source But the biggest changes that it now has the micro usb instead of a separate usb cable Okay That looks great work with anything that is hdmi That's not Also have an update to the ultimate gps breakout say one of our most popular boards We're still selling this extremely popular gps that can use the internal antenna or external antenna Works, you know great with Arduino circuit python python anything that gives you wants uart gps data um I think this one is the one that uh, also can be used for high altitude can do 10 hertz updates I love that you can just use external antenna So the new thing is it now comes with the battery Attached on the back So if you want to have the real-time clock keep track of time even when it's depowered You no longer have to solder the battery on it comes on it on for you very handy All right, and then the start of the show besides uli data or team or community everyone who Purchases things from a different to support an open source hardware company manufacturing in usa is Yay, this 3.5 inch capacitive multi-touch Display that you can be used in spi or 8-bit mode These are some displays that I I bought like almost 10 years ago and I forgot about them and then we were cleaning up and I found a bin Of 800 displays and I was like, oh my goodness. I should really get these into the shop so I designed a breakout board, but it's good timing because I've been doing so many redesigns that I've learned a lot and made this board even better So if we go to the overhead So one nice thing is it has a i-spy connector So instead of having to have a gigantic wired up demo look at how elegant this is I just have this qt pi board with a i-spy qt pi bff on the back and it just plugs and plays and I have full backlight and touch support a lot I'll connect it up so it makes and it's you know, I can move it around easier So this is a multi-touch display so you can actually have it can detect multiple fingers So here I've got four it can do five, but I don't have I guess it's about to do five fingers at a time I don't know you can't really tell but I can do five multi-touch It's 320 by 480 You can use spi and it can do pretty fast spi to the On-board display although I'll say if you want really fast updates use the 8-bit input So you'll need a lot more pins and of course a microcontroller that can handle 8-bit Display updates, but you're already eight bits at a time instead of one bit at a time So it's like at least twice as fast. I mean before times as fast It's got capacitive multi-touch over i-squared c there's also an irq pin so you can detect when a touch is detected On the spi port there's the micro you micro sd card so you can store images if you want to display them on here Got some mounting pads level shifting You can use this with i-squared c or spi because it has built-in memory buffer Even though it's got 320 by 2 320 by 480 pixels two bytes per pixel You can use it with any microcontroller pretty much because the memory the image is buffered on here You just tell it hey draw red at this location and we'll draw red at that location. So, um, you know, it's it's great for Use with my controllers micro computers raspberry pi has support for um this display as well And then now with capacitive touch so we have a resistive touch one and a beautiful capacitive touch one with nice shiny display And multi-touch support and that's new products


Welcome back to the channel. Today is story day. We are going to just dive right into my story because I feel like in 2024 we're starting out. This is one of the first videos and like so many people are new. I have been doing this channel for about four years now and like let's just share my story. Like how did I get here? You know, what's kind of my background? I just felt like telling the story today. So here we go. If you don't know us, we are a family of six that have moved from the US to New Zealand and have been here for almost nine years now. Today I just thought I'd share a little story. Where did I come from? How did we end up doing this? You know, what do I do for a living? All those kinds of things. So let's just dive right in. I was born in Albany, New York, but I mainly grew up in Wisconsin and so I live there for most of my childhood and then I eventually went to university and I studied marketing and I got my master's in communication and I've been teaching at the university level since then really. I love that. I also started having kids. I've had four kids, two girls and two boys. I had them all in the US and then eventually we had, we're big travelers at doing things. We love the outdoors. We love the backpacking, but we one day was like, well, we're gonna travel around the whole United States and then we decided, you know, we've kind of seen everything. I mean, we haven't been every single spot, but like most of it and we're like, why don't we think about international? So this was 2013 and we looked at moving overseas and New Zealand, just so you know, is not an easy country to get into and in fact with an American passport and it may be different if you're from different countries. I'm not sure, but I can just share my experience and yeah. So we came in 2013. Our intention was two years. We wanted to give our kids an international experience. We wanted to have an international experience and we just wanted to see how other people do things. What do you do and how do you do it? Honestly, you guys, I didn't expect to love it so much. Loved it here. It's just amazing. But things happened and really to my, I really didn't want to, but we moved back to the US after two years because that was the plan. My husband's father had passed and there's just, we hadn't been home and so we went back. We reintegrated into society in the US and to be honest, I struggled. I struggled a lot actually.  It felt like a step backwards. It wasn't and there's really great things about the US. I'm not like trying to put it down, but like for me, maybe it wasn't the best and plus it's freezing half of the year there. So that's not great. So anyway, we moved back and then we ended up coming back two years later because we're crazy and my husband got kind of this amazing job offer and situation kind of arose and we just really felt led to go there to come back here. And that time actually was much harder because we had already integrated back. We had done the move back and forth. Didn't want to do the moving again. We actually struggled quite a bit to move back because we had some teenage at the time and just we're feeling nervous about that and just so many things. Our mentality was quite different because when we moved back we were coming permanently, right? And so with the, well, at least, you know, for at least as long as it made sense and just a much more long term without, you know, any end date and we just were like, you know, it's just different when you're trying to actually set up community and schools and everything was a lot different than just coming for kind of a two year long holiday. Yeah. So that's kind of our story about how it's so now we've been in New Zealand for we're going on seven years and we are applied for citizenship and yeah. So it's good. Learned a lot. Learned a lot more about the country, obviously. Being here a lot longer, understanding the culture a lot better, having the function here and thrive here. So if you guys are considering a move to New Zealand, seriously, message me, go onto my website kiwiamericans.com. I'll have some links in the description, but I'm here to help you. I've been helping people for three years now move here from mainly the US, but it's not limited to the US and I have kind of a whole process in place. I have a free 50 minute course. Take that. So that's just like where you start like, so you know where to start everything you need to know and just kind of put it all out there for you guys. So check that out if you're planning on doing that. So that's kind of my story about coming to New Zealand. I have a lot I could share with you about that. And that's what this really, this whole channel is about, where I kind of share our journey and learnings that we have coming here. So if you have any questions or want to know more, let me know. Okay, so the second part of this video, I just want to kind of dive in more on a personal side and kind of, you know, who I am and kind of my personal growth over the last couple of years. Okay, let's dive into my story. But before we do that, I forgot to put on here. This is I always forget these things. So I have an American cookbook. So I've taken the best American recipes and adapted them to New Zealand Australian ingredients. So if you have an American friend here, you're an American coming here or art here. This book is for you. Link is in the description. I also just want to highlight one more thing because I'm just so excited about it. And I love you guys. And I'm hoping to give you guys an exclusive on this, but I hope you like it. It's very exclusive. It's my husband created a game. It's called adventure trek and is coming out next month. And yeah, we've got a lot of interest from distributors here in New Zealand and the US. And it's really cool. So if you're interested in this, I'm not going to talk more about that. Let me know. It's adventure trek life.com. If you want to check it out and get more details on the game, but I'm just excited about it. I just want to support my husband and his new creation. So so that's fun. But let's talk a little bit about me. I'm in my forties and like I said, I've had a marketing degree and then communication and teaching and I love teaching. Like there's nothing more rewarding than teaching. People go into it not for the money, right? Because it's not good money, especially in the US. Oh my gosh, you guys, I got paid so much more in New Zealand. It's not even funny. Okay. So yeah, so I've had four kids. I have two that have left home and my youngest is 12 and I have a 15 year old.  So that's fun.  So I've always worked, but I've worked part time teaching. When I came to New Zealand, New Zealand, they don't have a lot of people here. And so your skills, what, if you're very average, say in your home country, you're probably above average here because they don't have a lot of people with certain skills anyway. And so you're able, I mean, I was able to do a lot of jobs. I don't think I'd be able to do in the US and I enjoy that. So I've been teaching and writing courses for tertiary institutes here in New Zealand. And I enjoy that. I currently run a digital marketing company, which I also enjoy. And that's interesting because I was at marketing. So like learning marketing in the 90 late 90s, early 2000s, nothing applies anymore. Like some of the principles, maybe, but like, I had to relearn. So I started my like digital business in 2015. So when I moved back to the US, so we came to New Zealand, I had a great time. I homeschooled some of my kids.  And then when I went home, I was like, all my kids were finally in school for the first time. And now I'm ready to do something different. And I decided digital is the future. And so I wrote a goal for myself. And my goal was very vague. It was to be successful online. And the reason why I chose that goal was because I knew there was so much I didn't know, and that I needed to be able to pivot. And for me to say, I'm going to have be a successful, you know, creator, I'm going to be a successful affiliate marketer like I didn't want to limit myself. So I just had online success. And so since then I started an Amazon.com business and I'm still running seven years later. And it's probably my most profitable business, which makes sense because it's been running the longest. I've had lots of small businesses. So if you don't know, I've run a home improvement company for three years. I had a first short run of a skincare line, an organic skincare line before I moved back here in 2008, 17, 18. I have obviously YouTube channel and influencer. I'm like, I'm on the whole creator world. I've been creating for almost five years now. And I just do a lot. Like I just do a lot of different things. I'm always into it and I love it. And so it's interesting because I learned marketing, but I had to relearn everything in 2015 because now it's digital. Like everything is different. I have to tell you guys, like I get really frustrated when I'm trying to write, help these universities write digital courses. You know, you're welcome for the ones that I'm trying to write because you need to have people that are digital creators or understand the digital economy of writing these courses because you can't base it on old marketing principles. And so that's, you know, that's what I've been trying to do. I, you know, we get lots of arguments, but that's a different story. Look, how about if we all agree to disagree? So I, you know, I'm thinking what is 2024 look for me? I have so many ideas, you guys. I love New Zealand. We'll continue to talk about that. I have partnered with a immigration company and we're kind of working out those details. So I will get back to you on that. It's going to be good. And I'm here for you. Like you could meet with me. I highly recommend just joining my membership. It's only $39 a month. And the membership is there because moving to New Zealand isn't just like take this course and you know how to do it in the membership. It has all the trainings. It has access to me. It has other people that are moving. It's kind of like all the support that you need and everything you need to know in one place at a very reasonable price. So that's there. If you're moving here, I am here for that because I really believe that you as a person do nothing but grow exponentially when you move abroad. I think that you should all move abroad. It doesn't have to be New Zealand.  Like do it because the amount of personal growth you will have is second to none. When you become aware, you guys, I mean seriously, like I'm in my 40s, you know, I'm not like perfect and amazing at these videos, but I've had a lot of success. And it's so easy and it costs nothing. I mean, I shouldn't use the word easy. I wouldn't say it's easy. It's easy in the sense of like the actual physical work that you have to do, but it takes time. You have to have patience. That's the hardest part, the patience and the consistency. So if you guys are not in the digital economy, you need to be doing a video on that as well, but like it's so great because like I live in New Zealand and I couldn't move to Europe. I could move to South America. I could move to the States. I could move wherever, but my job wouldn't change and my life wouldn't change. And so it's an amazing feeling where you can set up your own life and do that. So I quit my job. So I was working full-time at a tertiary institute here in New Zealand and I quit 2022, 2022 early on. And so it hasn't been that long and I've been running my businesses on its own and they're doing pretty well. You know, it's interesting because business, you know, it's never exactly where you want it to be and you have all these goals and don't listen to the people out there. Don't listen like in three months, you can make 10k a month. Don't know. No. Those people are doing that because they've been building and they've built businesses and failed, created something and failed. All their learning has now added up to them being successful at 10,000 a month. Okay, so it's not that easy. So don't fall for that. But like I think we need to adjust our expectation. Like it's amazing out there that the digital economy allows you to make enough, right? Like what do you really need? Like figure out like what really is about... So this is what I did this year. Like I was frustrated that I wasn't as far as I wanted to be. And I was like, you know what? Maybe I just need to be thankful for where I'm at. Like I make good money for really the time and effort that I put in. I don't even put that much time in it. I have good processes in place and I love it. Like when I go and I do contract work because I do contract work as well. And I do that and it's like, you know, it really feels like work. Whereas in the digital economy, you can create whatever job you want to do around whatever interest you want to do. And it's like out there.  And let me tell you that does nothing but help you. And now we have AI and it's amazing. So anyway, so that's my story. So I really didn't know that I was entrepreneurship until we started our home improvement company in 2004. And I was just helping them out.  But then it just turned into like, I love this. And that's how I don't like, let me tell you guys, I would never have started a YouTube channel. Like I don't even watch YouTube. And I certainly don't want to edit videos. Shout out to Ethan who edits my videos because I hate it. And he's the best if you're looking for somebody. You just have to put the process in place. You got to try things. I only did it because people were begging me to do it. And my community was begging me. And so I did it and I tried it and it's the best, best ever. So, so get out there, try new things in 2024. I hope that story gives you some insight as to who I am and how I got here. And, you know, if you're interested in this kind of content. So in 2024, I'm gonna be talking about New Zealand. I'm going to be talking about the digital economy. I'm going to be talking about anything and everything that's associated with me traveling. I do lots of traveling. Last year, I spent three weeks in Europe. You know what? I haven't even done a video on that. You know what guys? I'm just going to be really, really honest. I traveled in Europe in three weeks in June and I haven't even looked at the pictures. My life is so busy. It's so fast. And it's so great. It's summer here in New Zealand.  Please comment below if you want one of these or want something about this or just want to need help moving here. I'm here for you or just questions you have or things you'd like to see on this channel this year. I'm here for it. See ya.


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