Okay, if I could welcome everyone to the August twenty-twenty-one, four or thirty-two meeting. We're extremely excited to be back in person somewhat. This is sort of a hybrid meeting today. We're going to have some people virtual and questions this year. But nonetheless, thank you to everyone after a long time. Thank you for this. That's wonderful. I can welcome you, members, staff, and guests. We ask for your patience during this hybrid meeting. Multiple staff members are behind the scenes to make sure all applicants and participants are able to communicate with the board at the appropriate time. I'm sorry, it's not. It sounds a lot better. My apologies. Hopefully that picked up. Applicants are participating in person. The public is able to participate in person or via virtual options. So they can stream the meetings through City TV. They can submit letters and statements via email to COC board meeting at Columbia SC.gov, leading up to and during the meeting. Those letters will be read into the record up until the time the board goes into board discussion. The public may also call in at 1-855-925-2801. And when prompted, enter the meeting code 4289. Participating by phone, you'll have three options. You can hit star 1, which allows you to listen. Star 2 allows you to record a voice message that will be read into the record. Make sure you speak clearly and leave the case information so we know which one you're calling about. And star 3 allows you to be placed in a queue to speak live when prompted. At any time listening on the call, you can hit star in your chosen option. But please wait until your case is called to hit star 3. You can also stream at publicinput.com slash COC Boza August 2021. And just make sure if you're participating by phone while also streaming the meeting, you need the audio on your computer to avoid playback issues. And there's a large delay between the Zoom and the live recording on City TV. So if you notice, we pause at certain times, which is to allow the audio to catch up to give citizens time to submit any comment. And we'll do roll. Mr. Dinkins. Here. Mr. Gregory. Here. Mr. Primus. Here. Ms. Benner. Here. Ms. McIntosh. Here. We have a quorum. Applicants with request before the Board of Zoning Appeals are allotted a presentation time of 10 minutes. This time should include but is not limited to an overview of the project, case history, and any pertinent meetings held regarding the request. This time also includes all persons presenting information on behalf of the applicant, such as attorneys, engineers, and architects. This time limit does not include any questions asked by the Board of Zoning Appeals or staff regarding requests. Any member of the general public may address the board at intervals of three minutes or five minutes if a spokesperson for an established body or a group of three or more. The applicant will then have five minutes for a rebuttal. The Board reserves the right to amend these procedures on a case-by-case basis. The Board or the general public wishes to discuss an item that's on the consent agenda that item will be removed and placed on the regular. The Board then approves the remaining consent agenda item. The first matter on the consent agenda is the approval of the July 1st, 2021 minutes. Case 2021-0075 for 4,800 Broad River Road. This is a special exception to permit a residential care facility for men. Case 2021-0076 for 1711 Shivers Road. This is a special exception to permit a residential care facility for women. In case 2021-0077 for 1618 McFadden Street. This is a variance to the minimum front yard step back for a single family dwelling. If anyone wishes to speak on the case to remove the case from the consent agenda, let the Board know now. And we'll also pause to give time for audio to catch up so that we can check the COC Board meeting at ColumbiaSD.gov and the public input phone number. And I'm not seeing any emails and there are no callers. Okay, thank you. All right, I would like to ask for a motion regarding the consent agenda please. I move that we approve the consent agenda subject to staff comments. Second. Okay, we have a motion and a second. All those in favor please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay, motion passes. Thank you. And if anyone was here for the consent agenda, you're welcome to leave. You don't have to stay for the remainder of the meeting. We're going to use the following outline for the regular agenda items. I'll introduce the case. I will have a timer going for the applicant to have the 10 minutes for their presentation. The board will be able to ask questions. We'll pause for public input prior to the applicant rebuttal and then action by the board. The first item on the regular agenda is case 7424 Garner's Ferry Road. Special exception to permit a second drive-through lane at an existing drive-through facility for a restaurant use. The applicants are present and they're welcome to come to the podium. Rachel, quickly, before we get going, do we need to swear in any speakers? We used to do that before we went virtual. Okay, I've forgotten the exact words, but we will accomplish it. So if anyone here is here to speak on any matter, would you please stand? Okay. Do you swear to tell the truth and nothing but the truth? Okay, thank you. Good catch. Hey, good afternoon. I'm Brian O'Donnell with Hill Fully Rossian Associates. I'm here today representing Chick-fil-A Incorporated regarding the existing Chick-fil-A restaurant that we are trying to add a second drive-through lane located at 7424 Garner's Ferry Road. We are proposing the expansion of the drive-through aisle to incorporate two lanes around the entire building. This includes expanding the existing outside meal delivery canopy that's there today to overhang the canopy to cover the proposed lane. This will be done by taking the existing roof off the canopy now and putting columns directly adjacent to the ones there and then putting a new roof over top and just virtually expanding the canopy out to cover both lanes on that. Our scope of work does not change any traffic patterns on site. It also does not adjust any ingress egress on site. Our intention is to reduce traffic buildup and increase safety for team members on site. Thank you. Okay. As you're aware, there's some specific criteria that we're asked to judge this request for special exception on. Yes, sir. You stated that the addition of the drive-through aisle doesn't change the vehicular or pedestrian traffic. So expand on that a little bit. It seems to me the addition of an additional drive-through would somewhat impact the pedestrian traffic. So today the single lane has a through lane on the right side of it and we are proposing to get rid of that through lane and put a second drive-through lane. However, it's still an entrance only and exit only on the same enter and drive exit. So we don't adjust any drive aisles coming in or out of the site. Okay. That makes sense. That's a good answer. Okay. Any members of the board have any questions for the applicant? So essentially it's like you're just feeding the same cars into two spaces in two lanes instead of one. Correct, yes, ma'am. Like in a bank or something. Exactly. We have a dual lane front canopy and it comes into one lane around the building and we're just proposing bringing both lanes all the way around the building. Yes. So from a pedestrian standpoint of parking, is there, what's the sort of path if you look on your site plan on that north side, sort of getting across that traffic? It seems like there's a little bit of... Along the north side? I'm sorry? Yes. I'm sorry, could you repeat the question? Looking at it now. Sorry, if you're looking at that parking along the north, it looks like those people would have to get across now two lanes of people pulling out. Two lanes of traffic? Yes. Yes, correct. So up there on the north lane on those 60 degree spaces, there will be two lanes, two drive-through lanes. But we have included a stop bar that stops them right there prior to both lanes exiting, the drive-through ordering, or I'm sorry, pickup area, and they would wait there. Now the cars parked up in that spot up there, they have enough room for code to get out and with fire, there's the 20 foot lane right there to get out. You know, given a tight space that it is, it could take a second for cars to, if they're backed up far enough to have to wait to get out. But we don't anticipate that much having an increased car stack on the drive that we're hoping to reduce that issue. Do we have any other questions from members of the board? What's Chick-fil-A going to do when the two lanes stop, start not being enough? They're going to get bigger properties and get three lanes out there then. Open another franchise. Yeah. Thank you, John. Do any members of the public wish to speak on this matter? Okay. Rachel, any public input? I'll come in, but we'll pause for a minute just to give the audio time because there's no caller on the line. Okay. Do we have any board discussion regarding this matter? Anyone want to talk about anything? Agreed. Okay. At this point, thank you very much. Thank you so much. I'd like to ask for a motion. Make a motion that we approve the special exception for the second drive-through lane subject to staff comments. We have a motion and a second. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay. Thank you. 2021-0078 for 530 Divine Street. This is a special exception to permit a drive-through facility for a restaurant use. The attorney for the applicants is actually on Zoom. So if she wants to unmute herself, she's welcome to begin when ready. Thank you, Rachel. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And certainly do appreciate having the option to participate remotely today. I am representing the Palmetto Pig restaurant. And their request for a special exception to add a drive-through pickup window. To the restaurant. In the application. I would like to make it clear that this would simply be a pickup window that customers would not be ordering at this window. It would just be a drive-through. The Palmetto Pig restaurant is, as you all probably know, you've probably eaten there. It is a barbecue restaurant down in the VISTA near the Todd and Moore store and by the compress, Palmetto compress apartments. And in addition of this pickup window, as you can see, folks would come in off a flasky drive past the pickup window and then exit onto Divine Street. As it pertains to the criteria for the special exception, we don't believe that this is going to have any effect on the adjoining properties in terms of noise, light, fumes, odors, litter. Certainly wouldn't have any effect on the aesthetic character of the area because pickup window already exists. It's just not in use currently. It would not contribute to a proliferation of pickup windows in the area. This is kind of, they're not a whole lot of restaurants down there with pickup windows. So it's not going to cause a lot of these to happen. And this is currently MX2, which permits a wide range of commercial, industrial retail university uses. And this use is consistent with that. Today in person, you have Jean Antley, who is the owner of the Palmetto Pig restaurant. And we also have Tony Shepherd, who is the traffic engineer that has helped us work on developing a traffic plan for the proposed pickup window. The alternative over to Mr. Antley to give you a little bit of background on his business. And then he'll turn it over to Mr. Shepherd. And of course, feel free to ask any of us any questions at any time. Thank you. Good evening. My name is Jean Antley. I opened the Palmetto Pig in 2002 of June. And we worked hard to build a business up until a couple years ago when the COVID pandemic hit. And that basically changed everything. In other words, we had to close down for two months. And, um, but what the COVID pandemic did was change the business model. Now more and more people are more likely to pick up food, call it in, or have a vendor deliver it to them. Obviously for safety precautions with the COVID and all that. And, um, I'm dealing right now with DoorDash, Child Now, Bites Squad and several others. And I've even turned several down because we couldn't handle coming in the front door parking in the very few parking places I have and entertaining my walk-in people to dine in. So we need a pick-up window. I strictly want to make a point of this. I don't want to, I don't want to order a window. I've been to Hardiz and I've been to McDonald's. And I can't understand a woman. And I'm sure some of you probably can't even understand me, but they couldn't understand me when I was ordering either. So that's out. We just want folks to, the customers who call the order in and they do now, but they have to come in to pick it up. Unless they request us to come deliver it to their car. We put the name on the order. So this would make it easier for them to drive up and say that I'm coming to pick an order up for Mr. Sanders or Mr. Fogler or whatever. And then the vendors like DoorDash and Bites Squad and Chow Now, they can come through the drive-through, which would be more convenient for them, more efficient for us, and could handle it a lot better. Because the way it's situated now, and I don't know if any of you have been there, they have to, if we have a line for the buffet, they have to wait their turn, so to speak, or get somebody else's attention. And it's a little inconvenient and time-consuming to get their orders out, even though we already haven't fixed, because they have to, the customers obviously have to pay for them. But if we could get a pickup winner, just a pickup winner for customers that call in and order something, like two plates of pound of meat, quarter hash, et cetera, or these vendors that come, DoorDash, et cetera, then it would help us tremendously to accommodate them, get them through. And, which is vitally important to me, is save some parking places, because I only have six parking places out front and one in the handicap. And obviously, if someone's coming in to pick up something, they have to park. And that's the ones that I control, of course, but anyhow, so that would make it very, very easy for us and probably help my business, because if it hadn't been for these vendors, we would have struggled a lot more than we already had. So, I appreciate you considering this today, and I appreciate your time. Thanks, Jane Dalla, Tony will give us the Traffic Engineering perspective. Thank you, if y'all would, I know this is probably a little hard to see from the distance you're at, but there is a small printout in each one of y'all's tables that you can look at. You can see exactly what I'm referencing and talking from. Just from a understanding of what you're kind of the base that you're looking at, we actually utilized the plans of record for the Pulaski Street inavista work that was done adjacent to the parcel, which gave us the most readily available surveyed information, and it also actually had picked up the building in its entirety as well. Therefore, you will see, based on the application that was submitted and the flow that's shown on the overhead currently, we basically took that and it expanded a little bit to determine, as you see the blue dashed line, that is the right-of-way line based on Pulaski Street. And then you will see that there's the place to put a small curb in the existing where there's actually a concrete surface all the way to the building. Going, that would have to be excavated out from the right-of-way line to the building. Going to put a curb in and actually asphalt and put the actual drive-through lane in. I know one of the major questions was what kind of width can get within this area. You're looking at about 11 foot effective width in there, and that's from the face of curb to the face of building. That lane would actually traverse forward as it shows where the existing pickup window is currently located. And then it would traverse forward towards Divine Street. They would have to cross what is currently a pedestrian path that is coming from the parking spaces along Pulaski. One of the things we would recommend in that area because of actually putting the curb in you depress the lane so you actually table the actual surface of the crossing. So the crossing is flat but the car is going over table. In other words, giving that additional warning and protection and slowing those vehicles even more. But this lane is a little narrow so the vehicle speed should be extremely slow to start with. Then they would proceed forward and actually exit onto Divine Street. Basically, you know, of the parking spaces he would, he would end up dedicating one parking space for that lane to exit out. From a operational standpoint since this is a basically just taking into account the current methods in doing business. He's not increasing the size or space of his business. Therefore, the lane use intensity is not increasing. And from a traffic operations standpoint this actually for a drive-through or for a pickup operation instead of them parking in a parking stall which currently they would be backing towards Divine Street through this drive-through they're actually going forward into Divine Street and they could clear the existing parking and have better sight lines actually coming out onto Divine than they would in a parking situation. With that. Thank you, Tony. So Divine Street is a local roadway. Correct. And of course Pulaski is a DOT roadway. So I guess whatever based upon our decision here today you're going to have to work with the city in regards to Divine Street. Have you had any input and I guess you spoke with the city traffic engineer. We've got a comment from the city traffic engineer. His comment was in relation to the exit point onto Divine based on SEDOT standards in a new construction there would be a 150 foot corner space requirement but that is in a new construction or when someone is changing the land use or intensity of that land use for any modifications on site. In this case we feel that it falls in that latter category so the existing would be in compliance and my understanding is Divine and Pulaski are both local streets. So Pulaski is not a DOT roadway? Not part of the state. It's mismatched. There's blocks here there. It's very confusing but the blocks that we're having question are local streets. Interesting that there's DOT plans on that part of Pulaski then if it's not a DOT street. This is actually a city plan. Okay it's a city plan. Yes sir. The plans are part of this thing where they're changing the crossing to Green Street. Is that where your these plans are about? No man these are the plans that actually did the changes around the compress. In the parking and the chicanes that were actually put in Divine Street headed to the railroad. One point of interest that you do bring up if I may with the Green Street bridge part of that project actually the negotiations with the railroad is the closure of the Divine Street crossing as well. So if you look at the traffic patterns in this area it's going to be a limited access facility in the near future. The Palmetto Compress people then who could previously have gone over the track will no longer be able to and will now have to be going past you to get out or you know more or less. Okay. Their desired path is towards the university that you'd anticipate they would come up to Divine turn on Pulaski go to Green to access back across. I'm thinking they were heading to five points half the time they probably headed over the tracks and then thought about it later but yeah okay. I got a question just given the you know given the limitations just by the size of the parcel what else was even I mean you might not have even considered anything else but were any other options considered? Based on the parcel size and the placement of the building any other option would be an actual impact into the building. Yeah that's a tight parcel. Yes sir. And I will say that pickup window already exists in the building so that was the business for the idea to actually put that pickup window into use. So Tony that left if you're leaving the drive through and you're taking a left across traffic onto Divine you know so close to Pulaski you think that's okay? It's an existing maneuver being made today. There's no statistic showing that it's a problem today. Actually the existing maneuver today is actually has more conflict potential because if you're in a parking stall that now this drive through comes through you're if you're wanting to make left you're backing actually towards the crosswalk crossing Divine Street where this one everything is actually in front of you. I would agree with that. Okay does anyone else have any other questions for the applicant? Any of the applicants? Do you have any idea how long people would be idling at the window for a pickup? Can you turn around handing the orders over? Most people call the orders in advance and we tell them how long to be before they come pick them up. In other words now we have a little I've had things that bike squad orders there and you read it off and they have a number when they pull up but they usually 15 to 20 minutes so it shouldn't be a problem. I don't want people backed up I don't want anyone coming and ordering from the window if anybody tries to do that we can say we'll go find a parking place and come in front and order from the cashier.  Approximately. I haven't experienced a drive up before so probably similar to McDonald's or something like maybe one, two, three minutes, according to how large the order was but normally we have it bagged up and ready to go unless they come so early that we don't have it ready yet and then we can tell them drive on back around or whatever we need to do. I have a question about sort of the buffer zone between the sidewalk and the drive lane that seems like a little bit of a harsh condition you know if you're walking down the sidewalk on Pulaski and you're being crossed over by people pulling in the drive lane and then driving next to you are there plans to try to that's where most of my employees park in the back back there and I do have big trucks from U.S. food service coming through there to impart back there too to unload I just meant this little strip kind of along here was kind of primarily that strip is actually five to seven foot wide I'm sorry that strip is about five to seven foot wide if you'll notice there the little boxes that are shown on the item that you're looking at those are actually planners the actual physical sidewalk going through is actually adjacent to the curb next to Pulaski street you see that it's actually a hard line down behind that has some concrete in it but there's also planners in there as well so that's not a physical continuous sidewalk but they're pretty small Tony can you get an estimate of the distance between the curb and the start of the sidewalk proper when you say curb which curb proposed curbing on the outside of the pick up lane the curbing that we proposed to put in the distance between that and the start of the sidewalk proper I feel like we're in that five feet I mean based on the scale it looks like we're in that five to seven range I want to say it was 25 feet from the face of curb at the parking stalls to the building we're coming back 12 to 13 feet usually your sidewalk is in that five to seven foot range so you still got almost seven feet six to seven feet available between the edge of the continuous sidewalk and the curbing of where the lane starts well if you look at the black top is 11 feet wide assuming everything is drawn to scale you're talking about more than 11 feet it looks like from the black top to where the dark asphalt starts up on Pulaski here's around 13 to the back of the curb at the drive through it Tony is 11 feet typical for a drive out seems kind of wide to me it's 11 feet 11 to 12 feet is kind of normal I mean I've seen down to 10 in some operations so it's within the parameters of normalcy the order number requires 12 well then that sells I was just sort of thinking out loud that might could help a little bit what you were talking about if we could shrink that asphalt width a little bit seems kind of wide but I think that sells it then and we really can't and the picnic table is gone the picnic table and the picture is going to be gone I think that's a really good question I think it's a little misleading when you brought that question up I've read this incorrectly as well the blue line is the right way line and the sidewalk is offset from the right way a few feet so what you were getting at is if you're walking down the sidewalk how close do you really want to be to a car and a drive throughout and I think there's a few more feet then it appears immediately adjacent to the drive out because as Tony said there's more concrete sort of connecting the sidewalk on the roadway and the site so I think that was a good question I think that helps clear it up a little bit well do any other members of the board have any specific questions before we get in the board discussion for the applicant regarding this matter can I ask one more question the other sort of piece of just thinking about the sort of site circulation is it looks like it's pretty typical and having been there a lot is for traffic to go kind of behind the building and into the vacant lot adjacent is there a concern that you have some sort of cross traffic situation that could start happening if you're introducing a new traffic pattern does that make sense like if somebody's trying to cut through do we need to control the other side of the road is that out of our purview Rachel I don't know Gene you might want to speak to that people may park in that adjacent area but that is not area that you control if people are parking there they're really not that's not your property correct that belongs to Mr. Little John but we don't have traffic coming through cutting through normally they go back out to Divine Street where they came in because that's where usually they enter I guess to answer a question would you have an objection to placing something back here to ensure that that could not occur I feel like that would control matter of fact I can have Ryan Brewer do that he's doing my fence around my koolabat there now so I could do that be a good idea really because I don't want anybody cutting through anything I'm out of questions okay well is there anyone here from the audience who would like to speak on this matter okay Rachel do we have any public input no email okay well this is an interesting case at this point like to open up for discussion I think we've like always have sort of discussed it a little bit but now's a good opportunity to air your thoughts or concerns what do you all think it's a very good idea because I mean I was thinking about turning the car engine off and turning it back on and they say you're going to be you do that if you're waiting for more than a minute but it sounds like actually it's going to be from a pollution perspective better to have this pickup window than having people starting to stop in their cars a couple of times at least it's probably make sure your mic is on is your mic on yes it should be do I need to stand much closer to the all right do I need to say everything I said again or did everybody mostly get it seems like from a pollution perspective we're probably it's at least to break you in point and you know I think Celia brought up some good points hitting some sort of barrier on that side there to prevent the cross traffic I think that's a great idea you just never know what you're going to do when you change up a traffic flow and I think you know here we are approving Chick-fil-A for two drivers no it's completely different but here's a local business that's trying to survive from COVID and I just I think it's a unique problem and a unique solution just given the tight nature of the parcel so I generally like the idea of it yeah you know regarding COVID is certainly a lot better you don't leave your car there's no argument there I think it supports the business at any time I mean there's a lot of reasons why somebody might want to do a pickup rather than go on in and have to leave the kids in the car or the dog or something like that and this way you can just do it you're supporting that business you're able to process a lot more customers with less asphalt all the way around and I don't think parking I mean traffic is just never going to be a problem back there because it's just it's going to become even more of a backwater once Green Street gets the Green Street goes through and Divine Street is closed off well I think the idea is to increase pedestrian traffic though with the Green Street closure yes true a lot of the development within the Innovista area is really pushes pedestrian safety and the hell you're just one there it's like already such a pedestrian nightmare and I worry about it but I mean there are certainly people who walk there I mean I see people coming from the Amtrak walking around there and pulling their luggage and stuff like that there's a large student apartment complex directly across the street as well that's the only one of the criteria that's really even in question they easily meet the rest one vehicular and pedestrian safety that's the only one that gives me any pause here at all what is the lighting situation there I don't really recall I mean I'm wondering if that's a concern I mean it's more of a lunch place they have those lamps all the way up and down Pulaski Street the city install when they did the renovation so it's well lighted now and I also have one behind my building on the pole did I pay for them myself okay can I ask a question to them again are you steeped there at supper I thought pull them back up please we open Tuesday and Wednesday for lunch only 11, 2.30 and then Thursday Friday and Saturday 11 to 8.30 and then okay so it would be dark after in the winter time but it's lit it's well lit is what you're saying because of the street lighting stay up there for one second and I think forget the traffic engineer guy's name but the crosswalk that's more that's like a speed bump crosswalk you talking in front of the building yeah well basically it's a probably the best way I can explain it to you is kind of the tabled intersection that was put in sorry Lincoln and green right there next to the Coliseum you had it ramped up and then it's flat then it goes back down I mean that's a bigger version of this we're talking about doing kind of the same thing ramping up and that way the actual crosswalk for or actual sidewalk for the pedestrian doesn't change elevation you keep that the same but you bring the other up to it and then back down to kind of create a little bit of a speed speed bump effect for the vehicle that's smart right Rachel can I actually have another question are there any because the two palmetto trees there will only be one palmetto tree left at palmetto pig but it looks like those two palmetto trees are coming out is there any requirements by the city that they replace those trees or is that on the city do we know I don't believe though for the palmetto trees if they were the grand trees it would trigger but a lot's going to come down to because I mean this even if they use this approved it's going to have to meet all land development traffic all other city development regulations landscape triggers are based on project value whether any new landscaping would be triggered above what's already there is there going to be a drainage issue if you look those squares they were designed for the city to plant trees but they never planted I planted the palmetto trees when we opened it up it's three of them the one right closer to take out one at the end of two in the front of building but there are if we could move them if you wanted to we could plant something in those squares that's what that was designed for but the city never put nothing in there interesting what about drainage stormwater drainage and stuff now that you've got this table going is that going to mess up drainage somehow I don't even know what the drainage is like there it's mostly hard to take now the the existing is basically pretty much all impervious area so we're really not changing the impervious area so what you're capturing you're still going to basically handle almost in the same manner but that will have to go through the design elements when Mr Antley gets a site civil on actually doing that work the reason I'm thinking about is like for example the pedestrian overpass at Pickens on Pickens where College Street goes over USC I mean that's undriveable when it's a big storm you know they put the cop cars there it's just like down at Waley Street so but this isn't much of a doesn't look like you're changing the elevation much so you're not going to have a dip it's just going to be a raised area and then flat like it always is correct actually the actual lane will actually depress and then as you move up then it actually raises back up so you would drain it down the grade that is currently draining now today thank you well I think at this point unless anyone helps has anything else we will wrap up board discussion we had very good suggestion earlier so don't know if we want to write that into any potential motion or not but at this point like that can I have one more comment I mean I keep going back to the pedestrian safety too and not so much I don't think the vehicular safety is that big a deal but if people are walking to Palmetto Pig I mean I go there a lot for lunch too you know instead of would it be out of our purview to suggest that they have some sort of fence put along the sidewalk to keep pedestrians from walking through the drive-through line maybe have them so that they're directed to the crosswalk whatever condition we want I think we were going to get a motion sort of to that effect some kind of shield just some let's make it vague if we do just to give them some leeway yeah because any kind of shielding because it is in a design district would have to meet those requirements of the and don't get the shield or a fence just nothing too specific certainly a good idea yeah just so that people aren't walking through the drive-through line good point John thank you would y'all is that something y'all yeah yeah yeah I mean they probably benefit their site as well okay well there's a good discussion at this point we'd like to ask for a motion and y'all write whatever whatever stipulation you want into it let's see board thanks my first motion do we word it as an approve subject to some sort of inclusion of kind of thing like here let me there's some sort of yeah I move that we approve this special exception request subject to some sort of some sort of barrier between preventing cross traffic behind the building that was discussed as well as some sort of shield along the sidewalk and the new drive-through lane to prevent pedestrians you want to amend that to be a barrier barrier John how about the barrier be between the asphalt the edge of the new asphalt and the right away line yeah yeah very good we have a motion do we have a second okay we have a motion and a second all those in favor please say aye aye any opposed okay all right thank you there's no other business thank you good presentation all right at this point we'd like to ask for a motion to adjourn second all those in favor please say aye any opposed okay


All right. It's my very big pleasure to introduce Roya and Safi to you. She's going to talk about Sensor Planet, a global censorship observatory. I'm personally very interested in learning more about this project. It sounds like it's going to be very important. So please welcome Roya with a huge warm round of applause. Thank you. It's wonderful to finally make it to CCC. I had joined talk with multiple of my friends over the past years and the visa stuff never worked out. This year I applied for a conference in August and the visa worked for coming to CCC. My name is Roya and Safi and I'm a professor at the University of Michigan. My research focuses on security and privacy with the goal of protecting users from adversarial network. So basically I investigate network interference and somebody is interfering right now. Damn it. What the heck? Okay. Cool. I'm good. Oh no, I'm not. In my lab we develop techniques and systems to be able to detect network interference often at a scale and apply these frameworks and tools to be able to understand the behaviors of these actors that do the interference and use this understanding to be able to come up with a defense. Today I'm going to talk about a project that is very dear to my heart, the one that I spent six years working on it. And in this talk I'm going to talk about censorship, internet censorship and by that I mean any action that prevents users access to the requested content. We have heard an alarming level of censorship happening all around the world. And while it was previously multiple countries that were capable of using deep packet inspections to tamper with user traffic, thanks to commercialization of these DPI's, now many countries are actually messing with users data. For the first time that the users type CNN.com in their browsers, their traffic is subject to some level of interference by different actors. First, for example, the DNS query where the mapping between the domain and the IP where the content is can be manipulated. For example, the DNS answers can be a dead IP where the content is not there. If the DNS succeeds then the users and the servers are going to establish a connection, TCP handshake and that can be easily blocked. If that succeeds then users and servers start actually sending back and forth the actual data.  Before I forgot let me tell you and emphasize that it's not just governments and the policies that are imposed on the ISPs that lead to censorship. Actually, server side which provides the data are also blocking users, especially if they are located in a regions that they don't provide any revenue. We recently investigated this issue of dual blocking in deep and provide more details about what role CDNs actually provide. Imagine now we have how many users, how many ISPs, how many transit networks and how many websites each of which are going to have their own policies of how to block users access. More censorship changes from time to time, region to region, country to country and for that reason many researchers including me have been interested in collecting data about censorship in a global way and continuously. Well I grew up under civil censorship, be it the university, the government, more frustrating the server side and I genuinely believe that censorship take away opportunities and degrade human dignity and it's not just China, Bahrain, Turkey that does internet censorship. Actually with the DPI it's become cheaper and cheaper. Many governments are following their leads. As a result internet is becoming more and more Balkanized and the users around the world are going to soon have a very very different pictures of what is internet is and we need to be able to collect the data and to be able to know what is being censored, how it's being censored, where it's being censored and for how long. This data then can be used to bring transparency and accountability to governments or private companies that practice internet censorship. It can help us to know where the circumvention to where the defense needs to be deployed. It can help us to let the users around the world to know what their governments are up to and more important provide the valid and good data for the policy makers to come up with the good policies. Existing research already shows that if we can provide this data to users they act by their own will to ensure internet freedom. For many years my goal has been to come up with a better map, a censorship better map where we can actually see changes in censorship over time, how some countries are different from others and do that for a continuous duration of time and for all over the world. Being such a map wasn't possible with the techniques, internet measurement methods that we had at the time. At the time and even the common techniques we now use, the measurement methods to be able to use for measuring internet censorship is often by deploying a software or giving a customized Raspberry Pi to either a client or a server and based on that measure what's happening between client and servers. Well, this approach has a lot of limitation. For example, there are not that many volunteers around the whole world that are eager to download a software and run it. Second, the data collected from this approach are often not continuous because the user's connection can die for variety of reasons or users might lose interest to keep running the software. And therefore, we end up with a sparse data where we cannot have a good baseline for internet censorship studies. More measuring internet, measuring domains that are sensitive often create risks for the local collaborators and might end up with their government's retaliation. These risks are not hypothetical. When the Arab Spring was happening, I was approached by many colleagues to recruit local friends and colleagues in Middle East to be able to collect measurement data at the time that was very interesting to capture the behavior of the network and most dangerous for the locals and volunteers to collect that. My painting actually experts what I felt at the time. I can't just imagine asking people on the ground to help at these times of unrest. In my opinion, conspiring to collect the data against the government's interest can be seen as an act of treason. And these governments are unpredictable often. So it's exposed these volunteers to a severe risk. While no one has yet been arrested because of measuring interest in censorship, as far as we know, and I don't know how we can know that in a global scale, I think the clouds are on the horizon. I'm still at all how Turkish government used their surveillance data at a time of co-op and tracked down and detained hundreds of users because there was a traffic between them and bilock, a messenger app that was used by co-op administrators. These things happen. Before I continue, if you know UNI, you might ask how UNI prevent risk? Well, with a great level of efforts. And if you don't know UNI, UNI is a global community of volunteers that collect data about censorship around the world. Well, first and foremost, they provide their volunteers with a very honest consent, telling them that, hey, if you run this software, anybody who is monitoring your traffic, know what you're up to. They also go out of their way to give freedom to these volunteers to choose what website they want to run, what data they want to push. They establish a great relationship with the local activist organization in the countries. Well, now that I prove to you guys that I am a supporter of UNI and I'm actually a friend with most of them, I want to emphasize that I still believe that consistent and continuous and global data about censorship requires a new approach that doesn't need volunteers help. I become obsessed with solving this problem. What if we could measure whether a client in anywhere around the world can talk to a server without being close to a client, somewhere from here, from University of Michigan, and see whether the two hosts can talk to each other globally and remotely off the path? Who are the people about this? Honestly, everybody was like, you don't know what you're talking about. It's really, really challenging. Well, they were right, the challenge is there, and I'm going to walk you through it. We have at least 140 IP addresses that respond to the same packet. This means they speak to the world, and they follow blindly TCPIP protocol. So the question becomes, how can I leverage these subtle properties of TCPIP to be able to detect the two hosts can talk to each other? Well, a spookiest scan is a technique that Jet Kriandel from University of New Mexico and I developed that uses TCPIP side channels to be able to detect whether the two remote hosts can establish a TCP hand shake or not, and if not, in which direction the packets are being dropped off the path and remotely, and I'm going to start telling you how this works. First, I have to cover some background. So any connection that is based on TCP, one of the basic communication protocol we have, it needs to establish a TCP hand shake. So basically you send a sync, and in the packet you send in the IP header, you have a field called identification, IP ID, and this field is used for fragmentation reasons, and I'm going to use this field a lot in the rest of the talk. After the user received a sync, it's going to send a sync back, have another IP ID in it, and then if I want to establish a connection, I said act, otherwise I send a reset.   If you don't do anything, because TCP IP is reliable, it's going to send you multiple SINAC. It depends on operating system 3, 5, you name it. As bookies can require some basic characteristics. For example, the client, the vantage points that we are interested should maintain a global variable for the IP ID. It means that when they receive a packet, and they want to send the packet out, no matter who's they're sending the packet to, this IP ID is going to be a shared resource, it's not going to be increment by one. So by just watching the IP ID changes, you can see how much a machine is noisy, how much a machine is sending traffic out. A server should have a port open, let's say AD for Votery, and wants to establish a connection. And the measurement machine, me, should be able to spoof packets. It means sending packet with the source IP different from my own machine. To be able to do that, you need to talk to upstream network and ask them not to drop the packets. All of these requirements, I could easily satisfy with a little bit of efforts. As bookies can start, with measurement machine, send a CNAC packet to one of this client with the global IP ID at a time, let's say the value is 7,000. The client is going to send back a reset following the protocol, revealing to me what's the value of IP ID. In the next step, I'm going to send a spoofed CN packet to a server using a client IP as a result. The CNAC is going to send to the client. Again, the client is going to send a reset back. The IP ID is going to be incremented by one. Next time I query IP ID, I'm going to see a jump two. In a noiseless model, I know that this machine talked to the server. If I query it again, I won't see any jump. So, delta two, delta one. Now imagine there is a firewall that blocked the CNACs going from the server to the client. Well, it doesn't matter how much of the traffic I send. It's not going to get there. It's not going to get there. So, the delta I see is one one. In the third case, when the packets are going to be dropped from the client to the server, well, my CNAC gets there. The CNAC gets to the client. The client is going to send the reset back, but it's not going to get to the server. So, it's going to send multiple CNACs, and as a result, the reset is going to be plus plus more. So, what jump I would see is, let's say, two two. Let me put them all together. So, you have three cases blocking in this direction. No blocking and blocking in the other. And you see different jumps or different deltas. So, it's detectable. Yes, yes, in a noiseless model. I know the clients talk to so many others, and the IP ID is going to be changed because of a variety of reasons. I call all of those noise, and this is how we're going to deal with it. Well, in two different slicking, we can amplify the signal. We can actually, instead of sending one spoof in packet, we can send n. And for a variety of reasons, packets can get dropped. So, we need to repeat this measurement. Some data from a Spooky scan of where I use the following probing method. For 30 seconds, I spoof the, I send a query for IP ID. And then for another 30 seconds, I send this five spoof in packets. This is machines or clients in Azerbaijan, China, and United States. And we wanted to check whether it's reached Tor Relay that we had in Sweden. You can see there are different jump or different level shifts that you observe in a second phase. And just visually looking at it or using auto regressive moving average or ARMA, you can actually detect that. But there is an insight here, which is that not all the clients have the same level of noise. And for some of them, especially these guys, you could easily detect after five level of sending IP ID query and then five seconds of spooking. So, in the follow-up work, we try to use this insight to be able to come up with a scalable and efficient technique to be able to use it in a global way. And that technique is called AUGAR. Well, AUGAR adopts this probing method. First, for four seconds, it queries IP ID. Then in one second, send 10 spoofing packets. Look at the IP ID acceleration or second derivative and see whether we see a jump, a sudden jump at the time of perturbation when we did the spoofing. How confident we are that that jump is the results of our own spoof packet. Well, I'm not confident. Run it again. I think so. Run it again until you have sufficient confidence. It turns out there is a statistical analysis called sequential hypothesis testing that can be used to be able to gradually improve our confidence about the case we are detecting. So, I'm going to give you a very, very rough overview of how this work. But for sequential hypothesis testing, we need to define a random variable. And we use IP ID acceleration at the time of perturbation being one or zero based on you see jump or not. We also need to calculate some empirical priors, known probabilities. If you look at everything, what would be the probability that you see a jump when there is actually no blocking and so on? After we put all this together, then we can formalize an algorithm starting by run a trial. Update the sequence of values for the random variables. Then check whether the sequence of values belong to the distribution of where the blocking happens or not. What's the likelihood of that? If you are confident, if you reach to a level that we are satisfied, then we call it a case. So, putting all this together, this is how Aga works. We scan the whole IPv4, find global IP ID machines, and then we have some constraint that is it a stable machine? Is it a noisier or have a noise that we want to deal with? We also need to figure out what website are we interested to test reachability towards them? What countries we are? So, after we decide all the input, then we run a scheduler, making sure that new client and server are under the measurement in the same time, because they mess each other's detection. Then we actually use our analysis to be able to call the case and summarize the results. I started by saying that the common methods have this limitation, for example, coverage, continuity, and ethics. When it comes to coverage, there are more than 22 million global IP ID machines. These are Windows XP's of predecessor, and previous these, for example. Compared to the previous board, one successful project is a Rai Atlas, and they have around 10,000 probes globally deployed. When it comes to continuity, we don't depend on the end user, so it's much more reliable to use this. Asking volunteers to help, we are already reducing the risk, because there is no users conspiring against their governments to collect this data. But our approach is not also zero risk. If you look, if you look, you have a different kind of riskier. The client and server is exchanging CNAC and reset without each of them giving a consent, and we don't want to ask for a consent, because if you do, the dilemma exists. We have to go back, and it's just the same that's asking volunteers. So to deal with that, and copy that, to reduce the risk more, we don't use end IPs. We actually use two hot back routers, which hyperability are infrastructure machines, and use those as a vantage point. Even with this harsh constraint, we still have 53,000 global IP ID routers. To test the framework, to see whether it works, we chose two thousands of these global IP ID machines, uniformly selected from all the countries we had vantage point. We selected websites from citizen lab test list. This is the research organization in torrential universities where they crowd source a website that are potentially being blocked, or potentially sensitive. And then we use thousands of the website from Alexa, top 10k, and then we get the auger running for 17 days and collect this data. One of the challenges that we have to validate the auger was like, so what is the truth? What is the ground truth? What would we see that makes sense? So, and this is the biggest and fundamental challenge for internet censorship anyway. But so the first approach is leaning on intuition, which is like no client should show blocking towards all the websites. No server should show blocking for bulk of our clients. And if anything happens like that, we just trash it. We should see more bias towards the sensitive domain versus the ones that are popular. And so on. And also we hope to replicate the anecdotes, the reports out there. And we did all of those. And that's how we validate auger. So at the end, auger is a system that is scalable and efficient, ethical, and can be used to detect TCP IP blocking continuously. Yes, I know. That's just TCP IP. What about the other layers? Can we measure them remotely as well? Well, let me focus on the DNS. You might ask, is there a way that we can remotely detect DNS poisoning or manipulation? Well, let's think it out loud. From now on, I'm going to give just the highlights of the papers we work for the lack of the time. Well, if we scan the whole IP before, we have a lot of open DNS resolvers, which means that they are open to anybody sending a query to them to resolve. And these open DNS resolvers can be used as a vantage point. We can use open DNS resolvers in different ISPs around the world to see whether that DNS queries are poisoned or not. Well, wait, we need to make sure that they don't belong to the end user. So we come up with a lot of checks to make sure that these open DNS resolvers are organizational, belong to the ISP, or infrastructure. After we do that, then we start sending all our queries to these, let's say, open DNS resolvers in ISP in Bahrain for all the domain we are interested, and capture what we receive, what IPs we receive. The challenge is then to detect what is the wrong answer. And so we have to come up with a lot of heuristics, a set of heuristics. For example, the response that we received, is that equal to a reply we got from our control measurements where we know the IP is not blocked or poisoned or something, the content is there. We can actually look at the IP that we received and see whether it has a valid HTTP search with or without SNI or server name identification or something. And so on so forth. So we come up with lots of heuristics to detect the wrong answers. The results of all these efforts ended up being a project called satellite, which was started by Willa Scott. I'm sure he's in the audience somewhere, a great friend of mine, a very good supporter of sensor planet. Selflessly, he has been a miracle that I had an opportunity and fortune to met him. We have satellite. And satellite automate the whole steps that I told you. For this work, we use science that developed in both of the work. We call it satellite because of seniority and it's sticking with the name. So how much coverage satellite has? If you scan IPv4, you end up with 4.2 million of Pandianus resolvers in every country and their territories. We actually need to make sure there are for that reason, we put a harsh condition. We say that let's only use the ones that their valid PTR record followed this expression. Basically, let's just use the open DNS resolvers that are name servers or at least their PTR record suggests that. This is a really harsh constraint. Actually, my students have been adding more and more regular expression for the ones that we are sure they are organizational. But for now, just being this harsh, we have 40K open DNS resolvers in almost 169 countries, I guess. Sensorship happened in other layer as well. How do we want to deal with that remote channel with the remote side channel? And especially, what about HTTP traffic or disruption that can happen in the TLS centric?  Oh, no. It's well documented that many DPIs, especially in great furrows, China, monitor the traffic and then they see a key word, a sensitive key word like Falun Gong. They act and they drop traffic or send a reset. And as I mentioned earlier, there were enough clear text everywhere, even in TLS centric, SNI is in clear text. And for a long time, I was trying to come up with the way of detecting application layer using this fancy side channel. Like, how can I detect that when the client and server need to first establish a TCP handshake? How the side channel can jump in and then detect the rest? We were lucky enough that the end pointed to a protocol called Echo. It's a protocol designed on 1983. And it's for testing reasons. It's a debugging tool, basically. It's a predecessor to Ping. And basically, after you establish a TCP handshake to port 7, whatever you send the Echo servers on port 7, it's going to echo it back. Now think about it. How we can use Echo servers to be able to detect application layer blocking. Well, when it's not available, let's say I have an Echo server in the U.S. and measure my machine in the University of Michigan, I establish a TCP handshake and I send a GET request to using a sensor keyboard, for example. It's going to get back to me the same thing I sent. But now, let's put the DPI that is going to be triggered by it. Well, for sure, either I'm going to receive a reset first or something else. So we can actually come up with the algorithm to be able to use Echo servers to detect disruptions on application layer. Basically, keyboard blocking, URL blocking. Results of this is a tool called Quack. And Quack actually uses Echo servers to be able to detect in a scalable way and safely better the keywords are being blocked around the world. So what do we do is first scan the whole IPv4. We find 47K Echo servers running around the world. Then we need to be able to check whether they are not belong to the end users. And that was a very challenging part because there is not a clear signal as it's, there are 90% of them are infrastructure, but there is still some portion of them that we don't know. So what we do is we look at the freedom of house reports and the countries that are partially open or not open. Not free or partially free, what they call. This is around 50 countries. And for those, we randomly select some that we want and we use OS detection of NMAP. And if you give us back, it's a server, it's a switch, and so on, we use those. So with the help of so many collaborators, after almost six years, we end up with three systems that can capture the CBI people blocking DNS and application layer blocking using infrastructure and organizational machines. So while it was, it was a dream or a vision that we can come up with a better map to collect this data in a continuous way, thanks to the help of a lot of people, especially my students, Will and other collaborators, we now have SensorPlanet. SensorPlanet collects semi-weekly snapshots of internal censorship using our vantage point in all the layers and provide this data in a raw format now in our website. We also provide some visualization way for people to be able to see how many vantage points we have in each country and so on. Of course, this is the beginning of SensorPlanet. We launched this at August and we have been collecting data for almost four months and we have a long way to go. We have users right now through organizations using our data and helping us debug by finding things that doesn't make sense pointing to us. And any of you that ended up using this data, please share your feedback with us and we are very responsive to be able to change it. Not as much as Zuni. They have a collective of very well-dedicated people participating. So now that we have this SensorPlanet, let me give you how it can help when there is a political situation going on. You all must remember around October, very Jamal Khashoggi, Washington Post reporter disappeared, killed at the Saudi Arabia embassy in Turkey. At the time of this happening, there was a lot of media attention and this news, especially two weeks in, become very internationally spread. Since the planet didn't know this event was going to happen, so we have been collecting this data semi-vehicle for 2000 domain or so. And so we went back and we checked the Saudi Arabia. Did we see anything interesting? And yes, we saw for example at two weeks in, around October 16, the domains that we were, that was reuse category and media category, the censorship related to those doubled. And let me emphasize, we didn't see like a block and not block over the whole country. Not all the countries have a homogeneous censorship happening. We saw it in multiple of the ISPs that we had vantage point. Actually, I freaked out when one of the activists in Saudi Arabia told us that, I don't see this. And we said, what IS, what ISP were in? And this wasn't the ISP that we had vantage point in. So we were looking for hints that, is there anybody else seeing what we were seeing? And so we ended up seeing, there was a commander lap project that also saw around October 16, the number of malwares or whatever they're testing is also doubled or triple, I don't know, the other. So something was going on two weeks in when the news broke. Let me emphasize this news media that I'm talking about or the global news media that we checked like LA Times, Fox News, and so on. But we also checked Arab news, which is, as the activists told us, is a Saudi Arabia's propaganda newspaper that in one of the ISPs was being poisoned. So again, censorship measurement is a very complex problem. So where we're heading? Well, having said that about side channels and the techniques that help us to collect this data, I have to also say that the data we collect doesn't replicate the picture of the internet censorship. I mean, having a root access on a volunteer's machine to do a detailed test is powerful. So in the next step, in the next year, one of our goal is to join force with UNI to integrate the data from remote and basically local measurements to provide the best of the world's worlds. Also, we have been thinking a lot about what would be a good visualization tools that doesn't end up to misrepresent internet censorship. I literally hate that one. Hate it. The number of vantage points in countries are not equal. We don't know whether all the vantage points that the data is resulted from it is from one ISP or all of our ISP. And then with test domains that are like benign, like I don't know, it defined based on some western values of the freedom of expression. I believe in all of them, but still, culture economy might play something's red. And then we put colors on the map, rank the countries, call some countries awful, and not giving a full attention to the others. So something needs to be changed. And it seems a horizon to think about it more deeper. We want to be able to have more statistic tools to be able to spot when the patterns are changed. We want to be able to compare the countries. Then, for example, Telegram was being blocked at Russia. If you remember, millions of IPs being blocked. If you don't know, go to my friends, when I talk about Russia. You're going to learn a lot there. But anyway, so when the Russia was blocking Telegram, I said to everyone, I bet in the following, some other governments are going to jump to block Telegram as well. And that's actually what we heard, rumors like that. So we need to be able to do that automatically. And overall, I want to be able to develop an empirical science of internet censorship based on a rich data with the help of all of you. Sensor Planet is now being maintained by a group of dedicated students, a great friends that I have, and needs engineers, political scientists to jump on our data and help us to bring meaning to what we are collecting. So if you are a good engineer or a political scientist or a dedicated person who wants to change the world, reach out to me. As a reference for those of you interested, these are the publications that my talk was based on. And now I'm open to questions. All right, perfect. Thank you so much for your so far. We have some time for questions. So if you have a question in the room, please go to one of the room microphones, one, two, three, four and five in the very back. And if you're watching the stream, you can ask questions to the Signal Angel via IRC or Twitter. And we'll also make sure to relay those to the speaker and make sure those get asked. So let's just go ahead and start with my tool, please. Hey, great talk. Do you worry that by publishing your methods as well as your data that you're going to get a response from governments that are censoring things such that it makes it more difficult for you to monitor what's being censored or has that already happened? It hasn't happened. We have control measures to be able to detect that. But that has been, it's a really good question and often comes up after I present. I can tell you based on my experience, it's really hard to synchronize all the ISPs and all the countries to act to the CNAC and reset that I'm sending. Like, for example, for AUGAR, this is on solicited packets. And for the governments to block that, there are going to be a lot of collateral damage. You might say that, well, Roya, they're going to block the IP of University of Michigan, the spoofing machine. We have measure for that. We have multiple places that I am actually back, have a backup if that case happened. But overall, this is a global scale measurement. And even in one city or like multiple ISPs, you know, it's really hard to synchronize being like blocking something and maintaining that. So it is something that's in our mind thinking about. But as of now, it's not a worry. All right, then let's go over to Mike one. Thank you. I wondered, it's kind of similar to this question. What if you are measuring from a country that is blocking? Do you also distribute the measurements over several countries? Absolutely. Every snapshot that we collect is from all the vantage point we have in like certain countries and portion of vantage point in like China or like US because they have millions of applications. So we don't like thousands of. So basically, at each snapshot, which take us three days, we collect the data from all of all of the vantage point. And so let's say that somebody is reacting to us. We have a benign domain that we check as well, like for example, the domain example.com or random.com. So if we see something going on there, we actually double check. But but good point because now our efforts is very manual labor and we're trying to automate everything. So it's still a challenge. Thank you. All right, then let's go to Mike three. Hi. Have you measured how much does IP ID randomization break your probes? Oh, and this is also really good. Let me give a shout out to Antiras. He's the guy at 1998 discovered IP ID or published something that I ended up reading. So like for example, what is this? Linux or Ubuntu in the newest version, they randomized it. But it's still there all this legacy operating system like Windows XP and prejudice or free BST that are still have global IP ID. So one argument that often come up is what if all this machine get updated to the new operating system where it doesn't have a maintain global IP ID. And I can tell you that, well, we come up with another side channel for now that works. But my gut feeling is that if it didn't change from 1998 till now with all the things that everybody says that global IP ID variable is a horrible idea, it's not going to change in the coming five years. So we're good. Thank you. Okay, then let's just move on to Mike four. When you were introduced, I was wondering, does the detection of the blockage between the client server necessarily indicate censorship? So because you were talking about validating how I was wondering if it turns out that there is like a false alarm, what do you think could be the potential cause? You're absolutely right. And I try to emphasize on that that what we end up collecting is can be seen as a disruption. Something didn't work. The scenic or reset got disrupted. Is that is a censorship or it can be a random packet drop? And the way to be able to establish that confidence is to check whether aggregate the results. Do we see this blocking between multiple of the routers within that country or within that AS? Because if one of this is for accident that just didn't make sense or didn't get dropped, what about the others? So the whole idea and this is another point that I'm so concerned about most of these reports and anecdotes that we read is based on one VPN or one vantage points in the country. And then there are a lot of lot of conclusion out of that. And you often can ask that, well, this vantage point might be subject to so many different things than a government censorship. Also, I emphasize that the censorship that I use in this talk is any action that stop users access to get to the requested content. I'm trying to get away from a semantic where the intention applied. But great question. All right, then let's go back to make one right. Hi, you mentioned that you have a team of students working on all of these frameworks. I was wondering if your frameworks were open source or available online for collaboration and if so where those resources would be? So the data is open. The code hasn't been. For one reason is I'm so low confident in sharing code. Like I'm friend with Philippe Winter, Dave Feifell.  But it really requires confidence to share code. So we are working on that. At least for Quack, I think the code is very easily can be shared. For Auger, we spend a heck of amount of time to make a production ready code. And for satellite, I think that is also ready. I can share them personally with you. But before sharing to the world, I want to actually give another person to audit and make sure we're not using a caseboard or something. I don't know.  But happy if you send me an email, I send you the code. Thank you. All right, then move to mic 2. Thanks again for sharing your great vision. I find it really fascinating, although I'm not really data scientist. But my question is, did you find any usefulness in your approaches in the spreading of the internet of things? I understood that you used routers to make queries. But did you send and maybe receive back any data from washing machines, toasters? I mean, I know being ethical and trying to not use end user machine limits your access a lot. But that's our goal. We are going to stick with things that don't belong to the end users. And so it's all routers, organizational machines. So I want to make sure that whatever you're using belong to the identity that can protect themselves if something went wrong.  It received and sent so many things. I mean, look, let me give you, show you, anticipate that, for example. The volunteer might not be able to defend that because it's already conspiring and collecting the data. But good question. I wish I could, but I won't pass that line. All right. I don't see any more questions in the room right now, but we have one from the internet. So please signal, Angel. Yeah, actually a question from Kuldi 585. I was in an African country where the internet has been completely shut down. How can I quickly and safely inform others about the shutdown? So while I think local users' values are highly, highly needed, they can use social media like Twitter to send and say whatever, there is a project called IOTA. It's a project at KEDA, UCSD University in U.S., and Flip Winter, Alberto and Alistair are working on that. They basically, remotely, keep track of shutdowns and push them out. If you look at the IOTA on Twitter, you can see their live feed of how the shutdowns, where the shutdowns happen. So I haven't talked about how to reach to the users, telling them what we see, or how we can incorporate the user's feedback. We are working with a group of researchers that already developed tools to receive the data from Twitter and basically we use that as some level of ground truth, but only does it such a great job that I haven't felt the need. All right, unless the signal, Angel, has another question. Nope. Can I add one thing? So I was listening to a talk about how Iranian versus Arabs were sympathetic towards Boston bombing in the United States, and there were a lot of assumptions and a lot of conclusions were made that, oh, this, I'm completely paraphrasing, I don't remember, but this Iranian doesn't care because they didn't tweet as much.  After the talk was over, I said, you know that this in this country's Twitter is being blocked and so many people couldn't tweet. All right, that concludes our Q&A. So thanks so much, Roya. Thank you.


Many women in today's Navy are proud to be a part of an organization that is committed to equal opportunity. Seaman Megan Brown is no exception. I really like the idea, considered it, spent a lot of time praying about it and decided that that was the perfect move for me and it ended up being one of the best things I ever did. Good morning. I think my dad was the driving force but my mom was also very inspirational about that too. They saw me very unhappy with the career choice I had in veterinary. It served me well but after four years it just wasn't what I wanted anymore. They saw that I was kind of just stuck pigeonholed myself in this career and they just both were like, you know, we really think you can do something else with your life.  Immersing yourself in an organization traditionally dominated by men can seem intimidating at first. A lot of women would probably have heard all the horror stories like you're going to join the military and it's a man's world. Thanks to the Navy women of the past who fought for equality, people like Brown can now prove their worth without gender-based discrimination. Being immersed in a culture where you're the one women of four males, it's not scary. It may sound like it when you are considering it but it really is, it pays dividends more than you'll ever know. Brown finds time in her busy schedule to volunteer and take college courses. Well nowadays I know that women are just, it's not a big deal if they're attending classes. If it's a co-ed class no one really bats an eye and I know that wasn't always the case. So I feel very fortunate that we don't have to, we don't even think about it. It's not even an issue in modern day society when back in the day all women were able to do were be housewives and mothers. Which is nothing wrong with that, that's something I think we should still appreciate and uphold but at the same time the glass ceiling really has been moved. Brown says she is committed to following in the footsteps of those who have protected equality for future sailors. Personally I would love to see myself excel and have more roles in leadership. I'd like to see more women do the same, not necessarily take over the whole thing but partner with our male counterparts and really do good things. Petty Officer Jason Howard, Suda Bay Crete.


But I think everything has to do with what his mommy would say. He would say, you know, my mother's going to watch this video. I have to be very careful. I says, you have to be very careful what goes into these shows. Not me.  You know? We deal with the truth in every one of our shows. We pull no punches in progressive discussions. Progressive discussions may sound like a nice name for a show, but it's not for the faint of heart. It's not for the faint of heart. Only for the open-minded. Open-minded, independent, free thinkers with an open mind. And if you don't have that, if you can't question authority or question your college professor or question your parents when they're wrong, then you have no business being aboard our starship. Yeah, we graduated from a pirate ship to a starship. But we still love the Jolly Roger, the Skull and Crossbones. Anyway, thank you for joining us. See you next time. Sorry for getting pissed off, but you know what? Damn it, that cat could have went out when it wanted to originally go out. It didn't have to wait until he went on the air. You know? But cats are funny, man. Cats have this arrogant, snooty independence about them compared to dogs. But, I mean, they could be really a pleasure to have around. If they're raised right, they can be very loving and affectionate pets. You know, and you don't have to walk them and stuff like that. But, you know, they have like a snooty independence about them where they do what they do when they want to do it. They go where they want to go when they feel like it. And then if you spray them with water and yell at them, they don't remember anything. Right? They are creatures of habit. They don't really remember disciplinary action. Like a dog. Can't hurt a cat. A dog can be disciplined and they will whimper because you're mad at them. You'll never see cats pulling a sled. No, no.  They will desperately, they'll give you their paw because they know you're mad at them.  Anyway, don't lose that bird article. Bird articles. The bird is the word. Remember that. Bird, bird, bird. The bird is the word.