Okay, I'll come back everybody to the C314, our second lecture. Today we're just talking about various digital equipment, and just giving us a, you know, a high level idea about these things, so that when we lead as leaders, we have to make decisions in our churches, in our ministries, we have some information based on which we can make these decisions. So we've been talking about sound equipment, let's move forward, let's look a little bit more, information here on the sound equipment that we can really use. So, in terms of microphones, obviously microphones are very important to use, and we just need to keep in mind, there's a few things in mind, that there are actually different kinds of microphones, broadly speaking, we have what is, what we refer to as dynamic and condensed. So the dynamic are, you know what I'm going to say, the typical microphones that we use, they are rugged, geropol, they use on stage, and the condenser makes, they capture more subtle or sometimes high sound, high sound levels or fast transfer, so they're special purpose, you want to think of it, special purpose. So if your sound person says, we need to buy two condensers, what's he saying? He's saying we need to buy two special purpose microphones, then you ask him, you know, what do you want to use it for? Then he said, okay, I need it for the drum kit, to pick up that kind of a sound, I need it for, you know, if you have people playing cymbals or whatever.  Dynamic mics are the regular mics that we use all over. And in dynamic mics, there are of course, what we have to do as a unidirectional, omnidirectional. So unidirectional means they pick up sound that's coming only from one direction, that's the example of speaking sound. Omidirectional is they're going to pick up sound from everywhere. So obviously for speaking, singing, you want to use unidirectional sound so that they only pick up the voice that's coming to the mic. You don't want the mic to pick up ambient sound.  Because you can pick up the sound of, you know, three people or the choir or whatever. So depending on the use, you would say, yeah, we need two unidirectional mics. We're putting it in front of a group of people singing with an omnidirectional mic. So that's something to keep in mind. And also there are the wired and wireless mics. So the challenge with wired mics would be, of course this cable is running all over the place. So if you have five, six mics on your stage, you'll have all those wired mics, wires running. So generally, if you want a cleaner stage and you'd like to go with wireless mics, less cable story about, but remember when you're using wireless systems, there could be interference with the transmission and reception of this wireless devices, could be interference with sound being picked up and so on. So there are the pros and cons and, but generally nowadays wireless mics are very clear. So there are a lot of moves towards wireless mics for its benefits. And there are of course other specialized mics, let me talk about these kinds of mics you could, other microphones are specialized for other kinds of instruments. So we haven't invested into any of these, but if your worship team or your band grows to such a stage where you want to invest in those specialized mics, that's fine. But generally we work with these, but it's fine. But just keep in mind, there are specialized microphones for different instruments that pick up and they're designed for those instruments, you can use them. So just to get an idea, generally the sound for the mic goes to the mixer, then goes through an equalizer. You can also apply some sound effects, the three are hot air or some kinds of software. You can apply some effects to the sound, goes through the equalizer, and then goes to the amplifier that boosts the loudness of the sound, and then goes out through the speakers. So your mixer, which is combining the sounds that come in from multiple microphones, the equalizer then controls various frequency levels, you can adjust to various frequency levels. And the amp is increasing, giving it a little bit more boost, higher levels. And then we talked about the monitor speakers and monitor speakers. So the monitor speakers are mainly for the people on the stage for them to hear what's happening. The main speakers are for the audience, for baking. So you can control these two things separately here. You're going to give it a lot of sound, so people can hear. The monitor speakers are more glad to have people to know, the people are singing, to be able to understand. This is how each one is singing, this is how each one is contributing to the overall sound. So that's kind of a general signal flow. So the equipment that you would need to buy, generally as you set up the congregate here, serve as you're deciding to come, you need to give them good sound, so they can hear your preaching, they can hear the worship. Generally this mixer, that's an important part that you would need to purchase. So again, there's so many options these days. Generally, you will go by the number of channels. How many channels can we take? So this one, let's put some pictures here. This one has 12 channels. And you have some things that are bigger. And also, a lot of the things are built in here on the device itself. So you could do the pre-amplifier, the pre-amplifier part. There's also built into this device here. So it's a mixer with pre-amplifier and so on. So you can get that. There's a lot of options available. And many of these come with equalizers built. So the equalizers can move up and down different frequencies so that the overall sound is holds. There are other effects that people do with the sound, have a compression delay, and so on. You don't have to worry about it. It's what the sound person does to work with the sound. And that's what the people do in the market. People do these things all the time. So generally, when you're thinking about buying a mixer, what I would suggest is to kind of think ahead. So for example, if you have a competition, let's say, of 100 people, then you say, OK, yeah. And maybe you have a worship team of three or four people. I have a nuclear format and some instruments coming in. So basically, I just need something. Six channels is enough for me. That's good enough for me. That is true. But it's good to prepare for the future. So OK, at some point, competition is going to grow. When there are more people, the worship team is going to grow. You're going to have more people, more instruments. Maybe you'll add more instruments. And so there will be more inputs coming in. So at that time, so with a buying a mixer, buy it for the future. Right now, your need may be just six inputs. Buy it for the channel. It's not a waste because the worship team is going to grow. The number of instruments you're going to use is going to grow. So always prepare for the future. That is my thought. And that's kind of the approach we've taken so that we're not investing over and over again in buying mixers and so on. And typically, when you buy a mixer, very important is to take proper care of it. So we buy a nice hard case. Keep it there inside the hard case that it's protected. And in our situation, we have to pack up every Sunday. In some places, in some places, everything is fixed. But in some places, we have to pack up and set up every weekend. Which means there's a lot of movement of these devices. And so it's good to always put them in hard cases and protect them. And then if you take good care of it, it can last you five, seven years before you have a need to replace it. But always think about the future, how the church is going to grow, your worshiping is going to grow, and buy something that you can grow with rather than just buying it for the immediate need. So that's just my thought and recommendation based on what you're trying. And a very important part, in addition to the mixer, you need all these cables. Just to give you an example, here are different kinds of connectors that are used. So this is what is known as a snake cable. I think I mentioned this before. I remember in early days, as we started having to invest in a bigger sound system, one day one of our setup people said, master, we need to buy a snake cable. I had no idea what a snake cable was like. What is this also talking about? So I haven't explained to me what are you saying, snake cable? Then he explained to me, this is basically this box that you can put all these connectors in. And then you have this cable that goes all the way to the mixer because the mics are all on the stage. Mixer is somewhere at the back of the hall. You need these things connected. So that's what the snake cable does. Oh, OK, then I understood. And then we taught this snake cable. And these cables are important. I think just maybe two weeks back, our sound person came and he said, we're having problems with two of our cables. They become old. So we are having problems with our live stream because the cable that goes from the mixer to our front of house console to our live stream console that has been damaged. So another one, so we have to buy another little expansion. But we have to buy it because we want to give sound to the people. And so we had to say, yeah, we've used it for long enough. There's wear and tear. OK, let's replace those cables. And we had to do it. So it's all part of having the service going well so that people can have good quality sound. But these cables are very important part of this whole thing. If the cables get damaged, the cables get bad. And obviously no matter what you do, you can have a great mixer. You can have great mics. If the cables are damaged, sounds can be bad. It's going to be destructive. So these cables are important. So let's keep this in mind. These are all small utility things. Now over here, I'm giving a sample set up. And I've put these costs to the Indian countries because that's what we have. But you can convert it to the cost in your currency. Or you can get similar quotes for the equipment from your currency. So if you want to have set up an audio equipment for the auditorium with about 100,000 people somewhere in this way, so let's say 1,000 people, what are the things you will need? So there's a front of house mixer. And these are all suggestions. I'm not saying you have to buy these. I'm just saying this is kind of the things that we use. And so I'm just sharing that information with you. You need a, this is a two-stage rack mixer. It's about some Indian peace here. And then we also need a broadcast mixer. Like I said, front of house mixer. And the broadcast mixer is the one for mixing sound for the live stream modules. Then we have a Mac that does the mix it, the life of the live stream. We use a Logic Pro. This, I think, is what's going to be one of these things that you can get at this moment. And I'm not telling you what this is used for. That's right. I think that's the software. That's the software for the mixer. That's fine. OK. Thank you. Thank you. It's one of the things that I need to talk to you about. So these are the other things that we're using. And I'm for out-of-the-world sound. And I'm going to do a little cost for this. I'm going to tell you some more details here. There are the mics. Now, we are using high-end mics here. So you don't need to use such high-quality mics. But we're using them now. Now, remember, we didn't start off with this. When we started in the beginning, many years ago, we used very simple, very ordinary mics. But now, we'll be able to offer quality mics and be invested in that. Because the sound quality was good. It's great to serve the public with it. So this is kind of the general piece. Now, I don't know the exact number of each mic that we have. But this is the cost per unit of the mic that we have. Similarly, these India monitors, there's a cost per unit. And again, this is probably a five or six. So I don't want to do that. That was India monitors in years. But we have different units of this. And different amplifiers. We have different amplifiers for unit, to be turned, ESC, and so on. So this is general, give you a general sense of it is expensive to invest in it. It's a good thing to do overall, so that you can serve people like this. So this is a representative thing. Let's, you can look at it, modify it for your units in your church. And again, I'm just saying that we never started with this. And it's after almost 18 years that we've invested in these things. We start on very basic things. And then eventually, we'll do this. All right. Changing a little bit to podcasting, podcasting is, again, another useful way of serving people. Now, we have not started podcasts in the sense of what we typically hear of people having a conversation over some topic. And so we haven't done that. What we are doing is, of course, we take the audio of our sermons or of our daily devotions. And we release them through podcast platforms. So that's kind of what we're doing. We're not actually recording separate programs for podcasting, which, if people have the time, that's a good thing to do. But we are not doing that. Instead, we're just using some of our existing content and releasing them as podcasts. But generally, if you, in case you wanted to do a podcast, what would you need? So good microphones. Like I said, I've just given you references to where you could look up these things. I would need good headphones. So generally, you'll have two or three people sitting and having a conversation on the topic. And all of that is being recorded. So you have three people sitting and having a conversation. They have good microphones to pick up and what they're saying, headphones. And they can hear each other. Then you need a recording software. Again, you can use open source. You can use licensed software for recording this. You do an audio interface and a mixer. And if you're also recording video, you need a camera. We'll talk more about this shortly. But you need a camera to record with your restaurant. So with this setup, you could have a good system for recording your podcast. Generally, it's two or three people having a conversation on a particular topic or maybe even sharing the good thoughts and so on. This has become an interesting way of ministering. There are some podcasts that have hundreds of thousands. Sometimes, I guess, there are even more than millions of listeners, subscribers. Christian from the Christian podcast, which is very interesting, which means that people are interested in this form of digital content. They like to hear conversations, which are, of course, live and spontaneous. And at the same time, it is communicating useful information on a particular subject.  So this has become a very widely used, widely accepted digital format in communication these days. And so it's something if you have the time and the interest to explore content. I have participated in other people's podcast, but we don't have our own podcast. But it just takes a lot of time and effort to do that. If you haven't stepped into it, that's something you feel you'd like to do. And here's what you need to get started. All right, now we're going to change our subject a little bit to talk about video production. I'll just maybe introduce this, and then we can continue this next week. So video production, of course, is something that's a very useful thing of ministering certain people. I remember we started our video programs back in 2001 or 2002. In those days, we just had a single camera, and we should go. We actually borrowed or rented, not rented, but borrowed somebody's church building. And they would have one camera, and I would stand behind the pulpit, and there'd be one camera pointing at me. There'd be two little lights shining. And we would record short, short messages. And then we would, again, it was the person from that particular church who did the editing of the video. And then we would send it to the local cable TV, and they would put it on their TV-TV channel. So that's how we started back in 2002, I think it was. It was a lot of work. It was a lot of effort to do those things in those days. And we were actually depending on another church, we were using their venue, and their equipment, and their bus. And of course, we paid for it, and that's how we started. But it gave us a little understanding of what goes into doing a little video production, very simple video production. And it gave us the opportunity to serve people through TV programs produced. Produced a video, put it on cable TV, you can reach people in the city. So it is very simple. So we did that for a few years. And then in 2012, we got TV. So then satellite TV became kind of a big thing in those years. We had different satellite television stations up and down, and got TV, which was from UK. They opened up for TV Asia, which means they were targeting the Asia region, Africa and Asia. And so got TV called us actually in 2012. And they said, can you produce programs to be aired on TV?  And they gave us their document that said, it has to follow all these criteria. It was like too much. How are we going to produce video programs that will meet their standard, our long list of things? They wanted that only if it meets their quality until they aired it, put it on the TV. But they said, they reached out to us, and they want you to come on that. Now, of course, they're not giving it for free. 30 minutes or 28 minute program is costing us so much and all of that. But then we took it up. We took up the challenge. And that's OK. God is giving us an opportunity.  Not to go up to this level of got TV was a big step for us. But we took it up. And I remember those years as we tried to kind of learn how to produce video programs for got TV. It was good because it challenged us. It made us, it forced us to lift our video production to a higher level. And so in those days, we rented everything. We didn't have any of our own cameras. Nothing. We didn't have anything wrong. So we rented everything from companies that vendors who had all the equipment. And we tried different things. So in a video production, you need a set. You need something nice, background, all of that. So initially, we had some people who would come up with the idea of a set for this particular sermon series. The set has to look like this. And the lighting has to come like this. And the cameras have to be in these positions. All those things that are being looked at to understand all that, who will help you do it. So we had to plan. We had to plan so it's going to happen. This is going to be the cost because we're going to use so many cameras, all those things. But we got started. Everything was rented. We got started. And we weren't got TV for seven years from 2012 to 2019. So we went through all of this. And I share this video. I'm just giving you an idea of our own journey. And then in 2019, we realized that there was a big move away from television through online consumption. That means people are not sitting. I mean, they're still doing it. They're sitting in front of TV and watching. But people are watching on demand. That means it's no longer, when you're on TV, our programs are coming on Monday evenings, 9 p.m. to 9.30 soon.  Only then they can sleep a little bit. But by 2019, people are moving away from that to on demand consumption, which was happening through online channels, streaming channels. And so we went off-guard TV. And we said, OK, we are now going to do video production for a streaming platform for a streaming audience. So that's when we started moving towards a live stream. So again, we started very small. In those days, we had only one camera pointing to the live church service. And that service would be streamed live on YouTube. Very simple setup. One camera pointing to stream live. And maybe we had 50 people watching. So not even 50 people, maybe 20, 25 people. And then something we watched afterwards. But we made that decision to move away from television to online streaming because we saw that that's the way the world's people were moving. And our video production was very simple. One camera, and I'll talk to you about the setup, stream, go to YouTube, live. And then, of course, that was in 2019. End of 2019, then early 2020, COVID happens, pandemic happens. Then we had to, everything was online. So people moved. People moved online for a lot of content. They were consuming. And so here we are in 2024. And we know that globally, people are consuming video content primarily through online platforms. People go on demand. They can go to YouTube, they search for what they want. And they see what they want or they consume what they want. Television is there. But sometimes, even many of our televisions are connected to streaming platforms so that you can stream. And you choose what you want to watch. We've got lots of streaming channels. You can switch and you choose what you want to watch and you listen to and so on. So the way people are consuming video content has changed a lot. So as a church, as a ministry, we need to think about ways in which we can create video content, whether it's the live streaming of our Sunday service, whether it's producing even a short video announcement about your own ministry, about an upcoming event, or whether it's producing short films. Say you're going to produce a film. That's five minutes or something. But through that film, you can actually impact people. So we've got lots of options these days. So what you can do with video content, you can live stream your service. You can create documentaries. You can create short films. Lots of things you can do through video content. Release it on platforms, online platforms, and reach people. So with that in mind, we are going to just get a little understanding of what's involved. So generally, I'm not saying for everything, generally, the video production has these three stages. There's a pre-production. So you need to plan. What are we going to do? What's the strategy? To ask the script, who are going to be the actors and who will do the audio, video recording? You kind of plan this. Sometimes it's a very simple thing. For example, if you're creating a short video, a one-minute video announcing an Easter program. Let's say Easter's coming up. You want to create a short video inviting people to your Easter program. You plan. OK, this is what in that 30 seconds or 60 seconds, in that 60-second video, this is what we're going to do. It's what it's going to look like. It's going to have the script. These are the people who are going to do it. So there's a planning. We call that the pre-production stage. Then there's a production, which is the actual shooting of that. So the shooting of the video. Sometimes it may have a single scene. Sometimes there are multiple scenes. And then for each scene, you may use the same set or you may use different sets. So all of that is planned. And then the production happens. You shoot the video scene by scene. And the post-production is basically producing the video where you're merging the video recording, the audio. And then you're editing it. You're making it look the way you want it to look. You may add music. You may add special effects. All of that is done by the person doing the video editing. So basically, you're going through these three stages. And then, of course, you need, in addition to the video cameras, you will need the right devices. So some of this, maybe you could do it on users. You can record a video using your smartphone. Or you can use specialized cameras, like our Go Pro, so PSLRs, use those cameras, and also the formats in which these videos are recorded there. They have different formats these days for high-resolution video recording. And so really, these things, you can leave it to the people to get a recording. Let them figure it out. But mainly, you need to have things through the pre-production production. So here's what I do. Here's what we do here at C. For a video shoot, I tell our media team, you plan and you send the budget. What is the cost? So our media team will plan this. So even, for example, a simple thing like our daily devotion. So on one particular day, so how do we record our daily devotion videos? So we will book a studio, or we'll book a venue where we're going to do the recording. And then they will plan. And of course, our daily devotion means we have to shoot seven episodes for one week, five minutes, seven five-minute episodes, or actually four-minute episodes, because 30 seconds before and after will be the internal year too. So they will plan. We need to record. We're going to record. If we're going to record four weeks of content, we will need totally 28 episodes, seven, seven, seven, seven, four weeks episodes. So they plan it out. This is the background. This is the person who's going to be doing the devotional. We need these slides. We need all these things. And therefore, then they'll work out the budget. It's in the budget. And I'll just approach it. It's OK. This is the venue. This is the past. And by now, because we've been doing this over and over again, the daily devotional, it's kind of more or less fixed. Because we're doing more or less the same thing. There are small variations, but generally it's fixed. Then the production happens. On that particular day, the pastor who's going to be recording those three or four weeks of devotional, we'll go to the studio. And they'll have everything set up. The background, everything is set. And then the person comes and he records each devotional in it. So they record the audio of the video. So the pastor's work is over. The pastor goes. But then post-production has to happen. That is where they will, the person doing the video to take real much, the audio, the video, put the scripture tags, things of that nature. Sometimes there may be some special backgrounds they have to put, all of that. And they'll release every devotional week by week. They'll release it. So that's the post-production. So this is a simple thing that goes into producing daily devotional. These are just five minute videos. But there is a pre-production. There's a planning stage, the budgetary. There's the action production. And there's a post-production run, which has to happen. So even though it's a small little thing, there is a lot of work that actually happens in producing this. And the videos have to be ready. It is sent out. And somebody transcribes it. And then it is released in time. And then it goes out on various platforms. So that's how it happens. It's a small thing. Now you think about bigger productions. If you want to create a short film or you want to do live streaming, we'll talk about live streaming as well, how that happens. So we'll pause here. What we're going to do is we're going to get into the video equipment. What is the equipment you need? And what are the different ways you can do the shoots? We'll talk about that. And again, I'm giving this more as a high level. So you understand this is what actually goes into video production. And you will obviously have a team of people doing this for you. But you need to talk to them. You need to engage with them. You need to tell them this is what I need, and so on. And I'll share some of the practical things that we are doing for our live streaming. I shared with you what we're doing for our very devotional. And I will share that you will be doing for our short films. So we are getting ready to produce short films. And I'll share with you how we are doing about that. So we'll talk about our live streaming, what goes into live streaming. We'll talk about what goes into these short films. And so basically, we are producing video content that will then be a blessing to people. OK? Now let me pause here. Any questions or any thoughts or doubts that you have? As many questions? There are no questions. We will close in prayer. Next week, we'll continue. We will go through the video for a minute. And I'll share with you about the live streaming and the short films. Just for you to get an idea of how these are done in the video production. Could somebody please close in? Heavenly Father, we thank you for this time of learning. We thank you for all the information that we are learning about. And we pray to God that we would be able to use this in our ministry and help us to make right choices and help us to invest in the right things to expand your kingdom. We thank you for the wisdom. We thank you for the learning that all of us are receiving. We give you praise in Jesus' name, we pray. Thank you, everyone. Enjoy the rest of your day. See you all tomorrow. Bye.


Good morning, everybody. Thanks for coming to the first talk. And my name is Ayush, and I'm going to present this paper on robust transforming combiners from indistinguishability obfuscation to functional encryption. And this is joint work with Prabhanjan and Amit. So since 2013, there have been a lot of magical results in cryptography, such as two-round MPC, replacing random miracles, non-interactive multi-party key exchange, and then establishing hardness for PPAD. All these results have been made possible due to indistinguishability obfuscation or functional encryption. So what is this indistinguishability obfuscation? So this obfuscation is a polynomial time algorithm, which takes in a circuit C and spits out another circuit C star with the following two guarantees. The first guarantee is that it should preserve the functionality. That is, for all inputs x, C star of x should be equal to C of x. And the second guarantee is the security guarantee, which basically states that if you have two circuits, C0 and C1, with identical functionality and almost equal size, then it should hold that obfuscation of C0 is computationally indistinguishable from obfuscation of C1. And a related notion is of that function encryption, which was first coined by Sahay and Waters. And then the first candidate construction was given by Gergetal in 2013. So it's just a generalization of an encryption scheme, wherein instead of having just all or none access over the encrypted data, now you have more fine-grained access to the private data. So here, as an example, if you think of this user who wants to encrypt some message x to a cloud, and then this cloud may be adversarial, and he might want to compute some function of this input. So what he can do in a function encryption is that he can query for some function f to the authority that does the setup for function encryption. And then this authority can release a functional key for this functionality. And then it turns out that using this key and the encrypted value of x, he can learn what is the value f of x. And from the security, we roughly want that given this secret key, the adversary or the cloud should not be able to compute anything that's should not be compute anything more than the value f of x. So let's look at what are the known constructions of indistinguishability obfuscation. Actually, there has been tons of work starting with the initial construction of Gurg et al into 2013, and up until recently, the work by Rachel Lynn and Stefano Tissero in 2017. So this is just a non-exhaustive list of all these constructions. So now the question that arises is, out of all these candidates are all candidates of the IO broken. So the answer to this question is, no. We do believe that we have several unbroken IO candidates which have proofs of security in restricted models of security. And now then our goal becomes to find an IO candidate which is secure, even if only one of these candidates is secure. And to state it more formally, if I'm given any arbitrary set of these IO candidates, is it possible to find a candidate that is secure, even if one of the candidates is secure? So this is what I'm going to study in this paper, and this concept is called IO combiner. In fact, what we do study in this work is a stronger form of IO combiner, which is called as a robust IO combiner, which says, which is just an IO combiner, except that it has more relaxed requirement. So we only require that the secure candidate is correct. All other candidates can be arbitrary, and they can completely violate correctness. And this was first studied by two concurrent works. The first, the AG NSY was the work in which I was also involved. The other concurrent work was by Fischlin et al in 2016. So let me now formally define what is a robust IO combiner. So let P, which is P1 through Pn, be a set of n IO candidates or just algorithms. Then there are two algorithms in a robust IO combiner. First algorithm is the obfuscation algorithm, which takes this list of candidates and the circuit C, and it outputs a circuit C star. The C star now is the obfuscation of the circuit C. Then there's an eval algorithm, which takes the list of candidates, the obfuscation C star, the input x, and it outputs y. And now we want two properties to be satisfied in this IO combiner. The first property is that if there exists one such candidate i in P1 through Pn, such that it is both correct and secure, then we want that for any input x, the output of the evaluation algorithm should be correct. That is y is equal to C of x. And the second is the security guarantee, which just says that if there are two equivalent circuits, C0 and C1 of same size, then it should hold that the combiner obfuscation of C0 should look indistinguishable to the obfuscation of C1. OK, good. So why is this robust combiner useful? So it turns out that it actually implies what is called as universal IO. And this was also observed in our previous work. What is a universal IO? So a universal IO, you can think of it as a given fixed scheme, such that if I give you a guarantee that there exists IO, then that scheme itself is a secure IO scheme. And let me now tell you more about what's known previously about these questions. So in crypto 2016, our work gave a candidate construction of a robust combiner from assumptions of DDH and LWE. But in that construction, we required that the secure candidate has to be sub-explanationally secure. Then there was another concurrent work in the same conference, Fishlin et al, which considered the case of combining candidates unconditionally. But in this case, they were able to give results for only constant number of candidates. And so now we ask two following logical questions. The first question is that, let's say we were not just interested in IO, but just we want an application of IO. Is it possible to combine these candidates with only polynomial loss to that application? And the second logical question that we ask is, is it possible to weaken the assumptions from LWE and DDH to, let's say, only one-way functions? So in this direction, we give two results. And the first result is the following. It just says that any combiner can be converted to a robust combiner. So more formally, if you have a combiner that works with only correct candidates, then using a one-way function F, we can actually convert it to a combiner, which is a robust combiner. And this transformation just suffers with polynomial loss. So although a similar result was also observed in RPS work and implicitly in Bitensky and Vacuant-Nathan's work on approximate IO, but that result required some exponentially hard DDH or LWE and also required the underlying candidate to be sub-exponentially secure. Whereas here, we can get this result from one-way functions and also with polynomial loss. So the second result of this paper is the following that if I give you incorrect IO candidates and any one-way function F, then we can construct a compact functional encryption scheme with only polynomial security loss. So then using the previous theorem and the results by Anant and Jain and then Bitensky and Vacuant-Nathan, who prove that using sub-exponentially secure compact functional encryption, it's possible to construct IO. Using that result, we give the following corollary that there exists a sub-exponential universal IO if there exists a one-way function which are sub-exponentially secure. So this notion is also giving rise to a combiner where you start with the candidates of one primitive, that is IO, and you get to another primitive that is FE. So we call this notion transforming combiners. So more formally, if you have N candidates of primitive A, such that only one of them is guaranteed to be both secure and correct, is it possible to construct a secure instantiation primitive B with the polynomial loss? So this is the notion of transforming combiners. And we, in fact, show that there exists transforming combiners, which are robust, and we get transforming combiners from IO to functional encryption. And then using the result of Gerg et al in 2017, we can show that this also yields primitives which are implied by functional encryption such as non-interactive key exchange. Now let me give you a brief overview of our techniques. The first theorem is about compiling a combiner which works with correct candidates to a combiner which is robust. So here, intuitively, what we want to do is take all the candidates that are input to the combiner, and use a one-way function appropriately, and then correct it in some way before feeding it to the combiner itself. So for each candidate P, what we'll do is modify this such that it self checks for correctness. So I'll just tell you the modified candidate. It takes as input the circuit C, and then it uses the underlying candidate P to obfuscate C. And let's say that circuit is C star. And then it samples random input points, and in fact, L of them where L is square of the security parameter. And then it checks that whether at all these points, the obfuscation output is matched with the output of the circuit. So C star of Xi should be equal to C of Xi for all i. Then if this check fails, in that case, it just reveals the circuit C completely. Otherwise, it just outputs the circuit C star. So we make falling to observation from this. The first observation is that this transformation gives you some sort of average case correctness, that is, probability over the input points and over the points of the obfuscator. The C star x is equal to C of x, with probability at least 1 minus 1 by security parameter. And then the second property is that the secure candidate, which we assume to be correct, is unchanged by this transformation because the check in the third point, it always goes through. Then we have got some sort of average case correctness. Now we want to get what is called as worst case correctness. So in order to do that, we revisit the idea of Vitansky and Vekunathan on approximate IO. It's called encrypting inputs. In order to do that, we modify the, we construct, we go to a similar outline, but we construct a different object in order to achieve these results. And the object is the following. We consider a special circuit garbling scheme with the following additional property. The property is that for any two equivalent circuits, C0 and C1, if you garble these circuits to squared bracket C0 and squared bracket C1, then it should hold that the circuit represented by the garbling circuit scheme, hardwired with these garbled circuits, are functionally equivalent. So this might not be true for any garbling scheme, but if we have this property, this allows us to argue what we want with just polynomial security laws. And then we show that such garbled circuits can be constructed from just one way functions. And in fact, I would not go into the details because of the time constraints, but I refer you to the paper for reading more about it. Then we combined the ideas that I just discussed in the following way. So we use the modified obfuscator to just instead of now obfuscating the circuit C itself, we obfuscate the evaluate circuit of the garbling scheme hardwired with the garbled circuit C. And then we release the encoding key of the garbling scheme, the MSK to the evaluator so that he can compute the obfuscation at any point. So using this transformation, it turns out that for any input X, the probability over coins of the obfuscator, C star of X is equal to C of X with probability at least one minus two by the security parameter. And then we can perform the standard BPP amplification to get almost full correctness. Good, so now I'm going to tell you more about how do we combine IO candidates to get a secure IO candidate in this case. So the idea here is really simple. If you have N IO candidates, they should not obfuscate the circuit in the clear because if you're doing that, then if one candidate is broken, in that case it will completely reveal the circuit. So every candidate should in some way just get a secret share of the circuit. And then on any input X, these candidates should be able to jointly compute C of X. So the question that arises is how do we do this? And this was also the methodology in the previous works and this is also what we follow in this work. We rely on MPC techniques. Okay, so let me just recall the approach of the previous work. So in the previous work, if C was the circuit to be obfuscated, we use a non-interactive MPC. And then we secret share the circuit C into C1 through CN. And we treat each CI as an input to the candidate slash party in this protocol. And then we obfuscate the circuit which contains this circuit share CI and the pre-processed state of the MPC using the candidate BI. But note that MPC satisfying such properties are based on assumptions such as LWE and DDH. So this was shown to exist from LWE using Mukherjee and Wix in 16 and then Elidboil and then Neve Gilboa and Ishae in 2017. The question that arises is is it possible to weaken the assumptions by relying on interactive MPC instead? So that is what we do in our work also. We secret share the circuit to C1 through CN using any additive secret sharing. Then we treat each candidate as a party in an interactive MPC protocol. And then we run the MPC protocol for the universal circuit with the reconstruction of circuit C comma X to learn the value of C of X. So this is just a high level approach. So let me go slightly in the detail. So how to evaluate this MPC? We, if you wanted to combine just two candidates, what we could do is have each candidate to obfuscate their next message function in the MPC. So P1 can obfuscate the next message function with C1 hardware and P2 can obfuscate the next message function with C2 hardware. And the reason here, so there is a, when you run this MPC, what happens is that you need OTs. And in fact, you need to run MPC for every input X. Therefore, you would need exponentially many OTs. So this is one problem that I'm going to slightly discuss in detail, but I won't get into the detail of the construction itself. So I'm going to recall what is a random OT. So in the random OT, party P1 wants to, wants to participate in OT protocol with P2. Think of it as having an access to box which has two random strings R0, R1 and a random bit B hardware. Then P1 gets two random string R0, R1 and P2 gets the string B and RB. From security, we want that P1 should learn nothing about B and P2 should learn nothing about R1 minus B. So how do you use this OT? Let me discuss more in detail how to implement OT. So there are following alternatives. We can use an OT protocol. But in this case, the assumptions are stronger. The second idea is that we can pre-process random OTs. But in this case, we would require exponential amount of processing because we want OTs for every input. And the third approach is use PRF keys to generate OTs on the fly. In fact, this is the direction that we are going to follow also in our work. So let's look at more in detail. So the example of combining just two candidates, P1 will now first get an X message function with the PRF key K12 and P2 will offers K the next message function with the PRF key K12. These keys K12 is used to generate OT between party P1 and party P2. But now the problem that arises is that what if candidate P1 is broken? Then it might completely reveal the key K12. So there's no security provided at all by this construction. So I'll just tell you my fix. The fix is the following. This is represented pictorially. Between every pair of parties, I and J, we do the following. In the example for two candidates P1 and P2, we will obfuscate the next message function with the PRF key K12, with the candidate P1 first, and then we will obfuscate it with candidate P2. So in this case, let's say P1 is broken, but P2 is secure, even then the PRF key is not revealed. So this is the basic idea. But we have lots of other roadblocks and with due to time constraints, I cannot go into discussing those roadblocks. But the problems that mainly arises are we have to handle malicious parties and then resetting attacks and we also want to avoid stronger assumptions. We also observed that FE allows us to avoid input-by-input arguments. So we can therefore use our ideas to construct FE from polynomial hardness itself. Okay, with this, I would like to refer you to the paper. So do check our paper. And I'll leave you with some interesting open questions. So first open question is, is it possible to construct an IO combiner from just polynomial security loss? And second open question is, if you have n function encryption candidates, can you get one secure function encryption candidates just from polynomial hardness and assumptions such as one-way functions or EDH? And that's it. Thanks a lot. Any questions? So actually, I have a question. You were using garbled circuits in an interesting way where you gave the master secret key outside. And it seems surprising that you could rely on security when the master secret key is known. Can you explain a little bit how that works? Oh, so, okay. There are two questions that we have to worry about. First question is the correctness question. So in the correctness question, the garbled circuit is encoded in the obfuscation but the master secret key is outside. So the obfuscation itself doesn't see the master secret key. So for him, intuitively, it should hold that if you encode an input X, X1 and input X2, they should be almost equally correct on both the inputs. So the other question is of that of security. For security, I make an observation that eval of C0 with encoding of circuit C0 hardware and eval of C1 with garbled circuit C1 hardware, they are functionally equivalent. So then we can rely on IO security to give a one-step. So you used the security of the garbled circuits only to argue the correctness of the obfuscation, not for the security of the obfuscation. Makes sense.


We bring together African practitioners and policymakers to Asia, sit down and we discuss issues related to lessons learned, if you like, from best practices in Africa. For example, ecotourism is much more developed in Africa and compared to the situation in Asia where the orangutan conflict, if you like, is somewhat sensitive but also very pertinent and contemporary at this moment in time. So the three main subjects we've been looking at in terms of the policy implications of great ape conservation in Africa and Asia are the possibility of red plus co-benefits contributing towards conservation of great apes, issues of human wildlife conflict and thirdly, rather, ecotourism. We're now here in Kelamantan, looking at issues on the ground of how orangutans are being affected by land clearance, land conversion and efforts by national parks such as the Sabangan National Park, forest rehabilitation for orangutan conservation. And here we are in the Neuromanthang area where there are a number of islands where orangutans are being rehabilitated with a view to them being released into the wild. And so there's, again, a very interesting perspective from the African situation where wild, great ape tourism is very well developed and it's something that we're looking into promoting here much more as well. We started in 1999 coming out to do orangutan nest surveys just looking at the population of the peat swamp. At that time it was thought peat swamp forest was fairly depopurate in terms of biodiversity. There wasn't much here. This is not true, as you can see from all of our pictures. And now we have expanded beyond the orangutans. We're studying the both ape species that are here, the gibbons and the orangutans. We've been doing long-term ecological work, looking at forest restoration, regeneration, both natural and assisted. We have a long-term camera trapping project focusing on the clouded leopard, which is Borneo's largest predator. But also we're trying to study and understand better so that we're trying to look at this place, not just up from the focus of the large mammals, but trying to make a much more ecosystem-wide approach right from the small, short-lived species up to the long-lived orangutans. Here we have a lot of activities to study about orangutans, about damning and plotting. Sometimes we can see orangutans here, and it's the easiest to find orangutans when the time is right. The islands and other islands here are islands that we use for pre-release sites for the orangutan before they go to the real forest. For the first time, seeing an orangutan in its natural habitat was something exceptional. It's a unique experience. It feels like a valuable thing to get such a visit. Of course, our hope is that this visit will bring great benefits to the future, in connection with the development of the environment, especially in the rural areas, the rural areas of the country, and I am very proud of it. What is really important for me is that besides our workshop of exchanging with a different expert on mountain gorilla behaviour, tourism, eco-tourism, the good part of it was the fact that we went in the film, talked with the people, lived realities, and discussed about how appropriate we can probably do eco-tourism according to the reality of each of the countries, each of the species. Bringing together a practitioner, I think, has facilitated that process. It's been the most valuable. And you can see behind the camera, there are guys who practise orangutan conservation in Asia, exchanging experiences with guys who are doing the same in Africa. And that's the real value of these kind of workshops and seeing things in the field as we're doing now.


Welcome to the first episode of What the Hell is This? where we uncover the strange and mysterious artifacts of Longmont. Today we're delving into the history of this flower millstone located on the west side of Longmont public media.  Well let me tell you these stones were once part of an early flower mill dating all the way back to 1872. These millstones were the heart of the operation until tragedy struck in 1934 when a fire consumed the old flower mill, also known as Longmont Flower Mill or the Denio Mill. But wait, there's more! In 1913, C.C. Pennock generously donated these stones to the city ensuring their preservation for future generations. And check this inscription. It reads, First Court Mill Used in Boulder County July 1859 by W.R. Floor, M.L. McCaslin and D. Horstboldt Pioneer. But what does that mean? Well according to Mr. Pennock, this mill was used to grind quartz and extract gold. In fact, he claimed that $50,000 worth of free gold was extracted from this very spot. It's believed that the mill was located near Goldhill in the area above Boulder where miners saw their fortune during the gold rush. So there you have it, the seemingly ordinary flower millstone holds a rich history of industry, innovation and gold fever.  Until then, keep exploring!


Hello, Joe fans. It's the Faceless reviewer here. It may look like I'm wearing pantyhose on my head, but that's just an illusion. I'm using hypnosis to conceal my identity. You may have thought I was HCC788, but I was the Faceless reviewer. I was the Faceless reviewer the whole time, and you never suspected. Just ignore any continuity to the contrary. This week, we are looking at Firefly. Not that Firefly. Not that Firefly. Not even that Firefly. We're going to look at the Firefly that was also the Red Ninja Leader and the Faceless Master. He could be whatever he wanted to be, depending on how he felt that day. I feel like playing the theme song. Commander788 here. It's time for another vintage GI Joe toy review. 3DJose.com is great. This is not a paid advertisement for 3D Joe's. The guy that runs the site doesn't even know I'm doing this, but I just had to tell you how great 3D Joe's is. There was a piece of information I needed for this review. YoJoe.com didn't have it. The Balomo guy didn't have it. Only 3DJose.com had the information I needed to confirm that Firefly version 2 was released on Firefly version 3's card. That was very important information to me. 3DJose.com is a great website. You can see 3D spins of all of the vintage GI Joe carded figures and a lot of the vehicles as well. Thank you, 3DJose.com, for all you do. We need to give a codename to a new patron. Jason Shetter has added his support on Patreon. This was a tough one. I normally rely on my network of spies to get information about everyone who gets a codename, but my information network hasn't turned up anything. I'm drawing a blank. That's it. Jason, you will be known as the Blank Viper. Thank you for your support, Blank Viper. Let's get on with the review. This is the review I intended to do last week. We have a lot to cover. We're looking at two versions of Firefly. I'm rolling both into one review because I don't think they should really be considered separate versions. I think the 1993 release of Firefly should be considered a variation of version 2. So they're both going to be in one video. The first version of Firefly was amazing and has a lot of fans. Let's see if the second version lived up to the standards of the first. HCC 788 presents Firefly. This is Firefly version 2 and 3, Cobra's Saboteur from 1992 and 1993. Version 2 was introduced in 1992 and was allegedly only available in 1992 and discontinued for 1993. I have my doubts about that. We will discuss that later. Version 3 was introduced in 1993 and was only available in 1993. It was discontinued for 1994. Version 1 of Firefly was introduced in 1984 as the Cobra's Saboteur. He had an awesome gray camouflage uniform perfect for sneaking around urban areas at night. He had awesome accessories too. He had a submachine gun. He had a backpack that opened up to reveal his sabotage tools. And he had a small green walkie-talkie for coordinating with Cobra forces. Firefly was one of my favorite figures from 1984. He looks great. He could be a real threat to G.I. Joe. Firefly wore a Balaclava mask similar to another Cobra figure from 1984, Storm Shadow. Firefly looked a little like a Ninja, but his file card didn't mention any Ninja background. However, in the Ninja craze of the 1990s, they couldn't resist giving Firefly a Ninja origin story. Version 1 was no longer on the shelves after 1985. The next version came out six years later and it was drastically different from Version 1. I'm reviewing both Version 2 and Version 3 in one video because I don't really think they should count as separate versions. I think the 1993 version is a color and accessories variant of Version 2. I'll discuss that in detail. I have the full card back for the 1992 figure, so we can see how that figure was packaged. The 1992 figure was first released on a standard card as part of the main set of figures released that year. The card, this card has much of the front torn away. That's because of how the accessories were packaged. The zip cord that came with the figure was on the package and it went right across the artwork. So it was almost impossible to take it off the card without tearing the artwork. We have some instructions on the front of the card, but a lot of that card is torn away. So let's flip it around to the back and see what the back looks like. We have the cross cell with some other figures that were available that year. They were numbered and Firefly is number 11. There is an advertisement for some of the sub teams that were available at the time. Drug Elimination Force, Eco Warriors and Ninja Force. We have our one flag point and then of course we have our file card which we will look at later. The 1993 version was released on a Battlecore card as many new figures were. Battlecore was new that year. Battlecore was the main line of GI Joe figures. Some of the figures were going to be released with a sound playing technology called BattleScan. The BattleScan gimmick was cancelled, the name was changed to Battlecore and all figures that were not in a subset were lumped into that label, including some reissued figures. This is all very cut and dry. The 1992 figure was released on the 1992 card and the 1993 figure was released on the Battlecore card. But there's one problem with this nice, neat scenario. The 1992 version 2 figure was also released on the 1993 Battlecore card. Thanks to 3djoes.com for having confirmation of the version 2 figure on the Battlecore card. It's amazing how many sites and sources don't have that information and it is important especially for collectors of carded figures. My theory on whether a figure is a variation or a new version depends on what the company intended to do. Factors to determine the company's intention include how much the figure changed and what the packaging says. In this case it's a bit muddled. You have a figure with no change but on a different card. And that card has several differences, not just the Battlecore. He's also number 18 now in the series instead of number 11. And there are some minor changes on the file card. Now normally those would all point to this being a new version of the character. But it can't be a new version if there's no change to the figure. Eventually they did make a change to the figure but the change is minor. They changed one color on the figure and the color of one accessory. That would normally point to this just being a variation rather than a new version. When I look at all these factors I still think these figures are variations. On the figure itself they only changed one color and on the accessories they changed the color of only one of them. The changes they made in my opinion are just not significant enough to call the 1993 figure a separate version. That is just my opinion. I'm sure a lot of collectors would disagree with me. In fact, I think all of the collector websites disagree with me. Let's take a look at Firefly's accessories. The 1992 and 1993 releases came with exactly the same accessories with one difference. The 1992 release had this blade launcher in gold and the 1993 release had the blade launcher in black. That is the only difference. The card contents did not describe any of the accessories. It just says includes figure and accessories. Firefly had a rifle. It is in the same lime green color as the figure. The file card calls this a standard Cobra NA-55 assault rifle. This is a really good looking assault rifle and it is new to this figure. The stock has an extended shoulder rest and it's got this extension up here on top that may be a rest for the chin or the cheek. It has a scope. It's almost a sniper setup, except there's no bipod. As for whether this is based on a real-world weapon, it may be a variation of the L1A1 rifle, similar to the one that came with 1984 ripcord. And you can see there are some similarities between ripcord's rifle and the one that came with Firefly. The lime green color really doesn't help it. It would have looked great in black or olive green, similar to ripcord's rifle. That color would have looked great. And that would have been a nice callback to the olive drab green submachine gun that came with Firefly version 1. And just to reiterate, the 1993 release of Firefly came with an identical rifle. The next accessory, if you can call it that, is the blade launching system. It included this blade launcher, this big box. On the 1992 release, it was in gold plastic. On the 1993 release, it was the same thing, but in black. Is the gold plastic susceptible to gold plastic syndrome? Maybe. For that reason, I will be demonstrating the blade launcher using the black one. The details on the two launchers appear to be the same. I haven't identified any differences. They just put a different color plastic in the same mold. It does have a little bit of detail on it, but not very much. It is basically a box. Sitting loosely in the blade launcher is the blade weapon itself. It is a top, so it will spin on this point here at the bottom. It does have some molded in saw blades around the middle. And it has some gear teeth at the top. That's for the zip cord. We'll look at that in a moment. It is quite large and bulky for an action figure accessory. The final piece of the blade launching system is the zip cord, which is a long, thin piece of plastic with teeth on one side and a ring at one end. And this is what will get the top spinning. To launch the blade spinning top, just take the zip cord and place it in the appropriate shaped hole in the back with the teeth side toward the center and press that forward. Now you're going to want to let the top spin around those teeth as the zip cord comes forward, so you can get the zip cord all the way in and the blades all the way back in the launcher and then you are ready to launch it. There's no real way to aim this thing, so I'm not going to bother to break out Dr. Meinbender as a target. To launch it, you just put your finger in the ring and yank back and that should launch the spinning blade. And here it goes. And here it goes. Alright, this is not working very well. I'm going to try it one more time. Get this in, get the blade all the way back in the back of the launcher with the zip cord all the way forward and this thing really ought to take off. Let's pull it really hard. There it goes. There it goes. See, it does work. And there you have it. Yep, there you have Firefly's secret weapon. The final accessory is the figure stand. They each came with a black figure stand and this is one great thing about the 90s. This is one thing I will never complain about in regards to the 90s. The figures came with figure stands and the 80s figures didn't. I really wish the 80s figures had these. The accessories for the 1992 and 1993 Firefly are a bit of a disappointment. The version 1 Firefly included a really nice submachine gun and walkie talkie and one of the coolest backpacks in the entire line. The version 2 and 3 accessories just don't quite measure up. Though I do like the rifle, I would really like to see that rifle in another color. With the accessories out of the way, let's take a look at the articulation. The articulation is the same for both, so we'll just look at one. The articulation was standard for GI Joe figures by the time, so he could turn his head from left to right and look up and down. He could swing his arm up at the shoulder and swivel at the shoulder all the way around. He had a hinge at the elbow that allowed him to bend his arm at the elbow about 90 degrees. He had a swivel at the bicep so he could swivel his arm all the way around. The figure was held together with a rubber O-ring that looped around the inside. That allowed him to move at the torso a bit. He could move his legs apart about so far. He could bend his leg at the hip about 90 degrees and bend at the knee about 90 degrees. Let's take a look at the sculpt and design and color of Firefly starting with his head. And on his head, he is wearing a helmet and a mask, and there is a mesh texture pattern on both. It almost looks like a fencing mask, except his eyes are exposed. It almost looks like a fencing mask worn backwards. There is a fair amount of detail with that mesh pattern on the head. On the 1992 figure, the helmet and mask were gray. On the 1993 release, the helmet and mask were black. On the chest, he has a lime green uniform with gray shoulder pads, really big shoulder pads. They're not the kind of shoulder pads that like stick out at the sides, but they cover a large portion of his chest and back. The shoulder protection has that same mesh pattern on it that is on the helmet and mask. He has a gray bandolier running over his left shoulder and under his right arm that continues to the back. On the front, it has a couple gold grenades and some explosive devices and a gold pouch. All this is the same on the 1993 release, except where it was gray, it is now black. Those gray mesh pads continue to his upper arms. He has lime green sleeves and he has a red cobra emblem on his left sleeve. That's a bit of a callback to the version 1 figure that had a red cobra emblem on his right sleeve. He has a gold electronic device around his right wrist and he has gray gloves. As expected, those details on the 1993 release are exactly the same except where there was gray, there is now black. On his waist piece, it continues that lime green uniform. He has a gray belt with some pouches and devices on it. Decent detail there. And of course, the same on the 1993 release except black instead of gray. His legs continue that lime green uniform. I'm calling this lime green. It's not quite neon green, but it's still pretty bright and obnoxious. He has a gray pistol holster on his right leg. He has a gray grenade holder on his left leg with three gold grenades. He is wearing tall gray boots and those boots actually have a cloth texture pattern on them. That's a very interesting detail and they also have rope tied around them. You can see the rope is tied at the sides. Very interesting details on the boots. And one more time on the 1993 release, exactly the same details, but with black instead of gray. 1984 Firefly did have a lot of grenades and explosives and his uniform was gray. There are some callbacks to the version 1 figure, so I can't say they completely went off the rails for version 2. However, Firefly was a master at infiltration and sabotage. I can't imagine he would find a lime green uniform useful for anything. His original gray uniform was perfect for his specialty. If I had to choose, I would say I like the 1993 black painted figure better. The black provides a little more contrast against the green, but it still has the green, so it's not much of an improvement. Let's take a look at Firefly's file card. Let's say that five times fast. We have two file cards to look at. Let's start with the 1992 file card. By this time they were no longer doing the file folder shaped file card. This is just a rectangular file card with rounded corners. It has the card art for Firefly here and a closer portrait above it. It has a description of some of the features and I'm going to skip that. I don't usually read through those. It has a Cobra, the enemy logo in the corner here. It has his codename as Firefly. He is the Cobra Saboteur. His vehicle specialty is the Cobra Paralyzer Driver. Enjoy the Paralyzer! Well, that's nice, but the Paralyzer was issued in 1991 and was discontinued for 1992. So it was a little late to cross-sell the vehicle on a 1992 figure card. We have a quote from Firefly here. He says, I came, I saw, I blew it up. The narrative section says, Firefly has been blowing things up for Cobra since Cobra Commander first donned his hood and opened up for business. Since that time Cobra has expanded to include entire battalions of bomb planters, arsonists, and booby trappers. But Cobra Commander still keeps contacting Firefly, the Rembrandt of plastic explosives, when a job needs precision bombing. Firefly constructs bombs protected by cross-wired anti-tampering switches. So complex, they are impossible to defuse. When the time is right, he uses his blade launcher weapon for maximum effect against his unsuspecting targets. This file card isn't actually too bad. Let's see what changes they made on the 1993 file card. The artwork is the same. They even still have the gold launcher. They did not change that to black for 1993. And the descriptions of the features are exactly the same. This top section has changed a bit. It says codename Cobra Firefly Saboteur. Instead of codename Firefly Cobra Saboteur, they've done away with the vehicle specialty, and they also removed the Cobra emblem from the top corner. The quote is the same. I came, I saw, I blew it up. And the narrative paragraph is almost exactly the same. They just changed the last sentence. On the 1993 file card, they removed the sentence about the blade launching weapon and replaced it with no building or mission is too tough for Firefly. I think these file cards are okay. They may not be as fun or as colorful as the version one file card, but they have some merit. Firefly's version one prototype file card gave several aliases for Firefly and indicated he served in the French foreign legion. The comic book completely did away with that and gave him a totally different origin. Looking at how Firefly was used in G.I. Joe Media, in the animated series he first appeared in Revenge of Cobra part one. He had a few appearances in the animated series, but not many. And he rarely spoke. He had the most exposure in the episode Ode Cobra. And that wasn't very much. He did not appear in his version two or version three uniform. He did not make the transition to the deke animated series era. In the G.I. Joe comic book published by Marvel Comics, he first appeared in issue number 24 at the end where he and Wild Weasel found Zartan's shack in the Florida Everglades. And they were quickly captured. He had numerous appearances in the following eight issues, but he didn't have much to do. He mainly got captured multiple times. He escaped Florida with Destro in a stolen killer whale. That was a good moment. He was with Destro and Fred when they attacked Snake Eyes' cabin. He blew up that cabin, but he was injured in that battle. Those issues didn't focus on Firefly. They focused on Zartan, Snake Eyes, Storm Shadow, and others. Firefly was a supporting character. In issue number 43, he was present when the Softmaster and Candy were killed. And he gave the order to kill them. But he didn't actually do the killing. Scrap Iron did that. In a couple issues, he's seen providing security for Cobra's secret base in Springfield, but he was barely more than a background character. He was present at the creation of Serpentor and G.I. Joe's attack on Springfield, but he didn't do much. He was mostly just in the background. He fared a little better in the Special Missions series, where he appeared in the first issue. His mercenary qualities were highlighted. He even got to lead a team in Special Missions number 2. His best appearance was probably in Special Missions number 12, where he steals the Battle Force 2000 vector jet. After that, he made appearances here and there, sometimes as a supporting character, other times just in the background. He did not get the spotlight. Firefly was presumed dead when Cobra Commander returned in issue number 98 and buried all his enemies in a landlocked freighter under a volcano. Firefly was in danger of being G.I. Joe's Boba Fett, a cool-looking character that didn't do much. Until, in issues 123 and 124, Ninja Force encounters a group of red ninjas in the woods of Transcarpathia, led by a guy in a red costume. The red ninja leader is revealed to be Firefly in Disguise. At that point, it had been so long since Firefly was in the comic, issue number 126 pauses to explain who he is. How did Firefly escape the buried ship? He used bats to dig him out. Later in that same issue, it is revealed that Firefly is also the Faceless Master.  The Faceless Master was a member of the Koga Ninja Clan.  Firefly didn't follow through. Cobra Commander brought in Zartan, who attempted the assassination, but killed the Hard Master instead. So, Firefly is a ninja now, even though there was never an indication of that in his early appearances. And Firefly knew Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow, even though he encountered both of them, and never indicated he had ever seen them before. At the end of that issue, number 126, Firefly puts on his version to uniform. I'm not going to do a full review of issue number 126 in this video, but I have to say, it is pretty bad. It's almost entirely exposition. It includes multiple flashbacks. It tells several stories, all of which seem implausible and out of character for Firefly. Firefly is introduced as a ninja and a rival to Ninja Force. Even though his figure was not in the Ninja Force line, and there's no hint of a Ninja backstory on his file card. This nonsense goes on for a few more issues. At the end of issue number 134, it is implied that Firefly is killed by Slice and Dice. It's a mercy. Looking at version 2 and 3 of Firefly overall, I do not like them very much. The first Firefly figure was one of my favorites. It was a standout figure in 1984, a year with a lot of great figures. He had a uniform that matched his specialty and reputation. He could creep around the shadows and infiltrate any enemy base. Based on his file card, Firefly's history and identity are shrouded in mystery. At least until they got to the 1990s and blew that mystery up. His file cards were right. He came, he saw, he blew it up. Why would Firefly, an infiltration expert, wear bright green? He's wearing a uniform that would practically glow in the dark. He could be seen by passing planes. He's not camouflaged for anything. I guess you could say this is his Ninja uniform. He is a Ninja now, and Ninjas don't care about concealment, right? The Ninja backstory is a retcon. It feels shoe-horned into the story. Was Firefly originally intended to be the faceless master? I doubt it. If the plan was to make him a Ninja, why isn't it mentioned on his file card? On any of his file cards, including the file cards that came with these releases. Why wasn't he included in the Ninja Force line? It takes more than a Balaclava mask to make a Ninja. Beachhead is not a Ninja. As far as the accessories go, I like the rifle, though I wish it were in a different color. I like the figure stand, of course, but I can live without the blade spinner. If I'm forced to choose, I'd say I prefer the 1993 release. I like the black a little more than I like the gray, but there's not much difference. That was my review of the 1992 and 1993 Firefly. I hope you enjoyed it, and thanks to 3djoes.com just for being awesome. Just a reminder, JoeFest is coming up soon, June 21st and 22nd in Augusta, Georgia. I will be there. I would like to see you there, too. If you like this video and if you like GI Joe, please consider subscribing to the channel and hitting the notification bell. That notification option really helps small channels get noticed, so thank you to everyone who does that. Please give this video a thumbs up on YouTube and share it with your friends. I am on social media on Facebook and Twitter, and I have a website, hcc788.com. Thank you to all my patrons, including the blank viper. You guys really make these videos possible. I really couldn't do it without you. If you like these videos and you'd like to support the channel in that way, please check out my Patreon. You can find out how to decode the secret messages you see in videos, and you might even be able to get your own codename. I'll be back next week for a special video that also happens to be somebody's birthday. I'll see you then, and until then, always remember only GI Joe is GI Joe. Because that would be ridiculous.


Just one comment you left in the 50 which I loved that you said a seguit no lightning was Bitcoin proof of stake I just wanted you know that how does everything sort of feed into that and how things are going to change, you know with all those questions Presented again, sorry That's something I said in the past and basically what I'm saying there is that lightning network involves doing Local validation of the same consensus rules at Bitcoin has to be the same consensus rules But you get to earn fees by committing funds into a channel That sounds very much like proof of stake to me. I think it represents a tremendous opportunity for Users who want to run a Bitcoin full node If you want to run a Bitcoin full node, it takes Quite a lot of commitment in data storage and CPU and RAM and bandwidth not many people do that Probably about five to fifteen thousand users. You're running one right there. I'm running one as well great How many people here running a full node? 10 Wow Go Singapore It takes a big commitment and resources and you don't get paid to do this How many of you would be running a full node if you could also run a lightning node commit some Bitcoin to it and earn fees on it? And so now you see that was about 20 people. So clearly incentives matters Lightning is one way we can incentivize running full nodes fully validating nodes and also full archive nodes potentially That's going to be a really important development in Bitcoin, and I'm very much in favor Now you would think that a group of miners that run Nodes that already collect all transactions right already have to be fully validating nodes Would look at lightning network and go Hey, we could earn more fees using the same infrastructure by running lightning nodes We could be hubs for payments We could extend into this space Why are they not doing that? Because lightning network and running full nodes is software and it requires maintenance system administrators and security professionals and Configuration and upgrades and all of the kinds of things that you can't simply get someone to rack and mount hardware to do It's an alien world. It's not better. It's not worse. It's just on the other side of that culture divide That goes a long way to explain why miners aren't jumping up and down and saying hey, yeah I want to run lightning. We're gonna be best positioned to be running these hubs Because it's not the same as racking mining hardware You


The immediate past president-general of Wuhan is Indigbo chief Nian Mordo has warned that Nigeria might run into a constitutional crisis if it fails to restructure before the 2023 general election, as some sections of the country might boycott the polls as a result of the growing dissatisfaction in the land. The former minister for information insisted that Nigeria must restructure to give its component units sovereignty over its natural resources, provided they pay some form of taxation to the federal government to maintain federal responsibilities. He also noted that domestic security must remain in the hands of the federating units. The former aviation minister warned that Nigeria's disintegration was not likely or unlikely if the conditions given were not met. Joining us to discuss this is Dr Soni Maduka and Dak Bada Mola, both are political analysts. Thank you very much gentlemen for joining us. Maduka and Ms R. Thank you. All right, if you can hear me I'm going to start with Dr Maduka. We always hear about the issue of restructuring, you know, every time it's pre-election season. And so it makes me really curious is the restructuring slogan or the restructuring conversation now a political tool, a way to get votes, or is it really a conversation worth having? Dr Maduka, can you hear me? All right, let's try our other guest. Can you hear me gentlemen? I can hear you now. Okay, go ahead. You want me to speak? Yes. Okay, what we're having in this country is we started on a wrong footing. If you look at the instrument of this country's evolution, you discover that there was a document signed and sealed. Sorry, do you have your television on?  No, okay, okay, it's off, it's off, okay, so what I've said, the instrument of our independence, there was an instrument, there was a document, and that document was signed and it gave rise to three regions before its non-metaphoric origin. So that was the basis of our existence. Although the war came and messed up the whole thing, but the ministry has no right to start niving off like Goan did and created 12 states just on a fierce issue. And the other ministry, John had started creating states, there was no impute from the civilians. So what we saw was just impunity by the ministry, and there's no way you can start like that. Now coming to the basis of this discussion, APC manifesto was clear. In 2024, their number one manifesto was that they're going to re-structure this country. And it was even based on that that Nigerians took out and voted them in. And unfortunately, they created or they formed a committee headed by Erufa. Erufa did a work and presented to the president, as at now that report is lying fallow. And of course, as gullible as we are, when they came in 2019, they say, ah, in this second next level, they're going to make it no. But unfortunately, we have just one year plus. That means that that report will not see the light of the day. The problem we have is just as stated by the former minister. If we don't do something right now, it's going to be very hard. For once in my lifetime, Sokoto, that is a caliphate of Muslims where you can never see anything talked about, anything called violence, is now being almost run over by bandits.  There's a serious foundation, foundational problem. Look at it from this way. Our constitution, the first paragraph say, we Nigeria, nobody, and that constitution was given to us at the day of inauguration. It was not debated. Nobody knew the content of that constitution and today we are seeing the problem. The problem is that if a minister, if a governor built a road for you, you go and drum and play and dance because he won't do him anything if he didn't build anything for you. So if the president is coming to commission something for you, which is our money, our commonwealth, Nigerians line up to drum as if something is wrong with us. What are you drumming? This is what they are supposed to do. So I think the problem we have is that that constitution has a very fundamental problem and until we bring it down, we will not be able to move forward. And of course that constitution is going to consume us all soon. Look at it in the creation of states. Look at it before. We have four regions and of four regions we are equal and matched. Today, when you talk about divisions now, we have three. The west, the east and the north. The north alone has more than enough to deal with even the south and the west combined together. On what basis? Who negotiated that kind of format? Who negotiated that idea of fighting and one of that? The whole thing is not right and I think we need to do something about it. And the earlier, the better. Otherwise, I'm telling you, we will wake up one day and this country will not be there. Well I don't think we won that but let me go to our next guest. It's interesting where the doctor left off. He's talking about the fact that our constitution is a problem but I'd like to take you back to the national confab that held, and this is not the first by the way. We've had constitutional conferences and we've had similar confabs but the one I'm referring to is the one that was done under the Jonathan administration where a lot of recommendations were put forward. I know it's gathering dust somewhere. Just as he said, the issue on restructuring by the APC as presented by Governor El Rufi is also somewhere gathering dust. I know that you're not a government person but I'm trying to understand here. Why do you think that we spend so much taxpayers' monies to have these tea parties and these so-called conferences and then at the end of the day these papers are gathering dust but then when it's close to election season, most of these same politicians who may have occupied office at one time or the other and want to run again begin to wax lyrical about this issue of restructuring. What exactly is that problem? Well, our problem is insincerity. Many of these things are put together, they are just jump stories. It is to solve the interests of some people, they are very cosmetic, there are things that we don't think through. In the first instance, when John, the former minister, I mean, tells you that there may be crises if we don't restructure and you ask yourself what exactly are we restructuring? Is it just to satisfy the political ego of some people and drum things into their ears that make them sound as if they are speaking something that deals with the interests of the people or just the jamborees they had in the past, I mean, in the first instance, they come from who elected them there.  So they were not elected.  So why do you have, why do you need a selected few, about 500 people to do what exactly we sent those other ones that at the national assembly are the sleeping millions of naira of taxpayers money and they have not done? That is the number one. Number two, what exactly are we restructuring? Are we meant to restructure our minds or to restructure, you know, the political interests of some other people? Let me ask you, you know, this restructuring part of the essence of restructuring is to develop, you know, to develop power to the states and the local governments, right? Okay, let me ask you, how many state governors right now are allowing their local government chairmen to even, you know, to function as a tortilla of government? That is where restructuring... That's a whole conversation on its own.  So that is where restructuring should start. Restructuring should begin with all of us and I will explain. All the governors, they get their locations, local government chairmen are meant to generate the revenues and all of these people. And let me tell you, everybody will tell you, develop power. What power are you developing? We're on the concurrent list of government, the concurrent list of government where the state and the federal, they both, you know, have rights to legislate and all of that. You legislate on housing. How many of these state governors have provided housing for their people? That is the question number one. And they're getting taxpayers' money. They're spending them on what they call security votes and all fictitious things they're spending on. And they will come and tell you, restructuring, they are the same people who are sending different groups to go and be championing restructuring. What is the problem who began restructuring from their home? That is number one on housing. Number three is agriculture. Who has stopped them from, you know, using a Greek to transform the economy of the states? Has anybody actually stopped them from doing that? Number three. Can I just come with you? They're talking about education. Yeah, but in terms of agriculture, I'm not holding brief for the government of the states, but if there has been an easy way out of going cap in hand to the federal government at the end of the month, you know, to get allocation, why would we be looking at agriculture? Easy money. Agriculture. Agriculture is as basic as it is. You have the land with you. You can take people out of poverty with agriculture. How much are they investing? Let every state governor come up and tell us how much they have invested in agriculture. Tell us how much they invested in education. These are the things on the concurrent list. They don't need any devolution of power. I mean, I just mentioned housing. I mentioned education. I mentioned health. I mentioned roads. So these are agriculture. These are major issues that if they focus on, they will transform each state and local government without going cap in hand to the federal government. So when you hear people speak about restructuring, they are bamboozling the people who don't, maybe, the susceptible minds, the gullible ones, the vulnerable ones, who don't know exactly how to demand good governance from their people. Every governor, every governor right now, I don't imagine the state. Every governor are just simply looting.  So then if you stop talking about restructuring, restructuring will be given by every. Oh, I think we're having issues with your connection. So I'm going to go back to Dr. Maduka. He's made a very interesting point about issues that need to be addressed and the fact that this is just a lip service of sorts. What do we do to get it to happen? Because election is here. And we're going to hear more of this. It's going to sound like they're going to start sounding like broken records. I was talking about it yesterday. Someone put a thread on Instagram of different politicians captured. One was Frank Akara, another, I think the transportation minister was braiding hair. This was their way of getting to the people because they want our vote. It's about to happen again. What do we do to get these things that they throw around to actually become something if we're really interested in changing Nigeria? Because we can't just keep saying that our leaders are not doing what they promised us. What about our role in making sure that these demands are met? Dr. Maduka. Well, yeah, you will have your demand to be met. If you have the playing ground, as of today, our leaders have improvised people. Poverty has shown everybody a lot of things. Somebody who is hungry will always look for something to eat first before you talk about. So our leaders have used poverty to give people that kind of mindset of nobody.  They are benefiting from the jointed construction of this country. So it's going to be very hard for them to change the narrative. It's going to be very hard. And like the other man talked about, the state has their role. The states have their role. But my problem about the state, like Lagos state, is that we cannot generate light without, first of all, asking the federal government. And you know, power is very important if you want to develop it. The state governments cannot do the same things without, first of all, getting approval from the federal government. Let me give you an instance. I did a paper on the wastage of coal in Enugu. Coal in Enugu coal is one of the main source of income to South Africa. Why is coal not in Enugu? Why do we get this in there because of oil? And of course, when I was asking one of the executives there, they say you can't do anything without, first of all, getting approval from a book. So these are the devotions of power we are talking about. The state should be able to have freedom to do what they want to do. That's what is obtainable elsewhere. But then the states cannot do whatever they want to do because our constitution is somewhat limited. You know, ask to a federal system of government of sorts, even though we're running a unitary government. No, no, no, no, I disagree with you. The federal system of government give room for states to be autonomous. Because if you look at the constitution we are using, or the federal unit we are using, it is in America. Every American state is almost like autonomous. Yeah, but in reality, we're running a unitary government. So that's the situation of things. But it's not supposed to be. And that's why I think that man said that we need to demand, we need to demand accountability from each and every one of our leaders. How do we go about demanding this accountability? How? How? Because I want solutions. For instance, let me just give an instance. I come from up there. How many times have I heard about my abbey state giving me all the projects, expenditure and the income expenditure as per a month? Don't do that. We are supposed to be seeing this thing so that you can be able to track what and what they've been able to do with the money they got from Abuja. Let me put it out. What have they been able to do with the money they got from IGR, internal revenue, internal generated revenue? But as of today, everything is like nothing is happening. Like he said, they are just looting right hand vote. And of course, you know election is just around the corner. So this is the time for them to mop up money. For instance, what are you talking about? It's a critical vote. A governor can just decide to take one billion as a security vote. And nobody talks about it. So this is the issue. And that's why I was changing on that constitution. I'm not a pessimist, but the issue is that the constitution, when you have a foundation that is strong, there's nothing else you can do. Build the base of this high scraper if you collapse around what happened recently because the foundation is wrong. But the earlier, the better. If we can be able to come back and say what is it that we need to do? Then let's see how we can, at least amend the whatever we can. All right, let me quickly go to that point because we're almost out of time. Mr. Danmola, quickly, I want solutions. We've seen how the push and shove from Nigerians, whether it's online offline, whether we went to protest, whether people were arrested and shoved into black Marias. We've seen what has come out of it and the reports from the panel that sat in Lagos. Nigerians are still hoping that something will come out of it. But how, aside from that, how do we also use the same tactics or something different to get our leaders to be more accountable to us if they've ever been accountable to us in any way? Well, in the first instance, let me tell you what the major challenge is on the political scene in Nigeria. Our politics is driven by Brigand de Jantogre. Go to almost every state in this country. You have an army of thugs, an army of, call them whatever, violent men who have been sponsored by these politicians who, even when you rise up to even say, well, you become a target, that's why you can see even at Beirut's in Lagos here, generating over how many billions of nair because they have the latitude to do so. So it tells you that and go everywhere, they're everywhere. So what I'm saying invariably is that the nature of politics we play is not allowing for critical participation. People who should drive the process are intelligentsia. So people who have clear mind as to how to move the country forward. But the people we have are elements who are even far more powerful than those who are in the National Assembly. As we speak today, you yourself can recollect how some thugs run into the National Assembly, hijacked the midst of the assembly and today nothing has been done. We can go on and on about many things that have happened. We have a president in this country who did all sorts, you know, and she had to go and, you know, many of these political thugs in Nevada and all these places were mobilized to do all sorts. So all I'm saying is, is there a picture of bloom? Let me just, let me say this. Quickly because we're out of time, we're out of time. For me, yeah, for me, you have five critical sectors that are within the powers of the states to transform the fortunes of their people. I have mentioned housing, I have mentioned health, I have mentioned agriculture, and I have mentioned road and I have mentioned education. Let the state governors, they don't need to, you don't need to ask for any restructuring yet. I have said two things. These five critical sectors, go and look at all the roads in Lagos. How many of the roads are fixed in Lagos? How many of the inner roads are fixed in Nevada? How many of the inner roads are fixed in Nundo? Let me go and fix their roads first. We have to go. And be able for the people who are generating the tax, you will go and build houses for them. Make the hospitals functional in their states. Make the housing affordable in their states. You can go and chair, man, a proper tortilla arm of government. Stop wasting our time on the structuring. And fix this monster down on the concurrent list. Now you don't need to go to court or anything to do. Stop bamboozling the vulnerable and the susceptible in the society. Give us good governance. I can tell from the passion in your voice. I can tell from the passion in your voice that you're sick and tired of this banter of restructuring. But Dakwada Amola, Sonny Madukah, thank you very much for being part of the conversation. We appreciate it. Thank you. My pleasure. All right. And I want to thank you all for staying with us and being part of the conversation. I am Mary Ann Acon. We'll leave you with this Vox Pop, worst Nigerians reacting to the reports released by the Ligestate Incest Judicial Panel. I'll see you tomorrow. I want to believe that what the result of the panel is is actually the truth. Because according to what we saw online, people were killed. And they said that their dead bodies were carried away by the soldiers to cover up what actually happened. So now going by the results that this thing actually happened is giving us hope that justice is taking place. And also it makes us to know that in future that the government is going to be taking steps in such a way that whatever policies that they are bringing out will not be anti-people. Because now that people can realize that their hope in Nigerian legal system has not faded away. We just hope, a revival of hope for all Nigerians in the outcome of Ligestate Incest Judicial Panel that look into what happened last year. So it was giving Nigerians hope that there is still something to believe in this country, socially in the court of justice. So we are very happy to that. And then also it's giving us another implication of what we believe about our government and about our leaders. When they just concluded that there was no atom of shooting and nobody was nothing like shooting and the CNN, other people who were present at the scene were just lying. But at the end of it, the truth come out. So we just appreciate those, the panel and then all those one who were involved in digging inside the truth to get it out. And then it also gives the youth opportunity to believe in their country, in our country. So we are very much happy. And then we still hope for more to come. They normally say that the future is for the youth. But what is happening in our country today is not giving us hope as a youth. And it's not telling us that the future is bright for us until the needful is done. They need to do the right thing. They need to bring the people involved to justice. That will give us the youth hope that our leaders who are before us have a future for us. But if they don't do that, there is no justice. There is no sanction. There is no bringing back to book all those people that committed those crimes. There is no hope for the youth in this country. No matter what, the lives that were lost would not be brought back. So there is nothing to say about it. We want to believe that.


Moving on to our next category which is brand revitalization, let's find out who the shortlisted nominees are. I think the brilliant part of the brand revitalization category was that it was a nicely fought category. This one surely was. Maybe it's the amount of change that's happening in the economy that kind of provided an overhang. Brands trying to stretch and revitalize themselves in various adjunct segments. We saw a team which was constant among winners around trying to handle a crisis very well or be able to really rejuvenate in front of customers what they thought was the best way to present and using the right media planning. Alright, let's find out, well there's no bronze trophy to be won, there are two medals however to be given to me. Let's find out who the silver trophy goes to.