In today's episode of Weird Darkness, an email from François contained this. I am also Catholic, and growing up I was never sure if my interests in the weird were really compatible with my beliefs as a Catholic slash Christian. Most people around me always reinforced that uncertainty. Apparently one could not believe in God and also in ghosts and aliens. Your podcast confirms to me that yes, these interests and beliefs really can coexist. It also confirms to me that I am not alone. In a 2017 survey, 52% of people in the U.S. and in the U.K. said they believed in ghosts. And about that same amount, around 50% believe extraterrestrial life does exist. 20% of Americans think ET has already visited our planet. But what of François' predicament? Can you be a good church boy or girl and also believe in the paranormal? Let's tackle the easiest question first. Aliens. Is there intelligent life on other planets? Never mind the fact that we have found no intelligent life on our own planet yet. Does the Bible say anything about extraterrestrials? The simple answer to that question is… no. The Bible doesn't say anything about life on other planets. Its focus is on this planet and its need for God. There well may be life on other planets. With God being the wonderful Creator He is, I'd have a hard time believing He didn't put life on other planets. When you're an omnipotent, omnipresent being, you'd probably get bored creating and watching over just one planet. But the Bible simply doesn't say one way or the other. It also doesn't mention five-hour energy drinks, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. Or that I survive on them, like right now working on this afterward. So for the meaty question, ghosts, what do you really think about them? Most will admit at least a small degree of love for scary stories. But what about reports of real ghosts? Is it okay to believe in ghosts if you're a Bible-believing Christian? Both children and adults alike wonder about the existence of ghosts. Some reject the possibility outright. Others insist that ghosts do exist and even cite experiences. Their own or a friend of a friend's story is proof. Of course, either a thing exists or it doesn't. No amount of belief will cause ghosts to exist if they don't. Nor could personal opinion cause ghosts not to exist if, in fact, they truly do exist. Tales involving apparitions drift down to us from ancient times. Various languages contributed words such as Wraith from the Scottish, Phantom from the French, Spectre which is Latin, Shade which is Old English, Banshee, Gaelic, and Poltergeist, German. In ancient Iraq, the epic of Gilgamesh portrayed Gilgamesh conversing with the spirit of his dead friend, Enkidu. Old Egypt left a cryptic tale about the ghost of Nebusamech chatting with the High Priest of Amun-Re. Such stories prove nothing, of course, except that the concept goes back a long way. In fact, even Christ's 12 disciples fearfully mistook Jesus for a spirit when he appeared walking on the sea at night. In Mark 6, verse 49, it says, But when they saw him walking on the sea, they thought it was a ghost and cried out. So even Jesus owned disciples believed in ghosts. So if you believe in the paranormal, I guess you're in pretty good company. Homer included ghosts in Hisodicy and Iliad, and Shakespeare cast roles for spirits in Hamlet and Macbeth. Whether these authors believed in ghosts is unknown. What they understood, however, is that a truly chilling ghost story can grip an audience. Yes, ghost stories have been around for ages, and some, such as Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, have become fixtures in modern culture. However, in recent decades the genre has exploded with an abundance of movies, such as the Conjuring series or the Paranormal Activity films and TV shows like Supernatural. These films and TV shows depend on spirits to drive the plots. Nonfiction programs such as Ghost Hunters attempt to investigate claims of ghosts using infrared cameras and other devices. Most reports of ghost sightings include details that defy logic, which is what makes ghosts so intriguing and mysterious. But there are some questions that defy logic as well. For instance, most alleged apparitions are clothed. But if a ghost is the spirit of a dead person, shouldn't a spirit appear unclothed after shedding his earthly body in its garments? Is one to conclude that pants, shirts, dresses, and medieval armor contain spirits of their own that faithfully cling to the ghost of a person? Or does the afterlife have its own clothing store? Or perhaps a mall of heaven.com? Wait, that would probably be .org, wouldn't it? Nonprofit. But then again heaven would be full of prophets, never mind. And then there are stories of ghost ships, such as the Flying Dutchman, Ghost Trains, and similar accounts. Does a vehicle constructed by human hands gain a soul that reappears later? People who listen to ghost stories around campfire understand that their friends have concocted those tales. The wish to embellish a spooky yarn naturally explains the addition of such silly details as ghostly nightgowns and horse garages. But what about people who insist they really did see spirit manifestations? Clothes and all. And what exactly is a ghost? Although definitions vary, the most common definition is that ghosts are the disembodied spirits of dead people that linger on earth. According to tradition, ghosts are invisible but can permit humans to see them. We'll come back to that definition a little later. There are other definitions of ghosts, however. In fact, science has a couple of interesting theories of what they might actually be. For decades, a Canadian neuroscientist named Michael Persinger has been studying the effects of electromagnetic fields on people's perceptions of ghosts, hypothesizing that pulsed magnetic fields, imperceptible on a conscious level, can make people feel as if there is a presence in the room with them by causing unusual activity patterns in the brain's temporal lobes. Persinger has studied people in his lab wearing a so-called God helmet, finding that certain patterns of weak magnetic fields over someone's head for 15-30 minutes can create the perception that there is an invisible presence in the room. Some subsequent research has pushed back on this theory, arguing that people were responding to the suggestion that they would feel a ghostly presence rather than to the electromagnetic field. However, Persinger counters that this experiment followed very different protocols than his own research. Other scientists have also found that environments that have a reputation for being haunted often feature unusual magnetic fields. Infrasound is sound at levels so low humans can't hear it, though other animals like elephants can. Low frequency vibrations can cause distinct physiological discomfort. Scientists studying the effects of wind turbines and traffic noise near residences have found that low frequency noise can cause disorientation, feelings of panic, changes in heart rate and blood pressure, and other effects that could easily be associated with being visited by a ghost. For instance, in a 1998 paper on natural causes of hauntings, engineer Vic Tandy describes working for a medical equipment manufacturer whose labs included a reportedly haunted room. Whenever Tandy worked in this particular lab, he felt depressed and uncomfortable, often hearing and seeing odd things, including an apparition that definitely looked like a ghost. Eventually he discovered that the room was home to a 19 Hz standing wave coming from a fan, which was sending out the inaudible vibrations that caused the disorienting effects. Further studies also show links between infrasound and bizarre sensations like getting chills down the spine or feeling uneasy. If electromagnetic fields or infrasound is what is causing the phantoms and specters to appear and you know that this is the cause and you're not believing it to be paranormal, then there's no danger whatsoever regarding the God vs. Ghosts question. But back to that definition from earlier. The most common definition of ghosts is that they are disembodied spirits of dead people that linger on earth. Here in the Weird Dark Church afterwards, I can get preachy, so here it goes. If you read your Bible, even if you haven't been reading it all that long, you might notice that there is not a single instance of a soul lingering on earth after death.  In Luke 23, verse 43, while Jesus is hanging on the cross, he looks over at one of the two thieves hanging next to him, the one who asked Jesus to remember him, and Jesus told him, Truly I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise. That would only happen if upon the man's death he would be immediately escorted through the pearly gates. Then again the Bible does affirm the existence of non-caporial beings and intelligences. Check out Mark 5, verses 2-15. And when Jesus had stepped out of the boat, immediately there met him out of the tombs, a man with an unclean spirit. He lived among the tombs, and no one could bind him any more, not even with a chain, for he had often been bound with shackles and chains, but he wrenched the chains apart, and he broke the shackles in pieces. No one had the strength to subdue him. Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains, he was always crying out and cutting himself with stones. And when he saw Jesus from afar, he ran and fell down before him, and crying out with a loud voice, he said, What of you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High? Adjure you by God, do not torment me. For he was saying to him, Come out of the man, you unclean spirit. And Jesus asked him, What is your name? He replied, My name is Legion, for we are many. And he begged him earnestly not to send them out of the country. Now a great herd of pigs was feeding there on the hillside, and they begged him saying, Send us to the pigs, let us enter them. So he gave them permission, and the unclean spirits came out and entered the pigs, and the herd, numbering about two thousand, rushed down the steep bank into the sea and drowned in the sea. The herdsmen fled and told it in the city and in the country, and people came to see what it was that had happened. And they came to Jesus and saw the demon-possessed man, the one who had had the Legion, sitting there, clothed and in his right mind, and they were afraid. In Acts 8 verse 7 it reads, For unclean spirits crying out with a loud voice came out of many who had them, and many who were paralyzed or lame were healed. Philip was preaching, and the unclean spirits came out of the people. Later in Acts 19 verses 14 through 17, seven sons of a Jewish high priest named Sceva were doing this, but the evil spirit answered them, Jesus I know, and Paul I recognize, but who were you? And the man in whom was the evil spirit leaped on them, mastered all of them, and overpowered them, so that they fled out of the house naked and wounded. And this became known to all the residents of Ephesus, both Jews and Greeks, and fear fell upon them all, and the name of the Lord Jesus was extolled. So the man was inhabited by a demon. The sons of Sceva tried to exercise it, but the man attacked them. In these cases, though, they are not ghosts, but rather demons or fallen angels. Bible scholar Charles Ryrie noted the very fact that demons can enter human or animal bodies shows they can pass through barriers that would restrict human beings. Demons are not humans, neither are they God, but they are superhuman, with superior intelligence and experience and powers. To deny the existence of demons is not skepticism, it only displays ignorance. To be unrealistic about their power is foolhardy. Demons can possess a person, taking over their body and mind. Demons can oppress a person, tormenting them from outside the body, which we can see as poltergeist activity or unexplainable maladies. Demons throw things, make noises. Anything you've read about or heard in weird darkness from a ghostly entity, demons are capable of creating. That being said, the Bible does record one occasion when the living appeared to contact the dead. In 1 Samuel 28 verses 7-21, King Saul donned a disguise and visited a medium to summon the dead prophet Samuel. I won't read the entire section to you, it's rather long, but the part I'm pointing to is that an apparition that looked like Samuel appeared to the witch, causing her to cry out in fright. However, this passage does not suggest that seance's work, and it absolutely does not condone witchcraft. In fact, it may not have been Samuel at all, as the prophet made some claims that later turned out to be false. For example, the apparition warned that all of Saul's sons would die on the next day, and while many did die, some survived. If it had been a connection to Samuel in heaven, it would have been accurate. Also, you can be fairly certain it was not in God's plan for Saul to seek advice through a medium, as he died the next day. In fact, like many, like Saul, who claimed to have encountered someone from the dead, they have some prior involvement in the occult. You're probably asking yourself, but why would demons want to deceive the living by impersonating the dead, right? As servants of Satan and enemies of God, they would have every reason to cast doubt on God's word and its warnings about future judgment. Getting people to believe in ghosts automatically forces them to reject key Bible verses, such as Hebrews 9, verse 27, and just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment. So you need to get it right the first time you visit earth, because that's the only time you'll have. Not to put any more pressure on you, but coming to a wrong conclusion about the afterlife has eternal consequences, and the wrong choice on this side of the grave can condemn a soul to eternal agony on the other side. While there is no physical evidence showing that the spirits of deceased people can loiter on earth, there is no physical evidence saying that they can't either. So I guess it's between you and God as to whether or not you can believe in the paranormal. Pray about it, ask him for wisdom and discernment, and be prepared for an answer, possibly an answer you don't want to hear. I've settled on believing that ghosts do exist, but only due to demonic creation. That's why I don't have an issue with the ghost stories. I just feel in my heart that those stories, if they're real, are demons taking the form of a dead loved one in order to try and trick that person into believing something that isn't true. Bringing that person one step further away from the truth of God. But that's a conversation you'll need to have with the Creator yourself. Meanwhile, if you're sitting in shirts someday, or sitting in a Bible study and begin wondering if your love of the paranormal and extraterrestrial makes you less of a child of God, reject that. That's also a demon playing mind games with you.  If you've not given your life to God, and you feel you want to right now, you can follow me in this prayer. Dear Lord Jesus, I know that I am a sinner, and I ask for your forgiveness of my sins. I believe you died for my sins and rose from the dead, not as a ghost, but as the living, breathing Son of God. Today, I turn from my sins, and I invite you to come into my heart and into my life, to live inside me, to guide me in my actions and thoughts. I want to trust and follow you as my Lord and Savior. Thank you. Amen. If you prayed that prayer for the very first time, welcome to the weirdo family in Christ.


So, Square is a company that focuses on supporting the technology of nonprofits, and in particular, we focus on building CRMs, constituent relationship management systems for nonprofits. The technology that we use happens to be a technology that's available, but as Eli did a great job explaining, there's so many technologies out there available to you, and our job here is to help you navigate what technology is right for you, what you can get through TechSoup and the relationship, maybe where there's some licensing wave, waving happening there that might help you out, but we're here to help you and support you. And we in, I think it was September or October partnered with TechSoup to be the North Texas community organizers of TechSoup and the NetSquared events and Tech for Good. So we are here to help organize this community. If any of you, particularly those of you in the North Texas area know of other resources that want to do educational programming, please reach out to us, let us know. We'd love to get as many people in this conversation as possible. And for today's event, we've got Peter Petrick, who is the founder and CEO of Square and Adam Schaffers, who is our lead DevOps system admin person who is going to be sharing with you some of our learnings about cybersecurity, and in particular, how they relate to nonprofits and specific issues that nonprofits have faced in that area. So I will be quiet now and leave it to the experts on cybersecurity, because that's why we're here. Thank you, Adrian, and welcome again, everybody. As Adrian mentioned, my name is Peter Petrick, the founder of Square. We've been in, really, North Texas. This is where the home basis, we've been here since 19, actually 2008, sorry, I was trying to count the decades plus since 2008 and supported a lot of local nonprofits, as well as nonprofits and other organizations, NGOs across the U.S. And as Adrian has mentioned, while we do have a preferred set of tools, a lot of our involvement is in the open source community in particular. Today's conversation applies regardless of whichever tool you use, or specifically, it's not specific to, you know, a particular industry or particular efforts that you're making with your organization. So with that, Adam, as Adrian said, is our lead, sysadmin slash DevOps person, and for those of you that don't know what DevOps stands for, is developer operations kind of, it's being shortened in the community and in the industry. But basically, think of a person that's truly kind of behind the curtains of making the websites work, making the servers secure, making sure that everything, basically, everything you need to talk to somebody at Adam's level is usually not a good thing. These are the people that are behind the curtain, and you hope you never have to talk to them because if you do, that generally means there is a problem, they're the people, it's kind of like insurance, you never know you need it until you really need it, right? So we spent a lot of time going through and making sure we adapt this presentation to be specific to the audience and to the level of knowledge we're not going to be getting into some deep, dark secrets of servers or the internet.  All right. Thank you, Peter. Hi, everybody. Yeah. I'm glad to be here, and I work for Square.com remotely, and it's my favorite job I've ever had. There's a lot of technical stuff, but like Peter said, this talk is for everybody, and there's a lot of things that we can do to protect ourselves, to protect our organizations, and I just want to go over all of that, and so basically starting out, but first of all, this is being recorded, but also feel free to chime in if you have any questions along the way. If I say anything that's unclear, I would feel a lot more comfortable, I think, if we're all interacting together in this.  So the first point I think that I want to kind of make is that this is about all of us, and we lock the doors on our houses of our homes for security, and we close the curtains on our windows, that's privacy, with our lives being online more and more, especially with COVID and everything. How do we do that digitally is the question, and then also maybe what's required of us, of the law, the legal aspects, I'll get into that a little bit. We can go ahead and go to the next slide, Peter. The point of this slide statistics basically is that it's a big deal. It's $3.5 billion lost to cyber crime, but what does that mean for us? Is this just, is that what happens to big corporations like Walmart or Amazon or something, or can this happen to a non-profit? How can this affect us? The answer is, I think, yeah, it affects all of us, and our organizations are on the line, too. So the next slide, Peter, please. Thank you. So to define our terms, digital privacy, what are we talking about is the first thing. Does anyone want to say or have any ideas? Okay, so privacy is our personal information, basically. We're talking about email addresses, phone numbers, social security numbers, credit cards, bank accounts, first, last names, physical addresses, et cetera, data or personal information, and we want to keep this safe. Next slide, please. So security, so for example, with security, if my laptop gets stolen, that's a real threat scenario.  Cell phones get misplaced or lost or picked up by who knows. My private information may be on that laptop or other people's private information, but if the hard drive is encrypted and it requires a password to log in, then at that point, that encryption and that password, hopefully a strong one, is protecting or securing my privacy and the privacy of everyone on my computer. So that's a simple example of security and privacy working together to achieve this common goal. Go ahead, Peter. So the disclaimer is I'm not a lawyer. My idea is to help us prevent things from happening and prevent needing to talk to lawyers. I do want to go over just quickly the basics of the legal stuff. So there's the GDPR that protects citizens in the European Union, the CCPA, it protects people in California. Those are general policies for companies that are collecting private information. In the EU, they have to opt in. In California, they have to be providing Californians a way to opt out. I think more importantly, most states in the USA where I am have some type of reasonable security procedures and practices law. And so I want to go over how we can meet those expectations of reasonable security procedures and practices. That's what the law states. That's really general and generic. And hopefully we never end up in a position with our organization where we're being asked if there was a data breach. Well, were you reasonably secure? And did you have best procedures and practices in place? Because that will be at the discretion of the judge. And that's never a position we want to be in. So this presentation is really about how to prevent this from happening in the first place. But I'm going to go over the simple things we can do to give us reasonable security and practices. So with common, I mean, a case study, an example is BlackBot. If anyone's heard of BlackBot, this is not a bad BlackBot or good BlackBot. It's just an example that BlackBot had a data breach in 2019. And BlackBot is a large corporation, I think, and they serve or work with 45,000 nonprofits. So we're talking about serving millions of people. They're one of the largest providers of financial and fundraising technologies to nonprofits. And they got hacked. They had a data breach in 2019. So at work, we call this a dumpster fire. And there's a couple more slides, Peter. You can go through them kind of quickly. And it's not a position we want to be in. If there's like a data breach affecting 45,000 nonprofits, what ended up happening is that I think people may be suing or losing trust in those nonprofits because they lost their data. And then the nonprofits in turn have to come together and sue BlackBot, who was responsible for all of this. And it's a big mess. There's 23 class action lawsuits underway right now. And so the question is, like, how does a nonprofit come back from that? Or how did this happen? How do we prevent it from happening in the first place to make sure something like this doesn't happen to us? I'm going to just interject really quickly. What Adam is also pointing out kind of indirectly here is that oftentimes as we think about data security isn't just about your organization or your laptop necessarily. And part of the reason why we chose to do this particular case study is because it's a well-known tool, but it's a third party tool. So if your website even has a contact form or it has any kind of interaction where you're integrating third party or maybe you're putting something in a Google form or Google Sheets and that data is flowing through a third party. Basically, I remember when on TV it was like, you know, it's eight o'clock. Do you know where your kids are, right? And this is kind of like 24-7, is do you know where your data is flowing through? So even though BlackBot may not be or this particular case study may not be you, your organization or your individual device phone laptop or something like that getting hacked, the third party, it's not good enough to just say, well, we just trusted them. Understanding how the third party providers are protecting your data and your constituents' data is the real highlight. Yeah, thanks, Peter. And please feel free to keep jumping in here. So how did this happen? Go ahead. So not by traditional means. Basically, they did not have a lack of IT guys at work. Tech was actually BlackBot's thing there. And it's supposed to be their expertise. And it is their expertise. So how did this happen? Was it they didn't have antivirus? Well, Windows 10 and Mac OS both come with antivirus installed by default nowadays. Was it that their operating systems are out of date? No, none of that stuff. They automatically update themselves. It's deception. So more and more cyber attacks are becoming about deception, the art of deception. And so the idea is there's social engineering, phishing, and data ransom. I want to talk about those three things. That's exactly what happened to BlackBot and how we can protect it from happening to ourselves. So social engineering is the idea that people are the weakest link in every security organization. What happens is people, a social engineer, can maybe pose as somebody in a position of authority over your organization or over your computer or your internet or your utilities, your telephone.  That would be a type of phishing email. We're going to get into that. So we have to understand, first of all, that a lot of the modern cyber attacks are psychological and not necessarily technical. Before we go on to this, I was thinking that a lot of it, too, is when it's, I think you can't emphasize the social engineering part enough. We really have to think deep down inside about ourselves about how we're vulnerable. Because I think things I was thinking about is we tend to be lazy or indifferent. It's not that we're dumb. It's just like we're in a hurry all the time. If we are really busy at work, we got this email. It looks legitimate. I'm being asked to provide this piece of information or do this certain task for my boss or something. And I'm just going to click through it, click the button. I need to log in on this website really fast and get this done. OK, got it. But sometimes we're vulnerable when we're in a hurry. There's urgency or stress, or we're trying to keep up a reputation or an offer sounds really good. These are all types of psychological vulnerabilities that we have as people. And we just need to be aware of them. And if those feelings are coming up, it's a good idea to slow down and just analyze the situation, maybe verify the communications using another communication platform. Like if I'm suspicious of an email, I'm going to make a quick phone call. It's a five minute phone call to protect everyone's data. Well, and one example I was going to share is as Adam and I were preparing for this presentation, literally as we went through the slides and the examples and everything else, my phone rings, just as we hung up from our internal call a couple of days ago, and my phone rings.  You're being charged $129. Stay on the line for a representative. Now, we've got quite a few people here on the call. I'm assuming everybody's at some point ordered something from Amazon, or probably now that we're largely stay at home, we're probably ordering more than usual. So a phone call like that comes in, and I'm thinking, what did I order from Amazon? I mean, I don't even know how many orders I'm expecting or anything like that. So I waited on the line until the representative came on, and they started quizzing me on different things. And I said, well, which order are you calling in regards to? So it's one of those kind of trust but verify situations where did I expect this phone call? A lot of times when a phone call like this comes in, like Adam said, you can use a different method to contact. But another option you might want to use when you receive a phone call from somebody asking for information, A, either ask them something that they can verify that they are who they are, that they know what they're supposed to know. And that's one part of it. And on more sensitive things, like if I get a phone call or if you get a phone call from, let's say a credit, somebody claiming to be from your credit card company, you can go and grab the credit card, look at the phone number on the back and say, you know what, I will call you back. And hang up on the call that was initiated externally coming to you. And now you can make a phone call going out and you know at that point for sure that you're calling the credit card company, right? And at that point, they can verify you, you can valid in and say, okay, I got a call that there was fraud on my credit card. Is that really the case, right? So social engineering again comes in many flavors. And I would say all of us are subject to some kind of a social engineering attempt many times throughout the month, even without probably realizing. A lot of it probably ends up in our spam, et cetera. But there is many, many opportunities for us to be exposed to social engineering. And we'll get to some specifics about it such as answering security questions. What's your mother's maiden name? What's your first pet's name? What's the first city you lived in? Because while they're called security questions, they don't provide as much security as we tend to think they do. Back to you Adam. Thank you, Peter. So we can move on to the next slide. So social engineering is gonna underlie various types of phishing attacks. Basic phishing, I think we've all seen like we only get the email and it's often poorly written. Often the domain name is misspelled, often has a strange attachment, et cetera. However, there's more advanced types of phishing that we need to be aware of. And that's what I wanna get into next. So here's an example. I just did a quick Google search looking for them, just to make a note that they can look really well designed. They can have all the company logos. Usually they have a suspicious link and then like click it, log in. And you think that there's a reason like this one says review your information or it might be even like a reverse psychology move where it's like your account has been compromised. Click here if this was not you. And sometimes Google really sends me those if it thinks someone's trying to log into my account or if I'm logging in from a different location than I normally do. So we get real ones and fake ones and they can look a lot alike. This one's pretty obvious in my opinion because it says it's from the Pentagon and what's American Express doing there and what's a .ci and domain name. But about that, I'm gonna show you guys that actually the from address can be anything and it will not necessarily even go to your spam box. Here's another one from PayPal, for example. And again, some of these examples might be may appear benign. We recently helped an organization who got an email from their domain registrar. So basically their URL like square.com you have to renew periodically the domain registration a separate from where it's hosted and everything else. And by now I think all of us realize that having control of the domain there is only one of those, right? It's like your phone number. And somebody sent them an email saying, oh, your domain has not been renewed. Your 30 days past due, if you don't click here and pay the domain's gonna expire. And so they, again, there's a lot of commonalities in these kind of spearfishing and social engineering and all of those elements which is generally they tend to induce a sense of urgency and some kind of severity, some kind of impact that's gonna happen. If you don't ask by this, then these severe consequences are going to happen. And obviously if it was a real email, which sometimes we do, whether it's go daddy or name silo or ICANN or something, whoever registers your domain. And part of the challenge nowadays is there is literally thousands of companies that are domain registrars, right? So if your organization, you might have one main URL but you might own 10, 15, 20 other domains that expire at different times, they might be even with different registrars. And so when an email like that arrives, it's very challenging sometimes to realize, okay, is this a real email or is this not? So just some examples to connect the dots about what we're kind of talking about kind of the theory and showing some examples to some of that you might have seen in your real life. And I can see the chat on my secondary screen here is being very active. So thank you for sharing your examples. Back to you Adam. Right, thanks Peter. So basically one thing I would really point out or advise to keep an eye on is email account emails because often our email accounts are tied to other more important accounts that we think of like maybe the company website or CRM that where I can log in and it has all my organization's contacts and that's like the last thing we ever want to lose. They're not necessarily gonna fish for that. Maybe they're just gonna send me a Google office or an Office 365 phishing email because they know that if I can get that then maybe I can use the password reset to gain access to something more valuable than just an inbox. So that's something to keep an eye on. It gets scary right here where we're talking about advanced phishing. It's gonna use social engineering and if you're targeted by some wannabe hacker or just like someone with too much time on their hands during COVID they figure out how to send fake emails. It's not hard to do. And what if they picked me or my organization as a direct target? They might even do some research like probably everyone in my organization or most of them are on LinkedIn and so they can get names, titles, what everyone's doing, who might regularly contact, who we can do some recon and then they're gonna pick someone and target them directly. That's called spear phishing. It's focused, very related to business email compromise. Third one. And the key parts to realize here is that you might think or one of your employees or whoever is associated. A lot of times this happens that we see it in organizations and they're volunteers, right? A relatively easy target doesn't may not even have a organizational email or something like that. And many people will say, well, it's not that big deal like, if somebody sends me an email, I have very little to provide or I don't have that much data, right? And what we have to be cognizant of is this is not necessarily about us as individuals. It's about the data and the access that we have. So it's that second layer, third layer because if somebody were to get into, let's say your computer or your email or your cell phone company or any of your accounts, again, nobody's quite interested in what are the contacts on your phone or what contacts are who you email from your Gmail account. That's not the key part here. The key part is where is your Gmail account or Yahoo or Hotmail or whatever you're using where is that link to what password reset can I initiate that's gonna go to that email. It's that next layer and the layer after that, that's the really important part. And a lot of organizations that we've seen is they consider the volunteers almost like this ancillary thing that nobody thinks about, yet those very people, even if they have read only access into an internal system, right? Maybe it's somebody that's providing some kind of support or some kind of care or something like that, just being a supportive volunteer for an organization but you're directing them to your website to say, okay, well, go here and maybe read only information. Well, that means they have a vector of attack for tapping into the database and if they get into their email and have username and password, they can start extrapolating a lot of information very quickly. That's right. At this point in the presentation, I had an idea of sending an email from Adrian to Peter, but it would be me who does it all. I don't know if you're able to share that, Peter, or if you're not set up for that, regardless of the point of stands that an email can be spoofed easily. Yeah, I don't have that set up but we've done again in our preparation and we can record a shared video maybe and share it when we publish this recording and some screenshots of that. But again, most people tend to think and I remember I'm gonna date myself here back in the 90s. There used to be emails going around, Bill Gates is gonna pay you $10 for every person to send you forward this email or whatever, which again, back in the 90s was very believable and a lot of people would forward it and I remember one time somebody forwarded it to me and I replied to that email but I changed the email headers, which is all the from to and everything else that said that I was Bill Gates, right? And everybody started all getting excited because they literally thought they were gonna get whatever, you know, $10 per forwarded email or whatever that was. And the scary part of that is again, this was back in the mid to late 90s when I was doing this, again, was doing it obviously to teach people a lesson back then, but the scary part is 20 plus years later today, we still have that same problem and that's just because the way the internet was designed, the way email was designed, et cetera, et cetera, it was never meant to go to the scale and to the kind of utility that we're putting it through its basis today. And the lesson still stands today just because somebody sends you an email like we saw a couple of emails here, right? That Adam was pointing out that it's a PayPal letter for example on here and it says, petersonfamilykiro.com or the previous email where it's American Express, but it's coming from a completely unrelated domain. Well, point stands that if we wanted to, we could replicate any kind of email in the from field. So don't make the assumption just because, let's say a follow-up email comes from Adam or Eli or somebody, if it comes from techsoup.org, you can't make the assumption that it actually came from there. That's a pretty scary proposition to think about is that you never really know when that email shows up in your inbox that it is actually from the person that the email claims to be from. That's right. Like at Square, we do implement the latest email technologies to help verify them. It's called SPF and DKIM and DMARC, but even there, with all of that implemented, I'm still able to send emails spoofed from my laptop at home from my boss to my coworkers that say like, cookrats your employee of the month and it'll even have his picture that automatically shows up. It'll have his signature. And unless you're trained in how to analyze the headers and even then it's still super complicated. Like my research in emails, it actually, it scared me how easy it still is to spoof an email. So my main recommendation about emails is never send confidential information over email. That's, if I had an organization that would be a company policy. We would have a more secure means of communication. However, we're gonna need email because like Peter was talking about, it's kind of a legacy technology that we just can't get away from. The world depends on it too much. So I like to just assume email content may be public. And again, a lot of times people say, and again, not to pick on anybody in particular, but a lot of, obviously everybody knows about, let's say Gmail, right? Or, and many people because Gmail offers services to where you can have your own domain, but it's still hosted on the same infrastructure. And sometimes people say, well, that's fine. I'm not worried about where my data goes or whatnot because I don't use Gmail. Well, the latest statistic I saw was 46% of email globally goes through Gmail servers because chances are whether your organization is using Gmail, one of the recipients of that email is likely on there, right? So it's not just, and that's the scary part or the eye-opening part really about cybersecurity is you can be doing everything right and you still have very little control about what's going on, right? So, what are you doing? And I'm happy to take any questions or input in the chat. The question to you is what are you doing to educate, train, make your team members in your organizations aware?  And again, so that could be an employee, that could be a volunteer, that could be a consultant, that could be a board member, right? All the different constituents that your organizations have, what are the different vectors of attack that you need to make them aware and educate them? And it sounds very scary and like Adam said, email is not a secure, secure mean of communication. Thanks, Peter. We can go to the next slide. Sure. So what happened to BlackBod was actually after they were targeted through phishing, probably like we were talking about a spear phishing, a business email compromise, something directly targeted to really be deceptive. I doubt they clicked on something that originated from some weird part of the world or far away, it was all misspelled where, but I think that it was probably a direct attack and that it was probably spelled properly. Everything was, had the company logos, it might have had a login link to their company website and it might have been appearing from someone who was a person of trust. So after that type of phishing attack, what it led to was a data ransom.  Question is, did they really get the data? Did they really encrypt it in the first place or is it a trick? Another question is if we pay, will they really give us the data back or will they give it part of it to us back and then ask for more money? It's a lose lose from the get go. So the idea is we wanna prevent this from ever happening in Blackboss case, they did pay it. And we're telling you a lot and we're gonna get as a matter of fact, next slide. It's gonna have a number of recommendations of actions you can do to protect yourself of we're trying to lay a ground here of what is out happening in the world and the things we're talking about and a lot of you again, appreciate your comments in the chat.  What we're talking about and what we're saying is happening to big companies or data ransom. Some of us have probably heard of the cases where a hospital had to shut down because their data got encrypted or entire counties had to shut down or school districts, et cetera, right? In many of the organizations that we deal with, people will say, well, we're just a small organization. We only have 20 people here who would care about us, right? And what we have to be aware of and we try to impart this on the organizations that we work with is to say the level, whether somebody's going after a corporation that has 10,000 employees or going after your organization that has 10 employees, the level of effort, the barrier to entry is almost zero. As a matter of fact, it takes way much more effort to social engineer a much larger corporation and get into their network than send something to you. And again, the cascading effect, the domino effect of getting into an organization with 10 employees and where they're all hooked up in the third party relationships and everything else, that's the part that's really relevant. If you've been online for a couple of decades, you know spam used to go only to specific people, but then it started trickling down to individual user accounts, right? Because again, the barrier to entry and the cost to send out that one additional email or a million additional emails was virtually negligible. And that's where we are today, whether it's with social engineering or phishing or whether it's with data ransom is yes, the hackers and the bad guys are gonna go after the big targets first, but what's happening there is only a month or a year or two away from what's gonna start happening to us as individuals, much less our organizations that are kind of in between those two extremes. But we're gonna see a lot more individuals who are suddenly gonna open up their laptop and it's gonna say, hey, your data's been locked, you gotta pay us X and it may be, in the grand scheme of things like a hospital or a school district, they will have to pay millions. The thieves, they know that they can't ask you for a million dollars, but they will ask you for $100, $500, $1,000, which could be a big amount to you when if you combine all the individual ones, the consequences of that are pretty substantial. So, and as Adrian just pointed out in the chat is, it's all digital data. There is no way to prove that you've deleted the zeros and one off the hard drive. Like literally, there's no way to know if somebody made an extra copy, there's no way to know if they're selling it on the dark net somewhere. There's just no way to know. You might still unlock your data, but you have no idea where that data might show up one, two, three, five years from now. Thanks, Peter. Another consideration would be, does your organization or the ones you partner with in the tech side of things have insurance that covers these types of scenarios? All right, we got about 11 more minutes, Adam. So let's go through these five things that everybody can do right now so that we give a great value. Got it. So five things we can do. Next slide, please. One is protect from physical theft. So we can do that by encrypting our devices, our cell phones, our laptops, and making regular backups. I recommend encrypted backups offsite at a secure location. There's a link in this slide and the slides will be made available afterwards. And so then you can download them and click the links if you needed more information or resources. And a quick tip, and you can Google this on, I use an iPhone, but I'm sure Android has a similar feature. If I take my phone and I hit the power button, I have, there's a setting in the operating system. And you don't have to unlock the phone or anything. If I hit my power button five times in sequence, one after another, right? So this is, it automatically locks my screen and it says, okay, is this an emergency? Do you need to call emergency services, SOS? Or is this a medical thing and show the medical ID, right? So this is a great thing to know that if you're in a position where maybe there's some physical theft happening or something like that, you can just reach in your pocket or purse or wherever you're carrying your phone, hit that power button five times, and it'll automatically lock your phone. And the only way to unlock the phone at this point, even if I cancel out of it, is it's gonna say, enter your passport, right? So they can just take your fingerprint or put it up to your face. Now they have to have, if they steal the phone, they would have to have the physical password. It's much more difficult to unlock the phone if you do that. So that's just another kind of a self-protection, quick way to protect yourself. The second thing I'd recommend is email scanning for phishing emails. Most emails scan for viruses nowadays, but there are providers, there are providers that provide more advanced detection for phishing and stuff. So I recommend either a third party like premium G-Suite's Office 365 or Amazon Work Mail, or if you're partnering with like a web hosting organization that handles your email as well, I would ask them if they're using RSVAM-D email scanning, which is gonna get you covered. And I recommend RSVAM-D, it's good stuff. Next one is DNS filtering. So we can install an app on our phones and modify a few settings on macOS or Windows. And what can happen is every time a domain name is resolved, which means when you type in like www.google.com, not only do these services check that it really is Google.com, which is what DNS is supposed to do, but it also checks to see if you're accidentally clicking on a malware or a phishing type of website. And so Cloudflare and Quad 9 both provide a free service that you can set up. Add those links there, they provide video tutorials, it only takes a few minutes to set up all the apps on your phones and on your laptops. I highly recommend it. Password managers are actually really great for this because if we regularly use a password manager to log into our regular websites, if we accidentally click on a website, that's a phishing website, the first clue is gonna be that it's not going to offer to fill out the form for us with our password for that site that we usually go to. Also a lot of them, I know Google Chrome will automatically offer to give you a generated strong password. So the days of coming up with a unique password and then remembering it, and then all the websites require like a different type of password with a certain amount of capital and lowercase letters and symbols and numbers. And it gets really hard to remember all your passwords. Like if you use a password manager, it's really easy to forget about all that and just let your computer work for you. I highly recommend it. And you hear a lot about people saying, have these long, complex, elaborate passwords. And sometimes people do that and then they reuse that same complex, elaborate password in multiple, multiple, multiple places. Here's a quick thing. I would highly recommend you choose distinct passwords and then use a password manager and you can keep them simpler, right? You don't have to go into all sorts of weird characters and everything that, but using distinct passwords, even if they're simpler and less complex is much better than using one complex password and reusing it across multiple websites. Why? Because if there is a breach that complex password is gonna get passed around on the dark web and the scripts and methods to test that password into your Amazon account, into your email account, into your credit card account, into all of these, they can run literally millions of these in a day for your username, password combination across multiple different sites. And they know 99.9% of the time they're gonna hit and say user invalid or password invalid because you may not even have an account there, but it's that 0.01% when they hit and it says, oh, Bobby's account, what's the password, right? And the next thing is gonna say, oh, what was your first pet's name, right? And a quick Google or LinkedIn or Facebook profile will provide that. And suddenly multiple of your accounts are compromised. All right. And so the fifth thing I recommend is two factor authentication. This one's a bit more complicated, but basically once it's set up to log in on your website, you log in like you always do, but then it will ask you for a code from your phone. And it helps. It does improve security. And if you get that set up, it will help. However, it's not foolproof. There are sophisticated fishing websites that have no problem with two factor authentication. So it shouldn't be considered a silver bullet. And again, password managers, for example, one password, they help and use the two factor authentication so that you can use it more readily. Again, if you have availability of setting up two factor authentication, that you can integrate into your, just having it text to your phone, that's better than not having it, but also realize that if somebody's really determined to get in, they can spoof your SIM card. And when it sends the text message with the two factor authentication, the code, they can actually see a copy of that and start doing that. So if you have a choice, yes, set it up on the phone that's better than not having it at all. But if you have a choice, kind of the next layer of protection is set it up through an independent tool. There is Google Authenticator, there's one password, et cetera, et cetera. And Melissa, you need to tell, you need to introduce us to your puppy. I don't know if you also noticed, I also don't know if you noticed Melissa's comment that her people all whine about two factor authentication, that they don't like to use it. Well, to kind of wrap this all up, summary is, it's a fight for online privacy and security together. And if hopefully you've taken away a number of things from this presentation, but if there is one thing of how the lens through which I encourage people to think about this topic is the level, it's layers of security and layers of improvement. You're not gonna go out there and suddenly encrypt everybody's laptops and set up two factor authentication and everything, everything, everything, just do one thing at a time, implement it, get people used to it, just layer it. Because the key part here is, are you making it easy for somebody to hack you to steal your data, to get into your computer and so on and so forth? If you need a kind of a mindset for protection, think about it from two standpoints. What do you have and what do you know? Those are two aspects that when combined provide an extremely secure point of verification. That is an example of the two factor authentication, right? What do you know?  Either your phone or your Google Authenticator or something like that, right? There is other layers of physical, called UB Keys or other validation devices that are used in much more advanced areas. But in your organization, you can just, every time you're looking at adding a layer of security, is it something you know? Is it something you have? Can you combine them together? Can you improve what you already have? Adam, I'll let you close it out. Sure, I think my last word to everyone is I think just like try to know yourself and have a healthy skepticism, a reasonable paranoia. Just like if it feels wrong, it probably is. Trust your instincts. Online, we have to be a little bit paranoid. It's better to be safe than sorry when we're handling private information like this. I think it's okay to confirm, neither confirm or deny things. We should train people about not easily giving out information that it's okay to take our time and sit on things to confirm communications using other methods if we're a little bit suspicious. Because most of these cyber attacks are starting out with psychology nowadays. And there are tech things we can do to protect ourselves. But I think the idea is basically a computer or a phone is like a glorified calculator. And we can never trick it that two plus two equals five. But with people, we have a different vulnerability like this and that's what a lot of modern cyber attacks are taking advantage of. So we fight for privacy and security together. In our organizations, let's implement these five things. Let's do training about all this stuff. And let's do research about tech organizations we're partnering with. Do they take security? Seriously, are they security conscious? What do they have in place? So I'll leave it open-ended with that, I think. Yeah, that's great. Thank you, Adam. And I'm sure that Peter and Adam are happy to stay on for a couple extra minutes if anybody does have questions that they want addressed but in respect of everyone's time or at the top of the hour. So we're gonna wrap up. And like I said, I'm sure Adam and Peter are happy to stay if anyone has a question they wanna make sure gets addressed. Yeah, feel free to unmute and ask a question or I'll put it in the chat and we're happy to address any inquires. Actually, I don't know if you can unmute.  Are we good? All right, well, you guys know how to reach us. Thank you so much for coming and being a part of it. We've got another event coming up in two weeks from today, February 17th. So hopefully we'll see you guys there. And if you need anything in the meantime or have any questions, let us know. We'll send out the slides and a whole bunch of links from today's presentation with the follow-up from this. Have a great day. Thank you, everybody. Thank you.


What's up everyone it's your girl Kenzie here from late in sports cards, and I'm ribbon another personal here for Bradley R We've got a 2022 tops finest Star Wars. Hi box. All right, Bradley. Here we go. Good luck. Let's see a darn sketch card There's a link there for you Tyler definitely check that out now should be updated for you bud Got refractor of Qui-Gon gin Inquisitor Thank You Tyler and Orion we've got catch on the bad batch refractor Valin Hess on the refractor We've got blue 122 of 150 supreme leader Snoke dude looks like guy off of Harry Potter. What's his name? And aqua to 199 Princess Leia, that's a cool one Julie Dolan as Princess Leia On the aqua 53 of 199 solid so far a fractor of Ochi off best doing of best doing We got refractor of Kiwi Trennitz pack of mini box one Fractor of Yoda Nice Yoda. That's card 122 120 as well Nice, so it's one of the shorter refractors on There you go, Bradley. All right mini box two for another auto here And a sketch card. Come on. Let's speak it to existence Some color coming up Lando Calrissian. We've got green and 99 here Cindula 17 of 99 On solo skin color match on the Refractor from the bad batch hunter We've got Boba Fett from the Mandalorian refractor auto Princess Leia Not bad to Princess Leia autos one colored one base Julie Dolan 3PO Refractor of Allegiant General Pride. We got orange coming up Bell is that a far orange to 25 the wrecker. That's a cool one The bad batch seven of 25 and last pack here for you Bradley zero frog lady and That will do it for you. All righty Bradley That will do it for your box of tops finest Star Wars six again for hopping back in and we will get these right out to you


In our talk in health, the Midra Centre for Disease Control and CDC says the country's COVID-19 active cases now stand at 4,180 with the majority of the infected people in stable condition. On its verified website on Monday morning, the Centre said it registered 216 new COVID-19 cases as of July 25. The infections indicate a decline from the 272 cases recorded a day earlier. The NCDC said that the country did not record any COVID-19 related deaths on Sunday and the total fatalities so far stood at 2,132. It said the country had also tested more than 2.4 million samples for the virus out of the country's roughly 200 million population. According to the Centre of the 216 new cases, 108 were reported in Lagos in 1996 in a quai bomb stage.


Welcome back to Afternoon Express and it's time for Winner Home on the show today where our three talented young design contestants turned three empty apartments into dream homes at the Polo Village at Valdivia State in the Cape Winelands and the best part is that you the viewer stand a chance of winning one of the completed apartments valued at over three million rand. Now the appeal of urban living comes with beautiful design, graceful architecture and working with minimal spaces. When it comes to small spaces, careful consideration has to be given on how to utilise what you have to work with. This season of Winner Home, our designers are faced with an exactly the same challenge as they decorate apartments on the breathtaking Valdivia State in the Polo Village particularly. Now today in the loft we have urban living expert and architectural entrepreneur Jacques Van Emden, managing director at Block to give us an expert advice on small spaces and urban living. Welcome to our loft. Thanks Anita. I've asked all of our experts that have come to the space, don't you think we have the most beautiful loft in the country? It's amazing.  Urban living is what you immerse yourself in and particularly living in cities like Cape Town where everything is on top of each other. You've got to expect to live in spaces that are sort of crammed in together. What does this mean and what is urban living and why is it such a big appeal? So for me urban living, it really starts with that we actually look at our cities differently. We want to interact with your city. It's no longer a thing that's different to you and you don't get involved with. You want to be involved with the public spaces, with all the retail, with all the experiences that cities have to offer. So you live in the city which is something that's been quite a big change and I love the active citizenship of people taking back their cities and wanting to be involved in what the spaces are around them, the parks, the public spaces. I mean I feel personally like the mountains partly mine and the oceans partly mine and I think that's what urban living is about and an urban home for me is it's so much about saying there's a new type of home that has to exist in this new living in this new urban living context and a lot of that home is we always say four walls makes an apartment but it doesn't make a home. A home is all those little pieces in between, it's the intangible things that go in there so we've got to really focus as people involved in making cities and making urban spaces, we've got to focus on making brilliant launch pads to live from and to still feel homely in. Yeah but then coming with that I mean when a spot becomes particularly popular a lot of people move in and the spaces get smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and sometimes it might feel like you're not in home, it might always feel like you're in a box apartment all the time but there are ways I think to avoid that. How can we turn small spaces into beautiful places that we want to live in? I think it's a key challenge and I don't think it's anything local, it's actually the world's going through this, urbanisation is pushing people to live in cities, it's across all the income ranges, there's a space pressure and I think one of the beautiful parts of it for me is that design is a big part of the solution which is fantastic. So for us at Block we focus heavily on what we call duality of use and third spaces. If you've got half of what you had to work with it's got to work harder, you've got to make every square metre you know punch above its weight it's got to be able to do two things. So it's really the meeting of innovation, technology and design kind of coming together to push what we did previously in Challenge Convention. Yeah so I'm big on the sort of business side of things and I'm always keen to rack people's brains around this because everyone said that if you're looking to buy property invest in spaces that are obviously either growing or you spotting trends and where they're going and it seems that urban areas and urban living is very popular. Property is quite expensive there, why is it so expensive? I think it's demand, it's a lifestyle that you want to buy into so as more and more people kind of you don't longer buy just the box or just the home or just the apartment, you actually buy the neighbourhood, you buy the community and it almost becomes self-fulfilling because more active people that want to move into a place they make it even nicer. So as more and more people like make an effort and put the effort in, it's obviously going to drive demand. And in those areas as you said it's getting smaller and smaller so once your demand's pushing up and it's getting more exciting to live there it almost self fuels itself so it can be quite intimidating. And that's a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs looking to sell property too. Absolutely. Can you prepare like give us some advice on preparing a piece of property to make it even more valuable in a spot that's rising in fame? I think we like to start everything on empathy so we really think about how people live in homes. I think under the space pressure you want to, we still South African just because we live in an apartment. You want to brine our vulgarities, you know? We want to have friends over, we want to entertain, we want to be social, you still have a pride in your home. So we really start to look at from an empathetic viewpoint we look at how people live in our homes. What do they want to do? Do they want a little bar? Do they need a study to work from at home? Maybe they're a student. What are their aspirations for each building that we look at or each apartment we look at? So I think for us your first point is empathy and then you have to jump into design. Design transcends economics. You can have brilliant design. You might have a beautiful floor finish like here or you might just be a raw concrete finish because that's all you can afford at that point in time. But the design of the space will transcend the finish, will transcend time. So for us we really, it's empathy and design coming together. This is great advice and I think it's triggering a lot for me about when I met our contestants and we're really drilling them on the idea of building in Valdivia. I think they've got this idea in the head of what a beautiful property should look like but it's got to fit into the location that it's going into, who's going to live in that property. So Valdivia is obviously a beautiful estate to live in. The Polo Village is a beautiful spot within Valdivia. What are our contestants meant to be looking for in that space particularly? Because those are not massive apartments but they are beautifully spaced. I think you've got to start with challenging convention. If you're under space pressure and you try to do what we did, you know, 10, 20, 30 years ago, it's not going to work anymore just because you only have so much space to work. Shea's launch won't quite fit me. So you've got to actually kind of, whether it's through furniture, whether it's how spaces connect, whether it's through detailing or making a passage, also a dressing room, whatever you can do, you've got a really challenged convention. And I think that's where you see people being incredibly successful and that's really what the designers or any designer is going to have to do in a space today. That's really, really small.  And I've been on to Private Properties' website and it is so incredible because there's so much on offer and they give you a lot of great advice in terms of looking for the right thing. But it is still intimidating because everybody that's putting something on the site is also trying to sell that thing to you. So what do you look for when you go into a site like Private Property and looking for that perfect investment home or maybe you're just looking to sell an investment home? I mean, I absolutely love Private Property. It's got some amazing functions where if you really get involved into the functionality, it can start to work for you through the notifications, through the alerts. And I want to encourage anybody that's buying or selling, you want to let the website work for you. It's an unbelievable user tool. So that's the first thing for me. And in terms of when you're looking to sell, you know, pictures always tell a thousand words. But I think for us, it's really about brilliant communication. You've got a small platform to communicate something. So it's more about being concise and leaving the user that's reading your whatever you're trying to sell, giving them something a bit more memorable to look at. Jacques, I hope that our contestants are watching this closely because that was some incredible advice packed up into a short little interview. So I appreciate your time on the show. I'm looking forward to seeing how you watch this project unfold and get your input towards the end. I'm excited to watch it as well. Awesome. Thank you so much, Jacques. It's so exciting because every day here in Afternoon Express, we step into the world of exquisite interior design with Winner Home. And you'll see the national talent as well as the contestants transform empty properties at the Valdivia State in the Cape Winans into dream homes using those finishes provided by Caesar Stone as well as Plaskon. Now, if you want a chance to win one of those finished apartments, which are valued at over a 3 million rand, go to privateproperty.co.za to enter the grand prize competition. Winner Home is proudly brought to you by Private Property in association with NetBank. Now, after the break, I finally performs live right here in the loft. I finally have money.


Hey guys, Thundee here. And as you know, at CES 2024, Samsung announced a ton of brand new TVs within the TV line. But this video, we're gonna be talking about their 2024 OLED TVs, specifically the S95D, the S90D and the S85D. Now the S95D is their flagship OLED and I'm excited to see what they've actually done with this TV. It does have their brand new AI chip in there, giving you some really great functionality, which we'll talk about. But the first thing we wanna focus on is the display itself. This year, we've got anti-glare technology on the displays, giving us a better viewing experience. What does that mean? When you look at the conventional TV from last year, like the 77 inch we have here, you can see the reflections with light coming into the window and of course it becomes a harder viewing experience. But this year with the anti-glare technology, it makes it just much easier to view in any situation where you have a lot of light coming in, similar to what they had with the Samsung frame TVs from last year. So that is a great thing to see. You've got of course, 4 HDMI ports, 4K 120 HDMI 2.1 as well. And of course it comes with a one connector port. Now the displays are 4K 144 Hertz. So of course as gamers, we love to see that. And speaking of gaming, the Gaming Hub has some more enhancement with more controller options that you can use, with the ability to use your smartphone as a controller. For some of those easy to play games, as well as also the new third party controller with Samsung partner with PDP, to give you something that is light easy to access so you can actually enjoy the games you want to play. Now overall, the look of this TV is nice. I love the nice floating stand that comes with it. And also the multi-channel speakers that are built in. Plus you do have some really great updates to the Samsung Smart Hub system, giving you more fluidity with content to watch, as well as some AI options to help you select the shows that you want to watch. Now the overall feel of this TV this year feels like Samsung has added a few things to improve your viewing experience overall and making it easier to watch. Now on the other hand, they do have the S85D, which is a cheaper but really unique model with its nice curved back. Also has 4 HDMI ports that are HDMI 2.1 and of course 4K 120. We don't know what the price things are, but are you excited for Samsung's new offerings for their TVs? The S90D goes from 55 to 83, while the S95D goes from 42 all the way to 77, which is pretty cool because it's a 42 inch OLED TV from Samsung. I can't wait to game on it and see how it actually functions all together. So let me know your thoughts guys. What do you think about Samsung's OLED offerings in 2024? The variants are like, share, subscribe and always enjoy your entertainment.


I think when you look at this season, it's really about our will and being able to force our will in any game that we play, whether we see a team that presses us, see a team that zones us, variations of man defense, we're going to have to be able to execute and execute and I feel confident that we can execute in all those situations and no matter who's on the floor, this is a deep group, we can go deep into our bench and have a quality student athlete come off and we can play a variety of different tempos, we can play a little smash-mouth inside with our bigs but we can also get out and create tempo with our perimeter players. I think this team is going to be exciting, exciting to watch, exciting the way that we play schematically with the alterations to the scheme, I think it's going to be an edge of the seat type of environment and again we've got a lot of quality student athletes so I think it's going to be a fun team to watch. We're looking back to last year, we have to get better defensively, we have to rebound the ball better, we have to make better decisions with the basketball so that's been our focus going in and we think that by improving a couple possessions on each side of the basketball gives us an opportunity to win a lot more games. We're trying to figure out our rotation and daily we we're talking now about our entire roster and where we see them. The one thing that this team has is that they have the ability to play a multitude of different ways. We can play big, we can play small, we can put multiple point guards if you will on the floor at the same time so we're just trying to figure out the best way to not only get off to a great start but to hand the baton off and still keep a high level play.