Most of this information comes from the Schedule 1 tax year 2022 instructions you can find on the IRS website, irs.gov, irs.gov, looking at the income tax formula. We're focused out here on the itemized deductions, remembering that the first half of the income tax formula is in essence an income statement, although a strange one where we have income minus the equivalent of the expenses being the deductions equals the equivalent of net income, that taxable income. Everything's upside down with taxes, everything's topsy-turvy, meaning that the taxable income we want as low as possible as opposed to normally we want net income as high as possible. Now, in prior sections, we went over some of these other line items in the equation. We'll just recap it right now as we then focus on the itemized deductions. So we went over the income line up top. Now, clearly income is good. Yes, the money is good. We want income, but for taxes, it's bad. So we would like to have income but not have to include it as taxable income if we're not legally required to because it's exempt or something like that. And then we have the adjustments to income, which you can think of as deductions and sometimes are referred to as above-the-line deductions or as Schedule 1 deductions as opposed to possibly below-the-line deductions here, or in our case, the itemized deductions are going to be the Schedule A deductions. You can also think about these up top deductions, the adjustments to income, as contra-income accounts because they're going to go decrease the income like a deduction, but they're going to arrive at this sub-total of the adjusted gross income. The AGI, that adjusted gross income is often the number used or at least based upon when we have phaseouts for income thresholds as income thresholds go up and we phase out certain deductions and certain credits. The below-the-line deductions, whether that be standard or itemized, are not going to have an impact on the phaseouts because we don't calculate the phaseouts generally on taxable income but rather on the adjusted gross income. So that's another kind of component it's useful to keep in mind. So now we're down here and we take the greater of the standard or itemized deductions. Exactly. Good deduction. We talked about the standard deductions before. It's important to understand the standard deductions to the extent that when you think about the itemized deductions because you have to clear the hurdle of the standard deductions before you're able to take the itemized deductions. And it's a fairly substantial hurdle that went up in a few years ago. Therefore, most people are going to be taking the standard deduction. And if there's no hope of taking an itemized deduction, if it's not going to be anywhere near as high as the standard deduction, then you don't have to go through some of the burdensome task of pulling together all the information for the itemized deductions because the person's going to take the standard deduction, which would be more of a simplified situation. So that leads to kind of some discussions in terms of your tax planning. If you're doing tax return preparation, your strategy might be either I'm going to focus on more basic tax returns, which means you might not be looking for clients that are itemizing the higher income clients. For example, because you might be saying I'm focused on scaling up the lower income tax returns, which means that I'm going to do more of them. I'll try to I'll try to scale them up at a lower profit margin, or you might have a strategy that you want to take on the higher, more difficult high income tax returns. And then you're going to do less tax returns because they're more difficult and higher income tax returns are often going to require more research and stuff like that. But you can have a higher profit margin per return. Also note that higher income tax returns because they have more cash flow also leads to the need for more income tax planning and that kind of stuff. You also could specialize as we've talked about before on terms of do you want to just focus on individual tax returns or take on business tax returns like a schedule E, a schedule F, and those types of things. Do you want to focus and take on bookkeeping needs, which often small businesses need to help them shore up those types of needs? Do you want to specialize in certain industries if you're taking on those more of business needs like escort or types of entities as corporations LLCs and type of industry construction and that kind of thing. So those are other things to think about when specializing. Now, the next thing to kind of understand is when would someone be pushed up from a standard deduction to an itemized deduction. The normal thing is is related to the home, the home purchase because the home mortgage interest is quite significant of a deduction. And then you've got the property taxes and state taxes are often deductible for federal income tax purposes. So the purchase of the home that combo, the property taxes and the interest on the home often pushes people over to the point where they're no longer stand am I standardizing but itemizing. Now, there were changes to the law a few years ago, which increased the standard deduction, which I believe is an attempt to simplify the tax code, right? If everybody just took a standard deduction and we didn't do all this itemized deduction, it would be a simplification to the tax code. So you've got more people, even if you're purchasing a home that might still be taking the standard deduction, which is a significant thing to keep in mind. Because oftentimes when you talk to mortgage brokers and whatnot, they will tell you that the government is incentivizing you to buy the home, which they kind of are. But you've got to be careful in terms of how big that incentive is because it's really only kicking in until you clear the standard deduction before you're really picking up the incentives related to home mortgage interest and property taxes. There's also caps on it.


Let's get started. What is this about, why from scratch? Then we're going to see what we want to do, what we want to have, what is going to work against us, how we can overcome these constraints, and the details of what choices we're going to make, and eventually what would be nice to do in the future. A couple of years ago, there was a huge craze about drones at ELC, and I was like, well, why don't I try it myself? Nowadays, it's so inexpensive to give it a shot that I didn't feel particularly bad in case I would just buy a bunch of equipment and then give it up. But it didn't go like that. For me, it was also a sort of challenge to myself of, OK, everyone seems to be able to do it with a huge course on it. Can I do it, starting from the other end? Back in the days when I started working, I used to work on microcontrollers for automotive dashboards, and there you had 8-bit microcontrollers. So for me, the idea was, can I try to use that experience and bring it to a drone? My other thing is, can I make something which looks like a toy but can be a sort of educational tool for my children? Why not also for somebody else? In these cases, you don't want to give to a child something particularly expensive, because you know it will break eventually.  One was, well, it didn't seem fair to reuse existing frameworks because that would have not really been a full learning exercise. I have nothing against what is already available. I'm sure it's far better than what I did. But for me, the idea was to really learn about the ropes about it. And second, most of these frameworks they tend to assume that you have a certain hardware configuration, a certain minimal amount of resources, RAM, and so on, which was going against the grain of the goal I set myself on. And the really idea was, how much can I squeeze out of this really low end hardware? I decided to start humble, so four wheel drive drone. Flying drones are cool. The problem is that when you have a software crash, you can end up also with hardware crash, physical crash. I wasn't ready for that yet. I still am not. Also, if you like my main source of material is eBay and you find a bunch of things about that there. That's a lot of components or kits that are really cheap for wheel drive drones. I wanted to make it so that it would be possible to plug in and out new components, experiments. So that required also a certain level of modularity, which kind of goes fine with low cost, because usually what you find are cheap components which do one single function, and that's OK. The main problem with flying drones is weight. You have to be very careful about your payload. On car drones, it goes a bit easier on you because you have a floor which supports it. So the only thing you have to care about is just to move the motors and inertia. And this modularity was also the idea that it would support the ease of debug, like unit debug. What I set myself as requirements were to be able to control the speed, the steering, and to have some means of controlling remotely. Obstacle detection, avoidance, camera string were nice to have goals. And for the sake of not disappointing anybody, later on I haven't managed to reach them yet. I have some work in progress on some of these items. Long term, remote computer vision, onboard computer vision, but these, they kind of go against the fact that I'm really trying to keep the bill of material cheap. Since I said this is a sort of hobby project, I didn't have much time to put in it. And really the idea was that this would be a kind of toy, and therefore I really wanted to keep it low cost. Nor I wanted to start depending on some custom made PCB. Some of these projects I've seen, they do that, but then I have nothing against it.  But this was not the case. Although I've seen that some companies offer fairly inexpensive creation of PCBs, but there's still kind of one level of magnitude, more complex than what they wanted to keep too. But this is just more details about what they wanted to achieve with the system design. So, okay, one more point is power efficiency. It's true that this is a car, but still there are ways to waste power even there. And I am gonna try to explain what is best and what is not so good. As I said, weight per se is not an issue because you don't have to keep it flying, but still you have inertia. So that affects how different or how complex is your steering model between the ideal case where you just say turn and it turns and the real case where it can even skid. So there is also a goal to keep the mass low. In this case, not so much for the weight, but for the inertia that it can gather when it's moving. Then finally, sometimes we make mistakes. You connect the wrong wire. So the idea was avoid to fry the most expensive components. So try to have some sort of buffer between the high power part and the more expensive control logic. This is a preliminary thought I had and at least these are my conclusions. If you think otherwise, feel free to stop me and we can talk about it. But basically, this is a comparison between two main options that are available.  On the other hand, you can have one such thing or similar which is kind of the brain of your system plus one or more microcontrollers which implement some low level functionality. As you can see from the amount of green, my conclusion was that it's preferable to go down this path because while it might be less convenient for flying drones where as I said, weight is an issue, here it's easier to compartmentalize functionality and debug it. Also, sometimes you want to have, if not real time, close to real time responsiveness. This is easy to achieve if you have even a 8-bit microcontroller which is doing one or two functions only possibly through some hardware IP block. If you start to put all the possible functionality on one single PC-like core, even if it has multiple cores, you still have a problem that you have to guarantee a certain set of time constraints. What some more advanced SOCs do is they have a sort of companion core inside the SOC to which they can offload some of this functionality. But then the problem is you end up tying yourself to some sort of proprietary solution. One example is the Intel Edison. If you look at the specific schematics of Intel Edison, there's an additional Pentium core inside it apart from the Atom core. And this Pentium core is the one which generates PWMs, controls, GPIOs, attacks, for example, as a interrupt controller. But then you end up having to develop for that. And for example, in the new version of mobile platform, this microcontroller has disappeared. So if you had put your time on that, you now have to start again from scratch. While if you select your own microcontroller, you are the one who decides what stays and what goes. Some considerations, again, I'm not gonna claim that what I've decided to be good is one solution that fits everything, but it was okay for my needs. If you are trying to do something different, you might find that what I have done is not appropriate or not adequate for your needs. It's true. Again, about the multi-board approach. There are, for example, still about the real-time responsiveness. There are, there is a set of patches which make Linux become a real-time OS. They are from Thomas Klexner, and over the years, and it's more like, more than a decade, he has managed to massage most of them into the Linux kernel, but still there's a delta. So if you want to turn your single core machine into a real-time machine, you have to, for example, start patching and maintaining the kernel, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it's additional work. On the other hand, if you have a set of microcontrollers, you can choose for each of them the real-time OS you want to run on them, and there you go. This is a very simplified view of the system. The backbone of it is the I2C bus. Let me see, okay, this is another option. So in option A, there's a sort of main board which can be interacted with over WiFi or some other radio, but it's kind of high-end implementation. The other view is if I put just a simple microcontroller which acts as a bridge between radio connection and the other microcontrollers, and they have a transmitter, this is a sort of remote control car variant, so it's as dumb as it gets, almost. There's a bit of assistance in the control of the motors, but this might also be a nice toy. Yes, one word about the power distribution battery, so maybe some of you are already familiar with it, I wasn't. I noticed that sometimes when I was giving full, I was giving command for full power, the system would just shut down, and this is the type of power distribution I was using. I had DC motors attached to a nine-volt voltage regulator and the control logic attached to a five-volt control regulator, and both of the regulators were attached to the main battery. It turns out that DC motors can drain quite a bit of a current when they are accelerating, and the typical cases of acceleration are from steel to full power, or even worse if you try to reverse the direction of the spinning, and this was causing a voltage drop across the battery. So in some cases that I found, some people even go as far as deploying two batteries, one for the logic and one for the actuators. This is the safest way because you really cannot influence one with the other. The other alternative is to limit the current that can go into the motor so that it never brings the battery to have a voltage drop. And this is the way it changed. So I replaced the normal voltage regulator for the motor drivers with another one which can also limit the current. This way it reduces a bit the maximum torque that the DC motors can provide, but on the other hand they wouldn't manage to do much because eventually the battery would just not provide all the current that they try to draw. Now I already mentioned that I'm using DC motors, but how did they come to this choice? Mostly in this case when you're driving wheels you have two options, and you can see them in various type of robots or cars that people are playing with. DC motors are fast, they are cheap, they are robust. They're not precise or rather they are in open loop so when you give some comment that you don't know exactly what the output will be. In other cases for low speed robots something which requires precision movement people use servo motors. If you know for example the Mindstorm kit from Lego they do have servo motors for that. That allows the main brake to just issue a command or position command and that's it. In real life there are various issues with the servo motors if you try to use them in high speed cases. For example they can vibrate, they need to be modified and they are also going against the constraint I set myself to try to keep the bill of material low. They are indeed more expensive. So I went for DC motors. This is an example of what you can find on eBay or Amazon. What you can see is the DC motor here, it spins fast and then here there's a gearbox which reduces the overall speed of the wheel. The option I choose has on the other end optical encoder. It's basically, if you are familiar with all the ball mice for computer they had the same stuff so the ball was making two of those rotate. The way they work is you have optical coupler which is LED and the photo transistor and the small windows that are in the optical encoder they pass between the pair. So sometimes the light can pass and sometimes it cannot and this generates a train of square waves and the frequency of the square wave is proportional to the rotation speed of the optical encoder. So this allows us to measure the rotation speed by just counting the number of transitions that are happening on the optical coupler. This is an example of optical coupler that I'm using. They are quite common in the wrap up world because that's what they use as end of line. So when the head of the 3D printer is moving they need to detect where it has reached the farthest position and this is how they do it. The platform I chose it even had the holes that were exactly shaped for this so I suppose that's what was meant to be used. You only need to basically power it and read the output and to read the output the way I did it is to put it on a GPIO configured as input and count the number of interrupts I was getting on this GPIO. It's the safest way. Sampling is not a good choice because in order to sample one should do constant reading at the frequency which is at least twice the maximum frequency of the train of square waves in input. So that would waste a lot of computational power just for reading mostly nothing. Interrupts is the way to go because you get to handle only the real events when there's a transition. This is how DC motors are driven. So what you see here is a H bridge and basically the way it works is opposite pairs of switches are closed to make the motor spin either one direction or the other. So for example, S1 and S4 if closed would make the current flow like this and for example make the motor spin clockwise while closing S3 and S2 would make the current flow like this and make the motor spin counterclockwise. This comes in a nice package like this and this is where for example I found out the hard way. First I tried the wrong one. There are two major options. Nobody usually tells anything about it but the one on the left is such that it can significantly affect the power you can deliver to the motor. So the efficiency is not so high and you can end up losing 20, 30% of power on the motor's driver. One hint is this one has a huge heat sink attached and that's because it needs to dissipate all that power that is not going to the motors. This one on the right instead is much smaller, doesn't have a heat sink and it's way more efficient and therefore it doesn't need to dissipate any heat. The price is not that high, maybe it's like 50% more but we are talking about a few dollars. The way they work is the following. You have two lines going to the motor driver, that's what we see here, these two and in input you give three comments, three lines, this PWM in one and in two. There's written A and B because each of these can actually drive two motors. So each of these can drive two motors and it means that you have twice the amount of input and twice the amount of output. Basically with two control lines, two binary control lines, you have four possible combinations and these are, make it rotate freely, which is sometimes useful. I haven't been able to figure out when I would like to use it but it's there. Make it rotate clockwise and make it rotate counterclockwise and the other way is to just lock the motor so it holds it in place. The PWM is there because we haven't still discussed about how to control the speed of the rotation. So the speed of the rotation is done by generating a PWM signal with a variable duty cycle and the DC motor acts as a low pass filter. So in practice the DC motor is integrating the PWM signal that it receives and it is driven by the integral of this PWM signal. So if you go from a fully saturated PWM signal, in this case the PWM signal is controlled or has 256 levels, it's 8 bits so you can go from zero duty cycle to 100%. And this is what I'm using to generate all of that and read the interrupts. If you are familiar with Arduino Uno, this is just a variant of it. It's much smaller, it's about this large and you can find it for about two dollars. For each motor what I can do is drive the status, meaning set it to spin clockwise or counterclockwise. I have a hardware PWM generator which is used to control the speed and I can read the output from the optical encoder, meaning that I can measure what is the actual speed which means that I can have a fully closed loop. And it's kinda nice because this is done for each motor individually, so four times, two dollars. I wish this stuff was available 20 years ago. They make nice toys nowadays. Okay, this is what I already said earlier. One more thing that I'm using is a proximity sensor. So the proximity sensor, I haven't fully integrated it but basically what it does is sort of a sonar.  This strobe needs to be about 10 milliseconds and that will cause the sensor to generate eight pulses and after that it will start listening for the Ecos. The output is a gate signal on the Ecoline which has duration which is proportional to the time from the last of the pin and the reception of the Ecol. That's the maximum time after which the Ecol is considered to be lost but basically what you have to do is measure the time that goes between these two transitions and that gives an idea of the distance of the object that you have in front. I'm using eight proximity sensors. You might have seen some installations where there is one and it's mounted on a motor so that basically the motor is made to make it swipe nightrider like if you want. That has a set of problems which are, first of all, stability. When you are moving, you cannot reliably detect Ecos so you have to wait a bit so it's not a continuous swipe but rather a set of movement. I don't know, I think the typical stepping is maybe five, 10 degrees and then you have to wait for a little bit and then you have to generate the ping and listen to it. That kills the idea of having high resolution scanning because if you are on board of something which is moving, it's difficult to keep the correlation between the movement of the Ecol and the movement of the vehicle. So the solution I choose is to have them fixed but to have many. Other problem is since these devices, they are roughly identical so they all work on the same frequencies, in the same audio range. You do not want to generate interferences meaning that if two are active simultaneously in the same direction, one might pick up the Ecol of obstacle detected by the other one. My solution is to drive them from the opposite sides of the vehicle. So I mark here in pairs those which can be active simultaneously. So for example, front left and bottom right because anyway there's the current between so I know that the Ecol shouldn't. There might be some type of reflection but that should be so attenuated that it shouldn't be noticeable. What I have not tried yet is to see if I can use them in double pairs. So for example, all those at the corners simultaneously and then the front back and the sides on another round. This would increase or double the time resolution but that part I still need to try. Now coming to the microcontroller itself. If you are familiar with Arduino, typically what you get is that there's a main loop and you can configure some interrupts but that's it. If you go for 8-bit real-time operating system you have much more available. You can have again interrupt handlers but you can have also task scheduling. You can have more complex structures like a semaphore, mailboxes and that's what I decided to do. Other thing is at least at the time when I started looking to it, Arduino was a bit of a problem because libraries were usually written for a single case scenario. Example, there were libraries which would detect the interrupts but they might conflict in terms of what resources they were using with the library driving the PWM because in general people don't run multiple use cases on the same microcontroller. So in that sense I had to rewrite a bit of the BSP that I was using. When I was looking for the real-time operating system I narrowed the option down to these two. FreeRTOS is probably the, or it's definitely the best known one because it's available for a variety of devices from 832-bit microcontrollers. The problem is that I couldn't find a port for the specific microcontroller which I was using which I found kind of strange but maybe there isn't so much interest. There were a few people who had done their own port but they were all kind of all the attempts and they didn't seem to be particularly successful. Also another thing that I found was that many people who were using FreeRTOS were complaining about the memory footprint. I haven't verified it myself but I found quite a bit of people saying that with a few tasks they had already run out of memory. On the other hand the one I choose, Chibio S has a much smaller footprint and it has actively maintained the BSP for the microcontroller I'm using and therefore I decided to go with that. Then comes the part about I2C development and debugging. I will not say much about this because I had a talk about how to create a I2C device six months ago in San Diego. I've put a link to it. Basically what this is about is, okay, I have, if I have this sort of architecture and this is the I2C bus I need to have a way to create something, in this case these microcontroller slaves which can be proper citizens on the bus. Why am I doing this is for doing this sort of activity there are a certain number of ready made boards that can do motor control for example but they're not exactly matching my needs. Also those boards they tend to come with limited amount of addresses while if I'm creating my own I2C slave I can have as many as I want of each type. Usually you do not get many variants of I2C slaves in terms of addresses so it means that on the same bus you can have only one or two, four at most in general. So just as a quick summary, the tools I've been using are AVR Dragon which is a tool made by Atmel and not only it can be used to flush the microcontroller but it also supports hardware debugging, hardware stepping which is kind of hard to do otherwise. If you're not familiar with it, the way it works is through the hardware reset line, it implements a protocol for AVR microcontrollers and every time you step through one instruction to the next it rewrites part of the memory so that it will stop at the next instruction. It's quite aggressive on the memory consumption, sorry, on the memory ware but it can make the difference when debugging because you do not have to rely anymore on a printf or equivalent, you can just see the content of registers. Then to analyze the bus protocol, basically to monitor that the slave was writing that what the slave was writing would be as expected, I use the bus part. This is a, there's a couple of versions. The one I have is based on FPGA which does sampling of the bus and it can interpret and decode the various protocols, I2C, SPI, you can also use it to generate messages on these buses themselves. Then I use a cheap 8-bit logic analyzer plus CROC and policy view. This basically turns your PC into a digital scope and for the analog part I use the Hantec scope plus Open Hantec. All of this I'm talking about is done with Linux so you do not need to resort to Windows for this. One thing that I had not accounted for but eventually turned out I had to do was develop my own high level protocol debugger. What you see here is just a screenshot of a tool I whipped together in a Python plus a TCK which uses the bus pirate to send and receive messages over the bus but allows me to do control of high level functionalities like calibrate, set a certain wheel to a certain speed, start it, stop it. I just realized at some point that it was not feasible for me to enter manually all the low level commands which would yield some high level functionalities so I had to basically put them together. And now we come to the selection of a main board for the case which is not just a remote control car. My conclusions are that this is what is needed. Of course, master and Linux, it's kind of my requirement but I wanted to keep a development environment that I was familiar with. Low power consumption, this is relative in the sense that most of the power goes anyway to the motors so it should be so that the power consumption of this board is negligible compared to the motors for the duration of the operations. It needs to be at least capable of behaving as a master on the S2C bus. Wi-Fi, mostly because when I work with it I set my Android phone in access point mode and I make the board appear with my phone. Other types of radio would be qualifying. I just found out this to be easy because I can SSH directly into the device from my phone. A small form factor because the car itself is not that large and USB on the go master, this is a requirement for future functionalities. My intention is to not use any, or my intention is to use, for example, USB webcams for taking images. At least for a monoscopic view this should be sufficient. I do not know if it will be enough for a stereoscopic view but that's what I'm planning to try. I put here the option I contemplated. This is a bit biased by the fact that working for Intel I actually have access to some of these boards at my office. The one I've chosen at least temporarily is the first one, the Intel Edison. This is a bit old and it's not that cheap. So it goes a bit against the grain of my initial requirements but it's the only one that I could get to work reliably. What I'm planning to do next is to use the chip. I don't know if you're familiar with it. It was presented six months ago at ELC. It's advertised at $9 computer so it definitely fits the bill of being part of a low cost drone. The only problem is that it has been delayed so I haven't been able to use one yet. I hope it will arrive by the end of the month. And then finally the Intel Joule. Actually I do have one of these on my desk. The problem is first of all it's more expensive than Edison because you're getting basically a real computer in it. So it might be interesting to use it for computer vision test but not for what I'm trying right now. And furthermore the board I have for it requires 12 volts so it's not compatible with what I have. I've seen that there's a tool called Gepetto which is a sort of helper for generating PCBs but even there the price goes high quite fast in the range of hundreds of dollars when one tries to get a board for this. So it's probably good for a high-end drone but not for this one. What I'm planning to do in the future is this. I don't know exactly in which order. I guess the major change is eventually it should work or so as a quadcopter I just need to get enough intelligence on board to be able to manage the stabilization. And that part I don't know if I can still keep the price low but it's minus score. Is there any question about this presentation? Thank you for listening. Thank you.


TheCube presents Ignite 22 brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. Welcome back to Vegas, guys. We're happy that you're here. Lisa Martin here, covering with Dave Vellante, Palo Alto Networks Ignite 22. We're at MGM Grand. This is our first day, Dave, of two days of CUBE coverage. We've been having great conversations with the ecosystem, with Palo Alto executives, with partners. One of the things that they have is Unit 42. We're going to be talking with them next about cyber intelligence and the threat data that they get is incredible. Yeah, they have all the data. They know what's going on. And of course, things are changing. The state of play changes. Hold on a second. I got a text here. Oh, my Netflix account was frozen. Should I click on this link? Yeah. What do you think? Have you had a little bit more of that this holiday season? Definitely. Unbelievable, right? A lot of submission going on. They're very clever. Yeah, we're very pleased to welcome back one of our alumni to the CUBE. Wendy Whitmore is here, the SVP of Unit 42. Welcome back, Wendy. Great to have you. Thanks, Lisa. So Unit 42 created back in 2014, one of the things that I saw that you said in your keynote this morning or today was everything old is still around and it's way more prolific than ever. What are some of the things that Unit 42 is seeing these days with respect to cyber threats as the landscape has changed so much the last two years alone? You know, it has. So it's really interesting. I've been responding to these breaches for over two decades now. And I can tell you that there are a lot of new and novel techniques. I love that you already highlighted smishing right in the opening gate, right? Because that is something that a year ago, no one knew what that word was. I mean, it's probably going to be invented this year, right? But that said, so many of the tactics that we have previously seen when it comes to just general espionage techniques, right? Data exfiltration, intellectual property soft. Those are going on now more than ever. You're not hearing about them as much in the news because there are so many other things, right? We're under the landscape of a major war going on between Russia and Ukraine of ransomware attacks occurring on a weekly basis. And so we keep hearing about those. But ultimately, these nation-state actors are using that top cover, if you will, as a great distraction. It's almost like a perfect storm for them to continue conducting so much cyber espionage work that we may not be feeling that today, but years down the road, the work that they're doing today is going to have really significant impact. Ransomware has become a household word in the last couple of years. I think even my mom knows what it is to some degree. But the threat actors are far more sophisticated than they've ever been. They're very motivated. They're very well-funded. I think I read a stat recently in the last year that there's a ransomware attack once every 11 seconds. And of course, we only hear about the big ones, but that is a concern that goes all the way up to the board. Yeah, you know, we have a stat in our ransomware threat report that talks about how often victims are posted on leak sites. And I think it's once every seven minutes at this point that a new victim is posted, meaning a victim has had their data, a victim organization had their data stolen and posted on some leak site in the attempt to be extorted. So that has become so common. One of the shifts that we've seen this year in particular, and in recent months, you know, a year ago when I was at Ignite, which was virtual, we talked about quadruple extortion, meaning four different ways that these ransomware actors would go out and try to make money from these attacks. And what they're doing now is often going to just one, which is I don't even want to bother with encrypting your data now because that means that in order to get paid, I probably have to decrypt it, right? That's a lot of work, it's time consuming, it's kind of painstaking. And so what they've really looked to do now is do the extortion, where they simply steal the data and then threaten to post it on these leak sites, you know, release it other parts of the web and go from there. And so that's really a blending of these techniques of traditional cyber espionage with intellectual property theft. Wow. How trustworthy are those guys in terms of, I mean, these are hackers, right? In terms of, it's really the hacker honor system, isn't it? I mean, if you get compromised like that, you really beholden to criminals. And so... So that's one of the key reasons why having the threat intelligence is so important, right? Understanding which group that you're dealing with and what their likelihood of paying is. What's their modus operandi? It's become even more important now because these groups switch teams more frequently than NFL trades, you know, free agents during the regular season, right? Or players become free agents. And that's because their infrastructure, so the infrastructure, the servers, the systems that they're using to conduct these attacks from is actually largely being disrupted more from law enforcement, international intelligence agencies working together with public private partnerships. So what they're doing is saying, okay, great, all that infrastructure that I just had now is burned, right? It's no longer effective. So then they'll disband a team and then they'll recruit a new team and it's constant like mixing and matching in players. All that said, even though that's highly dynamic, one of the other areas that they pride themselves on is customer service.   In this case, there are what appear to be very much humans who are explaining to you exactly what happened, what they're asking for, super pleasant, getting back within minutes of a response, and they know that in order for them to get paid, they need to have good customer service because otherwise they're not going to, you know, have a business. How, so what's the state of play look like from between nation states, criminals, and how difficult or not so difficult is it for you to identify, do you have clear signatures? My understanding, and with SolarWinds, it was a little harder, but maybe help us understand and help our audience understand what the state of play is right now. One of the interesting things that I think is occurring, and I highlighted this this morning, is this idea of convergence. And so I'll break it down for one example relates to the type of malware or tools that these attackers use. So traditionally, if we looked at a nation state actor like China or Russia, they were very, very specific and very strategic about the types of victims that they were going to go after when they had zero days. So, you know, new malware out there, new vulnerabilities that could be exploited only by them because the rest of the world didn't know about it. They might have one organization that they would target that at most a handful and all very strategic for their objective. They wanted to keep that a secret as long as possible. Now what we're seeing actually is those same attackers going towards, one, a much larger supply chain. So SolarWinds is a great example of that. The Haphneum attacks towards Microsoft Exchange Server last year, all great examples of that. But what they're also doing is instead of using zero days as much or because those are expensive to build, they take a lot of time, a lot of funding, a lot of patience and research, what they're doing is using commercially available tools. And so there's a tool that our team identified earlier this year called Brut-Retel C4 or BRC4 for short. And that's a tool that we now know that nation-state actors are using. But just two weeks ago, we invested a ransomware attack where the ransomware actor was using that same piece of tooling. So to your point, yeah, it can get difficult for defenders when you're looking through and saying, well, wait, dear, all using some of the same tools right now and some of the same approaches. When it comes to nation-states, that's great for them because they can blend into the noise and it makes it harder to identify as quickly. And is that an example of living off the land or is that BRC4 sort of a homegrown hacker tool? Is it a commercial off the shelf? So it was a tool that was actually, so you can purchase it. I believe it's about 2,500 US dollars for a license. It was actually created by a former red teamer from a couple well-known companies in the industry who then decided, well, hey, I built this tool for work. I'm going to sell this. Well, great for red teamers that are legitimately doing good work, but not great now because they built a strong tool that has the ability to hide amongst a lot of protocols. It can actually hide within Slack and Teams to where you can't even see the data as being exfiltrated. And so there's a lot of concern and then now the reality that it gets into the wrong hands of nation-state actors and ransomware actors. One of the really interesting things about that piece of malware is it has a setting where you can change wallpaper. And I don't know if offhand you know what that means, but if that comes to mind what you would do with it, well, certainly a nation-state actor is never going to do something like that, right?  So pretty interesting. Obviously the developer doing some work there for different parts of the nefarious community. Tremendous amount of sophistication that's gone on the last couple of years alone. I was just reading that Unit 42 is now a founding member of the Cyber Threat Alliance, includes now more than 35 organizations. So you guys are getting a very broad picture of today's threat landscape. How can customers actually achieve cyber resilience? Is it achievable? And how do you help? So I think it is achievable. So let me kind of parse out the question, right? So the Cyber Threat Alliance, the JCDC, the Cyber Safety Review Board, which I'm a member of, right? I think one of the really cool things about Palo Alto Networks is just our partnerships. So those are just a handful. We've got partnerships with over 200 organizations. We work closely with the Ukrainian cert, for example, sharing information, incredible information about what's going on in the war, sharing technical details. We do that with Interpol on a daily basis where we're sharing information just last week that Africa's cyber surge operation was announced where millions of nodes were taken down that were part of these larger system of C2 channels that attackers are using to conduct exploits and attacks throughout the world. So super exciting in that regard and it's something that we're really passionate about at Palo Alto Networks. In terms of resilience, a few things. One is visibility, so really having an understanding of as much of real time as possible, right? What's happening? And then it goes into how can we decrease operational impact? So that's everything from network segmentation to one of the terms and phrases I like to use a lot is the win is really increasing the time it takes for the attackers to get their work done and decreasing the amount of time it takes for the defenders to get their work done. I call it increasing the denominator, right? And the ROI equation, benefit over value equals, or benefit equals value over cost. If you can increase the cost to go elsewhere, right? That's the game. You mentioned Ukraine before. What have we learned from Ukraine? I remember I was talking to Robert Gates years ago, 2016 I think, and I was asking him, yeah, but don't we have the best cyber technology? Can't we attack? He said, we got the most to lose too. So what have we learned from Ukraine? Well, I think that's part of the key point there, right? Is a great offense essentially can also be for us deterrents. So in that aspect, we have as a company, excuse me, as a country, as a company as well, but then as partners throughout all parts of the world have really focused on increasing the intelligence sharing and specifically, and I mentioned the Ukrainian cert, there are so many different agencies and other sorts throughout the world that are doing everything they can to share information to help protect human life there. And so what we've really been concerned with is what cyber warfare elements are going to be used there? Not only how does that impact Ukraine, but how does it potentially spread out to other parts of the world, critical infrastructure? So you've seen that, I mentioned CSRB, but CISA, right? CISA has done a tremendous job of continuously getting out information and doing everything they can to make sure that we are collaborating at a commercial level. We are sharing information and intelligence more than ever before. So partners like Mandia and CrowdStrike, our Intel teams are working together on a daily basis to make sure that we're able to protect not only our clients, but certainly if we've got any information relevant that we can share that as well. And I think if there's any silver lining to an otherwise very awful situation, I think the fact that it has accelerated intelligence sharing is really positive. I was going to ask you about this, because 10 or so years ago, there was a lot of talk about that, but the industry kind of kept things to themselves. I actually tried to monetize some of that private data. So that's changing is what I'm hearing from you. More so than ever. I mentioned I've been in the field for 20 years. It's tough when you have a commercial business that relies on information in order to pay people's salaries, right? I think that has changed quite a lot. We see the benefit of just that continuous sharing. There are so many more walls broken down between these commercial competitors, but also the work on the public-private partnership side has really increased some of those relationships, made it easier. And I have to give a whole lot of credit and mention Yosissa, like the fact that during log4j, like they had GitHub repositories, they were using Slack, they were using Twitter. So the government has really started pushing forward with a lot of the newer leadership that's in place to say, hey, we're going to use tools and technology that works to share and disseminate information as quickly as we can, right? That's fantastic. That's helping everybody. We knew that every industry, nobody's spared of this, but did you notice in the last couple of years any industries in particular that are more vulnerable? Like I think of healthcare with personal health information or financial services, any industries kind of jump out as being more susceptible than others? So I think those two are always going to be at the forefront, right? Financial services and healthcare, but what's been really top of mind is critical infrastructure, just making sure, right, that our water, our power, our fuel, so many other parts of, right, the ecosystem that go into making sure that, you know, we're keeping, you know, houses heated during the winter, for example, that people have fresh water, those are extremely critical, and so that is really a massive area of focus for the industry right now. Well, can I come back to public-private partnerships? My question is, relates to regulations, because the public policy tends to be behind the technology industry as an understatement. So when you take something like GDPR as the obvious example, but there are many, many others, data sovereignty, you can't move the data, is there tension between your desire, our desire as an industry to share data and government's desire to keep data private and restrict that data sharing? How is that playing out? How do you resolve that? Well, I think there have been great strides, right, in each of those areas. So in terms of regulation when it comes to breaches, there, you know, has been a tendency in the past to do victim shaming, right? And for organizations to not want to come forward because they're concerned about the monetary funds, right? I think there's been tremendous acceleration. You're seeing that everywhere from the FBI, from CISA, to really working very closely with organizations to have a true impact. So one example would be a ransomware attack that occurred, this was for a client of ours within the United States. And we had a very close relationship with the FBI at that local field office and made a phone call. This was 7 a.m. Eastern time. And this was an organization that had this breach gone public, would have made worldwide news. There would have been a very big impact because it would have taken a lot of their systems offline. Within 30 minutes, that local FBI office was on site, said, we just saw this piece of malware last week. We have a decryptor for it from another organization who shared it with us. Here you go. And within 60 minutes, every system was back up and running, our teams were able to respond and get that disseminated quickly. So efforts like that, I think the government has made a tremendous amount of headway into improving relationships. Is there always going to be some tension between competing organizations? Sure, but I think that we're doing a whole lot to progress it. But governments will make exceptions in that case, especially for something as critical as the example that you just gave and be able to do a reach around, if you will, on onerous regulations that aren't helpful in that situation. But certainly do a lot of good in terms of protecting privacy. Well, and I think there used to be exceptions made typically only for national security elements, right? And now you're seeing that expanding much more so, which I think is also positive. Last question for you as we wrap in up time here. What can organizations really do to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to threat actors? We've got internal, external threats. What can they really do to just be ahead of that curve? Is that possible? Well, it is. Now, it's not an easy task. I'm not going to trivialize it, but I think that one, having relationships with the right organizations in advance, always a good thing. That's everything from certainly commercial relationships, but also your peers, right? There's all kinds of fantastic industry specific information sharing organizations. I think the biggest thing that impacts is having education across your executive team and testing regularly, right? Having a plan in place, testing it, and it's not just the security pieces of it, right? As security responders, we live these attacks every day, but it's making sure that your general counsel and your head of operations and your CEO knows what to do, your board of directors, do they know what to do when they receive a phone call from Bloomberg, for example? Are they supposed to answer? Do your employees know that? Those kind of communications in advance and training can be really critical and make or break a difference in an attack. That's a great point about the testing, but also the communication that it really needs to be company-wide. Everyone at every level needs to know how to react. Wendy, it's been so great having you on. Wait, one last question. Sure. What's your favorite superhero growing up? Ooh, it's got to be Wonder Woman. Yeah. Yeah, okay. Yeah. So, because I'm always curious, not a lot of women in security, in cyber. I had to get into it. And many cyber pros want to save the world. Yeah, no, that's a great question. So I joined the Air Force. You know, I was a special agent doing computer crime investigations and that was a great job. And I learned about that from, we had an alumni day and all these alumni came in from the university and they were in flight suits and combat gear. And there was one woman who had long, blonde, flowing hair and a black suit and high heels and she was carrying a gun. What did she do? Cause that's what I would do. Ah, awesome. Love it. On Wonder Woman. Exactly, Wonder Woman. Wendy, it's been so great having you on the program. We will definitely be following Unit 42 and all the great stuff that you guys are doing. Keep up the good work. Thanks so much, Lisa. Thank you. Our pleasure. For our guest and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, live in Las Vegas at MGM Grand for Palo Alto Ignite 22. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.


for it that they're just competitively sensitive information and and go from there well we would if we determined that didn't meet the um threshold we would come back into a public session discuss it right right okay so that's one and two uh number three was uh questions relative to the player acquisition um information that's uh in response to um question e2 e01 in the application i so that would seem to squarely fit within the competitively sensitive um framework if can remind me who's what question is that who's which picture is asked that question um i i think a couple of us did is this the rsm information yes oh yeah i think commissioner skinner did i think i did too i don't know if anybody else i i think i heard it differently um i maybe i i heard wrong could you just go over it again section e though i don't i don't recall that being in section e let me pull this up here it's uh for the answer in g is it b3 yeah that's the market here hold on market market market revenue and then second revenue in section c e2 e01 b and c for market share discussion i got the market share one next but as far as the player acquisition information is concerned and the modeling that is response to question e2 e01 well that wasn't my question if i can maybe clarify i think that was the graphic that i wanted to note the commission as part of the market share discussion so while it was in a different section i think it's relevant for market share um analysis but section b which is section b yeah okay so part of the the market share projections uh which is discussed in b3 g01 would may include the player acquisition information which is in e2 okay so we'll we'll call that one subject that would seemingly uh fit under the competitively sensitive uh banner and i think you would have grounds to move to discuss that with the the one caveat and we can um kind of navigate this is that i believe teresa mentioned that there are some publicly infer accessible information that is associated with that that we should not talk about uh privately but we can get to that the calculations that were referenced in the confidential section that so so um the confidential section noted by caesars referenced that they leveraged publicly identified you know publicly published information to estimate their handle so i think that the underlying assumptions used in their model are public but i don't know if their actual calculations are public i think that those calculations could probably be uh created based upon public public information but so i i would look to you um to define what would be confidential or not well i think to the extent that we're just talking with the calculations and how they develop their market share projections even if they use publicly available information it would still be competitively sensitive so that that would be okay okay anyway i think we're okay on this one having with teresa's clarification i think we're okay so the next one um i have on my list relates to the marketing agreements with the colleges and the future plans that um the entity may have as to how to move forward with those so that's one of the issues i flagged if that's still of interest number five i have the percentage of underage individuals who may have access to or visibility to certain marketing information and this i think related to what i mean commissioner ill mentioned it specifically and how the calculations were made relative to the stadium um information and otherwise highly uh commissioner brian if you're speaking to us you're on the we had the same question coming from different angles which was what's the actual percentage demographically of that group um and then i don't know if commissioner hell had a a different angle on that question but it's all within sort of what is the demographic information they got in making those decisions okay so though that would um it seems to me squarely fit within the competitively sensitive area as well yeah okay um so those are the five then that i have identified are there others that any i have a number of a couple of conditions and more supplemental information that was required but that's not related to this commissioner i had another one i was asking about the diversity spend breakdown and i believe it was heather who said that that information wasn't public publicly disclosed yes i have that one down too on these on the the actual spend right yeah diversity spend for vendors yeah diversity spend but i think in terms of dollars um did you get project um and um the projected revenues that's all that was also part of chorises no projected revenues in general yeah that she because it just there was limited information given there there's assumptions that need to be discussed but i think she's more comfortable um because the information is more confidential chris if you want to elaborate yeah i think the the there was limited information so in order for us to kind of share our observations as it compares to what is in the application we'd have to disclose i think information that the property had identified as as confidential for example the projected handle calculations in that event that again that would seem to fit under the competitively sensitive header neatly so i think that would be okay as well other any others that that's seven we have before we address the whether or not we're going to vote to go into executive session i um i am quite aware of the hour but i'm also quite aware that we've had um a category one applicant waiting in the wings today um i know that executive director wells had to go to do some other business um as she continues to be executive director of the agency um missioners we're going if we go into executive session we have to decide whether we're going to come back to public um farm um to the extent that we're willing to work into the evening um i'd like to know that i don't know what everybody's sentiments are i mean i think we're going to executive session and close out as much of this as we can and then we resume with the cat ones at the next meeting i don't think it's a good idea to come out of this at five thirty six o'clock and jump into someone else's application but i think the cat one should be resolved before we come back to finish this off since this is a cat three but i think we go into executive session to answer all the questions we have right now to make sure other than the supplemental information we're done well we might come back into public session once we're in here there are there's some opportunities here um or maybe not uh if we were to make a disposition um wondering um if mr. Hendricks if you were able to get that that um list to us now i don't know if that's something that's available so that i'll be blunt madam chair i'd like um i'd be to have it as well unsuitability so i i don't think i'm in a posture to take a vote on this today and i don't want to rush it and work to be blunt we're also missing part of what was supposed to be in the suitability and it's not there because of our error so and that's not on blaming anybody we're doing a lot of stuff right now trying to get it done but i think we can still keep the ball moving wrap this up as much as possible get to the cat ones and then come back to the cat threes we do have days baked in to make sure that we get to everybody i'm just thinking this is fresh in our mind so i'm trying to to think about that to commissioner brian um so i think that um director milleos i think that use um i believe it was that director wells would suggest that this could be the issue around the missing suitability piece could be a condition i'm just gonna be blunt with you madam chair i don't feel comfortable with that okay i don't know how anybody else feels well that the other three commissioners feel but i'm trying to find options here commissioner brian i'm not aware of that i'm not taking positions i'm just exploring options because they were presented to me so i'm i want to make sure we're we're thinking about so i hear you commissioner brian that you you wouldn't be comfortable with that being a condition commissioners i think that we can reach agreement to go into the executive session i think we should do that after a break we've only had a lunch break um so yes we are we are overdue and quite frankly i'm i'm reaching my capacity so i would hope that um we would not plan to return to the public meeting um to to to close out um this business with caesars or to begin another application presentation um at the late hour we started at nine this morning and like i said i'm i'm approaching my capacity yeah i understand that for sure um and so you would not come back but um assuming all questions were answered in the second session which we can't necessarily assume you would not want to come back or disposition i would not want to come back for my reasons but also you know i want to make sure that all the commissioners are comfortable moving forward and i know we have at least one commissioner who's not okay commissioner may or commissioner hill i don't care i'm interested to find out what we would learn in in an executive session you know it's hard for me to speak one way or the other if you know we're talking about you know um 10 instances of things that should have been reported that weren't maybe i can make a decision if we're talking about a thousand maybe i need to read them i and i just don't know what the universe looks like i think until we reach into that session um and so i would say that we go into the session and i can't make a decision until i see what what's presented and you know why i'm asking this question it's not to put any pressure on us but i'm i'm i'm told by my lawyer that i have to decide this if we're going to come back or not so i am in asking my fellow commissioners if we're coming back or not um i think i would prefer to go into executive session and not come back into a public session madam chair okay all right chair yeah i didn't say this but i i think commissioner o'brien said it um but uh commissioner maynard actually raised a good point if we're hearing um from the applicant for the first time all of those other issues about all those specific incidents um i would also like to have ieb take a look at that information in the context of suitability right so you know we're all hearing it but i think ieb needs time to assess so my worry is this is that we're going to have all this information in executive session but we probably need to put it on to a public record what we expect and what we're going to do so while we may i think i'm hearing from my fellow commissioners we probably won't get to a disposition we might need to come we might want to keep this public meeting open so that we can come back and give direction to the applicant on the public record does that make sense so that we can say what what it's outstanding um and then that would give direction for them on the public record as to what needs to be done it's outstanding does that make sense i'm now trying to this is completely legal uh does that work better than us just guys treat with that session counselor grossman yes if i understand what your your proposal it would be to deal with the executive session issues then come back and just for the public record say this is what we're doing next yeah really quickly not an extended not so technically we'll come back and we'll keep this open the public to the extent they're hearing we'll understand it sounds that we will not make any determination but we may give direction and and uh for what might be outstanding so that makes sense commissioners okay i'm seeing not okay thank you so um commissioners as you know i need to read this into the record and then we would need to vote are we all set question uh council grossman on process yes um i think as far as you're reading into the record of course we only have to focus i think on the uh i'm just trying to pull up the agenda just up to i think just a competitive um yeah yeah i don't think you know i don't think you have to get into the privacy exemption or the security okay yeah okay because i think we resolved on the first matter where privacy might have been a concern all righty the commission anticipates that it may meet an executive session in conjunction with its review of the ws i us lc oh my goodness i'm so sorry and with its review of the american wagering ink there's entertainment ink application in accordance with gl chapter 30a section 21 a 7 in gl chapter 23 and section 6 i to consider information submitted by this applicant again american wagering ink in the course of its application for an operator license that is a trade secret competitively sensitive or proprietary in which it disclosed publicly would place the applicant at a competitive disadvantage do i have a motion that everybody rush it once i'm not trying to be going to executive session for the reasons just stated by the chair on the record thank you commission o brian second any further discussion all righty commission o brian hi mr hill hi mr skinner hi mr maynard hi i vote yes i want to point out that the public section of commission meeting will reconvene at the conclusion of the executive session consistent with what we just discussed thank you and it is now five o'clock when would you like to reconvene commissioners state your time i'm just gonna five thirty it's all half hour can we do like 15 20 minute i just have file care stuff on the other end that's being pushed off i'm good with 20 i i never want to log on myself and i don't blame you i don't blame you okay we'll reconvene at five 20 everyone grab a bite or whatever thank you again for the very long day just as far as the technical issues go and mr handrex and all i'm not sure if you have the invite i can send that over to you if you don't have i was going to ask if you just for the appropriate zoom link we'll have our folks on i'm sorry that you may not have that again and it's been a long day for for crystal two and i don't see oh there she is i don't see her her face but i think she's still down the hall um so crystal if you can help uh council grossman with um the links um we definitely need rsm crystal i don't know man or anyone else i sure that yeah i'm not sure if we have i'm sure someone has mr handrex email i certainly have mr broga's email i can send it to him i don't i don't know if i have it and karen must have it as well or someone so if we can just make sure the applicant mr handrex gets the invitation and make sure our team for rsm has an invitation and chair i don't think you um we need to forward the invitation to the investigator on the geum side right the just need rsm for our outside contractor i um that's what it appears ryan christia skinner commissioner maynard christia hill if you want the real investigator i can have kevin murphy here i know he's been on all day but um you don't need him i think it would be helpful to have them present so that they can at least hear if they're going to be the ones involved in the additional investigation i part of you um director liliah okay then i i'll connect with kevin offline then okay and you'll take care of forwarding that invitation all right everyone thanks so much we're going to go to that for a different virtual room we will return to this virtual room at the conclusion of our second session thank you so much pod i just emailed you jeff's uh email okay let's say let's send that over yeah to hf thank you very much hi everyone are you still there dave for who took the screaming yes i am here okay i just making sure someone still has the street yep i still got everything going all right thanks thanks no problem there's the cat tail where's mango wherever there's food there's mango so now that food is out and about in the kitchen for dinner and stuff he's down there he and the dogs ground for the food oh my mojo i just i walk in and he just thinks i'm all only there for treats he doesn't only want to treat yeah i mean i heard the bird yesterday for the first time i was you got it you have a bird now no oh the purr i heard the purr today well it's a purr that sounds like a bird yeah i just she's got the sweetest little chirps and purrs yeah it's so polite mango on the other hand like he's incredibly vocal and can adjust but it's just obnoxious most of the time you know like just demanding i almost seconded a motion from mango yesterday everyone said a while you'll see my face just in a look of pain it usually means he wants to climb up and i've been trying to block him and he decides to dig in i can we can take down the um thanks i think that was all streaming everyone so we had our pet check um so this was reconvening um our public meeting a mass gaming commission public meeting number it's still number four a lot incorrect um and um we just came from a executive session with um our applicant and our advisor are us amon attendants um i'll take a vocal because we're using this virtual platform good evening commissure of rye good evening i am still here thank you good evening commissioner hill i am here thank you good evening commissure skinner good evening i'm here first time i said good morning good afternoon and good evening all in one day in public and we're going to be saying good night soon and uh commissioner maynard good evening good night commissioner there we go okay um so in terms of our um we have i see some members from um mgm on board um i knew that we probably needed to verify our um what our next steps would be um we we thought that we would we have the opportunity commissioners um to proceed and um under section seven i'm item seven of our agenda to make a determination on american wagering inks application there was a suggestion that we um would might want to wait for another piece of information from um iab we um i know that the one proposal because that could be a condition i want to throw that back out but i think that there was a suggestion that we would not be making a determination i want to revisit that in the event anybody changed their minds okay so um to be very clear to the applicant we will want to revisit this matter and um i guess that from my perspective we have mgm waiting on their category one application as well as their tethered um um partner um of um that mgm i um director wells we've worked hard on our schedule um and in our our thought process i know that commissioner brian suggests that this applicant be pushed into january my preference would be ideally if we could um if they if they they could be the matters could be addressed that we'd be able to turn to this on monday i'm not sure um of the outstanding matters michelle brian you're looking for iab's piece this is for caesars madam chair not mgm right just trying to but is there is there a way to put them at the end of mgm and ppc's main cat one and address them once that's done in terms of what we're waiting for from iab is that the application from um from the parent company and the list of uh a fulsome list of the discipline so what the and the the entity part that was missing because we didn't include that in the initial request yeah yes so that would be the application we can have our licensing division do a deficiency review of that iab is doing no independent review of the entity qualifiers of this point but we can have a deficiency review performed on that and on the catalog of fines or catalog of discipline all right are you wouldn't iab wouldn't do the shortened review we do that for the applicant entity but we are not under the regulation we are not doing that for the entity qualifiers yeah unless we ask for something above the and you know i noticed that when we did this yesterday that that had been carved out to be the applicant and then the individuals and no entity qualifier so right now let's specifically want more that is the baseline threshold that's being done by iab that's right and that chair for scheduling um uh i've been in contact with uh goss for guarding mgm's application i know they do he does have a personal matter of long standing on the 20th so they're hoping they can avoid the 20th if possible but they i think it's the cat one but i don't know pat at pat mandamus on i don't know if you can't comment on that but that's my understanding to put them on monday i'm sorry karen what what for scheduling i think gus is unavailable on the 20th but does bet mgm need gus to be there is it just uh the sports book for mgm springfield where gus needs to be there karen karen discuss i just want to clarify the oh i didn't realize you're on i'm sorry i i do but clearly this takes precedence of anything else so it's the 20th is the best day make it so i'll walk my schedule around right here well just to be clear we're gonna go forward as soon as the commission is ready for us to go forward you know commissioners i know it's really late but we've got this whole group sitting here and looks like everybody's ready to go but i'm i'm not available madam chair i have got kids downstairs that need attention right now i'm not available it would be nice we have a meeting tomorrow that i need to finish looking at minutes for that i haven't had a chance to do it so it's just not going to happen tonight i like the idea and it would be nice i would love to accommodate but for me i can't go on beyond you know another half hour or so it's just and it's not fair to it's not fair to commissioners it's not fair to staff and it's i don't think it's fair to mgm springfield because they won't have my full attention is it at all possible that this matter could be continued it could be taken up tomorrow morning is that at all possible we have reg matters and things on tomorrow morning we we do have another matter and is it possible it is possible by an amendment of our agenda i um i understand i am i think i can say that i am alone tonight because and i'll say because i i'm in this office and i'm willing to to accompany you but i am hearing to my fellow commissioners that they they can't um and i'm i'm very i'm very sorry um it is it is there's a lot of a lot of things that we're all weighing and everybody is weighing their their various um priorities and i i'm sure myself um as i think about um where i am sitting right now and thinking about how i'm going to get all these meetings into the calendar the way that we need to um because i've probably been looking at that very closely um for our applicant today um you have some i guess we should be clear um and again mgm i'm hearing that um Karen up i i guess i'm going to have to talk to you up offline and get back to pat and and talk about another another proposal for days um i'm hearing you know tomorrow's a proposal and i'm not sure that's yeah my only my only thought i'm starting we're starting at 9 30 anyway tomorrow oh i i have this oh yeah you're right 9 30 okay so um we do appreciate it's been a very very long day today we're not asking at all to say please stay tonight it's been a very long day from all i'm including the yeah where you even started this public meeting yeah um so um president kelly and and uh and and daniel and jed and pat my apologies that we couldn't be clear earlier today um everybody has been more than patient this is um as you know right a process and we are we are going to attack this in a thorough fashion you've already been part of this so you can be particularly appreciative of where we are um if you will but give me um the opportunity to talk to the other applicant now i um i feel that we need to turn back to that matter they're not to completely you know push our luck here just want to put sort of all options at the table if the hearing could be continued rather than closed is there an option on friday for any time um i know that that day had been taken off the table from me um i am absolutely willing because i was going to be traveling i am taking that trip off the table now because um i had already decided that because um my husband and my daughter and her boyfriend will be attending the pats and raiders game without me so that that day i'm making that decision now because of the work um it was our christmas gift and this um so this is friday and that's what i was going to talk to caren about we can open up friday if we could have this discussion and then get back to everybody because i don't really want to publicly discuss my federal but no no i'm just saying i'm saying i don't know i don't know if friday is available for anybody else but i want it to be a i don't want my friday to be the factor anymore um because i can do an evening evening flight if i decide we're we're open to jet jet we're we're open to anything but we leave that to the commission and right that's what i'm saying the negotiation of our days well that's one day i that was a one day that was clear and in many ways it was kind of a gift for everybody to get caught up on right i was gonna say a lot of us a lot of us because of that tried to have that be the one day to do a number of things before the end of the month and so it's gonna be very difficult for me to clear that day okay so um i just wanted it to be known that it's not um that's not a factor for me anymore i'm chair i i and maybe i'm over underestimating what we've got tomorrow in front of us i could hop in on the morning if this was continued i just want to throw that out there so morning tomorrow morning tomorrow morning if we started that tomorrow we have to we have to ask um our council is this an emergency because there's nothing properly posted can we get it on and if everybody was willing to do an eight o'clock start i can't do an eight o'clock start madam chair i can't do that yeah this isn't the end of the afternoon we really shouldn't do it tomorrow it wasn't noticed for tomorrow right it's just not not an emergency but it what if it's a continuation of today is that a way to do it and maybe not in the morning but what about after the meeting tomorrow i mean i know after i would ask then that it would be i'm on public forum but i need to be with my husband at three o'clock tomorrow oh okay then we will take care of that i'm going to be with him yeah that's a priority yeah i can read i can be group after three but it'll probably three to four and out of pocket i think maybe we discuss this offline and get back to everybody i don't i think it's been a long day for everybody so just let us know you don't have to discuss this for us thank you yeah thank you there's a lot of very closed windows and there's only one i i have to preserve this month tomorrow three to four yep absolutely um so um we could possibly but again we have a posting problem tomorrow um and that would be you know if we didn't close out this it would be a continuation because i'm comfortable doing that if we don't adjourn this could we do you know a four o'clock and i can find myself in front of a computer somewhere madam chair yep no the schedule has been given to us for a few weeks now and yeah some of us have tried to build our others life around the schedules we were given and i would not be able to come here tomorrow four o'clock okay so you can't eat it okay so you there so that's i'm sorry brad that i can't then i'm trying to keep everybody in mind i'm just understood yep thank you so that comes back to monday madam chair excuse me i'm sorry as commissioner brian suggested a couple times could we take this scheduling matter up i just want to be respectful of the app of today's applicant that's why i'm talking that's why i'm talking about monday now because i feel we should return to the applicant if we can have all the pieces that's where i was going from the start commissioner so thank you um if we have all the pieces if we won't have the pieces then we have to shift and we go to mgm if they're available um i hear that gusts wouldn't be available on the 20th but would be available on the 19th ideally we could finish up this if there are all the pieces could fall together on monday morning and then we would go to mgm at one madam chair just to clarify once again i was having a private conversation with karen about what my schedule looked like but the 20th is the most convenient for the for the commissioners i will be here for the 20th madam chair so don't worry about me schedule as as it suits the university but we really work out as accommodating everybody and get really we're pretty good we're pretty good so um but i want to be respectful of this applicant so the question is the outstanding items could they be resolved by monday the start of monday and if not yeah go ahead i believe we could provide all of the requested material by the start of day on monday i guess i just wanted because we might end up working somewhat through the weekend to provide all of that in a fully completed fashion so i i would ask when would the commissioners need to receive the material in order to digest it before i discuss it so so madam chair there this is a cat three applicant so we do have dates baked into january so if the prioritization is the cat one then we can absolutely get to the cat ones next week and then make sure we start off wrapping up this this applicant i mean even if we can't get to it before we become unavailable next week i i hear you but i i think i understand that there's also some issues for our testing and karen if you could if you could built into our schedule where we are doing the tethered earlier was a testing issue does that get implicated here yes i mean i think a lot of this madam chair ties into tomorrow's meeting because tomorrow the commission is scheduled to approve internal controls if that those regulations pass and go forward on tomorrow we may have a few extra days in january to give the commissioners a little wiggle room but we had originally scheduled that all these decisions needed to be made by the 19th of january to give gli enough time to review all the internal controls and get all this uh information ready for an operation certificate to allow for a pre-march madness launch so that's why this is this is so hard right now is because if you push the determinations out too far the operation certificate timeline gets compressed and we may not be able to finish so i'll get more information from gli once we see what happens tomorrow with the regulations on the internal controls okay so i'm hearing you i know i asked this question but i don't know if i heard the answer just as this would be could mr. hendrix the application that lorata needs that has that been submitted not fine it has not yet we are literally working on that while we're in this so that probably is going to not be submitted until monday is that what i'm hearing or could it be submitted before because loretta's team needs to director lilios's team needs to do its work in other words am i hearing correctly we would not be ready to move on the african on monday morning first thing it doesn't sound like it from what we want to make sure that we give you uh obviously basically especially a very fulsome application for cei that will likely be filed at the earliest over the weekends it would be available at opening a business on monday but i want to acknowledge it's going to be a large application so okay so that's really helpful so yes mgm would you be prepared before first thing on monday morning yes yes excellent thank you all right so gentlemen um and i because i don't know if i see any of your women colleagues with you right now i think you can go get dinner um now back to our applicant um thank you very much thank you i thank you all of the kelly thank you so much all righty um okay so now we need to talk about what exactly does our applicant need to do for a new to do for us so that when we we do have them come before us again everything is nice and tidy and clean um i think we should also discuss um i think we won't discuss conditions now because that would be part of our disposition so it's really anything that supplements the application at this point correct hon like one is completing the application by our inadvertent um matter so that's being taken care of and then um second the list of the my say is how would i what's the word um i mean is it i would call them disciplinary actions infractions or yes thank you i wanted to tell you assessments and fines but it's really disciplinary actions so we'll get that fulsome list it may be in a um spreadsheet however um is there particular items of information that you want on that so that when it comes it's fulsome enough for commissioner you want the nature of it where it happened when it happened and if there were any but what the um is it specified in there loretta i think doesn't specify we actually we did we sent us a communication um good thing there's a and there's a um you know a chart in the application we sent a supplemental communication indicating exactly what we needed okay so we'll have all of that clear so that's going to be a supplement what's next is those two i think it's the the missing piece from suitability and then that list unless i don't know if any of the other commissioners had anything else that they wanted supplemented okay i don't have anything that i i think is in paper form for the applicants to provide but we still have to close out the discussion on the diversity spend i think that might i think that might be part of our disposition discussion commissioner skinner i think similar to maybe what we did yesterday commissioner yeah i agree i just i'm noting for the record no i think there might be a few other items on that but in terms of um anything so that the um seizures is complete and it's in everything we're expecting for our disposition discussion all right now um um with that said uh mr. Hendricks we have marked up the 19th and the 20th for these matters we will monitor when everything comes in and i'll take the temperature of my fellow commissioners to see if we can get this before us before before the um the end of the 20th otherwise we don't anticipate meeting on applications again until january or correct yeah the third we have other business and then it would be four so that's what we'd be looking at well thank you we will endeavor to provide that material as quickly as possible also making sure it's as robust as possible uh we'd love to make an agenda another 19th or 20th we also understand the commission has a lot on its plate so if it's later we understand and and the reason why i'm being particularly careful here is that i think you could get the piece that we're looking for on on on disciplinary action quickly and it was our inadvertent you know action that is causing a little bit of delay and so i am trying to be empathetic here and try to get you you heard so that's why i was persistent in this discussion everyone um because there is only really two items missing so thank you and and um thank you for your patience today um and we will reconvene on this matter as soon as it's reasonable for us to have an ability to review what's outstanding so thank you commissioners do you have anything else for the outfits just to thank them for their time and their their presentation yeah thank you very much thank you um and yes go right ahead oh sorry i was just going to say thank you as well for all of your time today thank you mr hashin okay let's get um let's get out of here um everybody is hungry so commissioners are all business some taking care of we'll be ready to tomorrow morning remember 9 30 at our next meeting is there any other commissioners business it's not madam chair i move to adjourn second thank you okay um christina hi hi commissioner hill hi mr skinner hi mr maynard hi and i vote yes five zero thank you everyone


okay hi guys now this is a this is a this is a this is all these little like mini oscilloscopes this is a DSO 138 now I've built a few of these about 11 11 or 12 of them the differences with this one and I never thought really to make a video before I'm doing it and it was quite a long drawing out on there there's quite a few there's quite a big old bundle of components here for these balls but the differences with this one this is the new model this one claims to have better noise or less noise on the signal it's updated firmware and also this one you solder the SMD parts there's a nice seam here which needs to go here and there's the SMD resistors that need to go on so pretty much everything now seems about the same these little feet and yeah everything else seems pretty much same it it almost looks like the the quality of the LCD screen has improved I've got some spare old from the old in the older model I mean the older model is okay but don't get me wrong these are not real oscilloscopes I mean they're basic very basic functioning and they're not like a they're not like a high quality one now I don't know if you can see there's a slight difference in shading if I turn that same way round there's a slight difference in shading that screen looks slightly bigger it does it looks slightly bigger no bigger in width but bigger in length not by much really talking maybe four mil but slightly bigger the board itself is the same size they both say they're 2.4 inch TFT LCD screens but they are different models or what you can see there underneath this flap that says 13700 oh it's just a part of them and this one says 13700 as well so so there's no real difference there it's just my imagination even though they did the actual screen itself does look slightly bigger yeah I'm gonna go by that that is slightly bigger maybe it's the encasement slightly bigger or whatever there is a slight difference in that and I think this this red looks a bit nicer than the orange so anyway yeah so I've never done SMD before I have got some kits in my drawer back there of future kits to put together and they've got some SMD parts in there trying to see what else we got so there's a little that's the voltage regulator SMD you got this IC here that's SMD I just hope now that's some of the videos I've been watching tutorials on SMD work I hope I was paying attention because I'm about to put into practice well I will put a couple of these things on in like real time on the video but I'm not gonna you know I'm not gonna bore anybody with the whole thing being in real time and to be fair I've got a couple of videos that I want to watch and about tubes uncle Doug on YouTube absolutely fantastic and I'm gonna have that on in the background while I'm doing this that's not how I'm actually gonna watch those videos I just want it to be able to be on in the background there's one way again so I'm ahead while I'm concentrating I will watch it with great you know using all my concentration so yeah I'm gonna go and put the kettle and make myself a cup of tea I can hardly see these even through this magnifying glass I'm looking through I can hardly see these and so I just hope I just hope that you know I picked up enough watching the videos TX bench I watched his video on SMD I watched I've watched a few actually on SMD so we'll have to see if I was paying attention or not before when I've been doing these it's always been these little capacitors that have been the struggle because I will insist on checking all the components as it says per the instructions of assembling these boards that you want to check everything all your resistors everything so today's gonna be a rock the rule of learning curve for me because I've got to check these components before I put them on according to the instructions you can't check the ICs and they should've got some you know the correct equipment which I don't have for doing that but to be fair in practice I don't check everything I really can't avoid I just take it as everything's gonna be there and if it is missing the capacity unfortunately I've got lots of spares now because like I said I've done these eleven or twelve of these but not this is the new model I had a breakthrough for a little while because I got upset with the person who was selling them to me because they started selling them assembled competing against me so I didn't want to play with them anymore I had to wait until I found somebody else no good price but I didn't realize I was gonna get a load of SMD and now I don't get it at any cheaper price than what I was getting before I just get a lot more work because I've got to get all these on before it used to be all these were pre-put on and I only had this to do now I've got to do this and these and I bought a bunch of them so there we go DSO 138 SMD work got to be carried out by me virginity to be broken on SMD and if I manage to do these and I'm happy with it I can crack on and do the other kits that I've got because the reason I haven't done them is because I'm scared to do these but I've got no choice but to do these and I just want to sit with a cupboard full of them and we never do anything with them so this is where I practice this is this is where I'm going to learn through you know getting it right or getting it wrong how to do it but I've not been there and you know the last month or so I have watched a couple of few videos on SMD so I've picked up one or two things and like I said we'll see if I was actually concentrating or not see how much of a mess I make at this right I'm gonna go make me cup of tea first though so I'll see you in a minute I thought just before I start I start doing this I just give you a little look at the now this is all new I never used to get one of these yeah I get this bit because this is the bit where you calibrate the probe and such which is it's pretty straightforward I mean the whole kit is pretty straightforward it's just quite a few bits to it but this is all new so this is a good one because they've given a breakdown of each part of the circuit and voltages so you can go through it bit by bit now fortunately I mean I say fortunately for me I've not had a single problem with any of these it's always been first time boot first time go very very happy but I have seen on YouTube a few people have had issues with these so so this is good this is obviously a response to a lot of these people have had to give them places to be able to do some diagnosing troubleshooting on what the problems are so that's great that's new to me this is just basically you know all your parts here's your resistors all the different resistors and where they go same for the jokes diodes you know pretty much self explanatory there and the user manual it's everything is there there isn't anything missed out as I've had these before and again you got some brief block troubleshooting here which is what I used to have before this part's the new part this is the new part this is what you never used to get before as well and this is the SMD part list which it doesn't look too much got six three that's nine plus a force first 13 17 18 19 20 23 just 23 SMD parts do you want there yeah that's the voltage regulator that's a good guess one yeah there's three ICs and I got three ICs probably got three ICs one two let me just IC we go L.O.A. for T.L.O.A. for NLM 1117 and STM 321 I think that might already be on here I think that's this STM 32 yeah that's already on there so they've put the IC on oh I hear both and sold as well as that because that's that is nice that's the nice stuff that I mean it's just it says you don't expect you wouldn't you wouldn't expect it to be it's not our focus is it honestly is Microsoft camera absolutely life cam that's what it is life cam HD you can't focus it it doesn't focus at least for my other one this went wrong with me using the other one but at least then I get to focus on the front if necessary I can twiddle it but on this one I can't twiddle anything so yeah I was hoping it was going to be a list of the improvements but I was actually looking on the website for that there it is and I'll put it over here and I'll tell you what it says