My name is Brett Burry, we're going to do a presentation today on WordPress. This is actually kind of part of a presentation we've done in Entrepreneur Week, but what I found was that people wanted something that was just at a much more beginner level than what we had presented at Global Entrepreneur Week. So Tyler and our Travis and I spoke and we thought, well, we'll just kind of, all those questions we couldn't get to, we'll put in this step by step. So what I'm going to do here today is that if you were to do a, how many of you have actually used WordPress before and have an installation? So it's a good portion of you guys, but we're going to step through how I might set up an initial site. It's a very beginner level, so you, the people who've already done it before may learn just a few things. If you've never done it before, this will be a lot of new stuff. So I'm just going to start in, with a very clean install of WordPress and then go from there. And I've got kind of a checklist that we're going to go through all these things, but it's the theme selection installations. The first thing we're going to talk about, then we're going to upload some media. We're going to install some plugins. We're going to, we're going to create a custom menu. We're going to set up a few widgets and we're going to create a blog post page and we're going to walk through the elements of a post and then discuss that WordPress taxonomy, which is tags and categories. And then I'll take some questions if you guys have those. You can write them down and have them ready to go and then I'll read through those. And if something's not clear during the presentation, we want me to slow down, just to shout, okay? Thanks. So what this is, is this is a clean install of WordPress. This is what it looks like. And we're going to toggle back and forth between two screens, but primarily this session is about the back end of WordPress, and sorry for a second, when I switched screens it reduced everything on the size of my screen where I can't read it. So I'm going to move this screen around. We're going to go to the dashboard. So regardless of who you have installed your websites or who you're hosting services, they might have different menu configurations. Right now this site that I put up for the purposes of this demo is on WP Engine. It's a hosting platform for WordPress websites. But this is just the clean dashboard. This is a brand new installation of WordPress. This is what it looks like. We're going to kind of walk through these menu steps to see what's in there. The first thing is we want to pick a theme for this. This is the default theme, and that's actually what we're going to select. But I thought I'd show you some tips on how to select other themes as well. So I've been to you guys using custom themes or premium themes, the things that you paid for. There's one person in there and another person. So the way this works is that I'm in this interface. I see the standard theme that WordPress comes with, which is actually you can really tweak it to make it a great looking theme, and I'm going to click on themes. And so it gives me the default ones, and WordPress, the way they run their themes is it's 2017, it's 2015, it's 2016, and then so on down the line for their different default themes. So let's just say we don't want to use any of these, or we want to take a look and see what are our options for maybe picking something else to make our site look like. So what I do is I would click right here, and I want to add a new theme to my blog. So I'm going to click on add a new theme.  These are kind of slow to redraw. So you can look at the feature themes, you can look at popular themes, latest favorites, you can actually filter themes. So let's say that you wanted to only look at e-commerce themes, or you're going to do a blog about entertainment. You could kind of filter those thousands and thousands of results down to what you wanted to. My recommendation is that you actually probably just only use something that's on the popular list. And this is the reason being a lot of these things are free and it could be a wonderful theme, but if somebody somewhere else in the world who contributed this theme decides to get a new job or no longer supports it or does something else, you may have something that's kind of a nobody's developing that, but if you get a theme that's really popular and somebody's making some money on it, then you can assume that they will actually put the effort in to keep it up and running. So sometimes I run into people who pick something that look beautiful and it just gets abandoned and then you're kind of stuck. You can always switch themes, but I just make a recommendation to spend a little bit of money or pick something that's really popular or just use one of the default WordPress themes that are in here. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to show you how to take a look at one of these themes and we're going to just type in 20 in the search and then that'll kind of filter down just because I know how WordPress sites are named into a prior WordPress installations. So I don't think we have 2014, we didn't have 2012 in our system. So I'm going to click on this 2012 and I'm going to check it out and see what it looks like. And so this is kind of a really good way to see a whole bunch of themes, but honestly WordPress's delivery of the content doesn't do them a really good presentation of what they look like. This theme is not too appealing when you look at it with this default content. So what I'm going to tell you is we're going to install this theme and I'm going to show you a couple other places to go and get ideas about what a theme might really look like. I mean, if I were to see this, I wouldn't say, you know, I'm sold. This is the theme for my blog that I want. It looks pretty plain, but if you see some examples of this populated with content and configured, it's much more appealing. So what I'm going to do is we're going to actually install this one. We're not going to develop this one.  And this little thing right here, I always like to see some stars and some content. So it makes me think people are commenting on it. It can kind of get an idea that it's a living theme. Some of them have, you know, they might be in there, the list, but there are no comments on them. It's no one is actually using it as the inference. And I'm always kind of a little aware, even though it seems this is perfect for what I'm thinking of using. I just don't do that because I think it's too risky. So I'm going to click install. So where we were, we were back at the dashboard. I'm just going to retrace my steps. I went to themes. I went to the themes here. This connection is actually really slow today. So we're going to pretend that loads this page. We're going to pretend we search for 20, and this is my choice, and I'm going to click install. Well, this is waiting. I didn't expect to have internet technical difficult days. But let me show you a couple. We'll cut to the keynote, and well, that's happening. So these are some URLs that I want to just, I'm going to click through these real quick. I wasn't expecting this to take so long to upload my live demo. These are some good sources for themes that you can find. There's a place called Theme Forest. It's an internet marketplace for digital products. You can buy Photoshop templates. You can buy WordPress templates. You can buy little bits of software graphics. But if you go to Theme Forest, I believe it's .NET. There's tons of things to buy, and you can use those to look at the previews. That's also where a lot of premium themes are, and so you can see what someone who's actually making a living, making WordPress themes. They have much better work of themes, meaning that they're populated. They're trying to make some money, so instead of just having the robot there, they have lots of content. So it looks like this thing is actually uploaded now. I'm going to click on activate. OK, so now what you see, we're back to our screen we had before. We had 2012, 2015, 2017, and 2016. So I've installed a new WordPress theme. I haven't customized it yet. I haven't done anything. But I'm going to redraw our sample blog. And now we see that my new theme in here is installed in a different browser window. And this is what that new theme default looks like. Just to show you, sometimes you can toggle back and forth between themes. I can click on 2015. I could activate that. And then that would be our theme. I'm going to jump back here to this particular theme that we were looking at. And I'm going to activate it. We'll get it back on the right location here. So I'm going to go back to my realm. I'm going to reload this again. And here we are. So I've kind of showed you how you go around and shop for themes. We can go to that theme for site real quick. So this is that marketplace. So if I go to WordPress and I go to, let's say, e-commerce themes, they'll just show me tons of options. And what I wanted to show you on this, just because they're in there doesn't mean anybody's making any money on them. Or they're a good theme. It just means they're trying to monetize them. So what I always look for when we're looking for a theme is I like to see someone who is a top seller. Some people can make a phenomenal amount of money selling WordPress themes, maybe $50 a piece. And they're up in the many, many thousands just for one theme. So when you're in here, let's just look at WordPress. And we're going to sort by bestsellers. And we'll just click on this first one that popped up. OK, so this guy is a power elite author. You might look for something like that. You can look at the other things that they've done in the portfolio. This person sold $416,000, looks like $60 bills. It's a pretty lucrative business to be in. So it doesn't look like you're going to go out of business. So I just want to show you, when you're picking these things, just because they're in the theme force does not mean that they have the wherewithal to keep going. So look for somebody who has lots of sales. And that's just my tip. And then you can also look for live previews. And so the reason I like to shop for themes here is that they're populated with content. That 2010 theme that we loaded up, it's hard to visualize what that could possibly look like. But these people have a lot more content and be more appealing. So I think that's what we're going to talk about for the theme installation. And then the next thing we're going to talk about is uploading to media, to your WordPress site. So I'm going to work in at five. So we're back to this particular theme. And the way I like to get organized is that sometimes you don't know exactly what you're going to write or you're not sure what your blogs are going to be populated with. But you can start gathering assets for that blog as you're thinking about it. This is a good image I found. This is a photograph that I've taken. And so what I do is I just set up some folders and it's going to be called Images.  And so that's kind of the content that we're going to use for this post today. So the way you do this, I'm going to do one at a time. And what I want you to know is that sometimes you find images around the web and they're just a series of numbers and letters. Or if you take pictures on your phone or your desktop, it might be image one, image two, image three, or a snapshot with a date and time, try to name these something that's descriptive because a lot of times if you're blogging, they're not going to find your blog post, but they may find an image in Google Image Search that you've named properly and it probably would help overall just for SEO purposes.  So I'm just going to show you just one of these, we'll do this Western Auto Value. So we're going to upload the Western Auto Value. But this gets uploaded and this becomes part of my media uploading. We're going to talk about the different types of media that you could upload. So I'm going to click on this and it's in my library now. I'm going to click on that and this is the image. And so it gives me a URL. So if I actually type or copy that, I'm going to post that into a different browser. This is behind a little bit of a firewall for this demo and I'll paste it into this browser, which I already got permission to upload things. This is going to load. But what I wanted to show you is that you can do like a little bit of a digital asset management. So let's say you don't have your blog written, but you've taken some pictures of your grandkids or the high school football game. You can actually just upload them to WordPress. You don't have to make a page or post or anything. In all these URLs, you can reach those assets directly just by sharing those. So you don't have to, you can use WordPress and you don't have to write articles. You just use it as your own private image library if you wanted to. So this is a picture of the Western Auto building in Kansas City and I've uploaded that asset to my media library and now I can reach that and I could share this asset if I wanted to with this URL with whoever I wanted to. If I had to do something for a client, I wanted to show them a picture of some project that I'm working on. It doesn't have to be listed on your website as part of an article or a post. It's already in your media library. So that's that. So there's a little bit of information on here when you upload an asset to tell you about Disney the Dimensions, 1983,000, 20. This is a really big file. I think this is maybe the Wikipedia file for the Western Auto building. It tells you what kind of asset it is. It's a JPEG. It gives you a URL, it has a title on it. You can write a caption, an alt text and a description. So every piece of media that you upload, you can actually tag it with some information and the better the description, the more likely it's going to be found somewhere in through a search engine. So just make sure, just don't upload it up there. You've named the image something that's a descriptive image and then you can actually give it the alt text. So when I roll over that image for browsers that enable that, that's the text that's going to pop up and then you can also give it a description and then sometimes people that are, if you do Google image search, you'll show the description. So we're just going to do something real quick here. And then just pause. Okay, so those are the descriptions we put on this particular asset. And another thing I want to show you real quick is that this is kind of a Pullman's Photoshop. If you want to use it for that purpose, but I can edit this image. So let's say you don't have any image editing software inside a WordPress. I could rotate this. I could crop it. I could reduce the size. I could scale it down. So I'm going to actually just make this 2000 instead of that larger image. I'm going to scale it down. Actually, that's larger, so I'm going to make it 1200. And so we'll scale it down to that particular size. So sometimes you upload some photos and they're huge. You can actually use this to do a little bit of photo manipulation. So I'm going to save that and we're just going to close this out. So the next thing we're going to do is remember I showed you that assets folder we had. We're going to upload everything else to this. We're just going to upload them again and I'll drag all these over here and we're going to drop these files in the upload. So what I could have been doing, put my blog together. I don't know what I'm going to write, but I do know some great images that I've taken over the years and whatever project to start saving them. And then you can upload them to your WordPress and do some stuff in the background if you want to. So this is going to take a little while to do. So the next thing I want to do is that you can upload all kinds of assets. I could upload a recording to this website if I wanted to. I could upload a video to the website. I could upload PDFs. And so what I've done is I made some PDFs of these images that we have here. And I'm going to upload those. So again, I'm just going to show you and we uploaded all this stuff. It's part of our library now. Again, it's giving us those things that I would fill in and this just might be some sort of blurb or some sort of graphic I found this last night when I was getting some assets. So the plugins of the themes or the PDFs I made here, I just made two PDFs and I can also upload PDFs to my media file. So I've got my two PDFs that I have in there. And similarly, you can give somebody this URL on this PDF. So it's not on your Dropbox. It's not, you know, it's not in your Google Cloud account. It's just sitting in your WordPress media library. So when these things get up, just plot to this PDF, it has a URL. And so I grab that and I'm going to go over here to my Chrome and open up another tab, paste that in there. And now I've used my WordPress installation as a little bit of a file management system and I've got a PDF that's going to load into this particular system. So I think we've talked about the theme selection installation and we did some media uploading. So now we've got enough stuff to write an article if we want to, but I want to install a couple of plugins first before I write that particular article. So I don't know if you guys have installed any plugins, but the way WordPress works is that plugins add extra functionality. The core WordPress is a free program that there are people all over the world, literally tens of thousands, if not more, writing little enhancements and tweaks to WordPress. And the way you add those to your site is that you go to the plugins tab and I'm just going to click on the install plugins to see what the default is, because that's kind of what we're looking at right now. So as a default, this plugin comes standard with every WordPress. If you have an account with automatic, if you don't have an account with automatic, you probably want to get one because they'll give you a little ID number and this is a spam reduction tool that becomes standard. But when people post things to your blog, this kind of detects that it might be spamming. So that's a default thing, but we're going to actually look for a couple of plugins to add to this website. And one of them here is, this is the thing I'm going to show you. It's advanced image style, look at that. First I'm going to pause on this particular page. Similar to how we shop for themes inside of the WordPress shell, you can also shop for plugins. So you're still inside of your website and these are the plugins that are available and they're literally thousands and thousands of them. So let's say you want to type in a search engine, let me see SEO, we'll just type that in. And it'll give you a list of SEO plugins that type a bit pop up here. And if you look for another data, so it happens. See if you see some different things there. So we're going to look at images. And it'll give us some things that help us manage photo galleries and things like that. So here you could spend hours going through all of these things. We're just going to click on some of these just to start your smush is the name of this one. So I'm just going to give you some tips for installing plugins. Similarly to the themes, these things are free. You can install something that will work or not work. And so this is the box that people have when you get to get some details about that particular plugin you're thinking of using. And again, I look for people that have active installations. It looks like people are using this. They've updated it recently because even though it's described as something that may work perfectly, I always look for something that's been installed by tons of people. If you're going to, it's always fun to experiment with stuff and be the first person to try. But if it's having to do with your business or if you're going to be afraid you're going to lose some time fixing things, you might not want to do it. So you can also look at the reviews for these things. And so I can install this now. I'm not actually going to install it. I like to read the reviews. I like to look at the screen snapshots, the FAQs, those type of things. And it just kind of gives you an idea. It's just like shopping. You're just figuring out what it looks like if legit or not. But this one looks like a very popular active installations, one million. That's a monster amount of installations. I would be comfortable if somebody had like 10, 20, 30,000 installations for what seems like a common plug-in. And if it's really an esoteric thing, if you just see a few hundred or a few thousand, it'd be fine. So I just wanted to show you that. So we're actually looking for this thing called advanced image styles. And I'm going to look for that. And I'm just going to install this in here. So I'm going to install now. So it's installed in my system, but it's not activated. We're going to activate it in a second here. Then the next thing we're going to look for is a tiny MCD advanced. I'll tell you what these are in a second. I just want to show you. So I'm thinking about doing this. I can see from this screen that there's more details that I got one million plus active installations. I'm going to install it now, but I'm not going to activate it. So now, before we just have the single plug-in, and I'm going to click here, now I've got three things. And so if you want to see what the plug-ins are installed in your WordPress blog, this is where you would go. You could see them active or inactive. And then after you install these, every once in a while you'll log into your admin panel and there will be some updates that this particular plug-in manufacturer or the software developer has released an update and they'll update automatically. So what I'm not going to do, I'm just going to click right here and my bulk action could be to update all of these at once. You probably want to make sure your backups are working. You backed everything up because this is a point in your development where things could go wrong. I say that WordPress works amazing. I mean, we use it for all our companies, almost all projects involve some sort of WordPress website that we may customize or do database development on the back end to enhance it. So rarely does anything go wrong. So when I say it's not like this is not a precarious application that you're using, 99.9% of the time, everything works great. But I would always back up my stuff before I did a bulk update. But if you install daily backups, it's not a big deal. You're only going to lose the days, work or work or something goes wrong. You could also delete things if you wanted to remove those things as well. So I just wanted to show you that, that's how you can check all of those things off. So we've got two things installed, but we actually haven't done anything. We haven't activated those. And before I activate those, I wanted to, we're going to create a page and a post. So I want to tell you the difference. Does anybody, I'll tell you the difference between pages and posts. Database-wise, they're virtually exactly the same thing. It's just a document that you're adding, a record you're adding to the WordPress database that is going to be, they're called a page or a post. Maybe the differentiation between the two is a page is something that is going to be there longer. So if I'm going to say I'm a travel blogger and I have an article about myself and my travel business company and those things will be pages. But if it's my trip to China and my trip to Los Angeles and my trip to, you know, Greenland, those are all posts. It's more so your, the things, if you're looking at a magazine that the front pages that cover the magazine but inside that cover it's about the authors, it's about the publication itself. Those are pages. But all of those articles that were changed on a monthly basis, those are more posts. So you can decide and you can actually create either one, but that's technically the difference. Now some themes come automatically that they will, this particular page or aggregation is showing everything that's a post or everything that's a page. And so you might want to, if all your articles are written as posts and you want to make some pages, you can actually do that. You can just toggle them back and forth between those two possibilities. So I just want to tell you to do some pages and posts. So right now we're going to look at all the posts that we have in here. This is a default install. We just got one. WordPress installations come with one article or a post install is called Hello World. And so you can test at that and that's what shows up. So if we look at this particular thing that we're on, this particular site, this is it. I come down here. This is the default post for that particular thing. And so what I like to do is, just as a tip for development is I like to use this as a scratch pad. So I actually say add new and I put a post in here and it's called scratch pad. I can have scratch pad one, two, three, four, five, whatever I want to do. And then I just say that as a draft. I never publish my scratch pad, but I find it workflow-wise. I can get some of my content set inside of the WordPress installation. So it's not really an article that I've written that I'm ready to publish. I just create something called a scratch pad and I can put notes in here and play around with things. So I made some, I grabbed some content from some places. And I just grabbed some content that we're going to use to create some articles today about the city. I'm going to copy all that right now. I'm just going to throw it into my scratch pad, okay? So now it's not really an article. It's just my notes, but I'm saving them inside of my WordPress. So if I ever want to go to that URL and I can save the draft. You could actually give this your own login. Let me click here to add for visibility. So I apologize, but the screen through is that I can password protect this. So it's published. I can look at it at the office even though I'm not logged in. I want to see what my notes are. So I can publish this and I can just make it private password protected. So it's technically it's on the internet, but only I know the password. And then when I want to go to this URL and see what my notes are for something, it's my own private content out on the internet. So I thought I'd show you that. So I'm just going to save this as a graph. And so now I've created the scratch pad. So remember those two plugins that we installed with the advanced image styles and the tiny MC. I'm going to see this dialogue box here. This is the poor man's Microsoft Word in here. This is how I edit the stuff. So I see I've got Western Auto building. I want to select that and I'm going to make it bold. These are the tools that come standard with a default installation WordPress. And you can do a lot of stuff there. If there's a plugin that I like to use and it's called TinyMCE Advanced and it provides a different set of tools that you can customize. So that's one of the plugins that we just installed. So I'm going to go to my plugins and see which ones are installed. And I haven't asked and I'll leave this page. I haven't activated it yet. So let me go back to plugins. So now I'm going to activate this TinyMCE. So it was installed, we did that. And I'm going to activate this and it's going to activate it and it's also going to give me a settings. So some plugins actually give you the settings there. So now I see settings instead of activate. Some of them actually create other menus in your system. So let's say I were to have installed a different type of plugin. So I can go to the settings from this page but you'll notice now I've got something out here called TinyMCE Advanced and that's where I would go to configure that. And so there's not always a default place and it's kind of confusing sometimes for me. I install a new plugin. Sometimes they'll add their own menu item up here and it'll have its own separate thing in the menu bar. Other times they tuck it inside of tools. Other times they tuck it inside of settings. So if you install something you might actually have to look through this entire menu to see where it's at. If it's actually going to be a new header or if it's going to be a subcategory under tools or settings. I just thought to tell you that because I always end up poking around in here. So we're going to click on settings and we're going to reconfigure the tools that we have available to us when we want to write a blog post. So these are the other options that are in there. And so I'm just going to look at these and let's just say I want to put an underline. That seems like a pretty common thing that you might want to have inside of your tools when you're editing stuff. So I'm going to drag the underline thing up there to that toolbar. And let me see what else I'm going to add. I'm going to put, I don't use the emoticons but I'm going to put it up here to see what it looks like when you want to write something drop the emoticons in there. So now what I've done is I've modified this particular list of tools that are going to be available to me when I write a blog post or a blog page. So I saved my changes. And so now we're going to go back to our scrapbook, I believe. I can't remember if we did a page or post, a little fancy. It's a sample page, all posts. So this is our scratch pad. So I'm going to click on edit. I should probably just show you this while we're here is that this is going to keep track of all your articles over time.  You've got the author, you've got the category. So we haven't talked about if you want to apply to something and we're going to have the tags that you would actually apply to an article. And it tells you when it's last modified. And you can, all of these things are sortable. So if you want to, so you can look at the content. This is obviously, you're not needing that because there's only one or two here. So I'm going to click on edit, okay? And so what's going to happen now is we're going to see those revised menu from the tiny MC plugin on the head. So now I've got my underlying thing that I put in here. I've got my emoticons that I added there so you can modify this as you work to show whatever tools you want to put in there. So the next thing I'm going to show you is we're going to add some media to this dummy article that we put together. And so let's just add a picture of this 1920s Kansas City city market right here. So I'm going to say, this is the same paragraph I repeated over and over again by the way. So I put my cursor right here in my page and I'm going to click on the add media and remember you can use this to actually add new things but we're going to click on this tab right here that says media library and this shows us all the stuff that we added before. So I've created a page, I've added some text to that page, I've modified my tools available to me and we're going to add something in here. And I think this picture is the 1927 city market photo. So let me see, city market history. I'm going to say it's 1927 city market history. So I'm going to insert this into the post but before I do that, what happens when you upload one of those images to WordPress is it takes, let's say it was a 1000 by 1000 pixel image. And just in case you're not familiar a pixel 72 pixels equals an inch or so approximately. So if you, I think that's how it translates and so you can see what these sizes are. So each theme comes with certain default things. So if I upload a picture that is a certain size, by default it's going to make it into a couple of other sizes just to make it into smaller ones.  Well, I don't want to have to force the user to upload all those huge images when I'm only going to show them thumbnails. So what we're going to do is we're going to insert this in here into the full size is this size and that's whatever I uploaded. But they're going to make some common elements here. So we're going to put this in at 300 by 240 or I could put a thumbnail. So I'm going to put that in there and I'm going to insert that into the post. So I've inserted this into the post and I don't, and so that's what it looks like but you can see the text is not wrapping around and not really happy with how that looks. So what I can do is when I click on an image that I've inserted in here it gives me this little toolbox and I can click on here and edit that particular thing. So I can align it's center. I can link it to things. I have some advanced options. I can say it's center, right, left, none. I can edit the original image. So I can update that I'm not going to do anything. Remember that other plugin that we installed the advanced image styles plugin? I'm going to go back to my plugins and I'm going to activate that. First I'm going to save this before I get out of here. So now I've inserted this image. So I'm going back to my plugins. Okay, so now we're going to activate this advanced image styles. Okay, so that's activated. We're going to go back to our page, or to our post. And so we're going back to our scratch pad where we're editing this stuff. Now we've got an article down here that we'll put together, just cobbling it together, I'll put it. Okay, so now when I click on this image, I've got my advanced image styles and I click on here and you'll see that I've got this padding down here. So now what I want to do is I'm going to put 10 pixels around all of it. And I want to, let's see, So now you see what's happened. As I drop my image in and it's given me some space around there and it's wrapped the text around the thing. So I just, I don't know why they took this out of WordPress but it's almost, I installed almost every site that I have because it used to have something that was built in. So every once in a while, they may take WordPress from one version to the next and you may lose something that you really relied upon before. So I'm going to change these to 20 pixels around because I wasn't happy with the spacing around there. And so now that's what it looks like. So we made a blog post, inserted an image, dropped it in there, put a border around it. And now I'm going to click save. And so now we've got some content that we can use to put in a post that we're going to make. So the next thing we're going to do is we're going to try to customize this site a little bit with some menus and some other items. So a lot of times when you install a theme into the system, we're going to look and see how many posts we have right now and how many pages. So look at those pages. I think I should have, I should have logged in on my phone. I think my phone's internet access is faster. We call you guys probably online at the same time too. So we've got just this one sample page in here and we have a post that we know that we created before. So I'm going to jump down here to appearance. Remember, we installed that theme and we put this default one in here. So I'm going to go to my themes. Okay, so we're back at the themes. Okay, so this is my active theme. I'm going to click customize, okay? So later versions of WordPress come with some like a little bit of previewing tools and so we're going to actually modify this site to add some of the content that we've uploaded here. Okay, so I'm going to click on customize and hopefully it'll load faster. So just by the way, this particular installation I have, it calls every new website, Bretbury blog that comes in here. So these are my options available on this particular theme for customizing this 2017. So I have some site identity here. My site title I can put in here and we'll call this AC, okay? So that's our site title. Then I can put my tagline in here. And we'll just change this a little bit to show you how this works. You're super powered, everything. Okay, so I'm going to save this and you see that those things change in my preview so I can see what they look like and make them longer, shorter, whatever. I can check and see what this looks like on the tablet I wanted to. I can check and see what this looks like on a phone if I wanted to. So I can see my things just by pulling around down there before I publish it. So that's actually a pretty good tool and everybody should know that most people are going to look at almost every site on their phone now. So this actually may be the most important look of your site. It may look spectacular on your desktop but realize that the people are looking at it are going to see this. And so I'm going to click publish. And so now if I go over to my demo over here. So we've got our title that's on the live site now. We just changed that inside of the app and inside of this thing. So next thing I want to do is my customization menu. And yeah, I just published. Published is synonymous with save on this thing. And that's what I like to kind of preview this stuff because I didn't actually have to go over there. I was just showing you for purposes of that's what it's going to look like. This is a really good preview window that they have on over here. So let's look at the colors that we're going to have. We're just going to use, you can, different themes have different things. We're just going to keep what we have but I could actually go in here and select whatever hexadecimal equivalent I wanted to or use this palette to select something different if I wanted to make my background color. See it's changing the colors on those words. And I can say this is really subjected to this theme but it's analogous to lots of things that you find in different themes. So I'm going to go back and we're not going to change the colors. I hope not. Maybe I just, so we're just going to put light here before we apply it again. There's that. We should jump back a little bit more. So let me go here and we're going to go to, just want to get us back on the right path here. Okay, so then I have header media. Right now this particular thing shows up on tons of websites. So we can add a new image to our background right now using this system. There's going to be some default sizes or recommended sizes for this image. Honestly, I don't recall what they are at the top of my head but we're going to add a new image and we're going to replace that cactus I think or that plant or something else. So I click on add a new image and I come to my media library. So I can add something brand new to put on our blog post. So I've grabbed, let's see what I've got. I thought this might be a good thing for our Kansas City blog. We'll see what it looks like. So I'm going to select that and just put it in there, right here. Now this is our, I haven't published yet but we'll just see what this looks like. Is that looking, that's not bad. So we'll publish this. So we took a theme and we're going through the steps to modify that theme to customize it. We load this. Now this is our background for our WordCamp blog that we're putting blog posts for you. I've actually just looked at that. So that's pretty cool. Okay, so that's how you do the header media. You can actually, you know, you go to those websites where they have video that's rolling. You can buy some video online that kind of loops and that could be an animated GIF if you wanted to, you can do lots of stuff. It does tell you the sizes of the video, 2,000 by 1,200 pixels and it has some like a little website and kind of having the same thing loop through. This is where you would add it to have that header video. So the next thing we're going to do is we said we're going to create some menus. That was one of our steps here. So I can, I have a top menu and I've got a social links menu. So let me look and see what's in my top menu right now. So I go to my blog. I've got home about blog and contact in there. So when I configure my website, it'll give me some other options that I can add content. We'll also notice that before we only had that one post in there, that hello. When I, my first published step on this particular theme added a bunch of default posts into the system to kind of guide me along and how to configure this. So before we just had one page, it was Hello World. Now by clicking that one button, they've added this post, a sample, a homepage section and they've added an about article and they've added a blog article which is the one we had before and they've added a contact article. So they kind of do a big favor. It's like almost all sites having a ballot and a contact and those things. So they've kind of configured this homepage automatically to do a lot of work for you. So we can add different images and different contents to that particular thing. But right now I was going to show you how to do a menu. So I can add menu items to this if I wanted to. I could say a homepage section, blog contact. I could add a new page that I'm going to create. So what I'm actually going to do is I'm just going to take out my about page. I'm just going to add something and scratch pad. Okay, it's a page. I'm going to press this. I'm going to scratch pad. So I've added scratch pad. There it is. I didn't add it, it's not, I just put it in there as a placeholder. There should be a page called scratch pad in there now. Not the one we created, the one I just named. So you can modify that. I can take out some of those things. So we created a new menu here. And see this little social media menu at the bottom here? I can add things to that as well if I want to. So trying to figure out what we want to do next. We set up some, we're going to set up a widget. That's something else that's very common. Is that when you customize your WordPress themes, there's a functionality that, you know, you add plugins to systems. Well, widgets are kind of like that because they enhance things and there's certain areas of themes like a footer or a header or a sidebar. Those are all places where you drop in new widgets to help customize things. So we're going to add some widgets to this particular theme. Let's take a look and see what we've got right now. Right here is a place where these are widgets. There's an archive, categories, metadata, login. We're going to change that a little bit. So I'm going to click right here and I'm going to go to widgets. Okay? So I have a blog sidebar. I have a footer and I have a footer two here. So each theme comes with different widget areas. You can have a theme that would have multiple widget areas at the top or the bottom or the side. It's just whatever the developer does. These are pretty common. So your main page of your blog looks like this, but when I actually go to an article, you'll see that my article content's going to be there. But on the side of that is going to be a place for me to customize some widgets. So I'm going to show you what this looks like. We're going to put some new sidebar widgets on here. So we've got text find us, search, and about this site. But we're going to click add a widget. And these are things that come as defaults. There's audio, categories, custom HTML, gallery, images, metadata. And as you add different plugins, they may give you different available widgets that appear in this thing. So we're going to put something in here. And we're just going to put a tag cloud, just to have something in here. And so the tag cloud is going to be just our tags that we put on things. And we're going to show the tag counts on that particular thing. And then we'll click add a widget. Another one. And we're just going to put this in here powered by, let me see here. We can drop an image in here too. We'll do that real quick. We have our image library. We're going to add an image widget on here. And we're going to put plot twist in here. We're just going to put plot twist in as a thumbnail. So we're going to add that to the issue. So I'm going to publish this. Let's see what this looks like. I'm not sure why things aren't moving up in there. So I'll figure out, I think I don't know if it's the connection or what's going on. But we added some widgets to the system. So the next thing is, we wanted to talk about, just briefly, your taxonomy on your articles. So most of the ways that people are going to find you is that you're going to have blog articles or pages that have certain topics. The WordPress comes in with a certain taxonomy on all those pages and posts. So let's go to our pages here. All the pages we have in our system. And over time, we have 9.56. Let me do this one thing quick and then I'll take some questions. Thank you. You're going to edit this. And so the content that you put on the blog is going to have some tags and some categories on it. And so we're running out of time here, but what I want to tell you is that the distinction that you need to make is that anytime you put a category in there, somebody's going to be able to click on that category and find all of the pages or posts that you've put under that particular category. So let's just say this is Kansas City and you might have the crossroads and the river market and the plaza as your three categories, okay? But within those categories, you could have a tag that's called restaurants and a tag that's called shops and a tag that's called streets or something. So if I want to click on streets of Kansas City, it would cross across all of my three river market crossroads and plaza categories. Or if I want to click on restaurants, I would find all the restaurants. So it's just two different ways for you to pluck your content out of the articles that you've written. So I think we're running, we've got three minutes left and I don't know how long before the next session starts. 10, so does anybody have any questions? Yes? Oh, absolutely, yeah. Thanks. Go ahead. Add keywords to the media and image library. Right here where it says alt text. The alt text in the description, you can add those keywords in there if you wanted to. And you can separate them by commas, you can write a full sentence in there if you wanted to. So I've done a plug, I didn't realize. Oh, that was a timekeeper, not the next speaker. So that's where you would add them on that image library. Any other questions? Yep, excuse me. Oh, yeah, I'll be in the back of the room if you have any questions. Thank you very much.


Four days after the airing of this space pod, one of the most enigmatic and distant objects in the solar system will have all of its secrets revealed. Pluto has been a mystery to astronomers in the 85 years since its discovery, and NASA's new horizon probe is about to reveal everything. This is your space pod for July 10, 2015. For something less than the size of the continental United States, Pluto's recent history is marred in quite a bit of controversy, but if we're going to talk about Pluto's history, we actually first have to look at Uranus under the telescope. Through the use of Newtonian mechanics, it was discovered that there were perturbations in Uranus' orbit. After Neptune was discovered and its mass calculated, it was speculated that a larger object was needed to explain these, and the hypothesis of Planet X was born. In 1894, Percival Lowell, a businessman and astronomer, founded the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and in 1906, Lowell commenced a search for Planet X in Uranus. The observatory conducted this search for nearly a decade until Lowell passed away in 1916. Another decade would pass due to Lowell's widow attempting to seize the observatory's assets. The search finally resumed in 1929, and a 23-year-old fresh astronomer named Clyde Tombaugh was given the task. The discovery of the potential Planet X occurred on the 18th of February 1930, only a year into Tombaugh's survey. Using a blink comparator to rapidly switch between two plates exposed on the 23rd and 28th of January, a small speck was seen moving across the static stars behind it. After more imagery was obtained, a telegraph announcing the discovery of this new distant world was sent to the Harvard College Observatory on the 13th of March 1930. It immediately made global headlines, and Tombaugh was an overnight celebrity. Tombaugh advocated for a name to be assigned to the object quickly, and several were considered, but one from an 11-year-old schoolgirl from Oxford, England, Venetia Burry, became the leading contender amongst the astronomers, Pluto, the Roman god of the underworld. The official naming occurred on March 24, 1930 at Lowell Observatory. There were three choices for the astronomers, Minerva, Chronos, and Pluto. A vote was taken, and the result was unanimous. Pluto would be its name. Venetia was given 5 pounds, or the equivalent of 430 US dollars for her name's suggestion. Pluto resonated with Lowell Observatory because Pluto's first two letters, P and L, are the initials of Percival Lowell. The difficulty in resolving Pluto is anything but a small speck made study of it extremely difficult. Initially thought to have a mass near Earth, in 1948 this was revised downwards to about the mass of Mars, then revised further downwards in 1976 to no larger than one one-hundredth the mass of Earth. A surprising discovery occurred in 1978, Pluto had a moon, named Sharon after the ferryman of the dead. This allowed for an extremely precise measurement of Pluto's mass, and once again, down it went, this time to one-fifth the mass of the Earth. Decisions by the Hubble Space Telescope have helped us resolve Pluto and Sharon, and several more moons have been found in orbit around Pluto. We even got some detail from Pluto's surface. In 2006, a controversial decision was approved to downgrade Pluto from a major planet to a minor planet, what can also be called a dwarf planet. This was prompted by the discovery of other objects in the solar system that may be similar to Pluto, but we'll talk about that in greater detail during next week's space pod. But now it's New Horizons time to shine. Launched in January 2006, the flyby is set for July 14th, just about twelve thousand five hundred kilometers above the surface, aiming to gain understanding into the geology and morphology of Pluto and Sharon, their surface composition, and the atmosphere that may still be lingering around Pluto. This is the latest photo as of the airing of this space pod, a complex looking little place. And with our exploration of the plutonium system, an era of space exploration of our solar system will finally come to an end. Thanks for watching this space pod. I'm Jared Head. If you'd like to monitor NASA's New Horizons probe as it's currently on approach to Pluto, you can actually go to Pluto.jhuapl.edu. There you can get the latest imagery and updates from the New Horizons team. Also, don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe to us on social media. And a special thank you to all of our patrons on our Patreon page. We're very glad to have you on board with our space pods here. And we hope that you'll contribute to help spread the universe to everyone. Next week, we'll be talking specifically about that controversy involving Pluto and its downgrade in its planetary status. So, until our next space pod, keep exploring.


Elementary students in the Bemidji area schools are learning new reading skills through a very popular hamster so popular that the district has given them a copy to each student of the book from them to work on their reading skills with their families. Mal Meyer has this week's Golden Apple. The program is designed for students of all ages to be able to work on their reading skills with their families. I like pizza. The One District One Book program launched last week. Each student received a brand new copy of the book, the world according to Humphrey. Every student walked home with a book that day and you can see how proud they are to take that book home with them and it's their book to have. Each day, students from kindergarten to fifth grade will read a chapter at home. For parents who may have difficulties reading or short on time, there are audio book videos on the district's website of each chapter. Really the focus is at home, so we want to have activities for the parents to be doing, but the teachers then bring that back. And when they come back to class, they'll do different activities and trivia based on the reading. While some of the older students have already read the book, they can still learn from it. They're able to kind of understand a little bit more some of the things that the author implies but doesn't specifically say. So because they're at that higher level, they can kind of get some new things out of the book that they maybe didn't get the last time they read it. Deborah Brown says some of her fourth grade students have also read it before. And they're still enjoying reading through this book again and discussing it because it's just such a fun book. Some of the skills students have been learning through this book have been reinforced with their regular readings. They're still stopping every so often and talking about the characters or making predictions and giving them ideas for things that they can talk with their parents about when they read it at home. So far, it seems to be working. I've had parents come back and say that it was nice because it was something that we could talk about and read together. While this is the first year, the teachers hope the program continues. So I hope this initiative continues. I'd like to see this become something we do every year. With this week's Golden Apple, in Bemidji, I'm Al Meyer, Lakeland News. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.


Finally now in entertainment news, Britney Spears is pressing on with her quest to end the conservatorship that has governed her personal and professional life for over 13 years. According to reports, the singer's attorney carried out the star's wishes and officially filed paperwork to dissolve the legal mandate without the need for a medical evaluation. As reported, Spears gave a bombshell testimony during her court hearing last week, one in which she described the conservatorship as abusive and the cause of her deep unhappiness. She stressed that is not here to be anyone's slave and that had less than endorsing words about her father, who is one of the conservators. If uncontested, the filing could lead to Spears being granted her wishes. However, legal commentators are bracing for a challenge from those insisting the conservatorship remains in place. Ultimately, the decision will be made by the presiding judge.


All right, thank you everyone for joining us for the next talk So I have an alert here that I'm supposed to remind you that our Twitter feed is at voting village DC. That's all one word That's also where the speaker track list is it's a pin tweet at the top and also if you're gonna be tweeting about us We'd appreciate it if use the hashtag voting village 2019 also one word and with that further ado I'm going to be introducing Mary Ann Schneider and her presentation if the voting machines are insecure Let's just vote on our phones, which I think is sarcasm. It's a good reason to believe Mary Ann Schneider is the president of verified voting a role to which he brings a strong grounding in legal and constitutional elements Governing voting rights and elections as well as experience an election administration at the state level Immediately before becoming president of verified voting Mary Ann served as special advisor to Pennsylvania governor Tom Wolf on election policy Previously governor wolf appointed her as the deputy secretary for elections and Administration in the Pennsylvania Department of State where she served from February 2015 until May 2017 Throughout her legal career Mary Ann has focused on the intersection of civil rights and election law formally She was a senior attorney with advanced With advancement projects voter protection program and was trial counsel in apple white versus commonwealth Successfully challenging Pennsylvania's restrictive photo ID law on behalf of voters as unconstitutional infringement on the fundamental right to vote Mary Ann received her JD from George George Washington University where she was a member of law review and earned her BA degree cum laude from University of Pennsylvania Thank you very much Thank you. Thank you for that kind introduction and Thank you to the organizers for allowing me to speak today As you said my name is Mary Ann Schneider. I'm the president of verified voting. We're a nonprofit Dedicated to promoting secure and verifiable elections and the responsible use of technology in elections And what a wonderful turnout at the voting village this is such an important topic and I want to commend all of you for your efforts in Demonstrating that voting systems have vulnerabilities that we must be able to detect and to recover from And because as if you heard senator wide in stock The fabric of our democracy is at risk and it's under attack and we must stand shoulder to shoulder to defeat it So the title of this talk is if the voting machines are insecure Let's just vote on our phones and it is tongue-in-cheek, but in fact, that's what's happening And I want to talk to you Because as policymakers the press and the security community and the public pay more attention to the security of elections There is this growing trend to allow voting on mobile devices So I'm going to talk about the policy issues that this seeks to address and the current landscape of internet voting And what some of the solutions might be to address these policy issues? But as we know computer and database security is front and center. How many of you use a capital one card? Yeah, they just had a data breach of a hundred million records and the economic impact and increase in exploited vulnerabilities are rising fast Security magazine reported that such exploits increased 92% in 2019 over the previous year So because we count 99% of our votes on computers in the United States And because each state maintains a statewide database of voter registration records, our election infrastructure Is has a known set of vulnerabilities and that this thought village has demonstrated exist and are exploitable So we know that the risks are here and their risks not certain deeds, but they're not hypothetical They're real and pervasive the 2016 presidential election demonstrated this The United States electoral system was attacked by a nation-state with virtually unlimited resources And we know We know that voter registration databases not only were scanned, but they were penetrated and they were accessed And we know that local election official sites were attacked and there were some phishing attacks that were successful And at least one third-party vendor was penetrated And in fact just yesterday tech reporters Kim Zetter whom you may have heard from earlier today Reported on research by cyber security experts and they found that the election management software, which is the brains? behind Electronic voting systems were indeed connected to the internet and 35 jurisdictions All by it behind a firewall But the firewall is not impenetrable impenetrable The capital one breach that I just mentioned Occurred because of a misconfigured firewall So the finding is appalling Because it comes after election officials have adamantly stated that their systems are not connected to the internet and the reason for allowing this connection Was so that jurisdictions could receive election results faster on election night, but you know if you heard the other panel today You got the whole low down But and there's plenty of people here who can talk to you about the tech behind it but the fact of the matter is those systems were left online for years or months and This is what they discovered about systems that are not supposed to be connected to the internet How many flaws and misconfigurations might be presence in systems that are supposed to be Connected to the internet like for example some of the internet voting that's going on right now So in this whole atmosphere of risk that we've been talking about When state and local jurisdictions are actually doing some work and they're trying very hard to mitigate the risk to their networks To mitigate their risk to their internet-facing applications to protect their voter registration databases We are seeing worldwide a Proliferation of voting via mobile app and the new twist on this internet voting is that voted ballots delivered Via the mobile application are stored in the blockchain on the back end and that makes everything okay So let's think about this So how many of you left your personal cell phone at home and bought a burger phone to bring here?  I mean because we know there's a risk and of course we are at a hacker convention I get that and we're taking extra precautions But the risks we are protecting ourselves from here are prevalent everywhere And meddling in an election to affect the outcome is a pretty big motivator So it's not unrealistic To believe or to be concerned that vulnerabilities in the mobile voting world would be exploited to interfere with an election outcome Especially in a high-stakes election like a presidential or gubernatorial election But let I want to acknowledge some things up front voter participation and civic participation rates in this country are abysmally low And in a former life I've been in the trenches fighting voter suppression. So believe me of anyone I understand that there is a worthy desire to increase voter participation and remove barriers to voting But we also recognize we recognize our military and our overseas voters face enormous challenges in voting while away from home and deployed in difficult circumstances and We support better ways finding better ways to make it easier for our military and overseas voters to vote but voting by mobile app is not the way to do it and Opening the door. We're opening the door of county and state networks and and their servers to attack and Undermine all the work that's happening to protect those servers and that infrastructure So I want to review again the security challenges with voting It's very important to remember that the voting transaction is unlike any Transaction that we currently do online. There are three important concepts associated with the voting one The voter must be authenticated We care about the identity of the voter because we want eligible Registered voters to cast a ballot and we only want one person to have one vote So first we have to have a secure and trustworthy way of validating the voters identity Second once the voter is authenticated the voters identity is stripped from the ballot We anonymize the ballot in an effort to preserve ballot secrecy and Third jurisdictions need to have a way to conduct an audit to make sure the software that counts the votes did so correctly At the same time we don't want voters to be able to identify their ballots because we want to prevent voter coercion and vote buying and selling Except we really can't preserve secrecy online because the jurisdiction can always track back to the voter the especially if the voted materials are sent over email with an attachment and Mobile apps being piloted now have actually boasted in the press that they're being they're able to send the voted ballot back To the voter so they can check and make sure that it was right, but they don't indicate how officials or the app creators are prevented from seeing this so these this Lack of preservation of ballot secrecy violates the constitutional right to a secret ballot and this is so different from e-commerce If my son takes my credit card and he buys something on Amazon or steam They don't care if it's him or it's me as the car holder. I didn't if I didn't authorize the transaction I'll see a record of it and I can dispute it, but that's not how voting works And that's what makes it such a difficult security problem The transmission of voted materials over the internet is not new and here's my one slide. This is the map of where The internet voting is occurring. So the light colored states do not allow it But so the darker the dark the dark colored states that allow internet portal voting the Next shade down is email and fax and the next shade down is email only and then fax only but the The big piece it looks like mostly in the northern part of the nation They don't allow any transmission of voted materials over the internet This So that's 31 states and the District of Columbia permits some form of internet voting usually via email or fax But some states allow it through it through an internet portal and several jurisdictions Require voters who use their internet voting systems to explicitly wave their constitutional right to a secret ballot Because the voters privacy is not protected when they use the internet system And this has occurred over over a decade And this has been going on and some of verified voter verified voting's coalition partners like the National Election Defense Coalition Common Cause the Technology Policy Committee of the US ACM They reiterated this in a report published last year that this has occurred Despite multiple agencies credible Credible agencies advice that internet voting is not secure You have the Department of Defense research this and concluded that internet voting is too risky NIST studied this and concluded that internet voting is too risky Congress repealed its directive to develop a plan for internet voting for the military in September of 2018 The National Academies of Science Engineering and Medicine issued their report on securing the vote and they concluded that internet voting was too risky and Just the other last month the US Senate Intelligence Committee's report said You know that was on Russian interference and it said states should resist pushes to move their elections online Because in their words no system of online voting has yet established itself as secure So despite this apparent consensus we are now seeing a push for voting over mobile app on phones for military overseas voting and Here the recent examples are West Virginia is deploying a mobile app for mobile for military and overseas voters after conducting a pilot last year The city of Denver piloted a mobile app in 2019 municipal elections and Utah County, Utah Announced plans to offer the mobile app to its both voters this fall And that doesn't even include what's happening on the worldwide stage The new twist on internet voting with mobile app is that it does several things differently than voting by email facts or online portal The first of all the voter has to go through several steps including taking a picture of the voters photo ID and uploading it and then taking a video selfie and then the app uses facial recognition software to match the person's face with the photo they just uploaded and There are documented issues with facial recognition software regard about its reliability for voters of color and So it may not be a very good use Use case for that technology That underscores the point that when a technology is deployed we have to think through How it's going to impact all voters that may use it These mobile apps also allow the voter to track their ballot and their privacy is not Preserved and then finally the app stores ballots in the blockchain But only after the ballots have traversed the internet to get through a numerous servers Maybe to the county server to finally be recorded in the blockchain and in my own understanding Which I am not technologists, but the blockchain serves as an encrypted ballot box But putting aside whether the authentication privacy and security issues could be adequately Adequately addressed a huge problem is the lack of a software independent record that could serve it as the basis for trustworthy audit And if you heard Philip Starks talk he defined what software independence is that an undetected change in the software will not result in an Undetectable change in the outcome and we have no way of checking when a purely internet voting system is used But there's a lot we don't know about mobile apps and earlier this year several computer scientists some of whom are here at DEF CON Catalogged all the questions that we don't know about how these mobile apps work So verified voting board member David Jefferson advisory board member Joe Canary were co-authors along with Josh Greenbaum Duncan Buell and Kevin Skoglan and they they can give you they can give you a deep dive on the technology Behind this, but I'm just going to give you some of the high-level takeaways We don't know a lot of things about these mobile apps Exactly how does the machine learning in the facial recognition software work and how robust was the training? What protections are in place to protect the PII data that the app collects? What protects access that the access the back-end has to the voter registration database? If voters are allowed to receive a copy of their voted ballots after the fact what prefer what preserves ballot secrecy? And what prevents vote-buying and selling and coercion and what protections are in place to secure the transmission of ballots to mitigate the Risk that the voters phone has malware and our best practices and cryptography being practiced Josh Benelos sitting right here and some have called him the crypto god and he can answer all your questions about that He I didn't it was an oppressor for it That's right, you believe everything you read in the press right and then finally it's in the case of many internet voting systems officials on The receiving end print out the ballots and remake them so that they can be scanned this lessens the trustworthiness of the ballot for several reasons The voter on the front end never sees what got printed out on the back end There may be errors in the process of remaking the ballot and the record from the computer Even if it is reduced to paper does not create an artifact that can be truly audited so I think that They there's been a lot of reports that these apps are successful that they've increased turnout But I think what we need to know is how Trustworthy are those is the are these turnout numbers where they's really trustworthy voters who actually use the app so The other the app creators have also conceded The risks of hacking and that they cannot guarantee that they won't be hacked they state that they'll be able to detect the hacking Okay, that's a good thing, but then how do you recover from it? Are these systems resilient? Will you be able to tell which are the true ballots and which are the fraudulent ballots? so if Because it's impossible to know that and because we we can see that these are risks and we can never get the risk down to zero Which is why we have to have a way to check that the software has great behave properly if you're a candidate And you can't guarantee that every tenth vote that should be for you goes to your opponent How does that give you comfort in that kind of an application? So let's focus on the policy issues. It's all about military and overseas voters So and this comes up every every year every year the Commonwealth of Virginia has a bill introduced to do internet voting for military and overseas voters every year But what we need to do is look at the data. What does the data show? That this state is not that easy to come by but states should have it and they should look at their military and overseas ballots They send out and they should get answers to these questions Our voters not getting ballots that the issue we're trying to solve our voters getting the ballots But they're not able to return them or our voters getting the ballots and they are returning them But they're returning them too late Because if you answer if you look at the data you can see what is the policy issue you are trying to solve and then decide What is the solution that makes sense for that policy issue? So some of these problems have been ameliorated by the move act which gets military and overseas voters are ballots 45 days in advance in some cases 70 days in advance and The third ballot the third bullet about if they're getting them in late you can extend the deadline The second one is a little bit more difficult, but it requires Working together with military organizations with veterans organizations, which we're trying to do in Virginia to figure out How do we solve this policy issue? Because you know you've got to tell you sometimes when people are deployed they may not have an internet connection anyway Not only don't they have mail they may not have an internet or facts So we have to think about how can we make it easier for them to get the ballots back if that is the policy question We're trying to solve so Finally, I just wanted to because I'm running out of time here But I just want to talk about We have to think whenever we think of a technology solution for what we were doing especially when it comes to voting We have to deploy the technology in a responsible way So we agree that in general technology brings benefits But and we for example we can use technology to get info to voters We can use it to engage them and excite them and get them to participate We can use technology to enhance the non anonymous transactions that we do in our voting space We can leverage technology to count ballots quickly and to have unofficial results immediately Because speed is a value that somebody said is a value where maybe you know accuracy would be better But I mean that there are ways we can use processes in the polling place to encourage voter verification of ballots that are created by computers and Then we can conduct post-election audits to check that the software and the technology that we're using operated properly Fine, so what can you do and then I'll be wrapping up We can there's several things that we can do first of all we need to call on our legislators our elected officials we need to make sure that they understand the Technology in challenges that they face for those of you in the tech field You need to talk to people who may not be as tech savvy as you are and explain Why this might not be a good idea and why the security problems with voting are different than every other security problem we face And then and finally we should call on manufacturers to be transparent be we this is what we were talking about with Kim Zetter's article and What senator Wyden was talking about be transparent about your processes so that we can all rely and trust on the computers that count our vote Thank you again for the opportunity to address the DEF CON voting village 27


All of us in the music department here at Immaculata University. Hello, my name is Joseph Gehring. I'm chair of the music department and director of ensembles. A special tradition each year as part of the Kara Night program is the selected senior soloist in the singing of All Holy Night. I'm pleased to introduce Madison McGrogan, senior music education major as this year's soloist, accompanying by Sister Kathleen Dowd.


On the breakfast, President Mohammed Buhari nominated seven ministers to replace those who resigned recently to pursue their respective political aspirations. Also on the breakfast, ahead of the 2023 General Elections, defections continued to thrill political parties, as three senators belonging to the All Progressive Congress have resigned their membership of the ruling party. And don't forget we would also be looking through today's papers and bringing you great analysis of the biggest stories of the day. It's a beautiful morning. Thanks for joining us on the breakfast and plus TV Africa. I am Messia Bopu. And I hope you're having a great day. Those who live in Lagos State, I'm hoping that you're finding a way to cope with the scarcity and also the traffic and the cost of transportation. I'm hoping that all things would be sorted out as soon as possible. I mean, this is just me being hopeful right here. But we get straight to the crux of the matter. As always, we set up top trending conversation on different spaces. Now, first on the page this morning is the fact that the president has given an order as a commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Buhari orders the rescue of Abuja Kaduna train attack victims. Now, that was on Twitter, his verified Twitter handle, where you have at M. Buhari. That's the presidential or the president's Twitter handle. I beg your pardon because you have the president and the presidency. Now, the president on his Twitter handle, it reads, I have directed our security and intelligence agencies to scale up and speed up efforts to secure and save release of the remaining abducted Abuja Kaduna train passengers. My direct save is very clear. All hostages must be brought home alive and as soon as possible. Right, and you also have, I welcome the savory 10 of the recently released passengers to their families and loved ones. I am reiterating my solemn pledge to the families of those still in captivity. We will not relent until every single hostage is safely back home with their families. That's from the president has been tweeted yesterday. But something that was very, very obvious is the fact that comments were also disabled. So on the president's Twitter handle, the microblogging platform, you can't really find any comments right there. I really don't know. It was really disabled. Questions has also been flying about regarding this particular one. Despite the fact that Nigerians have not been able to engage the president via his Twitter handle. But the question is, why is this president speaking at this point in time? How many days before the attack? I mean, why is the president giving the other? Does the president really need to give an other before the security agencies or personnel swing into action of identifying this person, of going out and ensuring that these persons are also brought to book? I mean, we're talking about terrorists right here. And some people are saying, we have had several measures, especially at the time where in 2015, the president came on the platform. He came with, you know, an agenda. Three of them, security was top on the bonnet, the economy and the fight against corruption. And some people are saying, how far has the president fed with insecurity? And should the president be speaking at this point, how many more times?  Now, what happens now that the president has given this order? How will these persons be arrested? Now, we're talking about terrorists here. What's going on with the negotiation and ransom or ransom that families are being made to pay just to ensure that they secure their loved ones? Now, these are some of the questions that are begging for answers. But answers really not here. I really don't know if you have an answer, but Nigerians are questioning. Nigerians are asking several questions. And we hope that we eventually get answers as a people. But let's move away from the instructions and the directive from Mr. President. Another one is that Peter Albi will do well as a minister of economy. Ned Woeke is quoted on that. We're talking about a philanthropist who is very popular, very known. He said yesterday that Peter Albi would do well as a minister of economy. He does not have the structure and Igbo's are not ready for the presidency. Now, this is also another conversation that's getting a lot of persons talking. And let's tell you about what people are saying. Number one is that the Peter Albi, Nigerians are saying that the Peter Albi candidacy, it's not an Igbo candidacy, it's an Nigerian candidacy. And why we constantly always push and press for religious sentiment. But as far as we know, a lot of persons and political pundits are saying that we're more divided than we were in 2015, in 2019, in 1999. We further divided and we statement as this. Is this what we should be talking about? Should we be concerned about an Igbo president?  But these are the issues. And some persons are saying, when you talk about structures, structures are not made by spirit. Human beings create and make up the structures. And so they are saying that Nigerians have come together to give him the structure and what he takes for him to become president come 2023. And as I said, but away from that, we move away to another one, a very, very disturbing, big following, all of the trend that you have. Now, the police have actually ordered Portable to report to the nearest police station. We're talking about the artists. I mean, if you talk about the popular song that everyone knows about, with that collaboration with Olamide, the Zazu star, if you like to say, that's what it's been called. There's been a lot of reports and there's a video that actually went viral where you could see him involved in assaulting another individual.  And that has called for a lot of concern. People are saying, hey, rather than arrest him, let him get to a rehabilitation center because it could just be an influence of drugs and what have you. These are the conversations generating different reactions in different spaces. That's the march for our top trending this morning. We'll take a break. When we return, we'll be heading straight to the front pages of the National Dailies. Please stay with us.


Hi students, we have Shadeen with us from Red Deer, Alberta. Now Shadeen will tell you about the university. Hi everyone, my name is Chatelle and I'm from Red Deer, Alberta.