We will get back into our study of resisting the devil and then, you know, taking on the devil, going against the devil. So before we go any further, I just wanted to ask you if there's been any instance in your personal life where, you know, you've said no devil, you can't, you know, that kind of an attitude you carried through an experience. So if anyone would like to share, you can. Okay, so if not, then, yeah, I think I can share. So this was when my mum, she was very strangely like, you know, we were taking her for her regular checkups and all that. So everything was going on, but strangely, you know, there were certain symptoms and then they figured out that at that point in time, you know, she was diagnosed with final stage cancer. So it was a very big surprise for all of us. But anyway, you know, that happened. And at the time when these reports came out, one by one, you know, different doctors, they would just come, I mean, I used to work in that hospital. So many of them are my friends.  You know, there's all these issues, these challenges. So long story short, there were symptoms and there were some, you know, conditions which were very, very, you know, it was very serious. So literally they said two days, like she will not make it for more than two days in the hospital and you decide what you want to do. But anyway, so the thing is that she lived for at least about two and a half years after that. But when these things started happening, right from the hospital, I remember, you know, there were so many miracles that God did.  You can't have it. I will not let go of my inheritance. What is mine in Christ Jesus healing, I'm holding on to that. So God did so many miracles. They said like only two days she would survive because even the life support was not helping.  In fact, all my relatives came to see her and all, but her oxygen saturation levels. We prayed. Okay. And literally like I prayed over a food item and I gave it to her. And at that moment, I, I within myself, you know, I just said, Lord, nothing is working. Medicines are not working. Life support is not working, but you are a healing God. Nothing changes that. And I command the saturation levels to come up in the name of Jesus.  So I literally have seen these things in many instances, but I'm telling you of a little serious one, but I have seen it. It was so amazing that even the doctor at that time who was responsible for the oxygen saturation level, she was shocked. She looked at the recording of the saturation and she was like, how is it possible we didn't put her on medication, nothing.  So, you know, things like that. And once she was discharged, again, I went for review meetings and all. And then the doctors would say things like one of my good friends, like that doctor was telling me, see, you understand the medical things. You know, she won't make it. So don't try. Don't even try hard. Give up. So he was just trying to put it in a nice way to me, but within myself, you know, I still remember I sitting there on that chair. I was listening all the words were going into my ears. I was holding the reports in my hands and I just said, I reject every word of sickness, of affliction, of oppression in the name of Jesus. I didn't tell him, but I'm telling that within my spirit. Even after I got up from there, I said, no, she will live. They said she will not be able to walk, but she was walking till about the last week of her death. You know, so she made it and, you know, so many things happened contrary to what the doctors had predicted. So it was really a huge miracle. So, you know, it's like when the devil tries to come against you, really to, to tap into the power of God, to claim it and to see that inheritance manifest, we have to put up a fight. We can't say, okay, so sad. Okay, I give up. You know, no, no, we, we can't do that. And truly, when we hold on and we are ready to wrestle, resist the devil and say, no devil, you will not have it. You know, healing is my inheritance and I will have it. So I really saw the manifestation of that. And till today, you know, the doctors, when they talk about my mother, they say she was a sign and a wonder because medically, you know, for somebody to survive at a certain saturation level with like her bones had changed, the shape of her bones had changed. So anyway, I won't go into the details. There were lots of things which were not conducive for a reasonably good quality of life, but she managed with a decent quality of life, you know, till she actually passed away. But I know for a fact that it was the power of God being released, you know, for her to make it. So this was one of the most serious things in my life where I have, I believe that, you know, they only needed to put up a fight against the devil. And I have seen God's power, you know, manifest. And I'm very grateful for miracles that happen, you know, big and small. But to have that sense and you repluque the devil when the enemy is coming against you.  No, you can't do that. And I command you in the name of Jesus, you know. So, you know, take it on you, either be on the defensive or beyond the offensive. So just something that I wanted to share to encourage all of us that whatever the situation, easy, difficult, all this is real. And we will see God's victory manifest in our lives. So we can rebuke. The next thing here is cast out. So in this situation, when we see again, I will use the term for a believer demonized. OK, if a believer is demonized by that, we simply mean influenced by the devil. You know, to where the devil has started taking control of the faculties of a person. So that is demonized in such a situation. We can cast out that demon. We can say now we've understood when we studied about demons, we said that they are disembodied creatures. They are looking for a habitation.  So when you see that somebody is demonized or in the case of an unbeliever, if they are, we use the term possessed, OK, but for a believer, this term possessed is very misleading, this English translation possessed. So we will not use that. What we can do is we can issue a command to pass that demon out. So what would what did Jesus say? There are passages given here in the Bible from the Bible where he cast out, come out. That's all Jesus said, come out. And what happened? The demon had to yield to the authority of Jesus. And it comes out of that habitation, temporary habitation, which is the person. And then, you know, we have to work on strengthening the person.  So then what happens? The demons cannot come in or where do the demons go? We've already had this discussion. We know from Matthew 12, they go about, you know, they're wandering around trying to find the next host. So do they go to the fire, Hellfire? No, that is their final, final destination. But till such time, they are wandering about trying to seek a place of rest or next habitation. So we can cast out, we can cast out demons. OK, so that is also something all believers can do. You don't have to wait on any pastor or anyone. If a situation arises where you have to cast out, then, yes, you can do it. We will discuss more about how to do this later on. But I want to encourage all the believers. OK, so I remember I was telling you, we went for a conference and over there, people were manifesting. And at that point, you know, I went as one of the young people. There were other young people with me in church. So you see, really, it is amazing when the disciples, Jesus sent them. I think Matthew 10, isn't it? Yeah, he sent them out and they went and they did the works.  So they were really thrilled. So even us, as young people, because the situation came, we have to cast out demons and Jesus never separated his ministry to say, oh, I'm only going to teach from the word. No, he was teaching, but he was delivering. He was healing. It was all like happening together. So it is very much a part of our ministry, too. We can't say that I won't do.  I can't cast out.  So we have to be open to it. So, you know, when it came to that, even those were some of my initial experiences of casting out demons like the disciples. Even I was amazed. I was like, is it that simple demons are just listening to the name of Jesus because there is that kind of authority in the name of Jesus. OK, so, you know, we can issue a command to the demons and we will be amazed that the demons are trembling at the name of Jesus. At the name of Jesus. OK, like the way the disciples came back. We also come back and say, wow, Jesus, this kind of authority you have given us. It's amazing. It's amazing. So when you see demons taking control of individuals, you and I can just, you know, come in there, use the authority, just cast out the demons and set people free. OK, so go on the offensive. We can also destroy the works of the devil. OK, so this word destroy, we see in Hebrews 2 14, where Jesus destroyed Satan on the cross. What did Jesus do? We've discussed it, isn't it? In the victory of the cross, we said that he has. When you destroy something, is it is it possible to use it anymore? You can't, isn't it? If a beautiful gadget, I remember once I had a really nice phone, which I love, then I was walking on the road. I had removed the you put a case right on the phone to protect it. I don't know why maybe I wanted to clean it or what is temporarily I removed the case and that day when I was out, it didn't have a case. Suddenly it slipped and fell from my hand crack, fully cracked. I couldn't use it. It was such a nice, you know, gadget. I really loved it, but it's gone when something is destroyed. You cannot expect it to function anymore. So in that way, there are situations and circumstances. Of course, we know that the devil is completely destroyed. His power is destroyed by the cross that is a understood fact. It's a spiritual reality. Now, we by issuing a command with our words, what are we doing? What destruction has already happened? You know, we we are calling that to to work in our situation. So we we say or we remind the devil. Don't don't you remember? Your work has been destroyed. You have been destroyed on the cross of Calvary. We can say that to the devil when we are praying, when we are rebuking, when we are casting out a demon, we can tell the devil, this is what the Lord Jesus has done to you. Don't you know you have been destroyed on the cross of Calvary and not just that one John three eight. You see that Jesus came to destroy the works of the devil over there.  Like what I just explained to you, but it means losing. It means to, you know, like break up or or dissolve that that kind of an application. So the works of the devil. When I pray, I can say.  So it's like a stronghold. But what I'm saying, I'm saying like dissolve.   So in that manner, we can see that work of the devil being removed. OK, from that person's life. And also another beautiful thing is that we see that the anointing of the Lord Isaiah 10 27, we see that where the anointing of the Holy Spirit, it's the anointing that breaks the yoke, breaks the yoke is also in other words, it destroys, destroys the work of the enemy. So what is that? The Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit, what is the work of the Holy Spirit? He will destroy what the devil is doing. What does the devil do? Only thief's work, steal, kill, destroy, make person sick, make them sad, you know, steal, make them poor. That's what he does. But when we go against him, all his strongholds. Be destroyed. We can pray that we can say, I destroy. I destroy what the devil is doing in the name of Jesus. Now, in using these words, one more thing I'll tell you later on. I think it is there later. But when we pray for people, no, be a little sensitive because what happens is I, you know, this, this whole zeal that I'm talking about having anger against the devil and what he's doing and all that is important. But people will not understand it. So when I go and I pray for someone, let's say it's a new believer and I'm praying and I say, I destroy the sickness in the name of Jesus. Now, for this new believer, he's wondering, oh, my gosh, what did I do? Why is pastor using words like destroy and all? So I have to be sensitive. Maybe, maybe, you know, I don't use terms like that in in front of the person. But I know what I mean. I might use a simpler word in front of them. But maybe like once a person has gone, I've done this many times. I say, I destroy in Jesus' name under my breath. OK, and I issued that command. But when I was praying with that person, my prayer was gentler. I just said, Lord, I, you know, I pray that the people, they would come out of this sickness. I pray a release of your anointing. I declare a restoration of their health in the name of Jesus. So we have to be sensitive because also the mistake that sometimes we make when we are ministering to people is we scare them off. You know, when we say all these things over the people, I destroy and all. So be sensitive. Now, if you know that this person knows the kind of teaching that you are you have, then, OK, both of you together agree, let this stronghold be broken, be destroyed, makes sense. But don't scare off people because, unfortunately, with our zeal, you know, zeal is good, but zeal with wisdom is what is very, very crucial. Otherwise, what are we doing? We will create more confusion. Sometimes people, you know, say, like I bind the spirit of death. Correct. What they are praying is correct.  In my prayer, when I use certain words, no, their fear will double and triple. So I hope you understand what I'm saying. So just be sensitive. Use these words, but be sensitive to the context. Maybe at times you cannot use strong words right in front of the people. But you know what you're up to, right? So you can maybe pray under your breath or something because the devil will will hear it. And, you know, by faith, when you said it, you have destroyed. So your effort has not gone based, but in public, whether you can in that context, you can use words like this. Just be a little careful. OK, fine. Now let's move on. Now remove is another thing. We also see that there are yokes, yokes or bondages. Bondage is a better word that the enemy puts on people. Remember that woman in Luke 13, she was she was curled up. She was all twisted. But Jesus said, woman, thou art loosed. Then what happened?  So the the Holy Spirit can remove that bondage, whatever bondage. It could be a bondage of sickness, could be a bondage of poverty, can be a bondage of fear. Sometimes you see people are so talented. They are so, you know, they are brilliant. They probably are better than, you know, another person who is enjoying, you know, a good, successful career. But why is this person not doing well? Fear, fear is holding them back. They don't want to go for any interview or they don't want to take a take a job. What's the problem? Bondage, bondage of fear. They're not able to break out of it. But capability as good as somebody who's, you know, at really doing well in the career. So things like that. So when we see people are in these bondages and when I pray, I go against the devil, I take my authority and I say, you know, let this bondage be removed. Be broken in the name of Jesus. So what happens? Whatever bondage Satan has put on them breaks, right? And they are set free and, you know, they can praise God. So these are all ways in which we can go directly against the devil. Then overcome or prevail, overcome or prevail. This is also some action word. Overcome is to remember the wrestling match. So these words subdued, overcome. These are all wrestling is good to understand that. Overcome is when you have two people in dense conflict, then you have one person overpowering the other one. That is overcome where, OK, here is the devil. He's trying to do all the stuff. I overcome the devil. I prevail, I prevail on the enemy. So that is about the victory, consistent life of victory of a believer where every day I have to prevail. I have to conquer, subdue demonic works in my life, in the lives of people around me, in different ways. I might revoke, I might command, I might, you know, resist. I might cry, destroy, remove so many things. So I can do it with defense or I can go on the offensive. But I prevail over the devil every day of my life. So walk in victory. Now, again, coming to exercising authority the way Jesus taught us in Matthew 16. We see, he says, I've given you the keys of the kingdom. Keys representative was authority. OK. So when I have authority, I have to use it. Believers have authority. Only thing they don't know that they have a thought. Now, how can they use it in that same passage?  So when we try to understand the context, we recognize that though in the English, you know, it sounds like whatever I do on earth will be done in heaven. But if you go back to the Greek way of saying things, what it meant was whatever God has allowed in heaven, whatever he has loosed in heaven, what is loosed in heaven?  Nobody is sick in heaven. There are no tears in heaven. So all these things are loosed or they are abundant. They are liberally available. So that is loosed in heaven. So when I minister to somebody, I can lose the joy of the Lord over their lives. I have the authority to do that. Take what is from heaven and pour it off here on the earth. So I can do that. I have been given the authority. That's what Jesus was saying. So thy kingdom come, what is thy kingdom? The rule and reign of God. And when God, Christ rules and reigns, his rule and reign in heaven is not intercepted in any way, no? So there are no demons there, nothing. So the kingdom come means that kind of rule and reign will be seen in the lives of the people. That's all. So as a believer, I can lose the peace of God. I lose upon you the peace of God in the name of Jesus.  Shalom, shalom, shalom, perfect peace. Does it work? It should work because Jesus said that by faith when you release it, whatever you lose on whatever is allowed there, it will be allowed here. Similarly, the other thing he said, whatever you bind. So the way we understand is things that are bound in heaven. What is bound in heaven? The works of the devil. All is destructive works, all is, you know, destroying works. It's bound in heaven. So when I see anything which is not of God, it's simple, very simple. It's not of God, right? It's not of the kingdom. Ha, OK, I'm going to bind it because it's not there in heaven. So I'm allowed to bind it. That's how we go about it.  You're tying the hands of the devil. So what I could do is again, coming back to the example of, let's say there is confusion in the house, more specifically, you could take maybe a husband and wife. There's miscommunication, misunderstanding, all that going on between husband and wife. So what can they do in that situation? They know that, oh, there is some demonic influence causing this confusion between us. So you can bind the demonic spirits that are causing this confusion. So when you bind the spirits, what happens? It's like you're tying up their hands. No longer can you interfere.  So they are staying off now, but that doesn't mean whenever we bind, it doesn't mean that the task is over. You know, binding is usually like a part of the process. So once you have bound, you can apply wisdom. So now, you know, you might have some peace without the interference of these demonic influences. During that time, you could probably think of, you know, praying together or reading God's word together or if the situation is very challenging, then you might want to get some counseling, something. So you're applying wisdom to sort out the actual problem in a practical way. But how are you able to work on it? You've got some time out because you bound the influence of the spirits. OK, so when we bind generally, it's like, OK, stay off, guys. And then I have to look into what needs to be done also. So binding does not mean that, but I already bound. How come again, we are, you know, having this issue between us? Satan cannot permanently be bound off like that. OK, even if you bind him in this particular situation, he can enter through some other situation.  So we can bind, but also we see how we can respond with the wisdom to to resolve the loophole. OK, maybe it's it's about I'm just saying maybe communication is the issue, right? So maybe the husband and wife, they they recognize it and they say, OK, this is how we are going to sort it out and we will communicate better and all. So then what happens? That crack through which Satan could come and cause confusion is closed now. It's patched up. So you don't really need to bind the devil in that area anymore because he's out. You fixed it. So that's how, you know, we go about binding and applying this principle of binding the devil, you bind them. But at the same time, you go ahead and do what is required and lose. You know, lose again. I already said we can lose things. And especially when it comes to like delivering people from demonic powers, you can say, I lose you in the name of Jesus. So then what happens? You know, the the hold of the demonic power on the person is broken. So like that woman in Luke 13, who was bound and she was all crippled. And Jesus said, woman, thou art lose. She straightened up 18 long years. She was bent over. Think about it. Think about it. It was and again, notice in this case, the sickness is a result of oppression. Now, not every sickness is a result of demonic oppression, but in this case, it was. So when Jesus dealt with the spirit, the healing came. So sometimes when we are praying for people, we can say, be healed. We can say, you know, I command restoration. But maybe, you know, we see some results, but not the full result. But if that health condition is associated with a demonic influence, what should I do? I have to deal with the demon. OK, and I've heard some, you know, Derek Prince is another good person. When it comes to deliverance, he talks a lot about deliverance. He has a good exposure, many, many years of exposure in the demonic delivering people.  Why should I get into casting out demons and letting people lose from the devil's oppression? So what happens? They don't associate. If a situation is, has its origin in the demonic, unless you deal with the demonic, it doesn't help. So, you know, he, funnily, he says, you can pray with the devil. You can counsel the devil. You can do a lot of things with the devil inside the person. But there will be no release. There will be no, you know, lasting change that you see, because stronghold is not dealt with. Demons are not evicted. So when we discern again, not every condition is demonic. OK, please remember that. Don't go around. I mean, we must not go around, you know, casting out demons when there are no demons. So we when we deal with the demon, some health conditions will improve like that because it was the demon was the thing. So it doesn't help to, you know, counsel and do all those things with the demon inside the person. So that's a very real fact. So sometimes when we are ministering and we realize, yeah, this this has a demonic origin to it. Then we have to proclaim liberty. Remember, Jesus, when he came and he talked about himself in Luke chapter four, he said that he has come to preach the good news to the poor. He's also come to proclaim liberty, you know, to the captives or who are the captives? The ones who are oppressed by the devil, maybe through sickness, maybe through, you know, some mental conditions, maybe through poverty, maybe through something else. OK, so we we have to take authority and lose people. If we don't lose people, it doesn't help. It really doesn't help. They will remain in bondage. So lose people, then allow and disallow. Allow and disallow is also using our authority to command demonic powers. Remember, Jesus, sometimes when the demons, they said, oh, Jesus, you are this. Why have you come here?  He said, don't don't speak. You all you read in those passages. He did not allow the demons to speak because, you know, they knew him. So he allowed and disallow. So we can issue a command to you know, to kind of bring order in that situation. Sometimes, you know, we will see that there will be manifestations, some sort of unruly manifestation. So at that time, we can say, I don't allow you to speak. Be quiet in Jesus' name or we might see some manifestations where it is harmful for the individual. I remember once I've seen this one lady, she was so, you know, kind of controlled by the demon. It was very sad to see her. She was all over the place. You couldn't really control her movements and all that. And she was literally hit, banging her hands to the wall and all and her hand. Also, I still remember this nail was beginning to chip off because that kind she was just hitting herself.  So we have to take authority and exercise our command to allow or disallow certain specific, you know, activities of the demons. And we can even bind. OK, so basically be led by the spirit of God, but use your authority. You can use our authority and the demons have to listen. I don't know whether I told you this. I heard of a testimony where, you know, the authority of of gods, the name of Jesus and the dominion which we carry, right? It's so real and so powerful that in this testimony, I heard a pastor. He was casting out demons and he didn't know there were many demons. So he was not clear whether the demons are fully out or not. So he shares about casting out several demons. And then he came to a point he was still unsure. So he just prayed for wisdom from the Holy Spirit. Lord, I'm not able to find out whether everyone has come out or not. What should I do? And God gave him the wisdom and he just felt led to say, are you still inside? OK, so he just said that and then he got a response in the name of Jesus. I am asking you, are you still inside? And then, you know, it's like you're they are obligated to respond under authority, the demons. So the demons spoke up and they said, yes, we are still here. OK. So I was like, whoa, I was a little bit spoke by that, but I was like, wow, the authority that the believer carries, the demons have to respond to it. And that's the good part that I took away from it, that this kind of authority, you know, Jesus has given us. So we use it, we use it, we allow, we disallow. Then we can also pull down. We've already seen that when it comes to our mind, where we are told that we must take every thought cap to be pulled down, every thought that tries to exalt itself against the knowledge of God. So that is also an action word, isn't it? And this is more applicable in our personal walk with the Lord, where in our minds, we will not allow anything that dishonours God. You know, I can't afford to have that thought. I have to pull it down in Jesus' name. And so I'm using my authority over the works of the devil. Now, you could you can use this pulling down of strongholds in other places as well.  So but basically action, you move into action, use your authority and you tear down the strongholds of the devil. So these are things believers can do. And we should be doing these things so that we see God's glory manifest. Now, there are other things that one can also engage in in order to see the victory of God. That would be prayer and intercession, as Zellie shared earlier, that when people prayed, many people prayed, you saw the victory of God. You saw the power of God against the devil. So intercession is very helpful. And remember, Paul, after he describes the entire spiritual armor towards the end, Ephesians 6, 18, and he says, you know, pray for all the saints with all kinds of prayers in Ephesians 6, 18, he talks about it. So he's kind of included it in the passage of the weapons. So one weapon which I have is prayer. And we know that prayer, prophetic prayer, can bring about a Shamar. You remember that Shamar is like protection, protection hedge, hedge around us, our families and our congregation and city and all that. So when I pray, when people pray, devil is trying to penetrate. I'm not able to. What is happening? You know, like those Saifa movies, you have a shield, right? And whatever in those things, it's some some field and all they create. So anyway, we are talking about the protection that happens through prayer. So God can, you know, keep his people from the from the works of the devil. So prayer is important so we can invest our time in prayer. And that is an offense against the devil. Devil will be so angry. Why are these people praying? Because they are praying, I'm not able to enter. I'm not able to do. My plans are getting destroyed, right? So that's the point. That's what we want. So pray, we can pray individually. We can pray as families. We can pray as couples. We can pray in the church, in our fellowship, right? So what's happening? The devil will be clamoring. What is this? I can't do my thing, but raise up the shield of through prayer. Then in prophetic intercession, we have seen how Jesus told Peter, the devil. He has tried to sift you like wheat or in other words, the devil is looking for opportunities to bring down people. OK, and particularly, particularly, you know, we see this in scripture also that strike a shepherd and the sheep will be scattered. So his main target can be leaders because he knows. Oh, this is strategy. If I getting one one believer is more challenging. How about if the pastor falls? How many people are there under the pastor? Hundred people, hundred people will be in confusion. Hundred people will be affected. So he is ready and waiting, OK, to to bring down people, especially those in leadership. Now, prayer is very helpful. You know, when we pray, I pray for myself as a leader. And, you know, if the congregation understands the way Jesus prayed, he prayed for Peter, Peter that, you know, your your faith should not fail. Satan desires to sift you like wheat. But I have prayed for you that your faith should not fail. So we pray for one another. You know, we pray for our pastor friends. We pray for our church pastor, our leaders. And we say, Lord, you protect them. You, you know, give them the wisdom against the schemes of the devil. Lord, we cancel. You can use all these words. Remember, just now we said destroy, remove, pull down. All of us have the authority. So when I'm praying for my leaders, my pastors, I can say these words and say, Lord, we we bind what the devil is doing against our pastors, our leaders, our congregation, our young people, our children. Lord, we pray for their minds. We pray that, you know, godly, godly wisdom will be theirs. So when we pray, that's an active way of fighting the devil. And it's an active way of stopping the devil from doing his destructive work. So, you know, we cannot overemphasize the power and the impact of prayer. So pray, pray, pray, pray, you know, just pray. So that's very, very important. Now, next thing, how can I fight the devil? You can, you and I can frustrate the devil with our righteous actions. So you do, you and I do the right thing. If you think about Daniel, OK, and his friends. So what was the what was the decree at that time? You must bow down to this mighty structure of, you know, the the king. And if you don't, then we will put you in the fire. So what was their spiritual warfare, a spiritual warfare was? What is the right thing to do? God said you must only worship him and not, you know, a human being or a structure or things like that. So they decided, OK, whatever happens, we will do the right thing. They did the right thing, righteousness. You remember breastplate of righteousness. So it's it's breastplate will protect your vital organs, your heart, your your lungs, which you need to for your basic functions.  What if they are destroyed? Person is destroyed. So righteousness, when I walk in righteousness, how is it helpful for me? I am protected. OK. Yes, Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, they they had a huge danger to face because they did the right thing. They said, no, we can't, we can't bow down. So then what happened? They were thrown into the fiery furnace and there is nice one, nice explanation about that fiery furnace. It was heated so many times and, you know, people who went close to it, things, you know, they got burned, even the soldiers who went close, you know, to put people into the furnace were burnt up. It was so hot, so hot, but what was the outcome? For their righteousness, they had an encounter with God in the fiery furnace.  Now, if we end up just burning ourselves a little bit in the kitchen, you might have something, some smell, right? But you have a fiery furnace and men who went into it and who came out of it. No smell of fire. So what is what is happening? It's spiritual warfare where God is saying, look, my protection on you will be many fold when you do the right thing. Don't get scared. Nothing will happen to you. OK, I am with you. So that encouragement was there with Shadrak Mishak when they even said, God, even if anything happens, this is the right thing. So we will do what is right. So we are here to do what is right. Again, in Romans 13, we would read about the right actions that one needs to take. And that puts us in a better place. Now, let me just quickly read off, read Romans 13 for us. And I think that I can only complete till there. But that's that's fine. We have sufficient and more time to go through our course. Yeah, and also next week, I think I need to give you another assignment. So I will do that. OK, so Romans 13 verses 11 through 14, it says, and do this, knowing the time that now it is high time to awake out of sleep. For now, our salvation is nearer than when we first believed. The night is fast spent days at hand. Therefore, let us cast off the works of darkness and let us put on the armor of light. Let us walk properly, as in the day, not in revelry and drunkenness, not in lewdness and lust, not in strife and envy, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill its lust.  Like, don't make any provision for the works of the flesh. Instead, we walk in the spirit.  So if you want to summarize it and just put it in the simplest way, what we are being told is a believer should walk like a believer. What is a believer to be a righteous person? That's who we are in Christ Jesus. So our life has to match who we have become.  It shouldn't be the other way, you know, isn't it so sad? Like, we are believers, but our actions and our words and our lifestyle is no match to who we are claiming to be. So simply put, believer, be like a believer. OK, walk in righteousness and that becomes an offense against the devil. And the devil is so mad. He'll be like, no, don't don't walk in righteousness. Only then I can get some cracks through which I can enter your life. I can get some foothold, you know, I can get some place, give the devil no place.  OK, I'll discuss little more about this later. In the next class, we can stop here. And I think this gives me an opportunity to promote or, you know, commercial commercial breaks or everything. James, the book of James, which we are studying at APC Sunday Services. You know, I just want to encourage you whenever you can. You can the recordings are available. And if you have the time to attend the life service, then, yeah, you know, that is if you are not attending your own, otherwise, please attend your own church, you know, be faithful there. But the book of James, the study of the book of James is also this very practical believer, be like a believer, live like a believer. What should be the behavior, the lifestyle of a believer? So currently, we're doing that study, so it will be good for us to engage and learn from. OK, so let me stop here. Any thoughts, comments, anything before we pray and close for today? All right. So I'm really hoping that you're getting something out of this. And, you know, may God bless you and may you be able to live a victorious life every day in Christ by using, you know, all all the things that we are learning in this class.  I request anybody. Can you please pray and wrap up this today's class? Father, we thank you for this time, God, we praise you for the opportunity you gave us to learn from your word. Lord, we pray that as we continue to live our life in this world, help us to exercise the authority and to see your kingdom come and to see it manifest in its fullness, Lord. We thank you for all of us in the class. We pray that we will continue to grow in your word and walk according to your plans, Lord. In Jesus name, we pray. Amen. Amen. Thank you, John. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. God bless you. Have a wonderful weekend. You know, worship the Lord together with your church families. We'll meet again next next week. So take care. Bye for now.


Oh, in person? In person. It was not pretty enough to not be that funny. Whoa. But. Wow. I was running from the biggest fear that I had, which is letting someone in and giving someone the possibility to reject me or to her. I don't like to be rejected to the point that when I was younger, I would not approach women. I would not engage in certain activities or try stuff because I didn't want to fail at it. I didn't want to be rejected by my peers. Did you know that rejection piggybacks off of the exact same pathways as physical pain? And that in essence means that when you are hurt, the same area of the brain that gets activated during that time is activated after a rejection.  Now, on one hand, this is great because who likes pain? But on the other hand, because rejection is a part of achieving success, if we try to avoid rejection, we try to avoid our potential. And that is why it is really important to work with a licensed healthcare professional to help us reroute our brain so that we understand not how to avoid rejection, but how to effectively deal with it. And if you know the time is right for you to work with a licensed healthcare professional, I want to suggest for you better help. Better help is a service that you can utilize from your phone to schedule appointments, video calls or to text, a licensed therapist. Better help is available worldwide and best of all, it really is all about you and the relationship you build with your counselor. For example, if you're not feeling the counselor you were assigned, you can change at no cost whatsoever. And speaking of cost, better help is actually more affordable than offline counseling. And you can use financial aid. A happier, mentally healthier, better aligned with your ultimate potential version of you is possible today. And if you believe that and you are ready to get started, then I want to help you do that with 10% off your first month of therapy at BetterHelp. All you have to do is go to betterhelp.com slash booty. That's better, H-E-L-P dot com slash booty. What's up, lovers and friends? Welcome to my YouTube channel with special guests, enjoy the podcast. Hey! I invited you all back because the last video I did with you performed well. Yeah. And I like to feed the algorithm. I sound a little surprised. No, I'm joking. I was very surprised. As long as you perform well, I'll continue to bring you back. The real reason that I wanted you to come back is because we're partnering once again with BetterHelp.  JD, you are a really big advocate for therapy and a active participant of therapy? Mm-hmm. Client of therapy? I am a very active participant in therapy. Personal therapy, marital therapy, you name it. All them therapies. All them therapies. You know what? This episode is actually inspired by you, Los. Oh! Because I listened to the last episode that you guys had because I am an avid listener of the podcast and you said that you are deeply afraid of rejection. Hate it. Hate it. I know I don't like to be rejected to the point that when I was younger, I would not approach women. I would not engage in certain activities or try stuff because I didn't want to fail at it. I didn't want to be rejected by my peers if I didn't perform up to a certain level or something like that. So I mean, for me, the fear of rejection just means that you're missing out on things in life, on friendships, just life in general. So for me, getting past rejection just helped me enjoy life more. So I want to challenge us today to tell our absolute horror rejection stories. Yeah. I got a pretty bad one. I got a couple pretty bad ones. Yeah? You want to go first? I want to kick us off. Should I kick us off? You need to kick us off. Okay, I'll start off. It's your idea. This is actually the worst rejection I've gotten and it was a job rejection. I've had some, actually I'll tell both. The romantic rejection I got that was a really, really bad one and I got actually in trouble for this on the internet. So in 2012, I was in a not so great relationship and I had lost an opportunity with somebody that in light of the bad relationship became so much greater in my brain. You know what I mean?  So in essence, like months had passed since I had not spoken to that person I was in the not so great relationship.  I just want to reach out and say what's on my heart. Oh, I remember this. And just be like, look, I know that you're going to do your thing. I'm going to do mine. It was, if it wasn't though, because we lived, no it wasn't. Yes it was. We were on different continents. We had both moved on. It wasn't like that. It was more just like, look, I just want to tie up loose ends and say, I know that things didn't end the most clean way but it's Valentine's Day. I thought of you. I think you're an awesome human being. I wish the best for you. And even though we couldn't be together just know that someone out there saw incredible things in you. Stop laughing at us. It is a future. Such a future move. This dude wrote me back though and was like, do not contact me. That was so inappropriate. I am in a relationship back up and it was like a really big ego moment, check moment for me. But I mean, ultimately the person was right. It was probably not even. Curious. I was about to say, when you read that text did it sound like him or what do you think? It was like, babe, who's texting us? It was my ex. I don't know. You replied. It definitely was that option. I don't know. The language was so direct it was genderless. It was genderless language. It was just like, no. Yeah. It might as well just said no. I don't believe it was him. I'm gonna go on record and say it was probably. Probably was. Is that because you can't imagine any man rejecting me? Yeah, that's it. No. That's not it. You know what? It's appropriate to draw a boundary and again it was helpful for me because from that point on, there was just no halfway door for communication. I knew exactly where I stood with that person. It was actually really helpful. It hurt, but it was helpful. Do not call me. Do not contact me. I was so inappropriate of you. It's Valentine's Day. I'm with my girlfriend. It's almost like you Googled the response. Yeah, right? I'm gonna say this. Google's often right. Copy and paste. Ex-boyfriend, if you're out there, let us know. Was it you? Or was it your girl, man? Oh, true. We just wanna know. We're gonna get to the bottom of this. Inquiring minds wanna know. One time I got rejected. This was back in the MySpace days.  And I had a fly MySpace.  What was your song? Top eight were pretty good. I think I had Bartender as my song. Oh, my God.   Is it not? No. Bartender? No, the fire song. What is Bartender? It was a good song. Can you guys see it? I don't know about great. Bartender. Oh. Look at that man. Ah, with her. Is that when you were bartending? No, I wasn't old enough to bartend at the time. But yeah, so I met a girl. Oh, she's still going. I was still in my bar. Go ahead. I met a girl on MySpace who lived in the same city. She just went to a different school. And so we were messaging. We wanted to meet her. Or in high school. This is high school, yeah.  Anyway. So, you know, we were messaging. I want to link up. So we linked up. And the first thing she said to me was like, oh, you look better on MySpace. In person? In person. To your face? The first thing she said. Oh, wow. Exactly. I would have hit the wrong one for sure. It was exactly that. I remember I just felt so shitty inside. Like, I just left. Like, I was like, oh. And then we ended it real quickly.  He took your ball and went home. Yes, bro. I mean, what else are you supposed to do at that point? She don't want to play with your ball. You better eat. Wait, wait, where's your picture? Where's your picture? I was just standing on stairs. I don't know. I didn't understand. You know what? Because I was going to say, that's kind of like pre-filter days, because in all honesty, that is something that I think some people need to hear today. Right. I worked on a show. And we always had a casting sheet of people.   And then you're like, one of these things doesn't belong. Come on now. Yeah. How we started. Are we just not going to talk about it? How it's going. Which is tough, but it's a good reminder to be like, no, your authentic self is the best. Because that way, when people see you, it's a pleasant surprise on the other way around. Yeah. What was the lesson then from that? For me, I was just taking worse pictures. Something like come up like. Pleasantly surprised. Make weird faces on yourself. I have no idea what happened with that. But I do know that I took that. And every picture that I took, I always would look at it and then look in the mirror and be like, is this like, is this true representation of who I am? So what about you guys?  I know JD's going to say I've never been rejected. I am a model. I have been rejected. Funny enough, because of modeling, I keep rejected all the time. So I guess I became numb to rejection because in my line of business, out of 10 jobs, if I can book three out of the 10, that's a win for me. But I have actually been more so the rejecter in relationships. But I can't see your face reaction, but I'm sure. He's done it on this podcast. We've already had a rejection story from JD. I rejected this sex. I rejected the sex. But we were friends.   In coitus. And then you said no, thank you. She showed up looking different than her picture. Hashtag Jared. Jared over here. So she pulled a Jared on him. She pulled a Jared on him. So you look better in your pictures. But I was respectful. And I was like, look, but we were vibing. Like it was super when we always revived me via text or whatever. So I gave her a tour of Chicago. We hung out. We were friends for a long time. Yeah. It was all good. Said no to good to say yes to great. That's fair, though, because it's like we vibed as friends.  And that isn't existing. And so it's actually the more responsible thing to do. Which is crazy, because it's kind of cringy to hear the story when you first hear it.  And then you never spoke to her again. Yeah, that's worse. That would have been me for sure. I go for that. I would have done that. And if you flew it, then why would you? I would have spoke to her, though. I would have spoke. No, no, no. What do you mean? I'd say I would have. I wouldn't have not spoke to her. You would have had sex with a person just because it. I would have had sex with her, yeah. But yeah. Because you wanted to or? Because she's there. And you know, she flew out. I would have felt bad to say I would have. Zoom in on Lois right now. So, Shane, let me ask you this. When you got the rejection, you got the email, did you feel that you were able to learn from that, from the way he received or the way he delivered his rejection? I can't remember the time if I was able to take that and transform it into like a valuable lesson.  Yeah. But I know long term now, I definitely recognize boundaries. And I recognize that Valentine's Day, it's just for lovers. Yeah. It's for lovers. And it's for you too. It's for the people that you're seeing.  And so I often use Valentine's Day to reflect on love and sex. And so I might write things on my own platform or on my own YouTube channel, but I would never reach out to somebody else. Not on their birthday, not on Valentine's Day. If I felt it was appropriate, if I had some reasons. Not on holidays. Holidays are for people who are connected. It's not for us, OK? Do you want to share the professional rejection story? Oh, I'll quickly share that one. Yeah. In essence, you get rejected from jobs, but you often don't know why. But your agents and managers do. So I was auditioning for BET for a comedy position. Don't ask. It was when I first came to America, I was very poor. I was like, anything possible that I can do. No, in our country. BET is the reason I came to America. They helped to sponsor my original work visa. So they had an opportunity. It was after 106 in Park closed. They had a show called The Experiment. So anyhow, I was auditioning as a comedian for it. And I knew in the audition, I was like, this is not. This ain't it. This ain't it. And so anyhow, my agent forwarded me an email. It was like, they don't need you for the call back tomorrow, don't worry. But instead of sending me a fresh email, they forwarded me the rejection. Not funny. Not even not funny. It was not pretty enough to not be that funny. Whoa. But where's the lie? BET, that's unprofessional. It wasn't BET as a whole. It was whoever the producer, which I usually outsourced. And then they don't think that I'm going to see that. It's not a professional of my agent, too, to like send that kind of.  No, that's not cool. That's weird. Look at Jay standing up for this one. No, but that's really disrespectful. That's a weird thing to say. It's rough, but I was going to say, I don't think it's that in that world. You're not pretty enough to not be that funny. Well, it wasn't addressed to her. It wasn't addressed to me. And I don't know their relationship. Even if you're addressing the agent. That's perfectly OK, I'd say. Really? I would say that. Well, especially if they have a relationship, or maybe they said, and then I knew at the time my agent did have other talent auditioning for that role. So they probably were like, good for this person, not this person. They can say that. They can say, they can say, well, no, no, here's the thing. They can say not funny enough. They don't have to say, you're not pretty enough to not be that funny. It's basically, if you're the agent and I'm the production guy, I'm basically saying like, yo, if you're going to send me somebody that's not funny, make sure they're hotter than that. I mean, if I'm the agent, I'm like, OK, good. Well, now I know I can't send this person. That sounds crazy to me. Maybe it's just me. I agree. No, I'm not saying it's a nice thing to say. It's definitely fucked. But I don't think it's that out of pocket for that world. Yeah, like, no. You know what? It was helpful for me, though, too, because at that time, I wanted to talk about sex and nothing else. But because my agent was like, well, there's not a lot of sex auditions. So we're going to send you out for a lot of stuff. And that was my moment, actually, to be like, I don't think that you understand what my brand and my direction is. I don't think you have access to the kind of jobs that I want. You get the general jobs. I need niche jobs. It actually led me to wanting to leave my agent. And then I partnered with Adam, actually, who is still my manager to this day. Everybody who I actually left that agent for, I'm still with to this day. Because I was so clear on what my brand was, because I knew very clear what it was not going to be. If you're out there and you're dealing with rejection and you're trying to figure out how to process this, we got something for you. Better help.  I just want to make out with you so bad. It's great. It's awesome. Make out right now. That can be part of the podcast. You got your own camera. Rejection hurts, but it can help. Yes. How? The one thing that makes me cry to this day is music. Music makes me cry all the time. And I remember I just went through a rejection through music, and it wasn't like from somebody. When you say music, you're talking about your musical career. My musical career. Just for clarity. You're like Eminem now. I heard a new Eminem record, and it brought, you better lose yourself. No, but when my career, I remember getting to a place. It was like 2018. And I was putting out music. It wasn't going anywhere. I would make plans. I would hire a videographer. He wouldn't show up. Like it kept disappointing me over and over and over again. And so that big rejection you had where that dude left your performance. Oh, yeah. Which is fascinating, though, because I don't think that you recognized that you could have done better until that happened. Yes, yeah. Because the truth is. The crowd loved it. And you didn't prepare that much. And I didn't prepare that much. So I think it was a good lesson for you. Oh, it was huge. It was huge. And I learned a lot from that, but I remember going into a ball.  Like just hurting like my whole, I didn't want to eat. I didn't want to do anything. It took you like two, three months before you could perform again. Anything at all that had anything to do with music. I remember after that performance, like kind of wondering, like, what is that? Is that it? Is that it? Well, no, because you rented out rehearsal space. Like what's the leader? The week later, I went and I rented out a rehearsal space. And I just started going hammer.  Which one was the next one? MGK was there. Oh, yeah, that's right. That's right. That was a good one.   Yeah, he sounds just like that. But what I really want to say is that I remember the next day I'm having a conversation with you. And I was like, I remember just being like, I hate this feeling. I don't want to do music anymore because nothing in the world makes me feel like this ever. And you were like, look, this is what you love. This is what Shan said. She was like, this is what you love. You are going to have to get used to rejection. You are going to have to go through this feeling over and over and over and over again. Because this is your passion. And the good thing about it is because if it can bring you that low, it can also take you that high.  What can I learn from this? And that was the only way that I could cope with the rejection. I was the one who was in control of the exit door of the strategy. So I had fear of intimacy, not just sexually, but just fear of letting someone get close to me. Because the closest ones to you or the thing that you care the most about can hurt you the most. I was running from the biggest fear that I had, which is letting someone in and giving someone the possibility to reject me or to hurt me. Yes. Can we talk about that? That it's so much easier. When you're one foot in, one foot out, and then you leave, then you can always go back to in your mind, like, oh, well, if I would have put both feet in, I would have succeeded. But the truth is, you may not have. We know a lot of people like that. Or you might have put both feet in and got knee capped. Right. That's what I asked, took up out the game. I would have went pro, but you know what I'm saying. I'm only 5'5", but you know. We would have won the table. Coach didn't put me in on that last play. You know what I mean? Like, all four quarters, he didn't want to put me in. The whole year, he didn't let me play one game, man. If I played one game, we would have won. And I told him. I told him. What would you learn, bro? I'd say just for me, rejection just offers clarity. You know, it gives you a chance to kind of just play Monday morning quarterback. You know, you get to watch the film, get to look back and say, OK, this work, this didn't work. What could I, like, you know, like, everybody's just saying, like, what can I have done different? What could maybe I've done better? Where did I not set myself up to succeed? Where did I set myself up to succeed? Like, rejection can show you, it's not necessarily just to see what you did wrong. It's to see what you did right as well. It's a chance to take in, you know, both sides of the coin. So, for me, I would say, you know, rejection just kind of gives you that space for clarity. You know what's fascinating is we actually started to, like, take away your breath. You really won't, like, wound up there. You did take his breath away. Yeah, I took it away. Again, another one. Another one. On Who Can Relate, which I was a guest on, we were talking about the mirror effect. And Robert Greene basically said that without a physical mirror, we would create so many physical faux pas because we can't see ourselves.     Who is this? Who's this generic, oh man. But it's through the mirror that you can actually see parts of yourself that you can't intuitively sense. And what we don't have is a mirror for the inside, where we can actually see how we come across the other people. And that's where a lot of people do need help. And that could be a partner. It could be your audience because y'all are so honest. But it could also really be best-serviced through a licensed healthcare professional, a licensed mental healthcare professional, like a therapist. And if that does interest you, I strongly suggest that you try better help. And you liked that, did you? That was good. I didn't even see that coming. You just walked right into there. Well, listen. How would my hand in walking me right through there? Can I take you to the finish line? Please. Thank you for watching this video. Now, if you know in your heart and in your head that the time is right for you to get linked up with a licensed professional therapist, then I wanna suggest to you better help.


All right, next up we have Tom Samstag talking about the InfoCon DB. Please welcome Tom Welcome, I'm happy to announce something that I hope will be a good resource for the community InfoCon DB. So first off I have a quick disclaimer. I'm gonna talk a little bit about stats of presentations How many presentations different people have everything is as of the current state of the database which is not complete If if the database does not represent your years of presentation history Don't be offended. Nothing was omitted intentionally. Things just haven't been Catalogged yet Everything's far from complete. So with that said Who am I? My name is Tom Samstag. I go by technical Tom or tech on IRC. I Am a principal security engineer at security innovation We are a security firm specializing in application security Always looking for good engineers, especially in the Seattle area So if you understand how software works and know how to break it Check us out. Also, check out. Can you hack us? It's a cool challenge site that we have for Recruiting, but it should be fun. Even if you're not interested in a job Fun little CTF type thing. I Also hang out with the neg 9 crew. I am part of the core neg 9 Staff We are a hacker group that is now primarily Located in Seattle. We've been doing CTFs for a long time and We apparently accidentally won hacker jeopardy last night still trying to figure out how that happened So, yeah, normally I'd end my about me there, but we need a little bit more background here So I like cons I like hacker cons I like attending hacker cons This is my current badge collection. It's not as extensive as I'm sure many of yours are But I'm at the point where I'm afraid to try new conferences because I know if I do it'll be added to my must-attend every year list I Just really like attending cons Where my friends are the ones that get back from DEF CON talking about how they're never going to go to Vegas again I am the one who's already planning next year and how to make next year even better. I Also enjoy watching videos of conference presentations if you also enjoy watching presentations from conferences I Hope you you know of the site info con org This is an amazing resource. It's built out of the dark tangents project The data duplication village that originally was hosted at DEF CON and people came to him and said We want access to this outside of DEF CON. So this is the Internet-facing version of the data duplication village where he has terabytes of media from conferences going back through the hacker history So it's a great resource, but once you start using it you realize it's really just a a directory structure of Files it's it's just like browsing a an open directory structure So at the same time that I am getting really into watching stuff on info con I also watch a lot of TV and I'm at home watching TV with my Kodi media center and I love how it talks to the TV DB and It displays all kinds of meat metadata about that the shows that I'm going to watch It shows synopsis and actors and actor bios and all of that and So Those combined both info con and the way that Kodi displays that meet that metadata That's kind of what inspired me to start info con DB org So info con DB org I've been selling it as IMDB for hacker cons as of yesterday morning It's live publicly available Info con DB org. That's a snapshot of the front page as of when I made these slides yesterday So I'm probably losing some of you right now because you're just going to start browsing it and I'm fine with that But we want to talk a little bit about what went into making it Thus far because this is an ongoing project so While making this this site and this database and this huge amount of data and curating it I realized that a lot of my time was kind of split among four different goals and These four different goals are all vying for my time. They're all competing with each other and Only by balancing the four of them am I able to make this site really what I want The four goals are the platform That's the technology behind the website itself making it a good UI making it usable And then also that the admin stuff on the back end that let me manage the site and manage all the other goals appropriately There's coverage getting as many cons as possible. So getting the data from every con that's happened Turns out there's been a few conferences in the past couple years The third goal is complete make sure the data is complete Make sure that every conference that I have indexed and every presentation at every conference has as many of the data fields Populated as possible And the fourth goal is to make it accurate Make sure that everything that I am displaying is as accurate and true to what actually happened as possible So going through those goals the platform. This is actually the easiest of them Right on the about page. I give a little bit of a description about what technology goes into it It's a simple Django web app Powered by Postgres on Docker hosted by Digital Ocean The technology behind it is relatively straightforward Moving on though to coverage. So this is Again trying to bring in the data from as many conferences as possible all of the conferences eventually So There's several options depending on how the conference has their data the best option is if the conference has their data in structured data, so if the web if the the website of the conference used FRAB similar to how Torcon this year did and Tor camp Before it and then another third-party option that some conferences have used is called sketch and these Options are great because I can just download the the json files ingest at all matter of seconds Unfortunately, they're not the most common option that I've been able to do the most common option is web scraping I have to preface this with a little bit of a trigger warning here You may be offended by the next the next point here. I am doing web scraping with regular expressions I know that may upset some of you and you'll say why not use something like beautiful soup and In all honesty, I tried to go that route I'm looking at web pages for conferences that were done in the 90s or earlier All of these things are so horribly inconsistent even within the page that Trying to do any kind of a scraping Taking into account the HTML markup doomed to fail So actually most of the data in info con DB right now was scraped with regular expressions off of web pages Sorry if that upsets you So then the next problem that we run into is there are plenty of conferences that don't have archives Defconn is amazing because you can go and you can view the website for Defconn one Well, I don't know if Defconn one had a website But you can go back to Defconn two three and see the web page as it existed as they published it then Not all conferences have that a lot of them are Say a WordPress website where a slash schedule is the schedule for the year and then after that conference they change schedule and That content is lost A lot of times I I've been relying on the Internet Archive But that's still hoping that the Internet Archive spidered that site at the right time of the year to get that content and In lots of cases that hasn't been the case some of this content just isn't available on the website anymore and That leads to the third or the next potential I Actually have to credit my wife for this one Defcon. I'm sorry Torcon 13 The Internet Archive failed to get any program just any descriptions of any of the talks my wife actually volunteered to manually Transcribe the paper program And that's how all of the descriptions for Torcon 13 are in here And that might be an ongoing thread depending on what what the conference organizers are able to scrape up from their archives And then in the future Especially in the coming months and year Hopefully I'll be reaching out to more conference organizers and seeing what they have with what they have digital archives of their past stuff Maybe working out a way that I can get any structured data that they have. I don't care what format it is I can make it work Anything is better than writing a regex to scrape webpages or typing programs So that's the second goal the third one is complete this is making sure that Every data point that can have a value does So when you're scraping all this data in mass a lot of things can fall through the cracks I've got back-end scripts that find missing data So one example of that is at the bottom of the front page There's this box saying hey do you want to help? Does gercon 2017 have a conference u2 playlist URL and what that is is every time the main page is loaded it randomly finds a Data point for a conference that it doesn't have a value for and asks the user. Hey Can you help me here? So that's just the very first example of user interaction Hopefully in the future that will expand to to elicit more help from users But in addition to that for completeness, I have scripts in the back end that help find schedule holes So I know where when every presentation was I know what room it's in find the holes for me Maybe that that presentation just didn't get Didn't get scraped properly I Have automated scripts for YouTube playlist and info con org Matching of videos to presentations so I point it at a YouTube playlist for a conference and it uses YouTube DL which most of us use just for downloading things from YouTube but it's also handy for getting the metadata from a playlist and an awesome Python library called fuzzy wuzzy from a Seat geek for fuzzy string matching and it goes through and figures out which presentations match which Videos and does all that automatically I'm also Automated Automatedly extracting Twitter handles from people one of the the safeguards for that is Going through and extracting anything that looks like a Twitter handle But then making sure it's not only unique for that user for that presenter, but also Pinging Twitter to make sure it's a valid Twitter handle that kind of stuff So all those speak to completeness But then just filling in a value for every piece of data doesn't help if we don't also stress accuracy There's several ways to Focus on accuracy One thing you'll notice as you browse the site is for each presenter I store two fields one for name and one for handle an interesting side effect of our community Name doesn't have to be a legal name But it's a value that's more used like your name and a handle is more used like your handle my my classic example of this is Cheshire Catalyst is his handle and When asked what his name is he says Richard Cheshire now That's not his legal name, and he's upfront about that, but that's his name to the hacker community So there are scripts right now that look at Names and try to extract which part is a name versus a handle in all of the many ways that That hacker cons have credited people whether it be name and then parentheses handle or name slash name dash aka's every every way that you can imagine it's been done by some conference There's also a lot of work in presenter deduping. So Every way that a presenter's name can be mangled or Presented has been done. My best example of this is Marsha Hoffman from the EFF Does a lot of work in the hacker community? this is her list of credits on the page as of yesterday and We see we have almost every variation of number of F's and number of N's in her name even as recent as 2014 so finding these these duplication of of data and the air the slight errors that are introduced and Coalescing those people future User interaction is going to be a big part of this planned feature for the hopefully near future is going to be a way of Allowing people who are browsing the site to flag inaccurate data I Don't think it's going to be a Wikipedia model anytime soon where anybody can edit anything But allowing users to say hey, this doesn't look right or this is obviously a scraping error This person's name shouldn't have HTML in it That's going to be the next step of allowing the users to help make this a better site So those were the four kind of goals that I was you that I was using to steer my development in this the other the other interesting thing that I wanted to throw out here and why This is worth me being on stage and not just saying go check out this website. There's a couple interesting findings So I Announced on Twitter a few days ago that if anybody was able to guess the most prolific The the presenter who has had the most credits to their name I'd give a free bottle of booze to whoever could guess first and surprisingly nobody get Kind of surprisingly nobody guessed I kind of put it out there because I thought it would be difficult for anybody to guess because y'all Everybody thinks of the the presenters that they see that they remember that are that are active in the hacker community But they forget some people so this is currently the top most prolific presenters and you see it's actually Kurt Upsall from the EFF who Does at least one ask the EFF panel every DEF CON and at sometimes two or three more presentations every year? Nobody guessed them But then we see a lot of the common names that we'd expect Now this is one of those things that again, this is as of the data that I have This is going to change over time and it's displayed dynamically on the front page Another interesting piece of tidbit trivia the 20 plus year club so I looked at everybody who was in the database who had more than one presentation and Sorted them by the duration between their first presentation and their last presentation And we actually have people who are still presenting today who have been at this for well over 20 years And I thought I'd just share that list with you here Of course Jeff Moss dark tangent. He's been he's been doing this for a little while manual Goldstein so we start to see a lot of the people who are actually been active in Conference organization at the top Matt blaze another name that you should all recognize and then Let's see Kingpin Mudge well upon space rogue They just did a panel at DEF CON so we see a lot of that but so the these was it? 12 people have all been at in this active in this community for over 20 years This is information that you that you can't Really get a good grasp of and until you start amassing this amount of data and actually being able to pull interesting statistics out of it, so What's next for info con DB? So I'm releasing it today. I just made it active I made it publicly accessible as of yesterday It's been in active development for about a year now. So what's next? So first obviously making sure that it can actually survive all of you hitting it I've been the only one using the site for a while. So Making sure that you guys don't bring it down will be a good first step so far. It seems like it's working One early piece of feedback I had given to me was Not just reinforcing the presenters that are very active Not just reinforcing the rock star mentality, but also be more inviting So one of the next new features is going to be a page highlighting new presenters people are presenting for the first time this year As a because I mean it doesn't matter if you're Dan Kaminsky's presenting, you know while not fully cognizant or You know doing your 20th presentation or you're up here for the very first time it takes a lot of guts to get up here and we need to encourage people to share their their wealth of knowledge and and be active in this community so Highlighting people who are up here for the first time Advanced random presentation so there's there's a page link on the front page for a random presentation And so one of the upcoming features will be an advanced version of that for instance Watching a video at on your lunch break So you asking the site give me a random presentation with a YouTube link done in the past five years under 30 minutes and Maybe about this subject matter Tagging is another feature that's going to be a lot of work the beginnings of it already there You'll see it on some pages But it's not exposed very well yet, and it's not the data is not populated yet But being able to tag subject matter so that we can see So you can actually do a deep dive into it into something that interests you User data error flagging that's kind of what I was talking about earlier allowing users to help curate this data make it Make it accurate and help this to continue to be a good resource API access is something that's high on my list. It's kind of Speaks to why I did this in the first place But allowing people to access this for whatever cool projects that they have ideas for I've already seen since I made this public somebody scraping or Crawling the page that isn't a search engine that I recognize so somebody obviously wants to get all this data might as well make it easy for them and Some other ideas about ranking popular presentation some way to Allow people to see that must-see presentation so That's all I've got for you in this presentation, but unlike most Presentations up here. This isn't the end of the story for for this project. This is just the beginning so I'm releasing info con DB dot org to all of you to the community I want it to be a good resource. Feel free to drop me any Con any any comments that you have any feedback any bugs I can be reached Well, I can be reached If you go to info con DB go to the about page there's a feedback form with email and Feel free to check it out and get back to me Thank you. Any questions? Yes, it is powered by Postgres So yes a sequel database Any questions? Yes. Yes. This is a This is a project of love that that I've spent a year on I Don't foresee anybody wanting it. I don't foresee me giving it to anybody much much much to the the annoyance probably of my wife For the amount of time I have spent on it and the time I will continue to spend on it But yes, this is this is a project of the communities. I think So I have been focusing mostly on data of cons that have already happened I Don't want to be the These are the conferences this year Web page. I have seen too many of those come and go It's a hard task to try to be that timely with data. I'm looking more for the archive That said I did make sure to get this Torcon in Before that this Torcon started because it'd be kind of silly to not be able to look up this con But yeah, the focus is more on an archive of the past then Make sure you go to these cons in the future. I'm not rolling it out though Yes Yes, the question was about open sourcing it It's it's an idea. It's something I've thought of it's less a focus because it's a service But I haven't rolled it out It was more about making it functional to this point at this time Um, yeah, that's a good question. He asked what qualifies or disqualifies a conference for making the list I've largely been focused on the obvious hacker cons and there are so many of them that It's not like I am sitting around waiting for the next conference to happen I am at least as of now focusing on security related conferences, hopefully not or less of a focus on The more busy side of things and focusing more on the hacker side of things That may change in the future though right now, it's largely been ad hoc a lot of it's going to be Who can I most easily get the most bang for my buck in scraping just because there's 30 years worth of hacker history to try to import here. Yes Yeah, so I tried to find similar Similar sites before starting this trust me. I did not want another project on my plate I've got plenty of unfinished projects already. I wasn't able to find any until a good way through development I found another one it was not easy to find and In my personal opinion, I feel that maybe they spent more effort on Getting every conference and less effort on the the accuracy and the completeness side of things so For me it didn't quite meet my priorities That said it it was the only instance. I have found that was trying to do exactly this There are other sites out there that tried to do the database of conferences Mostly looking forward And they unfortunately don't seem to stick around very long. I don't know if it's just the The amount of effort to keep them timely that that kills them or not But I would be more than welcome to talk to anybody who has other examples of similar things Going forward ideally hopefully in the future it will be less about scraping webpages And more about receiving structured data. We seem to be more aware of that nowadays than we were when You know when DEF CON started Then again, like I have evidence that DEF CON is still hand editing their program or their their their website for the schedule Spaces and inconsistencies in the markup So it's going to be a battle. I think for some Ultimately, I want this to be a service that I provide on behalf of the the conferences so Hopefully they're incentive to incentivize to work with me Without impacting what all of the work that they put into actually throwing the conference Yeah, I will definitely be doing more of reaching out to the conference organizers going forward. I See more people piling in getting ready for closing. So Feel free to grab me some time after closing if you want to talk further. Otherwise check out info con DB org and Shoot me any feedback through the website. Thank you