Who's ready to get statistical? It's not even a word. My loves, welcome back to my channel. Today we're going to be doing my 2022 reading statistics. I'm so excited. Well, today is going to be the best day ever. I love stats. I love stats, right? I love looking into statistics, looking into my reading for the year, and that's what we're going to be doing today. We're getting really nerdy with all of the stats that I can tell you and reflecting on how my reading went in 2022. We're going to be looking at genres, star rating, how long a book had spent on my TBR, what kind of authors I was reading, what kind of age range I was reading, everything. We're going to be talking about everything. So if you like charts and statistics, this is the video for you. Let's just get into it. There's nothing holding us back. We're going to start with the Goodreads statistics that Goodreads give you. But that's quite, in my opinion, limited. I like to track a lot more than that. And then we'll get into the kind of charts that I have made. Okay, so in 2022, I read 132 books, which I am really happy with. That is the most I have ever read in a year. That is 41,181 pages, which again, I'm happy with. I don't actually know how many pages I've read in previous years. Let's see how many I read in 2020. Because that was, I think, the year that I read 131 books, which I've written that in a second. I actually read more pages in 2020, 42,000. But so that's pretty typical for me. That seems to be the number that I keep hitting. I would love to hit 50,000. How cool would that be? Anyways, so yeah, the start of the year, my reading goal was 150. I was trying to read 150 books for the first time. And as some of you may know, I had a pretty rough start to 2022. And I didn't read a lot. I only read, I think, five books in January. So I think if I had read more in the first couple months of the year, perhaps I would have hit 150, but it just didn't happen. So I think in September time, I set my goal to 132 books, so one more than the most I've ever read in a year. And I did it. So that is the most books I've ever read in a year. I'm pretty happy with that. The shortest book I read this year was Randomize by Andy Weir at 28 pages. This was part of the forward collection, which is these sci-fi novellas that are on Kindle. And the longest book I read this year was Jade Legacy by Fonderly at 713 pages. Quite a lot! Quite a big book! My average book length in 2022 was 311 pages, which I feel like is pretty standard. You know, I read some books that are under 300 pages. I read some that are like 500 pages. It all averages out to 311, which I feel like, I feel like an average book length is like 311 pages. You know, I feel like most books like around the 300 mark.  I was just trying to adjust my camera and it's moved loads. Oh no! Okay, hold up everyone. We're doing some maneuvering of the camera. I'm so sorry. The level of unprofessionalism far too much. Okay, right. We're just dealing with the camera having changed slightly. So the book that most other people have shelved on Goodreads that I read this year was Cersei by Madeline Miller, with almost 2 million people having shelved this, which is kind of crazy. The book that at least people have shelved was Stephen Fry's Inside Your Mind, an audible original, which 114 people had shelved. That isn't technically a book. I don't think. Stephen Fry does some of these shorts, like he does the Inside Your Mind ones, but I love his historical ones. He does like Victorian England, Edwardian England, these kind of like audible series. And I'm like, what is the difference between that and like a really high quality non-fiction audiobook? There isn't one. So I'm reading on audible. I'm counting it as a book. Don't care. The rules don't apply. I think not a lot of people have shelved this because it technically is not a book, but I count it towards my goal. And I don't care, right? I make the rules. So my average rating for 2022 was 3.7, which I think is my average rating for Goodreads like ever. So at least I'm consistent. I feel like that's a pretty high average rating at 3.7. The highest rated on Goodreads book that I read this year was again Jade Legacy at 4.67, which is a ridiculously high rating. And I think it deserves it. I love Jade Legacy so much. I can't wait. I need to make my dad read this series. Okay, let's get into my statistics now. One thing that I think is interesting that I just want to tell you that we don't have a graph for because we have a graph for everything else is the average time a book could be on my TBR. This is something that I started tracking this year for the first time. And the average time a book could be on my TBR before I read it this year was 7.3 months, which I feel like is pretty good. I read a lot of books just as they came onto my TBR, like new releases that hadn't been on there long. But I also got through some books like Cersei. Cersei was one of the oldest books on my TBR. That had probably been on, I don't even want to know how many months that had been on my, on my TBR for. Let's find out. 44 months that had been on my TBR. So it all averaged out to 7.3, which I feel like, you know, shows I had a balance of reading books that had just come on my TBR and books that had been on their ages. Okay, graphs come to me. Okay, let's start with star ratings. Before I've had these in bar charts, but you guys have told me that it's easier for you to see in pie charts. So everything I think almost is in pie charts. So this year I had 29 five stars, which I'm happy with. I feel like 29 five stars is pretty good. We had seven 4.5s, 32 four stars, 23.5s, I should probably scoot over it. Hang on. 25 three stars, seven 2.5s, eight two stars, three 1.5s and one one star, which was really a DNF, but I felt so vindictive towards it that I just got a one star. So let's chat about genre. This one's interesting. I haven't really looked at these graphs before I'm coming and speaking to you because I kind of want to react to them naturally. So I read one classic, seven contemporary, 27 fantasy, three graphic novel, seven historical, 13 horror, one humor, three magical realism, 27 mystery, 11 nonfiction, eight romance, eight sci-fi, and 16 thriller. So yeah, it checks out the fantasy and mystery are my top two genres. They are the genres I read the most. I feel like I didn't consciously read as much fantasy this year, but thinking about it, maybe I read a lot of series, like I finished a lot of series and a lot of them were probably fantasy series. So I reckon a lot of my fantasy reading was parts of series, if that makes sense. I feel like 11 nonfiction is pretty good. That's like my fifth most common genre, which isn't bad. Like I feel like that's pretty good. I don't know, I did, I feel like I set a nonfiction goal at the start. Yeah, I haven't reacted to my goals yet. I would be doing that next week and seeing how I did, but I feel like I set a goal to 12. But like 11 is close enough. I'm pretty happy with that. Okay. I'm surprised I actually read equal amounts fantasy and mystery. I feel like if I were to make prediction next year, maybe more mystery, I feel like mystery is what I feel the pull towards. But also there's not like as many mystery books out there as I feel like as fantasy. Do I mean there's more to choose from for fantasy? Let's chat about the format in which I read the books. 13 were audiobooks, five were ebooks, 64 were what I call mixed media, and 50 were physical. So mixed media is typically when I have the physical book and the audiobook, and I read them together. That was something I especially the first half the year, I feel like every book that I read, I had to have the audiobook as well in order to like make sense of what was happening. I found it just harder to read at the start of the year. My brain was a little bit foggier. I've been trying I think more towards the latter half the year to just read physically if I can because it is, I mean I have script. I love script. And if I have, if the audiobook of a book is on script that I'm reading, I will probably listen to it because it's just easy. But getting lots of audiobooks on audible, it's expensive when I already have the physical book. I don't need to do that. But I do love that reading experience, especially if a book you know I've heard has a great audiobook. You're thinking of things like True Crime Story this year. There's been loads of books where I feel like having the physical and the audiobook really enhanced my reading experience. So I don't regret it, but I think it's just interesting. This shows that I love reading mixed media. In terms of audience, I read 97 adult, one children, six middle grades and 28 YA. So really starting to skew towards adult books now. I feel like that's been one of the biggest changes with my reading this year is starting to read a lot more adult books than YA. I feel like I've been pulling away from YA a little bit. I don't know, I think when I first got back into reading I read a lot of YA, but I feel like I've been getting into problems with YA where I don't know if it's just that YA I've been picking up. I mean it's not exactly a massive sample size this year, but I've been reading some that just feels like I don't like the writing. I don't think they're particularly well written. That is so mean. I have this problem sometimes when YA reads really young, and I don't think it works. I don't have that problem with middle grade. I never feel like oh this middle grade reads young. I don't like it, but some of the YA I've been picking up, I wonder if I've been saying it reads young. It's hot and conflating that it was bad writing. I don't know. I don't want to say it because poorly written often. I feel like that's mean, but maybe it's maybe I'm using it as a synonym. I don't know. But I feel like yeah I haven't been loving a lot of YA I've been picking up. I have got some YA I'm excited to read, but even just looking at my TBR card, I feel like there's a lot of adult books and a lot of YA. So that has definitely been a new new skew this year. In terms of where I got the books from, I only read one one book that I got from a book box this year. Oh my god 16 from Book of the Month which is actually more than I thought it would be. I read quite a lot of Book of the Months. 34 were gifted to me. Four were from Kindle Unlimited. 46 were books I owned and bought myself. One was from Audible. 14 were from the publisher and five were from Script. So books I own myself and books I'm gifted are always going to be the two biggest categories I would say here. 14 from the publisher is still quite a lot considering I I don't really request books from publishers anymore. I just it just feels like a lot of pressure for me. Like when I see because I like separate them in my spreadsheet if they've been sent to me or if I bought them myself. And I just feel a lot of pressure to read a book quickly if I got sent if I'm a publisher. And that pressure means I just don't read it quickly. I just like push out my brain. I don't know I'm not very good at it. So I just don't tend to like if a publisher reaches out to me and says would you like this book and it's a book I'm really excited for I will bite their hand off but I don't reach out anymore and request books. I'd rather think I just buy them myself when they come out rather than feeling that guilt that I put on myself. But Book of the Month they read quite a lot from this year as well which was surprising because I only started working with them when I started working Book of the Month like mid to end of last year I think mid to end of 2021. So yeah I've worked with them all through 2022 and I love Book of the Month. I love the selections. I love the books I get from them. So yeah I read 16 Book of the Month gave me. We are almost at the end. Let's talk about series. So 35 books I read this year were part way through a series. 13 were first in the series but I did not continue all those series if you've watched my series wrap up of the year. Yeah I didn't continue with 13 series. Some of those I've DNF'd and 84 were standalone. So go Megan. I wonder what this was last year. Can I find that out? No I don't think I was tracking that last year because I'm wondering how it compares but I don't I think that's something I started tracking this year. Okay I had I didn't have first in a series or part way through series but last year 56% were stand-alones and 43% were part of a series. So a much bigger chunk of my reading was part of a series. Well not much better but bigger chunk of my reading was part of a series but a lot of those were first in a series. So I really feel like I've done a good job this year of prioritising stand-alones and prioritising books that are part way through a series.  We go out we got through this quickly. In terms of author status 17 were debuts, 65 were authors I'd read from before and 50 were new to me. So it's pretty much a 50-50 split between authors I read from before and authors I haven't because obviously debuts I haven't read from before. So I feel like that's a split I always like to have. I always like to be you know discovering new authors but also really trying to carry on reading the releases of authors that I've loved before and really enjoyed. So I'm pretty happy with that split. So that is all of my reading statistics of 2022. I hope you enjoyed going through that with me. I love going through the statistics. So yeah let me know. I would really love to know if there's anything you'd like me to track next year because if there is I kind of need to start doing it now as I begin my spreadsheet. So if there's any info that I didn't go through there that you would like me to track for this time next year please let me know. But yeah here's to an amazing 2023. I can finally say happy new year to you because it's finally the new year for me.  So I feel like good vibes for 2023 and I feel like looking there there's a few things that I'm super happy with in terms of my reading for 2022 and some things that I would like to grow and improve. So next week we will see my goals. We'll react to my 2022 goals and then we'll set my 2023 goals and now then I think that's all of the kind of 2022 reflection content done and we're just into 2023. I'm very excited. If you got into the end comment is that like I feel like it's a bar chart emoji. Yeah comment the bar chart emoji if you got to the end. Thank you guys so much for watching and I'll see you very soon in another video. Bye!


Hello, and welcome to the Ruderman Roundtable. I'm State Senator Russell Ruderman from the District of Puna and Ka'u on the Big Island. I'm your host here on Think Tech's program, Ruderman Roundtable, where we focus on environmental and good government issues. Today I'm joined by Marty Townsend, director of the Sierra Club for Hawaii. Thank you for joining me, Marty. Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it. Very nice to see you outside the halls of the legislature. So the Sierra Club encompasses a wide range of policy issues facing Hawaii. What are the biggest challenges facing Sierra Club and its efforts in Hawaii? So I think, you know, at the core of everything that we do is battling climate change. So, you know, that encompasses a wide range of things, like you said, from invasive species controls, shoreline erosion. But the thing that's really sort of percolated to the top is our water issues. And so everything from ensuring water quality, but also water quantity, so restoration of streams, ensuring, you know, the natural connections between the ocean and freshwater streams, as well as, you know, making sure that our water resources aren't contaminated. And that's a significant undertaking. But also dovetailing with that is clean energy. We know that we have to address the causes of climate change, and that is our fossil fuel-based economy. And so Hawaii is, you know, taking the leadership role in converting, making a just transition to a fossil-free fuel, a fossil-fuel-free future. But and that's a huge undertaking. I mean, we have a commitment to 100% renewable by 2045, but there's still a lot to get us actually there. You know, the next set of benchmarks. And yeah, so it's a huge undertaking. And for the most part, I'm the paid staff for the Sierra Club, but we're really a volunteer-led organization, and it's a huge group of volunteers who work to help make all that happen. Now when you say you're the paid staff, does that mean you're the entire paid staff? Well, for a long time, the Sierra Club had only one staff person, and we were just blessed with a major donation, and so we will be scaling up. So we have a few new staff people coming on. And how many volunteers or how many people are actively involved with this? That's a hard question to answer, because there's so many different facets of it. So in terms of like our political work, the things that we do at the Capitol to make change happen there are about 60 people who are regularly like engaged in specific issues, and then separate from that is a whole other community of people who are working on outdoor education programs. They host hikes and, you know, cleanups and trail restorations and work days at farms almost every weekend on all the major islands. Nice. Yeah. Well, speaking legislatively first, what are the most pressing concerns for the Sierra Club? And what's the first thing you would do to move the Legislature to solve it? Well, so we've been working on clean energy, we've been working on water issues, working on invasive species controls, funding for Department of Natural Resources. But all of these battles, the thing that they kind of, that they have in common, is the makeup of our Capitol. If we had a legislative body that recognized the importance of being a long-term investment in environmental protection, Sierra Club's job would be much easier. So really a lot of the things that we work on would greatly benefit from improvements to our electoral process. How we get people elected has a significant impact on what policies we're allowed to get passed. So. What do you mean? Tell me more about that. How does, how do we get people elected to relate to the environment? Well, so the reality that we are all confronted with is that private corporations have an outsized influence in our democracy. You know, there was a study in 2014 from Princeton University and Northwestern University where they found that 90 percent of average Americans have zero influence on elected politics, on the decisions that their representatives make. And that really the entities that have the most influence are those who donate. I think that that study found something like two-thirds of the political donations came from a point two percent of the American population. Like that just blows my mind. And it's all about this, you know, reciprocal economic relationship, right? So the politicians, they have to raise an absurd amount of money in order to win an election. So the companies will give them that money and then in turn the companies come around, have to meet those victors and ask for tax subsidies, for example. I think that same study found that over the past five years the 200 most politically active companies, meaning they contributed to campaigns and they contributed to political causes, they spent about almost $6 billion total over five years. But in return they got more than $4 trillion in tax subsidies in the U.S. So that gives an idea of like the economy that we're working in terms of our own politics and so I feel like campaign finance, which is a huge honor, but it's an important issue. We need to have, you know, a fair playing field so that people who have equal rights have an equal voice. So it's things, you know, it's all kinds of electoral, political changes, things that you've worked on yourself that we need to get changed, but we're not going to get changed until we get, you know, because it's not in the interest of incumbents, right? So that's probably the reason why voter turnout is so important, but at the same time why voter turnout is so low because- You just had a world record low voter turnout. World record low, like, oh my God, it was like, it was 30%, just over 30%. That's crazy. It's in a state that is the lowest in the nation of voter turnout, so it's an all-time low I think we saw. And I think you pointed to at least one of the reasons why is because a lot of people feel they have no influence on their government because of the outsized influence of corporate money. Right. And it's been part of a downward turn since the 50s, a consistent downward turn. And I mean, there are a lot of like ancillary issues that can point to why it was a low voter turnout. For one thing, we had many more people registered to vote this past primary election than the previous primary election, something like 40,000 people registered. That together with having a less number of people actually voting made that drop even more significant.  And so people weren't that very interested, but I think those are, you know, sort of all ancillary. It really comes down to do people feel like it makes a difference that they vote. And there were a lot of people who got engaged while Senator Sanders was running for president. And the fact that he was, that was no longer part of the conversation. I think people just sort of tuned back out. And that's really unfortunate. I think that's something that we who are concerned about improving politics in Hawaii need to figure out how to address. We need to keep people engaged. We need to make it easier to vote. I feel like people should just be automatically registered to vote. You know, Oregon passed the law. People are automatically registered to vote once they go to the driver's license. We knew there's several ways you could do it. People who pay taxes. Once you pay taxes, you're registered to vote. Make it so super easy. You don't have no registration, nothing. And then you just focus on, you know, people who are doing like identity theft kinds of things to prevent voter fraud. And there's none of this like you have this form or that form where you turned it in by this time or that time. You make it in rights, an inherent right, and you make it a holiday. Every election day should be a holiday. And it should be a big deal that we need to go and vote. Yeah. So, and I think we do those kinds of things. And we can start to then pass laws that actually address some of the fundamental problems in our voting system. You know, this idea that we must choose a lesser of two evils. Why not have a voting system where votes are ranked? Right? You have instant runoffs. And so if my top choice doesn't win, that's okay because my votes then get counted towards my second choice. And the second choice has as much, has a better opportunity of winning. Are there places in the country that have what's it called ranked choice? I'm sorry. What's that? Yeah. Well, it's either called rank voting or instant runoff. Instant runoff. Is there places that do that? Yeah. Places that do do that. And it seems to be working. Yeah. I know like major riots and like that because the sky has not fallen, right?  Why not separate those two? Vote for the party. And those parties get seats assigned based on the percentage of votes that they collect, right? So if you get 5% of the vote, then you have 5% of the seats in the house in the Senate. And then people can vote for whichever candidates they want. Not necessarily being tied to one party or another. That might be awesome. But that's going to be a big change, right? But we really can't do any of those until we have people turning out to vote. Because incumbents are not going to make these kind of changes to the voting system. It doesn't serve their interests. So when I think about good government and what would make our democracy more responsive, there's sort of two big issues, one of which you touched on, which is campaign finance reform, which might include even publicly funded elections. And then there's all the other good government things like easier voter access, perhaps term limits voter initiative, lobbying reform. So the big one, which we mentioned of campaign finance, I have one friend that says that's the reform that makes all other reforms possible. Right. But of course, as you just mentioned, we're not going to get there because most incumbents see it as contrary to their best interest and won't let it pass. How can we ever make any progress on this issue? It's kind of a catch-22. It is a catch-22. And the thing is, I think people need to overcome this defeatist sense of like, my vote doesn't count and get out there and vote for the candidates that are going to support this. So we had a significant, a notable number of progressives running for the first time against incumbents, and the low voter turnout really hurt them. I mean, some of them really had a really great shot. And if the voter turnout had been better, they may be in office right now. And those are people who would have voted for campaign finance reform. So it's part of our own human psychology, where we have to overcome that inherent sense of like, my vote doesn't count, doesn't make a difference. They're going to do whatever it is they want anyway, whatever's in their interest. We have to play the long game and recognize that the more we engage in the process and the more we put our weight behind those that are going to fight for us, and even if they don't win this time, they will fight again the next time, like, keep it going, right? That's the only way that we're going to be able to build the momentum we need to to make these kind of fundamental changes. And so we just had this incredibly low voter turnout right after this huge wave of new people getting involved with the Sanders campaign. Where do you see us right now? Are those people that just got involved? Are they going to stay involved? Or do we have to somehow reinvigorate them or re-inspire them? Or what's going to happen next? I mean, if only I knew it was going to happen next, I would be... I was kept, man. You didn't know. You know, we're going to have to keep them engaged. We're going to have to find those issues that people are going to feel like, yeah, this makes a difference. It matters that I'm engaged because we're going to need them in 2018. And there's no guarantee that we're going to have the Senator Sanders to help invigorate people. You've got to be self-motivated.  He inspired you. You feel like, for once in your life, there was a politician that was speaking to you and you need to harness that inspiration and have it motivate you for the next five years. This is going to be a multi-year struggle to regain our democracy. And if we fail to do it, voter turnout is going to get worse. And the special interest services that the Capitol currently provides are only going to get worse. And so we don't really have a choice but to engage. We have to, or we're giving up. And for me, that's just not an option. Do you think it's going to be possible to do that? Yes, I do. I do. I think actually for the eight people that ran on the progressive ticket went through, they, I think, really inspired young people to get more involved. And I think over the next two years, we're going to see even more engagement. It's going to be tough. We're going to have to find those issues that really speak to a wide range of voters. And like you said, campaign finance reform is the reform that makes all of the reforms possible. And so if we can stay focused on that issue or one like it that speaks to all of us, then I think we have a real shot. The main thing is for us to not get disheartened. Well, you've inspired me just to hear your optimism. And I'm here with Marty Townsend. Marty Townsend, director of the Sierra Club of Hawaii. And we're on the Ruderman Roundtable. We'll be back in just a moment. Thank you. Looking to energize your Friday afternoon? Tune in to Stand the Energyman at 12 noon. Aloha Friday here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm Jay Fiedel. And I'm the host of Research in Manoa Mondays from 12 to 1 on ThinkTechHawaii.com. Take a look at us and learn about geophysics, learn about planetology, learn about the ocean and earth sciences at UH Manoa. You'll really enjoy it. So come around. We'll see you then. Aloha. I'm Kaui Lucas, host of Hawaii Is My Mainland every Friday here on Think Tech Hawaii. I also have a blog of the same name at kauilukas.com where you can see all of my past shows. Join me this Friday and every Friday at 3 p.m. Aloha. Welcome back. I'm State Senator Russell Ruderman. You're here at the Ruderman Roundtable on Think Tech Hawaii. We're with Marty Townsend, director of the Sierra Club of Hawaii. Thank you once again, Marty, for being with us. Thank you again for having me. I appreciate it. We were just talking about government and good government and things that might make it better. Let me ask you one more question before we leave that subject. If you could achieve one change or improvement that would make our government better, our democracy better, what would it be? Tough question. Tough question. It can be two things. It is not one. Well, focusing locally, which is where I work the most, I hope that the incumbents who are back in office will take note of the amount of enthusiasm and interest that came from these new challengers and will look upon themselves to try to improve the process a little bit. In my experience, I've found that the rules, the internal rules of the House and the Senate are tough. They are slanted towards benefiting the leadership. They don't necessarily serve public interest, transparency, ensuring public engagement. So I would like to see those rules loosened a little bit so they can't be so easily manipulated and used to circumvent what clearly might be the general popular concern. I feel like there's just way too much emphasis on the leadership, right? You have to be in leadership or to make any change happen. And then, in my opinion, undermines the functionality of our democracy. And it turns what should be, it gives political weight to things that have nothing to do with improving public policy. And that's unfortunate. I think that's part of the reason why we have such apathy is because we've allowed that style of politics, transactional politics to happen, to dominate as opposed to legitimate, genuine problem-solving for the public interest. So I have hopes that the House and the Senate leadership will amend some of their internal rules. Well, let me just play devil's advocate for a minute. We talk about the progressive candidates that didn't quite make it. What would make an incumbent who may be faced one of those? What would make them say, oh, I better pay attention instead of thinking, well, you see, they can't unseat me. After all, so I'll just be business as usual is just fine. What would make them, do you think anything happened to make them serve 10 months? Yeah, I think for several of them, it was really close. And the skin of their teeth was a low voter turnout. And if we continue to engage voters and get people to turn out more, then they may not be so lucky next election. And so their choice is to evolve here and listen to the voice of the public or to risk getting voted out in the next election. I mean, I think it's a mistake for us to look at just one election, and that makes all the difference in the world. It's never like that. All of the stuff is long-term cyclical. And for many of us, we're in it for the long haul. A lot of the progressive challengers indicated that they would run again. And so yeah, so I think it's in the self-interest of the incumbents to embrace some change. Good, wonderful. So let's switch a little bit to talk about agriculture in Hawaii. It's another area of focus that affects the environment. And of course, your club is involved. What are some of Hawaii's greatest needs, agriculturally speaking? So I'm not a farmer myself, but in working with farmers, I found that it is a really tough row. Access to water, access to land, access to financing. I mean, a lot of small farmers have a hard time getting them when they need to get started. I feel like those three things, the way it currently is, is set up to benefit large corporations, industrial agriculture, and not set up to benefit small farmers. I think there's a lot that we could do on public policy to help improve access to financing for farmers and ensure fair access to water. I mean, I'm very concerned about the evolution. As we evolve away from sugar, we've been involved since the 1980s. But we haven't been making the long term decisions that we need to to ensure that everyone has fair access to water for things like diversified agriculture. We've kept a lot of the control of water with a few private corporations, the sugar plantations. And that's not necessarily in the benefit of all of us. It's in the benefit of a few. But water in Hawaii is a public trust resource. No one owns the water. And we, as the public, should just ensure that there is fair and easy access to the water so that everyone can benefit. So that's been a fundamental issue for the Sierra Club. We want to see the restoration of streams. And we want to see the diversification of agriculture to really restore Hawaii to a more sustainable economy. You mentioned access to land as well as water. And I hear from some small farmers that that's such an important issue. Because, first of all, not only is it hard for them to get access to land, but if they don't have any long term equity in the land, then their financing becomes one of the challenges, which is the third issue. So those two are very, very related. It's one thing to own land and be able to borrow money against it. But if you're just leasing the land, and if it's just a year to year lease, you're not going to get finance for the equipment and the improvements. That's one issue that the Sierra Club's been working on with the Department of Land Resources is their land division has been focusing on these short term annual permits, which has really made it difficult for small farmers to get the financial investment that they need. And so trying to push DLNR to embrace these long term lease relationships with farmers who have demonstrated a commitment to the land. They've been there since the 70s, whatever. And there's no reason why they should have a long term lease. What are some of the other things that the Sierra Club is working on to support agriculture? So we also do a lot of hands on stuff. So we started this year with what we call lahannas, or work days. We've been doing it once a quarter. Now we're going to start doing it once a month. Basically 20 or so volunteers go to a local farm and help with whatever labor they need. So we've been working at Tarot Farm and helping them to break open more patches and clear the mud and make, prepare the land for the planting of the huli. And then helping them to restore their all the ancient, you know, the diversions from the stream and get it to go back to the stream. It's really rewarding work. And it's something that has a direct benefit on these farmers who then can take their tarot or whatever their product is to market. So this is individual farms, or farmers that need help. And you find a way to prioritize them and say we're going to go help this one. Yes, right. It's kind of like, I don't know if you're familiar with permablits. So it's an organization I love. And they do really good work. And what they do is it's basically it's like a farm raising kind of approach, right? Where they say, okay, we get together and we're going to work on your yard and then we're going to work on my yard and then we're going to work on his yard, right? And we all work together and everybody's yards are now, you know, growing food. And so it's kind of a similar idea where we look for neighborhood farmers and we try to develop a relationship with them. And if they need like manual labor, we are there. We have come with our gloves and our hats and our boots and do what we can. That's great. And I guess that answers my next question. What is your club doing locally to advocate for better? No, this is a little different. How are you advocating for better stewardship of our lands and natural resources? You mentioned the deal in our land lease efforts. So we do a lot of engagement with the Department of Natural Resources. They meet twice a month and their meetings are public and we encourage people to attend. We help people to write testimony and engage in issues that affect public trust resources, natural cultural resources. And it's a huge universe of things from invasive species controls to ag leases and or leases on public land to water decisions. And so, yeah, there's a huge variety of things that we work on with the Department of Natural Resources. And it's important work, but it's also computational and controversial. But I think so far we've seen really good movement. I'm actually very happy with the appointment of Suzanne Case to deal in our, she's been very fair and thorough. Yeah, both the Department of Natural Resources Board as well as the water commission, but both entities have been making some solid decisions lately. Oh, that's great to hear. Wonderful. Let's switch for a moment to energy. We talked about energy in the context of global warming and climate change. And Hawaii has made a commitment to being a world leader in renewable energy. What does the Sierra Club stand on Hawaii's energy future? Well, we're trying our darndest to get Hawaii to really achieve this 100% renewable goal by 2045 or sooner. And I think the thing that we are coming to recognize is that HIKO is the obstacle. Hawaiian electric industries is- I didn't say that. I didn't say that. I'm responsible for my own comments. It's okay, we've had a conversation. They know how we feel. The way in which Hawaiian electric is set up, the way in which we have run our monopoly and invest our own utility, it's just not geared towards our design to support diversified renewable energy sources. And so we need to break up with HIKO. It's a bad marriage and it's not serving our interests. So we will be looking at policies this coming session to figure out ways in which we can either one, improve HIKO's behavior so that their interests line up more with the public's or create an open relationship with HIKO and can see other people. That's quite an analogy you have there. Great, I just came up with it just now. I hope it's a backfire. And of course, this issue is very much in the air as the recent sale, essentially, of HIKO, of HEI to an offshore company just was rejected. Yes, that would be true. And so the future of energy is suddenly back on the table for discussion. So it's a very exciting time. Yes, it was a huge victory. I think we are still coming to terms with how big that victory was. We really dodged a bullet on that one because if Nextera had taken over our utility, it would have been a hundred times harder to get where we want to go. But so we have a chance now with that, with the way HIKO has already indicated that they're not interested in being our utility necessarily anymore. So let's seriously investigate what our options are. And maybe we can come to an agreement that benefits everyone, you know, Hawaiian Electrics investors and the public. And if not, we have to put the public's interests first. And... I wish more people said that. That's so nice. So tell me a little bit more. You mentioned we have a get outdoors program. We have programs where people go on hikes with the Sierra Club and the Hawaii Service Trip program. Is that what I'm saying? Yeah. Tell me just a little bit about that. And also, how can people get involved with the Sierra Club if they want? Can you tell us where they can connect with you on the internet? Our website is www.SierraClubHawaii.org. And there you can find... Say that again. SierraClubHawaii.org. All spelled out, .org. Thank you. And there you can find all of our outings, as we call them. Everything from these work days to hikes, to service trip projects where we do trail restoration. And yeah, so it's a great program. It's all volunteer run and we'll train people who are interested in hosting their own outings. We'll give you all you need to know about outdoor safety, CPR, whatever, all of the training you need to be a safe and effective hike leader and then encourage more people to participate. And just for my selfish interest, is this only on Oahu? No, yeah, every county has an outings program, yeah? And it's all volunteer run. And so on our website, you can go to each island and see what our outings programs are. And so it's a lot of Saturday, Sunday hikes, sunset hikes, those kinds of things. Like a lot of things that help to encourage the connection between people and the environment and do it in a way that doesn't have a negative impact on the environment. I think that's part of the problem. People kind of go, I have my smartphone and I have Facebook and Yelp and I know the hikes to go on and I just go. But oftentimes you don't recognize the extent of the impact that you have on the environment. Right, about 100 people are all going to the highest raked hike. We're having a significant impact. And it's important for us to really practice the values of take out what you carry in and not to try to clean your shoes so you don't carry invasive species, those kinds of things. So I really encourage people to go on a hike.  They'll teach you everything you need to know and you'll have such a better experience because you'll learn about the native species, you'll learn about the history of the area and it would really improve your appreciation of the hike they've gone on. So. Well, thank you so much. Thank you, I'm here with Marty Townsend, Director of the Sierra Club of Hawaii. I wanna thank you once again for joining us. Thank you. We're here at the Ruderman Roundtable. I'm Senator Russell Ruderman from Pune District on the Big Island. We're here on Think Tech Hawaii every other Tuesday. Thank you for joining us. Mahalo.


In this session, we are going to discuss the topic of understanding state. The state is an organization which has historically evolved through many different phases. It has performed various functions in various periods of time and was mainly differentiated on the basis of its structure and ruling authority. So the ultimate goal of the state is to provide security, liberty and welfare to its people which it seeks to accomplish by one means or another. So, ryasat kya hai? This is an organization. Baas simple baat hai aur organization ka purpose kya hai? Number one, to provide the security, then liberty to its people and the welfare. Tastor par koi bhi ryasat jo hai uska buneadi maksat apne logon ki pula ho behbood ka kyaal rakta hai. So, various thinkers and philosophers have defined the state in many ways and four things are considered as common ingredients for any state. That is, territory, population, government and sovereignty. Yani koi bhi ryasat hai uska ye buneadi chaar components hai, ingredients hai, jiske bahag hai koi bhi ryasat nahi kehla sakti. Jise ilaka hai, abadi hai, hakumat hai aur iktadaryala. Yani ryasat mukammal tabhogi jab uske paas ye chaarun avamil maujood hoonge. So, states must be defined both in their institutional and functional domain. Like the experts, they have their perception that state is in reality a number of interacting institutions and organizations. It's a perspective ki state jo hai mukammali nahi usakti jab tak uske paas interacting institutions and organizations nahi ho. Yani within state bhi toh kuch required hai nahi aur wo institutions hoti hai aur organizations hoti hai jinn ke darmean proper interaction ho na chahiye. But the following definition of state by man not only defines the structural aspect of a state, rather it also explains its functional attributes. Ab structure ka matlab hai ek institutions hai aur functional kya ke unka apas mein interaction hai. So, it is a very interesting definition by man. The state can assess and tax our income and wealth at source without our consent. Definitely, state ke paas tunke authority hai toh wo humse text leh sakti hai chahi hum dena chahiye kya na dena chahiye. Lekin, humari income par state text leh sakti hai. Ye uska right hai. It stores and can recall immediately a massive amount of information above all of us. Ye ek aisa angle hai. Desper churu mein taraz bhi kya gya ki state ko jo bhi information humari baare mein chahiye wo state ka hak hai ke wo hasil kar leh. So, it can enforce its will within a day almost anywhere in its domain. Its influence on the economy is enormous. It even directly provides the substance of most of us like in state employee. Mention hai wo reality hai. Kini hum, dekhne hai ke jo humne definition ki under jo important cheez hai highlight ki ki state text leh sakti hai, state information gather kar sakti hai aur phir state enforce kar sakti hai apni koi bhi policy ya apni will ko apne rahne wale logon ke upar. Ab usme logon ke will count nahi ho ghi. Pal ke state ke authority jo hai that matters a lot. So, the state penetrates everyday life more than dead and historical state. Its infrastructural power has increased immensely. Bakke sasa jo change hai wo hi hai ki state ki powers jo hai wo increase hui hai. Kais hai increase hui hai? Kunke humare rose mara ke jo maamlaat hai usme state ki involvement a boh zyada direct hai. Agar hum historical evidences se compare kareen, to zahere state ke pass jo authority thi, the central authority thi, wo come implement hoti thi door daraas ke ilakon ke andar. But now with the speedy communication and speedy transportation, now it becomes a reality ki humara state ke sasa jo interaction hai, state ka jo humse interaction hai, wo itna speed up ho gaya hai ke koi bhi chee state se chuppi nahi rahe sakti hai. Nahi hum iss kabal rahe jate hai, ke log jo rahne wale hai wo apne kuch maamlaat ko state se secret raksake hai. So, the state is a political institution because it wields power and for that reason is a focus for political sociologists. Ab yaha yeh svaal hai to why political sociologists want to understand state, definitely state a political institution hai.  Oath important area concerned, uske baare mein concerned hoti hai aur consider krte hai ki ye humara area hai. So, that's why political sociologists wants to understand state.


Everybody force here ripping four boxes for Jonathan. Oh, it's like Jonathan. We mess with this thing all night To prism draft basketball hobby a bum and chrome baseball choice from 2023 and a 2023 Bowman Chromie University football We'll start with the prism drafts. Hopefully we hit a women Yama had a good game tonight. It's first double-double Ten block three shots You might average three blocks a game Good luck Jonathan purple ice is a Keegan Murray 125 149 rookie sensational signatures of Gabe Kelshaw silver Jerry West hyper of Kyrie Irving and a blue Steph Curry Numbered Steph the 199 Can't wait more widescreen Justin Edwards to 149 on these sensational signatures silver rookie scoot Henderson nice scoot hyper Aaron Bradshaw Purple ice Jared McCain to 149 and a Taylor Hendricks fearless Hendricks there. There's an Adama Sanogo to four to 49 rookie Otto Adama Sanogo silver Larry Bird hyper Trey Johnson And a red Trey Johnson out of two 99 KD silver fireworks out of 99 is a Julian Phillips rookie Otto now College penmanship Julian Phillips silver Tristan Rukjevic Hyper rookie tiger Campbell And a blue wave of trachevion Smith a mojo behind it actually blew a trachevion Smith Fall by I'm and Thompson mojo brilliance to 25 very nice card Mojo brilliance Way to end that first box. All right one more prism draft To 199 we've got a KJ Williams rookie Otto the college penmanship silver Carl Malone Silver rookie leaky black hyper Carl Malone blue wave of Marcus sassar rookie Marcus sassar out of 249 silver Kianti George Larry Johnson Otto to 75 UNLV Larry Johnson right there running Rebels silver rookie Kendrick Davis hyper rookie Kendrick Davis blue Patrick Ewing an mojo behind that now Grady dick fireworks 17 of 25 Very nice The Ewing is the 199 Grady dick to 25 on the fireworks here the Raptors rookie Shooter purple rookie nice Taylor Hendricks first rounder out of UCF right there To 75 maybe they're maybe UCF's first first round pick in history. I don't even remember man Definitely the highest draft UCF player Taylor Hendricks Dexter Dennis to 149 rookie college penmanship Otto Got silver magic Johnson Hyper magic Johnson Mojo shirquavian smith to 25 the mojo is going crazy here The coalition is interesting though Because the silver and the hyper in the past couple packs have been the exact same and there's been a mojo in it as well Nice shirquavian smith at 25 It has been interesting In a good way though. It's been good Brandon Miller base Julian Strother on the rookie auto blue Remember to 125 silver rookie Kobe buffkin a hyper rookie Kobe buffkin and a red keegan murray Red keegan to 299 Thompson. All right All right solid boxes there. Let's do the 2022 Bowman chrome university football box now for you, jonathan First woman auto josh williams travis hanter auto Be nice josh williams first woman based auto Shoulder sanders base green shimmer here is first woman dante smith Good color on the dante smith first 82 of 99 refractor kade club nick Extractor first woman donovan ezra asiraku And the extractor ramblin man quorum block brock bowers Early risers club nick refractor first is elijah badger ramblin man marvin harrison jr Shimmer bow nicks working on something big here. Come on gold First bowman auto jake garcia. Nice a quarterback gold first woman auto 41 to 50 I'll do sophomore qb right there Arkansas ramblin man jory and dickie refractors mitch labor labor Extractor first woman kyle mccord purple mini diamond first bowman jaffari harvey How much number to 399 maca ebuca Early risers jackson arnold refractors zeven makabe aqua first woman jaleel farouk to 299 does it for the The football here comes the baseball 2023 bowman chrome choice First woman autograph here is a carlos de la cruz Good start on the base Other base first bowman autos kennedy corona and some gold here true gold first Bowman auto of junior garcia 39 of 50 nice true gold So true gold in both bowman boxes here very nice. That'll work for sure. Thank you again, jonathan We will get these cards out to you shortly


Pack W. Stock goes to resistance and comes straight down. Why did it hit a resistance and came back down? Well, look what ended up happening right here. In pre-market, there was a big seller out there at E. Then when the market opened up, look at the seller out there, 147,000, 273,000. So here's a stock that's up on the day, but now all of a sudden it decides to go down.  And look what ended up happening.  Why is the stock going down on me? That's not what the newsletter I said that I subscribed to. It wasn't that indicator that was why is it going down? Even though it might still think it's up, why is it going down? Because this seller out there is selling it and he's pushing it down. And guess what? And if you don't see that, you can go from taking a loss to be a big loss.


Hi everybody. So let me start by thanking you all for being here this late on day four to watch my talk and Let me just start by introducing myself and what I do So I've been an open WRT developer for more than 10 years now And I've been involved with the Linux wireless drivers pretty much almost as long and When I started thinking about what I'm going to talk about here at this Congress I I kind of look back to see what are the really important topics that kind of That I think about frequently in my work with with the project and one of the main issues That I come across frequently being a Linux wireless driver developer is What about freedom to extend those wireless drivers freedom to make changes to actually have decent drivers that are upstream and that are Not just usable for simple purposes of connecting to the existing network with your laptop But it can actually be used to build something more like the fry phone project building decentralized mesh networks like building your own access points and maintaining your own infrastructure and Software freedom in that regard and the freedom to program your own hardware are kind of a big deal so Let me first start by saying why it is such a big deal to have free drivers here in Many of the existing consumer access points as you've probably been aware during the last time There are so many security holes going on like if it's I've actually spent some time Looking at the GPL tar bowls of some of the routers that were exposed as being fundamentally insecure And I looked at where where these security holes are actually coming from or if it's something that people spent Months researching or if it's something that's really simple and what I found in many cases What was that it's something where somebody with a security background just spend a small bit of time Looking into these devices and these were the first holes that fell out So I guess you can you guys can expect for for lots of devices out there. There will be more security holes there will be more More remote exploits probably for for devices connected to the internet Simply because all of the code that runs on there is pretty horrible and to be able to change that you need to be able to Change the wireless drivers themselves as well because they're becoming a lot more complex And it's a lot harder to figure out what's going on and the more complex a piece of software is The usually the easier it is to find some bugs in there And that brings me to the second part stability Typically what you have in the normal consumer access point and with the drivers study that you get provided It's something that they tested in one particular scenario They may be test do do a test where they have some clients connected to it in an isolated environment And with a known configuration and if you deviate from that when building your own devices or making changes you can expect things to break horribly and and Just as well with these drivers you have a huge maintenance cost simply from the complexity of these source codes and free software goes a long way into Fixing these kinds of issues at the core by making sure that code is public code is Revealable for anybody who wants to see it and anybody can help make changes to make things more simple and more understandable And you can actually then go ahead and have Features implemented that are not deemed relevant by the vendors Like I pointed out to you earlier the fry from project in many places a big deal We've had some talks here about it as well and the ad hoc mode I think in many cases is simply not considered relevant by the chipset manufacturers at all yet It drives all these huge mesh networks. So if you don't have free drivers, how can you get that implemented? And so this is this is really what this talk is all about And to put it put it a bit more in perspective I like to present to you my like my journey through Linux wireless like how I started With very little freedom and what changed over time So when I began looking into my first wireless router there with WRT 54g We only had a binary only driver for Linux 2.4 Where we did some really horrible kernel hacks to be able to to push it forward and still make some kernel changes And it was really hard to keep like the full thing going and we couldn't make any changes to the wireless driver itself And it was only many years later partially replaced by an open-source driver based on reverse engineering But it never had the same degree of stability as this binary only module So as you can see not a lot of freedom going on there, but it was like the best thing we had at that point to build access points So what then came up came along a bit later in the game was the mad Wi-Fi driver Which is partially open has a binary only component that still runs in kernel context But at least it was free of any sort of kernel version dependencies and actually a large part of the driver Was open so we could do a lot more tests. We could play with the our talk mode We could play with rate control algorithms and all these things But of course still not fully free and there was still large parts that we simply could not touch properly Until it was later freed up by a proper upstream driver Of course, this also came years after After the original project that was still dependent on non-free binaries And it was basically a few years too late to be really relevant for a lot of research because by the time It became practically usable for many things the hardware was already pretty much outdated and But it it was still a useful prototype for developing Mac editor to 11 features so for the core wireless infrastructure of the Linux kernel and actually used it myself to develop The the basic form of the rate control algorithm that is still used by many drivers in the stack today But this was not really the most interesting part of my time in playing with Linux wireless Because what came afterwards was the f9k driver and now for the first time from from a ferrous Which made the most popular chipsets in the community. They actually developed the driver themselves and They published it and they upstream it upstreamed it themselves So this was really a big step forward and unlike the the earlier attempts at doing drivers with mad Wi-Fi This one was completely open and to the last bit So you could actually see how it tuned the radio parameters You could influence the code that messed with the tx power You could change the parts where it sets the frequency and you could play with lots of low-level radio parameters So this was really the dream driver for research projects for innovative things for building your own access point And for all that but even getting that usable was kind of a big deal because They the initial development was only prompted by customer demand from a laptop customer So they wanted to have Linux on their laptops where they were shipping with the Theros wireless cards And they wanted it to be usable on Linux itself So they forced Qualcomm a Theros or a Theros that was as it was only known back then To build this driver and actually push it upstream and this is one of the examples where actually Knowing about the values of free software doesn't give you much room in a chipset manufacturer Yes, we actually have to have the customer demand to be able to influence the decision making and of course since it was there And it was supporting chips that were not just used in laptops, but also similar chips That made it into access points There was a strong push from the community to open up even more code and documentation and kind of push the whole thing forward I myself Invested maybe more than three years of work into making this driver usable for production environments And it had the nice effect that actually at some point it was stable enough that Customers of a Theros that were doing embedded hardware actually started asking a Theros for commercial support on the S9k driver Instead of the reference driver that they just provided as an SDK And of course at that point in time They had never imagined that they would support S9k in such a configuration So they looked at who's doing all this work in the community and which was me for a large part And so they sent their own customers to me for support But now there were also quite a few issues with S9k a lot of work to really make it stable and usable came from the community because the vendor was unwilling Unwilling to invest any sort of significant resources comparable to their own internal development in making this driver better Additionally, there was there were many people involved in the company from the community They were actually pushing internally to be able to provide better open source support and have developers commit resources to that But this this progress was often very slow because of high turnover like at one point Yeah, the one engineering manager or project manager convinced that this whole open source thing was not going away And it was actually a useful thing and then he moved to another company and the next guy It was just as locked down as the other one was initially. So it's a repeated effort and It's it's really hard to kind of make this sustainable Whereas when customers demand a feature they usually jump immediately because they want to generate sales So these open source drivers really had Very limited resources like with f9k at some point It was two people working on it and then it just became one and then the one guy never really had much time So after some point there were not really that many contributions from a pheros or later QCA themselves it was basically maintained by the community and During the time where they actually try to figure out if they could commit more resources They also had some crazy ideas on how they could unify the f9k code base with the code base of their internal Driver and kind of sync it up both ways and have some ways of Maintaining control of a development direction of the open driver Which in some cases really goes against the Linux development model So kind of also made things harder because they were not really ready to commit to that Before they had they would figure out this whole unification thing which was impossible to figure out properly Now the biggest issue with us 9k is of course the 8 or 2.11 n chips that it supports They're going away and they have this new driver called as 10k for the 11 ac chips And it's actually named after as 9k with just a number increment because they wanted to really achieve the same sort of thing Of course, it didn't work out properly because of poor planning and other things and I'll get to that later But basically was horrible enough that I decided to stop working with QCA and figure out some alternatives so Media tech came along and they actually They're much smaller than Qualcomm, so you have less of this this bureaucratic BS going on and they actually Did found out that this open source thing is really nice for various reasons which I'll get to later And they decided they actually want a Mac 8 or 2.11 upstream Wi-Fi driver They just didn't know how to create such a thing So I offered them some help with in that regard and I started Writing a new driver for the chipsets from scratch which took me about a month of work But it was contract work paid paid for by them and in some ways It's it might be a suitable replacement if we can get enough hardware with this chipset going on For the things that were previously done with as 9k So one of the issues with that is there's like in as 10k There's a proprietary firmware that controls some things which is obviously it goes against the things that we want But the good thing about this chip is this firmware is very small and very simple So it only sets the channels and it only does some Calibrations which are the things that it might be interesting to some research projects But in many ways, it's not relevant to the day-to-day things that we want to do with this driver So the driver actually has the possibility to control the entire data path Which is what we need to build mesh networks to the rate control and software and all of these useful things So it's not as free as as 9k But it's it's usable and I hope someday to convince them to open source the firmware as well Which maybe will be possible because they've already figured out that open source is a good idea so Okay now to the point Now let's see what's wrong with as 10k and I thought a bit about like how to how to present this and In the end decided to show it with some pictures that I hope will match the intellectual level at which I assume the decision-making was going on So let's start with the first one which is kind of a big deal We have the stoner guy they create a successor to a popular free software driver But they put all the interesting parts in proprietary firmware. How nice So I was kind of deciding whether to use the stoner guy or the scumbag Steve here But then decided to go with Hanlon's razor which says never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity So to the next point they wanted to offload all the things that they could offload they finally had a microcontroller on there which was reasonably powerful and They were building a firmware with lots of fancy abstraction and they decided all we're going to do it like with the mobile chips We're just going to offload everything because they basically combined their mobile development unit with the network development unit So they would use the same approach for mobile and for the access point designs, which yeah It might save some resources, but of course There's lots of different requirements and like putting everything together is a bit hard and offloading all the things to proprietary firmware kind of Completely goes against what we as a community need or what people need to be able to build flexible devices So they decided they they offload scanning they offload lots of power safe handling They offload large parts of the data path. They do rate control entirely in firmware So we if the rate control is crappy and it actually is We cannot replace it. So that's kind of in the way of many useful things And that's also a big reason why I decided that I don't want to be involved with F10k any more than I have to So on to the next point which is kind of a funny one They actually put a lot of effort into designing fancy abstractions to keep the firmware compatible While their own internal engineers were basically treating the firmware as an extension to the driver so in the end they changed the Firmware a bi compatible layer pretty much with any version that they made and any branch that they made Defeating the whole purpose of the entire thing So if you actually look at the F10k driver, you have like five different Firmware interfaces and firmware APIs were depending on the version of the firmware and Sometimes just on the version not on the actual chipset You get a completely different API and it just handle has to handle all of those Because the Linux kernel is supposed to be compatible with firmware changes and everything So it's a big mess and I don't see anybody cleaning that up anytime soon. So Actually when I started looking into F10k before it became public I decided yes I could get involved in that mess if I wanted to but it would have been a multi month full-time job just to clean up that mess with Let's say slim chances of it actually succeeding in the long run due to the bureaucratic decisions at that level So I decided against it and decided well another manufacturer might just be more understanding when it comes to open source So to the last minor point with the driver They decided oh, well, we it's it's we don't just use plain 802 11 frames from the driver and then send those out It cannot be that simple. So they figured out a fancy mode which they called native Wi-Fi And I think this is actually a Microsoft term So they use the property of like the the Windows networking stack where it has some fake 802 11 headers That the drivers expected to put in there and they put that in silicon and they expect the Linux driver to like take the full 802.11 headers replace them with fake ones so the hardware can then replace those with the real ones while transmitting the packets So I spent a lot of time here talking about Qualcomm atheros So let's take a short look at what's up with the other vendors So you have Broadcom there they made actually made a soft Mac driver for some of the recent chipsets But they only made it for like one or two Generations of chipsets and not really for the 802.11 AC ones and they decided for the new stuff They're only going to support full Mac where it means that you don't even have the 802.11 data path in software You basically send in ethernet frames and you can configure some things But you have no freedom to actually have any sort of flexibility there And this is a trend that we're seeing with with other kinds of devices as well Like with with Marvell. They also have some full Mac devices though thankfully mostly limited to the mobile ones But they kind of follow the same trend as as 10k with the development of the the AP chip sets. They also Offload more and more things to proprietary firmware, which they also Frequently change they also have no real stability in the firmware interface and they kind of take away all the control But still have enough Boiler plate code in the kernel to be say to be saying we have a linux upstream driver But it's just unusable for for any purposes that go beyond the simple access point or simple client cases And you have really the same with Intel except that they're much more limited they have some AP support for a few chips But nobody uses it. So typically if you try it as a few people have done It doesn't work Because nobody ever uses that stuff or maybe some people use it in limited configuration to do Wi-Fi direct but for any real usage no not usable and With real tech you have something similar going on They keep cranking out new chipsets every now and then where they have different drivers all the time And they also put more and more stuff in firmware So it's it's all pretty much headed in the wrong direction and we have to focus on the few choices that we have Where we were kind of closest to where we need to be and I hope to be able to to build something like that based on media tech If they can manage to to properly stay on the market So in all of this discussion and dealing with chipset manufacturers There's lots of challenges which present a very small set of opportunities And I like to talk about what the the issues in working with the chipset manufacturers are so Educating them is kind of hard as I as I Pointed out earlier with Qualcomm a theorist They have lots of bureaucracy there and sometimes you have enough people to push internally for for putting open source On the agenda, but in the end most of the people there will not care And most of the people there will just go with the cheapest option where where they don't have any any sort of Cost that they cannot attribute to a particular business case or a particular like set of specific clients And they also expect their clients not to care about open source Which has the result of their clients actually not seeing anything usable based on proper open source So they don't know how to ask for it But if some customer has some people inside that are actually very smart about open source They can easily push for the chipset vendor to to make some changes to their roadmap But only if they're big enough in volume one of the really good examples here is is Google Chrome OS because they actually had people in there in the teams that dealt dealt with the chipset manufacturers that cared a lot about doing the right thing and Initially, I think they only demanded that all of the drivers that they get from chipset vendors are open source And then they found out that this is not enough because then they get tarbles of crappy vendor drivers That are still hard to integrate so they changed that over time to demand that the drivers need to be upstream So suddenly the chip vendor is forced to adhere to a quality standard controlled by the kernel community, which works much better So the big question here is can we engineer customer demand for free drivers? And I'd like to leave that for the discussion later because I think that's that's really the easy easiest possible way to make some changes to that ecosystem and one of some of the ways that we can do this that I found all that kind of work is Educating big customers with enough volume that open source is a nice way to kind of save on development costs because as as many many vendors that combine Silicon from different vendors they typically find out pretty quickly that all of the reference software for their hardware is only tested in very very limited Constellations and typically only with the default modes that the reference SDK is designed to use So if you if you deviate from that and if you kind of put it put a driver for from a different vendor in it in a Different the system with it with a system on chip from a different vendor Then you have all these kinds of mismatches through the hacks in the various trees Because vendors always assume that you're going to source everything from them and if you educate them that with with free drivers and Free kernel code and if it's all upstream then they don't actually have to worry about mixing those combinations anymore because typically kernel drivers are tested in lots of very diverse and very varying conditions with different platforms and typically a Driver for a system on chip is written in a way that it often does not depend on hardware support for that particular system on chip But it that it allows to be compiled with lots of different architectures for which it's it never will be useful Just to make sure that the code is written that is written is clean and portable and is supported in many different Configurations and with those kinds of quality standards You have a lot easier job of integrating all that in your own board if you're building a new system Then if you just get some random driver blob that was tested in one configuration But can be expected to to fail epically in various other configurations And I think a big deal in educating those customers is also to to provide good reference code and examples like actually had many years ago, I had a meeting at Broadcom and When I was still working for QCA and I sat down with some of the managers there and there was one guy responsible for the Embedded SDK part and he actually told me oh, yeah We are fully aware of open WRT because customers frequently ask us for features that they see there And then we have to go and build them ourselves And so this is something that that works You you show you show people what they can actually get with a decent platform with decent source code And then you tell them now go and demand this from you from your chipset vendor and depending on the size This can have a real impact There's actually a third way that has also turned out to to be very useful in some cases supporting GPL enforcement action because if you have a group of People enforcing the GPL against a particular router vendor or ODM and they've been caught repeatedly and They there's a lawsuit going on and they kind of see that they're on the losing end of this lawsuit It's nice to be able to tell them now if you were to use open source software You would have a lot less issue with the licenses You would just publish that and you would just have clean separation between the the open source code and the proprietary code It would all be much easier because in many cases It's actually not the ODM or the router manufacturer that's directly violating the GPL But they get reference code from the chip vendor which is really fishy with Licensing and you have that very frequently because the chip vendors are worried about the unique selling points and They so they they worry about marketing market differentiation and at some point they decide all building better hardware is hard Let's just differentiate by doing different quirky software and It's that I always see the analogy there that they're constantly fighting whether the wheel should have five or six corners and They still haven't figured that one out in the meanwhile We're building something that's supposed to have round corners, even though they aren't fully round yet But they they haven't figured out that this would be a nice idea yet Maybe we should tell them So then there's another key player that kind of spits in our soup here, which is the FCC It's it's always a bit of a love-hate relationship with the FCC because I think in some ways Sometimes they have demanded some good things like in the whole net neutrality debate They might actually be on the good side. I don't know. I haven't really followed much of that But here in the Wi-Fi space. They're really problematic because they noticed that some people put up some access points where That we're interfering with better rate weather radars and they looked at okay Where does this come from and then they see oh there's people there that are tinkering with their radios and Maybe they shouldn't do that. Maybe the tinkering is what's causing these issues So they basically treat user access to flexible radio devices as a bug that they can fix by policy And so they decided oh just going against the users is hard because there's so many of them We'll just make the hardware manufacturers are lackies and we just make them responsible for ensuring that the user has no control over his own device and This of course generated a strong backlash in the tech community from some key people that were responsible for a large part of the development of the internet actually and I guess they didn't quite expect that I think I think they thought that those this was just be would just be really Uncontroversial because they only want to make sure that the weather radars aren't messed with and they actually Made some revised rules based on the backlash But in some cases, they're really just as bad as the original ones like there was this this thing where they actually in the earlier version asked router manufacturers to Describe how they will prevent something like the free firmware DDWRT from being flashed onto the device and they had to show how they will prevent that and In the new rules they came along said oh well this was really not our intention to lock down the full devices and Our intention was only to make sure that they cannot touch the radio part But the kind of the concept that was pointed out to them repeatedly that they simply Refused to understand is that there's a big difference between the intention and the likely outcome And this is this is the part where they're still struggling to understand that concept Because they still maintain that oh well, they're only going to lock down radio parameters And they're not going to touch anything else But I've already heard from some silicon vendors that they already figured out that locking down only the radio is hard Locking down the entire platform is so much easier. So and so much cheaper. So let's just do that because nobody cares about that, right? Something that was pointed out to me in in an earlier talk at this Congress, which I found really interesting was there's a Interesting coincidence in timing between those rules and the appearance of a secondary user of the spectrum called LTE you which are it seems that they're attempting to do a land grab of like the the the unlicensed spectrum because Their license spectrum that they fully controls apparently not enough for them to guarantee the bandwidth that they want to have So they decided all let's just grab some of that Wi-Fi Nobody's using it, right? And so we really have to figure out how to deal with that. There's lots of people that are doing active campaigns You can find on the news sites That where people are complaining about the FCC, but one of the the main issue is there's many people Don't seem to get that it's just as important to fight against the part of locking down the radio parameters Then it is to fight against the lockdown of the full platform Because there's so much research going on so many interesting things like friends of mine are Developing a way to dynamically adapt the TX power of of the radio per station So if it figures out, oh, well this note is closer Then it can lower the TX power while getting the same throughput, which I think I think will do a lot of good things in for large high density networks and When having lots of access points and crowded spaces But the problem is the changes to the new chipsets are making it increasingly impossible to deploy something like this because all the access to the hardware level that we need to be able to build Something like that is going away based on some lame excuses And we have to figure out how to push this debate in the right direction Make it clear to people that just going for the convenient option is really not enough in this case And we also have similar problems in the EU actually the ETSI has decided to do something similar like that Which in some cases even goes beyond the scope of the FCC We I think we still have a bit more time to influence that one because it's it shows up as a EU directive and it still has to be implemented by the various countries international law and that gives us some leeway to to like in the individual countries Motivate some politicians to fight against those parts as well But I I can't give you many details about the inner workings of that one because I try to stay out of politics I just figured it was important to at least mention this because it's kind of becoming a big deal So what happens with all this hardware lockdown? That as I mentioned before the chipset manufacturers are already considering hardware lockdown to have an easier way to deal with the FCC rules And then there's the router manufacturers that are already already partially doing it In some cases maybe as an excuse to cut down on support costs by people that are reflashing The devices to custom operating systems in some cases. It's actually the excuse was we want to prevent Chinese clones I think this was the excuse that ubiquity networks uses whether they have some really popular outdoor equipment Which gets deployed in fry funk frequently and now with the new devices They actually locked down the bootloader and prevent flashing of custom firmware and they said oh, yeah This is about the Chinese clones and everything and It's in some cases I've seen the lockdown also be used as a very cheap excuse for market segmentation Because if you can in one market Cripple a few features and sell it as the basic version And then you have the same piece of hardware and you just put a different piece of software on it and a different key And it unlocks the full features You can have like different target groups and you can just enforce by some DRM schemes That people don't just change one for the other and what I'd really like to discuss with you guys What can we do about all of these things? I've put down a few few ideas like spread the word on on the FCC issues There's another point here, which I did mention before which is we can all analyze the security of the existing devices out There just to make the argument much more compelling that locking down these devices will actually prevent people from fixing the devices because they come shipped by the manufacturer buggy as hell and Making it very easy for attackers to get into your network and there has to be some way to have hardware that is actually fixable and if we just make sure That we we show that this is an industry-wide issue and that actually pretty much all of the standard routers out there are running Horrible software, which will have horrible security issues Then maybe we can show that this is this is kind of a big deal And one of the other things that I would appreciate some real help with is Writing free 802.11 drivers as I mentioned before the empty 76 driver with the experience that I've built over the time I built that thing basically in a month and now I'm adding support for a second chip set where I've put About five or six days worth of work in and it already does monitor mode and it sends some packets So I can do a bit of scanning and just like more people to get involved with that field So that we have the resources that when a chipset vendor comes along and says we want an open source driver But we need some help that we have a pool of people that can actually look at that code and Improve that code and write some free software drivers And it I can tell you from experience that it's a pretty exciting field to be in and it's a really really nice feeling When you brought up a large part of code For the first time and for the first time you see our now money to mode is working and I can actually send packets And I'm just making progress over time and it's I think it's a lot of fun And I hope that more people will figure out that it is a very interesting field in a very challenging field And one of the things that I just discussed with a with a friend of mine Some minutes before this talk was I think we should get together and create some some written material or some presentations specifically tailored at decision makers in big chipset vendors and big router vendors probably differentiated by target group where we figure out like what world are they living in like what are the concepts that they're used to thinking in and just Create something that is framed in a way that it will provide them with compelling arguments to do open source And I hope to get some some feedback from maybe from you guys or from people watching the streams later On how we can create something like that And this is really all that I have for now, and I hope you brought some really good questions Yeah, thanks a lot for your presentation that was really interesting Assume somebody is already a pretty decent C programmer So what's the best way to get your feet wet with Colonel driver developing especially in the realm that we were just talking about? I Mean how to get into that field how to figure it figure things out or I don't consider myself a good enough C program I to be quite honest and probably don't have the resources I just wanted to invite you to To give some practical advice how if somebody has the resources and some in the skill set You know the C is C skill set and some understanding of Linux programming or kernel programming What does he or she do to really start? Getting into that community. I think in some ways. It's actually pretty simple You just pick something where you find a device on the on the net That can do Wi-Fi and you figure out that Linux support for it is working to some degree But it's not fully working and then you just start playing with it You start experimenting if you can figure out what's actually going on if you can write your own debug code to figure out How the hardware works and you just start playing with it and see what happens? I think that's the best motivation to get into something like that to not have a specific plan Like I need to do this and these are the steps But actually play with something on still until you start to understand it more and just enjoy that process Hello, thanks for the great talk I have a question about firmwares. So from what I'm aware There are very few Wi-Fi chips with free firmware. Yes, and I think this is a probably not really Investigated security issue because especially if you have a PCI device then a bug in the firmware You can basically own the full device through a DMA attack. Yes And do you think there's what's kind of the status with firmware and do you think there's a potential to get more A chip that's with free firmware and yeah so far The fight is already to at least get some free drivers And I think free firmware it goes a few steps beyond that and I think it's a very important fight to have And I fully agree that it's a big deal with with regards to security They pointed out with the F10k firmware They have the approach of offloading everything and they they have some fancy bits in there That actually parsed TCP packets and do some funny things with those and they do some other protocol related things as well So I expect that there will be broken code there and there will be ways to exploit that and It's just not that the awareness of that It's just not very widespread yet because there haven't been many practical attacks on such firmware yet one question from the internet yes Which laptop manufacturer do require either us drivers? There aren't that many laptops anymore with Ethereus drivers. I think it was a for a for a short period of time There were a few laptop customers that that used it I Don't know if they actually shipped large quantity, but these days Qualcomm ethereus basically gave up on building cards for laptops on the left Are there any Wireless card chipsets that you would recommend in terms of firmer openness where the The firmer is open for those cards and this production grade. Let's say and Hacker both have to speak I know only of one such thing. It's an old ethereus 11 and usb device where During the the height of like the people lots of people working inside ethereus fighting for open source actually managed to convince Management to release the firmware for that one. There hasn't been that much Development afterwards mainly because the firm was only opened after the device was already long obsolete But it's if you look for devices supported by F9k HTC You will find an open driver and open firmware and you can you can compile everything there. Thank you Please Hi, thanks for all the work. You've put in over the time. I'm a very happy user of open WRT. So thanks a lot I dabbled in trying to do some work in free BST for some ethereus chips And that was a couple years ago when ethereus was willing to give out documentation Are there any vendors that are? Easy to deal with in getting documentation. I am not afraid of signing any NEA's or something like that, but like I Think many vendors are very reluctant to give some random guy Documentation on the hardware. Well with with media tech. I now have a working relationship So if you want to work in that field and on such drivers, I could probably introduce you and I For my own work I got the documentation under NDA and maybe I can convince them to hand it out to a few other developers as well to make progress there All right. Thanks. Yes How we can push manufacturers Where are you? From the IRC chef from the IRC. Okay. How you can push hardware manufacturers? Which one's the chipset or the routers? I think it was referred to slide 20 okay The the hardware manufacturers it depends on at which level like that the hardware manufacturers themselves If you can get the right contacts, you will find You sometimes you only have to connect their engineering departments with the people making the decisions because they will have learned about the frustrations of using crappy vendor SDKs and They will appreciate having something open But they just need to realize their power that I can actually ask the chipset manufacturers to provide something like that When it comes to chipset manufacturers, it depends if you're like the If you're talking to the market leader like Broadcom in many ways they simply don't care much about Doing something open because they already have a good position and they already know the value of their chips and their software and They they are likely not seeing anything wrong with what they're doing. So in some ways you probably have to go for the underdog and Help give present present them with some opportunities to sell more hardware like with some of the chipset vendors that I looked at I I guess they must have been losing customers with a crappy state that their software is in and They must at some point realize that better software can actually lead to getting more customers Yes It's very Good feeling that when I saw your Commit messages that the whole source code is occupied with your email ID in there so my question is I'm a Beginner, I mean I have good knowledge of CNC programming and I would like to contribute something I would like to know is there any webpage or the IRC channel where I can have a interaction with the people Who are contributing there? Which part Linux wireless or open WRT or which one yeah drivers I think there's not much Coordination going on among Linux driver developers. It's like people doing their own thing and then Discussing patches on the mailing list there is a Linux wireless summit frequently, but it's mostly interesting for people that already like regulars in in dealing with it with the drivers and I think I don't know if they have any sort of beginners workshops But I think you can you can easily get in touch with people if you just pick something That's there that you would like to play with and you just start making some patches fixing some bugs playing with a device or even asking for advice on On a technically detailed level I think if people notice that somebody is coming along and Caring about not just how can I do this but like what are the specifics of this and this in this part? They can probably find the motivation to help them along and to get them involved in discussions So I think there's lots of ways Simply by playing with something yourself that you can get into that field I have a question about something. I don't understand in this issue as your talk has the title freedom considered harmful What is it actually that they consider harmful? What is the vendor incentive not to publish this as open source instead of Locking it down. I understand of course the incentives for publishing it at all source, but why are what is the reason for them not to do it? some of the reasons are They're always afraid of losing control In many ways it in many ways they get the impression that if they publish something then other people will do different things with that and They have no control over what happens with a result and apparently on many levels that matters a big deal to people and Then there's also like big corporations like welcome They fully buy into this imaginary property kind of thing and especially that like the Qualcomm itself Their business is as far as I know patent licensing and anything that's even remotely involved with open source has to be a separate company just to to keep the lawyers happy and The lawyers themselves are also Establishing lots of paranoia about all the bad things that can happen if you publish open source software Like it might in the fringe on somebody's else's rights And if it's not published as open source it might still be there, but at least people won't see it and In some cases companies might also be be embarrassed to to show the quality of their software to the world Okay, thank you From the IRC. Yes How big should a customer be to make the vendors doing free software? I think in some cases it actually depends on having like at least a million chips per year or something a comparable volume So it typically has to be big to matter Small companies with 10,000 or 100,000 units are probably not big enough to convince a chipset vendor to change its ways Okay, I guess this was it. Thank you very much Another question We got another question from the IRC. Yes Why do the vendors need to be nice? They have no profits from using their hardware for researchers because they lose the possibility to sell them Research-grade hardware at much higher prices How how are you going to make them to be nice? Well The thing with with all kinds of research is a lot of the useful research that they benefit from if it's open source Comes from people that don't just go and buy expensive research equipment And many of the vendors are actually not in the business of selling expensive research equipment And that brings me to to another point Which which I heard actually from from a theorist back then when they were more open towards open software They actually said that Having lots of small companies that are able to build hardware That can support themselves simply by having open source software where they don't need to use the support channels of the vendor They they all combined might actually produce the volume of one big customer So it it's it is actually a way to increase sales and it is actually about many more things than just being nice there There's a lot of benefit to be had from that It just depends on more people making compelling compelling arguments in that space I think in many ways, it's if you look at it from the perspective of the people in those companies It is easy to find a kind of a frame or a mindset in which you can explain open source in a way That makes sense to them from from a financial point of view as well Okay. No, this was really the last question. So Thanks again, thanks for the work you do without you. Thank you all


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