Thanks for staying with us. It's time now to go and leave off from the press to see the headlines that are making the front pages of our National Davies. Okay, I got stuck there. Well, we're going to be looking at some of the newspapers and we'll see what the headlines are this morning. And joining us to discuss this is Professor Kamilu Sanifagi. Good morning and welcome to the program, sir. Good morning. I'm sorry to you very much. Okay, so the papers today are screaming some headlines. So let's just begin with the very first paper here on our lineup, and that is The Punch Newspaper. The Punch Newspaper leads with diesel price drops as Dangute sells 1,225 naira per litre, supplies petrol in May. The writers also on that story that or the writer is that dealers get 1,000,000 liters each at 1,225 naira per litre. Price drops in your Lagos and Ogung. Your take, please. This is a very good news, but the price of diesel is coming down. Even though it is not as people expected to do, but I think it's a good news because diesel sources are emerging in Nigeria, and it is great in other sectors because, you know, like, heavy industries will now have the term, but then what they used to buy. So I think the impact of this change on the economy. It may not be so drastic that we have a drop in this area. Okay. Well, I should have even started with a smaller headline. We've seen a 44-year-old being sworn in in Senegal. Senegal president sworn in advocates Africa's unity and security. So I'd like you to comment on that. Well, what leaders went there? African presidents went there. This is someone who has never held an elective position, and right now he's been sworn in as president of Senegal. What do you think about that? 44-year-old? Yeah, this is a very good thing, you see. It is now taking us a liter. We are having a break from the legal thing in Africa, where we have people in their 70s and 80s protesting and winning elections. Now here in Senegal, a youth has been able to make it. And these shows are a lot of things. Number one, in the 60s, when we emerged as independent, most of the leaders were youths, and we saw what they did with their respective countries in terms of struggling for independence and in terms of providing possible leadership. So there is a little hope that the person, the old person in Senegal will make it. And the second thing is that the youths in Senegal even have shown that they have impact on the policy, on the policy. Of course, even the former president, Mike Yissel, arrived on the support of the youths to make it. And now the youths, despite the operation of the government, especially Mike Yissel, when he turned against the youth, they are able to rally around behind one of them and they make it. So I think this should be an eye-opener and a lesson to the youths. Not only in Senegal, not only in Nigeria, but in Africa where our youths now are very pessimistic. So I think this will raise their hope. It is unfortunate that one leaders are not there, which shows that most of them do not accept this person. They do give him the necessary support that we should have, but it is an internal approach, it is a democratic thing, but we ought to welcome and we ought to give full support, especially given the protracted crisis in Senegal, which almost blocks the distance of the youth. Despite all these odds, they are able to make it. So I think that the world ought to have come and join in this happy success in Senegal. We also have to be happy because of the trend that is going on now in the area. While we have such a military course, Senegal is holding on to perhaps the only country in the sub-region that has not experienced a limit. So I think it is a good honor that we now see and let's cross our fingers and hope that we give him the massive support that he has from the youths. Is this not a pointer to the fact that his administration may be mired with a lot of problems because he doesn't have the support of some of the people we expected to support him? One of the things that he talked about when he was sworn in is that he was passionate about Africa's unity and we understand whether we say it in harsh tones or we don't say it at all that whenever any leader rises up and talks about the unity of Africa, he does not ever have the blessings of the West because when Africa is united or if Africa is united, there's going to be a different song being sung on the continent. So don't you think his campaign, his manifesto and what he stands for could have been responsible for this unacceptance from the other world leaders? Yeah, I think it is part of the problem, part of the issue. You know, he took the right when he was campaigning, he took again the top stands especially on the Poma Coroma in Nantes, France. He talked about the need of these Western powers to allow African countries to do their own affairs. They should not be meddling in the affairs of the continent. So I think that will be part of the reason why we haven't seen that, especially given the fact that France still has very strong influence on its former colonies. Maybe it is the one that is pushing them to come. So that is one thing. So what all this thing shows is that there is going to be a very tough time. So the way out for a feeling now is not just to rely on rhetorics, but to try to build a very credible team. Because if you are saying they don't have experience and so on, which African leader, which one leader has experience in governance? You know, the success of a leader depends on his position and the team that is able to build. So it is a team work. So if he is able to do that, he is going to move out of his time, he is going to move out of challenges and make it better. All this is an indication that rough times are ahead. So he has to tighten his belt and build a credible team in order to make it. Tough times are ahead. Well, let's bring that home to Nigeria. Federal government finalizes electricity subsidy. This is from the Guardian newspaper. Federal government finalizes electricity subsidy removal. Plans 200% tariff hike. And what do you think about that? Now we are hearing that. The Guardian and also Demi trust carry the same issue. This is one of the major problems of promises here that we are just trying and doing. One, this is going to be a very, very costly thing, not only to the electricity consumers, but to the nation as a whole. By the time the government say they are raising it from, let's say, 65 Naira per unit, 200 Naira per unit, they are just looking at one direction that they are going to make money from. That which is about 200% of what they are saying it now. But they haven't looked at the impact of this increase on other sectors. Definitely this will raise inflation. Secondly, to lead to the collapse of many industries, because electricity is perhaps one of the cheapest or even one of the cheapest source of energy and the main source of energy for industries. Now by the time we raise it to such level, many companies are going to collapse. So at least those who are able to survive it, they are going to raise their costs of production in order to recuperate this huge amount of money. So I think the government is just being very wise and accomplished by raising the electricity. After all, we are just finished saying that there is hope that diesel is coming down. But now if we raise electricity, we are just compounding the problem. And we are going to see so many problems and challenges in the economy as a result of this decision to raise the tariff of electricity. And the unfortunate thing is that they are trying to do it within weeks of having that. So I think all this will not work out well for the country. Yeah, especially now that we are hearing, whether they officially say the tariff goes up 200% or not, the gas supply to these people who supply us electricity is going up by maybe more than 100%. And then we are expecting that when the review is done, the tariff will go high naturally even without the government having to do anything. And then we are talking about electricity and then we have seen somewhere like the UCH. On the point newspaper, it carried that disconnection. UCH doctors suspend night shift begin strike on Tuesday. And also on the Guardian newspaper, we have also seen this story like that about UCH staff scaling down work hours over power outage. This is a hospital where lives are saved, supposed to be saved. And then there are no night shifts, only day shifts because of this connection to a facility like a big hospital like UCH. And it's worrisome for me. The tariffs have not even gone up. But the amount of money being owed, the discourse and who are very responsible is so much that these connections are being made. Even we hear that Ministry of Power, at some point, they were telling us that they were owing. Asurok was even owing. And so many other ministries and power status were owing the electricity suppliers. And we don't know where we are going. Now the tariff is about to go up again. I mean, I don't understand. No, it's not that we don't know where we are going. And just we don't like to know where we are going. Because all this is showing that we are going down the drain. We are heading out towards a crisis.  And then perhaps I strike there. And then the cost. We are just by city. All these things will eventually explain our role for the government. And also, you know, the primary responsibility of the government is the lives and welfare of its own citizens. We have access to government in terms of how much revenue they generate and how much subsidy they remove. And what is happening in UCFH is that they are going to have a strike.  And these are some of the things that I was leading to earlier on. And I say the hype and these things will generate social problems. Because even the issue of jump up, we are going to see a lot of it. Many people know the every little environment, conducive environment for people to work will not be there.  And they will maybe go to Green and Pistols. That would be another thing. And there will be a cease and strike, you know, on this issue. And there will be high inflation as a result of this issue. And there is going to be, you know, an increase in poverty and the high guide in the country. So I think what the government ought to do is to rethink over this issue and not consider itself as a business venture, where today in the new subsidy they are there tomorrow. Increase price, this one and so on. And at this high time, that the government should help rethink on these IRF World Bank sponsored policies because of the negative impact that they have. And because the way they are leading us into just these hospital shows, I believe fear again. But there could be similar things all over. Perhaps it will not be very late. I mean, too long. One perhaps other sectors will join in the strike. Maybe I will do it in the medical sector and others since they will all join in terms of that. I hope it will not take us to that. And I hope the government will have a rethink like I said on these issues. Okay. Some people are receiving the news of the crash of the dollar with a pinch of salt. Some people are staying positive. One hundred or one thousand two hundred and eighty Naira to a dollar at official parallel markets. That is what the Naira is selling right now. Did you receive that news with excitement or you're still just waiting to see what happens? I received it to the next few weeks. On one hand, we are very hoping that they will be coming down at the dollar. You know, it's a good thing. It's a show. It's a sign of things. But on the other hand, it's mystic that this is too late that we just happened. You know, we have to go back before this administration. We have to go back to less than Naira. One dollar was about six hundred plus to seven hundred. Now it is one hundred and one thousand two hundred plus, which is almost twice what it was in just less than a year. And so we are seeing the effect. And we are feeling the effect of that. Remember, you know, there is a question in the country. And by the time you raise the dollar to such level, everything is what we are seeing now. It's a result of this devaluation of our currency. So, like I said, the government should have a distinct on this, the imperial policy. In just too late, it's just, you know, palliative, if we can call it, we have to call the government to say now it is one entire two hundred and eight. This one, but just kidding, we are just playing with this, you know, the situation because unless we support the Naira, unless the government support the Naira, unless Naira, you know, is strong in all the situation that we are having now, in terms of inflation, in terms of poverty, in terms of unemployment. And we know the collapse of our industries. We are just going to see it continue, which I think I don't know any place for that, but we should expect it. Well, so you don't see any impact on the cost of commodities in the market by the crash of this dollar. You don't see it having any impact on anything else. Because for now, anyway, we have not seen any impact because nothing has come down because of the dollar crashing. But do you think there is hope? No, no, no, you see, one of the problems of inflation is attitude and it is behavior, okay? Even if it comes down lower than this, I think we will not be willing to, you know, adjust the price downwards. Our attitude, the attitude of, you know, market people is such that, or business people is such that they are quick to raise prices, but they are very slow and very unwilling to bring it down despite what happens. So, at least, you know, the government takes action also in good direction. You know, you see, even people like to be assuming the dollar comes to what it was 10 months ago. That is about 670 to 700 dollars. We will likely see a decrease in times of inflation quickly. But, you know, soon we will be able to do it, but we are not going to have it the way we used to have it. So, like I said, part of the problem is also attitude and behavior. We are quick to raise money in the cost prices and we are very willing and ready to bring it down when factors are necessary to bring it down. Well, you talked about hunger and then still on daily trust this morning, there's a story saying on Doe residents loot truck conveying Tinaboo branded greens. We've seen this happen in Abuja. We've seen this happen elsewhere. And now it is happening again in Doe state. Residents loot truck conveying Tinaboo branded greens.  You see, this is part of what I said earlier. It is we are sitting on a cake of gunpowder. It's a time bomb. Because hunger is such that it propels people to be whatever they need. Even until they manage to level 6. And secondly, there is this issue of a comfy cat syndrome that it happens somewhere, and some other people are going to do it and so on. These are some of the things that should indicate, that we should tell the leaders that something is wrong in Nigeria and we cannot continue with this kind of policy, thinking that people in Nigeria, like we said, we are the most socialist people in the world, we suffer and smile, suffering and smile in Nigeria. We shouldn't take that for granted. Because by the time it becomes continuous, it will be too difficult and too hard. I mean, we are impossible for the government to erase it. Look, a lot of people are in such crisis. It started in some places, profit of places and the leadership didn't refuse to take action. Until it exploded and became a serious challenge. That is when they took it. And also look at what happened with COVID palliatives. When it started in some places, before we met it, it supported other places. And this issue of also trucks being attacked, have started in one place here and there. But like I said, the thing is such that it is an indicator. That if nothing is done by the leadership, we are going to have a very serious problem on this issue of military, this issue of military. I think it goes like one adage in a language is saying, the stomach is the legislative chamber of a human body.  So unless we do that and address this issue, I think what we are seeing now will be just a charity. My people have that saying too. What is in the stomach is what carries the one in the head. So unless you feed well, you may not reason well. But I don't know what's the craze about branding these things in the first place. I'm not saying the people who stole it or who cut it away, all the bags of rice or whatever grains they were did well. But what's the craze about branding these things? This is from Governor Diz and you put a photograph there. This is from Tinobu. You put a photograph there. What's the craze about this branding in the first place? These are things that should come to the people as help from the government, as a right to them even.  Like you are a saint or something. I don't understand why these things are done in the first place. You see in the first place, I don't know whether we will discuss a pretty open room in that. But you know, you're in the meeting. But this branding is just part of the Nigerian politics. The leaders tend to show that whatever they do to the people is when they are right, that it's a privilege, it's a privilege that they are doing it. Initially, this kind of branding used to be other ceremonies like when there is going to be a national day or anything, the house will be. They were used to it when they will have a place with pictures of the leaders and now people will come and... Now it became a campaign issue that whenever there is going to be a campaign, then you have people putting their pictures and names and items so that they can now convince the electorate that the ones that will do them good. But now, at this time, after the campaign, the government is doing it. It shows the level of inconsideration and intolerance of leadership to the issues of Nigerians. It shows also the leadership is taking the people for granted that they will now display and have small bags here and there and then give them, you know, having their own pictures. Or perhaps they will do what they call palliatives, they will select some people and give them 25,000 or 35,000 all in the name of showing that the government is even doing them a favor. So I think the reason is no politics. Then any consideration of the welfare of the people is just political consideration. That is why you have it. And the dangerous aspect of this situation is that people may not bother to discriminate between palliatives coming from the politicians and the goals of private people.  We don't need this quote to expand. I don't need to say it, but I will likely go see it generating all public transport, private transport. And if care is not taken, they will even go to stores and market and start doing these things. This is a recipe for anarchy. Like I said, let the government ought to take a lesson and take precautionary measures before it is too late. Well, maybe I don't know the terms in law, but I think this is misappropriation because money is voted by the government. The people's money is voted for a particular thing, and then you're supplying that thing, I know, but with your name, I see if it is coming from your pocket, that for me is stealing or misappropriation or something, one word that is really not good enough.  I mean, I don't know. But in Kirby State, the governor, that is on Nature News, Governor Idris probes aggregate warehouse looting in Kirby. We're just talking about looting. Sometimes they loot trucks, sometimes they loot warehouses. Now people know where government warehouses are and where they are hungry enough, they go there and loot it. Whether it is because they are hungry or because they are just thieves, but something gave them the opportunity to do that. Something gave them the heart, the strength to do that, the confidence to do that. So I don't know. The governor is probing the looting of the warehouse. You see, probing is just going to be a restricting exercise because this is a no-action. Okay? Perhaps the way they will do is, you may see the identifying the leaders of some of the innocent people will be victimized on that. And secondly, you know, probing will not bring an end to the issue. On the contrary, it is going to add fuel, I mean, fuel to the fire because by the time you do it, people will now begin to lose hope that all what the leadership is about is to suppress them and to come down heavily on them. We believe when they find an opportunity, it is going to be worse. So I think what the governor is going to do is not just to set up a probe and investigate the situation. They should take action, they should take measures. After all, you see, you are delaying the federal government alone but even if they state governments, they are to delay. For example, KD is one of the major rise producing states in the country and naturally each state has an area in terms of agriculture that it has some competitive advantage. The governments want to have also based on that, especially given the fact that we are being told we are now in the removal of all subsidies that the allocation to state has almost doubled. So we should see also the governments coming in on this issue. We shouldn't only blame the federal government but also the governments. The leadership collectively should address these issues rather than to wait when it happens. We now say to the committee to investigate. You know what they say about the committee in administration that the committee is a group of amped doing the unwanted code and really. So we can say to the committee, the government is not willing to do anything but we can say to the committee and we need to do the dirty job unless it will happen at the end of it. It will be a way of addressing the public resources unless it will happen at the end of it. Okay, well, let's hope that something will happen and let's be proven wrong. But when you talk about committees and all that there's also another story here on Nature News. Energy commission to promote clean cooking awareness across Nigeria's geopolitical zone. Is that not an exercise in futility? Knowing that the price of gas is going up, the price of kerosene is up and so many other things. Electricity tariff is going up so you cannot have a hot plate in your house because you can't pay the bills. So clean energy, I don't know what they're talking about promote clean cooking awareness. You cannot use a hot plate, you cannot use a gas cooker, you cannot use anything that is supposed to constitute clean cooking and I don't know how this awareness campaign is going to be successful when people are going back to firewood because they cannot afford gas anymore, they cannot afford kerosene anymore, they cannot afford to use hot plate because of the electricity tariff. So is this not an action in futility? It is. This is what I said earlier about the government should not consider itself as a business bench which should put the welfare of the Nigerians first. Second, the government should be worried about the fact that there is a linkage between all these policies and other sectors of the economy. Well, gas is very expensive so you cannot expect people not to eat and the end result is they will be used firewood and then we will be back to square one on the issue of the green house effect, you know, global warming and other things so there will be deforestation in some places. And secondly, the government, you know, who is talking about clean cooking is also denying the fact that in Nigeria over 70% of Nigerians are in rural areas, not in urban areas. So, many of them have never seen given that gas is let alone gas cooker. And now by the time we are making this when we are raising the price in urban areas also where people are using gas and other electrical materials you want to cook they will sort back to, you know, the traditional way of firewood and that will help a serious thing. I think it is an exercise in continuity what they are trying to do now. The only way is let them bring down the cost of gas that will encourage many people to stay on it and that will minimize all the effects that we are seeing about deforestation and so on. Well, let's hope that the best will come. Quarter one or the first quarter of 2024 was really, really tough and we are hoping that the second quarter and subsequent quarters will be better. Just that I am afraid that on that nature news there is a small headline there that scares me and La Seppa raises alarm on low air quality in Lagos state. So I hope that the air quality will look into it and see how the environment can be kept clean so that we can breathe fresh air and live longer for our families and all that. We would like to thank you, Professor Fage for coming on the program this morning. It is always a pleasure having you join us. Thank you very much for having me. We have been talking with Professor Kamilu Sani Fage and he was with us on the press. We'll take a short break and when we return we'll take our only hot topic this morning. Stay with us.


When we were kids we had our grades in our schools and after we went to college We had our GPA but guys states and union territories were given grades Do you want to know how this is happening and do you want to know which state is the topper? Continue watching this video first of all, what is this performance grading index? See it is a tool to provide insights and data-driven mechanisms on the performance and achievements of school education across all states and union territories So the index is grading the school education across various states and union territories See the prime objective of this index is to promote evidence-based Policy-making and also it helps to highlight course correction to ensure quality education for all Now coming to the most important fact This index was devised by Department of School Education and Literacy under the Ministry of Education See as far as prelims is concerned. We need this information only This performance grading index is released by Ministry of Education to be specific It is devised by Department of School Education and Literacy and know that so far The department has released to the performance grading index report for the year 2017-18 2018-19 2019-20 and now for the year 2020-21 So this is about the basic information of performance grading index now coming to the indicators See the PGI that is the performance grading index it has a structure and this PGI structure comprises of 1,000 points and this is across 70 indicators Grouped into two categories one is the outcome category the other one is governance management And these categories are further divided into five domains They are learning outcomes and quality access infrastructure and facilities equity and governance process So this is about the PGI structure. It comprises of thousand points It has 70 indicators groups into two categories Outcomes governance management and they are further divided into five sub-domains infrastructure and facilities learning outcomes and quality governance process access and equity and Out of these five domains learning outcome Access infrastructure and facilities and equity comes under the outcome category and Governance process comes under the governance management category Now just have a look at this table to know the weightage given to each and every domain See learning outcomes. They have 180 points access 80 points infrastructure and facilities 150 points Equity 230 points governance process 360 points and totally they comprise of thousand points Now what is done in this report? See the performance grading index 2021 it classified the states and union territories into 10 grades for example The highest achievable grade is level one and this level one is for states and union territories That are scoring more than 950 points out of the thousand points and the lowest grade is level 10 Which is for score below 551 points now. What is the need for this grades and scores? See the ultimate aim of the index is to help states and union territories to identify the gaps Once they identify the gaps the states and union territories will accordingly Prioritize the areas for intervention and they can make sure that the school education system is robust at every level And this is exactly why this index is devised by the Ministry of Education Now with this basic understanding, let us discuss about the performance grading index 2021 report. Now, let us see who is the topper Interesting know like in school states are also assigned grades here But unfortunately, there is no state in the top grade See Gujarat, Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Punjab, Chandigarh and Maharashtra They were categorized under level 2 and the score they got Ranged from 901 to 950 out of the total score of thousand. Okay See out of the states that we saw just now Gujarat, Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh were newcomers That means these three states achieved level 2 for the first time Now moving on in level 3 that is between a score of 851 to 900 A total of 12 states and union territories are found And this includes national capital territory of Delhi, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Odisha Now the third point and an important point is that No state was found in the bottom three grades. It is commendable, no? It means that all states are performing good But it also needs a certain tweaking for improvement Now moving on see the newly formed union territory That is the Ladakh has made significant improvement in performance grading index Yes, it has improved from level 8 to level 4 in the 2020 to 21 report This is appreciable because it is the highest ever improvement in a single year Now if you want to know more topics like this subscribe to Shankarae's Academy's YouTube channel or watch the daily news Analysis of Shankarae's Academy. Thank you


Hello everyone, this is Miguel Pez-Colina and the product manager for my Christian Toolkit for applications And I'm going to show you how to deploy it on OpenShift using a template. So this is OpenShift 4.6, as you can see, and I'm going to deploy here MTA. First thing that I'm going to do I'm going to create a project for MTA and I'm going to call it MTA So now I have a project and as you see I have it selected MTA and Then I need to obtain MTA itself. So I go to web.htslash MTA and it takes me to the website for my Christian Toolkit for applications within the developers and then I go to download and I go To the all downloads and I need to obtain the web console. The web console in this case for version 5.0 I will click on download and it will download a file. So I go to My downloads and I have the file that I've just downloaded right here I unzip it and I obtain this folder. So this is the folder that contains this zip file. I navigate into it and I go into OpenShift Templates and I have the templates here to be added to OpenShift. So I go back to OpenShift I click on create resources from the general definition here and all I need to do is drag and drop the file to create the resources to import the template into OpenShift. I click on create and now the template is imported. So the next step is that I go to add again and then I say okay, I want to create it from catalog. In the catalog I can click on and I can type MTA and it will appear here to see the template and then I click on instantiate the template. I'll see a lot of options to instantiate the template versus the namespace, the application name, CPU, memory, the executed CPU, the memory, the storage, the capacity, database. So you could turn this up. Normally if you leave it as it is it's okay. So I click on create and this will start instantiating MTA on my opens here. Once these containers get instantiated I could click here on OpenURL to access the console. Okay, default user is MTA, default password is password so you can log in easily. Thereon you will be able to bring the documentation to change the users to turn it out to create your booth and sit down. Thanks for listening.


Moving to the other side here, I think that Joe Horn is one of my favorite plays in the Slate. He's a wide receiver for New York. He led the team with eight targets in week one. And I thought that was interesting because like leading up to that week, I wasn't really into Joe Horn because he was limited in practice. I had a foot injury, was no less the starter. He's a guy who joined the team late in training camp because he was acquired via trade. But eight targets, four deep targets, those were both the most in the team. And he's $14. So I think that Joe Horn is one of the better plays salary considered on this entire slate. Easily my favorite guy on New York, but also one of my favorite guys on the Slate. What's your read on New York in general? Yeah, so I mean, Horn led with the seven targets, but played 78% of the snaps, which is still good. But McKay, McKeown McKay and Colby Pearson actually out snapped him by a good margin. So I want to try to factor that in again. I'm just trying to blend all this information. But Horn does rate out really well for me, especially at just $14. I think he's the best wide receiver value on the Saturday Slate for sure. I think he's I have him as top two on the four game slate. So I mean, per dollar, I don't think you can really nitpick Joe Horn. But I don't think that he's necessarily the clear cut number one based on the snap rate that we saw. So yeah, maybe we can try to leverage that in this game, because again, this is the much more appealing game on the two game slate.


One of the big myths we've already actually seen is that you should start off and try and anchor the other side with a really high number.  And by the way, if you go and you make an offer on a house and it's unreasonably low, what does the seller think? You don't know what the market is? You're trying to take advantage of me? So one thing I'm really against is making unreasonable offers at the start.


A cop in a donut shop may seem like a cliché to most of us, but for nine-year-old Brooke, the scenario was one she will remember for a long time. Brooke was standing in line at a gas station waiting to buy some donut holes, but when she got to the cashier, she discovered she didn't have enough money. As it turns out, there was a kind stranger waiting behind her, state trooper Chad Savannah. What happened next created a chain reaction of kind deeds which is melting people's hearts. We've all been there. You place an order, raise the cashier, and realize you don't have enough cash. Nine-year-old Brooke describes the moment in a way that we can all relate to. I was standing in line and I didn't have enough money, and I'm like, frozen. Brooke tells the butler eagle, I didn't know what to do. But luckily, trooper Chad Savannah was standing behind her in line, and without missing a beat, he told the cashier to add Brooke's order to his bill. Brooke was caught off guard by the kind gesture, and as many young kids would do in her position, she hurried out of the store after receiving the donuts. The one Brooke got home, she was able to collect her thoughts and decided to write a thank-you note to her local police department, thanking the unknown trooper for helping her. In the letter, she enclosed a $10 bill to cover the cost of the donuts. The letter was passed on to the kind state trooper who had helped her. Trooper Savannah and his colleagues were all moved by the little girl's gratitude. I think everybody here was very moved by the kindness of this nine-year-old, as the captain of the police department to KDKA News. The officers decided that Brooke deserved a reward and gathered some money together to purchase a $50 Toys R Us gift card for Brooke. They mailed the card to the little girl and figured she would buy some toys for herself. But what she did instead took them by surprise. She purchased $50 worth of toys with the gift voucher and donated them to Toys for Tots. When the police found out about Brooke's generous donation, they decided that she deserved a special treat. They invited her to the police station where she was given a full tour. Her favorite part of the day was getting to sit in the squad car. Brooke's family says that Brooke acted completely on her own and that her thoughtfulness was not out of character at all. We're trying to teach our kids right to take care of what they owe for, says Brooke's mom, Beth Yost, to KDKA News. Brooke is certainly a role model to all of us. We could all be a little more kind and selfless. You never know whose day you could change for the better.


Today we have a very interesting distinguished guest in a kind of different format than we've used in the past in the Energy Seminar, and that is a panel discussion, and our very distinguished guest is requested that most of the dialogue be between him and the students, so we have a student panel and then a lot of students sitting in the front of the audience here. So our very distinguished guest today is Ted Koppel, Mr. Ted Koppel as I call him, the Peter E. and Mimi Haas distinguished visitor for 2018 here at Stanford. He is, I think it's probably not overstating it, one of the, not the most distinguished honored and admired telejournalist in U.S. history. Not too much. And for you big data guys, I know we have a lot of those, the data supporting this. This is a pretty low bar. More so now than then, Ted has won the Most Overseas Press Club of America awards, breaking the previous record holder, Edward R. Murrow, 12, Alfred I. Dupont, Columbia University Awards, 8P Body Awards, and 42, count them, 42 Emmy Awards. And for me, I'd like to give a little personal thing. I remember in the 1980, about 1980, struggling to do oil security work and then a few things happened in the world that were kind of almost created, almost as much turmoil as we see today, mostly here in the U.S., and I would flip on a nightline at that point and find Ted Koppel kind of telling us all the truth of nothing but the truth in a very unbiased way. I wish we had more people around nowadays like that. So thank you for that at a personal level. I think that's continued through his entire career. So what we're going to do this is Ted will give a little preamble about why he wrote the book. Then I'll ask the panelists to introduce themselves and then we'll start on the panel. Questions. We'll have some time for audience questions, again focusing on students at the end. So Mr. Koppel. When I told my wife that I was going to write a book about the danger of a cyber attack on the power grid, she said, why you, you know absolutely nothing about cyber warfare and even less about the electric grid, both of which were true at the time. What got me interested in the subject was Leon Panetta, who at the time was Secretary of Defense, and he gave a speech to a group of defense contractors in which he said, among other things, that the danger of a cyber attack on our electric power grid was first of all a very real danger and secondly would be the equivalent of a cyber pearl harbor. That caught my attention. And I began to make some phone calls, not so much to determine what the, I mean how an attack like that would take place, but how prepared our government was in the event that an attack like that took place. So I began by calling FEMA and then I called the Department of Homeland Security and then I called the Red Cross and in each case I couldn't get past the phone tree. There wasn't a single human being who answered the phone at any one of those three agencies. So that intrigued me because my reasoning at that point was, if I can't get a hold of anyone, when nothing is going on, when there is no crisis, what in heaven's name is going to happen in the event that a power grid is knocked out? And that's when I began to do my research on the subject and let me very quickly just sort of give you the conclusion of it all, which is that the likelihood of a cyber attack on the grid is significant, that some of the top intelligence people who were in the government at the time that I was researching the book told me that both the Chinese and the Russians have already embedded what is equivalent to kind of a cyber landmine in our electric power grids. We only have three power grids in this country. There is one on the east coast called the Eastern Interconnect. You have one out here on the west coast and for reasons that are still not all together clear to me, Texas has its own grid. Were there to be an attack, it would be the equivalent of an act of war. In fact, it would be an act of war. The likely consequences of an attack on the power grid, a successful attack, would be the tens of millions of Americans would be without electricity for a period that could range up to several months. Thousands would die. There would be chaos in our cities. You have only to imagine what the consequences of an attack like that would be if the electric power were to go out in San Francisco or Los Angeles or Chicago or New York. Imagine it's the middle of summer and air conditioning goes out, lights go out, refrigeration goes out. Your water taps stop running because water is powered by pumps and pumps need electricity. You could try to flush your toilet, but it wouldn't flush. The consequences of no capacity to get rid of human waste in a city like New York, eight million people, hot, 90 degrees outside, it wouldn't take long before the health consequences would be huge. I'll leave the consequences of the attack at this point and just leave you with one larger question that I hope we get to. Most discussions about cyber attacks on our infrastructure focus on what can be done to prevent them. One of the rules of thumb of cyber warfare I have learned is that offense almost always trumps defense. It is all but impossible to protect against a really sophisticated cyber attack. Problem number one. Problem number two is one of attribution. How does the U.S. government respond to an attack that is going to create chaos when it cannot tell on day one, day five, possibly for several weeks after an attack with any certainty who was behind it? So with that as sort of an opening, let me turn to my colleagues here on the panel and I'll be happy to address any questions you have later on. Great. We'd like to give short introductions to each panelist, Bianca. Hi, my name is Bianca Droud and I'm a first year master's in atmosphere and energy, really interested in modernization of the power grid. Hi, I'm Alexi here. I am a junior studying computer science and political science. I have worked both on the technical side and the policy side of cybersecurity. And my main focus on campus is trying to get computer scientists like me interested in policy questions and like making our country safer. I'm Rachel Hirschman. I'm a senior studying political science and management science and engineering. My focus tends to be on cyber security and other international security issues. Hi, I'm Rafi Savlion. I'm a postdoc at Slack National Lab in Stanford University. My focus is on electric vehicle integration and renewable energy integration in the grid. Great. So we have a few questions and we'd like to start with how likely is a cyber attack on the grid and who is most likely to perpetrate it so anyone can jump in? Oh, you're asking me? Good. All right. Imagine two lines on a graph. The one line is the line of nations that have the capability or that have the greatest capability of launching a cyber attack on the grid.  And then of course you get to groups like ISIS, which don't yet have the capability. Those at the top of the capability scale are also the least likely to launch an attack. Why? Because we have the greatest interaction, the greatest number of interconnected interests with the Russians and the Chinese.  That's the other line on the graph. So that Chinese and Russians, not very likely at all, Iranians under certain conditions, North Koreans, again under certain conditions, but probably more likely than the Iranians. Syria depends. I mean, let me just point out to you, it doesn't always have to be a devastating attack. What is really important to understand about cyber warfare with regard to the United States is that because of our enormous dependence on the internet in this country, we are probably the most vulnerable nation in the world. Imagine a cyber war if you could limit it just to a cyber exchange between the United States and North Korea. There are so many times when the North Koreans are without electric power to begin with. If you've ever seen any of those satellite photographs of the Korean Peninsula and you see South Korea ablaze in light at night and North Korea essentially dark, the United States is vulnerable to a cyber attack. The United States has been hit, is being hit by thousands of cyber attacks every day. The kind that do damage, well, we've been hit by those too. About two and a half, three years ago, vacuumed up 21 million records, personnel records, of American men and women who worked for the government, State Department, Pentagon, White House, CIA, FBI, 21 million records. We the most successful intelligence crew of all time. We paid very little attention to it, the public eye. So how likely, those who can do it, not very likely, those who are trying to get the capability the further down the scale you go, very likely, but fortunately they don't have the capability yet. But they likely will. And I would imagine that sometime in the next five years we will be hit by a major cyber attack. And I'd also just jump in and say that Iran, speaking of countries with less capabilities or less intention of doing it, Iran did get into a New York dam a few years ago, which isn't the electrical grid, but it is another element of our critical infrastructure. And while the New York facilities discovered that they were there, Iran actually never executed the payload that they put in there, so an attack never happened, but they were there. And I would go out, I wouldn't be going out on a limb to say that countries are in our critical infrastructure, they just haven't actually executed an attack yet. And something else to remember is a cyber attack is usually through a virus.  You release it in the wild and something happens. So for example, Stuxnet, which a lot of people believe was used by the United States against Iran, an instance of Stuxnet two years after the original outbreak of it or the original release, a power plant in Germany actually was found to have this virus actively in their system. So there are externalities to using cyber weapons. And the cyber war that Mr. Koppel mentioned would affect the world. It would not just affect the United States, especially because a lot of the companies that make the internet great are housed in the United States. So attacking the US power grid or the internet broadly would be, just the global economy would not, it would be very bad, let's put it that way. There's been a recent loss of the NSA's crown jewels. Do you think that will somehow find its way in attacking us? What do you mean? I just remember reading this somewhere that there was a huge breach in a lot of their cybersecurity tools and they're just trying to find them on the black market now to see who has them and who's selling them. So you're referring to a lot of the tools that the NSA uses, their source code has been published on the internet. Yeah, that is a big concern. Actually a lot of people at the NSA, there's a really good New York Times article about this a couple of months ago, a lot of people at the NSA are very, very worried about that. Those tools are very dangerous. And in the wrong hands, they could do a lot of damage. So you were talking about as you go down the capability scale, the probability of attack increases, well if anyone in the world with a computer can use the NSA's flagship cybersecurity weapons, what can happen? Suddenly this attack doesn't seem so infeasible. A nuclear attack, it's a lot harder to steal a nuke than it is to steal a cyber weapon. And one other point, and I hope we get into a little bit of a discussion of this later on, over the years we developed, we in the Soviet Union developed a sort of a modus vivendi, a way of dealing with the reality of each side having enough nuclear weapons to in Winston Churchill's famous phrase, to make the rubble bounce. And whereas during the first few years of the atomic age, both sides were trying to find ways to defend against a nuclear attack. And that entailed, among other things, silly little propaganda films like Duck and Cover, which were ways that school children were encouraged in the event that there was a nuclear attack to get under their desk, a whole lot of good that would have done, right? And it was only after about ten years of unsuccessfully dealing with the notion of preparing ourselves against a nuclear attack that we and the Soviets eventually came to the conclusion that the best we could deal with the new nuclear reality was MAD, Mutual Achievement Assured Destruction, the notion being whatever you can do to us, even after a nuclear attack on the United States, we would still be capable of launching an equally great nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. And basically that balance of terror has sustained us, but that also involves knowing who the enemy is. It involves being able to go to the President and saying, Mr. President, the Soviets have just launched half a dozen nuclear missiles against the United States. Do you want to hit them before the missiles land or do you want to wait until after the missiles land? You've got twenty-eight minutes. But there is no question about where the attack comes from. In the case of a cyber attack, there are lots of questions and probably very few answers for the first few weeks. Yeah, so that kind of leads into another topic, which you've already touched on. How prepared are we currently for an attack cyber or otherwise on the grid? And I think each of us may have something slightly different to say on this, so if any of you want to jump in. I mean, I'll add from a technical side, there are some basic defensive measures that many corporations and the government have not yet taken with regards to the security and the cybersecurity of these systems that can involve kind of physical security measures and just protecting the intrusion of individuals into the spaces. But then there's also with SCADA systems. A lot of these systems, which are operational technology, come with default passwords that corporations rarely change. So a lot of the systems that make up are kind of the basic premise of a lot of critical infrastructure of the electrical grid have the same password. So if you get that one password, then you can infiltrate a lot of systems. And I could speak to a kind of other defensive measures, but I think that even that just proves to you that there's a lot of steps that can be taken from a technological perspective to just even have basic levels of defense with respect to the security of the grid. Yeah, another thing that we talked about kind of a different angle. There are like a million bottlenecks that exist with like different people who have different states and the importance of the cybersecurity of the power grid. And that's really scary. So you have like the utilities answer to utility commissions who answer to rate payers. And how are you going to get all of those people on the same page? Yeah, just to let's just think about that for a second. There's a default password for almost all of the of the systems that control power and et cetera, et cetera. There's one password for all of those and they haven't it hasn't been changed. Now you got to think if that's going on, what level of thinking is going on here? Like are people even thinking like anyone who has brought this problem, it's an easy solution. So to answer the question, if we're not even doing this basic level of thinking, are we doing any thinking at all? Like that's operationally like functional. I don't know. I think for a large bureaucratic establishment like a utility, first you have to mandate it by the government to do something. And then you have to give them the money to do it and then train them on how to use it. They won't do it on their own. I don't think the incentives exist. Someone could disagree with me, but I just don't think they exist. I've worked with utilities in the past and that's sort of the ed and flow. If you're going to make them stay beyond six PM, you have to give them everything. Let me just, if I may, give you a little bit of background in how the electric power industry works. There are currently 3,200 electric power companies in this country. They are all interconnected. The SCADA system that my colleague here was referring to a moment ago, that's an acronym for supervisory control and data acquisition. SCADA systems, the power grid depends upon maintaining an absolute balance between the amount of electricity that is generated and the amount of electricity that is used. I analogize it to a giant balloon with 3,200 valves. Half of them let air in, the other half let air out. Too much air in, the balloon explodes. Too much air out, the balloon collapses. If you can get into one of these SCADA systems and the huge power companies, the big ones, are indeed very well protected, but they are connected to the small ones, which are not very well connected. When I talked about the Chinese and the Russians mapping sort of a navigational system to get into these SCADA systems, they come in through the least well defended. Even if there were a better system than the one that exists, you still have the human factor.  It becomes infected. He brings the thumb drive back to work the next day, plugs it into his system, and the system is infected. There are so many different ways to get into these systems. One other thing, just so you have a sense of how many different ways there are of undermining our system in the United States. A number of years ago, when President Obama drew the red line in Syria and warmed the Syrians, what would happen in the event that they used chemical weapons? At just about that time when that threat was made, a bulletin went out on the Associated Press. The bulletin stated that there had been an attack, gunshots fired at the White House, that the President's whereabouts were unknown. Within three minutes, the AP discovered that they had been hacked, and that this was a phony bulletin, and they pulled it and corrected it. Within those three minutes, the market dropped hundreds of points. They found out later that the attack, the hack attack, had been committed by the Syrian government. Just tiny ways. It didn't take much.  Yeah, so you're kind of talking about some scenarios of a cyber attack. Do any of you have any other ideas of how a cyber attack could play out? A really interesting scenario in Ted's book actually is if, for example, a Chicago in the winter needs a lot of power and maybe can't generate as much power as it needs. Florida in the winter needs less power. So Chicago says, hey, the Chicago grid needs more power. Can you pipe some from Florida? So they start doing that. Imagine a scenario where that system has been infected, where an attacker can see that happening. Florida is about to pipe power in Chicago. Chicago is accepting more power. Imagine if every other station in the United States were then to flood Chicago with power. Bam, autonomously. The attacker doesn't even know what's going on. It just has a little trigger in that system that says if Chicago is accepting power, make everyone give them power. The grid explodes. No one needs to sit there and monitor it. It can just be autonomous. It's turned on remotely. Some scary stuff. I could chime in. So after the 2003 blackout, I believe on the east coast, most people in the U.S. grid and on the technology side wanted to implement what are called synchrophasers, which are essentially, they measure not only, so the way voltage works is that it's a sinusoid. There's a magnitude. There's a phase. Prior to the development and adoption of synchrophasers, we mostly ran our system by measuring magnitude. And they wanted to push in these devices that will measure phase. And they realized that during this blackout, they weren't monitoring the phase. And the phase was going haywire and no one could look at it. So now everybody wants to put synchrophasers everywhere. But the one problem with synchrophasers is that it's based off a GPS signal. And it's very easy to imagine a few guys with an antenna and a radio spoofing, essentially a large substations set of synchrophasers and just taking it completely offline.  There could be a van parked somewhere doing it and they could drive off when the grid collapses. So yeah, you can run your imagination a thousand ways on what you can do. You can also basically map out the entire transmission network. I mean this is currently the California ISO. I know the California ISO is an example. They have a computer room where they have their entire set of network models and there's an armed guard sitting outside. But I can basically just go online and map out everything, estimate essentially the resistance and inductance and all these parameters and build my own model. And I know exactly what's going on. So yeah, I think it takes maybe a master's degree and mal intent to really bring down the grid if you really, really want to. Now there is this concept of the air gap, if any of you who know more about it could explain what that is. And talk about some possible solutions for grid security and what are the obstacles to effectiveness. So an air gap, this is something that's very common, especially in the energy industry interestingly. It's the idea that when you, you have the internet, right? We've heard that term a lot. Internet means there's this giant web that connects your phone to the Google servers, to the Facebook servers, to the Stanford network. It's all connected. The idea of an air gap is that there's no networked connection between your internal network and the external network. There's literally a physical air gap between your network and the internet. Now the issue is this creates a very false sense of security, right? You have the idea that, oh, the internet can't touch my network. There's nothing.  That's connected to the internet. You bring the, Mr. Koppel's example of the thumb drive, someone plugs in a thumb drive. Bam, you've just defeated the air gap, right? So the issue, you hear a lot of people saying that air gaps are bad. It's not that they're bad. It's that people believe in them a little bit too much as a catch-all solution to this sort of thing. I don't know if you guys have thoughts about that. Well, let me make another point. I think we are spending too much time as a national policy trying to find a defense against a cyber attack and not enough time at all focusing on what the government would do in the event that infrastructure, like the electric power grid, were undermined and taken offline. There are things that can be done. I mean, in the interim, while I was never able to get through on the phone, ultimately I got to interview some of these senior people, the Secretary of Homeland Security. When you ask Homeland Security, what is it that you would do in the event that a power grid was knocked offline? They have no answer, not quite accurate. The answer they have is the same answer they'll give you for a hurricane or a flood or a blizzard. Make sure you have a 72-hour supply of food. Make sure you have a 72-hour supply of water. If you are taking prescription medicines, make sure that you have a weak supply of your prescription medicine with you. And oh yes, make sure you have a battery-powered radio. So I asked the Secretary of Homeland Security, what is it you're going to tell me on my battery-powered radio after an attack like this that you can't tell me now? Is there a plan?  And he said, I'm sure there's a plan up there somewhere. I'm not. And I really, just to give you a small example of how unprepared we are, I spoke to the man in charge of Homeland Security for the state of New York. And I said, how much food have you got in the event that the power is knocked out? And he said, well, we have 20 million MREs. MREs are meals ready to eat. They are the, you know, the mill. And any one of those MREs would last you certainly for a day, possibly two days. I said, wait a second, let's just do the math, shall we? You've got eight million people in New York City alone. So what you're telling me is you have a three-day supply of food. And he said, that's right. I began looking into the issue of why there are so few MREs. You know why? Because they only have a shelf life of five years. So the government doesn't want to buy 200 million MREs because if there's no major crisis after five years, they'd have to throw them all out. What we do have is freeze-dried food. Freeze-dried food has a shelf life of 25 to 30 years. It would make eminently good sense if Congress would allocate a few billion dollars for the purchase of two or 300 million freeze-dried meals. You think in the current atmosphere we're going to be able to convince Congress to do that? Not a chance. But at least then, in the event of a cyber attack, worse comes to worst, terrible news, no cyber attack, but other crises, floods, earthquakes, blizzards, the food would get used. It's not going to go to waste, but we have taken no steps to prepare ourselves for the likelihood of a cyber attack against our power grid. Bless you. Do any of you all have any other ideas about response to a cyber attack? He covered it pretty well. Any technical responses that may exist or could one day exist? Something that Europe is really big on is these certs, these computer emergency response teams. They kind of see this as a catch-all solution. So if there's a cyber attack of any kind, especially in critical infrastructure, this team would come in, identify where the attack, where it's localized, and try to kind of cauterize it, make sure that it's isolated, and then try to do attribution after that. The issue is that works well for Sweden, for example, which has one power maker and one power distributor. And so they're able to sit right on top of that facility that does all of that and monitor it. But for a place like the United States with 32,000, right, 3200, sorry, still massive, very, very difficult to have that kind of localized knowledge. In the case of an incident. So I don't know. A lot of the principles that apply to common cyber attacks, because of the complexity, the enormity, and frankly, how little we understand our power grid, it's particularly difficult. So yeah. I would imagine that would make it harder for an attacker as well. 3200, completely different systems. Some are mechanical. Some are electrical. So there's this principle in cybersecurity. But all interconnected. Yes, all interconnected. And an attacker has to get it right once. A defender has to get it right every single time.  Whereas it seems like the government already isn't thinking about it. This crisis occurs. Are we going to be able to do that complicated intricate 3200 companies sort of thinking? Don't even need that.  Basically a transformer steps down wattage powers so that electricity can be transmitted over long distances and then steps it back up again. These giant transformers are huge. They are enormous. They are 80% of them made overseas. It takes, from the time a transformer can be knocked out with a rifle. When you drive in the countryside, just stay on the alert on the lookout and you will see sort of a chain link fence surrounding a giant piece of equipment. In the middle of a field, nobody there to defend it, nothing to protect it, it can be taken out with an AK-47. Somebody did that here in Northern California just a few years back. No defense. And the time it takes from the moment that it is ordered until the moment that it is delivered, about a year and a half. Has to come from overseas. They are so big, these transformers, that special trucks have to be designed. They have no moving parts. The average age of a transformer in the United States is 40 years, they're 40 years old. So that some of the special rail lines that delivered these transformers 40 years ago no longer are no longer active. And if you've heard about the state of our bridges and highways, these are so enormous that they would probably cause many of our bridges to collapse under the weight of transporting them. How many of these guys are there? Thousands, thousands, and here's the bad nerves, they're not interchangeable. Each one is unique. Problem, we don't talk about it. Government's not doing anything, well that's not true.  We have developed, or at least the Department of Homeland Security working together with the Department of Energy has developed the equivalent of that, something that would sort of keep the system going for a few days. But that's it. So I think we'd all agree that there's, it's, the security of the grid is really not a priority. So why does the security industry not make the power grid a priority right now? Yeah, that's a really interesting question. So cybersecurity as an industry is a very nascent sort of sector of our economy. And the main people that have a lot of money for it are the big companies. So like JP Morgan, for example, I imagine they pay many cybersecurity firms a lot of money to come in and take care of everything. I'm talking like desktop passwords, I'm talking their servers, everything because that's what's required of a financial institution. But JP Morgan can afford that, right? JP Morgan has line items in their yearly budget specifically for this. Does PG&E have a similar sort of budget? Highly doubt it. Right, it's an industry tool towards large corporations that have a lot of risk that can afford to pay tens of millions of dollars in some cases. We just, as a nation, we cannot, that system just doesn't work. Just not tooled towards a public utility. Actually, I interviewed Jamie Diamond on this very subject. Three years ago, JP Morgan had spent, I believe it was $800 million on cybersecurity. And Alex is exactly right. The big banks, this could be a cyber attack, we've only been talking about the power grid. It could be devastating to the banking industry. Absolutely devastating. And devastating to a number of western economies, including our own. By now, I am confident that JP Morgan has spent well over a billion dollars on cybersecurity alone. PG&E actually spends a ton of money on cybersecurity. PG&E is one of the best in the country.  Can't do it. So how does PG&E justify that to the CPUC and the rate payer? It was normally, for example, in the financial system, if there's a small amount of money, if there's a larger attack, there's a larger amount of money to be lost. So the calculus works out in the balance sheet for a bank. But for something like PG&E, it must be coming from some sort of government. I'm going to speculate here, but I'm pretty sure the state of California is pushing them to implement this and is funding them to implement this. Because they only make money by selling electricity. That's it. From my perspective, it's essentially coming from the top to do this. And you probably can't do that in every other small utility. So from your conversation with people from PG&E, how did they justify this? No, actually, I haven't talked to the folks at PG&E. I did talk to the head of one major power company. And he would only talk to me on background. In other words, I could not identify him or his company. You'll find the electric power companies, when they speak to the issue publicly, they exude nothing but confidence. They are convinced that they cannot be hacked. They are convinced that no one can break into the system, at least so they say. And I concede it would be awkward for a senior official at one of these power companies saying, yeah, we're vulnerable as hell. We're really worried about what's going to happen. Again, the problem is offense beats defense. Almost every time. And while things can be done to make it more difficult, to the best of my knowledge, there is no 100% secure system. How do you think we should incentivize even the smaller utilities to have the same level of perseverance of PG&E? Do you think it has to come from the top? Is there any way to change the system, something small, some sort of market incentive? I think actually some of the companies like PG&E are trying to help out some of the smaller companies. Because their security depends on the security of the smaller companies. But again, it's not full proof. Just one, I think we have a little time for audience questions. So we ought to open it up to see if we have a bunch of students in the front, which they see. Let's start here. We talked about how the interconnectedness of the grid brings vulnerability. But are there chances for, as you were just mentioning with PG&E, helping smaller companies to pool resources and create effective firewalls or defense mechanisms? They can certainly harden the defenses from what they have right now. I mentioned a little bit earlier, you heard us talking about SCADA systems, the supervisory control and data acquisition. Part of the problem is those SCADA systems are made by only two or three companies. So that the SCADA system that runs the power grid in Tehran or Shanghai is the same one that runs the power system in San Francisco. And at, what do they call the conference, what is it, the Black Hat Conference in, they usually have it in Las Vegas. One of these companies that creates the SCADA systems was talking about the passcode that only their company has. And of course one of the hackers at the said, oh, you mean this passcode and provided it. Again, it's, I'm not aware of any foolproof defense system. Kind of going off that as well. There are a lot of opportunities. This idea of information sharing, you hear this a lot in cyber policy. It's the idea of when an attack, when a company is attacked, it shares all the technical information of that attack with anyone who might encounter it. So if your SCADA system was attacked, you could tell every other power company in the world that has the same SCADA system. Hey, this attack happened, we noticed this on our network, this is how we noticed it, and this is how we defeated it. That sort of information is really helpful and that's something the Department of Homeland Security has been focusing a lot on for critical infrastructure is creating this sort of community of sharing when it comes to cyber. But it's really hard. Companies don't want to share if they're hacked or to what extent they were hacked. It's embarrassing. So, challenges. Hi, so, sorry. So earlier, it seems that, for example, bringing an example of transformers that having spare pieces of infrastructure is a proposed method of offense against one of these attacks. The discussion of a cyber attack on the power grid still feels a little bit abstract to me. There was the other example of power trying to be funneled to Chicago. But what I'm inferring from the discussion of people being out without power potentially for weeks or months is that physical objects will be destroyed in one of these attacks through ultimately software manipulation on the grid. What other physical pieces of infrastructure would fall victim in a cyber attack? It's not so much a physical object. It is the capacity of the SCADA system to interconnect 3,200 companies. If you have 3,200 companies, all of them trying to maintain the balance between electricity coming in and electricity being supplied to customers, I can't even begin to imagine the permutations and combinations of the interrelationship among 3,200 companies. Only the internet is capable of running those kinds of calculations at the speed of light, which is the way it has to be done. So is there a system that can defend that? Look, there are options, the creation of microgrids so that instead of depending on a gigantic grid that's taking care of the entire West Coast or the entire East Coast, more and more now, but we've done some really stupid things over the past few years. Our military bases used to be energy independent. They used to run their own energy system. And about 15 or 20 years ago, somebody decided at the Pentagon or Congress, I don't even know who it was, that this was a bad idea, that it would be cheaper if our military bases were hooked into the local power company of the nearest community, which means our military bases are now as vulnerable as our civilian power industry. One of the things that can be done to change that is, for example, to take some of these nuclear generators that have been powering our naval ships, nuclear ships, submarines. They haven't had an accident in 50 years, right? They are incredibly safe. They could be put on military bases so that not only the military base becomes independent, but it would have enough energy left over to service the local community, turn it around. All of these things, I mean, I asked someone who told me that this was an option. If the president tomorrow said, go ahead and do it. If Congress provided the money and said, go ahead and do it, how long would it take? Ten years. Let's do these two here. So we've talked about how offense is better than defense in the case of, we've talked about how offense is better than defense in the case of protecting the grid. And in the case of nuclear war, you've talked about mutually assured destruction. How would mad look like in the case of the power grid where it's difficult to attribute a cyber attack? Well, I mean, imagine this. The president is sitting in the situation room. All electricity on the east coast is out. Millions of people without electricity. The president is there with the head of the NSA, the head of the CIA, the head of the FBI. He's there with the Joint Chiefs of Staff or maybe just the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.  And finally, the head of the NSA says, wellness to president, as best we can determine, the attack originated in Copenhagen. Copenhagen?  Well, no, sir, it originated in Copenhagen, but then it was transmitted through Auckland, New Zealand. And then before Auckland, actually, it was Santiago, Chile. And before Chile, it was Madrid. And as best we can determine the really original point of origin, yes, says the president.  Brooklyn. Now what do you do? The Russians have cyber teams spread all over the world capable of launching attacks. Whether they can launch one sophisticated enough to take out the power grid, I can't tell you. But they are capable of launching attacks from points all around the world, as I assume we are too. And it could take a very, very long time to determine who was really behind it. And if you want a sort of preamble to what the conversation would be like between us, let's say we assume it's the Russians who did it. The conversation, Mr. Putin, I can guarantee you, would be saying exactly the same thing that he's saying now about the interference in our election system. Russian government had nothing to do with it. It may be that some patriotic Russians on their own decided to play games with the American. But I can't control everybody in this country.  What are you going to do? Okay, one last question here. Sorry, running out of time. So I've had the point made to me a number of times about cybersecurity as a growing industry, but that a lot of companies in the cybersecurity space actually lack the workforce or the qualified workforce to really tackle the problems that they're looking at. And I'm curious as to what you see the role of somewhere like the booming San Francisco Bay Area tech industry. What is their role in contributing to the solution of this problem? And not just the San Francisco Bay Area, but the global tech industry is having people building great apps that are going to be useless when you can walk your own dog and you don't have power. So I'm curious what our role is at that point. Well, I don't mind walking my own dog, actually. I really don't know what to tell you. Part of the problem is, and you sort of touched on it when you talk about the tech industry, the folks who work at the Department of Homeland Security in putting the Department of Homeland Security sort of at the point of the spear in terms of defending American infrastructure, you are taking the least competent agency in the U.S. government and charging them with the most complex because the Pentagon can't do it. It's constitutionally prohibited from doing it. The people who have absolutely the best experts in government, the National Security Agency can't do it. They could be invited in, I suppose, to help the power industry, but such is the level of competition within the power industry that they're reluctant to provide all the information that the NSA would need. Again, and maybe this is an appropriate point on which to close this conversation down, we are a reactive society. We are not a preemptive society. It is not until after disaster strikes that we begin to ask the question saying, why didn't anybody do anything about this? As long as these things are purely theoretical, I'm not sure that we're ever going to come up with the kinds of solutions that we need, but somebody mentioned before, they hadn't seen evidence of an actual attack on the power grid. The Russians knocked out the Ukrainian power grid physically, knocked it out using a cyber attack. You know what saved the Ukrainians? It is such an old system that they were able to manually turn it back on again. We couldn't do that in this country. On that note, I'd like to thank the audience for great questions, our very excellent student panel for a great dialogue, and last but not least, Mr. Kapov for his clarion call to all of us and alerting us to such a big threat with such troubling and dire consequences. I hope we all can take this information and become better citizens in interacting with our government on it. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.


Welcome back to HPE Discover 2021, the virtual version. My name is Dave Vellante, and you're watching theCUBE. And we're here with Guido Appenzeller, who's the CTO of the Data Platforms Group at Intel. Guido, welcome to theCUBE, come on in. Thanks, Dave, I appreciate it. It's great to be here today. So I'm interested in your role at the company. Let's talk about that, you're brand new. Tell us a little bit about your background. What attracted you to Intel and what's your role here? Yeah, so I grew up in the startup ecosystem of Silicon Valley, came from my PhD and never left. And, you know, built software companies, worked at software companies, worked at VMware for a little bit. And I think my initial reaction when the Intel recruiter called me was like, hey, you got the wrong phone number, right? I'm a software guy. That's probably not who you're looking for. And, but, you know, we had a good conversation. I think at Intel, there's a realization that you need to look at what Intel builds, more as an overall system, from an overall systems perspective, right? That the software stack and then the hardware components are getting more and more intricately linked. And, you know, you need the software to basically bridge across the different hardware components that Intel is building. So I'm here now as the CTO for the data platform school, so that builds the data center products here at Intel. And it's a really exciting job. And these are exciting times at Intel, you know, with Pat, you know, got a fantastic CEO at the home. I worked with him before at VMware. So a lot of things to do, but I think a very exciting future. Well, I mean, the data center is the wheelhouse of Intel. I mean, of course, your ascendancy was a function of the PCs and the great volume and how you change that industry. But really data centers is where it at. I mean, I remember the days of people saying, Intel will never be in the data center. It's just the toy. And of course, your dominant player there now. So your initial focus here is really defining the vision and be interested in your thoughts on the future, what the data center looks like in the future, where you see Intel playing a role. What are you seeing is the big trends there? You know, Pat Gelsinger talks about the waves. He says, if you don't ride the waves, you're going to end up being driftwood. So what are the waves you're driving? What's different about the data center of the future? Yeah, that's right. You want to surf the waves, right? That's the way to do it. So look, I like to look at this in terms of major macro trends, right? And I think that the biggest thing that's happening in the market right now is the cloud revolution, right? And I think we're halfway through or something like that. And this transition from the classic, you know, client server type model, you know, that where with enterprises running the old data centers to more of a cloud model, where something is, you know, run by hyperscale operators or it may be run, you know, by an enterprise themselves or it may sedate the edge. So there's a variety of different models, but the provisioning models have changed, right? It's much more of a turnkey type service. And when we started out on this journey, I think we built data centers the same way that we built them before, although, you know, the way to deliver IT had really changed, right? It's gone to more of a service model. And we're really now starting to see the hardware diverge, right, the actual silicon that we need to build in order to address these use cases diverge. And so I think one of the things that is kind of most interesting for me is really to think through how does Intel and the future build silicon that's built for clouds, you know, like on-prem clouds, edge clouds, you know, hyperscale clouds, but basically built for these new use cases that have emerged. So just kind of a quick aside. I mean, to me, the definition of cloud is changing. It's evolving. You know, it used to be this set of remote services in a hyperscale data center. It's now, you know, that experience is coming on-prem. It's connecting across clouds. It's moving out to the edge. It's supporting, you know, all kinds of different workloads. How do you see that so evolving cloud? Yeah, I think, I mean, there's, the biggest difference to me is that sort of, cloud starts with this idea that the infrastructure operator and the tenant are separate, right? And that is actually has major architectural implications. I mean, just to, you know, I don't know if it's a perfect analogy, but if I built a single family home, right, where everything is owned by one party, you know, I want to be able to walk from the kitchen to the living room very quickly, if that makes sense, right? So, you know, my house here is actually an open kitchen, right, it's the same room essentially. If you're building a hotel where your primary goal is to have guests, you pick a completely different architecture, right? The kitchen from your restaurants, where the cooks are busy preparing the food and the dining room where the guests are sitting, they're separate, right? I mean, the hotel staff has a dedicated place to work and the guests have a dedicated places to mingle, but they don't overlap, typically. I think it's the same thing with architecture in the clouds, right? That's sort of, you know, initially the assumption was it's all one thing. And now suddenly we're starting to see, you know, like a much, much cleaner separation of these different areas. I think a second major influence is that the type of workloads we're seeing is just evolving incredibly quickly, right?   I mean, there's some really good research out of Google and Facebook where they run numbers. And for example, if you just take a standard system and you run a microservice based, an application written in a microservice based architecture, you can spend anywhere from, I want to say 25, in some cases over 80% of your CPU cycles just on overhead, right? And just on, you know, marshalling, demarshalling the protocols and, you know, the encryption and decryption of the packets and your service mesh that sits in between all these things. So I created a huge amount of overhead. So for us, kind of 80% go into these overhead functions. Really, our focus only needs to be on how do we enable that kind of infrastructure? Yeah, so let's talk a little bit more about workloads if we can. I mean, the overhead is also sort of as the software, as the data center becomes software defined, you know, thanks to your good work at VMware. It is a lot of cores that are supporting that software defined data center. And then there's... That's exactly right, yeah. And as well, you mentioned microservices, container-based applications, but as well, you know, AI's coming into play and what is, you know, AI is kind of a morphist, but it's really data oriented workloads versus kind of general purpose ERP and finance and HCM. So those workloads are exploding and then we can maybe talk about the edge. How are you seeing the workload mix shift and how is Intel playing there? Okay, I think the trend you're talking about is definitely right, right? We're getting more and more data centric, you know, shifting the data around becomes a larger and larger part of the overall workload in the data center. AI is getting a ton of attention, right? It's, look, if I talk to the most operators, AI is still the emerging category, right? I mean, we're seeing, I'd say five, maybe 10% percent of workloads being AI is growing. They're very high value workloads, right? They're very challenging workloads, but, you know, it's still a smaller part of the overall mix. Now edge is big, right? And edge is too big, it's big and it's complicated because the way I think about edges, it's not just one homogeneous market, it's really a collection of separate submarkets, right? It's very heterogeneous, you know, it runs on a variety of different hardware, right?   The network operators, there's a pretty broad range of verticals that all look slightly different in their requirements. And, you know, I think it's really interesting, right? It's one of those areas that really creates opportunities for vendors like HPE, right? To really shine and address this heterogeneity with a broad range of solutions. Very excited to work together with them in that space. Yeah, so I'm glad you brought HPE into the discussion because we're here at HPE Discoverer. I want to connect them. But so my question is, what's the role of the data center in this world of Edge? How do you see it? Yeah, look, I think in a sense what the cloud revolution is doing is that it's showing us it leads to polarization of a classic data into Edge and cloud, if that makes sense, right? It's splitting, right? Before this was all mingled a little bit together. If my data center is my basement anyways, you know, what's Edge, what's data center, same thing, right? The moment I'm moving some workloads in the clouds and I don't even know where they're running anymore, then some other workloads that have to have a certain sense of locality I need to keep closely, right? And there are some workloads you just can't move into the cloud, right?  And will I ever connect my smoke detector with my sprinkler system via the cloud? No, I won't, right? Just for, if things go bad, right? That may not work anymore. So I need something that does this locally. So I think there's many reasons, you know, why you want to keep something on premises. And I think it's a growing market, right? It's very exciting. You know, we're doing some very good stuff with our friends at HPE, you know, they have the Proline DL-110 Gen10 Plus server with our latest third generation Xeon's in them. The OpenRAN, you know, which is the radio access network for in the telco space, HPE edge line servers, also the third generation Xeon says there's some really nice products there that I think can really help addressing enterprises, carriers, a number of different organizations, you know, these edge use cases. Can you explain, you mentioned OpenRAN, VRAN, so we essentially think of that as kind of the software-defined telco? Yeah, exactly. It's a software-defined cellular, right? I mean, actually, I learned a lot about that over the recent months. You know, when I was taking these classes at Stanford, you know, these things were still done in analog, right? That basically a radio signal would be processed in an analog way and digested. And today, typically, the radio signal is immediately digitized and all the processing of the radio signal happens digitally. And you know, it happens on servers, right? Some of them HPE servers. And it's a really interesting use case where we're basically now able to do something in a much, much more efficient way by moving it to a digital, more modern platform. And it turns out you can actually virtualize these servers and run a number of different cells inside the same server, right? It's really complicated because you have to have fantastic real-time guarantees versus sophisticated software stack. But it's a really fascinating use case. You know, a lot of times we have these debates and it's maybe somewhat academic, but I'd love to get your thoughts on it. The debate is about, okay, how much data that is processed and inferred at the edge is actually going to come back to the cloud. Most of the data is going to stay at the edge. A lot of it's not even going to be persisted. And the counter to that is, so that's sort of the negative for the data center, but the counter to that is there could be so much data. Even a small percentage of all the data that we're going to create is going to create so much more data, you know, back in the cloud, back in the data center. What's your take on that? Look, I think there's different applications that are easier to do in certain places, right? I mean, that, look, going to a large cloud has a couple of advantages.  You have, if you need very specialized hardware, if I want to run a big learning task where I suddenly need a thousand machines, right? And then this runs for a couple of days and then I don't need to do that for another month or two, right? For that is really great. There's on-demand infrastructure, right? Having all this capability up there, you know, at the same time, it costs money to send the data up there, right? If I just look at the hardware cost, it's much, much cheaper to build it myself, you know, in my own data center or in the edge. So I think we'll see, you know, customers picking and choosing what they want to do where, right? And there's a role for both, right? Absolutely. And so, you know, I think there's certain categories. At the end of the day, why do I absolutely need to have something at the edge? And there's a couple of, I think, good use cases. I mean, one is, let me actually rephrase a little bit. I think it's three primary reasons, right? One is simply a bandwidth, right?  There's no way I'm gonna move that into the cloud. It's just, you know, cost prohibitive. I might have a hard time even getting a line that allows me to do this, right? There might be latency, right? If I need one to reliably react a very short period of time, I can't do that in the cloud. I need to do this locally with me. I can't even do this in my data center. This has to be very, very closely coupled.  I think, you know, that if I wanna make sure that if things go wrong, right, the system is still intact, right? You know, anything that's sort of an emergency kind of backup, you know, an emergency type procedure, right? If things go wrong, I can't rely on that there'd be a good internet connection. I need to handle things locally. Like, you know, that's the smoke detector and the sprinkler system, right? And so for all of these, right, there's good reasons why we need to move things close to the edge, right? So I think there'll be a creative tension between the two, right? But both are huge markets. And I think there's great opportunities for HP ahead to work on these use cases. Yeah, for sure. Top brand in that compute business. So before we wrap up today, you know, thinking about your role, I mean, part of your role is a trend spotter, right? You're kind of driving innovation, righty? Surfing the waves, as you said. Skating to the puck, all the... Have my perfect crystal ball right here. Yeah, go on. All the cliches, right?  But so what are some of the things that you're overseeing that you're looking towards in terms of innovation projects? Particularly, obviously, in the data center space. What's really exciting you? Look, I mean, there's a lot of them. And I pretty much all the interesting ideas I get from talking to customers, right? You talk to the sophisticated customers. You try to understand the problems that they're trying to solve and that they can't solve right now. And that gives you ideas. Just to pick a couple, right? I mean, one thing, one area I'm probably thinking about a lot is how can we build, in a sense, better accelerators for the infrastructure functions, right? So no matter if I run an edge cloud or I run a big public cloud, I want to find ways how I can reduce the amount of CPU cycles I spent on, you know, microservice, marshalling, demarshalling, service mesh, you know, storage acceleration and these things like that, right? And so clearly, if this is a large chunk of the overall cycle budget, right? We need to find ways to shrink that, right? To make this more efficient, right? So I think, so this, this basically infrastructure function acceleration, it sounds probably as unsexy as any topic could sound, but I think this is actually really, really interesting area. I want the big levers we have right now in the data center. Yeah, I would agree, Guido. I think that's actually really exciting because, you know, you actually can pick up a lot of the wasted cycles now. And that's just, that drops right to the bottom line. But please. Yeah, exactly. And it's, you know, it's kind of funny. I mean, we're still measuring so much with spec end rates of CPUs, right? Performance is like, well, they make sure we're measuring the wrong thing, right? If 80% of the cycles of my app are spent in overhead, right? Then the, the speed of the CPU doesn't matter as much, right? It's other functions that I need to learn. So that's one. The second big one is memory is becoming a bigger and bigger issue, right? And it's memory cost because, you know, memory prices, they used to sort of decline the same rate that, you know, our core counts and then, you know, clock speeds increased. That's no longer the case. We've run to some scaling limits there, some physical scaling limits, where memory prices are becoming stagnant. And this is becoming a major pain point for everybody who's building servers, right? So I think we need to find ways how we can leverage memory more efficiently, right? You know, share memory more efficiently. You have some really cool ideas in that space that we're working on. Yeah, and Pat, let me just start to interrupt, but Pat hit into that in your big announcement. I mean, you talk about system on package, I think is what he used to talk about what I call disaggregated memory and better sharing of that memory resource. And I mean, that it seems to be a clear benefit of value creation for the industry. Exactly, right? I mean, if this becomes a larger, for our customers, this becomes a larger part of their overall cost, right? We want to help them address that issue. And then the third one is, you know, we're seeing more and more data center operators are effectively power limited, right? So we need to reduce the overall power of systems or, you know, maybe to some degree just figure out better ways of cooling these systems. But I think there's a lot of innovation that can be done there, right? To both make these data centers more economical, but you know, also to make them a little more green, right? I mean, today data centers have gotten big enough that if you look at the total amount of energy that we're spending in this world is mankind, right? A chunk of that is going just to data centers, right? And so if we're spending energy at that scale, right? I think we have to start thinking about how can we build data centers that are more energy efficient? I'll do the same thing with less energy in the future. Well, thank you for laying those out.  I'm sure Gelsinger is really happy to have you on board, Guido, I would be. And thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to be here, great to be at the HP show. And thanks for being with us for HPE Discover 2021, the virtual version. We're watching theCUBE, the leader in digital tech coverage. Be right back.