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Cypherpunk Desert Bus: My Role In The 2016 Zcash Trusted Setup Ceremony
The Zcash protocol needs a special trusted setup phase for technical reasons.
The secret key ("cryptographic toxic waste") generated during this phase can be used to steal money - currently in the form of creating counterfeit coins, stealing from everyone collectively.
For the secret key to leak, all six participants need to collude or be compromised. Emphasis on the latter: there are a lot of ways that the participants could be compromised against their will.
As one of those participants, here's my account of what I did to ensure that secret was destroyed.
- Disclaimers
- Initial Contact
- Threat Modeling
- Timeline
- Friday 21st - Prep Day
- Saturday 22nd
- Sunday 23rd
- Monday 24th
- Post-Ceremony
- Footnotes
First of all, I want to make it clear that I am not receiving any compensation for my participation in the ceremony; the Zcash Electric Coin Company is paying my expenses. Once the bulk of my participation is complete, I would be willing to accept donations for this work, although have not yet.
Secondly I want to make it clear that my participation in the Zcash trusted setup ceremony shouldn't be taken as endorsement of Zcash. But since many people have taken it that way anyway, I'm going to start with a summary of some of my major concerns about Zcash and the trusted setup ceremony.
Nothing you will read below changes the fact that you're trusting me and five other participants not to collude. Full stop. End of story. It is IMPOSSIBLE for myself and the other participants to prove to a third party that we did not collude to keep the secret key. If you do not believe you can trust me, you should stop reading now.
The purpose of this writeup is for education, entertainment, and peer review. If you are not reading this writeup for one of those reasons, STOP NOW.
Single Point of Failure
As of writing, I'm not aware of any efforts to independently audit the deterministic build process used to create the compute node DVDs that every participant in the trusted setup used. This means there's a massive single point of failure in the whole process that completely undermines the value of the multi-party computation.
Until the software and deterministic builds are audited, the entire ceremony is a bunch of crypto hocus pocus that means nothing.
You may have heard of the DNSSEC Root Signing Ceremony. It's a rare example of a in-production key signing ceremony; its participants are trusted with the integrity of the DNSSEC system that (is supposed to) protect the integrity of the DNS system.
Arguably the Zcash trusted setup makes the DNSSEC root signing ceremony look like childs play. By that, I don't mean to say that the DNSSEC Root Signing Ceremony isn't done in a professional manner - it is - but rather than that the security requirements for the Zcash trusted setup are much higher.
The reason why is incentives: if you have a backdoor to DNSSEC, it's hard to turn that backdoor into profit. If I had a DNSSEC backdoor what could I do with it? I guess I could try to MITM some online banking… But I'm not a criminal; I don't have the contacts necessary to do that on a big enough scale; I don't know how to launder money; I don't know how to find trustworthy partners-in-crime.
Or maybe I'd try selling that DNSSEC backdoor to the nearest Chinese/Russian/United States embassy. But how do I know they'd take me seriously? How do I know they wouldn't turn me over to the local law enforcement?
Even if I had a backdoor to DNSSEC, I don't have any easy way to turn that backdoor into something that'll personally benefit me. On the other hand, if I had a Zcash backdoor, it'd go like this:
Acquire Zcash secret keys.
Print money at will.
There is no step three.
Even a thirty-something kinda-overweight from-the-suburbs nerd like myself can pull off that!
The cryptography behind Zcash is both highly experimental, and relatively weak. Fact is, if zk-SNARKS turned out to be totally broken, unlike more mainstream crypto, it just wouldn't be all that surprising:
> ...and now you may kiss the...
> Sorry Steve, I'll be back in a half hour! Gonna factor some primes.
Meanwhile, if the pairing crypto behind zk-SNARKS gets broken:
> Mind reviewing this? I think I broke pairings.
> Kinda busy this week; how about you put it up on arXiv?
> You know Zcash uses them right?
> On second thought, close the door...
On top of that, there appears to be uncertainty about the strength of the actual parameters chosen for Zcash's crypto. The threat here is that an attacker may be able to create fake zk-SNARK proofs by breaking the crypto directly, even without having access to the trusted setup backdoor.
I've had some experts tell me they thought the security level was 2^80 operations (very weak), while others (including Zooko himself) thought it was more like 2^96. I'm not sure which figure is right, but the fact that there's disagreement is a bad sign.
Scale and Scalability
The current Zcash protocol inherits the same O(n^2) scalability problem that Bitcoin has, and then makes the problem significantly worse. First of all, unlike Bitcoin, Zcash can't be pruned: every private Zcash transaction results in one or more revealed nonces that must be stored indefinitely by all Zcash nodes.
More importantly, verifying Zcash private transactions is orders of magnitude slower than verifying Bitcoin transactions: tens of milliseconds compared to a few microseconds. This is so slow that if Zcash users used private transactions frequently, even without attacks mining Zcash could become unprofitable for all but the largest mining pools even due to slow block propagation effects; if small miners were not forced out of business the Zcash network could even have difficulty maintaining consensus.
In my opinion the Zcash team has been irresponsible, maybe even dishonest, in their choice of block interval and size parameters.
Equihash Proof-of-Work
Zcash uses the Equihash PoW in an attempt to make hashing more decentralized. The hope here is that Equihash will be "memory-hard", with the costs to hash dominated by the cost to acquire and operate commodity DRAM rather than specialize hardware. Equihash hashing is comprised of basically two main stages:
- Fill a fixed-size memory buffer with the BLAKE2b hashing algorithm.
- Repeatedly sort that memory while doing a trivial computation.
Since BLAKE2b is fairly efficient, the cost is supposed to be dominated by the repeated sorting; for Zcash the fixed-size memory buffer was expected to be about 1GiB. However, as of writing Tromp has managed to get memory requirements down to just 144MiB! The Equihash paper predicted that kind of optimization would incur a multiple orders of magnitude penalty… not a good sign.
More generally, the Equihash paper never actually properly analysed the actual cost of implementing Equihash on real hardware. Instead they assumed that implementations will use commodity DRAM, and that hashing cost will be dominated by the capital expense of acquiring that DRAM.
That's a big assumption. For example, Tromp has reported good equihash performance on NVIDIA GTX980 GPU, which as of writing has a retail cost of about $500 USD and comes with 4GiB of GDDR5 DRAM; if Equihash really works as intended, the cost of that RAM should dominate hashing costs.
So what is the cost of that RAM? $10-$20, depending on how dodgy of a supplier you're willing to use. That's a lot of room for improvement with custom hardware. For instance, it's easy to imagine a $5 ASIC being developed to act as a highly specialized memory controller; Zcash hashing hardware would simply be that ASIC surrounded by RAM chips.
The situation gets even worse though when you take energy costs into account. Fully utilized GDDR5 DRAM needs about 100mW/GiB/s of bandwidth; a GTX980 has about 225GiB/s of bandwidth, so we'd expect it's GDDR5 DRAM to consume around 22W. At $0.05/kWh that's roughly $10/year minimum - probably more like $20/year once inefficiencies are taken into account. You'd want to do a more in-depth analysis than my hand-waving, but the point is, this strongly suggests that over the lifetime of Equihash hashing equipment, energy costs are higher than the capital costs of aquiring DRAM.
So can we reduce those energy costs? The Equihash paper states that:
To the best of our knowledge, the highest reported bandwidth in commercial products does not exceed 200 GB/s (Playstation 4 has 172 GB/s bandwidth), whereas the desktop DDR3 can have as high as 17 GB/s bandwidth.
Even if it was the case, the highest reported bandwidth applies to large (a few GB) memory chips, for which it is not so hard to place sufficiently many reading pins to get the bandwidth. For smaller chips (700 MB) we presume it to be much harder.
Their information is very out of date. The current state of the art in both bandwidth and power consumption is to stack memory dies directly on top of logic dies and interconnect them with microscopic thru-silicon vias:
This technique has even been standardized by JEDEC as the High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) interface; Xilinx uses this technology in their UltraScale+ FPGA line, offering 4GiB and 480GiB/s in a single package. A major part of the energy used by DRAM is consumed by driving long wires at high speed to move bits to compute units and back; the shorter wires enabled by HBM can reduce IO power consumption by 10x or more1.
We haven't even discussed more exotic possibilities like custom DRAM ASICs, but I think I've made my point: it's quite likely that custom Equihash hardware will be developed if Zcash catches on, and that hardware will reduce costs at least one or two orders of magnitude.
This by itself isn't worse than Bitcoin's PoW. But there's a big potential problem: because this hardware may be significantly more expensive to develop than SHA256 ASICs, we may end up with a winner-take-all situation where the first firm to develop a Equihash ASIC has a massive head start over its competitors. Exactly what Equihash was trying to avoid.
Founders Reward
20% of coins for the first four years are allocated to a "founders reward", intended to compensate the investors and developers who created Zcash. However 20% is extremely high - for starters it gives 51% attackers a significant advantage. Secondly, because the implementation of the reward sends those funds to a single multisig address that's rotated periodically, the address itself is a major single-point-of-failure for the currencies monetary supply: a compromise of that address could easily lead to the price of Zcash crashing, for instance by a thief selling their coins. Equally, governments could force the Zcash Electric Coin Company that controls that address to dump coins on the market in an attempt to hurt Zcash. This should be a significant concern for anyone thinking about investing in Zcash.
Secondly, much of the communication around the founders reward has been at best borderline dishonest, by stating the founders reward is 10%. That figure is true when you consider the entire lifetime of the coin supply, but given this is an investment, I believe Zcash should err on the side of caution and stress the 20% figure that is relevant to investors today - Zcash may not even be around in four years.
Finally, the fact that the Zcash team has a very obvious and very direct link between their income and the price of Zcash is legally risky, which in turn is a risk to the whole Zcash community due to the highly centralized way Zcash protocol development is organized, particularly with the Zcash trademark (discussed below). After all, there are obvious similarities with Zcash and highly regulated constructs like stock offerings.
Zcash™ Trademark
The Zcash Electric Coin Company has both trademarked "Zcash", and threated others with lawsuits for using that term. This is a centralization risk: it'd be easy for control of that trademark to be used to bully alternate development teams from improving the protocol and/or implementations of it. For example, the US Government could order the Zcash company to add AML/KYC features to the Zcash protocol - as was done with the Ripple protocol - and then use the trademark to prevent other teams from promoting alternate directions for protocol development, or even simply promoting that the protocol remain unchanged. Consider the legal risks faced by an exchange who simply wants to ignore the changes that the wider, decentralized community has rejected, but now has to contend with the fact that continuing to call Zcash, "Zcash", exposes them to lawsuits from owners of the trademark.
Note too that Zcash has been specifically designed in a way that makes adding AML/KYC to it possible because it is possible to prove the origin of funds by revealing a view key.
Software Quality
I personally ran into a bug that caused the Zcash wallet to crash the daemon with an assertion error within the first 30 minutes or so of using Zcash; I wasn't trying to do anything clever, nor was I looking for bugs. Along with the other bugs that had to be fixed right after the 1.0.0 launch, I think we have strong reasons to wonder if the current software quality is at the level needed in a crypto-currency.
Additionally, there are concerning signs that the team doesn't yet have a solid crypto-currency background, such as (still open) issue 713; Zcash doesn't have any staff or advisors with significant architectural design and implementation experience on successful, stable, crypto-currency systems used in production (Ethereum is neither used in production for its intended purpose, nor has it yet proven to be stable).
For investors, a potential concern here is that the Zcash trademark may make it structurally difficult for other teams of developers to participate and improve the protocol that the economic majority is using. By contrast in the Bitcoin space we have multiple competing teams with quite different visions for the Bitcoin protocol, yet they all make use of the term "Bitcoin" and are all promoting their efforts to the wider economic community, who in turn has the ability to choose between them.
Disclaimer Disclaimer
Keep in mind that my job here isn't to promote Zcash, so the above (and below) emphasises negatives and doesn't talk about positives; I'm erring on the side of caution in making sure that my readers leave with a broad understanding of what problems exist.
Also, all these problems can be fixed, some more easily than others.
Initial Contact
Zooko initially asked me on Sept 26th via unencrypted Twitter DM if I was interested in participating in the 2016 Zcash parameter generation ceremony as a "Human Witness". I asked him to move the conversation to Signal, noting that:
[W]hile I don't care that much… for the record keep in mind that the moment you ask someone to participate in this, you potentially expose them to pretty big threats. At minimum, if I were in your position I would have asked over Signal, not easily wire-tapped twitter DM's.
Later that day Zooko contacted me via Signal. I asked him to PGP sign the Signal safety numbers so I could be sure I was actually talking to him, which he didn't do.
Two weeks later on Oct 14th Zooko contacted me again via Signal, saying he "Still [hadn't] gotten around PGP-signing my Signal fingerprint" and asking if I could be a part of either the Oct 15-16th ceremony, or Oct 22-23rd ceremony. I ignored the message until later that day Zooko finally sent me a PGP-signed email confirming the Signal safety numbers (and for that matter, his phone number!). tl;dr: I agreed to be a part of the Oct 22-23rd ceremony.
Zooko reached out again on Oct 18th outlining what would actually happen on the 22-23rd weekend. At the time I had just arrived in San Francisco for the Rebooting the Web-of-Trust Conference. We discussed me potentially teaming up with Michael Perklin, however he had already bought the offline hardware for the ceremony, so I rejected that suggestion as I wouldn't be adding any value as a witness - if the hardware may be backdoored it's game-over already. As Zooko put it:
[So] for you to feel like you're providing full redundancy, you wouldn't want part of your explanation to be "and then I relied on Perklin's claims about what he had done…"
I also asked a security expert and developer I knew in SF if they'd be interested in helping me with the trusted setup. But I didn't get a response back in time, so I decided to do it alone.
Threat Modeling
At the time I didn't actually know much about how the trusted setup actually worked; I hadn't even been given a copy of the instruction sheet. But I knew the basic architecture:
At one level my job was very simple: run the software on the compute node, shuffle data to/from the network machine over the air-gap as required, and ensure the secret is securely deleted when everything is done.
But how was I going to make sure the secret didn't get leaked? Let's look at the threats I faced:
Backdoored Software
As mentioned above, the software used by every compute node was identical and thus a single point of failure that could be backdoored; I actually raised this as a issue publicly with Zooko a few weeks prior to the ceremony on Twitter.
There's also a second problem: what if my laptop was already compromised? I knew I'd need to burn a DVD with the compute node software, and since I was travelling at the time I only had my travel laptop available to do it with. It'd be possible for an attacker who had backdoored my laptop to cause it to burn a DVD containing something other than the correct compute node software.
I knew I couldn't actually solve either of those problems directly at the time. So instead I decided to rely on the fact that the ceremony instructions were to use a (hopefully!) write-once boot DVD, which could later be audited to ensure that the correct software was actually used.
Of course, this raises an important question: Is it really impossible to modify a DVD-R once written?
Backdoored Hardware
Obviously, if the hardware used has a backdoor, all bets would be off. Here in the Bitcoin space we even have a suspected example of this in action: it's plausible that the way Craig Wright fooled Gavin Andresen into thinking he was Satoshi was via a backdoored laptop.
Commercially available computers are filled with firmware that can undetectably backdoor your system. For example, academics have demonstrated hard-drive firmware backdoors that steal passwords2, Kaspersky has reported3 these exploits in the wild, and the Snowden leaks have confirmed4 the NSA has hardware level exploit capability. I personally was told by a friend of mine who owns a security-related hardware company that a former NSA employee once applied for a job there, and when asked about qualifications, they eventually admitted while at the NSA they had worked on "consumer firmware"; my friend told me that guy wasn't hired.
Like every other ceremony participant, my primary defense against hardware backdoors was to acquire hopefully clean hardware by purchasing brand new hardware from a randomly chosen store in person with cash. The assumption here is that it will be infeasible for an adversary to actively backdoor the hardware purchases because the large number of possible sources of it.
Physical Attacks
A physically present attacker has a lot of options. It's safe to assume that if an attacker got direct access to the compute node, even for just long enough to briefly plug in a USB cable, it'd be game over: it's quite plausible that an adversary could exploit a firmware-level bug in a USB controller and from that take over the whole machine. So obviously I'd need ensure that any such attacker would be detected, e.g. by being caught on video.
Physical attacks was one of the reasons why I was inclined to limit the number of people I performed the ceremony with. As I said to Zooko:
I suspect [having multiple observers present] just introduces ways to exploit, rather than removes them. There's fuck all you can do against slight of hand with a skilled magician.
Wireless Attacks
It's quite plausible that an attacker could compromise a machine via an attack over WiFi or Bluetooth; some computers even have remote management capability at the chipset level via wireless, e.g. Intel's Active Management Technology (AMT). Equally an attacker could use a wireless interface as a way to get undetectably exfiltrate data from the compute node, bypassing the DVD audit trail.
Computers have other wireless interfaces too: microphones and accelerometers are also wireless data inputs. Fortunately I think it's highly unlikely that there exist any ways of compromising a not-previously-backdoored computer via a microphone or accelerometer, and I say that as a former analog electronics designer!
Electromagnetic and Acoustic Leakage
Computers leak electromagnetic interference that often corresponds to the state of the computation being performed. This is a very real and very plausible attack: in fact one of the members of the Zcash team, Eran Trommer, has demonstrated real-world5 attacks against GnuPG that steal secret keys via both electromagnetic6 and more recently even acoustic leaks!7
There's multiple different ways these attacks can happen:
High Bandwidth — The state of the computation is directly measured by the attacker via leaked radio waves. Fortunately modern computers are so fast - GHz - that the radio waves emitted are both very difficult to record with anything but highly-specialized equipment, and are relatively easily shielded.
Low Bandwidth — The state of the computation is indirectly measured by changes in power consumption. The lower frequency makes it much less likely for the leak to happen via radio waves - a computer usually doesn't have any metal long enough to act as a good antenna - however it does make it possible for leakage to happen via electric field, magnetic fields, and sound. In particular, the switch-mode power supplies that are a ubiquitous part of modern electronics are usually designed with planar magnetics that emits a relatively large magnetic field that can easily couple to other things in the vicinity. Secondly, sound is generated directly by switch mode power supplies, both due to the magnetic components acting as speakers, and due to fact that most ceramic capacitors are made from piezoelectric materials that physically vibrate as the voltage across them changes.
A big problem with the low-bandwidth attacks is that the signals emitted can be sufficiently low frequency to be picked up via audio inputs such as microphones, either directly in the case of acoustic leakage, or indirectly via magnetic fields coupling to the analog input circuit. The latter is of course a very common problem, and is often seen in the form of unwanted 50/60Hz hum in audio recordings.
This means that an attacker could make use of "found" equipment to perform the attack. For instance, a cell phone left next to the compute node could potentially be backdoored in an over the air attack against the baseband firmware, then the microphone in that cell phone used to pick up an acoustic or magnetically coupled leak. Tromer's team have even demonstrated this exact attack against GnuPG, stealing a secret using a plain mobile phone placed next to a laptop.
Secondly, an attack could happen after the fact. Any audio recording such as a surveillance video or video taken by a journalist could potentially have unintentionally recorded leaked data, which an attacker can later extract.
Fortunately low-bandwidth attacks can be prevented in software by using cryptographic algorithms that use constant power. I have no idea whether or not the compute node software has this property; it would make for a good research topic.
Now that we've discussed what I was up against, let's look at what I actually did to attempt to defeat these threats:
Thursday 20th - Pre-Ceremony
As mentioned previously, I happened to be in San Francisco prior to the ceremony. I had been thinking all week about a plan, and had finally decided: my station would be mobile. As I said to Zooko that morning:
I'm going to do a bit of travel for it. My assumption here is if there is a threat, someone is going to have to physically follow me to get close enough to tamper with the process, so I'm going to optimise to detect such threats.So I plan on sending any such agents on a bit of a chase, and I'd[sic] they exist, hopefully catch them on camera.
What do I mean by mobile? I didn't actually tell Zooko this at the time, but I had decided to rent a car and do the actual computation in it, spending as much time as (safely) possible driving and using a cell phone data connection to communicate.
Now imagine your an agent assigned to compromising my station. If there aren't any location independent remote attacks, what do you have left? Physical attacks. For example, if you knew that Zooko was camped out in a hotel, you could rent the room next to him and spend the whole weekend with a bunch of radio gear doing a EMI attack. But how do you do that against a station hurtling down the highway? You've got a whole bunch of problems:
- How do you find them?
- Once you find them, how do you get close enough, long enough, for your fancy gear to work?
- How do you avoid being seen while doing this?
Of course, that's not to say this is impossible, or that my solution was necessarily better than hiding out in a remote forest cabin all weekend, but at least it'd be a very different threat model than the other stations.
My second decision was where to do this. I knew at that point that at least one or two stations were going to be in the US, so I decided that I'd do the ceremony in Canada to provide some jurisdictional diversity. Being a Canadian, I also wanted to be subject to the Canadian legal system rather than US legal system in case anything went wrong.
More specifically, I decided to go to British Columbia on the west side of Canada for a few reasons:
- It's much closer to SF, and in the same timezone; had I gone back home to Toronto I would have had much less time in the day to prepare.
- I have family living there who could help out if needed.
- I know the area better. While I've lived in Toronto almost all my life, I've spent much more "outdoors" time in BC and know the highways and towns in the area much better than I do Ontario.
And of course, who doesn't want to do a roadtrip in the rockies!? I mean, just look at it!
So with that in mind, I booked a 10am next-day flight on CheapAir (with Bitcoin!) from SFO to an airport close to my family in BC. Under my name of course - it's impossible to fly to Canada on commercial flights without showing ID to the airline, and I'm definitely not going to break the law by using a fake ID (and I don't even know where to get one!).
Later that day I left the web-of-trust conference I was at an hour early, and bought two GoPro cameras at Target, a cheap still camera, and all the SD Cards they had (not many!) and went back to my hotel. Before I went to bed I made one last phone call to someone I trusted via Signal and told them my plan: head to where my parents are and do the trusted setup there. After that, I put my phone in airplane mode.
Friday 21st - Prep Day
Wait, did you really think I'd buy a plane ticket in the clear? Fuck no. Even if the attacker wasn't government, god only knows how many people have legit, and illegit, access to the passenger lists kept by airlines.
Actually, after that call I did one last thing: I checked the flight schedules to Vancouver for the following morning over Tor. The first flight of the day was at 6:15am, so I woke up at early and took the hotel shuttle bus to SFO airport. I got there about an hour prior to departure and bought my ticket right at the counter.
My rational for the dummy ticket was simple: Vancouver is a few hundred KM away from the dummy ticket's destination, so if anyone was in fact trying to follow me I'd buy at least a few hours while they travelled to my new location.
Just prior to my flight I bought a new Android phone and backup SIM card from one of the BestBuy vending machines; the SIM card was one of those sketchy and overpriced $0.30/MB things, but I figured it'd be good to have a backup.
On the plane I wrote up a plan - and shopping list - on my (paper!) notebook.
Upon arrival at Vancouver I realised I had forgotten to download the OpenStreetmaps map for BC, so I turned on WiFi on my phone one last time to do that via the airport WiFi.
Next task was renting a car. Similar to the random purchase concept with the computer, I picked one of the half dozen rental companies at random to maximize my chances of getting a "clean" car.
Car in hand I drove to Vancouver city center. I needed cash though, so I went to the first bank I found and withdrew $3k CAD; it's way too easy to be tracked via credit cards! This was the first time I used the two GoPros: I positioned them on the dashboard to get a view of the interior of the car looking backwards, and a view looking forwards. The idea here is I wanted to make it difficult to do things like plant bugs on the car without being caught on video.
While I had a map, unfortunately OpenStreetmaps doesn't have shop information; I hadn't had enough time the night before to plan out where I'd be going in detail. And of course, I had my phone in airplane mode the whole time. So I was mostly driving at random and stopping whenever I found a store selling something I needed. In order:
Home Depot — Screwdriver set
Safeway — Food, drinks, aluminum foil, aluminum pans
Staples — The compute laptop! Zooko had told me I needed a fast Intel i7, so I would up buying a brand-new MSI GE62 gamer laptop; there's not many choices when you want a brand new laptop with a DVD burner. I also bought the DVD-R media I used later here.
Random used laptop store — I bought a second laptop to use as the network node; the disk image only had ethernet drivers for networking, so I planned on using three laptops total, with my existing personal laptop acting as a bridge between the phone and ethernet.
After this I headed out of Vancouver on the Trans-Canada Highway, turning my phone off entirely and wrapping it in aluminum foil around Langley. The idea here is if airplane mode wasn't actually working, I wanted to put some distance between my last known location and where I turned on the never-turned-on burner phone.
Of course, I also wanted to get a better SIM card for it than the dodgy one I picked up at the airport… Unlike the US, getting SIM cards in Canada without giving up your identity isn't trivial, but suffice to say, I was able to pull that off. It was getting late, so I decided to finally break radio silence and gave Zooko and the team a status report at Abbotsford - not as far from Vancouver as I had wanted. Also in Abbotsford I finally was able to buy a decent 120W inverter to actually power the laptops and other gear at a Canadian Tire.
Surveillance Strategy
Now, if you've been paying attention, you might ask what did I do with the laptop during all this shopping? I relied on the GoPros to watch them for me, setting them up to record video every time I left the car. On the one hand, I was the only station operator who ever let anything out of their site; I recall Zooko(?) mentioned how he put his compute node in the bed while he slept.
My rational for this was in part pragmatic: carrying around three laptops and a bunch of other equipment like DVDs, ethernet cables, etc. is a huge pain, and awkward too; I might end up breaking something, or attract attention from all the gear.
There's also a more devious reason: I wanted to tempt any adversaries into trying to tamper with the equipment. Regardless, they'd be taking a big risk for the simple fact that they'd have to break into the car to do it.
I also didn't have a choice anyway: once the ceremony had started, the laptops needed to be left running constantly, and I didn't want to risk messing with them. I'd probably have to leave them alone on occasion anyway to do things like pay for gas, so might as well get over it and trust the gear.
Of course, the downside is now I have a pile of surveillance footage that needs to be carefully reviewed. I've done a preliminary check of all of it, but another review is a good idea. I was also taking quite a big risk: if a camera failed for any reason, I could end up with a gap in the chain of custody. For example, when I got dinner later that night, the lightning was poor enough that the interior camera didn't get a great view. I happened to be able to see the car clearly where I parked it, but that's not as convincing as it could be.
I needed a place to stay for the night. Sure, I could have tried to sleep in the car, but doing the ceremony while tired didn't sound like a good idea, particularly given that I was driving. Also, I needed a table to do tech prep anyway.
However I didn't want to give away my location. So I found a rather odd independent motel in Hope and paid with cash. I did check-in under my real name - trying to do otherwise was just going to attract attention - but being an independent the whole process was done on paper, so no risk there!
I had been hoping to be able to park the car in such a way as to be able to take surveillance footage of it from the room window, but wasn't able too; I considered finding another motel, but in the end decided not to as it was still raining hard and I was getting pretty tired.
Ceremony Tech Prep
That night at the motel I finally was able to burn the network and compute DVDs required for the ceremony. I did this in with Tails, and made (labeled) primary and backup DVDs for everything.
A tricky part of this was I didn't want to turn the WiFi adapter on my personal laptop on; it was a Thinkpad T520, so I used the "airplane mode" switch on the side. The concern here is that it'd be easy to leak where I was via the MAC address of that laptop; here in Canada the Snowden leaks revealed that our equivalent of the NSA, CSEC, was illegally using MAC addresses to track people at airports. So I used a copy of Tails that I already had on the laptop, and did the actual download of the network and compute node iso's on the newly purchased T530.
Next task was modifying the compute node. Without ever booting it up, I took it apart and removed the WiFi/Bluetooth adapter, along with the SSD and HD storage. I probably should have removed the microphone at this point, but didn't think of it.
After putting it back together the compute node was booted up for the first time. Note how the fact that I powered it up for the first time only after the wireless interfaces were removed, to avoid it being compromised wirelessly.
Finally, I booted the compute node DVD and ran the DVD burn test, leaving the compute node here; I didn't shutdown the compute node after this point until the end of the ceremony.
I didn't bother dragging all that equipment into bed with me for the night, but I did take one precaution against any ninja's attempting to sneak in:
No, I'm not trying to hold the door closed; I'm trying to make sure that if the door is opened, I'll get woken up.
Saturday 22nd
Shielding the Compute Node
The next morning I did one last bit of preparation, and built a faraday cage for the compute node from the box it came by lining it with aluminum foil.
Believe it or not, this is actually a totally legit way of both shielding electronics from outside interference, and preventing EMI from leaking; I used to use it myself on occasion in my previous line of work as an electronics designer.
First of all, you might ask how did I ground it in a car with rubber tires? The answer is simple: you don't have too. I'm only concerned about relatively high frequency electromagnetic signals getting into and out of the compute node; grounding a faraday cage is only relevant if you are trying to shield something from a static DC field.
Secondly, the way that a faraday cage works - and RF shielding in general - is basically that the metal in the shield "shorts out" the electromagnetic wave. Specifically the magnetic component of the electromagnetic wave causes the electrons in the metal to move, creating what's known as an eddy current. However, that current also creates a magnetic field too, and as it happens, that magnetic field will be opposite the first field, cancelling them out.
The better the conductivity of the shield is, the more closely the two fields cancel out. The problem is, at high frequencies like radio waves, conductors don't act like conductors anymore; if a high frequency current in a good conductor is forced to go in a loop, the current will act as though it's going through a poor conductor instead.
So I made sure to buy the widest aluminum foil available, and covered the inside of the box with foil in big, continuous strips running from top to bottom in one go. Secondly, I made sure that at the edges the top and bottom halves of the clamshell box overlapped as much as possible with a snug fit to give as many possible paths for current to flow between the edges. A quick check with a cell phone confirmed that the box did at least successfully shield both cellular and WiFi.
Setting up the Car
Next I moved everything to the car. This was somewhat tricky as I needed to maintain surveillance of both the room and the car, so I left a GoPro running in the room while I setup the second GoPro in the car, then did a few trips to move all the electronics equipment over with the laptops going last. Note that the compute node was powered on at this point, running off battery.
Here's a photo of the final setup. Front seat:
And back:
While still in the motel parking lot, since I had WiFi available in case I had any networking issues, I decided to do the first part of the ceremony and hit enter. Doing that resulted in a prompt to add additional entropy:
Please type a random string of text and then press [ENTER] to provide additional entropy.
That's the point where this is getting serious. While I hadn't seen the source code for the MPC process at that point, it was obvious that I was probably about to generate the secret. And I was right.
A potential risk here is the secret getting leaked via the cameras or some other device with a microphone, so I turned off the cameras, stashed away the cellphone, and took a look around to see if the parking lot was empty. Satisfied, I proceeded to fill the screen up with random "typing" - mostly just mashing the keyboard randomly to make the sound as unlike normal typing and as confusing as possible.
That generated a commitment, which I then entered into the network node as instructed, "locking in" my role in the MPC.
Interestingly, as I was leaving the motel I noticed that someone else had entered the lot with a truck and horse trailer and parked across from me; I circled back to see who they were. They looked like locals, so I left. They also left soon after me and went in the opposite direction.
Having committed, I was actually done for quite a few hours; I was scheduled to be the last person to do the next step in the process, disc 'A'. So I starting driving north up highway 97 towards Merit and did some sightseeing. But first, gas; it's a 120km without any service stops:
Along the way I got some breakfast:
Not a bad view!
When I got there, I took the opportunity to buy some SD cards… This was actually a persistent problem: I hadn't actually done the math on how much space I'd need for all the GoPro footage, having never used them. Turns out it's a lot! I wound up buying every SD card this store had, something I'd end up repeating a few times:
Highland Valley Copper Mine
After Merritt I headed north to Ashcroft via Logan Lake. Along the way is the Highland Valley Copper Mine, currently the largest open pit mine in Canada, and one of the largest in the world. They have a rest stop on the hill overlooking the mine:
It has a bunch of cheery displays talking about the environment:
Speaking of the environment, a few minutes up the road gives you a much more interesting view: the tailings pond.
Don't let the pretty blue color deceive you: that's a 10km long, 2km wide, 150m deep former valley that's now filled with 1.3 billion tons of waste rock from the mine. The dam behind me is 3km long, so I thought a FUCK YEAH ENGINEERING selfie was appropriate:
The funny thing is, I thought the place looked kinda familiar… and I remembered visiting a big open pit mine when I was a kid. So I asked my parents, and sure enough it was the same mine.
Notice how I'm getting a signal, even though I'm in the middle of nowhere next to a tailings pond?
Actually, I lied earlier: this isn't going to be a roadtrip through the beautiful Rocky Mountains. This is going to be a roadtrip through the British Columbia interior. While the rockies are beautiful, they have two big problems: tourists and cell phone coverage.
What I actually want for this trip is to be somewhere as empty as possible, to make any attackers trying to follow me stand out, while still having good cell phone coverage. The interior is perfect for this because it's a giant plateau that's frankly kinda boring. This means there's little if any tourist traffic, especially in late October, the middle of the off season, and not many people voluntarily move there.
However, because there aren't annoying mountains in the way, there's a lot of industry, logging, mining, farming, etc. And since truck drivers - and their employers - like to be able to stay in touch, coverage is actually surprisingly good.
Coming into Ashcroft, you can see things are getting quite a bit flatter than you'd normally think of when you think of British Columbia:
But it's still kinda pretty, so I stopped at a A&W for lunch. Or to be exact, I went to their drive-thru and ate in the scenic parking lot:
The Chasm
I continued north on Highway 97 and got one last bit of sightseeing in at the aptly named Chasm Provincial Park:
Apparently by the time I finally managed to get myself and the valley into the frame at the same time I was getting a bit annoyed…
70 Mile House 93 Mile House 100 Mile House 150 Mile House
After the chasm I don't really have very many photos. Here's why:
See, that part of BC is a place so boring they named all the towns after mile markers:
It's also where I came up with the name "Cypherpunk Desert Bus"
On the bright side, my plan was working just fine: the whole drive I had cell phone coverage!
Disk A
Finally my turn rolled around, well after dark. So I pulled off at the next rest stop somewhere near Australian, BC and downloaded disc A, right in front of an outhouse:
When that was done I opened up the compute node's box, put the DVD in, pressed enter to start the computation, and quickly closed the lid again. I had about 30 minutes before the computation would be done, so I started driving down the highway with cameras running.
Now, I gotta admit, it was a somewhat weird feeling to be finally doing the ceremony for real. I don't know exactly how the math works, but for all I knew, in the unlikely event someone was actually trying to steal the keys I would have been in the middle of nowhere, after dark, and being followed.
So I decided to take the next side road I found… and ran right into Spectra Energy Transmission's CS No. 5 Australian facility. I'm not quite sure what that facility actually does - something to do with a natural gas pipeline I think - but regardless, it continuously emitted a loud turbine-like screeching noise. Now I don't know about you, but I figured hanging around a natural gas facility at night with two GoPros and three laptops might be misinterpreted, so I found another side road nearby to it and drove down it instead.
That also turned out to be not the greatest idea. Not only did my side-road turn out to run right past the facility, it hadn't been used in years and at one point I had to drive around a fallen tree:
While the road did have the redeeming feature that I was probably not trespassing, I decided I wasn't doing my credibility as a non-terrorist any good, so I headed back to the highway. On the bright side, around this time the computation finished, which meant I was able to start burning disc B.
After one more jaunt down a side road - this time past a few residential houses - so I pulled over yet again to upload disc B. And promptly ran into a problem: I'd run out of credit on my SIM card.
Actually, I knew this was a risk and had tried to refill it hours previously with Bitrefill. Which would have worked just fine, except that almost all my BTC were on my laptop… which was temporarily booted into Tails and acting as a bridge between the burner phone and the ethernet-only network node. It had taken a bit of fiddling to get that setup, so rather than reboot it I had been trying to get someone else to loan me the BTC. And of course, no-one in the group had any handy either!
At that point I was getting pretty tired - and potentially about to delay everyone else to boot - so I decided to cut my losses and use my normal phone instead. Which of course would have immediately given away my location to any attacker with access to cell phone tower records.
A nuance here was that I still didn't want to give up my identity to everyone else on the team. We were using Signal group chat to co-ordinate, and I had used my burner SIM to register. So to be able to keep using that I ended up having to also enable the WiFi hotspot on my regular phone; usually Signal works fine with your original number if you change SIM cards, but I didn't want to risk messing things up.
In any case, once the upload was complete I told Zooko that I'd be going radio silent until the morning and turned off both phones to go find a motel without being tracked.
Unfortunately I didn't really have good options. I could either stay near Quesnel - only a few minutes away - or drive about 120km north to Prince George, or an equal distance south to Williams Lake. And when you think about it, all the options are basically the same anyway: there's only about a dozen places to stay in a 300km radius of Quesnel, so any attacker who knew what car I was driving could check every possible place in a few hours.
So I decided to head to Quesnel, and wound up finding a motel on the side of the highway about a few km before Quesnel city center. Like the previous night, the check-in process was 100% paper based; they hadn't even configured their cash register to print their name on the receipt:
I carefully brought all the equipment inside for the night, leaving it on the bed. Curiously, the room was massive, quite possibly both the largest room I've ever stayed in, and the cheapest:
I also setup my anti-ninja alarm:
Unlike the previous night, I was able to park right in front of the room, allowing me to setup a GoPro in timelapse mode with a view of the car:
I ended up going to bed at around 9:30pm; pretty early, so I didn't bother setting my alarm.
Sunday 23rd
…and sure enough, I slept for almost 12 hours; I should have known that'd happen given I had gotten hardly any sleep the past three nights. In any case, I quickly moved everything back to the car, returned the room keys, and started driving.
Disc C
Once I got to Quesnel itself I found a residential road and turned on my cell phone finally, and found out that the not only was it my turn, everyone had been wondering where I was for the past hour and a half. So I got everything reconnected while idling next to a church with a horse out the front:
Once it had finished downloading, and the DVD was burning, I started driving again. I wound up stopping at what looked to be some kind of water truck refill station next to a highway interchange:
Not such a bad place to be actually: I was basically in the middle of a big field, and sure no-one was near the compute node. This is where I actually moved disc C to the compute node and started the computation.
Disc C was expected to take 90 minutes to compute - the longest of the three - so once I got the compute node running on it I started driving to Prince George. Though I made a quick detour to the Cariboo Pulp & Paper mill nearby first:
I also did a few big loops through the rural roads north of Quesnel, including a drive to the end of the road near Ten Mile Lake (yup, yet another X Mile name…). When the computation was finally done I pulled off to a rest stop in the middle of nowhere by Hush Lake to upload the DVD… and was complemented on how fast it went. Here's the sat view of Hush Lake:
Completely empty other than the rocks, trees… and a big cell tower a kilometer north of me. Presumably, it was so fast because I was the only person using it!
With disc D uploaded I had a few hours before the next and final round. So I made my way to Prince George and did my favourite thing: industrial sightseeing. Behind me is three pulp mills, an oil refinery, a chemical plant, and a big railway yard, among other things.
I had a couple hours to kill, so I decided to figure out how to get some good photos of it all. I couldn't find a good angle that really showed the massive scale of the industrial plants in the city. But I did figure out one thing, it's much easier if you don't stand in front of the frame:
Last Disc
Eventually my turn finally came near. So I headed slightly north of Prince George, to the rural area just outside the city core. I burned the DVDs next to a big bank of mailboxes:
As usual, once the computation was started, I drove off. This disc was expected to be just 15 minutes, so I soon stopped again by someone's house to burn the final disc, disk F, and upload it… and then my internet connection stopped working. Which was especially strange, as my phone wasn't showing any signal issues, and it had been working perfectly well until the moment it quit.
So I drove back to the mailboxes I had just been at - a place where I had been using the internet connection just fine - and tried it again… and it worked briefly, only to stop working again a minute or two later.
Now, keep in mind that I was uploading the very last disc for the entire ceremony; once I finished it was done. As Zooko said while I was trying to connect:
Where the hell are you and what kind of security precautions did you take?
Eventually I gave up and drove back to Price George city center - I figured at worst I'd use the WiFi at the Tim Hortons. In the end I pulled into the parking lot of the visitors center, the internet started working again, and the upload finally finished:
After confirming everything one last time I finally turned off the compute node, (hopefully!) destroying the "cryptographic toxic waste" forever.
Of course, I was far from finished; the ceremony wasn't worth much if I lost the surveillance footage sitting on a big pile of micro SD cards. So I found the nearest Staples and bought two external harddrives to start making copies.
I also needed to drive back to Vancouver, and I was sick of plateaus. With the sun coming down I spent the rest of the day driving to McBride via the much more scenic highway 16:
Monday 24th
So an interesting question is what should you do with the compute node hardware after the ceremony is over?
If everything worked as planned, powering off the compute node should have destroyed the secrets forever; the secrets should have been kept in only in RAM and never written to any kind of non-volatile storage.
On the other hand, if things didn't work as planned, there could be a secret still stored in some kind of non-volatile memory. It's possible, though unlikely, that an attacker was able to backdoor the system in some way, but wasn't able to exfiltrate the data. For example, an attacker who was able to compromise the compute node via an exploit after the initial commitments may have no way of exfiltrating the secret other than recovering the actual hardware.
So I argued that some of the stations should fully destroy their compute nodes, while other stations should preserve them as evidence for later forensic evaluation. I also argued that the stations with the highest chance of compromise should be the ones that kept their nodes, to maximize the chances of an attack being detected.
With all the precautions I took, I thought a successful attack on my station was less likely than others, so I opted to destroy the hardware thoroughly.
Destroying the Compute Node
Unfortunately, that's not very easy. The problem is essentially that bits are incredibly small: cutting up a flash memory chip may be guaranteed to render it unusable, but doing so won't actually destroy the data on it; in theory an advanced attacker could still read the data off the chip by reattaching wires in the right places. Sure, that's going to be incredibly difficult and expensive, but we're talking about a secret that could potentially be worth billions of dollars in the future.
EEPROM and Flash memory both work by trapping electrons; if you heat up the silicon enough it stops acting as a semiconductor and conductivity increases, allowing the trapped electrons to escape (among other things). Or at least, that's my understanding of it: I'm no semiconductor engineer!
So that means I just chucked the laptop into a campfire right? Well no. For starters, I knew this would all end up being public, so I'd be smart to figure out what the rules and regulations were, and follow them:
I checked the BC Government's website to determine if any fire bans were in effect where I was. I also reviewed their "Backyard & Industrial Burning" pamphlet and "Ministry of the Environment Burning Requirements" on that same site. Given the latter, I decided to not "burn" the laptop per say, but rather heat the relevant components of it to the point where all information would be unrecoverable.
I checked that the laptop was RoHS compliant. This means that no lead or other toxic materials were used in its construction.
I bought a propane torch, a respirator, a fire extinguisher, and a large metal pan.
I drove to a clear-cut (lots of those in British Columbia!) and found a part of that clear-cut where the topsoil had totally been removed leaving just a big sandy pit. I think they had been using it to setup their camp or something - there was a bunch of trash in a pile there as well, and signs of previous fires:
I completely took apart the laptop and separated all electronic and non-electronic components (in particular, that means all the plastic components were removed). While technically "electronic", I removed the actual lithium battery cells from the battery control electronics in the battery pack - I had no desire to start a lithium fire!
With respirator on and cameras running, the electronic components were all put in that big metal pan, and the blowtorch was used to methodically heat the electronics completely piece by piece until everything was blackened. This was done in entirely in the metal pan, against a rather absurd backdrop:
If anyone can recover data off these RAM chips, I'll be very impressed:
Finally, all of the electronics were removed from the site. Afterwords I bagged them all up to preserve them as evidence; other than the lithium battery cells I haven't actually thrown any part of the laptop away yet.
So what's next? A lot more work!
For me personally, after I finally destroyed the compute node I sealed up all the evidence left over - the DVDs, the electronics used, the shielded box for the compute node, etc. - for future forensics. I can think of a ton of questions to ask, and I'm sure others have questions I haven't thought of.
I've also got hours worth of video footage and photos that I need to decide if and how to release with potential privacy and maybe even legal issues to think about.
There's also lessons to be learned: I went into the ceremony knowing very little about it, and having never done anything quite like it. If people make use of zk-SNARKs, for the foreseeable future we're going to end up doing more of these crazy ceremonies, so hopefully we can do a better job next time.
After all, next time, rather than there being theoretically hundreds of millions of dollars on the line, next time their might actually be hundreds of millions of dollars on the line; we're going to need to up our game.
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/226240-sk-hynix-highlights-the-huge-size-advantage-of-hbm-over-gddr5-memory ↩
http://www.s3.eurecom.fr/docs/acsac13_zaddach.pdf ↩
https://securelist.com/blog/research/68750/equation-the-death-star-of-malware-galaxy/ ↩
http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35661.pdf ↩
Sufficiently real world that they even resulted in multiple CVE's, like CVE-2014-3591 ↩
http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~tromer/papers/radioexp.pdf ↩
http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~tromer/papers/acoustic-20131218.pdf ↩


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O'Collegian, 1939-12-20
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, f v. ...... . - 77ie sfa7, walter sacc, ftrtor j campus exodus begins early this morning vacation scheduled to begin at six afternoon the occupants of oklahoma state are on march, hitting trail that leads home via bus, train, car, thumb, and ohanks mare. t h o s fortunate students whose schedules were so arranged they could obtain an lcavo absence have already departed, but mass evacuation is expected as classes close tomorrow every highway leading out college city. practically dormitory, fraternity, sorority house will call it quits for lock their portals. early departure may be the order of day following announcement that penalties for class cutting will not in effect this year. freshmen and sophomores required to attend classes juniors seniors placed on own responsibility regarding attendance. any one planning miss school cf agriculture should confer with individual professors. engineering students who leave before holidays are advised bring official notices .dean's office if they have job. "there no arts sciences, home economics or education, commerce leaves all decisions teachers. the daily qcollegian volume xlv (2-593) 'complete (ap) coverage stillwater, oklahoma, wednesday morning, december 20, 1039 number 112 - r. nahl's retailing class visit bunn general store as an added attraction to their studies, dr. p. c. made a field trip glen-coc. the object of this was jake dunn's merchandise store. sunn boast fact that he has little everything m his store, and statement verified wholeheartedly by members class. contained so much only small aisle left which people may pass from part another. gloves, socks, pots, pans, tubs were hung celling. (continued on pago 3) "" ii i iii old gym is to be remodeled for dances first 'o' club hop success; plans laid more i)i'. nelnoii s. walko, head nf the physical education de-partmi-nt, and "o" members tiro so ploaxcd with lite suiccww of dance saturday nitfht, december 10, that they plan not only continue each nitfhl, but also remodel interior nymnah-itim, where arc tfivun. lights will he vastly improved from now on. those holes in floor, which hove trapped ninny nn unwary foot past, removed replaced by on exomplnry floor no hole. long rows drab benches upstairs balcony sm banished booths corner equipment table tennis other khiuts. windows are due a little attention, too. four loud speakers scheduled installation should make distinct improvement acoustics plr.ee. have been made repair xwimming pool nnd women's dressing rooms, which, opinion women students, sadly need some quite :i while shower ro .m jtnitlrularly hi repair. blue devils routed 51 to 41 by cowboys s : - record stands three up, two more to go on aggie east tour continuing nil-victorious their current swing along tho eastern big-time basketball nrcuit, the court cowboys of oklahoma state made thier re :ord read at straight wins, in as many starts, last night, when they downed duke blue devils, nt baltimore, maryland, by a count ffl 41. ' j immediate particulars tilt word not bo had o'collegian went prcssijpther than final result, but from score both clubs must have offensive guns trained high. -1 such an ballgame is almost unheard iba-coached aggies for light defensive type play with cbntrol ball leading point theory. (conlritird payc 3) radio hook-up may be acquired by city police cornish approves 150-kilowatt station stillwater soon have n broadcasting system as a result of unanimous vote the commissioners monday night approving their portion city-county cooperative plan whereby 15-kllowatt can purchased with assistance public works administration. one-half 55 per cent that must paid up sponsors will furnished county, which lias already allocated money in its budget, and action commissioners, steps tuken immediately to secure 45 grant from government agency. application for governmental aid is being prepared forwarded wpa headquarters, mayor o. c. whipple said tuesday. proposed station, would installed municipal building, operate on regular band 2450 kilocycles cost about $1000 county pay cent, asked cent. ernest young is flier from randolph field former aggie takes preliminary air work tuesday c. young, who graduated oklahoma state last spring, among the more than 200 flying cadets at govern-, ment's "west point of air" field, texas, were scheduled to complete primary phase aeronautical instruction tuesday. was an engineering student, son v. m. ycung, instructor in mechani cal engineering department at oklahoma state and director of ground school work for the forty aggie students who were selected training here under civil aeronautics authority program. following his graduation from state, young entered nine months army course tulsa in july. he was, stationed there three months, successfully completing elementary phase government went to randolph field where was placed controls a 400 horse-power basic plane study such, advanced phases as night flying; blind flying other departments work. when primary is completed, will be transferred n more kelly field, also located near san antonio,- texas. after fly-(contiiitied on payc 3) now it's "it ain't the proper thing to do but best way out advice from one who knows this situation by zane palmer the olo sayin "it ain't what you do but way that it," is fast losing foothold and taking over second fiddle role to, proper thing to do, tut it a darn good do," because: gotta girl? most fellows have girl. must love her for herself, instead of christmas present would like get from her. she , will love you for the present gotta give her, if gold (pres- ' cnt) digger (she) hasn't already started. so-o-o. blank comes (check). either got to ditch her or get dame a present. rub comes. in searching present, must examine following, (u) your pocketbook, (b) old man's pocket, (c)' department store, (d) ten cent stores (you cheapskate,) (e) junk yard (you're broke), and as take off sox (a dime pair given by girl last year) soak blistered dogs (feet), conclude that at first store found nothing; less t second, third were broke anyway, so it didn't j make no difference what saw. being broke, thereby resort putting "touche' (french bite) on mother, have any sense justice, brenfc up with moll. the latter would be smartest, since mother spent her last cent j for ingredients fruit cake. , regardless, possibility remains that you aren't going to buy a christmas present your girl. in breaking up with one and only (we human vultures always give 'em cuto?) there 4are many angles considered, sometime curves too. now, can tell are low in grades and that by ul means your tlmo should be do-votcd entirely to studying, but she wouldn't believe it; therefore, you went no place fast. being consistent is a key anybody's success, so with mind, send her picture of yourself (small,. invaluable, old all 'inexpensive). sure receives it prior clristmas. give love. tliis the first step. just human nature for people better on defense than offense. likewise weaker sex (if docs not weigh ton) back 'eight ball' instead us vultures, as second tep, tell this thusly: "darling, i have given my picture, havo never one largo or cxpcaslve any other girl. doesn't mean anything you? (use heavy accent question, makes them feel bad.) i've toldwhat mean to me, but, alas, .what have i received in return. don't think you love mo and are such a swell sport that wouldn't hurt my feelings for the world. i'm serious, honey. now realize brooder field than so far as can't you, shouldn't be stingy with even though upliftcr of life's darkest moments distress (come on cowpokc, wipe smile off blow your pose kinda snlf-i fish like. it makes them believe it). if does rip heart shreads, go way i'll mine. adlos, senorita (that is spanish boys eating adding machines). save dough didn't have. gotta gal howtver, some fortunate fellows girl. girl, cither (a) lucky, (b) smart, (c) uglier'n horse false teeth, (d) unpopular or me. case like this, wo will take only better good burghers town those who no definite but mustered up courage, relish n date home flame after christmas. this instance known "coup' d'etat" which means couples arc too tight three couples. need say more7 merry only twelve days remain to renew drivers licenses twclvo in which stillwater may obtain without submitting an examination, both written and a demonstration of driving ability. tag agent ben chonto announced recently that december 31 is absolutely the inst day renewals will be issued examinations. since have been 4,300 sold more than half total number 8,100 nvallablc drivers, choato said yesterday. . thle year for first time, every member family or firm not stand line get his her own license renewed. any cr take n group 1939 agents office them renewed, providing he pays customary 50 cents signature individual whom on renewal envelope. state engineer magazine out tuesday morn the second issue of oklahoma came off press and is being wrapped for mailing by circulation department. tins features an article on new york inspection trip assistant dean whiteside, also tome interesting cuts some things seen by, students making this fall. albeit nelson has in istmc that gives facts about "america's snow cruiser" which admiral byrd taking to south pole. roy fry concerning salt water oil wells. cover attractively decorated a cut engineering building, done red ink. last present staff will put out, as changed nt mid-year. there be number vacancies open time anyone interested working (continued page 3) virginia sale to end allied arts sale, sister of the late chic "specialist" will give a program in college auditorium january 15 that conclude this semester's series. mir gives one-woman show featuring her own original american characterizations. complete lineup for next art scries be announced near first year, terry martin, chairman committee, said. final plans laid for youth meet in oklahoma city dec. 28-30 comanche county representative lauds ag legislature group preparations the local oyl, were made inst "night at a meeting to attend third annual session of legislature, inc. which will be held state capitol building during christmas holidays from december 28 550. -.approval8-fi:om-..various,pijijte. adult organizations and notables have been received by stanley synnr, chairman incorporated organization. following letter was bill logan, representa tive, yesterday. "greetings to you and the ok-lahcma youth legislature, inc. i am proud of move have made,' by incorporating organisation. oyl last year was disgusting, degrading, an insult average intelligent young man in oklahoma. hardly past age a legislator myself know that year's communist sympathizers failed reflect true healthful thinking oklahoma's yruth. are symbolic "the nya, ffa, ond 4-ii clubs oklahoma arc. n healthy ycung, person mind body. sincerely hope tho legislature this will be highest temper grade under new setup. its members sane thoughts sound reasoning. any body who has communistic sympathies is promptly evicted, rejcctcdby legislature. goes also for having leanings toward 'ism' excepting americanism. "i wish there legal way making "that other" legislative group refrain from fools members, preventing thorn embarrassing real youth." respectfully, bill logan, representative comanche county. state session open thursday morning with registration all delegates. held entrance two chombers house senate capitol. assigned senators representatives assist model procedure both houses. american legion given their full support incorporated order most con realized men women attend. students not had privilege attend campus meetings may represent session. information pertaining details obtained writing stanley sypnr, chairman capitol station, city. organization office i bus terminals proffer their connections transportation according to the two in stillwater will be plentiful today. all directions nu' available from ns early as 7:55 a. m. wednesday until 1:55 :i. in. thursday morning. turner at 111 west seventh (l,l.one 1015) has a leaving foutli for shawnee with chandler tulsa and cklahoma city 9:50 !05, 3:30 end b:30 p. going north ponea oily, wichiln connec-ll'i is tn 10:15 2:45 7:15 ' union iius station 100 sixth (phone 418) perry, enid wichltn 10.30 4:50 i.nd 11:10 one leaves pawnee, cleveland, r-.nd pawhuska nt e.35 1:50 joavps oklahoma d'so u. 1, 4, !i:45, 10 through cunning drumright 0:15 ind 11:15 3:20, 4:55 7:20 yale oilton 7:45 rn. make tho groyhound gushing, drum-right tulsa. holiday changes are granted in library rental books from the will bo available over christmas vacation at special rates, and regularly three seven-day may checked out for two weeks. tho usual fee of ten cents per week be suspended, to replaced by a charge coupons used books. a 97-year-old man says he was rejected, his army service in 1001 because too feeble. the is still unwilling to accept him, probably localise it doesn't like admlfan'error.' o'collegian want ads bring results. caa $15,000 award fund made by shell oil company through the intercollegiate aviation scholarships and awards has set aside n to three outstanding pilots trained under caa. tho will go $2,250 scholarship be divided into $1,000, $750, $500 awards. proficiency, a premium trophy university college that established most proficient record for year in training of pilots. flight schools goes school which trains winning students. $50 given instructors seven who compete finals elimination tests ore held before june 15, 1040. each flying recommond their student pilot submit complete records grades ground institute aeronautical sciences. from national board judges are to" select regions. kcelonal hoard regional boards districts thnt region with final being washington, d. c, jometlme after similar tost private pilot's license. members number one ju',ue tests. should bo won vcmdu)iting senior paid lump sum. if is bv junior, he receive one-half immediately other half upon completion ills yetir. sclwlaatic going any sophomores thirds distributed through-c.t remaining years college. gardner lead establishing lester gnrdnor, executive vice-president, sciences states, "the company, convinced soundness program desiring encourage efficient students along lines, (continued on pain' 3) former student in address to aggies eileen traver now studying at u. of michigan miss kileon traver, atu dent oklahoma state and the university michigan, spoke f.ngllsh students from school education prairie ployhotuc on tuesday afternoon "more effective methods teaching english public schools." "there is a recognized importance through htghschool," said, "but arc ineffective leave tho without good working knowledge subject." new method whereby child taught first grade made acquainted with tiie subject his whole life. an elaborate record kopt cacli child's development elementary, junior senior (continued pflfe 3) it's just plenty of fun to go swimming on christmas, 'tis said virgin islandsgirlspeaks enchantments ky immuiic smith "it's lotsn fun to go swimming on christmas," or at least wanda driggs, home economist junior, thinks it is. miss briggs, ft worth, is nn ex-rosident of the virgin islands, where, she solemnly affirms, quito a common practice for plunge in carribcan christmas day. explanation this phenomena that climate islands seldom varies, and usually rnngos somewhere between 70 00 degrees farenhcit. born agana, guam, has covered quite bit territory during her nineteen years life, having been philll-plnos, china, japan, honolulu, cuba, haiti, porta rico saint thomas croix islands. also, lived texas, oklahoma, colorado, arkansas, california, attended four different colleges, tcu, smu, colorado state, oklahoma where present majoring life. "also," says, "i can produce positlvo proof i wasn't kicked out all those if necessary." enjoys courses on being asked what mot impressed her about the campus here, miss briggs replied, "i en-joy offered here bet of all, but find that they demand more time and effort than similar course at othor collages i've attended. also, i like friendly atmosphere tho tolerant attitude poople toward one anothor. guess maybe that's call domocracy campus." wanda lived longest in virgin islands, where, as she explains, christmas is celebrated two days instead one. "ye," said, "everyone goes to church morning, second day thoy recuperate from activities before. everyone always pvxstty well done by because get up bofore daybrak see natives give plays dance stilts thirteen feet high. however, isn't nil, attmid all horse racos, too." regrets thing most sorely during stay saint croix, was lack a nlce-stted hurricane. "do you know," she nvuirncd, "i always wanted to be in even 41 little hurricane, and i missed one of them." "swimming, horse-back riding moonlight picnics hiu the favorite jmmtimes people saint croix," and, according miss briggs, "social lifo is more active changeable than it states a'.so, things speed up whon tho navy oomes in." wanda found hard get used driving on right side road after coming back good old us, neon signs were most fascinating objects that sho found, difference proved interesting. briggs likes sew, mokes her own clothes. a mombor signin kappa, enjoys sports, flowers, collecting small elephants us n hobby. at present collection numbers about 137 elephants. (it all started when while child playing shores carribean, ebony elephant with tusk missing. wnnda also remarked nt end if interview thought convertible coupes very . " ' latin-america theme of talk by dr. stewart international club hears monday "because the present european conflict united states m in a favorable position to expand its relations with south america from all possible viewpoints," ur. watt stewart, professor latin american history an nddn-before relationship evening. spoke on (continued pauc 2) last issue this is the of daily o'collegian until after classes take up cliiistiniid holidays. next publication will be thursdnw morning, .tnmmry !, 1010.
Object Description
|O'Collegian, 1939-12-20
|Oklahoma A & M College-Students-Newspapers; College student newspapers and periodicals-Oklahoma; Stillwater, (Okla.)-Newspapers
|The student-run newspaper at Oklahoma A & M College from 1924 to present
|Stillwater, OK; Oklahoma A & M College, 1924 -
|The Daily O'Collegian
|Copyright 2011 Board of Regents for the Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical Colleges. All rights reserved
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subset: commoncrawl


text:
2015 Chevrolet Silverado 3500 Vortec 2WD SRW LTZ Heated Leather
Vehicle Notes
WE FINANCE Let North Texas Truck Stop assist you with all of your financing needs. We can offer a finance program that is custom tailored for you through our large auto financing provider network. Contact our Sales Department for complete details anytime at 1-877-355-5008. Stock #3109 Carfax Certified Texas Truck 6.0L Vortec V8 Engine LTZ Package Two Wheel Drive Crew Cab Fog Lamps Tow Mirrors Chrome Running Boards Forged Wheels 275/65/18 Hankook Tires Spray-In Bedliner Rear View Camera Power Sliding Rear Glass Leather Interior Dual Power Seats Bucket Seats Heated Seats Memory Seats Power Driver's Pedals Automatic Dual Zone Climate Control Steering Wheel Mounted Audio Control Factory Brake Controller Keyless Entry This is a true Texas Truck that is CARFAX CERTIFIED accident free.
- Type: Used
- Model: Silverado 3500
- Trim: Vortec 2WD SRW LTZ Heated Leather
- Exterior: Summit White
- Interior: Cocoa/Dune
- Stock#: S3109
- Model #: CC35743
- Mileage: 81498
- Engine: 6.0L Vortec 1000 VVT V8 SFI E85-Compatible Flex-Fuel Engine
- Exhaust aluminized stainless-steel muffler and tailpipe
- Frame fully-boxed hydroformed front section
- Recovery hooks front frame-mounted black
- Brakes 4-wheel antilock 4-wheel disc (Requires single rear wheels.)
- Chassis single rear wheel
- Pickup box Wideside
- Cooling auxiliary external transmission oil cooler
- Battery heavy-duty 720 cold-cranking amps/80 Amp-hr maintenance-free with rundown protection and retained accessory power
- Suspension Package Standard includes 51mm twin tube shock absorbers and 33mm front stabilizer bar
- Trailer brake controller integrated
- Air cleaner high-capacity
- Trailering equipment Trailering hitch platform 2.5" with a 2.0" insert for HD 7-wire harness with independent fused trailering circuits mated to a 7-way sealed connector to hook up parking lamps backup lamps right and left turn signals an electric brake lead battery and a ground The trailer connector also includes the 4-way for use on trailers without brakes - park brake/turn lamps (Will be deleted if (ZW9) pickup box delete or (9J4) rear bumper delete is ordered.)
- Steering Recirculating ball
- Engine Vortec 6.0L Variable Valve Timing V8 SFI E85-compatible FlexFuel capable of running on unleaded or up to 85% ethanol (360 hp [268.4 kW] @ 5400 rpm 380 lb-ft of torque [515.0 N-m] @ 4200 rpm) with (E63) fleetside pickup box; (322 hp [240.1 kW] @ 4400 rpm 380 lb-ft of torque [515.0 N-m] @ 4200 rpm) with (ZW9) pickup box delete (Does not include E85 capability with (ZW9) pickup box delete.)
- Alternator 150 amps
- Rear wheel drive
- Differential heavy-duty locking rear
- Transmission 6-speed automatic heavy-duty electronically controlled with overdrive and tow/haul mode. Includes Cruise Grade Braking and Powertrain Grade Braking (Requires (L96) Vortec 6.0L V8 SFI engine.)
- GVWR 10000 lbs. (4536 kg) with single rear wheels (Requires *35743 or C35943 models and (L96) Vortec 6.0L V8 SFI engine. Requires (AY0) single-stage air bags.)
- Rear Vision Camera with dynamic guide lines (Removed when (ZW9) pickup box delete or (9J4) rear bumper delete is ordered.)
- Air bags frontal driver and right front passenger single stage
- Air bags single-stage frontal and thorax side-impact driver and front passenger and head curtain side-impact front and rear outboard seating positions (Always use safety belts and child restraints. Children are safer when properly secured in a rear seat in the appropriate child restraint. See the Owner's Manual for more information. Required with (C7A) 10000 lb. (4536 kg) GVWR.)
- OnStar 6 months of Directions and Connections plan (Visit onstar.com for coverage map details and system limitations. Services vary by model and conditions.)
- StabiliTrak stability control system with Proactive Roll Avoidance and traction control includes electronic trailer sway control and hill start assist
- Daytime Running Lamps with automatic exterior lamp control
- Single-slot CD/MP3 player (Replaced by (U42) rear seat DVD/Blu-Ray Entertainment Package when (U42) is ordered.)
- Bluetooth for phone personal cell phone connectivity to vehicle audio system
- 6-speaker audio system
- Window power rear sliding with rear defogger
- CornerStep rear bumper
- Tailgate EZ-Lift and Lower (Deleted when (ZW9) pickup box delete is ordered.)
- Wheels 18" (45.7 cm) forged polished aluminum includes 18" x 8" (45.7 cm x 20.3 cm) steel spare wheel. Spare not included with (ZW9) pickup box delete unless a spare tire is ordered. (Requires single rear wheels.)
- Bumper front chrome
- Door handles chrome
- Grille surround chrome
- Wheel 18" x 8" (45.7 cm x 20.3 cm) full-size steel spare Spare not included with (ZW9) pickup box delete unless a spare tire is ordered. (Requires single rear wheels. Included with (E63) pickup box. Available to order when (ZW9) pick-up box delete is ordered.)
- Lamps cargo area cab mounted with switch on center switch bank
- Wheelhouse liners rear (Not available with dual rear wheels. Deleted with (ZW9) pickup box delete.)
- Tire carrier lock keyed cylinder lock that utilizes same key as ignition and door (Not included when (ZW9) pickup box delete or (9J4) rear bumper delete is ordered.)
- Tailgate and bed rail protection caps top
- Bumper rear chrome with bumper CornerSteps
- Tires LT265/70R18E all-season blackwall (Requires single rear wheels.)
- Mirrors outside heated power-adjustable vertical camper manual-folding and extending black. Includes integrated turn signal indicators consisting of 50 square inch flat mirror surface positioned over a 20 square inch convex mirror surface with a common head and lower convex spotter glass (convex glass is not heated and not power adjustable)
- Glass deep-tinted
- Moldings bodyside chrome
- Tailgate locking utilizes same key as ignition and door (Deleted with (ZW9) pickup box delete.)
- Fog lamps front halogen
- Headlamps halogen projector
- Steering column manual Tilt-Wheel
- Air conditioning dual-zone automatic climate control
- Driver Information Center 4.2-inch diagonal color display includes driver personalization warning messages and vehicle information
- Universal Home Remote (Removed when (TRW) provisions for roof mounted lamp or (VYU) Snow Plow Prep Package is ordered.)
- Remote Keyless Entry
- Seating heated driver and front passenger
- Theft-deterrent system unauthorized entry
- Windows power with driver express up and down and express down on all other windows
- Remote vehicle starter system
- Assist handle front passenger and driver on A-pillars
- Steering wheel audio controls
- Door locks power
- Visors driver and front passenger illuminated vanity mirrors
- Defogger rear-window electric
- Mirror inside rearview auto-dimming
- Seat trim Leather-appointed front seats
- Steering wheel leather-wrapped with audio and cruise controls
- Floor covering color-keyed carpeting with rubberized vinyl floor mats (Double Cab and Crew Cabs include second row floor mats)
- Seats front 40/20/40 leather-appointed split-bench 3-passenger with (KA1) heated seat cushions and seat backs. Includes 10-way power driver and front passenger seat adjusters including driver/front passenger power recline driver/front passenger power lumbar 2- position driver memory and adjustable outboard head restraints. (Upgradeable to (AN3) front full-featured leather-appointed bucket seats.)
- Seat rear 60/40 folding bench (folds up) 3-passenger (includes child seat top tether anchor)
- Instrumentation 6-gauge cluster featuring speedometer fuel level engine temperature tachometer voltage and oil pressure
- Cruise control steering wheel-mounted
- Power outlet 110-volt AC
- Cooling external engine oil cooler
- Rear axle 4.10 ratio (Requires (L96) Vortec 6.0L V8 SFI engine.)
All pricing and details are believed to be accurate, but we do not warrant or guarantee such accuracy. The prices shown above, may vary from region to region, as will incentives, and are subject to change. Vehicle information is based off standard equipment and may vary from vehicle to vehicle. Call or email for complete vehicle specific information.


text:
Use code ZEK when depositing for the first time for a special offer 😉
Last week some things got in the way and I was unable to post as many predictions as I wanted to. However it is a new week and time to get back on track!
Before we move onto day 1 predictions I would like to take a quick moment to talk about AlphaDraft's latest contest. AlphaDraft is giving fans a chance at $15,000 and an all expense paid trip to the world finals in LA on October 6th. All you have to do to participate issignup and enter into their $10 qualifiers for both EU and NA, or you can pay using previously won WFEC tickets. Don't win the grand prize? No worries, in this tournament you are battling for your share of $50,000 in total prizes. Qualifiers take place each week for both EU and NA LCS.
That is out of the way now, let us move onto day 1!
The Break Down
Please note that this section is based off my opinion. Stats are often used when forming my opinion but these predictions might differ from other analysts.
Splyce vs. Unicorns of Love Favored: Splyce *Potential tie* Kill Count:
One of the first matches of the day, with a potential to have a high kill count. Splyce has not won many games, currently sitting at 5th behind FC Schalke 04 with 2 wins. However they've managed to match up with many teams with a total of 4 tied series. Picking up a few surprising ties, such as their tie against H2K. I suspect that they should be able to take a win off UOL but there is a potential tie here. However, neither team has shown they are very worthy of Fantasy picks. The picks I show you here are the best available ones between these teams, but certainly not the best available ones all together.
Splyce Picks
- Trashy – A surprisingly high kill participation (82%), Trashy has had major roles in the organization's success so far. He also currently holds the highest KDA ratio on Splyce.
- Kobbe – He has had his moments for sure this split. Against H2K he went 6/3/9, netting a total of 33 points. Nothing to call home about but certainly not bad. Especially against H2K.
Roccat vs. Giants Favored: Roccat Kill Count: Medium – High
Giants might be ahead of ROC in rankings currently but their performance has just been too poor to recommend any of the players on the team. When comparing the two teams roster I just cannot help but think that on paper ROC is the better team. Again paper stats do not always translate well. I will however, personally be avoiding Giants members today.
Roccat Picks
- Steelback
- Parang
- Betsy
Team Vitality vs. FC Schalke 04 Favored: Team Vitality Kill Count: High
Despite the standings again, I also suspect Team Vitality will come out on top. This match certainly will not be easy between the two teams and FC Schalke 04 will for sure bring a fight.
Team Vitality Picks
- Cabochard – Probably one of the better top laners to pick Fantasy wise. Decent KDA and kill particiaption when compared to other EU top lanes.
- Kasing – When it comes to Fantasy, Kasing has been scoring very similar to FNC's Yellowstar. He is a fairly consistent low death support. He holds a KDA ratio of 4.0 and a kill paritciaption of 76%.
- Police – Police has been consistently performing well. Against G2 Esports he had a combined KDA of 10/2/12, or 54 points across 2 games. His KDA ratio is 6.4 and he is involved in a large majority of VIT's kills with a kill participation of 75%.
H2K vs. Origen Favored: H2K *Highly Favored* Kill Count: High – Very High
H2K has been far from perfect this split but there is no comparing them to OG. While Origen has shown its potential, the team has struggled greatly, only picking up one win (Although they have impressively managed to match-up with plenty of teams, scoring 4 ties.) I would avoid picking OG members for today.
H2K Picks
- Odoamne – Odoamne has had his moments of glory (and I'll be honest I just really like watching this guy play!). In all seriousness he is a good pick for this match up. He will be going against soAZ who is no stranger to death this split.
- Jankos – Jankos is very involved within these games. With a 79% kill particiaption he plays a large role in the score H2K gets. Not the most kill oriented JG pick but certainly not a bad one either – with a potential to do really well against OG's current roster.
There are some other H2K members that would not be bad picks. However it is still really hard to tell who are definite go to H2K picks and who to avoid. Personally I might consider picking up Freeze (as he might be able to bully xpeke who is new to his current position).
Fnatic vs. G2 Esports Favored: Fnatic *Possible Tie* Kill Count: Very High
Fnatic vs. G2 Esports is most likely going to be the game of the day. Right now FNC stands at first place with 5 wins, 2 ties, and only 1 loss. However G2 Esports is only a point behind them, currently sitting at second place with a record of 4 wins, 4 ties.
There is a potential for an upset here. However, based on G2 Esports matches so far, FNC is a better team to pick from for Fantasy – even if they lose they have shown they can gain FP while taking an L.
Fnatic Picks
- Febiven – With a KDA ratio of 6.0 and 72% kill particiaption, Febiven has had huge success this split when it comes to Fantasy LoL. The last series he played was against Roccat were he brought in a total of 21 kills, 4 deaths, and 22 assist – or 103 FP (on alphadraft.) That is more then most NA LCS players get in matches that go to a third game.
- Rekkles – Rekkles is almost always a strong pick, especially in Fantasy. He has a kill participation of 77%, which is very impressive as a ADC. He also has a high KDA ratio of 6.6 – but more importantly (fancy stats out of the way) he has been performing well this split getting a decent amount of kills and assists each game while not dying much (or sometimes at all). His consistency is what makes him such an amazing choice.
- Lastly I am going with YellowStar who, despite dying a lot some games, makes a huge impact within the game. He is apart of nearly every kill making him a great support pick (although he is expensive). He might not be the best support pick for Fantasy but he certainly is not a bad one.


text:
Sarah Ann Winsett b. 4/5/1830 Williamson Co. TN, Married to Alexander Green b. 4/11/1830. Daughter Mary Elizabeth Green b. 11/26/1868. Mary Elizabeth is my GG Grandmother. Found her by accident. All of our information listed her as "Molly"
Have limited information on the following Winsetts
Jason 1795
Lucinda 1817
Elias D 1819
Mary D 1821
Abraham Glenn 1825
Martha Jane 1827
William J 1832
Marcus L 1834
Thomas M 1836
Daniel H 1838
Contact me direct at firstname.lastname@example.com


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Dynamic Morale
Supply and Morale
There has to be a point to getting supplies to all your units in SEOW, right? Well, yes, there is a point. If you don't supply your units often enough, they will run out of supplies. If a unit runs out of supplies, several things happen:
- The unit stops moving - stops dead.
- The unit stops fighting - it is a defenceless target.
- The unit's morale declines.
If items 1 and 2 aren't bad enough, then 3 is the real killer. But before I tell you why, here is something background to Morale in SEOW.
What is Morale?
Morale is a measure of how motivated and committed a unit is to the aims of the campaign. Units with high morale will fight on regardless of enemy numbers and regardless of their own proximity to safety. On the other hand, units with low morale may simply give up. Good commanders keep their forces at high morale levels.
In SEOW, each unit can be in one of 5 morale states:
Morale State Internal Morale Value Excellent 4 High 3 Average 2 Poor 1 Desperate 0
The starting morales for Allied and Axis forces units are set at campaign initialization time using DCS options new in SEOW3.1.0. Thereafter SEOW tracks the morale of each unit individually throughout the campaign. Morale information is displayed inside each unit's tooltip (see Supply Tracking thread).
How Does Morale Change?
Morale can drop under the following circumstances:
- The unit is out of supply and cannot access supply from nearby sources.
- The unit suffers combat losses.
- The unit suffers artillery barrage (friendly fire can cause morale drop too).
- The unit receives enemy propaganda.
- The unit is close to a civilian party that is in distress.
- The unit is isolated from friendly command units, airbases and supply points, and is close to enemy units.
Alternatively, morale can increase under five circumstances:
- The unit receives supplies.
- The unit is close to a friendly command (or morale influencing) unit.
- The unit is close to a marked rally point (see drivable vehicles).
- The unit is close to a civilian party that is feeling positive.
- The unit is within 100 km of a friendly AM radio broadcast station - occasional +1 morale effect, reported in Campaign Notices.
The method for calculating the morale update is as follows:
- At the end of each mission, each unit is allocated a morale increment of zero (0).
- If supplies are needed, each unit searches for nearby supplies. If it finds some, no matter how few, the unit's morale increment goes up by +1. If no supplies are found, and the unit is completely out of supply, -1 is added to its morale increment.
- Any active barrages near the unit are evaluated to see if they delivered an explosive load sufficient to affect morale. The total barrage morale effect is added to the morale increment.
- Any nearby rally points will each contribute +1 to the morale increment.
- Each nearby enemy propaganda drop will each contribute -1 to the morale increment, to a maximum effect of -2.
- All nearby friendly units are polled to find out if they are leadership units. If any leadership units are found, the morale increment is increased by the Morale_Influence value for that unit type.
- If no friendly leadership units are found, nor any friendly airbase or supply points nearby, the presence of each nearby, non-desperate enemy unit with supply will contribute -1 to the morale increment.
- Morale is changed according to whether any civilian parties are found nearby. For each civilian party found, a die is rolled. Eighty percent of the time, the civilian party is feeling positive and its Morale_Influence value is added to the unit's morale increment. The other twenty percent of the time, the civilian unit is deemed to be in distress and its Morale_Influence value is subtracted from the unit's morale increment.
- The total morale increment is then added to the unit's previous morale state. This may give values less than 0 (Desperate) or greater than 4 (Excellent).
- Finally, if the new morale value is outside the allowed range, then it is moved up or down to sit at 0 (Desperate) or 4 (Excellent), whichever is closer.
Example: T-40M near civilians under barrage
Let's try an example. Suppose a T-40M tank platoon has morale state Average (morale=2). It finishes a mission with 23% fuel capacity, and is near 2 GAZ buses (civilian parties), a GAZ-M1 Kommissar car, another T-60 platoon, and an 85mm Flak gun. But it has been barraged by a Panzerwerfer three times in the last mission. The default Object_Specifications table lists the following Morale_Influence values (these can be edited by campaign designers):
Object_Type Morale_Influence T-40M 0 T-60 0 GAZ Bus 1 GAZ M1 1 85mm Zenit 1
Here is the morale update logic that SEOW DCS applies:
- Starting with a morale increment of 0, the T-40M platoon searches for supplies but doesn't find any. That's bad, but it has 23% supply and morale of Average, so it keeps its chin up after this setback: morale increment still equals 0.
- Next it seeks leadership influences from friendly units around it.
- The T-60 platoon has a Morale_Influence of 0, no help there: morale increment still equals 0.
- Next the GAZ bus, a dice is rolled and it comes up 13%, so the bus is in distress! The T-40M platoon sympathizes: morale increment drops to -1.
- The second civilian GAZ bus gets a die roll of 35% - perfectly happy state: morale increment is raised by one, getting back to 0.
- Looking for more leadership, the T-40M finds the nearby GAZ-M1 Kommissar who waves his pistol and rallies the T-40M platoon further: morale increment = 0 + 1 = 1. *** Finally, the T-40M sees the heavy flak unit nearby, always an encouraging sign: morale increment = 1 + 1 = 2.
- Now the Panzerwerfer barrages contribute -3 to the morale increment, yielding a final value of 2 -3 = -1.
- The morale increment is finally -1, so the T-40M platoon will reduce its morale state by one to Poor (and it's fuel state is a matter for concern).
The process is repeated for every other undestroyed unit on the map, including civilian and leadership units. No unit can influence its own morale.
Civilian and Leadership Units
Here is a list of hard-coded civilian units in SEOW DCS:
Bus_US GAZ_Bus RAF_Bus Bus_NAAFI US_Bus Germany_CivilTrain USSR_CivilTrain
Leadership objects (with non-zero Morale_Influence values) are listed in Object_Specifications table of SEDB, typically flak, command units etc.
Any non-flying object can be set to have leadership properties in SEOW simply by editing the associated Morale_Influence field of the Object_Specifications table. Values must be positive integers or zero. Lastly, the measure of "nearby" for assessing morale increments and supply proximity is the normal radius of control.
What Happens to Desperate Units?
- The last thing a commander wants is a desperate unit (morale=0). Desperate units are liable to either desert, which means "spike their weapons and run away, never to return", or even surrender, which means "spike their weapons and give themselves up". Both outcomes are devastating for the friendly commander, as all equipment is lost, even whole ships.
- In technical terms, after all resupplies and morale increments are made, SEOW cycles through ALL desperate units and calculates the number of non-desperate enemy units within the normal control radius.
- If there are NO nearby non-desperate enemy units, i.e. the desperate unit is not under threat, a die is rolled to determine whether the desperate unit will desert. The critical die roll percentage depends on the desperate unit's fuel state. An unthreatened desperate unit will desert with a chance of approximately 10%.
- If the desperate unit is threatened, it will surrender more than 50% of the time. The more non-desperate enemies nearby the higher the chance of surrender.
- To sum up, the whole point of morale is to simulate the effects of combat stress and lack of supply on fighting forces. Keep your forces in good supply and close to leadership units and flak support. If you fail to do so, your forces will lose heart, stop fighting and then desert or surrender. Then you will be a failed commander, joining the list of those forgotten commanders who have failed to maintain their own supply lines and troop morale before you.