ZillyGurke – Minecraft vanilla Anarchy – Using Information Thats Not There

Yo welcome back to the cucumber and also in German Leyland I don’t know if the English title is actually not used but laser Google n translates to laser cucumber land something like that and it’s currently located under the AP 88.2 14.5 6.9 4 and it moved from this IP and

I still own this IP but I don’t think I will use that IP for this minecraft server again so this is the new IP and the domain is always pointing towards the correct IP as long as I am paying for this domain I cannot guarantee that

I will pay for Zilla whom calm my entire lifetime I can guarantee though that I will pay for a minecraft server for a long long time if it’s the case that I am NOT interested in paying for this domain anymore it’s likely that the server still up so just research the name laser

Government which is also unlikely to change and search if there’s IP update or something like that just for a rare case because I’m I’m talking long-term plans here alright so let’s connect to the lynda.com yeah so if you’re interested in playing on a vanilla minecraft server without any rules and

Actually without any administration as long that there is as long as there is no need for administration and I would say there is no need for administration as long as this is playable and by playable I mean by acceptable TPS and the ability to spawn right I mean

Really building this wall to trap new players but I mean in the beginning the player leader build a trap at the at the spawn which made it impossible to spawn because you were spawning inside lava and yeah every new account would just die in lava and that would like

Completely defeat the purpose of me paying for the server or like keeping the server at all if there’s no chance of actually playing on the server right so in this case I had to hop on and give a account administrator rights to change the game rule and to increase the spawn

Radius right so I’m doing things like those when I noticed them I will probably not be actively playing and monitoring the server or like having some support contact whatever that you can reach out when something goes wrong but I try to like especially in beginning check how everything works

Yeah try to guarantee some playable experiences and also players build like machines it is likely that I have to do something I do not know what I am going to do I I would have to decide and when it happens right but I don’t feel like running around and like teleporting to

Players and destroying like machines with creative mode or whatever this is certainly not my plan and this will be like a last hope thing yeah so but in general if everything works fine and the server runs and it is playable and there will be no accounting game that has access to administrative

Powers so you can hijack my minecraft session of any of my accounts you can yeah I even get a hold of my minecraft passports but you won’t be able to get in administrative powers on the server so that’s something that I can guarantee that the server stays anarchy and

Unmotivated yeah so this is that about the concept of the server it’s a server without roots it’s a server without it’s a server with as little administration as possible I would call it that right to be like a hundred percent transparent here and – yeah it’s just it’s just real

It’s unrealistic to have on a hundred percent unmoderated server right because as one steps in and flats the spawn with lava and I forgot to fix that in the beginning then I would have to step in as admin straighter and increase the spawn radius for example so it’s just

Unrealistic to never do anything but yeah I’m I’m not here like doing anything unnecessary yeah and you won’t be banned for like using rude words and a chat or something all like cheating I mean they’re like no actual rules but yeah I just like hope you you’ll keep

The server life because otherwise it’s gonna be problematic not gonna lie if the server is not playable anymore we have a problem even though I I cannot talk about it being a rubric because there are no rules but let’s not make it too complicated right we have like almost I

Don’t know I would say here like actively playing maximum 4 or 5 players and it’s all kind of chewed here and it will probably stay in that chill way so if you are interested in playing long-term minecraft in a chill environment without roots where you can

Be sure your word white is not lost and the soul will stay up and you can play with your friends here then the server is definitely something for you there are no anti cheat plugins currently installed I’m not planning to install any altitude plugins but I cannot guarantee that the server will

Chain stay unchanged for like ever I can only guarantee that I will not intentionally reset the word fire I have backups and so on but you never know if the data center explodes or whatever right but yeah so so that’s about about the server and if that’s interesting for

You make sure to check it out and play on cbn.com currently and we are going to watch a video from the DEF CON now so I’m going to play back video in the background and we’ll keep building this wall so it’s kinda boring I’d say in my

Opinion so I suggest that you close the video now and play on the server if you have any questions about how to service run how it will stay online or like about any questions about the server I mean I I took some time to explain a lot

But yeah feel free to ask it in the comments and yeah I would just play back the video now and I hope to see you in-game so we are watching a video from the DEFCON conference channel it’s from 2015 and it has 15,000 views it has a

Tie to Def Con 23 Michael think Frank I don’t know and with the with the talk title applied intelligence using information that’s not their link to the videos as always in the description when you talk about intelligence unless there’s been a well-known leak in the press or something there ain’t a whole

Lot of examples to talk about and will certainly talk about those what I was really wanting to do today is talk about some actual projects and most of the time like my intelligence clients they don’t want me to talk about what I’m doing for them for obvious reasons

Sometimes I get lucky like two years ago and had a client where we did a project maybe like six seven years prior I was able to talk about that but normally that’s not the case so a couple years ago I decided that I wanted to become my

Own intelligence client okay so what I ended up doing is I went into business with my girlfriend and we have a online retail business and it’s it’s doing pretty well we’re in our second year and it’s growing and I like to think the reason that it’s growing is not because

We work hard but we do work hard I like to think it’s because we’ve got these little hacker brains and we just have better intelligence than everybody else or we create better intelligence I should say so I’m going to show you some apps for the concrete examples how we

Create and apply is telogen s– in our own business in addition to the other examples I’m going to show so I’m going to show you how we do intelligence campaigns not only on our competitors but also on the sales channels that we use and I’ll describe why that’s

Important in a bit here the other thing that’s important for retail businesses is you want to know exactly what kind of inventory to buy before you buy it I’ll show you the intelligence that we use to do that and I’m also going to show you how we manipulate markets or as I tell

My mother we protect our investments all right so when people hear the word intelligence usually they think immediately military intelligence right well this there’s not a whole lot of that that applies to what we do you know the other side of it is either business intelligence or competitive intelligence

And those two are really pretty different but I think it’s important that we describe the differences between the two business intelligence is what’s happening within your business you use internal data and you focus on knowing your operations and you focus on doing your resources and what you’re

Really trying to do is make your whole operation just more effective and more efficient than everything that’s all very useful but it’s also very different than competitive intelligence because we’re the competitive intelligence you’re trying to find what’s happening outside your organization and it doesn’t matter if you are a business or a

Political organization or if you are a investigative journalist trying to collect information this is all more competitive intelligence you’re using external data and your focus is on knowing your competitors and annoying their markets so this is the air where we’re gonna live today we’re going to live in the competitive intelligence

Area so a lot of people they think competitive intelligence that’s Canada that’s kind of murky but it’s important to know that competitive intelligence is taught in every top Business School in fact if you are running a business it’s your responsibility to do this kind of stuff that’s also important to know that

There is actually a professional association of people who do competitive intelligence with newsletters and and conferences in the whole whole shop so I want to talk about the title a little bit applied intelligence so what I’m talking about applied intelligence I’m talking about intelligence that’s actionable all right

Something that’s going to change the way you’re doing things the problem is is that most of the intelligence that’s collected for the organizations that do collect it it’s not actionable it won’t actually change what they’re doing and the other problem is most organizations tend to over collect intelligence when

They do collect it so when you do that it comes at a higher cost and you’ve got more exposure the other thing is that a lot of the intelligence that’s collected is done because people just feel obligated to collect it not what’s any real reason so for example I don’t know

Me if you saw this this is something I had up I was tweeting about it I came up with a little scraper that every hour would go off to the DEF CON site and it would make a printable mobile-friendly version of the DEF CON speaker schedule

And it’s still up there if you if you’re looking for it and if you go through my Twitter account you can find it so I’m doing this and it’s cool and it’s useful and I know a lot of people were using it because I was collecting analytics on

This stuff right so I got the access time IP addresses I wrote a cookie so I could tell people they were looking at it more than once but this is more analytics not really intelligence and the reason I don’t really consider this to be good intelligence is because there is

Absolutely nothing in these logs that would have changed anything that I was doing in fact the only thing that I found out that was really interesting is probably about 90% of the traffic was box there wasn’t even human activity but again that’s not going to really affect

Anything that I was doing now if I wanted to make this applied intelligence what I could have done is instead of having just a static you know table with all the schedule on it I could have given people the option to click on the talks they wanted to go to and I could

Have predicted I could have generated a nice little schedule for people to take along like oh you know 4 o’clock I need to be on this track that would have been handy and it also potentially would have created some actionable intelligence because if I had this information and if

I had it in aggregate I could make some projections as to which talks are going to be really popular which ones are we going to run out of seeding and it could have been useful for people doing speaker ups I didn’t do any of this kind

Of stuff but I see the potential use that could have changed the way things were done ok the second part of the title information that’s not there or isn’t there that is a direct reference to metadata now for most of us we had no idea what metadata was until the Edward

Snowden disclosures came across and then suddenly you know we heard the word surveillance you know we all know what that is and we knew that things that we were doing online on our phones even at the library where it’s now subject to surveillance and there was something called metadata that was involved in

This and the people in the United States we were pretty much confused but fortunately we have with officials that can help us in this area so Diane Feinstein comes up and Sue’s this this was a very hastily called editing but from the Intelligence Committee and she goes as you know this

Is just metadata there’s no contact at all okay so as a citizen of the United States this made me feel pretty damn good all right it’s just okay so you know I went to the library but you don’t know what I look that hot okay okay that’s

Pretty good so then our own president got involved so it’s nobody’s listening to your phone calls that’s not what this program is about they’re just looking at names what they’re not looking at names and they’re not looking at content but sifting through this so-called metadata they’re sifting through the data okay

Nothing I’m pretty familiar with data I’m not familiar with a sift command you know so this was good this was very good yes this was very good because now we know more about metadata you can sift it okay so I’m starting to feel pretty good about metadata but I really got confused

Then when Michael Hayden was the former NSA boss trying then he said all we kill people based on metadata [Applause] so okay I need to know a little more now I need to know just a little more okay so metadata metadata is so important in it’s largely misunderstood

And we probably all know that metadata is data that describes other data right but more importantly than that it’s data that provides context for information and usually at the very best metadata it doesn’t even really exist it needs to be created all right and that’s where the

Fun is that’s that’s where the best word that data hacking happens so if you study metadata you know academically in college they’ve got this whole plethora of kind of categories for metadata I like to keep it simple and say there’s two kinds basically there’s parametric data and that’s data that has to be

Collected or created and then there’s embedded data and this is probably where most people got familiar with metadata initially like in the 90s and that’s generally user created it tends to be kind of stuff like the embedded headers in the digital photograph that describes the camera that was used when the

Picture was taken the f-stops geocodes in fact this stuff has become like a whole branch of law now because it’s all submissive on courts so I’ve got a couple of examples of these and some of the data that’s leaked this way this is one actually is last year if you’re at

My talk and I’m using it again cuz I just love it this is a selfie of a Russian Russian soldier that was uploaded to Instagram and unfortunately before he uploaded it he did remove the Geo codes so it revealed the fact that while his government said they had no

Troops in Ukraine he was in your brain another example another war related example this is kind of a famous one this is a Tony Blair memo this was the memo that was the justification for the invasion of Iraq and what 2002-2003 something like that right after 9/11 and

It was actually used by Colin Powell when he went to the United Nations to make his justification and the assumption was that this was done by area specialists and it was all original work well researched well we find out it was actually plagiarized and not just plagiarized but it was plagiarized by a

Graduate student in some place in the UK oh that was the original document was a graduate students paper and they know it was plagiarized is not only was the content the same but soared their grammatical errors so where this gets interesting though is in the metadata you know Microsoft Office files are full

Of metadata oh my goodness for version control and all kinds of stuff people look at the metadata here we can see that the people who did the plagiarizing we can figure out who they were and we can see that they were not area specialists but they were actually

Political advisors to tony blair so it’s kind of a nasty thing it’s kind of stuff happens a lot though the CEO of Google Eric Schmidt a couple years ago he wanted to just to put a PowerPoint presentation online that was just kind of a general status report for how

Things were happening at Google what he neglected to do though is that when he made that report he actually made a copy of a very confidential PowerPoint presentation that was for internal use only and he did a lot of editing of the slides what he neglected to do was edit

The speaker notes and within the speaker notes he leaked the existence of a brand new project called Google Drive and that was well before it ever was officially announced so watch what waking your speaker notes because there’s a lot of you know it’s out there okay so let’s talk that was embedded

Metadata let’s look a little bit about parametric metadata and see how that’s used so according to the NSA this is their own admission this is what they collect they collect phone numbers of parties making phone calls they collect the time a call is placed they collect

The duration of a phone call and also who initiated the call okay that’s kind of invasive right but you know it’s actually they’re not doing anything that any Android app isn’t making available to the developer right it’s steps in it’s it’s in all your phones give an

Android but with this metadata you can get a lot of really interesting stuff you can what the rulli after is the relationships between callers okay cuz the metadata creates the context within the phone calls how they were placed and within that you can figure out the relationships of the callers and these

Relationships can then be profiled and once you’ve profiled them you can pick off the anomalies and outliers and at that point it becomes possible to differentiate between a phone call being made by a parent at work to their child making sure they got home from school

Okay that phone call it’s going to look very different than some some criminal operative calling in for instructions it’s gonna look very different and they’re also able to identify things like burner phones those those things are big outliers that kind of stick up when all this stuff gets profiled the

Other thing is you can look at these the patterns the people are calling and their relationships and you can tie them to other events and if other events affect the way people will relate there may be a connection between that and those events so these are the kinds of things that the NSA

These are the real the real red flags and they’ll go three hops okay so what that means is if you have a phone call unknowingly with somebody who has had a phone call with somebody who is a person of interest but now suddenly you’re kind

Of a person of interest to so that’s how that all works so you could you could look at this and say well yeah it makes sense that they would look at metadata because it’s the easy way out you know otherwise they’d have to look at all these conversations and they’d probably

Have to do some kind of speech to text conversion and deal with languages and they’d have to deal with dialects and all that kind of stuff but it’s it’s just better data just flat-out better than it’s already digital they can be processed but it needs to be created

Okay and that’s the important thing about metadata all these relationships and stuff need to be figured out it’s kind of like how long do you need to play the game of Clue before you know it’s mrs. peacock killing and Colonel Mustard in the library with a candlestick right if you’re good at this

You’re gonna figure it out long before the other people that are playing the game so that’s that’s that’s where the mind games come in with with metadata okay so how do we do metadata how do we process things well I’m not the NSA I don’t have unlimited resources and stuff

So the area where I live is called OPSEC or operational security and that is a military term and what that refers to is looking at your day to day operations to see what kind of intelligence you’re leaking and if you had an adversary looking at your day to day operations

What kind of actionable intelligence could they collect okay why do this online you know the Internet is my theater it’s just I won’t have things like employment postings last year I gave examples about how companies leak strategic plans through their employment postings and I think you can kind of figure out all

That could probably happen right if you think individuals leaked information about themselves in social media wait till you get a whole organization together leaking information on social media it’s a lot of information gets leaked this way the wave orders are fulfilled so if you go online place an

Order on a website and if you watch the process you see what kind of emails you get back you look at order numbers all those kind of stuff and you can learn a lot about the way a company fulfills items where things are shipped from all

That kind of stuff if they have a store and if they maintain a store you can learn all kinds of stuff about pricing strategies the products they choose to to stock the products that they choose not the stock very rich source of intelligence if you sell something to a

Company online the way they buy things can be very revealing in fact you can tell a lot about an organization’s financial health just by looking at the check numbers you know just little things like that and then it’s the whole regulatory area and this is largely things that are done for transparency

You know financial filings things that get filed with the courts variants licenses all that kind of stuff together this is where I get competitive intelligence from this this is where I live and for my counterintelligence clients this is what we protect okay so the first day I’m going to talk about

As far as things that we really have been able to capitalize on is sequential numbers and the privacy League the data leaks that happen with sequential numbers it’s really staggering sequential members are used everywhere I mean absolutely everyone there on your vehicle identification numbers social security numbers ticket numbers order

Numbers I mean they are literally everywhere and you know from from a data standpoint you need unique identifiers to represent things like orders people all that kind of stuff but you don’t need sequential numbers and typically the only reason these numbers become sequential is because it’s sloppy programming you know somebody programs a

Online app and instead of providing a unique order number they basically reveal the index for that order and some team in some place right so they end up being sequential well unless you’ve got chargebacks and weird things going on but you can pretty much count on these

Things being sequential so I’m going to show you a little story I’m going to tell you a little story to show the power of sequential numbers and how the US government almost let an entire generation who’s susceptible to identity fraud all right so here’s how it happened social security cards they all

Have numbers on and the first three are an area number the middle two are a group number I really don’t care too much about those they basically kind of identify the regions you’re from and that kind of thing and where things were processed but the last four digits are

Interesting because those were serial numbers and from 1935 up until 1972 when they changed the law they were truly sequential numbers but it wasn’t a big deal because I don’t know about you guys but I grew up like in the 70s and I was probably 14 15

Years old when I got my Social Security card and if I had gone with a buddy or if there have been somebody else applying for the number at the same time we would have got sequential Social Security numbers not a big deal because there wouldn’t be a whole lot to connect

These two people together so if you knew one number you probably couldn’t guess the other one because he wouldn’t know who the other person was right well this all changed in 1972 these numbers became no longer sequential and I don’t know why they did that but I know the way the

Government works and I know it wasn’t because they had a lot of foresight and we’re thinking about the Tax Reform Act of 1986 because in 1986 the IRS said if you are going to declare a dependent on your taxes that dependent needs to have a social security number and I think was

Probably done more for tax reform to weed out fraudulent activity on taxes because the year they did this there were 7 million fewer dependents claimed on tax farms but again I believe it was an accident that in 72 they stopped doing the sequential numbers it wasn’t

Because with this I can’t believe it was but if they hadn’t changed the law in 72 this would have been the scenario you’ve got three kids back in the late 80s you need to declare them as dependents on your tax forms we’ve got kids that are maybe ages five three and one or

Something they don’t have social security numbers so what do you do you go to the post office you go to the Social Security Administration and you file for Social Security cards for all all of your children at once so the bigger the family the bigger the threat

Because each of these siblings will have sequential Social Security numbers and it’s pretty easy to pick up a social security number right if you work in HR if you do credit kind of stuff or if somebody dies you know you’re all familiar with the Social Security death

List right as soon as you die if you’re an American citizen your social security number gets published it becomes public so nobody uses it but if you know one of these numbers and you know they have siblings it would be trivial to guess what their social security numbers are

So I’m very thankful that they changed the law but it would have been catastrophic of advice if they had okay so how do we use sequential numbers in our business and sequential numbers again are usually not thought of as being metadata but they really are so my

Girlfriend and I we started our business budgets and frames and decisions right other things before nothing really caught on but we got excited about this one because our month-to-month sales were pretty good you know we were having like 150% increase in sales pretty much pretty consistently every month that

We’re going on this and I was excited I mean this was growing a lot faster than my consulting practice and I think probably in the next year or two it’s going to surpass my consulting practice but we were getting very confident at this point right you know a lot of my

August and September we were plowing money into the business everything that we were making we’re putting back in plus some so we were investing in inventory we are investing in space shelving fulfillment equipment like scales and all kinds of stuff in what we were doing because we had some

Confidence we had about six months of consecutive growth we’re in this now okay and then came October you know sales just went through the floor so what you need to remember here is that we sell on a number of different channels and probably 80% of our business comes from this one channel and

Our business on that channel was really really off and we were getting very concerned because we were still plowing money into this business right so we’re thinking you know we don’t know this business we’ve only been at this for a few months did we enter at a bubble you

Know then we hit the peak of the bubble now this is it’s gonna be this from now on you know we didn’t know so we were trying to figure out what was going on we’re pulling up spreadsheets we’re looking at old orders we were trying to get a clue right so my girlfriend’s

Reading off order numbers and amounts and stuff and I’m plugging things into a spreadsheet and we both notice that about the same time that the order numbers were getting bigger and then it was like okay we need to find two orders that were close together and we found

Two that were placed almost at the same time and the order numbers that we were getting from this channel were incremental well they weren’t incremental they were sequential right it’s like okay we got something that so here’s what we did we took the last harder number that we had to fulfill in

October and we subtracted the last order number we had from September and this gave us an estimate of the number of orders that were fulfilled through this sales channel by all of our competitors for the month of October pretty cool huh we knew that they fulfilled 6500 orders

Roughly that month this was our bad month so we’re thinking well our average order we figured out to be 12 48 and we had no reason to believe that our orders were any different than anybody else’s that was using the sales channel and we determined this to be pretty typical

This is very competitive so this was pretty typical so we took our average sale and by the way that should not be July that should be October we multiply it by the number of orders that we estimated for October and we figured out that the gross sales on this channel in

The month of October our bad month was just over eighty one thousand dollars all right that’s pretty cool so now let’s look at the other months so we took the last order number from the last order that we fulfilled coming from the sales channel from April May June July

All the way through October and we were able to figure out the number of orders that were placed right and from this we were able to figure out the gross sales for that channel right fun with metadata cool stuff right we were happy because we looked at our October sales and it’s

Like well it’s not consistent with the channel it’s the market is fine we screwed up some place we did something that caused our sales to be around or maybe it was just a fluke but we did not enter the market at the beginning of a bubble so we were able to sleep much

Better at night knowing this okay so better living through metadata so this is what there’s the channel sales actually it looked like even though ours were really down for October theirs was actually up a little bit so all we’re like well what else can we figure out well if you want to figure

Out what you can figure out write down what you know well we know that the channel that we were selling on their Commission’s around 20% so we were able to figure out how much commission they were making every month and they were making 1516 well we also know that when somebody

Buys something on this channel they’re charged for postage and as resellers we get some of that back but the channel keeps of dollar 25 on every sale so we’re able to look at their postings that they get and we’re able to figure out that their average monthly profit

For this sales channel this website is about $24,000 a month and if they have annual profits well that’s really got interesting you know we’re thinking this is probably not information they wanted to share probably not with somebody who’s got 20 years of web development experience and where they have to plan

It again I really got distracted by those with us can I get them down tennis because it for postage and as risa their Commission’s around 20% so we’re able to figure out how much commission they were making every month and they were making fifteen sixteen thousand dollar commissions interesting

Well we also know that when somebody buys something on this channel they’re charged for postage and as resellers we get some of that back but the channel keeps of dollar twenty-five on every sale so we’re able to look at their postage that they get and we’re able to

Figure out that their average monthly profit for this sales channel this website is about twenty four thousand dollars a month and that they have annual profits of about three hundred thousand dollars right here well this really got us thinking you know we’re thinking this is probably not information they wanted to share

Probably not with somebody who’s got 20 years of web demo experience and this this channel I mean honestly it’s probably something you know their biggest task every month would be making PayPal payments to their young you know doing Commission checks off to people basically I can’t imagine that it takes

Anybody more than a couple hours a month to run this seriously they don’t advertise they have no expenses to carry no inventory their business model is clearly better than ours so for now but again all because of metadata and sequential numbers so I’m gonna look a

Little bit at how we buy inventory one of the things that I’ve learned in retail is that there’s a market price for everything and if you’re lucky you’ll get the market price is if it’s inventory as it gets older you tend to get lower the price over time so you

Really want to get that market price but you’re not gonna make you’re not going to make it retail but trying to church for more than market that’s a good way to not sell stuff so the way you make money at retail is not by selling stuff

You make money when you buy stuff all right if something has a market value you know you can probably sell it for that but if you can buy it for well below market that’s where you make your money so procurement is really important for us and there’s a number of websites

Where we buy stuff too and we sell on multiple websites but does one channel that’s delegating another business it’s the only true market that we really deal with them and I refer to it as a true market because it’s large enough I mean there’s I don’t know how many

People sell on this market but there’s a lot of them they’re not but they’re big ok you know there’s literally millions of products out there so it’s mature enough there are enough professional sellers out there there’s enough market demand supply and demand curve going on

So that it is a true market and if you want to know what the market value is for something you go out and look in here so what we do is we have bottom-up software that goes off and autonomously looks for things that we might want to

Buy and it compares them to our main channel where we sell and it looks for market prices and it comes up with a little report like this for us this would be really time consuming to develop on our own having a software that does this is really nice

Basically what it does it identify is the item where it found it what the price is but the market price is anything with a margin of less than 300% we really don’t deal with and then it tells us we if we should buy it or ignore it which is really cool it’s a

Real time-saver for us so the little pie thing there’s actually a link if you click on it it’ll actually go off and show you where you can buy it and it’s like I said it’s a real time-saver the minute step would be to automate this so that we automatically buy our inventory

We have to think about it kind of like was a two years ago the box that I wrote that buffed cars over a nine-month period we bought like 20 million dollars worth of cars oh I saw to talk about that I don’t know if it was Disgaea so

One of the reasons we’re able to do this is because we’re selling unique items and there are major major privacy issues for retailers as selling unique items so unique items truly unique items to be things where there’s only one of so realistic you’ve got an address there’s

One piece of real estate their vehicles you’ve got a stock number you’ve got a VIN it directly identifies a specific vehicle original art is another one you only have one copy of an original art unless it’s like a signed photo or something even then it’s you’ve got a

Numbering system to identify it then there’s also likely unique items that would be things like first edition books autographed items most used things and these are things were it’s possible that you’ve got two copies of something but you probably don’t you know it’s rare enough where they only probably have one

Copy of a first edition of Catcher in the Rye for example because it’s rare enough so when you’ve got a situation like this here’s what we do remember that we were very new to this we did not know this industry at all but we wanted

To learn and what we did is we wrote software that automatically collected the entire inventory of our what we consider to be our main competitors and this channel actually made it really easy for us to do this because they actually list the top resellers on the

Channel so we would look at all of their inventory and we would do it again and basically the Delta of the difference these two over maybe a day or a week’s time will give us metadata that described what they sold and for how much and also what didn’t sell appear in that

Period so this is how we learned about our competition and we did this a lot so the more of this you did the more metadata we got that describes what soul how much how long the inventory stayed online before ever sold and again what did sell and the were you able to do

This because you look at the inventory one day you look at another day if something’s missing here you assume that it’s sold for the last known price right and this is I mean you can tell so much about businesses that sell unique or or probably or likely unique items I mean

We think of all the businesses out there that put all their inventory out online you can study this to the point where you can almost do their bump smart you know you know what their money is coming in so okay one more how do we protect our investments well we have software

That looks for situations like this so if we’re sellers see in our prices 1950 we’re competitive with sellers D and E that are selling a little bit more of this we have software that’ll go out in a flag situations like this where people for whatever reason they’re

Dumping stuff for below market value so we have software that goes off and we immediately buy these things okay this is how we kind of pseudo manipulate our markets so if we find things that are under priced like that we just buy them they become our inventory and we’re protecting our

Investment but again we couldn’t do this without intelligence and like I said I have to believe if we were just typical sellers we would just tend to not be doing that well you got to really know the business and in our case our proprietary intelligence tools and our

Collection of metadata really make the difference for us so if you find this kind of thing interesting you can follow me on Twitter and my twitter handle up for the rest of the slides here I tend to almost live tweet while I’m developing you know like I’ll

Talk about bugs I’m finding on my own codes and stuff like that the other thing you can do is watch the DEF CON website this set of slides will be made available on that website these are much more complete than what you’ve got on your conference DVD

There was also an article written about me and the Christian Science Monitor last week but something you might want to check out six of my other deaf contacts are online they’re all on YouTube and with the exception of I think one they all involve intelligence and competitive intelligence and then

Finally the last thing you might want to do is this is a book that I wrote this is actually the second edition of the book I wrote em right after this I’m heading over to the no starch booth to do a book signing if you just have a

Question that’d be a great time to sit and talk and I’d really love to see you there so thank you very much all right that was a fast ending definitely a faster ending than what I usually do in my videos oh boy I would perform so bad on such a

Stage but yeah weather was a fun talk I don’t know this guy had like he gave me a good boot time to listen right and we slowly decrease the amount of with us they’re actually coming in quite handy here on digging the wall fundamentals or however you want to call

That yeah cool so that’s it with this episode if you’re interested in the server a Anarchy minecraft server where cheating is allowed and yeah even know entity plugins isn’t that great but you can still get kicked for flying without hex because this game is packed as yeah nice advertisement I ended over

Here yeah I guess that’s it so if you actually watched until here which is kind of unlikely that anyone will ever listen to this any human will ever listen to this yeah come check out the server it’s located on the city who the come currently if you actually have

Listened to the talk I was playing back in bed sound quality in the background and you found it interesting then make sure to check out the description where I linked original video that I played back and there you can like leave a like if you actually like that and yes for

The speaker or the DEF CON conference channel and also check out yeah my good shank or however you pronounce these names and check out his Twitter and so on yeah because this is purely a advertisement video for the server but I can also recommend these these speakers

I am playing back in the background and it’s just fair to give them a little bit of advertisement cool cool cool so that’s it from from my side see you in the next episode of this advertisement serious