Why do businesses lie?

Truly modern electric wheelchair design – part 2

Mozilla is an ‘Internet Villain’?

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ZDNet yesterday reported (https://www.zdnet.com/article/uk-isp-group-names-mozilla-internet-villain-for-supporting-dns-over-https/) that an industry group of ISPs (Internet Service Providers – the companies that make money selling you your broadband or other Internet connection) voted The Mozilla Foundation, developers of Firefox – one of the most private and secure web browsers available – this year’s “Internet Villain“

What?

To the increasing number of people concerned about the large scale abuses by governments and corporations of surveillance, tracking and data harvesting tools, Firefox is seen as “one of the good guys” – a product with built-in ad-blockers and technologies that automatically block spying technologies like single pixel tracking images and automatic collection of browser finger-printing (a method of identifying you and your machine by collecting details of its hardware and software configuration.)

So, why is Mozilla suddenly a villain?

Because like Google’s Chrome browser Mozilla Firefox has plans to introduce DoH protocol – DNS-over-HTTPS.

A little background

DNS (Domain Name Service) is the mechanism that turns a URL (like www.biznik.co.uk) into the IP address (the ‘dotted’ addresses – in this case 5.196.141.21) that are actually used to route traffic over the Internet. The ‘thing’ that performs this translation is called a DNS server of which there are thousands of public and private examples spread all across the Internet. In order to resolve (translate) the URL of an unknown external domain into an IP address, a public IP server must be found that knows that domain and consulted to obtain the IP address. There’s a bit more involved than that (actually, quite a bit) but that explanation tells you all you need for this discussion.

The highly significant factor is that since the dawn of the Internet, DNS has operated in plain text – out in the open allowing anybody who can see the requests flying back and forth (like your ISP) to monitor every request made – and therefore track everywhere you go on the Internet. A clear abuse of privacy which becomes clear that most ISPs sell this information to data brokers who use it to help build the profiles these shady operators try to build on every one of us.

The public DNS server that you use is set by your ISP – unless you have taken steps to set your router (and possibly your workstations or laptops) to specifically use a DNS server of your choice.

Even this is not enough to stop your ISP listening in or simply diverting your DNS requests to its own servers regardless of which server you intend them to go to. This is because all DNS requests travel through the same port (port 53 – think of an Internet port being like a radio channel that you can “tune in” to or choose to listen to). Simply by programming the router at the ISP’s end of your Internet connection, the ISP can either listen in to all traffic flowing through port 53, recording the request and response regardless – or go further and ignore where you want the traffic to go (say, Cloudflare’s public DNS servers) and force the DNS request to its own servers anyway.

Either way, the ISP still gets to record all your DNS requests and may interfere with them.

An example may help.

caA number of years ago I moved to rural France. The village in which I live has no fibre Internet – in fact it is so disconnected that I cannot even obtain a telephone landline (the local telephone exchange has no spare lines left) and even if I could, the poor quality of the cables used to carry telephone signals would prevent even a very slow speed ADSL – around 512Kbps – the speed of an old fashioned dial-up modem). In effect, the village is cut off from the outside world of the Internet.

So, I installed an expensive satellite connection that, for around 4 times the price of the gigabit fibre connections available in towns as close as 5Km away, claims to provide 26Mbps download rate (2.6% of a fibre connection) and 6Mbps upload (outgoing). In practice the actual performance ranges between 0% and 60% of these headline figures. On top of this, the amount of data is capped at just 50GB per month – in both directions. If this figure is exceeded the ISP (Eutelsat) clamps the transfer rate (speed) of the connection to sub-dial-up rates – think 100Kbps in practice. In effect, the Internet gets turned off. As the radio signal has to travel several miles into space to reach the satellite then make an equivalent journey back to earth the “round trip” time is over 3.4 second – where a more typical ADSL or fibre timing would be a few milliseconds. On to of which the connection exhibits so much jitter (a technical term which measures the variance of time it takes one packet of data or the next to arrive at its destination) – being so bad that it is impossible to stream simple audio – like a telephone conversation.

But, needs must.

The satellite hardware was installed before we moved in (work was ongoing to adapt the house to my needs). But I installed the satellite modem/router and connected a laptop to perform a quick test that all was working. That done, everything was switched off. So imagine my surprise when I received an email the following morning telling me the whole month’s 50GB of data had apparently been used in a few hours. As the connection is uncapped between midnight and 06:00 even had the equipment been turned on and the line operating flat out at its claimed rate it would have been impossible to consume so much data in the time that had passed.

The company stuck to its guns and over several months similar sudden alleged spikes in traffic occurred – each causing effective cutoff of service.

After about 6 months of wrangling during which I patiently repeatedly insisted the company provide proof of the consumption they claimed I eventually received a spreadsheet containing a list of all the IP addresses and data consumed during that first, disputed night.

Take a moment to understand what just happened – my ISP produced a list of all the websites and other Internet based services (eg; streaming services, VOIP telephone services, email, cloud storage …) I had allegedly contacted and a measure of the amount of data allegedly passed between here and each of them.

It being the work of moment to do a reverse DNS lookup (the opposite of normal – translate an IP address into the URL it relates to) I could see that the vast bulk of the traffic was downloads from one of the big CDNs (Content Delivery Networks – in short companies that exist to deliver popular files like Netflix or YouTube videos from servers they operate around the globe – so that the content is delivered in a timely and responsive manner – and the load doesn’t all fall on one server behind a single Inernet connection).

To add to the fun, in an effort to “prove” that I was responsible for the traffic, the spreadsheet had been falsified (if we assume that any of it was true) as some idiot had clearly been watching my actual traffic over the six months it took them to produce the spreadsheet and had inserted a few rows showing alleged connections to the cluster of web and email servers (including the one that hosts the biznik website) which are located in a data centre in Strasbourg.

The problem is – several of the IP addresses quoted in the spreadsheet were not in use until 4 months after that first night as I had purchased an extra block of addresses as part of a reorganisation of server use months after contracting for the satellite service.

Great bunch of crooks. And technical idiots.

When I followed up the spreadsheet provided with the innocent question of exactly HOW the company could even produce a detailed list of all the alleged connections as all my machines are configured to use specific public DNS servers far away from the ones the ISP owns I eventually learned that the company diverts all traffic on port 53 (the DNS port, remember) to its own DNS servers regardless of the address that traffic was intended to go to.

Hence, not only was the ISP recording every single connection made from my premises and the amount of data flowing over those connections, it was taking control of where that traffic actually went.

So, we get to the point

DoH (DNS-over-HTTPS) uses the same encryption that is used to safeguard your connection and flow of data when you do your online banking or pay for some shopping with your credit hard. The same encryption used by this (biznik) web site and every other that runs inside the anadigi.net umbrella and being heavily promoted by groups ranging from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (https://www.eff.org/) to Google and browser addons like HTTPS Everywhere (https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere).

Just as no ISP can see inside the traffic flowing between you and a secure, encrypted HTTPS website (the traffic appears as a meaningless pile of gobbledygook while on route) the forthcoming adoption of DoH denies them the ability to see which URLs are being looked up – and therefore deprives them of the ability to tap this rich stream of data and turn it into revenue by selling it to data brokers we never gave permission to have it in the first place.

So there we have it. As the ZDNet article explains, everybody from the British Government through the self-appointed censors of the Internet the “Internet Watch Foundation” (https://www.iwf.org.uk/ to read what they say about themselves and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Watch_Foundation to read a little background on the howlers committed and criticism of the organisation’s operations and methods) to the ISPs who are looking at the loss of a very lucrative , if questionably legal, revenue stream want to put a stop to DoH – just so they can continue spying on and monitoring us.

The arguments against DoH

As the ZDNet article reports, DoH is being attacked by governments and private organisations alike using the same worn out arguments that taking back the privacy of our communications will allegedly prevent censorship of “banned” Internet resources, prevent the blocking of child pornography and make it more difficult to catch criminals and allow GCHQ and the NSA to spy one everyone on the planet unhindered.

Couple of points:

1. Anyone who wants to engage in criminal or terrorist activities or access perverted materials already has plenty of options to carry out their activities using commonly available technologies from a simple VPN to use of the Tor network (https://www.torproject.org/ – in short, a way to go complete “dark” on the Internet – whether motivated by a wish for privacy or to access the so-call “dark-web”). Please listen, idiot politicians and law enforcement people – you can howl at the moon as much as you like – you are not going to stop bad people from doing unspeakable things by abusing the privacy and rights of the 99%+ of the world’s population who simply want to go about their business without being spied on or told what they can and can’t do.
2. I am in no way condoning or defending anyone’s ability to commit crime or engage in child pornography nor any other form of abuse. But DoH does not prevent the kind of censorship embraced by the IWF and British Government. The fundamental DNS mechanism itself allows for domain registrations (the “biznik.co.uk” part of the “www.biznik.co.uk” website URL you are possibly reading this on) to be struck off where it is shown that the domain is hosting illegal material – such as child pornography. Removing a domain entry from the public DNS record doesn’t just block access to a web site (by diverting attempts to visit it to the “naughty bin”), it removes the site completely from any access. Also, a site shown to be illegal can have its IP address removed or blocked at the Internet level – and as truly illegal and repugnant websites don’t even use the DNS system – they are accessed directly by IP address requiring no name lookup at all this is a far more effective way of putting paid to illegal behaviour. As a simple example, if you type the IP address 5.196.141.22 into the address bar of your web browser you will find yourself presented with the test site for our “The Primary Channel” children’s learning platform – normally accessed via the URL https://ttpc.anadigi.net – don’t worry there is no actual child information or child produced content there – the site is full of test guff we use to try out functionality before release – though do feel free to play the video on the home page!

The arguments for DoH

The current plain-text DNS system that dates back to the pre-dawn of the Internet has long been recognised as open to abuse and attack.

Abuses can include the fact that anybody with access to DNS traffic can record and use the information openly revealed – and that means more than just your ISP. The Internet’s resilience comes from its ability to direct traffic via any available route – cut the big cable that connects Asia to the United States and all the traffic it normally carries simply gets routed via Europe. An individual Internet user has no control of the route any message takes over the Internet – and any reply may come back via a completely different route and, to make matters worse two messages sent even simultaneously might take completely different routes.

For example, here’s the result I got when I looked into the route traffic might take from my workstation to Cloudflare’s public DNS server at IP address 1.1.1.1

mtr -r -c 5 1.1.1.1
Start: 2019-07-05T06:31:54+0200
HOST: gpws.anadigi.loc Loss% Snt Last Avg Best Wrst StDev
1.|– 10.0.0.254 0.0% 5 0.9 0.8 0.8 0.9 0.0
2.|– 192.168.254.251 0.0% 5 1.1 1.3 1.1 1.9 0.3
3.|– ??? 100.0 5 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
4.|– 89.234.160.161 0.0% 5 96.6 89.2 66.3 111.3 17.2
5.|– te1-8-1064.par-p1.as39886 0.0% 5 92.3 91.8 70.7 111.0 14.3
6.|– ae0-4102.par-th2-crluxpe0 0.0% 5 81.3 93.1 81.3 109.4 12.3
7.|– ae1-10.par-th2-crluxpe01. 0.0% 5 100.1 80.7 69.2 100.1 13.8
8.|– equinix-paris.cloudflare. 0.0% 5 78.7 95.4 78.7 109.4 12.0
9.|– one.one.one.one 0.0% 5 60.3 72.6 60.3 96.9 15.3

Looking at the results we can see that our message passed through EIGHT different servers before arriving at Cloudflare.

• Of these, the first is my ISP’s router sitting at the other end of my connection to the Internet
• the second has a private IP address so is probably inside the data centre used by the ISP (yes, I’m guessing as I have no way of knowing who operates it).
• The third is a server running in full stealth mode – it returns no IP address so cannot be looked up in the DNS system to give any clue as to where it is or who operates it and the 100% packet loss shown doesn’t mean that it just gobbles up my message without passing it on – it just doesn’t respond to queries asking who it is, where it is or even how far away it might be – a bit of a concern, maybe?
• The fourth has no domain name associated with it but just returns its IP address. Fortunately another quick query tells me that it is run by Odpop.net in Paris
• The next four all return a named identity that I can look up to see who operates them

The key thing to note, however, is that a DNS query sent to Cloudflare’s servers in plain text (as is the current practice) allows ALL or ANY of these intervening services to record the content of the request – including where it came from (my IP address) and the URL I am looking for. Valuable information that any of these servers could harvest and sell on.

DoH arose from this need to plug a technical hole in the way the Internet works

Plain text DNS is very insecure. For example, having seen that our DNS request passes through many servers (some of highly dubious provenance) on its way to the server we want to answer us, any one of those intervening servers could choose to answer our DNS query itself – or pass it on to a spoof server that takes our request for the IP address of (say) our bank then instead of returning the correct IP address of the real bank’s server sends back the IP address of a web server that delivers an exact replica of the bank’s welcome page, invites you to login as normal, perhaps rejecting your attempts to type in just a few of your password letters as is common … so that within a couple of attempts your entire login ID and password have been collected. This kind of “DNS hijack” (or “man-in-the-middle” attack) is increasingly common and results in $billions of bank fraud each year.

DoH eliminates this security problem (as well as many others I could explain) by simply preventing any of the servers that sit on the route a DNS query takes from the requesting machine to its intended DNS server from seeing that the content of the message being transmitted is a DNS message at all. And, even if some clever clogs says “Ah ha! If this message is going to Cloudflare’s DNS server then it MUST contain a DNS query” – so what? That knowledge helps them not one bit as the encryption would need to be broken before they might see the DNS query itself.

Here we go round the same broken record again

So, is DoH “bad” and an obstacle to preventing criminal activity on the Internet?

Of course it isn’t. As I have explained, anyone with serious criminal or perverted aims in mind doesn’t use the DNS system to begin with.

As for the secretive, shadowy, self-appointed and technically incompetent Internet Watch Foundation, while its stated objective (removing all child pornography from the Internet) is laudable, DoH does precisely nothing to stop their work (though I would argue that work should be conducted in a more open and transparent manner and certainly not in the control of a single government).

The global DNS system is jealously guarded by a multi-national group of sensible trustworthy elected people who will remove the DNS entry of any domain shown to be hosting illegal content of any sort and help to block the IP address from being accessed as well..

The question that begs an answer is whether a shady group of self-appointed guardians (who have made some horrendous mistakes in their time) and a single government should be allowed to control what an entire population is allowed to see or watch. Or, as there is broad agreement between at least democratic societies on what constitutes “illegal” material IF such a mechanism is to exist it should exist at a supra-national level.

To explain the dangers very simply. There is no technical difference whatever between the actions and laws being put in place by western democratic governments and “the Great Firewall of China”. Both simply apply a blocklist to routers carrying Internet traffic in and out of the country.

The ONLY difference is the contents of the blocklist used. In the UK example cited by ZDNet the blocklist (purportedly – nobody knows as the websites on it are neither explained nor told that they are being blocked and users of the list must either use it in full or be forbidden to use it at all.)

In China the population is denied from obtaining Google search results, stream their news from CNN, Fox News, the BBC or Al Jazeera and are forbidden from reading the London Times, the New York Times or the Straits Times – so being forced to hear only the news, information and religious views approved by the Chinese government – because if the Chinese Government wants to block CNN (as an example) all it needs to do is add “cnn.com” and the associated IP address(es) to its blocklist and, hey presto!, CNN does not exist in China.

In the same way, there is nothing to stop someone telling the IWF in the UK to add an allegedly Muslim jihadist site to the blocklist (in fact there is an additional, mandatory blocklist in force for just that purpose).

So, here’s the problem

If I want to visit a web site promoting “extreme” views – whether far-right, far-left or religious based – in order to educate myself, decide whether the people behind the site have reasonable grounds for whatever grievance or action they are espousing or gain a better understanding of how young people are persuaded to travel half-way round the globe to pick up weapons and suicide vests and give up their lives … then I expect to be able to do that.

And, I expect to be able to do that without my government or shady, unaccountable, private organisation either blocking my access to that information or adding me to some watch-list because their self-delusional paranoia tells them that anyone searching for or looking at such material is of course a supporter of the cause.

Sigh! I’m an adult who has been on this planet for over 60 years. I am entirely capable of “being exposed to” extremist material from any direction without feeling the need to run off to learn how to fire weapons and set off bombs. That’s just not me. What is me is a curious individual who wants to know what motivates such groups so that I might better understand how to moderate whatever motivates them – and, as the father of three sons (way too sensible to be swayed by extremists of anypersuasion as tyey are) I would quite like to understand anything that their younger minds might have taken to in order – as a responsible parent – to hold a sensible, informed conversation with them.

When the UK Government (just as they’re the example we’re talking about here – I suspect the U.S, French and other governments act in similar ways) blocks a website because they consider it too extreme to be seen by the sensitive eyes of their citizens there is NO difference between their action and that of the Chinese Government blocking access to BBC, CNN or other sources of news and information.

And as for monitoring and recording every Internet connection I make I’ll just ask a single question.

If it was considered reprehensible that the East German Stasi police employed people to sit in postal sorting offices noting the sender and recipient of every letter passing through the post, why is it acceptable that democratically elected governments record the time, date originator and destination of not only every email or simple text message we send but every single Internet web page, image and service we connect to.

Just because governments have the technical means to do this does not give them the right to do it.

Bring it on, Mozilla!

To the good folks beavering away at Mozilla I say “Bring it on – more power to your elbow”.

As I have explained, there are very good technical reasons for the replacement of plain text DNS with DoH technology. It’s a weaknesss in the structure of the Internet that has been left unattended for too long.

And why pick on Mozilla? Google’s Chrome browser is used by many times more people than use Mozilla’s Firefox browser and Google is an equally staunch supporter of DoH. So – UK Internet Service Providers – why not point your arrogant tongues at Google? Anything to do with the fact that upsetting the Internet’s biggest player could hurt your business in oh so many ways – while taking a pot-shot at Mozilla (a non-profit foundation) lets you mouth off with no fear of retribution?

Do I really have to say it again?

None of us signed up to be spied on. None of us signed up to have our right to privacy removed. None of us signed up to have some unaccountable do-gooder or civil servant decide what we can look at, see or read. None of us should expect to come under the watchful eye of a secret service just because we happen to have sneaked a peek at some “suspicious material”.

As I have said many times, any technology is as equally capable of use for good or evil. The Internet and all the technologies that comprise and surround it were designed for good,

So just stop using them for evil. OK?

Windows 10: Yet another problem (another reason to ditch it today)

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If you use Windows 10 (why?) you will be familiar with the almost constant succession of disastrous updates and flaws Microsoft pushes out to all users of the operating system.

One of the latest to be found is that Microsoft disabled Registry backups in Windows 10 some time around October last year.

Apparently Microsoft disabled this very important feature intentionally but didn’t think it worth telling any of the ~800 million users of the operating system about it. Even worse, the operating system continued to report that the backups had been completed satisfactoriy – even though only an empty backup file had been written!

The problem was first spotted by Ghacks (https://www.ghacks.net/2018/10/31/windows-10-bug-prevents-registry-backup-creation/) who gave the full technical background.

A non-technical explanation that still explains the import of the issue can be found at Forbes (https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2019/06/29/microsoft-windows-10-upgrade-registry-warning-upgrade-windows/) – which also contains links to some of the other malware vulnerabilities, dead computer, data loss and unannounced disconnection of previously working peripherals (like a mouse or keyboard, for example) that have resulted from “updates” and “improvements” pushed out by Microsoft.

Microsoft has issued an explanation (er … the change was made to reduce the amount of disk space taken by the operating system!! Since when was a backup a disk storage problem?) which you can read on the Ghacks site (https://www.ghacks.net/2019/06/29/microsoft-explains-the-lack-of-registry-backups-in-windows-10/) – along with instructions to restore the function “if you want to”.

Let me try to explain the significance. Windows stores ALL its settings (including those affecting security, the operating system itself and individual application programs) in something called its Registry. This is not a plain text file but a pseudo database which can only be edited with a program – regedit.exe – provided with the operating system. Microsoft issues dire warnings that the Registry should NOT be edited by users who do not fully understand the consequences of doing so or the thousands of arcane settings it contains. I would agree – one wrong click of the mouse or a slip of the keyboard when using regedit can make your computer completely inoperable.

Now – Microsoft issues instructions to those very same uncomprehending users to go ahead and edit the Registry to restore a function that should never have been removed!

Why are Registry backups so important?

If you are a Windows user living within a corporate environment in which your security and the mundane – though vitally essential – matter of backing up the state of your machine and its data is taken care of by “the IT Department” then you can (I certainly hope) ignore this problem (at least … the other ones that have happened are a little more bothersome – like finding your work reports or spreadsheets have suddenly disappeared). Peace be with you!

BUT … if you are one of the millions of people who simply purchased a PC or laptop pre-loaded with Windows or fell for the free upgrade offer that Microsoft ran to encourage users of earlier Windows versions to “upgrade” to Windows 10 I very much doubt that you have an effective backup routine in place, let alone know what a “roll-back” is or even have enough security to keep malware and “bad guys” from getting at your machine and its data.

My evidence for that statement is the number of friends who have come to me over the decades clutching their machine or hard drive, holding it out like some form of offering while uttering the time-worn phrase “Please get my data back for me” or “It just stopped working, I don’t know why and all my life and work history is on it!“

Unless the cause of failure is an irrecoverable hard disk failure or ransomware style encryption of the entire storage the cause is probably malware (computer virus), hardware fault or just turning the machine off the wrong way. All of these causes (and more) can corrupt the Registry.

And Windows usual response to finding a corrupt Registry is to refuse to boot up at all – ie; your machine is as good as dead.

However, if the Registry has been backed up then even in the case where no System Restore points have been made a Registry Backup can usually be used to restore the machine to an earlier state, allowing Windows to boot and data to be recovered or copied even if program settings and operating system updates or configuration changes must be performed once again.

So … a Registry backup is just about the last line of defence when it comes to restoring a dead Windows machine to life.

But if the Registry backup file is empty … you are out of luck.

Let’s hope you have a friend like me who is able and willing to at least take the machine apart, take out the storage drive(s) and get your data somewhere safe.

I only do it once per close friend – recovering their data can take anything from a few hours to over a day of my time. I give them a sheet of instructions describing an effective backup procedure and send them away with instructions never to darken my door with a dead PC again – owning a computer is just ike owning a car – you don’t have to know how it works BUT YOU DO HAVE TO KNOW HOW TO USE IT SAFELY!

Taking back your privacy

Why you should not pay for “free” online services wih your personal privacy

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If you are one of “those people” who respond to any discussion around online personal data privacy concerns with the statement “Well, I don’t do anything wrong so why should I care if Big Brother is watching what I do?” this article is definitely for you.

Even if you are becoming concerned after recent scandals such as Facebook’s involvement in releasing personal data about its member to Cambridge Analytica – which may have been used to influence elections on both sides of the Atlantic or you have asked Google the question “Where was I at 10:15 on 20th June 2016 and who was I with or near?” and have been horrified to find it can gve you an accurate – if not always correct – answer and are becoming aware of just how much of your personal life and private actions are known – and spread around across who-knows-how-many shady companies and organisations you may find this article interesting.

Whether you bother to read it and do anything as a result is entirely up to you – after all most of us still live in free societies and are allowed to make our own choices – for now. Of course, anyone managing to read this from within China has no such choice (See Forbes magazine article at https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2018/10/28/why-we-should-fear-chinas-emerging-high-tech-surveillance-state/) and soon, if democratically elected governments get their way, you will have no choice but to have every aspect and activity of your life tracked and monitored.

Let’s get a big fallacy out of the way

Most people with little to no knowledge of how computers and software work will happily take any information that comes out of a computer as fact.

This is a dangerous belief – especially when those who believe it include police, judges and politicians.

I’ll give a very simple example. Back in the 1990s I was stopped by UK police on a motorway and accused of breaching the 70 MPH speed limit by a not inconsiderable 47 MPH – in other words I was accused of driving at 117 MPH. As the car I was driving at the time was a Saab 900 whose top speed while carrying no more than a driver under ideal test track conditions was only 102 MPH – and at the time I was returning from holiday with my then young family filling every seat and the car stacked to the roof, every underfloor compartment full of a month’s worth of holiday paraphernalia – and on top of the car sat a large, very non-aerodynamic luggage box equally full of “stuff” I tried to explain that it was impossible for my car to travel at that speed – especially as at the section of road over which they said they had measured my speed I had just pulled out from behind a lorry travelling at 55 MPH after allowing faster traffic to pass.

The response from the two police officers was “Well, our computer said you were going that fast and you can’t argue with a computer so we’ll be having your licence please!“

The computer they were referring to was a device called VASCAR – a very simple computing device that calculated speed by measuring the time taken to travel between two previously entered points and as speed = distance / time the device gave an immediate readout of the speed of the vehicle just measured.

As the officers became increasingly agitated while I tried to explain to them that something was wrong I eventually asked them to show me the time and distance measurements used by the VASCAR device (a legal right in the UK) – which made them very angry … they accused me of “wasting police time – a criminal offence” and suggested they would “cart me off to the nick, leaving my family stranded on the safety shoulder of a busy motorway without protection“. Such was the strength of their belief that “computers can’t be wrong”.

There is a saying in computing circles that goes back to the dawn of the industry – Garbage In, Garbage Out or GIGO for short. Basically translated this means that if a computer is fed incorrect data it will reliably and accurately though not correctly produce faulty results.

In the case of these police officers, instead of following the correct procedure for using VASCAR which was, at the start of each shift, first to use the device to measure a known distance and correct for errors caused by tyre pressures or wear and then drive between the two points that were to be used for measurements measuring the actual distance between them with the recently calibrated vehicle – directly into the VASCAR device.

So, having taken photos of the time, distance and speed readouts from the VASCAR I wished the officers good afternoon and went on my way. Over the next week I drove back and forth along the stretch of motorway (it happened to be on my regular route to work) measuring each time the distance between the two bridges the police had used. Though my car’s odometer was neither calibrated nor particularly accurate to read my measurements consistently showed a distance approximately 40% shorter than the police VASCAR unit’s readout.

I disputed the alleged speeding offence and eventually ended up in a court to defend myself. The police were so confident the VASCAR “evidence” was irrefutable they didn’t bother to show up. Probably just as well – as armed with the photos I had taken on the day of the VASCAR readouts, some very large scale Ordnance Survey maps of that stretch of motorway and a ruler I was able to show the court that the true distance between the bridges was a staggering 45% shorter than the distance used by the VASCAR unit. One simple calculation and the truth became clear – I was actually travelling at an average speed of 64.5 MPH between the bridges – entirely consistent with the report I had given at the time. My case was immediately thrown out – followed by the quashing of fines issued to dozens of other drivers who had been pulled over and accused of speeding by the same officers on the same day – each of whom had swallowed the line that “a computer doesn’t lie – and can’t be wrong“.

I eventually learned that among this particular police traffic unit its officers had decided that the calibration of the VASCAR unit followed by a new measurement between the points to be used was too much bother by far. One officer had taken it upon himself to jot down the distance readings from his car’s VASCAR unit for all the popular “speed trap” points they used – and gave copies to all the other officers. So, instead of measuring (even vaguely accurately) the distance between the two bridges the fine wielders of authority who stopped me and dozens of other motorists that sunny afternoon simply dialled-in to their VASCAR unit a distance setting read from the sheet passed around the traffic unit. Unfortunately for them, they used the number for the wrong pair of bridges along that stretch of motorway. Hence – GIGO … their VASCAR unit spent a few hours spitting out speeding tickets to entirely innocent motorists while they applauded themselves on the fine work they were doing to keep everyone safe from idiots who cannot understand that SPEED KILLS! (don’t get me started – I’ll just say that if that statement had an ounce of truth we should all spend our lives entirely stationary and live forever).

So, if a simple computer cannot be relied upon, what happens when we scale to an AI driven monster sized computing cluster?

Simple. Not only does the same principle of GIGO apply to these machines and the algorithms they run but it has proven to be almost impossible to “train” one without even slight prejudices in the mass of training data fed in to them sending them off into quite extreme positions.

Which hasn’t stopped Google, Facebook et al deploying such machines in their never-ending pursuit of profit. As I wrote to a friend recently, the sole purpose of Google’s and Facebook’s activities is to parcel people (including you if you fall within their data hoovering clutches) into “lists” that they sell to organisations who want to sell you something, sway your political views – or target you for hate crime. Neither organisation worries itself too much over the accuracy of these lists (eg; whether an individual should actually be included or not) or what purpose they are used for – as long as someone wants to buy them.

Remember that these lists result from the private and personal data that users of these companies’ services allow them to gather after being attracted to the shiny gadgets, services and apps they provide – without bothering to read the (admittedly long, multi-page, fractured and densely legalese) contracts that say, in short (for your benefit) ALL YOUR DATA BELONG TO US.

I’ll talk about the dangers that arise from giving away your privacy in a moment. But, having established that (a) you are paying for the services you use with your personal data (b) it is worth asking – Is your privacy worth anything in monetary terms?

Last year Google earned $116 BILLION just in advertising revenue based on what it knows about you. Facebook reported revenue of $59 BILLION in the 12 months to March 2019 – an increase of 32% year-on-year – despite all the scandals that have rocked the company in the period.

So, there is part of the answer – your personal data produces ~$175 BILLION per year to just two companies exploiting your privacy. Add in all the shady data brokers and other personal data harvesters and trackers who mostly fly well under most people’s radar and your personal data and you have an industry fast approaching revenues of a $TRILLION each year – all from what these companies can get to know about YOU.

How do these companies collect your personal data?

The ways in which all data harvesting companies operate are pretty similar and well documented so I won’t repeat them here other than to add a few missing pieces that aren’t covered in most online articles.

The Pingdom article “How Google Collects Data About You and the Internet” at https://royal.pingdom.com/how-google-collects-data-about-you-and-the-internet/ and the Salon article “4 ways Google is destroying privacy and collecting your data” at https://www.salon.com/2014/02/05/4_ways_google_is_destroying_privacy_and_collecting_your_data_partner/ reveal the main ways in which your personal data is gobbled up.

If you would like to scare yourself witless, follow the instructions in the CNBC article “How to find out what Google knows about you and limit the data it collects” at https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/20/what-does-google-know-about-me.html to discover what Google (admits) knows about you. The map that shows everywhere you have ever been since you first logged into a Google service from your mobile phone is normally enough to cause most people an attack of the colly-wobbles.

The articles linked above reveal only part of the picture of how – and how deeply – you are tracked. To understand more …

• First we must look at the apps installed on your phone. Phone operating system manufacturers (essentially Apple and Google) have been slowly forced to provide controls over the permissions individual apps have to access the sensors in your phone. These include sensors for location tracking (GPS, Wifi, Bluetooth, micropohone, inertial movement etc), listening (microphone), watching (multiple cameras) and your ID through various device identifiers. If you haven’t already done so I really recommend you check why (for example) that “free” weather app you’re so fond of needs access to you device identity, microphone and contacts.
• Shopping malls and individual retailers offer free WiFi for less than altruistic reasons. Whether you connect to it or not, your phone – if WiFi is left turned on, is constantly seeking possible connections – and in doing so exchanges one of its unique IDs (its WiFi device MAC address) with every WiFi point it comes near. These IDs are happily hoovered up by the shopping mall – and used to look you up in a database (because hundreds of personal data tracking companies know who you are and the full range of IDs inside your phone) thereby knowing exactly who is in the shopping mall.
• It gets worse. No single WiFi access point could cover an entire shopping mall so multiple access points are installed throughout the building. Altruism? Nope! Using WiFi triangulation (in short, how strong the signal from your phone is when picked up by several WiFi access points) allows the mall owner to know exactly where you are in the mall – which shop you are in or whose window you are looking at.
• So, not only does the shopping mall know who you are it knows where you are.
• It gets worse. Individual stores use several technologies to not only identify precisely who is visiting their store but precisely which department or counter they visit. These technologies use not only WiFi triangulation in the same way as the shopping mall but shorter range “beacons” that use Bluetooth, ultrasound or NFC (Near Field Communication) to identify your presence at a counter or department by “pinging” the Bluetooth receiver, microphone (ah, so that’s the reason the weather app wants to access your device’s microphone – which can ‘hear’ frequencies well outside the human hearing range) or the NFC transceiver embedded in your phone or credit cards if you have ever used one to purchase something in the store. And, if you do buy something, that purchase is recorded alongside your identity, credit card details and all your phone and credit card IDs the store can grab. All without your permission.

I could go on to talk about web tracking cookies, single pixel image tracking, screen grabbing scripts and all manner of other invasive and very nasty technologies used to steal your personal data (who you are,where you are, where you have been, who you are with, what you are doing … the list goes on and on).

But let’s just look at one more increasingly common and rightly scary technology – facial recognition.

Facial recognition – is it good or evil?

If you read the article linked at the very start of this piece about the dystopian combination of technologies used in China to control its population to almost “thought control” levels of behaviour, you will have seen that facial recognition is being widely deployed as part of the universal surveillance machine China’s government is attempting to construct.

Small problem. Facial technology in its most advanced for available today doesn’t work.

So what, you might say – silly Chinese for wasting their money.

Not so fast – there’s a lesson here which gives valuable insight into the dystopian world we are sleep-walking into. Because it is not just China that has deployed facial recognition throughout its cities – they are merely the most ambitious users of the technology.

If you live in the USA or Europe and walk the streets of any major city, pass through any large railway station or airport those “security cameras”, so ubiquitous you pay no attention to, are almost certainly connected to some form of “AI driven” facial recognition system. So, do these things do any good or should we be troubled?

I think we need to be troubled. At the moment, the technology is a waste of money. For example, in the UK several police forces have deployed the technology both statically in city centres and at events such as large gatherings (eg; the Notting Hill Carnival in London) and at perfectly legal civil protests.

Why is the technology currently a waste of money? Because it doesn’t work. The UK organisation Big Brother Watch recently submitted a number of Freedom of Information requests to police forces across the UK. Before revealing the responses take a look at what London’s Metropolitan Police (“the Met”) have to say about the technology at https://www.met.police.uk/live-facial-recognition-trial/. A nice, reassuring explanation – all for our protection.

Now for the reality. The response from the Met can be seen reported at iNews article “Met police’s facial recognition technology ‘96% inaccurate’” at https://inews.co.uk/news/technology/met-polices-facial-recognition-technology-96-inaccurate/ which also discusses some of the breaches of personal privacy (the technology currently breaches European GDPR legislation as, despite the Met’s assurance that they displayed posters wherever they deployed the technology no attempt was made to obtain consent from a single individual to having their very personal data (their face) recorded and stored in a database for up to a year or longer and one man who did verbally object to having his face recorded was arrested – but why should a police force bother about complying with the law) the technology brings.

The BBC described the use of facial recognition as “Face recognition police tools ‘staggeringly inaccurate‘” at https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44089161 and went on to report that its use in London had incorrectly identified 102 people as potential suspects. The Met assured the BBC that nobody had been arrested but failed to mention that 102 entirely innocent people had been harassed and accused of crimes about which they knew precisely nothing.

In Wales, the police managed an even bigger result. Their system, deployed at an international football match, managed to falsely identify 2,000 people as wanted criminals. Showing blind stupidity (that beliefe that computers can’t be wrong – again!), the force blamed the poor quaity of images provided by Interpol and UEFA for the high number of false positives.

GIGO – remember? But now escalated from a potential speeding ticket to potential arrest as a known football hooligan – when all you had been doing is innocently spending some leisure time attending a football match.

So, right now I’d say that facial recognition technology is a positive danger to people simply going about their legal business and agree with UK Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham when she said police had to demonstrate that facial recognition was “effective” [and] that no less intrusive methods were available going on to say “Should my concerns not be addressed I will consider what legal action is needed to ensure the right protections are in place for the public“.

The future of Facial Recognition technology

Facial recognition technology will improve with time. The Chinese are not being silly. Once the cameras are in place (and never mind China, the UK has more CCTV “security cameras” in operation than there are people in the entire country – making the UK the most closely watched population on the planet) and the recognition technology improves we can be tracked and monitored even if we choose to leave our mobile phones, connected watches, fitness trackers and all the other devices that currently secretly monitor us at home.

In shopping malls and stores, why bother with all that WiFi / Bluetooth / ultrasonic / NFC nonsence when a couple of CCTV cameras can do the job just as effectively.

You can have your own views about Google Earth – the zoomable views taken from satellite imagery covering most of the planet. Maybe you’re happy to show off your property to the world – maybe you object to your expensive car collection being shown to every crook on the planet. Whatever.

But, how do you feel about satellite technology that can watch you and recognise you the moment you step outside your home or place of work and then follow you in real time while you go about whatever it is you want to do. Fantasy? Read this article from the MIT Technology Review https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613748/satellites-threaten-privacy/ to understand that the technology to do just that is almost certainly in operation and it is only government restriction that prevents the necessary level of detailed imagery being made available to commercial interests. But that will eventually happen.

So, what happens when Google starts offering “Google EarthTube” or whatever they might call a live video streaming service capable of zooming into any spot on the planet?

I live in the south of France where the climate is pleasant and it it is not unheard of for people to strip off and do a bit of sunbathing in their own large gardens … (and here’s the important bit) … in full expectation that they are doing so in private. As private as if they were in their bedrooms.

What price privacy then? Will people still be prepared to behave as they wish – strip off to collect some vitamin-D? Or will their behaviour change with the realisation that millions of 15 year old boys will be watching.

Do you still not mind giving up your personal data?

If the way that personal data and a devil’s brew of personal data stealing technologies is currently being used in China – not to just keep its citizens safe from harm or combat terrorism – to actively control the thoughts and deeds including such private matters as religious beliefs and sexual preferences doesn’t scare you and the trials of facial recognition and unannounced deployment of the technology in other public spaces in democratic societies offers you no concern then please stop reading and accept my apologies for taking up your time – happy future nightmares.

Did we ask for our privacy to be taken away?

No we did not. Nor were we informed in any realistic way that it was being removed from us.

And yet it is being removed at frightening speed, without our consent and by people who don’t even understand the basic workings and limitations of the technologies being deployed – let alone what happens when the mass of data that this combination of mass surveillance (spying) tools gets thrown into a heap and some “AI” is set the task of making sense of it all – because, believe me, that data pile is far too big for any group of human minds to organise, sift through and get any “results” from.

To understand the dangers, I will examine just one tiny piece of the massive data pile and ask

Why is everyone so keen to get their hands on all my contacts?

Let’s examine what can be done with nothing more than one person’s list of contacts.

The collection of contact data is conducted for numerous purposes. First, just accept that unless you have been extraordinarily careful and vigilant with the apps installed on your mobile phone, the social media sites that ask for access to your email – or just use Google services – you and all of your recorded contacts are out there, in the wild, waiting to be used for some purpose you might never consider.

All the smoke screen of “advanced AI” and “super-intelligent machine learning” peddled by tech companies is just so much hot air and that what actually happens in their algorithms is a very crude probability matrix – as biased from the outset as the people who “programmed” it and set its parameters and you may start to understand this:

• Take a look through your contacts list – if like most people you have collected over time names and phone numbers of people you know only peripherally (your dentist, the guy that services your boiler, members of your sports club, business contacts …) ask yourself how an algorithm determines your relationships and “weighs up” the strength/value/nature of any given contact to you.
• Even if it gets access to your call history (something else data brokers are very keen to get their mucky hands on) there is almost nothing of import that helps determine the nature of your relationship with any particular contact. To illustrate, some of the most valuable (to me!) contacts in my contacts list are people I went to school with and have known for over 50 years. But these days, living far apart we have no need to talk frequently to arrange get-togethers and it’s likely that I phoned my boiler guy more often last year than I phoned any of them – in fact I doubt I called them at all from my mobile.
• So let’s look at another angle to “measure” a weighted value of a given contact. Do you appear in THEIR contacts list? Now it’s very likely that I will appear in the contact lists of friends I have known for over 50 years – and they will appear in each other’s list … a “network” is forming. But I probably get stored in the contacts list of my boiler guy – simply because I am a customer. I happen to know that I have recommended his services to several of our local friends and they have become customers. Now we have another network – all those friends are in my contacts list and in my boiler guy’s list and he in theirs. So, what’s a poor, dumb algorithm to do?
• Dive deeper, of course! Consider yourself as the root of a tree – every single one of your contacts is a branch of your tree. Now along comes a spider and spins a web connecting all the branches where their contact list contains your details. Getting a bit complicated? Nope – we’re not even started.
• When the algorithm looks into each of your contact’s databases it finds a whole bunch of other contacts that may or may not be in yours – say someone as innocent as another member of a sports club you both belong to. The algorithm sets about the task of making connections – so if another sports club member appears in one of your contacts contacts list … and he/she was once given your contact details because he/she wanted to challenge you to a squash/golf (insert your favourite sport) competition but never got round to it – a more strongly weighted connection is, nevertheless, made between the two of you.
• The algorithm is, of course, entirely devoid of the knowledge that you’ve never even met this third person.
• So … here we are, only one step removed from your contacts list and, returning to the tree picture I hope you still have in your head, we are already into n-dimensional territory (hint:just imagine the web of connections between people who pop up at random in random contact lists and the picture should appear)
• Now … here’s where it starts to get really scary …

Our (actually their) poor, dumb algorithm has a massive web of connections of people who – to the best of its witless knowledge – are somehow connected … even though it has no way of differentiating close friend from commercial service provider.

Doesn’t matter.

These companies are in the business of parcelling people into saleable groups so when an “advertiser” asks for all the people who might be interested in ex-pat financial services living in France they can sell a “list” and rake in the money. So the next task is sorting all these people and connections into groups … somehow.

So … ask yourself … “am I feeling lucky?”

Because if you ask yourself a second question – “what / how much do I really know about the people in my contacts list?” you can begin to see how the cards are stacked against you and get an inkling of an insight into the gross dangers these misuses of technology inevitably lead to. And why, whenever people stand in front of me and say “privacy? huh! I never do anything wrong so I don’t care if someone is tracking me everywhere I go, watching everything I do and monitoring everyone I know or speak to” I get an overwhelming urge to (metaphorically – I don’t have a violent bone in my body) beat them about the head until their common sense wakes up.

Danger – your contacts meet your contacts contacts!

In short, there is a very large likelihood that amongst your contacts there will be people with a criminal past. Very probably unknown to you but certainly known to the data brokers  Equally, you will have contacts in your list with all manner of secret perversions and interests of the kind they wouldn’t want their mothers knowing.

So … all this data gets fed into an AI algorithm (if it wasn’t so serious I’d laugh – instead I find myself crying!) programmed (with all sorts of assumptions and biases that affect the outcome even before it has looked at its first byte of data … and it is tasked with drawing together “probabilities” (aka “likelihoods” or more simply “stabbing a guess“) at how you are connected to other people in your contacts list – and they to others in their contacts list and the n-dimensional networks that then form.

The actual task, remember, is to place you in a group that forms a list that can be sold.

So we return to the poor, dumb algorithm – which sees all these connections but has no way of weighing them up.

Bigger danger – here comes more personal data collected about you

An “AI” (actually just a bigger, more complicated algorithm) mashes up the n-dimensional contacts database with the even bigger data set that contains the data about everywhere each person (lest we forget, we are talking about living individuals here) has ever been, everything they have done, every web page they visited, every phone call they made, to who those calls were made and a “profile” (itself n*-dimensional) is constructed allegedly “describing” them, their supposed (guessed at) interests and activities in great detail – the better to form the (biggest possible – this is multi-billion $ commerce remember) list an arbitrary advertiser – or other enquirer – might be willing to pay for.

How does the AI generate the profile?

Let’s imagine that your contacts list contains (I hope unknown to you!) a paedophile. That person and their perversion is unknown to the police, their family and the community they live in. But their activity and every perverted step they take on-line is watched over by the data gatherers.

So … go back to the start. The first algorithm (that built the n-dimensional contacts list but had no idea how people were connected one to another) is asked by the “AI” ‘who else does this pervert know?’ … and your name pops up. The question actually returns an n-dimensional list (simple analogy = a 3-dimensional web – but actually in many more dimensions) which now throws up a significant number of individuals with alleged paedophilia interests. It is highly likely that you will appear in the contacts lists or have some other connection to a significant proportion of this group of people. It “follows” (see? inference = ‘proof’) that because you have connections to so many people in the artificial network known to have paedophile interests you are likely to have paedophile interests too.

Don’t believe me? Cast your mind back a few years when the game of “6 degrees of separation” was the fad of the day. Stated simply, a connection can be made between any two arbitrary individuals among the entire planet’s human population in 6 hops or less. Essentially Jim knows Sally who knows Ben … who is best mates with the President of North Korea. Fascinating game when played that way round.

Scarily harmful when used by idiots (sometimes given the name “AI machines” sometimes known as “policemen” … see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ore

Start at Wikipedia and dig away until you find out what really went on … and, sad to say, still goes on to this day. On your journey take note of the 33 innocent men who were forced into suicide and the hundreds of others whose lives and livelihoods were ruined the minute the Met Police broke their door down in the middle of the night, lost their families, saw their children snatched into care, lost jobs, homes, professions or licences to work – were largely blokes like you and me … innocent working men or professionals whose only “crime” had been to pay for an entirely innocent (I’m talking Popular Mechanics – not even Playboy) magazine subscription on-line.

In fact, just the sort of people you would expect to be ‘net-savvy and wish to read a broad range of international journals. Good upright citizens who never “did anything wrong” and would never wish to (metaphorically) harm a fly.

But bias and misrepresentation of data turned them all into paedophiles.

WRONGLY!

Of course, quite apart from the publicly judged and proven errors committed by the Met that directly led to all the suicides, broken families and ruined lives the biggest factor of all never gets mentioned.

Not a single Plod thought to apply a reasonableness test to the “Gold Mine” of data handed to them nor even question its provenance or reliability. After all, a computer had produced it so it must be right. Right?

No, WRONG! We’re almost back where we started.

The data had been found on the computer of a gang of crooks operating a money skimming scam and ONE idiot young Texas cop decided that as the skim involved charging a small amount of money through an Internet portal gateway – on the other side of which lay some very dodgy web sites – all the names identified by the credit card numbers skimmed must belong to people searching for child pornography … therefore he had a list of paedophiles! And this is how the list of ove 7,000 (mostly) entirely innocent British men was handed to the Metropolitan Police – as a list of more than 7,000 British paedophiles. The Met reacted as if all its Christmases had come at once – especially as the list contained numerous well-known public figures including entertainers, lawyers, medical professionals, poiliticians and even a few High Court Judges.

So … computer generated (in this case just stored credit card numbers) data was turned into false information – not by a computer or an algorithm – but one stoopid young Texas cop with a surplus of time and imagination and a complete absence of common sense.

Back to the AI and its profile building. Though you (I hope!) have not a single paedophile bone or thought in your body, the data brokers will happily include you in a list they are happy to sell to anyone (government or blackmailer) who comes knocking waving a wad of cash asking for a list of paedophiles. More names on a list = more money in their coffers.

Doubt me for one moment and you really haven’t dug deep enough into Operation Ore.

There is more, much more. But as we head inevitably toward a Big Brother state it’s only going to get worse.

The only difference between the actions of the Nazis and the “opposite side” Stasi that followed them – and an “AI” is that the AI reaches the wrong conclusions a million times faster.

But, hey, what’s the fuss about? The Americans have been doing this stuff for years. As long as we’re not beardy terrorists and aren’t engaged in criminal or anti-social activities we have nothing to fear. Right?

Er … what happens when someone changes the definition of “criminal” or “anti-social” (like the Chinese have done) or treats the haul of data (available to a filing clerk inside a town hall near you) in a similar manner to the trivial (by current standards) haul of “gold” handed to Operation Ore?

Did someone just mention a slippery slope?

Summary

We all do things that we consider private – things that we may take to the grave with us. It doesn’t matter if it’s as innocent as going to a specialist store to buy a present you don’t want the recipient to know about until the big day comes round or you phoned in sick and played a round of golf instead of doing the day’s work. It’s between you and your conscience.

Now, imagine a world without privacy.

How will your behaviour change when everything you do is being watched by somebody? Everything you do monitored and turned into a guesswork profile that, according to the prejudices of whoever looks at it could turn you into a criminal or sex offender or just someone who isn’t going to get that job or promotion you want?

What will your life be like when your government follows the Chinese model and start issuing “social scores” to rank your citizenship value – in the process treating you like you might train a pet, as someone who gets a bonus for doing or thinking whatever those in charge approve of and face stiff penalties for expressing the wrong view or just being facially recognised because you happened to walk close to a random protest rally? How will you celebrate when your livelihood, home and family are taken away from you because of one drunken post on social media?

How will you feel when your actions and thoughts are constrained by whoever has control of the big surveillance machine and so gets to decide what you can think or express and what is deemed unacceptable.

The level of power and control on offer by mass surveillance that robs everyone of their privacy is actually every politician’s wet dream come true. And – as is the nature of the beast – once started on the slippery slope the addictive drug of control will inevitably lead to ever more stringent definitions of “right” and “wrong”. A political party wants to stay in power. Set the machine to reduce the social score of anybody that expresses a view not in line with the party’s thinking.

Fantasy? Wake up – it’s happening today in China – the world’s most populous country.

“I do nothing wrong so I have nothing to fear.“

If you still believe that then you deserve all that’s coming your way.

Should governments be entitled to read our messages?

Surveillance Self-Defense