 I am Sylvia, known as Phoenix. Stefano Stack. We are three of the four founders of the Dungeon Tech, the Digital Martial Arts, which is a strange thing. We are trying to explain you in this 30-minute lecture. First of all, how many of you read cyberpunk novels or seen cyberpunk movies, okay? I think all of us. Lon Mohrman or Johnny Mnemonic, Matrix, Ghost in the Shell, Nirvana, or cyberpunk novels such as Burning Chrome or Snow Crash by Neon Stevenson. In all these cyberpunk stories, the net can kill. We go online by plugging ourselves in the net or hearing helmets and if we are killed in the net, we die also in the physical world. But this is sci-fi, okay? The net is not a killer. We go online every day, a lot of times in a day. We browse websites, we go on Facebook on social networks, we text, we chat, we flirt, we dump each other online and none of us is dying because of this. Am I right? Well, there's a phenomenon called cyberbullying, which is killing hundreds of young boys and girls, children, teens and preteens in many countries each year. Teens and preteens decide to kill themselves after many months of harassment. Their life turned to be a nightmare and the only way out they see is to commit suicide. And there's another phenomenon called cyberstalking. Stalkers often find their victims online, then they trace back them into the physical world, start harassing them, start following them, start treating them and occasionally they kill their victim. And what about child enticement, pedophiles looking for kids on the net, luring them to post photos and videos and then blackmailing them to have more and more or even to organize a physical encounter somewhere in the physical world, which may end in rape, in sexual violence and in the killing of the victim or maybe the child himself decides to take his life after this for the shame of what happened. And what about Ashley Madison dumps? Do you know about Ashley Madison? Ashley Madison was a dating website dedicated to affairs, which is a specific word when you are married and you want to have sex with other people, which is not your suppose. So Ashley Madison was a dating website for married people, secret dating websites. Their database were hacked and the tons of gigabytes were published and there were some grown-ups, some adults that decided to kill themselves in the shame of being exposed by these dumps. So the net can actually kill. We are living in the same world cyberpunk novels told us. So we should stop right now thinking about digital world as it was virtual. We should stop using virtual term. It's not virtual, it's digital, but it's real. If you use the term virtual with a young boy who is asking for help because he's bullied online and he says to you, please help me. Someone is harassing me online and you say, oh, it's a virtual thing. Don't worry about it. You are just putting a wall between you and him. You are saying it's not my problem. It's not real at all. It's not real at all. But digital aggressions are real and they must be managed in the moment like you would do when someone tries to hurt you in the physical world. Each of us has a digital self and a physical self. We exist in two different worlds. They are both real. You have digital, ego, and physical ego. Both of these identities can attack. In physical world, you have martial arts and in digital world, you have martial art. We started studying cyberbullying about four years ago, maybe five years ago. At the time, we were working in another association that had built Linux laboratories for schools free of charge. We started asking the schools that we serviced if they needed anything, if there was anything we could do for the cyberbullying phenomena. They basically told us that it didn't happen in Italy where we are from. They have cyberbullying in the United States, in Canada, sometimes in Belgium, apparently in Australia, maybe in Germany and France, but it's never going to reach Italy. It just won't. About one year later, Carolina Picchio committed suicide. This was the first big and recognized cyberbullying case in Italy. Following that, apparently everyone, every major institution in school in Italy, got a handle on his phone number. Yeah. They start calling me and say, oh, Mr. Canavisi, you are doing cyberbullying things. Come to our school. We will give you two hours. In two hours, you have to scare the bullies and teach everyone, make everyone aware of the phenomena, so that they will be safe for the rest of their life. With two hours, 300 students and two hours. Is it enough? It's just we can't do it. It can't be done. We could and we could be famous. Yeah. We could have been famous and possibly even rich off of it, but it wouldn't have accomplished the goal of making them safe for the rest of their lives. So we started thinking about cyberbullying. Okay. We have a problem. How do you solve a problem? How do you solve a problem the hacker way? How do hackers solve a problem? There are four steps. You study the problem. You understand how it works. You study a thing. You understand how it works. You find a bug or a solution. So study, understand, find a bug, or find a solution, apply it, or exploit it. So we started studying cyberbullying. First of all, we realized that we needed something to change the mind of young boys and girls. And you cannot do it with two hours encounter. You need a long journey. You're leading a long... You need something that will continue long enough to change their minds about how the world is supposed to work. So, well, his brilliant idea was that since his mind was changed at that age by martial arts, maybe we should try building a martial art. I did judo and judo gave me a mindset, a way of seeing the world, a way of behaving. I use every day in work, in relationship with other people, it's not just defending yourself. If someone tries to hurt you, it's a code of honor. It's a way of life. I taught judo. So I knew the methods of martial arts. And I knew that they were... They are capable of changing the mindset of even young boys and girls. They have been doing this for 100 years. So we could use this. So we started studying cyberbullying. And we started reverse engineering it. Okay? If you have to understand how a thing works, you have to hack it. You have to reverse engineer it. So we took a lot of cyberbullying stories and we made timelines event by event. Of course, if you start searching for cyberbullying, you only find famous cases. And by famous, I mean infamous people who stories that ended with suicide, people that didn't make it. So we started studying those and comparing the various timelines. And we started finding patterns. There are always patterns. So every pattern that we recognize is a form of attack or a combination of attacks. If you can find that pattern missing that small bit, then that small bit is an attack in of its own. So if you have a pattern with three elements in a case, three elements in another case, and just two elements in the third story you are studying, you say, okay, so these two elements are an attack technique. And this second, this third element is another technique which may occur or not, but this is not related. And we started theorizing attack techniques using the point of view of the target. But we do not use victim. You are victim if you give up. You are not a victim, you are just a target. And we started theorizing attack techniques using the viewpoint of the target because a martial art must give you a way to recognize the attack when you are subjected to it, when someone does it to you. So we have the utmost respect for what the police and judges do. They come after an event and their job is to punish based on what happened. So they see a pedophile that pretended to be a 16-year-old looking for a 14-year-old, or they see someone stalking someone else or just anything you can think of, any crime you can think of. But they have the full story and they can say, okay, this happened, but later on you found out something else, and so you can judge the entire sequence of events. We wanted something that could work while it's still in the process. So with fear under attack, you don't care if they want your money or if they want to rape you. If they apply a wrist lock, you need to know how to defend against a wrist lock. And so basically you cut an attack down to the individual techniques, and if you can defend from every single technique, you will be safe either because you defeat your opponent or because you keep him at bay until he decides to go away on his own. And martial arts also teach to avoid the conflict when possible. A true martial artist, it's not one who wants to fight, it's one who decided not to fight if it's possible, he avoids the fight. So we started studying and theorizing attack techniques and we found also defensive techniques. Because we studied cases which ended well because young boys and girls, the targets, managed to solve the attack by their own. So we took these patterns and say, okay, this works, this works for this kind of attack, this work for this kind of attack in this specific culture, and we theorized the defensive techniques. Then we studied the defensive techniques we found, and we found out that they were the practical application of martial art principles, ancient martial art principles, like Yin and Yang, like the void, like the fluxes of attacks. If any of you is a martial arts artist, you know the basic principles. Don't stop and attack, let the flow pass and things like that. So we had a martial art, we didn't invent it, it was already there, we just discovered it, and we are keeping it and developing it, but we are just discovering it, we didn't invent anything. So study, understand, find the bug, and there is the bug. In digital aggression, there is a bug. The bug is that the aggressor, the attacker, needs everything from the target. If he needs something to blackmail videos or photos, you will give them to him. If you don't, he has nothing to blackmail you with. Even if he pushes you to commit suicide, he's burying your body to kill yourself. So you have to give things to your attacker. If you don't give anything, if we can do a target hardening, making targets more secure and more self-conscious, and teaching them how to use technology quicker, to be quicker and more effective than their attacker, they will be safe, we have almost done. So we started applying this with a small classroom of 10 boys and girls from 11 years old up to 14, 15 years old. It was a test class. This happened in 2014. And in three months, one of our boys stopped an aggression by his own. And then another one, and then another one. And they started seeing the digital aggression and stopping them. And after only one year, one of our disciples stopped by her own pedophile in only nine minutes. He was pretending to be a 16-year-old boy, a nice 16-year-old boy, and found her on Facebook and started chatting with her on private messaging on Facebook. Sorry. This is slightly besides the point of this session. This case will probably be in the workshop at 5 p.m. in Tao. Yes. We will do a workshop on this. And you will study, analyze a real cyberbullying case and disassemble it and find the techniques. So if you like to... If you want to try your hand at doing what we did in the first year of our studies, we will be holding a workshop in Tao at 5 p.m. Yes. But we can just, I think, we have a small time. This girl was contacted by this 16-year-old boy, handsome boy. He started chatting with her on Facebook and... Flirting. Yes. And flirting. And flirting, yes. He was flirting. But she was a Zanshin tech practitioner. She was a digital warrior. So she knew that she has to identify, to verify the identity of anyone who contacts her. So when chatting with this 16-year-old boy, she asked, why don't we move on WhatsApp? Come on. It's better. It's quicker. It's nicer. Let's move on WhatsApp. On WhatsApp, she extracted the cellphone number of his contact, of her contact. She traced back the telephone number and finds out that this 16-year-old boy, it's instead a 25-year-old man, extremely violent, racist, with a very concerning profile on Facebook. He has many subscriptions on porn websites and dating websites and sexual encounter websites. So it's a 25-year-old man... Pretending to be a 16-year-old boy to entice a 14-year-old girl. So she used the safety net we have. She warned, she contacted other people. We did a little bit of ozint, too, and we confirmed her suspects. For any of you who don't know, that's open source intelligence. Yes. All we teach is legal. And then she confronted him, calling him with his real name, and he replied, oh, gotcha. And fleed. Yeah, he said, got me. You got me. Yes. And then we managed to let the police know about this man. But unfortunately, they told us that they couldn't do anything because, mostly because she was too quick. She didn't give him time to commit a crime. Nine minutes. The attack from when they met on Facebook to when she scared him away lasted nine minutes. In those nine minutes, he didn't have time to commit a crime of any kind. So basically, there was nothing the police could do. This time. This time. But this is exactly what martial arts teach. How to win without extracting your sword. This is the true meaning of Yaido, for example. And she won without having to use the force to use the police. So this is good. This is good also because he could relate a possibly police visit to his home to the young girl he found the day before. So he could have became the, how do you say? If he had connected the police coming to his door with a girl who found out who he really was just the day before, he could have decided he could have made it his point in life to find out who this girl is and attack her. And it could be her worst nightmare for the rest of her life. Of course, of course, his name was, well, the police, the police now knows that we asked if there was anything they could do. So they already know his name informally. So this is the martial art we have been teaching for four years. We'll be reserving a small amount of time at the end of this talk for questions. So if you have a question, write it down or keep it in mind. And a martial art. First of all, martial art must have rules. So we have rules, a code of honor. So the first rule in our dojo is do not attack. This is obviously a discipline based rule. It means that anything we teach you, anything you learn from us, anything you learn in the dojo, you will not use that to attack others. But only to recognize techniques, and so you can defend from them. Think about suicide push. We study how people push their targets to commit suicide. It's necessary because if someone starts trying to push you to commit suicide, you have to be able to recognize it. But this also means that if you have any amount of intelligence of your own, you'll be able to use that technique to push someone else to commit suicide. That's against the rules. You can't do that. And obviously we don't teach these kind of techniques until we know that that particular student is ready to learn it because he won't use it. This is martial art too. We don't teach potentially dangerous techniques to everyone. We teach them to those we judge. They are ready to learn them. And the second rule is the respect. And you have to respect everyone and everything. So you have to respect other disciples, all the masters, and even your attacker. Because if you leave the attacker a way out, then he'll choose it. It's a very old... It's an interesting principle that was introduced as far as I know by Sun Tzu in the Art of War. If you leave your opponent an honorable way out, he'll take it. If you force him into a corner, he'll fight to the death. So respect to everyone. Interestingly, respect isn't just for everyone, including your opponent. It's for yourself too. And that can be hard to teach to children. Very hard. Especially teens. The third rule is what we say in the dojo stands in the dojo. Because sometimes people want to say all the group, a difficult situation they are living, or something embarrassing. And they must be sure that the group, the dojo, is a secure place in which they could speak to each other. And they know they will not be tagged because of it. At least two masters and three disciples. This is also for protection. Basically, if you have one master with a few children, they could decide to say anything about him. And it will be his... It will be his word against the children's. And the other way around is also wrong. You can't have a master with one disciple or two masters with one disciple. So basically, we have this rule to protect everyone. It's also interesting, vaguely interesting, for its math. Because two masters and three disciples means a minimum of four people. Yes. Two plus three in Zanshin Tech makes four. Because some disciples are also masters. For example, on this stage, I am the highest rank because I'm the school leader. So I am a master. They are both masters, but they are also my disciples. So they count as both masters and disciples. So right now, there's one master, because we have no one to teach at this time, and two disciples. But if we had someone with a white bracelet here, there would be three masters and three disciples. And so we can do a lesson of Zanshin Tech. So it's a small algorithm, and it's intended to have people of different ages inside the dojo. You never stay alone with a young boys and girls. The last rule is leave the dojo the way you found it. It's not just a rule of order. We arrive in the dojo, there is nothing. We we mount the tables. And if we need computers, each student, each practitioner, mount his own computers. And when the lesson ends, he has to unmount the computer and put everything back in order. But this is not just putting things back. This is self-discipline. Self-discipline. Putting things back and respect the dojo. It's self-discipline. Self-discipline is the programming language of yourself. Like I said to a young boy once, if you decide to fold your pyjama every morning and put it under your pillow, not because you have to, but because you want to. Because you choose to. Because you choose to. You are learning the programming language of yourself. And when you will be 20 or 30, and you will lose your job, or you will lose your partner, or you will have to start everything from scratch, you will look yourself in the mirror, and you will say, okay, now it's time to change, and you will change. Because you have learned how to program yourself using self-discipline. So this is the last rule, but it's not less important. It's not the least important. It's just the last one. So at this point, we were trying to build a martial art, and we needed to figure out how to judge the ranking of people. We all have ranks. So he's obviously the highest in rank, and the two of us have different ranks. We don't have colored belts. We have colored bracelets. These are cobra bracelets from the survival world. This is paracord. Because what we do, it's a survival course. And of course, if you have to build a martial art, you will start with white and with black. But what colors do you put in the middle from white to black? And unfortunately, the same train of thought that brought us to think of the problem as hackers also means. So we have white, orange, orange, white, green, blue. I know we are nerd. From the blue level, you are master. So this is the first dance. This is our black band. From this point, you are master. Even if you are 14 or 13 years old, you have to teach younger people why you learn new things from your teacher. Younger in practice. Younger in practice, we had once 12 years old girl teaching to a 25-year-old girl and complaining because she was old. She was too slow to trace email headers. Come on, email headers. It's easy. She did a good job. So this is what we have been teaching in these four years of activity. We are also teaching other people how to teach. We are forming new masters all around Italy. And we hope to create new masters also outside Italy because this thing works. It does not work or work only for cyberbullying. In cyberbullying, you have all 15 techniques, attack techniques. The attack techniques are just 15. You have all of them in cyberbullying. You have a small subset in cyber harassment, cyber mobbing, cyber stalking, or black mails and other things like that. This works for any kind of digital aggression. Both for young people and for adults. We have disciples of any age. We are open to any questions. You can find us in Italian Acura Embassy. You can ask for us in Italian Acura Embassy or visit our websites. We are on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram. We were also namesy, but they shut it down. If you want, there is a workshop at 5 p.m. in Tau tent, a two-hour workshop. It will be emotionally intense because we will study a real cyberbullying case, disassembling it in single events, extracting the attack techniques, and discuss them together. And we will also see a case which ended well. So we will do a little bit of compression, decompression at the end of the workshop. 5 p.m. in the Tau tent. Thank you. Oh, shall we salute? We are martial artists. Right? This is the bow. So, thanks a lot. If there are any questions, please feel free to walk to the microphone. Yes? Yes. She was aware of it. Yes, she asked when the little girl moved on WhatsApp, she gave also her number. Yes, but this was part of her strategy. She was aware of it. And this is an ancient principle you can find in Chinese art of war, which is you give the attacker something to have a great victory. So sacrifice something to have something back. She was aware about it. She also didn't sacrifice so much because her number was already publicly available on some sites. Not all of them, but any other questions? Thank you. Wow. Our explanation was that exhaustive. Okay. So if there are not any questions anymore, you heard about the workshop tonight. Let me thank you also to Claudio, Sylvia and Stefano. Thanks a lot for having you here. And it was a big pleasure for us. Thank you. Thank you.