Re: <nettime> Lorenzo Tripodi: Attack to Autistici/Inventati Another step into digital fascism (Substack)

[allan siegel via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Dear Nettimers,
Thank you Lorenzo for that comment. 
It reminded me of a 'declaration' from many years ago; I am pretty sure it originated with the Black Panthers and goes as follows:

*THE POWER OF THE PEOPLE IS GREATER THAN THE MAN'S TECHNOLOGY!*

Rather appropriate these days!

cheers
allan

On Mon, Aug 31, 2026, at 10:16, Lorenzo Tripodi via nettime-l wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> Thanks to Patrice for forwarding my humble reflection to Nettime, something I wouldn’t have dared to do. Unfortunately, as an urbanist/filmmaker, I am not technically skilled enough to follow the complexity of the issues many of you are able to grasp. However, I'd like to report a fragment of a conversation with a friend bringing what I think is a valid point:
> 
> The way I see it, you can’t solve a technological problem with technology, because whoever has the most resources wins that war. Nor can you solve it with more encryption, because whoever has the most resources will crack it (see Turing vs the Nazi Enigma machine). Perhaps it’s better to approach it from a cultural angle, by distributing expertise rather than centralising services. That way, at the very least, rather than having a single weak link where hitting one is enough to bring down 100, they’ll have to go to the trouble of hitting 100 of them.
> 
> Cheers
> Lorenzo
> 
> > On 30. Aug 2026, at 17:38, Geoffrey Goodell via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org> wrote:
> > 
> > Dear all,
> > 
> > I agree with Bill's assessment, although the problem is actually much larger
> > than that.  As I have argued for decades [1, 2], the real problem is that we
> > have optimised Internet routing and naming for simplicity of adoption rather
> > than equity in use.  That design choice might indeed have been instrumental to
> > the popularity and growth of the Internet, as well as the world wide web and
> > electronic mail in particular, during their early days, but it also created a
> > set of control points that would eventually undermine its mission to connect the
> > world.
> > 
> > The control points take several forms.  For example, because routers can see the
> > endpoints of flows, they can use IP addresses as the basis for filtering,
> > throttling, or redirecting traffic by carriers and service providers.
> > Certification authorities can exercise power by charging money or soliciting
> > data as a precondition for providing certificates, and those that do not, such
> > as Let's Encrypt, are vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks by carriers and
> > VPS providers.  Content distribution networks, such as Akamai and Cloudflare,
> > generally hold the signature keys of the endpoints they represent, weakening
> > their usefulness as mechanisms for end-to-end security.  In short, powerful
> > have become gatekeepers.
> > 
> > The problem is not new, but it has grown more acute in recent years.  Streaming
> > services, such as Netflix and its brethren, have stressed the economic calculus
> > of flat-rate pricing that allowed carriers to sell best-effort 'transit' rather
> > than self-serving quality-of-service guarantees [3].  Following escalating spam,
> > abuse, and cyberattacks, service providers employ vigilante blacklisting
> > services and carriers threaten their customers to protect themselves.  Following
> > the proliferation of heavy server-side scripting to meet the CPU, network, and
> > battery requirements of mobile phones as well as aggressive web-scraping to
> > train AI algorithms, service providers have turned to CDNs that enforce zealous
> > identity-based filters, such as Akamai Identity Cloud [4].
> > 
> > Unsurprisingly, the Domain Name System (DNS) is no different.  There is no
> > shortage of proposals to leverage ICANN's role as coordinator of DNS registries
> > to counteract abuse [5, 6], and there is every reason to believe that
> > eventually, whoever is strong enough to coerce the acceptance of one such
> > proposal will do so.  By now, we should all be familiar with the fact that any
> > global system for names cannot be both secure and human-meaningful without a
> > central authority [7].  Nevertheless we try, perhaps naively imagining that the
> > fault lies in the gatekeepers that occupy the control points, or in the
> > incentives that they face.  Wrong.  The fault lies in human nature and the fact
> > that the control points exist in the first place.  "Men will not look at things
> > as they really are, but as they wish them to be -- and are ruined" [8].
> > 
> > And so, the problem is not a single domain, such as .ORG, or any particular DNS
> > registries or registrars, or the fact that the headquarters of ICANN is in the
> > United States.  The problem is that we believe in global names, or that the
> > presence or absence of global names can be the basis for meaningful security.
> > 
> > A far better approach would be to use a combination of onion routing and
> > cryptographically self-certifying names, which together are a powerful way to
> > mitigate control points, to access most Internet services.  I say 'most' because
> > there are some Internet services for which onion routing is inappropriate, such
> > as high-fidelity video streaming (e.g. Netflix), which requires a different
> > economic foundation to be efficient, or high-precision time synchronisation
> > (e.g. NTP), which is more like a support function than an application.  But for
> > most of what we do, such as web browsing, e-mail, messaging, chat, remote system
> > administration, phone calls, and so on, onion routing is a fine solution.  And
> > because bandwidth, unlike latency, can always be improved by adding more
> > infrastructure, onion routing will perhaps one day be appropriate for
> > teleconferences as well.
> > 
> > The bad news is that using onion-routing and self-certifying names requires
> > users to install and use special software for which there are no commercial
> > alternatives, meaning that it usually cannot be found pre-installed on
> > shrink-wrapped computers or smartphones.  The good news is that the free
> > software that does the job is patent-unencumbered, battle-tested, and available
> > today.  Make no mistake, that software is Tor [9].  Most of you already know
> > that Tor can be used to visit websites and other Internet services anonymously
> > and without sharing metadata about your Internet usage with your local carrier.
> > But what is important here is that Tor can be used by anyone to set up a
> > website, as I have argued before, with a self-certifying name, an 'onion
> > service'.  In this manner, anyone can deploy and operate a reachable website, a
> > private branch exchange (PBX), a chat server, or anything else, without asking
> > permission or paying gatekeepers (you'll need an Internet connection).  The only
> > catch is that users, not only providers, of these services will need to install
> > Tor.  (Once you install Tor Browser, you will be able to reach the second link I
> > provided for the Tor Project, for example, and others like it, without using DNS
> > at all.)
> > 
> > For operators concerned about the long-term viability of the services they
> > operate in light of intensifying political and economic pressure, which might
> > eventually lead to their domain names being decommissioned with extreme
> > prejudice or even the collapse of DNS as we know it, I recommend that you take
> > the opportunity to deploy an onion service now.  Figure out how it works, learn
> > how to make it robust.  Tell your users how to reach it.  You are right to be
> > concerned, but wrong if you think that this problem will be fixed without direct
> > action on your part.  Be prepared.
> > 
> > Best wishes --
> > 
> > Geoff
> > 
> > [1] G Goodell, P Syverson (2007).  "The right place at the right time."
> > Communications of the ACM 50(5), pp. 113-117.
> > https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/1230819.1241689
> > 
> > [2] G Goodell (2023). "The Forgotten Preconditions for a Well-Functioning
> > Internet." Data & Policy 5.  https://doi.org/10.1017/dap.2022.38
> > 
> > [3] A Odlyzko (2000).  "Should Flat-Rate Internet Pricing Continue?"  IT
> > Professional 2(5), pp. 48-51.  https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/6294.877498
> > 
> > [4] Akamai Technologies.  "Client reputation."
> > https://techdocs.akamai.com/identity-cloud/docs/client-reputation-1
> > 
> > [5] M3AAWG (2024).  "M3AAWG DNS Abuse Prevention, Remediation, and Mitigation
> > Practices for Registrars and Registries."  http://www.m3aawg.org/DNSAbusePreventionRegReg2024
> > 
> > [6] ICANN (2026).  "ICANN GNSO Seeks Input on DNS Abuse Mitigation PDP 1 Initial
> > Report."
> > https://www.icann.org/en/announcements/details/icann-gnso-seeks-input-on-dns-abuse-mitigation-pdp-1-initial-report-18-08-2026-en
> > 
> > [7] Z Wilcox-O'Hearn (2001).  "Names: Decentralized, Secure, Human-Meaningful:
> > Choose Two."
> > https://web.archive.org/web/20011020191610/http://zooko.com/distnames.html
> > 
> > [8] Niccolò Machiavelli (1532).  "The Prince."
> > 
> > [9] Tor Project.  https://www.torproject.org/ or
> > http://2gzyxa5ihm7nsggfxnu52rck2vv4rvmdlkiu3zzui5du4xyclen53wid.onion/
> > 
> > On Sat, 29 Aug 2026 at 01:11:51PM +0200, Bill Woodcock via nettime-l wrote:
> >>>> The domain Autistici.org has been seized and it is not online
> >>>> anymore.
> >> Just a reminder that we did _not_ win the fight to free .ORG in 2019, and
> >> that it exists solely as a profit-making surveillance enterprise... it does
> >> not work for non-profits, it works against them.  If you run a non-profit,
> >> particularly one which handles sensitive information or at-risk people, .ORG
> >> is a spectacularly bad place to route your data through.
> >> 
> >>                      -Bill
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
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