For those who haven’t been following this topic, a couple days ago the US designated Italian anarchist collective Autistici/Inventati as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist Organization. A/I provides free web services such as encrypted email, web hosting, and fediverse hosting for leftist & antifascist individuals and orgs. They’re probably most well known for running the blog hosting platform NoBlogs(dot)org.
As we’ve seen in cases such as those of Francesca Albanese and some ICC judges, US sanctions on individuals and small orgs are devastating in all sorts of ways. From being cut out of the banking & payments system to being banned from most internet platforms, these sanctions make it hard to exist as an individual in society, let alone function as an organization. Any business and org that A/I interacts with - from banks to server providers and domain registrars - now risks secondary sanctions by association, and so most will preemptively comply out of fear. Already A/I has been shut out of their Paypal account, some of their servers, and their bank has given them a notice that they will need to close their accounts to avoid repercussions on all their customers. It’s an existential threat to their activities. This is all in the span of two days, despite the sanctions technically only being effective from September 25th.
Here’s a good writeup on the history of A/I and the current situation. It’s hosted on NoBlogs though, so I don’t know if it will stay up for long. It’s archived on the Wayback Machine, in case.
What I mainly want to focus on here, though, is the domain registration problem. Their domains mostly use the .org TLD, which is managed by the US-based Public Internet Registry (a 501©(3) non-profit corporation based in Virginia). Already yesterday A/I’s domains were briefly unresolvable, although they seem to be back for now. It’s likely that A/I will need to move to another TLD which is more resistant to the US’s pressure, if there even is one.
This is actually the question I want to pose here to our more knowledgeable comrades: are there any safe neutral TLDs, resistant to US censorship? The US controls most generic TLDs, and even some national TLDs on behalf of countries without the resources and know-how to manage their own. Many other TLDs are similarly in control of allied countries like the UK and France, which will probably enforce US censorship if ordered to. I run a few sites under US-based TLDs, so this episode reminded me I need to rethink my choice of domain registration. The broader issue though is that they US controls so many layers of the web stack that just worrying about DNS might be futile. Is it even possible to setup a web hosting / comms stack that is fully independent of US control?
I think probably the technology and legal challenges sections of the wikipedia article on Anna’s Archive are the best picture of the current state of play. Anything more insulated than Anna’s Archive probably needs to be only on an overlay network with no clearnet presence.
That’s a good tip actually, I’ll check that out. SciHub & AA have been dealing with this problem for a while. Although, both of them have to keep multiple mirrors on different TLDs and rotate them regularly, so that’s not very promising.
is there a reason a direct ip address is not feasible, outside of people memory? rdns are also not completely safe, but something like ip6 is easy to obtain
The domain is a part of the URL sent to the server in an HTTP request. Multiple websites can be hosted on a single server with a single IP. “Virtual Hosts” as Apache calls them are a ubiquitous method of setting up http servers which would break down in this configuration.
Also, TLS certificates which are used to encrypt HTTPS traffic are scoped based on domains.
On top of what @PorkrollPosadist@hexbear.net mentioned, IP addresses aren’t as durable as domain names. Switching server or hosting provider usually means changing your site’s IP address, and you’d need advertise the change to all your users which there’s no easy way to do.
I’m sorry, autistici?
Yeah it literally means autistic people. They named themselves that because they were a bunch of geeks and this was their special interest. Also half of them were probably actually autistic.
Onion DNS?
Onion DNS is technically a good decentralized solution, the problem is that very few people use Tor. Also, it’s only really useful for browser navigation. For anything more automated than that, even something as simple as RSS feeds, you run into the problem that the vast majority of non-browser clients don’t work with Tor.
So what you are saying is we should adopt it more so it doesn’t face those problems
I think there was some crypto web3 bullshit that people were trying to make that was like NFTs but for domain names. I guess that has the same problems as .onion because you’d need special software to be able to resolve those websites and it would be a barrier to the average person to have to get that going.
I think that would actually be a one in a million good use case for NFTs: proving ownership of a small unique identifier like a domain name. You’d still need DNS servers to resolve those though, and the servers would still need to be trusted, so at the end of the day the crypto part wouldn’t achieve much.
Also of course anything vaguely crypto related in current year is a pile of dogshit, so it’s a moot point anyway.
