Starting from the end — As of 19/10/2026, we are back online with our website after an absence of one month, during which we had to search for and get to know new platforms and projects that could host us, and finally adapt the structure of the old website, hosted on Noblogs.org, to the new one on Sindominio.net, the platform that we finally chose. Of course, we do not want to talk about that migration, which is in itself of very little interest, but about the events that forced it upon us.

The calm before the storm — Noblogs.org was a platform for blogs and websites run by the Italian collective Autistici/Inventati (A/I) which, in addition, offered completely free of charge an infrastructure —email, mailing lists, videoconferencing, chat and others— that was an alternative to the large commercial platforms, implementing the economic model of donation-supported services, an embodiment of the idea to each according to their needs, from each according to their abilities. The only requirement to enjoy these services was to share its principles —which can be summarised as antifascism, antiracism, antisexism, antihomophobia, antitransphobia, antimilitarism, anticapitalism and anti-authoritarianism—, to be a project of a non-commercial nature and to understand its manifesto. The collective was formally constituted as an association (Associazione Investici) and, through that legal form, ran its infrastructure to provide those services. Its history began in 2001 with people and collectives interested in technology, privacy, digital rights and political activism, and, in its navigation over the years, it met with some rough waters:

• 2004: civil lawsuit won against Trenitalia in defence of satire — A/I had hosted a parody page that imitated Trenitalia’s home page¹, but altered its contents to criticise the rail transport of military material destined for the war operations in Iraq, changing the original slogan Where do you want us to take you today? to Where do you want us to take your tanks today?. Trenitalia applied for interim measures against the publication. On 3 August 2004 a ruling was issued ordering the page to be taken down. The Investici Association and another affected person appealed. On 7 September 2004 the Court of Milan upheld the appeal, revoked the earlier interim measure and rejected Trenitalia’s interim claims. It also ordered the company to pay the costs of both phases of the proceedings, set at €5,100, plus the additional items indicated in the decision. The court held that the page constituted a legitimate expression of satire and political criticism, protected by Article 21 of the Italian Constitution, on freedom of expression. It also reasoned that parody did not require prior authorisation from the owner of the imitated page [1].
• 2004-2005: police access to the server — In the course of an investigation into the anarchist group Crocenera Anarchica that led to the seizure of its website hosted by A/I and the removal of its email account [2], the Italian postal police, directed by the Bologna Prosecutor’s Office, compromised the security of A/I’s main server, monitoring, intercepting and decrypting all of the server’s traffic, without that activity being communicated to A/I [3, 4, 5] (which discovered it only a year later, deciding to adopt a redundant distributed server architecture² [8]). This police action was considered probably abusive and disproportionate in scope [9].
• 02-05 July 2007: temporary shut down of Noblogs.org — On 2 July 2007 the platform Noblogs.org gets shut down. The reason is having hosted the game Pretofilia by the game designer Molleindustria (real name Paolo Pedercini) [10], accused of offending religious sentiment and the subject of a parliamentary question in the Chamber of Deputies about measures to counter offences against religious sentiment and religious denominations [11]. On 5 July 2007, Noblogs.org is online again: the U.S. provider where the Noblogs.org server was located, communicated that its contents were leagal in the U.S.
• 2008-2011: Investigation into threats and defamation related to CasaPound; international letters rogatory and search of a server in Norway — People linked to CasaPound, an Italian neo-fascist organisation, reported alleged intimidating and defamatory acts: graffiti on a wall, red paint on a doorbell and texts published on Indymedia and Noblogs pages that opposed the handing over of public spaces to neo-fascist groups. In August 2009, the association was questioned as a persona informata sui fatti —a person who can provide information about the facts—. According to its own account, it explained that it did not keep the activity logs (logs) of the account under investigation or the personal data of its holder. The Prosecutor’s Office promoted requests for international judicial cooperation addressed to Norway, the Netherlands and Switzerland in an attempt to obtain those data. In November 2010, the Norwegian police went to the provider hosting one of Autistici/Inventati’s servers and copied the contents of its disks. The association stated that the operation affected information on about 2,000 users of that server, although contemporary press coverage gave higher figures in some reports. The collective denounced the disproportion of copying an entire server when the investigation was seeking data relating to a single account. According to its account, it restored the services on other servers about two hours later and recovered normal operation of the infrastructure in about 24 hours. The underlying Italian investigation ended up being closed [12, 13].

All these proceedings followed ordinary judicial channels, without the collective A/I receiving any special classification from the Italian authorities.

Over time, A/I stood out as a provider of free software tools for authors [14] and became a regular reference in guides to self-defence against surveillance and privacy protection [15]. After the Snowden revelations, these activist infrastructures received a wave of new users who preferred an email provider that would not hand over personal data when the state demanded it. Outlets such as Genbeta included it among the email alternatives after the closure of Lavabit, and a security notice from the British section of the IWW union cited it as an alternative to Riseup³ [8]. In addition, it has been the subject of study for its role in the history of the hacker movement [16] and in the field of digital identities and social networks [17].

The storm arrives — From its founding, in 2001, until 25 August 2026, the collective A/I sailed with relative calm, given the rough seas we have just described. However, on 26 August, an unexpected event —both in its timing and in its (dis)proportion— occurred: the US State Department, together with the Treasury Department, announced the designation of A/I as «specially designated global terrorists» [18]. In the press release [18], A/I is described as an «extremist group that builds and operates the digital infrastructure for violent Antifa⁴ cells and other far-left militants across the world». In addition, the release states that «these tools are specifically⁵ designed to support the operations of far-left terrorist networks, built to enable them to organize, recruit, communicate, disseminate propaganda, share information about targets and tactics, and carry out violent attacks — all while remaining anonymous, untraceable and beyond the reach of the law». The collective A/I published a press release the same day in which it rejected the accusations, emphasising its «dedication to providing a platform of tools for digital self-defense, addressing the need of free communication for activists and other individuals, groups and associations» and declaring that «Antifascism and anticapitalism are not terrorism. Protesting is not terrorism. And everyone has the right to speak out and to struggle for humanity» [28]. Although that designation has no jurisdiction outside the US, it had immediate repercussions:

• 27 August 2026 — The PayPal account that the collective A/I used to receive donations was closed without prior notice.
• 28 August 2026 — The web domain autistici.org was found to be inaccessible: the entity Public Interest Registry (PIR), the registry of the .org domain⁶, decided to prevent the normal publication or resolution of the DNS⁷.
• 28 August 2026 — Noblogs.org suffers an attack and A/I deactivates it to secure it and, at a later stage, puts it back online in read-only mode.
• 01-12 September 2026 — Banca Popolare Etica, the bank where the Associazione Investici held its current account, after announcing its intention to temporarily suspend the account containing all of the association’s funding obtained through donations, made the suspension effective on 4 September, unilaterally. The suspension covered both incoming and outgoing payments, preventing A/I not only from receiving donations but also from paying its suppliers. According to Banca Popolare Etica, the bank has been forced, at first to suspend and then to close A/I’s bank account, because of secondary sanctions: the designation of A/I as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist came with the inclusion of the collective on the OFAC list (Office of Foreign Assets Control: an agency of the US Department of the Treasury that enforces economic and financial sanctions) [29], which would have meant interrupting all the services that depend on US intermediaries, such as debit and credit cards, causing harm to the bank’s customers and putting its very existence at risk [30]. However, this position of Banca Popolare Etica has been challenged by A/I itself, which on 8 September 2026 filed with the Court of Pisa an urgent application for interim measures, under Article 700 of the Italian Code of Civil Procedure, against Banca Popolare Etica, in order to obtain the immediate restoration of the operation of its current account or the transfer of the balance to another account [31]. According to the collective, the suspension of all kinds of operations, without the collective being involved in any proceedings in Italy or the EU and solely as a consequence of its inclusion in a US sanctions regime without any possibility of defence, without having received requests to remove specific content, is unfounded; moreover, it goes beyond the implications of inclusion on the OFAC lists, a measure that provides for a period until 25 September for winding up existing relationships [31]. This position has also been shared by other entities and individuals; for example, on 12 September, Francesca Albanese — an Italian jurist, human rights expert and UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories — expressed her support for A/I’s application to the Court of Pisa, stating that in 2025 the Court of Monza ordered a bank to keep open the current account of a customer sanctioned by the US because inclusion on the OFAC lists does not require suspension in Italy, without that court order affecting the existence of the bank in question [32].
• 06 September 2026 — The collective A/I decides to interrupt its activity and dissolve «to protect users and communities from manipulation and from the legal and economic risks that could arise from an executive order issued with no respect for the rule of law.» [33]. This decision predates the application against Banca Etica (08 September 2026).
• 18 September 2026 — A/I closes definitively: the time between the announcement of the closure and dissolution of the collective (06 September) and the effective closure (18 September) was left so that all groups and users could make a backup of websites, blogs, emails, etc.

The calm after the storm? No: consequences and aftermath — And we go back to the starting point: the disappearance of the La Ricotta Project website was due to the series of events summarised here, which leave considerably more lasting consequences than the simple migration from one platform to another. The closure of A/I raises several questions worth reflecting on, especially in an era like ours in which communication through a medium such as the internet seems to be fundamental, but also reveals our extreme vulnerability in the management of this tool. This text is not the place to venture into lengthy disquisitions, given also its length and the amount of information to analyse, from the Orwellian language of the announcements of the US State and Treasury Departments, through the conduct of Banca Etica, to the billion-euro question what can we do?. The intention is not to evade these questions, but to postpone them to (one or more) events devoted to these topics that will take place at the Espazo La Ricotta in the near future and, if circumstances require, to dedicated writings, giving ourselves time to research even better, reflect and make proposals, while trying to avoid talking for the sake of talking.