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Yeah, reminds me of the "Security" xkcd (https://xkcd.com/538/) - a threat from a good ol' 5-dollar wrench defeating state-of-the-art encryption.

Never estimate how state actors can use violence (or merely the threat of it) to force people to do things. The only way to respond to that is not through code or algorithms or protocols, but through political action (whether it be violent or non-violent)

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Soatok Dreamseeker is working on a more xkcd-538-proof system: https://soatok.blog/2025/08/09/improving-geographical-resili... https://github.com/soatok/freeon. Fundamentally, though, it's built on the assumption that geographical resilience is possible – that a group can be distributed such that no one organisation can perform $5-wrench attacks against enough of them to break the cryptography. (Given that the attack's impossible, a sensible attacker would avoid tipping their hand by attempting it, thus sparing contributors from violence.)

I should be clear:

Nothing is xkcd-538-proof, in absolute terms. Violence is always possible.

But having a tool that is more resistant to authoritarian overreach by being geographically distributed does make it harder to pull these attacks off.

can we align that code, algorithm, code to be forms and important forms of political action?

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