Speck&Tech 79 "World Wide Walls"

Hey there!

Over the past 9 years, Speck&Tech has organized 100+ free events across Trentino, open to everyone, and built on a simple, winning format: two talks on the same theme, tackled from different perspectives.

For this second event of the new season, we’ll explore the invisible borders of the digital world — from firewalls to algorithms, from overt censorship to the subtle forms of control that shape what we see and what we think we know. Who decides what information flows, and what gets blocked? How do technology, power, and freedom intertwine when the walls around the web are no longer visible?

From open internet movements to modern-day surveillance, from tools that measure censorship to systems that manipulate attention, we’ll navigate the tension between connection and control, freedom and filtering: welcome to "World Wide Walls"!

This event will be fully in English 🇬🇧 Access to the venue is reserved for those with a valid ticket, which will be scanned at the entrance of Impact Hub Trentino. If you can’t join us in person, follow the live stream here.

Please find below our amazing speakers:

1. SIMONE BASSO
🇬🇧 10 years of Internet Freedom: my experience measuring and circumventing Internet Censorship

ABSTRACT: Internet freedom is the collective term used to describe organizations working to measure and overcome internet censorship. These organizations began to gain prominence around the time of the Arab Spring in 2011, when governments such as Egypt's completely shut down internet access in response to public protests. That moment drew attention to increasingly sophisticated forms of censorship — techniques that are now potentially available even to Western governments. 
In this talk, I'll draw on my ten years of experience (2014–2024) to offer a technical and methodological perspective on the phenomenon. I’ll introduce the main open-source projects in the field, showing concrete examples of how we measure censorship and how citizens can bypass it. I'll focus on how censorship techniques have evolved across different contexts, examining how control methods have become more refined over time, and discussing specific cases from various countries — including some in Europe.

BIO: Simone Basso has been measuring the internet since 2010, focusing mainly on performance and censorship. He developed the Neubot project during his PhD at the Nexa Center for Internet & Society of the Polytechnic University of Turin. From 2018 to 2020, he collaborated with Measurement Lab to design and implement version 7 of the NDT protocol, used for measuring internet performance. From 2014 to 2024, he was a core team member of OONI, where he worked on developing client-side measurement engines to detect internet censorship and conducted research on the blocking and throttling of specific protocols and services.

2. CARLO PIANA
🇬🇧 Code, Law and Freedom: the clash between law, technology and digital rights, under the ruling of platforms

ABSTRACT: This talk explores Open Source and Open Standards as foundations for transparency and independence. We will address the overwhelming power of gatekeepers in the platform economy and how legislation can effectively intervene, mandating algorithmic transparency and competition, or making things worse, by imposing insecurity by design or thwarting openness. The discussion will focus on the law's role in protecting privacy and uncensored communication, particularly against surveillance and interception risks, including promoting strong encryption and freedom to tinker.

BIO: Carlo Piana is an Italian IT lawyer concentrating on legal issues related to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), standardization, and Digital Rights. He is a current Board Member of the Open Source Initiative (OSI), having previously served as its Chair, and was formerly the General Counsel for the Free Software Foundation Europe. With nearly 25 years of experience advocating for FOSS and Digital Freedom, he has acted against the superpower of platforms, since his involvement in one of the largest and seminal antitrust cases at the EU Court of Justice on abuse of dominance and refusal of interoperability.

This event is proudly powered by Telmekom:

and is organized in collaboration with NOI Techpark Südtirol, who are waiting for you on November 7-8 for the South Tyrol Free Software Conference:

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