When Islamic State needed to move and disguise its money, it turned, US prosecutors said in 2023, to the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange: Binance. So too did al-Qaida, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas, which used the platform to help bankroll its operations in the years leading up to the 7 October attack in Israel. Binance was not accused of directly financing these groups, but prosecutors found that it knowingly allowed its exchange to function as a conduit – enabling extremist organisations to shift funds, evade scrutiny and frustrate investigations.

At the centre of it all was Binance’s founder and chief executive, Changpeng Zhao. By 2024, the self-styled “king” of crypto had fallen from grace, pleading guilty to money laundering charges and entering prison, while Binance agreed to pay a record $4.3bn penalty for its role in facilitating terrorist financing. The case was hailed as a rare victory for regulators willing to take on the industry’s biggest players – and for victims of the violence linked to those financial flows. Among them were the families of US citizens killed on 7 October, who are now suing Binance in a class-action lawsuit accusing the company of “pitching itself to terrorist organisations”.

But in late October, Donald Trump announced that he was pardoning Zhao. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, framed the decision as a corrective to what she called the Biden administration’s “war on cryptocurrency”, insisting that Zhao’s crimes had produced no “identifiable victims”.

It was a familiar refrain, dressed up for a new audience: that corruption is somehow a “victimless crime”. The claim is absurd. Terrorist organisations do not exist in a vacuum. They depend on white-collar criminals capable of building and maintaining secretive financial pipelines. The victims of bombings, shootings and mass casualty attacks are, all too often, also the victims of bankers, executives and financiers who made that violence possible.

È Natale… poi arriva Capodanno… e subito dopo la Befana.
Un trittico di giorni che, per chi ci crede o no, ha un potere strano ma reale… quello di rallentare il rumore e far respirare la testa.

Allora dichiariamolo ufficialmente, un periodo di pausa e leggerezza. Un periodo in cui proviamo, anche solo un po’, a essere più positivi verso tutti. A rispondere con un sorriso invece che con un muro. A dare spazio a ciò che unisce, invece che a ciò che divide.

Perché l’anno nuovo è lì, ormai e io voglio che qualcosa cambi.

Lo so… sembrano i soliti propositi che si ripetono ogni anno. Ma stavolta lo sento diverso. Non so se in bene o in male, però so una cosa con certezza… io ci voglio entrare dentro, in questo 2026, con intenzione e coraggio.

E la mia scelta è chiara.
Voglio dedicarmi più che mai al #Fediverso italiano. Non per “fare scena”, non per parlare… ma per fare. Per migliorarlo, anche solo di un centimetro alla volta. Più accoglienza, più collaborazione, più comunità, più persone che si aiutano invece di farsi la guerra per niente.

Ci riuscirò?
Qualcuno seguirà l’esempio?
Chi già ci sta provando avrà voglia di unire le forze?

Non lo so.

Però so che vale la pena provarci. E che certe cose cambiano solo quando qualcuno smette di chiedere “chi lo farà” e decide “inizio io”.

Io ci sto.
E tu?🙏

It’s the busiest shopping season of the year – and a time when many are trying to figure out where to ethically spend their money.

Over the first year of Trump’s second term, companies and institutions have fallen in line with the administration’s anti-DEI and anti-immigration policies. As a result, people are supporting economic boycotts to show their discontent with the businesses capitulating to the president.

Over the Black Friday weekend, the groups behind the No Kings protests – the largest days of mass protest in recent memory – put their weight behind a campaign called We Ain’t Buying It, calling on people to not shop at Target, Home Depot and Amazon during the marquee week of holiday deals.

More than 220 organizations joined We Ain’t Buying It, the coalition said. The campaign reached millions of Americans, driving more than 40,000 to take a pledge to be a conscious consumer. Signs also point to people spending their money at smaller companies instead. Little Blue Cart, a directory of progressive small businesses, saw record-breaking traffic during the campaign period, the coalition said.

Just as an editing point, you really started two consecutive grafs with "over the"?

One of the project areas of the Social Web Foundation for the last year has been end-to-end encrypted messaging. ActivityPub, the standard protocol that powers the Social Web, has privacy controls, but they do not protect the content of messages from server operators. Encrypted messaging has become a standard feature on most social networks since ActivityPub was created, and its lack has inhibited Social Web adoption and public trust in the network.

ActivityPub is extensible, though. As part of our E2EE program, Mallory, Tom and I adapted the Messaging Layer Security (MLS) standard as an extension of ActivityPub to make the MLS over ActivityPub specification. The protocol fits the great MLS E2EE system onto the ActivityPub API and federation protocol.

But a protocol specification is not enough; it must be implemented. That’s why we’re so happy to announce that the Sovereign Tech Fund has commissioned work with the Social Web Foundation to coordinate two new interoperable implementations of MLS over ActivityPub. This investment by the Sovereign Tech Fund will help move the Fediverse towards more privacy for social web users, no matter what server they use.

We decided to partner with two different projects in order to make sure that we’re making an open standard that can work between implementations. With two implementers, we’ll need to communicate clearly about architectural and implementation decisions, and make sure that those decisions end up in the final version of the spec — not in a TODO comment in the source code of a single project.

The first project is Emissary, the great social web application platform behind projects like Atlas and Bandwagon. Ben Pate, Emissary founder, says, “The Emissary Project is deeply committed to the Fediverse, where we are building a free and trustworthy Internet for all 8 billion humans. Delivering on that promise, Emissary is excited to team up with the Social Web Foundation to bring End-to-End-Encryption (E2EE) to the Fediverse. We are eternally grateful for the SWF’s leadership and support, without which this project could not have happened. Our work is already underway, and in 2026 anyone will be able to build E2EE applications on the Emissary platform.”

The second project is Bonfire. Bonfire is a modular framework for building federated apps, with its first app (Bonfire Social) offering a social networking experience enhanced with tools for privacy, trust, and collaboration (such as circles and boundaries).

The maintainers of Bonfire, Ivan Minutillo and Mayel de Borniol, said: “We think that end-to-end encryption should simply be the default for any private communication online. Working with the Social Web Foundation to bring E2EE to ActivityPub marks a crucial step in fostering privacy and trust, and especially in enabling the fediverse to become a safe space for activists and communities to organise, coordinate, and collaborate meaningfully. By making secure, user-friendly messaging a core part of the fediverse, we’re helping lay the groundwork for decentralised networks where people can go beyond talking in the mythical ‘global town square’ and actually organise and accomplish things together.”

This work will happen best if the Fediverse community tracks it closely. We’ll be making updates here on the SWF blog as progress continues. Developers and active users may also be interested in the ActivityPub E2EE Messaging Task Force at the W3C, where the specification is being developed into a report for the Social Web Community group. Finally, we’ll be using the #JustBetweenUs hashtag to share progress and ideas, so you can follow it to see what’s been happening.