Chapter 2b: Server Issues: Networked Infrastructure

Contributors: Systerserver

"Activist infrastructures are where the messy, grinding, generally invisible ­labor of 'doing feminism' takes place." Cait McKinney in Information Activism - A Queer History of Lesbian Media, 2020

"[T]echnologies are about relations with things we would like to relate to, but also things we don't want to be related to." Femke Snelting in Forms of Ongoingness, 2018

Feminist networking

Feminist networking is a situated, transgressive and technopolitical practice that engages us in more-than-human relations with hardware, wetware and software. Networks are material, and interfaces to affective relations through protocols. Networking can be in that sense laborious, an act of care, of wielding solidarities, of sharing and of growing alliances, recognizing our precarities, identities and collective oppressions. It is a community practice, a way of staying connected and connecting anew, of looking for and cherishing those critical connections which are always already more than technical. Feminists have long recognized the power that communication technologies hold for forming translocal movements, mobilising and sharing information without moderators. But when it comes to practices of appropriating technology, and coming closer to the machines in ways that are 'unfaithful' to their militaristic origins, we sense hesitation, fear and structural obstacles in our society and queer communities. As with Systerserver being part of this wider trans*hack, cyberfeminist network, we dare to introduce our server's activities as a catalyst to push techno-feminism into existence and announce that we are here to stay. We set out to appropriate and develop technologies for and with our network and communities, critically addressing the oppression of a techno-fascist system. Together we have a need to share ways of doing, tools and strategies to overcome and overthrow the monocultural, centralised oligopolic technologies of surveillance and control. We need to resist the matrix of domination. Stop the techno-facilitated exploitation and continuation of social and climate injustice(s).

Feminist networking prompts us into making space for ourselves and choosing our own dependencies. These prompts embrace the feminist politics of embodiment, situatedness and consensual decision making. Feminist networking is not constrained to digital technologies, or even to the particular 'network of networks' aka the internet. But when we are talking about the internet and its potential for feminist networking, we need to move away from thinking of it as something 'given' that we might 'use'. We need to shift away from the cloudy image of cyberspace serving the extension and intensification of capital, governance and data power.

Feminist networking is praxis : it means collective vision for a feminist internet as a technopolitical way of becoming servers, that we can 'co-create', involving our bodies, materialities, networking skills and knowledges.

Networks as infrastructures of one's own

A feminist server goes beyond a technically facilitated node in the network, it is an (online) space that we enter "as inhabitants, to which we make contributions, nurturing a safe space and a place for expression and experimentation, a place for taking a role in hacking heteronormativity and patriarchy." A server is a place on the internet that we can share with our intersectional, queer and feminist communities, a place where our data and the contents of our websites are hosted, where we are chatting, storing stories and imaginaries, and accessing the tools we need to get organized (mailing lists, calendars, etherpads) Hence, serving, and becoming a server is not just a neutral relation between two or more computers. It is tied to politics of protocols, of infrastructure capacity and power, responsibilities, dependencies, labour, knowledge, and control. What are the politics of self-hosting and being addressable on the internet, by having an IP address of one's own? How can we emancipate ourselves from the techno-fascist platforms and services? Which layer of the internet network we want to dismantle. Who can become a server, who is being served?

As feminist servers, we refuse to be served in networks that increase our dependencies on cis male dominated and neoliberal technologies. The spacial vocabulary around having a place or 'a room of one's own' on the internet is therefore important, referencing historic feminist struggles for agency, and safe/r off- and online spaces for uninterrupted time together to imagine technological praxis otherwise.

In her essay, A Room of One's Own, Woolf addresses the need for women to escape from the societal pressure of fulfilling their assigned roles as care-givers, house wives and servants, and become creative without being affected by society's expectations of moral chastity on women. By earning our own means, we can claim the privilege of not sharing a room, so that we can think and write without constant interruptions from the gender based assigned duties. For many people in the feminist movement, the fight to become our own persons, with our own spaces, our own devices and ways of accessing the internet, is still ongoing in the face of intersecting, economic oppression and gender based societal roles and constraints. This can sometimes look like a practice of withdrawal, of temporarily locking the door behind oneself or of creating separatist spaces with peers whose experiences are similar to our own. Yet importantly, insisting on this room of one's own - not unlike the room of the woman who writes on the back of and in reference to other women authors (a room full of books one can presume) - is also insisting on connecting with others, of making critical connections. In terms of feminist servers, the server thus becomes a 'connected room' or even 'infrastructures of one's own', characterized by the tension between the need for self-determination and the promiscuous and contagious practices of networking and making contact with others. These practices inherently surpass strong notions of the individual 'self', facilitating instead a collective and heterogeneous search for empowerment, and partake in creating the conditions for networked socialities and solidarities. (see Femke Snelting, in Ongoingness). They transform to a connected room, a network of one's own, with allies as co-dependencies, attributing each other(s), interacting as radical references to evade hierarchies of cognitive capital, which are crucial for sustaining collective efforts of resistance against capitalistic logics of knowledge and cultural production.

Furthermore, the metaphor of one's own room highlights the ways in which bodies need to be accommodated in the practices of feminist servers and networking. These bodies incorporate our data bodies but also the ways in which we show up in gatherings and places outside the digital networks. Self-organised gatherings such as the eclectic tech carnival (/etc) or the trans hack feminist convergence (THF), and feminist hacklabs such as marialabs, fluid.space, mz balathazar’s laboratory, t_cyberhol, as well as (art) residencies or other larger gatherings (Global gathering, Privacycamp, OFFDEM, CCC) have been crucially nurturing and fueling the desires for our own servers. These are moments where feminist networking can materialise into feminist servers and affective infrastructures.

insert /etc 2024 - Berlin image here

The importance of these offline-online entanglements manifested in the renovation of part of a building in an eco-industrial colony in the mountains near Barcelona, which hosted the first THF. The room onsite was transformed into a public interface for the practices around the feminist server: anarchaserver.org Open for visitors, it was used during system administrative work sessions, and for gatherings, sonic improvisations and radio. The door, window, ceilings and multi-levels were analogous to the functionalities of a server’s hardware-software counterparts (ports, encryption, including a repository... and even a firewall). It also had a bed,where somebody could sleep, rest and reside in analogy with the Living Data container, which hosts ALEXANDRIA for Wiki documenting and ZOIA HORN for multi-site blogging.

Politics of networks

Through out these gatherings, Systerserver, a feminist server project of almost two decades, has come about. The feminists involved in this project have configured their own infrastructure of two physical servers in the data room of mur.at, an art association in Graz, Austria, which hosts a wide variety of art and cultural initiatives. The physical servers found this shelter through the networking of activists and artists during the /etc gatherings. Donna Meltzer and Gaba from Systerserver went to Graz to upgrade the servers' hardware in 2019. The first machine, installed and configured in 2005, is called Jean and was refurbished by ooooo in 2023 on a visit to mur.at. Both servers are running on Debian, which is a Linux based operating system, and host Gitlab, Peertube, Mailman, Nextcloud, Mastodon, providing a social networking platform for our wider feminist communities, and a VPN software, Tinc. The VPN is the most recent addition, facilitating the need for home based servers by our peers, which in turn provide services for our feminist communities as well. Those server projects interweave into a feminist networking, an affective, sociotechnical infrastructure, enabling the emergence of more trans-feminist groups and collectives to host their own infrastructure.

A VPN software creates virtual private networks, connecting computers and machines that are not sharing the same physical location. In contrast to the internet, though, the network between these machines is concealed, thus called private, as it only exists between the trusted machines that are added to it, and cannot be seen by Internet providers or other bodies, who are not invited, nor authenticated in the private network. A VPN can also facilitate a public entry point to our private machines, making them addressable and thus allowing them to become servers. Usually, devices are assigned an IP address that changes periodically, thus called dynamic. A home or office router, also switches its public IP regularly, because the internet service provider (ISP) distributes IP address from a given pool, which can expire and trigger an IP address change, so called a lease time. ISP do this to manage their available addresses more efficiently and for minor security benefits. Domain names https://wwww.servpub.net need to be mapped to what we call a static or fixed IP address in order to be translatable to a unique machine’s service or content.

So if a request is made to a domain name (for example https://wiki4print.servpub.net, which is serving our wiki) that is hosted on one of these machines that has been invited into the private network of Jean, the domain name request first reaches Jean, as the only server that has a public address in this network. On Jean, a web engine configuration software resolves the domain and maps it to the private address of the machine, which hosts the wiki. The request is thus rerouted internally, meaning inside the hidden/internal network, to the specific machine.

Systersever has configured three of these private networks (VLAN?): "internes", "alliances" and systerserver. The first is for Systerserver's physical servers at mur.at to reach a back-up server in Antwerp, which has no public address. The second is for facilitating a range of home-based server initiatives within our community, such as the Etherpad servers of leverburns which we use for technical documentation during our server maintenance work sessions, or allied communities such as Caladona and brknhouse that want to serve content without having to commit to the high costs of acquiring a public address. There is also the network named “systerserver” which was our first attempt to install and configure Tinc for the publishing infrastructure of the ServPub project, making the raspberry-pies wiki and website accessible. (chapter 2a)

Having a fixed IP is costly due to its scarcity, and how the pool of IPs are reshuffled and resold based on their geolocation, the distribution of addresses and the politics that stem from this. The exhaustion of available IPv4 addresses has led to the adoption of address-sharing technologies and significant architectural changes in internet services, further contributing to the decline. The future transition from IPv4 to IPv6 usage remains uncertain, influenced by technical developments, economic factors and global events such as pandemics and economic crises. There is therefore a discrepancy of pace in advancement of technology that supports IPv6 in different parts of the word. IPv6 adoption is scant in most of Africa, the Middle East, Eastern and Southern Europe, and the western part of Latin America. Due to the smaller pace of network growth in those regions it appears, for the moment, to be adequately accommodated by the continued use of IPv4 NATs. This means that internet service providers (ISPs) can charge higher prices for a reduced number of IPv4 addresses and in some cases, legacy IP blocks of addresses that were not regulated by any regional internet registry system because they were allocated before those registries came to existence and are sold in the grey market. [8]

During the translation of the VPN manuals Tunnel Up/ Tunnel Down by one of the authors of this paper,[9] the Chinese artist and translator Biyi Wen pointed us to the art research project "A Tour of Suspended Handshakes". In this project, artist Cheng Guo physically visits some nodes of China’s Great Firewall. Using network diagnostic tools, the artist identified the geolocations mapped to IP addresses of these critical gateways, based on data published by other researchers. At times, these geolocations correspond to scientific and academic centres, which seem like plausible sites for gateway infrastructure. Other times, they lead to desolate locations with no apparent technological presence. While Guo acknowledges that some gateways may be hidden or disguised - for example, antennas camouflaged as lamp posts - the primary reason for these discrepancies lies in the redistribution and subnetting of IP addresses, as well as their resale. These factors make it difficult to pinpoint exact geographical locations. Additionally, online IP geolocation tools provide coordinates in the WGS-84 system (the global GPS standard), whereas locations in China must be converted to GCJ-02 (an encrypted Chinese standard). This further complicates geographic identification, as mapping activities have been illegal in mainland China since 2002. [10] In the case of the Great Firewall, the combination of IP redistribution and encrypted coordinates obscures the true locations of its gateways, rendering the firewall a nebulous and elusive system. We would like to argue that for mobile (ambulant) servers, geolocating the private servers concealed behind the private network -beyond the main public-facing nodes - remains a challenge. However, unlike the Great Firewall, the mobility of such servers is not enforced through a top-down governmental control. A network decentralisation, through the support of community based hosting that relies on shared static IPv4s, obtained through VPN tunnels and reverse proxies, dynamic DNS services, or Tor onions [11] has the potential to counteract authoritarian policies and provide a means of circumvention.

Infrastructure as data activism

Being part of the internet, or internets, creating and maintaining our own networked infrastructures involves an understanding of the technicalities and politics of IP addresses, networks, routing and subnetting, and of an economy of scarcity and institutional and corporate control. One way of addressing the politics of networking and of relating with technology is by 'following the data'. Data is not just an informational unit or a technicality, it is how we relate to computers, both on a supra- or infra-individual level but also as something that can be incredibly personal and intimate. We need to keep asking 'Where is the data?' (as in binary information). We need to develop technical awareness and accountability in how we participate and are complicit in the existing infrastructures in which our data is created, stored/sold and analyzed. We need to make space for collective inquiry, experimentation, imagination and intervention around data, including how data infrastructures can be contested, reshaped and repurposed to align with interests and publics other than those originally intended. In becoming more engaged, we cultivate our sensibilities around data and infrastructure politics.

By making infrastructures visible with the aid of drawings, diagrams, manuals, metaphors, performances and gatherings, Systerserver traverses technical knowledge with an aim to de-cloud (Hilfling Ritasdatter, Gansing, 2024) data and redistribute networks of machines and humans/species. We have the potential to exchange knowledge, and to maintain and care for a space together in a non-hierarchical and non-meritocratic way - often referred to as “feminist pedagogies” in the introductions and talks about our praxis. It centres around developing tactics and approaches related to content, welcoming various and diverse experiences located in the places where we physically meet, and cultivating learning by accepting life experiences, recognizing that knowledge is socially constructed.

Juli Evans self-publishing wizard zines image

Mara Karagianni self publishing zines image
https://psaroskalazines.gr/ 

"Humming birds" is a performative event which took place in 360 degrees of proximity in Faqladen (Berlin) & caledona (Barcelona). Using basic feminist federation by sociometric exercises and voicing techniques we explore the Fediverse, all talking the same protocol ActivityPub.

"Home is server" is a performative event which took place during The Feminist Server Summit, 12–15 December 2013 ,organised by constantvzw in brussels. "Home is a Server" is about collectively embodying a computer with some props, a script, CPU, RAM, watchdogs, triggering data, ports, kernels, hard drives. Together we follow the data flow while we install a server, send data in/out, install a wiki and publish a recipie for pancakes which we bake and eat together. 

Cryptodance - THF 2016

The Cryptodance is a performative event to familiarise ourselves with different modes of encryption. Whilst collectively embodying issues of security, privacy, safety and surveillance, we converge on a technopolitical urgency for sovereignty and a desire for affinities with the body/machine ~ living organisms/algorithms. Cryptodance was developed in August 2016 during the preparations for THF 2016!, by a small international constellation of choreographers, hackers and dancers. They met, discussed and wrote a choreography combining dance annotations, crypto techniques and careful somatic tactics. Goldjian and bolwerK started plotting the Cryptodance project during a Ministry of Hacking (hosted by esc in Graz, Austria), where they formed a joint(ad)venture of the Department of Waves and Shadow and the Department of Care and Wonder.

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history and topology of VPN

After the WWW and http protocol, the question of secure connections became urgent as the ability to connect beyond institutional networks became wider. AT&T Bell Laboratories developed an IP Encryption Protocol (SwIPe), implementing encryption in the IP layer. This innovation had a significant influence on the development of IPsec, an encryption protocol that remains in widespread use today.

"IPsec, introduced around the mid-1990s, provided end-to-end security at the IP layer, authenticating and encrypting each IP packet in data traffic. Notably, IPsec was compatible with IPv4 and later incorporated as a core component of IPv6. This technology set the stage for modern VPN methodologies." "IPsec, introduced around the mid-1990s, provided end-to-end security at the IP layer, authenticating and encrypting each IP packet in data traffic. Notably, IPsec was compatible with IPv4 and later incorporated as a core component of IPv6. This technology set the stage for modern VPN methodologies." [12]

By the end of the 1990s, Microsoft was working towards implementing a secure tunnel protocol, creating a virtual data tunnel to ensure more secure data transmission over the web. The encryption methods used in the PPPP were vulnerable to advanced cryptographic attacks. The MPPE (Microsoft Point-to-Point Encryption) only offers up to 128-bit keys which have been deemed insufficient for protecting against advanced threats. Later and together with Cisco, Microsoft developed another protocol, the L2TP, for serving multiple types of internet traffic.

"L2TP (Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol) works by encapsulating data packets within a tunnel over a network. Since the protocol does not inherently encrypt data, it relies on IPsec (Internet Protocol Security) for confidentiality, integrity, and authentication of the data packets traversing the tunnel." "L2TP (Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol) works by encapsulating data packets within a tunnel over a network. Since the protocol does not inherently encrypt data, it relies on IPsec (Internet Protocol Security) for confidentiality, integrity, and authentication of the data packets traversing the tunnel." [13]

A later tunnelling protocol is the openVPN, which has been designed as a more flexible protocol allowing port configuration, and more security.

Tinc protocol follows here...

the drawing of encapsulation from tunnel up/down

While https is another way to secure traffic over the internet, it is distingue from IPSec in that IPsec secures all data traffic within an IP network, suitable for site-to-site connectivity. HTTPS, the secure version of HTTP, using SSL, and its successor TLS secures individual web sessions, typically used for secure remote access to specific applications via the internet.