Zurich, Switzerland
Software engineer
I build and operate data infrastructure for open protocols. BigBrotr collects, archives, and exposes data from independent Nostr relays on hardware I maintain.
Selected projects
All projects →BigBrotr
ProfessionalAn OpenSats-funded observatory for the Nostr network: eight independent Python services that discover relays across four transport networks, archive what they serve, and expose it through a read-only API and a paid data-vending machine.
- 250M+
- events archived
- 5,000+
- relays monitored
- 2,000+/s
- sustained ingest
OpenSats grant
nSealr
ProfessionalNostr signing devices in five form factors, held together by 220 conformance vectors and firmware that refuses to sign until twelve readiness gates pass; ten remain unmet on the ESP32 scaffold.
- 107 of 220
- conformance vectors are refusals
Entangle
ProfessionalA self-hosted federated runtime for organizations of coding agents: a permission graph, Nostr-signed coordination, git-backed artifacts, and deterministic tests that prove the plumbing without spending model API calls.
Cantina Royale Tools
ProfessionalA public explorer for a live blockchain game's 20,413 NFTs, built on an offline snapshot compiled into SQLite at build time, so the data is reviewed like code rather than fetched at request time.
- 20,413
- NFTs indexed
create-academic-research
PersonalAn npm scaffolder for research repositories built around four entities – digested papers, one survey, self-contained contributions, and per-venue submissions – after a rewrite that deleted most of the first version.
Job Search Tool
PersonalA local-first job search system where the dashboard, REST API, and MCP tools share one application layer, so filtering and state changes behave identically on every surface.
Research
All research →2025
The Conspiracy Money Machine: Uncovering Telegram's Conspiracy Channels and their Profit Model
USENIX Security 2025
Vincenzo Imperati, Massimo La Morgia, Alessandro Mei, Alberto Maria Mongardini, Francesco Sassi
2025
Hard to See, Harder to Block: Exploring the Challenges in Email Tracking Pixels Detection
IEEE Access
Federico Cernera, Vincenzo Imperati, Massimo La Morgia, Alessandro Mei, Alberto Maria Mongardini, Eugenio Nerio Nemmi, Luciano Ortenzi, Francesco Sassi
Posts
All posts →Changing a specification is mostly a migration problem
The Nostr wiki format change was agreed before I touched it. What kept it from merging was that nobody had written the converter, which is a different kind of work from being right.
A duplicate can be an observation
BigBrotr stores one Nostr event once and records every relay that served it, because repeated content is redundant while repeated observation is the measurement.
An index must preserve the specification's distinctions
A Nostr storage backend returned the wrong rows because its index kept tag values but discarded tag keys, collapsing a distinction required by the protocol.