In October, the Open Technology Fund continued to both receive a large number of support requests and support a diverse portfolio of Internet Freedom projects and fellows. With the calendar year coming to a close soon, OTF has so far received over 650 requests for support totaling nearly $85 million. This month OTF held its annual Summit, a collaborative event that gives OTF-supported projects and individuals the opportunity to collaborate, connect and share resources.
Notable accomplishments
- OTF hosted the annual OTF Summit from Oct. 18-20, bringing together OTF-supported projects and fellows, Lab partners, Advisory Council members, funding partners, and other members of the Internet Freedom community in an open atmosphere that allowed for a free flow of ideas and collaboration, problem sharing and solving, and new partnership formation. Read more about the 2016 Summit here: https://www.opentech.fund/article/otf-summit-countering-censorship-through-collaboration
- The Signal encryption protocol developed by OTF-supported Open Whisper Systems is now used by around 2 billion people globally, as in October Facebook completed its rollout of the Signal encryption protocol to its Facebook Messenger platform. The Signal protocol has also been adopted by WhatsApp and Google Allo. Read more about this important security enhancement for hundreds of millions globally here: https://www.wired.com/2016/10/facebook-completely-encrypted-messenger-update-now/
- Net Alert released its second report, this time analyzing censorship on Chinese live-streaming video applications. By reverse-engineering the popular apps, Citizen Lab researchers (including former OTF fellows Jason Q. Ng and Jeffrey Knockel) discovered the use of keyword blacklists with tens of thousands of banned terms, while also shedding light on the decentralized aspect of Chinese internet censorship. Read the full report, including easy to understand visual content, here: https://netalert.me/harmonized-histories.html
- Censorship detection research platform OONI released a new public API that allows anyone to programmatically fetch raw OONI measurement data. This API can be accessed here. OONI also published a report based on a study of network interference in Egypt. Read “Egypt. Media censorship, Tor interference, HTTPS throttling and ads injections” here.
- The second class of OTF’s Information Controls Fellowship Program (ICFP) wrapped up their time as fellows, finishing up their work focused on anti-censorship research, circumvention tool creation, and analysis of security vulnerabilities in popular peer-to-peer communications tools, among other topics. Several of the fellows’ outputs included reports which are either published or pending publications. You can find more details about the fellows’ work and their accomplishments here: https://www.opentech.fund/article/icfp-second-round-wrap-results-and-outcomes
- Privacy and anonymity-enhancing operating system Tails completed their OTF-supported work, with their contract closing at the end of October. While operating under OTF support Tails was able to successfully implement a number of vital improvements, such as improving the available email platform (replacing Claws Mail with Icedove), scaling out infrastructure, and releasing several stable releases. The most recent version, Tails 2.6, is available for download here: https://tails.boum.org/install/os/index.en.html
- Translations into Mandarin (88%) and Spanish (80%) are nearing completion for Security First’s Umbrella app, which provides an easy-to-follow checklist on operational security best practices. OTF’s Localization Lab, which is currently translating 60 internet freedom projects into over 240 languages and dialects, is facilitating the volunteer crowdsourced effort. You can track the progress and contribute to the Umbrella translation efforts here: https://www.transifex.com/otf/umbrella-app/
Select news collected by OTF from the month of September 2016 - Get the full feed live @OpenTechFund
Activists fight back against Turkish government’s block on Tor and VPNs | Daily Dot
Russian Search Engine Will Only List Top News Stories from State-Registered Media | Global Voices Advocacy
How the UAE is recruiting hackers to create the perfect surveillance state | The Intercept
China’s plan to organize its society relies on ‘big data’ to rate everyone | Washington Post
Death threats and repressive regimes: the activists fighting for online freedom in Africa | Wired
Understand Your Internet: The Five W’s of Information Online | Tow Center for Digital Journalism
Thais Step Up Web Surveillance After King’s Death | NDTV
Internet Blackouts Can Seriously Damage a Country’s Economy | The Atlantic
How countries like China and Russia are able to control the internet | Quartz
- Program Update