DuckDuckGo donated $ 225,000 to various OpenSource projects

Two and a half months ago, a post appeared in the DuckDuckGo blog where search engine owners collected nominalists for donations. Today , the very projects that DuckDuckGo provides financial assistance in 2016 have become known . Below is a list of lucky ones.


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1. SecureDrop .
The essence of this opensource project lies in the anonymous transfer of information from the informant to the press. You can read more about it on the official website , there is also an article about the launch of securedrop in onion for The Washington Post . It is difficult to overestimate the significance of such projects - the WikiLeaks project immediately comes to mind. For the transfer of important information (which can be a state secret, but to have an important public response), information sources can get not only double-digit terms, but also lose their head. Therefore, projects such as SecureDrop are needed - you can independently verify that the source is anonymous (along with other methods, vpn / tor / proxy, etc., you can achieve close to 100% confidentiality).
DuckDuckGo, like others, donated $ 25,000 to them.

2. Freenet .
Freenet is a peer-to-peer decentralized network designed to enable everyone to disseminate information without censorship. In words, the network works extremely simply - the downloaded content is divided into blocks, encrypted and sent to different users. It is very difficult to find out who keeps some information (even a user who stores part of a file can hardly find out what exactly is stored with him). The network has some limitations and shortcomings - weak, by today's standards, the speed of work, the inability to create dynamic content within the network and the lack of centralized search on the network (although centralized search, in a sense, conflicts with the idea of ​​decentralization, so consider it a minus or not big question). The project started in 2000 and has not yet been released (the latest version is Freenet 0.7.5). The project received from the search engine $ 25,000.

3. OpenBSD .
I think that from the entire list this project needs the least presentation. OpenBSD is a free operating system based on 4.4BSD. The priority of the OpenBSD developers has always been the security and openness of the operating system, as well as the licensed "clean". The project was launched in 1995 and has been developing for more than 20 years. The current version of the operating system is OpenBSD 5.9. The amount of donations is also $ 25,000.

4. CrypTech .
Much less famous project than the previous one, but no less ambitious. One may speak about information security, algorithms, anonymity, etc., but if the hardware is compromised, there is no point in all this. The CrypTech project started relatively recently (more than a year ago), but has already received no small investments from well-known organizations: Google, Comcast, Cisco, ICANN, etc. The annual report can be found here (pdf) . “For the current prototyping, the open platform of the Novena laptop on the ARM processor is used. It is based on fully open hardware, from design to source code of all software firmware. ( Source . ”The project also received $ 25,000 of assistance from DuckDuckGo.

5. Tor Project .
I think everyone interested in the course, what Tor is and how important it is. By catching, duckduckgo has already been launched in onion and is working successfully there. Tor is an open source, proxy server based software that allows you to establish an anonymous, secure connection from listening. I guess this is all that can be said about this popular project, the search engine donated the same $ 25,000 for the benefit of Tor.

6. Save Security .
Unlike the others on this list, SaveSecutiry is not an open-source project, it is a campaign to draw public attention to issues such as government surveillance. The project emphasizes the importance of encrypting personal data so that they do not fall into the hands of the police and others who are not always good at hand. This is just one of the few projects of the Fight for the Future team. The campaign received $ 25,000 from a search engine.

7. VeraCrypt
VeraCrypt is a fork and successor to TrueCrypt, whose support was discontinued in 2014. This software allows you to encrypt user files on the fly. It supports several encryption algorithms: AES, Serpent, and Twofish (with combinations of AES-Twofish, AES-Twofish-Serpent, Serpent-AES, Serpent-Twofish-AES and Twofish-Serpent). The project received $ 25,000 from DuckDuckGo.

8. LEAP .
A non-profit project whose mission is to develop software to circumvent censorship and maintain the confidentiality of your Internet traffic. Roughly speaking, this is a VPN implementation for suppliers and end users . The project is in active development, applications for Android and Linux are already available, versions for Windows and MacOS are still on the way. The search engine donated $ 25,000 to this project.

9. GPGTools .
A project whose goal is to improve OSX operating system security. The project consists of several components: GPG for Mail (a plug-in for Apple Mail, which allows you to encrypt / decrypt, etc. letters), GPG Keychain (a program that allows you to manage OpenPGP keys), GPG Services and MacGPG. DuckDuckGo donated $ 25,000 for GPG for Mail.

Actually, that's all. As you can see, open-source is represented by many interesting and socially important projects, and many of them are directly related to privacy, security and anonymity. In the digital age, people are increasingly thinking about the fact that privacy is the same basic right of every person as the right to life, inviolability, etc.