5th of July Foundation

Security - Privacy - Liberty

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Celebrate 5 July with some new privacy tools

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Ten years ago today, on the 5 July 2012, the United Nations adopted a resolution on “the promotion, protection, and enjoyment of human rights on the Internet”.

The resolution was commendably simple in stating that “rights that people have offline must also be protected online”.

We couldn’t agree more, and that’s why we named our foundation after that momentous date in internet history.

Read more in Swedish: Tio år sedan FN:s 5 juli-resolution om mänskliga rättigheter på internet

The 5th of July Foundation is here to provide concrete tools that help citizens globally to enjoy the online rights to security, privacy, and liberty that the United Nations has officially granted them.

Here are some new and updated tools and features to honour the day:

Flashdrop for encrypted image and video sharing

Flashdrop lets you upload (or “drop”) a file and share the link to it. The file selfdestructs in 12 hours, although we may tweak this time or add more options. Currently you can paste files up to 50 MB. Try it out at:

https://share.5july.net

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New Flashbox for disposable emails

We have updated our popular tool for receiving disposable emails. Check out the beta of the new Flashbox here:

https://flashbox.5july.net

The old Flashbox (at flashbox.5july.org, if you have to) will remain online while the new Flashbox is in beta.

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United Kingdom added to Integrity VPN

Users of Integrity VPN can now choose to get an IP address in the UK, in addition to Sweden and the USA. Just download a new Wireguard configuration for the country of your choice:

https://wg.5july.net

Note that Integrity VPN is a paid service that some Internet providers offer their customers – you can’t buy Integrity VPN directly from us.

That’s all for now, let’s celebrate the 5th of July by enjoying our online human rights to the fullest!

5July signs the Open Letter Against Apple’s Privacy-Invasive Content Scanning Technology

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As of today, the 5th of July Foundation is one of the signatories of the open “privacy letter” to Apple.

The letter is a result of Apple’s plans to give an American organisation access to content stored on your own phone or other Apple device.

In signing the letter, the 5th of July Foundation asks that:

  1. Apple Inc.’s deployment of its proposed content monitoring technology is halted immediately.
  2. Apple Inc. issue a statement reaffirming their commitment to end-to-end encryption and to user privacy.

Sign the letter at Appleprivacyletter.com (image from the same site).

Jabber update

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If you have experienced problem with our Jabber server, they should be fixed now.

The background is that we installed a new SSL certificate on 20 February 2021, but we missed attaching our signature correctly. Today, 26 February 2021, we fixed this problem.

Depending on your platform and settings, your XMPP (Jabber) client might have warned you about problems during this period.

There are no signs of attack attempts. This was simply a miss in our routines, for which we apologise.

Thank you for alerting us about this!

5july ❤️ EFF

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The 5th of July Foundation has donated 500 USD to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which will be doubled by fund donors to 1,000 USD in their Power Up campaign. We also became official members.

EFF is an American nonprofit organisation “defending civil liberties in the digital world”.

Today is the last day to have your donation doubled – go ahead and support digital liberty!

5july advises the EU on new internet legislation

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The European Commission is currently crafting a new legal framework for the internet. The so called Digital Services Act will replace the old Ecommerce directive from the year 2000.

As part of this process, the Commission has initiated a public consultation, in which the 5th of July Foundation has participated. The public consultation ends today.

The 5th of July Foundation has summarised its advice to the EU in three main points:

  1. No censorship prior to publication
  2. No upload filters – especially not for opinions
  3. Mere Conduit for platforms (without curation)

You can read our full statement in this PDF (2 pages).

Read more in Swedish on our news blog Femte juli:

New XMPP server and security breach

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We have today officially launched our new XMPP (Jabber) server.

Register an account here:

https://jabber-signup.5july.net/

Our old XMPP (Jabber) server will be has been shut down.

If you used the old server, make sure to use a new password when you register on the new server.

Note that the new server has server address jabber.5july.net (the old one had .org in the end).

Security breach

The immediate reason for the switch to the new server is a security breach that occurred this morning. We think that usernames, hashed passwords, and possibly contacts have been leaked. We are still investigating, but bottom line is that there doesn’t seem to be any security patch for this vulnerability (for the version we are running, see below), which means that similar attacks could happen again. We will therefore shut down this server and start using a new one. We have sent an XMPP message about this to all users of our old server.

The switch to a new XMPP server has been in the works for some time already. Our old XMPP server ran on an older version of Prosody, and we had had problems updating to the newest version, possibly because the database had been corrupted after migrating from ejabberd to Prosody earlier on. After several attempts to update Prosody, we simply decided to start a new XMPP server running on the latest version. We tried migrating all accounts from the old to the new server, but without success. (If you noticed downtime in the last few weeks, this was the reason.) We therefore decided that we would have to ask all of you to register new accounts on the new server. Far from ideal, but doable.

Better XMPP compliance

The good news is that running the latest version of Prosody will make it possible to add various extensions that some of you have asked for. The Conversations’ XMPP compliance tester gives us a score of 80 percent currently, up from 60-something for the old server. We’ll implement more features over the next weeks.