5th of July Foundation

Security. Privacy. Liberty.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

5july signs #SaveCodeShare

The negotiations of the new EU copyright directive are coming to a close. The parliamentary committee for Legal Affairs (JURI) will vote on the directive on 20-21 June 2018. Since JURI is the main committee for this directive, the result of their vote will be the official recommendation for the European Parliament, when they vote about the directive at a later date.

Free Software Foundation (FSFE) and OpenForum Europe (OFE) have researched how the proposed directive may affect free and open source software, and the communities that develop them:

The proposed Copyright Directive has the clear potential to harm Europe’s competitiveness and growth in this area. Importantly, it could also restrict important fundamental rights of developers and internet users, without achieving a proportionate benefit. In particular, the proposed Article 13 could create barriers for the development of source code by imposing liability on platforms used by developers, harming a sector fundamental for the Digital Single Market. Therefore, both OFE and the FSFE consider that the proposed Article 13 should be redrafted in order to be consistent with the existing legal framework around intermediary liability, as established by the e-Commerce Directive.

The 5th of July Foundation has today signed the #SaveCodeShare open letter, which will be handed over to members of the EU parliament before the vote.

Sign the open letter here:

#SaveCodeShare

Read more about the proposed Copyright Directive over at Julia Reda:

EU censorship machines and link tax laws are nearing the finish line