5th of July Foundation

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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

Happy 5th of July – some updates

It’s the 5th of July 2016 today, and it’s been four years since the UN Human Rights Council adopted the “Resolution on the Promotion, Protection, and Enjoyment of Human Rights on the Internet”.

The 5th of July Foundation took its name from the day that bore those great aspirations:

Let’s promote, protect and enjoy human rights on the internet!

New podcast on internet politics

Our latest project to do this is a podcast, which covers internet politics in a broad sense. It’s in Swedish (so far) and we call it “5 juli-podden”. You can listen on for example Itunes, Soundcloud or Youtube.

Blog anniversary

Today also marks the two year anniversary for our resident blogger HAX, who is also co-host of the podcast. We’re celebrating by giving hax.5july.org a little facelift. As always, it’s somewhat of a challenge to make a blog work smoothly and look tasty without letting third party companies (read: Google) put their code on your pages.

Expanding our services

So far the “promotion” of human rights on the internet. What about the “protection” and the “enjoyment”?

It’s for those purposes that we run our privacy services: A free disposable email service (still beta), a free encrypted Jabber chat server, and our paid VPN service Integrity VPN, which we are now expanding, so that customers of more internet providers will have the choice to enhance the security, privacy and liberty of their everyday communication.

So that’s a brief update on our doings. We look forward to many interesting developments in the coming year. Cheers!

Bahnhof vs. Data Retention

There is an important legal battle going on between the oldest independent ISP in Sweden, Bahnhof (which has always stood up for privacy on the internet) and The Swedish Post and Telecom Authority (PTS).

Our sponsored blogger, writer and thinker HAX comments the latest installment in this battle: Bahnhof won a temporary injunction which allows them to refuse to hand over certain data to authorities. Read about it here.

5th of July Foundation is happy that its board member Wilhelm Dahlborn wrote the appeal that the court now listened to.

There is also a legal case going on between Swedish telecom/internet provider Tele2 and that same authority, PTS, about data retention. The second highest administrative court in Sweden has sent that case to the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) in Luxemburg. On April 12, there will be an oral hearing in this case.

“Let’s Encrypt” now used by 5July.org

5th of July Foundation firmly supports the right to use encryption technology without backdoors or interference. Ideally all communication via the Internet should be encrypted.

We are therefore happy to announce that we have just started using Let´s Encrypt to issue the certificates that we use on our https web servers. Let us cite from their own presentation:

“Let’s Encrypt is a new Certificate Authority:  It’s free, automated, and open.”

Let’s encrypt is supported by Electronic Frontier Foundation and many major Internet corporations and organisations.

P.S. Our resident blogger HAX often comments on the politics of encryption and questions relating to freedom of communications. Read him! And yes, “he” uses a certificate from Let’s Encrypt since today also!