The funding target has now been met!
Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke
371–380 of 469 posts
Re: Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke
#372This is amazing news. Glad to see companies that benefit so much from free software helping to pay it forward.
Update, Feb. 5, 2015, 8:10 p.m.: After this article appeared, Werner Koch informed us that last week he was awarded a one-time grant of $60,000 from Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative. Werner told us he only received permission to disclose it after our article published. Meanwhile, since our story was posted, donations flooded Werner's website donation page and he reached his funding goal of $137,000. In addition, Facebook and the online payment processor Stripe each pledged to donate $50,000 a year to Koch’s project.
Re: Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll check that out. Thank you!
By all means. Ed25519 (which underlies signify) is a pretty decent modern signature scheme. (tweetnacl.c also implements it, in less code.) It also seems you want to expire things, so I do feel I have to warn you that signatures are a totally separate thing to a secure time source, which is a whole different bag of marbles. However, since what you're designing sounds like a logic bomb/copy protection/DRM system, I mu…
It's a non-trivial task to design software that will deliberately fail and cannot be easily by-passed with a debugger.
Re: Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke
#374"Update, Feb. 5, 2015, 8:10 p.m.: After this article appeared, Werner Koch informed us that last week he was awarded a one-time grant of $60,000 from Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative. Werner told us he only received permission to disclose it after our article published. Meanwhile, since our story was posted, donations flooded Werner's website donation page and he reached his funding goal of $137,000. In addition, Facebook and the online payment processor Stripe each pledged to donate $50,000 a year to Koch’s project."
The problem, in other words, was that lots of people like me, who depend everyday on gpg and are thankful for it, would have supported it over all these years if only we had known that its maintainer was barely scraping by on $25K a year.
Kudos to Pro Publica for bringing this to everyone's attention.
Re: Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
The people who would buy computers with Linux probably wouldn't pay for tech support. Enterprises might, but not individuals. Plus I suspect that Microsoft is pretty keen to defend Windows on the consumer front - I've heard stories of deep OEM discounts on the condition that they don't offer alternative OSes.
I mean in the same way you buy a Dell notebook and get two years of phone support, you would get the same with a Dell Ubuntu notebook but Canonical would provide it and Dell would pay them for it.
I mean that the people who would buy a Dell Ubuntu notebook mostly wouldn't use phone support. If Dell thinks the same, they wouldn't pay Canonical very much to provide that support. They do now sell the XPS 'Developer edition' with Ubuntu; I have no idea whether they pay Canonical for support, or how much that makes.
Re: Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke
#376Let's send him some money directly: https://www.tilt.com/campaigns/werner-koch-deserves-to-get-p...
Why is that better than the GnuPG donate page: https://www.gnupg.org/donate/index.html ?
It worked well for me when I donated.
Looks like this is working, the number is way up. A little advertising goes a long way.
Re: Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke
#377Apparently Stripe and Facebook just stepped in to pledge $50K/year each. https://twitter.com/stripe/status/563449352635432960
That's awesome, but it's weird to me that Facebook, etc. will happily pay a senior engineer a total compensation of $200k+ yet only pledge $50k for the maintainer of a critical tool. Not trying to look a gift horse in the mouth here, just odd perception of the priorities here.
Re: Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke
#378No worries, I'm sure everyone contributes more to their respective governments to break encryption than they'll every send to anyone seeking to protect it. Send more money to this guy if you want to feel better about your shitty (respective) country or self. Better yet, just donate to the EFF like a uselessly trendy dweeb. Being a decent citizen isn't about standing up for what's right or wrong (that makes you a terrorist), instead it's about sending money to your respective, government-approved cause.
Re: Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke
#379Apparently Stripe and Facebook just stepped in to pledge $50K/year each. https://twitter.com/stripe/status/563449352635432960
That's awesome, but it's weird to me that Facebook, etc. will happily pay a senior engineer a total compensation of $200k+ yet only pledge $50k for the maintainer of a critical tool. Not trying to look a gift horse in the mouth here, just odd perception of the priorities here.
They have to pay the engineer $200k, or he walks. They didn't have to pay the $50k.
Re: Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke
#380There does seem to be a need for an "Internet fund". Pick 100 of the core free technologies that everyone relies on and pay people to maintain them.
I'm really dismayed that the Core Infrastructure Initiative, which was created in the aftermath of Heartbleed to fund OpenSSL and other critical software, has chosen to prioritize NTP , and not GnuPG[1]. Most of the companies that rely on OpenSSL are probably using a distro that uses GPG to securely distribute the OpenSSL package. [1] http://www.linuxfoundation.org/programs/core-infrastructure-...
Visibility, those who scream loudest win, people were screaming about NTP (long before heartbleed as it happens).