The Electronic Frontier Foundation has developed numerous technology projects that aim to defend online freedom, privacy and security, and now it wants the help of developers. The EFF has announced Coding with EFF, an initiative to get developers to assist on their open-source projects.
“We at EFF are always excited to unveil new ways for our technically skilled community to help expand and defend our rights online,” the EFF wrote on its blog. “And time and again our members demonstrate an unbelievable drive and ability to take action in truly game-changing ways.”
Open source projects include:
HTTPS Everywhere: A Firefox, Chrome and Opera extension that makes sure users’ browsers are more secure by encrypting their communications. The project is a collaboration between The Tor Project and the EFF.
Privacy Badger: A browser add-onfor Chrome and Firefox that blocks online advertising and other embedded content that tracks users without their permission.
Open Wireless: The Open Wireless Movement is an initiative for a ubiquitous open Internet. The movement is working to build technologies that let Internet users open wireless networks without having to compromise security or sacrifice bandwidth. The EFF has been working on a custom router software build that would make sharing networks easier, improve security, and speed up users’ Internet connections, according to the movement.
STARTTLS Everywhere: A system that ensures and authenticates STARTTLS encryption between mail servers. Currently, STARTTLS prevents passive eavesdroppers and allows bulk or semi-targeted attacks to be detected. The EFF would like to improve the technology to deploy both detection and prevention for such attacks.
Specifically, the EFF is looking to add more automated tests to HTTPS Everywhere, give Open Wireless translation support, and write tests and translate the UI for Privacy Badger.
“Some ways you can help include improving design, improving usability, fixing bugs, reporting bugs, finding security issues, fixing security issues, writing tests, adding new features, translating interfaces, or helping with whatever needs to get done,” according to the organization.
More information is available here.
