Hello, my name is Werner Koch.
In 1997, I started GnuPG so that
people would have a free tool
to protect their communication.
GPG has been far more successful than I imagined.
Today, activists rely on GnuPG
to coordinate their activities:
For us, GPG encryption was invaluable,
because it was one part of
a very crucial set of strategies to help
secure our communications and secure identities
as we try to do what we do best,
which is fight for democracy.
Lawyers depend on GPG
to safely speak with their colleagues and clients:
GPG is the way that I most often communicate
with people who are in need around the world.
Journalists use GPG to securely discuss stories
with their collegues and their sources:
I do strongly believe that
had we not been using GnuPG all of this time,
many of our sources and many of our journalists,
would be in danger or in jail.
GPG has even become a critical part of the Internet's infrastructure.
I would say that the majority of people
who rely on GnuPG have no idea that it's there.
In 2014, GnuPG's future looked bleak.
I even had to let go of my last employee,
and could only work on GPG part-time.
But, a last ditch donation campaign
raised 250 000 euros from individual donors.
Also, Facebook, Stripe and the Linux Foundation
committed to regular donations.
Thanks to your donations,
Werner was not only able to work on GnuPG full-time,
but he could hire five additional software developers.
Hello, from Japan!
With this team, we have been able to
not just maintain GnuPG and provide regular updates,
but actually implement some new features.
One of our main focuses has been
making GnuPG easier to use
to help fight mass surveillance.
For this, I developed a new key discovery service,
which is called the web key directory
and it makes finding someone's encryption key easier and more reliable.
I've implemented a new trust model called TOFU.
Although it doesn't provide as strong authentication as the web of trust,
its improved usability means that TOFU is
more likely to catch man-in-the-middle attacks
and phishing attempts for most users.
I have implemented a new test engine for GnuPG,
written many new tests,
and adopted and improved a set of Python bindings
for interacting with GnuPG.
And, we're moving beyond GnuPG's core.
My main job has been helping improve Enigmail,
the OpenPGP plug-in for Thunderbird.
I've set up a community platform
that makes it easy to report problems
and discuss new ideas.
I've spent a lot of time improving
GnuPG's smartcard infrastructure.
And I'm also developing a new security token called Gnuk.
Its schematics are free
so that anyone can build one.
We want to continue this work in the long term.
But, we want to do it in such a way that
our first loyalty is unambiguously to the general public.
This means that the majority of
our funding needs to come from individual donors and not corporations.
This is why we are appealing to you today.
We need you to make sure that GnuPG
which has proven to be important to so many people
is able to not only fix security problems quickly,
but also continues to improve.
A great way to ensure our long-term stability
is to make recurring donations.
Our goal is to raise 15 000 euros per month.
To do that, we hope to convince
2000 of you to commit to donating
just 5 or 10 Euros per month
the cost of 2 or 3 cups of coffee.
This money allow us to fund three developers
including supplies and travel.
With that money, we will firstly
continue to support GnuPG and its users.
And we'll write a book called
"An Advanced Introduction to GnuPG,"
which will explain how to securely use GnuPG
to digital security trainers,
programmers using GnuPG,
and, of course, enthusiasts.
If we can double that---
if 4000 of you donate just 5 to 10 euros per month---
then we will increase the size of our team
and dedicate them to help
other projects in the GnuPG community.
One project that we really want
to contribute to is GPGTools.
We want to make sure that
the Apple mailer is supported
as soon as a new version of macOS is released.
Now, maybe you don't use GPG
to encrypt your email.
Nevertheless, some journalists
whose work you value
rely on GPG to protect their sources,
and some activists fighting
for a cause that you sympathize with
rely on GPG to protect their communication,
and some lawyers speaking with their clients
rely on GPG to protect attorney-client conversations.
And, you probably interact with
many Linux-based systems everyday
at least two-thirds of the Internet
are run on Linux-based systems
and these rely on GnuPG for security.
So please, if you recognize the importance of GnuPG
even if you don't use it directly
consider donating to support our work,
and the work of so many others.
If you care about investigative journalism, support GnuPG.
It's that simple.
To me, I think it was really amazing
to be asked to be part of this process.
And, I just hope that people fund GnuPG encryption and they fund it often.
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