Become a member of the Free Software Foundation today to help us reach our goal of $450,000 by January 31st.
Quoted from: Build us up! Free software is a cornerstone of a free society
You guessed it. We're not talking about Santa. The NSA and the world's big Internet and telecommunications companies have built a massive Surveillance Industrial Complex that undermines all our freedoms. We need to build our own infrastructure, one that values freedom, privacy, and security for all people. We need your help to do it.
The Free Software Foundation has been defending computer users' freedoms and privacy for nearly thirty years. No matter the political climate, we have always fought to defend the freedoms of all computer users. Today, in the face of mass surveillance, more people than ever are discovering that free software is a necessary cornerstone of a free society. With this momentum, we can turn our blueprints for a free software future into brick and mortar.
Since day one of the PRISM scandal, the FSF has been sounding the alarm. We've published high-profile op-eds in Wired and Slate, and as members of the Stop Watching Us coalition we marched on Washington to protest mass surveillance. And we're not just talking about the need for change; we're doing something about it. This September, we hosted a hackathon in honor of the GNU System's 30th anniversary, where participants made contributions to a dozen projects that form key building blocks of a surveillance-free future.
All the while, we've continued to build towards many more of the prerequisites for a free society, from working with hardware manufacturers to fighting DRM in HTML5.
With your support, we can do so much more in 2014.
The Free Software Foundation is only as powerful as our membership base; individual donations account for the majority of our funding each year. This has always been a grassroots, community-supported movement, and it always will be. This year, we need to meet our goal of $450,000 to build our vision for the free software movement. You can become a member of the FSF for just $10/month ($5/month for students); when you join, you'll get a variety of benefits, including free admission to our annual conference, LibrePlanet.
Please consider joining as a member to help us meet our fundraising goal by January 31st.
Every dollar you give helps to build us up.
If you believe in our work, please share this appeal with your social networks.
The FSF's campaigns target important opportunities for free software adoption and development, empower people against specific threats to their freedom, and move us closer to a free society.
Our successes are driven by the efforts of supporters and activists like you all around the world. Please take a moment today to make a contribution, by joining the FSF as an associate member, making a tax-deductible donation and volunteering your time.
The Free JavaScript campaign is an ongoing effort to persuade organizations to make their Web sites work without requiring that users run any nonfree software. By convincing influential sites to make the transition, we raise awareness of the need for free software-friendly Web sites and influence the owners of other sites to follow.
Please sign our petition to stop DRM in HTML5.
When done correctly, "Secure Boot" is designed to protect against malware by preventing computers from loading unauthorized binary programs when booting. In practice, this means that computers implementing it won't boot unauthorized operating systems -- including initially authorized systems that have been modified without being re-approved.
This could be a feature deserving of the name, as long as the user is able to authorize the programs she wants to use, so she can run free software written and modified by herself or people she trusts. However, we are concerned that Microsoft and hardware manufacturers will implement these boot restrictions in a way that will prevent users from booting anything other than Windows. In this case, we are better off calling the technology Restricted Boot, since such a requirement would be a disastrous restriction on computer users and not a security feature at all.
Microsoft has shelled out a mind-boggling estimated $1.8* billion to convince the public that it needs Windows 8. Why the record-breaking marketing deluge? Because a slick ad campaign is Microsoft's best shot at hiding what Windows 8 really is; a faulty product that restricts your freedom, invades your privacy, and controls your data.
Windows 8 comes with plenty of "features" Microsoft won't tell you about. Because Windows 8 is proprietary software, you can't modify Windows 8 or see how it is built, which means Microsoft can use its operating system to exploit users and benefit special interests. Windows 8 also includes software that inspects the contents of your hard drive, and Microsoft claims the right to do this without warning. To make matters worse, Windows 8 also has a contacts cache that experts fear may store sensitive personal data and make users vulnerable to identity theft.
Learn more about our campaign and pledge to upgrade away from Windows at http://www.upgradefromwindows8.com
If we want to defang surveillance programs like PRISM, we need to stop using centralized systems and come together to build an Internet that's decentralized, trustworthy, and free "as in freedom." The good news is that the seeds of such a network are already out there; as we wrote in our statement on PRISM, ethical developers have been working for years on free software social media, communication, publishing, and more.
Check out the surveillance campaign area to get involved with the effort to make the Web safer and from surveillance. There's something to do for people of all experience levels.
Free software is simply software that respects our freedom — our freedom to learn and understand the software we are using. Free software is designed to free the user from restrictions put in place by proprietary software, and so using free software lets you join a global community of people who are making the political and ethical choice assertion of our rights to learn and to share what we learn with others.
This is a campaign aimed at getting new users into free software.
The FSF is just one part of a massive global movement for free software. Recognizing this, the FSF created LibrePlanet (libreplanet.org), a wiki and community site to help free software users, developers and activists around the world connect and share information and resources. Visit LibrePlanet to create a profile, add your organization, or list your activist project. You can also join the mailing list, the IRC channel, or the identi.ca group.
The FSF opposes the ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) because it is a threat to the distribution and development of free software, and we campaign against this and other international agreements that undermine people's right to control technology. Learn more about our campaign against the ACTA.
The FSF welcomes volunteers in all of its campaigns. You can keep up with the most important happenings in our campaigns by following our news feed, blogs feed, and the #fsf IRC channel.
