The Open Source Technology Improvement Fund is now a Tax-Exempt Charity Today we received official word from the US Department of the Treasury, that our application for 501c3 non-profit status has been accepted. This means that we are now exempt from being taxed as a corporation in the United States,…
Our KickStarter has just ended and we have learned a lot about how to raise money for our supported projects. We faced a number of challenges that were difficult to overcome in the short window that we had while the KickStarter was live. We have extensively evaluated every aspect of…
I would like to thank Mike from HTPCguides.com for assisting us with migrating our servers to Linux, optimizing their performance and hardening our complex infrastructure in order to get ready for our KickStarter. We used two guides in particular: http://www.htpcguides.com/install-configure-configserver-csf-firewall-security/ http://www.htpcguides.com/install-wordpress-on-raspberry-pi-with-raspbian/ (no, our servers are not running Raspberry Pis, we…
We have just submitted our KickStarter project for final approval. We will hear back in 24-48 hours on final approval and be ready for launch! We are uploading videos to YouTube, reaching out to privacy companies, and gearing up to make waves in the privacy community! Spread the word, donate…
In our efforts to chase down a nasty bug in Microsoft IIS that caused first time visitors to get timeout errors, we uncovered a number of serious performance issues with the site. I (Derek) have spent the last two days migrating the site completely to free software. The site is…
We are revealing our KickStarter project image. This is the image that you will first see for us on the site when the campaign begins! Credit goes to Zach Graves for creating the image.
We are releasing our final goals for the OSTIF Kickstarter project. This includes four sets of goals, from our primary goals to three sets of stretch goals should we exceed funding for our primary goal. The figures we have reached are based on multiple price quotes for services from companies…
We have agreed upon our rewards that we will be offering for Kickstarter to donors that support our cause. We've tried to balance giving our donors well deserved recognition and rewards with keeping the overhead for the donation drive down. The (tentative) rewards will be as follows: Donate up to…
A series of updates on what we have been up to! We continue to negotiate the terms of bug bounty agreements with our supported projects. A special thank you to Matt Caswell of OpenSSL, Samuli Seppänen of OpenVPN, and Mounir Idrassi of VeraCrypt for our ongoing dialogue. The website will…
TrueCrypt - The venerable full disk and container encryption software that was abandoned by its developers in 2014, was believed to be secure, despite the development of the software ending. This was the consensus among the security community because the software had been audited by iSec (a subsidiary of NCC).…