GNOME starts privacy fundraising campaign

The GNOME Foundations's executive director, Karen Sandler, has announced a new "Friends of GNOME" fund raising campaign specifically to help make GNOME "one of the most secure computing environments available", with a particular focus on privacy. Billed as "Help make GNOME safer than ever", the privacy campaign will fund development of application containment, improved disk encryption support, integration of TOR (The Onion Router), better user control over diagnostic reporting, more robust VPN routing and applications using system-wide privacy settings. Also on the agenda are changes to control how GNOME devices identify themselves on local networks and the addition of anti-phishing features in GNOME's web browser, Web.

The campaign was inspired by a keynote talk at August's GUADEC, the GNOME user and developer conference, in which Jacob Applebaum of the Tor project asked the developers to consider the idea of integrating support for the non-profit anonymity network, which has over 3,000 relays and 400,000 users, into the GNOME environment.

According to the discussion on desktop-devel-list for the privacy campaign, the GNOME project is also planning an accessibility campaign and preparing a call for proposals. Donations for the privacy campaign are already being accepted with an apparent goal of raising $20,000.

(djwm)