Supporting the Open Rights Group
Early in 2023, we started providing sponsored hosting to the Open Rights Group (ORG), in order to support their campaign for digital rights in the UK. Our motivation for sponsoring them is simple: we require security in order to provide our services, and our encryption requirements have only increased since we last mocked the government’s plans to ban it. The current government’s latest efforts on this front underline the ongoing importance of the ORG’s work.
Encrypted data can only be accessed by the holder of the key. This locks out everyone else – including the government. Successive governments keep trying for a magical solution which gives them, and only them, access too, despite the fact that such an approach only serves to undermine the security of the legitimate, everyday uses of encryption. It turns out that when faced with implementing the impossible, providers will simply turn off security entirely, as Apple have just done by disabling Advanced Data Protection for UK and only UK users.
We continue to support the Open Rights Group and their work to try and allow UK users to secure their own data. Our sponsored services provide public facing servers for the ORG website, the @openrightsgroup@social.openrightsgroup.org fediverse presence and the blocked.org.uk service which tracks which sites have been blocked by major UK ISPs. We also host internal Nextcloud, Collabora Office, Matrix and email services.