At this point in my life I’m lucky enough that I have some expendable income. So here are a couple of organizations / individuals I donated to recently – maybe this will inspire you dear reader to also donate some – if you have the means to do so:

• Firefox extensions:
  • A good source for people / projects / organizations to support is people / projects / organizations I use daily. So I checked about:addons and made some donations to the following:
  • Cookie Auto Delete (donation link) – reduce the amount of tracking websites are able to do.
  • NoScript (donation link) – a good security suite, and hopefully a way to encourage developers to not use JavaScript for basic features that are already available with HTML. Using basic HTML where it suffices has many, many advantages (more performant, uses less battery, more accessible for screen readers, easier to crawl and thus find by people, etc). That said, NoScript is a tool I would only recommend advanced users.
  • SponsorBlock (donation link) – many ethical discussion here to be had about “peddling unverified claims about random products” vs. “a man has to eat”. Maybe another time.
  • Decentraleyes (donation link) – Reduces tracking potential (and maybe also speeds up websites by keeping the files locally)
  • Some more meta-level thoughts about Firefox and extensions:
    • it’s great that Firefox exists. Then again, the organization itself seems to be captured at the moment who want to push all kinds of different agenda and put the mission of an independent, trustworthy browser at risk. Also, I’m not donating to them, because apparently their CEOs argument for their compensation was “but look how much all other CEOs are making” :(.
    • It’s surprising / worrying / inspiring how these great extensions are run by a very small amount (sometimes a single) developer.
• WinRAR – not strictly a donation, but after many years of using it directly / indirectly, I purchased a license. I started using RAR back in the DOS days, where I used to marvel at their advanced user interface, features (such as splitting the archive into parts to fit on floppies!) and great compression ratio (compared to PkZIP, ARJ, LZH and the likes).
  
  (image source: archive.org)
• exiftool.org – a great piece of software whether you want to add metadata (for better organizing your collection for example) or remove it (so that random people can’t physically find me)
• IrfanView – a great little piece of software for image viewing / batch manipulation (such as resizing, format conversion, etc) developed by a single developer. Also, used the “plugin” concept, which I found (and still find) really cool. Just like in Winamp, foobar2000, FAR manager, Win(Total)Commander, etc.
• publicdomainreview.org – this site comes up on HackerNews from time to time, most recently with their “What Will Enter the Public Domain in 2025?“. I’m staunchly convinced that the current copyright regime is largely a power play to enrich the rich and does very little to actually “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts”. So, I always celebrate when more things go into the public domain.

Somewhat related: my employer also offers a generous gift-matching program (so, anything I donate is doubled up to $10k per year – for certain “verified” organizations), and so I donate monthly to these fine organizations:

• fsfe – aka. the Free Software Foundation Europe
• Signal Technology Foundation
• the Freenet project
• the Document Foundation
• debian.ch
• Software Freedom Conservancy
• Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Internet Archive

And a bunch of other, non-technology charities that help different groups of people in need.

There are also some projects I would have liked to donate to, but couldn’t figure out how:

• 7-Zip – a great archiver (even though there are some controversies around the project lead). It was nice having to legal solution, instead relying on cracked versions of WinRAR. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a way to donate to them (I only found an outdated reference showing that it was possible at one point).
• uBlock origin – most marketing by definition is a scam (because, if the product was useful, people would actually be looking for it). And frequently it’s a much more direct scam (as in non working products, products that can actually hurt you or rouses to take your money). Ad-blocking is a must in todays world.
• Rufus – for easily creating bootable USB sticks. The author doesn’t take donations, but recommends donating to the FSF. I already donate to fsfe (see above), hopefully that counts
• Dos Navigator – after Norton/Volcov commander, DN was amazing! And I still haven’t figured out how they did some of their screensavers! (here is a recording of several of the screensavers, but it’s missing the one that I’m thinking of – the red/green/blue cylinders with gradients that mix between themselves and with the foreground – all this on a VGA card). Turns out you DN is freeware today!
• FAR Manager – is the evolution of DN for the Windows and beyond era. Long file name support! And plugins! And all of this for free and open source.

Sadly it seems like the maintainer might have passed sometime last year (or is at least gravely ill). From the page:

Folks … sorry for the delay (again) in getting out an update … just got out of the Hospital … I now have some severe health issues to deal with (complete Kidney failure … need a Kidney transplant) plus another operation … large needles inserted into my spine …however I will try to better maintain the MVPS HOSTS file. Well just got back from Hospital again (excessive water in lungs)

If you could … please consider a donation. Thanks to all that contributed … every little bit helps.

https://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm (archive.org link)

So, I donated – may it be of some use to them / their family! And I encourage to do the same if you benefited from this great file!

As for alternatives, there are several good ones:

• I now use nextdns.io on the machines/mobile devices I maintain
• pi-hole is also an alternative
• Specifically for Windows, HostsMan is a good software to manage/update hosts files
• Browser plugins like uBlockOrigin are also very useful

For the last decade it has been the case – and continues to be the case in my opinion – that ad/tracker blocking is the single most effective way to keep devices from being infected with all kinds of malware (and, it generally makes web browsing faster!)

Cluj-Napoca is European Youth Capital 2015. Congratulation to everyone involved!

Internet is Freedom – a speech given by Lawrence Lessig at the Italian Parlament – via the Security4All blog:

PBS: Copyright Criminals – while the video is not online, you can watch the trailer and listen to some remixes inspired by it which are under a CC license.

And just as a bonus: a cynical video about filtering the Internet – via the IT Law in Ireland blog:

Update:

The History of Copyright Law – via the laughing squid:

TED Johanna Blakley: Lessons from fashion’s free culture

Update: it seems that I already posted the last video – admittedly I’m becoming senile with the advance of the years