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.

As most of you probably already know, the Republic of Haiti has been hit by a catastrophic earthquake. Please donate to the organizations which are trying to help. The online donation has been proven a great success – so good to see the bright side of globalization (speaking of online – it is an interesting example of how offline events can be observed online – an other example being the Google flu-trends). Below you will find a compilation of reputable information sources, which is important, since there are always a lot of scams around important events like this.

Important! Most of the information is rather specific to the USA and most of them presuppose credit-cards. If you live outside of North-America and have PayPal account, I would recommend donating to the Haiti Earthquake Children in Emergency Fund. You can get a list of ways you can donate via PayPal/eBay on their blog.

• Doing the Right Thing from the SANS diary – it gives a couple of very good advices. It also specifically lists the following organizations:
  • CARE
  • The International Red Cross
  • Doctors Without Borders
• If you have a Google Checkout account, you can donate to CARE or UNICEF using it. The Google crisis response webpage also lists a lot of trustworthy organizations which accept your donation and SMS numbers (valid in the USA only!) which can be used for donation. They also offer free calls to Haiti trough Google Voice
• Here are a couple of great tips from the CERIAS blog (written by professor Spafford) to help you avoid being scammed:
  

  • Do not enter any information at a Web page that pops up unexpectedly when you visit some other site.
  • Never click on a Web site address (URL) in e-mail sent to you; it may look official, but most will be pointers to fraud or attack sites.
  • Don’t assume that every Web address returned by a search engine, such as Google or Bing, is a legitimate organization.
  • Do not respond to e-mail requesting donations or making a special offer (such as asking you to hold their assets while Haiti rebuilds).
  • Do not reveal any personal or financial information during a phone call you did not dial yourself.
  • If a friend forwards a URL, phone number or e-mail, don’t trust it until you check its validity. Your friend may have been scammed first.

• A similar article on the Microsoft website: How to avoid online donation scams
• If you are from Canada, here are a couple of resources (via Security Balance):
  
  

  RED CROSS: www.redcross.ca
  WORLD VISION CANADA: www.worldvision.ca
  UNICEF: www.unicef.ca
  SALVATION ARMY: www.salvationarmy.ca
  MÉDECINS SANS FRONTIÈRES: www.msf.ca

• Many community websites also include a suggestion to donate (for example reddit.com or oneforty) and you can be reasonably sure about their recommendation if you’ve been using the site for some time (then again, it never hurts to double-check).

Picture taken from rbrwr’s photostream with permission.