This member story was featured in the 2016 APC Annual Report, as part of our work on use and development.
2016 was a busy and productive year for eQualit.ie, with complex global political shifts, continuous assaults on critical internet infrastructure and software libraries that provide for network privacy, and a growing climate of online censorship spurring our drive on several important projects.
Deflect, the flagship service that protects websites from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, saw an influx of new clients signing up for free mitigation services.
We launched a new infrastructure for capturing and analysing malicious behaviour on the network, an effort that is called Deflect Labs, examining sizeable and repeated attacks on the websites of organisations like the BDS Movement and Black Lives Matter to understand the nature of these attacks and how best to defend against them.
In addition, after two years of writing mathematics and code and a battery of tests, eQualit.ie released the world’s first free/libre end-to-end secure, synchronous protocol for group chat, (n+1)sec, with support from the Open Technology Fund. Thanks to the (n+1)sec project, it will be possible to have secure group chat on various messaging systems, like Jabber/XMPP or IRC. We also wrote a dogfooding client for Pidgin and you can try it out too!
As always, eQualit.ie keeps a focus on its mission to “promote and defend fundamental freedoms and human rights, including the free flow of information online.” Whether through free/libre and open source tools for digital security, conference presentations or security trainings, eQualit.ie encourages all human rights defenders to stay connected and stay empowered.
Image: Photo: Richard King presenting Deflect at Freedom Online Conference in San José, Costa Rica, October 2016.