Public Livestream on 14th of April at 8PM CEST and Patreon

Organization
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Originally published at: News - Whonix Forum

Whonix is a project which requires a lot of dedication, passion and time to be properly maintained. Especially Patrick has sacrificed a huge part of his live to making a fail-safe way to use Tor accessible to as many people as possible.

For the last few years, he mainly was able to focus on the tasks required to maintain Whonix thanks to the dedication of individuals supporting Whonix either in the forum, wiki, on Github or on all three, as well as the occasional donations provided by generous donors. However, because of the nature of these donations, it continues to be challenging to focus on long time goals, seeing how it is hard to make extensive plans based on occasional monetary support.

Because of this, over the course of the last few months, we have looked into different ways of obtaining long term funding, either via government programs or by incentivising people to donate on a more regular basis. In the end, we decided to look into the latter, as it would enable us to have an even better communication with our community, wouldn’t in any way compromise the open and rather democratic structure currently in place for support and development and make it possible to give something back to our most generous supporters. It also would keep Whonix in the hands of our great community, instead of trusting a government organisation which may have different goals or requirements and would potentially force us to not act in the best interest of our users, by limiting our ability to implement the features we deem necessary.

To make this possible, we decided to team up with Patreon, a service which enables you to donate a certain amount of money every month. You are able to cancel your regular donation anytime you want and, best of all, will receive certain rewards by us if you decide to donate. These rewards all have the goal of both giving you an incentive to donate a bit to keep Whonix sustainable for the future and furthering the cause behind Whonix in general. You will be able to more directly decide on new features and may gain access to other rewards, like a monthly live stream in which Patrick Schleizer and I, Ego are going to cover certain topics related to Whonix, Tor, anonymity, journalism and cryptography, as well as answer question of Patrons.

Our complete list of rewards:

 

  • $1 Become A Patron
  • $5 Join the Monthly Livestream
  • $10 Priority Support
  • $15 Livestream Chat Access
  • $20 Immortalize yourself by becoming part of the Whonix Installer Source
  • $30 Vote on Features
  • $50 Personal Support
  • $100 Personalized Video Guide
  • $500+ Advertise on Whonix.org
 

Now, I am aware of what some of you may think right now.

Isn't Patreon a service which requires the use of something traceable like a credit card or PayPal and don't they use Cloudflare, the enemy of all Tor users?!
Yes, that is correct. Because of the fact that a lot of Whonix users are rather critical of services using Cloudflare, it was important for us to address this head on. Obviously, we can understand that a lot of users will not be able to use Patreon due to the fact that they require to stay as anonymous as possible. We understand that and will never ask someone who needs to stay anonymous to give up that anonymity, simply so we may get some cash. We also will continue to focus on keeping this subset of our user base, the one that really requires anonymity, as safe as possible.

If you are a user who has no issues with using a service like Patreon, would like to support Whonix and are able to do so, we would be very grateful if you could do so via a monthly donation.

Since it is quite a lot to ask you for money when you aren’t sure whether you will enjoy the rewards, we have decided to make our first monthly Whonix-Livestream open to anyone. It will be broadcasted via Youtube Live which you may access via the Tor Browser Bundle with Whonix and you may ask Patrick and me anything you’d like via OTR.

To join our livestream, simply visit Youtube via this link on Friday, the 14th of April at 8PM Central European Summer Time: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh6htf3E721zcvahGLxFl9w/live

For our American users, that would be 2PM Eastern Time. If you click on the link, there is also a timer to show you when the stream will start.

We hope to see many of you join our stream. If you miss it, you will be able to watch it later on our Youtube Channel were every stream will be publicly available after the fact.

In conclusion, we hope that you will enjoy using Whonix for years to come and would be thankful for any support, no matter how small.

Our Patreon may be found here: https://www.patreon.com/whonix

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Hi @Ego !

Please let me say thank you again for your great work and effort!

The funding page for Whonix (Patreon) says:“The Whonix Team is creating Whonix, the most secure OS”. I am not sure if it is appropriate to claim Whonix as “the most secure OS”.

I understand the relationship between security, anonymity and privacy can be tricky. But do you think that we need a more suitable short definition of Whonix?

Thank you!

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I have to agree with @iry, how about “privacy and security focused OS” ?

Would it be possible to get those rewards via a onetime Donation that would cover a whole Year ?
I don’t like Patreon, I would prefer to Donate via Monero or Bitcoin.

Also what does Vote on Features mean ? Could you please explain it?

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Good day,

I have to very much agree with both of you on this one. The original wording was both a rather strong bit of hyperbole. as well as not entirely correct seeing how a Major part of what makes Whonix truly secure is dependent on the right choice of host OS. In combination with Qubes for example, Whonix has truly the ability to be one of the most secure Environments in General use at the Moment, however if Windows is used, that obviously isn’t the case anymore. I thus changed it to “Whonix, a fail-safe OS for Tor” which is true, no matter what host is employed.

To be entirely honest, this hasn’t been discussed so I’d have to first communicate with @Patrick on that front though it would obviously be a great way for those who (for a variety of reasons) may not use Patreon. I’ll ask.

The way we wanted to realize this was by giving Patreons who are qualified for this tier an somewhat regular vote on a few preselected Focus Points for the developement of Whonix in the future. Meaning, there would be a choice between a variety of Basic developement Goals, like as an example general purpose Usability improvements, Things like the anon-connection wizard, etc. However, since currently, we don’t have that many active Patreons, prevering such an election process with only one or two People participating over the community on the Forum is as far as I am concerned counterproductive.

Have a nice day,

Ego

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What would you (or Patrick) consider long term goals?

Of course this may potentially happen, but only if you sign something without actually reading it before. Usually you plan what the money will be used for. If you don’t like to implement X because it may cause significant problems for other users just don’t sign anything. But I don’t see any reason to exclude this option per se. What if X would also be a benefit other users? Did you also consider some NGO’s ? Maybe some other options like crowdfunding?

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It’s a good question. From the outside perspective, it’s easily missed how much work it is to maintain Whonix. I wonder how we could be more transparent about communicating this. It’s all on our task tracker and github, visible for anyone, but not easily known my visitors of whonix.org without digging.

Usage of money:

  • ideally, paying people full time to work on Whonix

Very rough roadmap:

Then release that as Whonix 14. Apart from that there is a ton of work that no one in the Tor ecosystem is currently tackling. Devastating issues such as keystroke deanonymization and stylometry just to name a few. A lot developer manpower is required to fix these. And even non-developer positions would be worth filling - such as explaining what I am explaining now, to advertise these issues more so they can be actually get fixed.

patreon is crowdfunding.

1 Like