Riseup.net, the non-profit collective which has been providing dissidents a way to encrypt their communications since 1999, without revealing your location or logging your IP address, is running out of money:
The news is not good
We hate to be bad news birds, but we need to tell you that Riseup will run out of money next month. We had a number of unexpected hardware failures, lower-than-expected regular donations, and a record year of new Riseup users which puts more financial pressure on us than ever before.
We need your help to keep things going this year, so we are starting a campaign to ask Riseup users to give us just one dollar!
Can you give us a dollar? There are a lot of easy ways to do it: https://riseup.net/donate
It seems that Riseup.net saw a boom in new users in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations, but has not managed to match that growth with sufficient regular donations.
If Riseup.net shuts down, that also means the end for 150,000 email accounts and over 18,000 mailing lists that depend on the service for their privacy and security.
It would be sad to see Riseup.net close its doors. I hope people who value online liberty will support this noble cause.
(Yes, I already donated.)
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Done, thanks Graham!
I hadn't heard of riseup before, so am not a user but it looks interesting.
I wonder, since the us go v would prefer this service to be unavailable they might be responsible for increase of non donating users.
No conspiracy, just tons of competition since Snowden. Look at the Guardian Project, and all the start ups. I've never heard of this group, but now will look into it. Thanks Graham.
Riseup was the go-to email service. Now there are plenty of other rival services out there including: Posteo, Tutanota, ProtonMail and VFEmail which all offer similar services (and in some cases, more secure).
What is their annual operating cost?