VPN Community Initiative Village 2022

VPN Village Description

IFF’s virtual VPN Village took place this Fall. The Village, a combination of private and public events, was hosted with ARTICLE 19’s Team Digital, and with the support of the following partners: The Calyx Institute, TunnelBear, and NordVPN, and various other allies.

VPNs (Virtual Private Network) are becoming the go-to tools for users looking to protect themselves from surveillance or to circumvent censorship. They are an essential tool for human rights defenders and journalists. However, it is often hard to choose a reliable and trustworthy VPN from the large market that includes expensive and shady providers. The VPN Village will cultivated conversations for those who are researching, distributing, or using VPNs. Workshops and trainings were centered on addressing the impact of VPNs on the Internet Freedom community, both the good and bad. The Village made space for civil society, developers, activists, and VPN companies to come together to discuss:

• The use of VPNs as part of a censorship-resilient community
• Strengths, vulnerabilities and flaws inherent in VPNs, and understanding how they impact vulnerable or marginalized populations
• Best practices and standards in the promotion and use of VPNs
• Industry standards among enterprise and community-ran VPN instances

Workshops & Events

Running a Tor Relay and a Snowflake (Workshop)

Date: Tuesday, November 28, 2022
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Presenters: Gus (Tor Project)

Threat Modeling and VPNs (Talk and Q&A)

Date: Wednesday, November 29, 2022
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Getting Started with Outline: Helping your friends and family access the Open Internet (Workshop)

Date: Tuesday, December 6, 2022
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[daniellacos.se/only Daniel LaCosse]: Daniel LaCosse is an engineer on the Outline Team who's previous work includes a TEDx talk on the logic of storytelling and building the Vine web player from scratch (RIP). He spends his free time improvising board games and trying to convince random strangers they should only be building their apps on web.

Vinicius Fortuna: Vinicius Fortuna is the engineering lead of the team at Jigsaw that protects people’s ability to participate in the global internet. He has led the team through initiatives to prevent censorship via stronger internet standards and platforms; mitigate censorship via circumvention tools such as the Outline VPN and Intra; and expose censorship via measurements and data analysis.

How to Critically Choose a VPN (Talk and Q&A)

Date: Wednesday, December 7, 2022
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Everything You Wanted to Know about VPNs, but Were Afraid to Ask (Glitter Meetup)

Date: Thursday, December 8, 2022
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