Project Galileo: the view from the front lines

Growing up in the age of technology has made it too easy for me to take the presence of the Internet for granted. It’s hard to imagine not being able to go online and connect with anyone in the world, whether I’m speaking with family members or following activists planning global rallies in support of a common cause. I find that as I forget the wonder of being connected, I become jaded. I imagine that many of you reading this blog feel the same way. I doubt you have gone a month, or even a week, this year without considering that the world might be better off without the Internet, or without parts of the Internet, or that your life would be better with a digital cleanse. Project Galileo is my antidote. For every person online who abuses their anonymity, there is an organization that literally could not fulfill their purpose without it. And they are doing amazing work.

Working with Participants

As program manager for Project Galileo, Cloudflare’s initiative to provide free services to vulnerable voices on the Internet, a large portion of my time is spent interacting with the project’s participants and partners. This includes a variety of Continue reading

Happy Birthday to the World Wide Web!

Today, March 12th 2019, marks the 30th birthday of the World Wide Web! Cloudflare is helping to celebrate in coordination with the Web Foundation, as part of a 30 hour commemoration of the many ways in which the Web has changed our lives. As we post this blog, Sir Tim Berners Lee is kicking off his journey of the web at CERN, where he wrote the first web browser.

The Web Foundation (@webfoundation) is organizing a Twitter timeline of the web, where each hour corresponds to a year starting now with 1989 at 00:00PT/ 08:00 CET. We (@cloudflare) will be tweeting out milestones in our history and the web’s history, as well as some fun infographics. We hope you will follow the journey on Twitter and contribute your own memories and thoughts to the timeline by tweeting and using #Web30 #ForTheWeb. Celebrate with us and support the Web!

Athenian Project Turns One: Are Election Websites Safer?

One year ago, Cloudflare launched the Athenian Project to provide free Enterprise-level service to election and voter registration websites run by state and local governments in the United States. Through this project, we have helped over 100 entities in 24 states protect their websites from denial of service attacks, SQL injection, and other malicious efforts aimed at undermining the integrity of their elections. With the end of the year approaching, and the November 6th US midterm elections behind us, we wanted to look back at the project and what we have learned as we move towards 2020.

US Midterm Election Day

The morning of November 6th was full of anticipation for the Athenian Project team with the policy, engineering and support teams ready as polls opened in the East. Early in the day, we were notified by our partner at the CDT that some elections websites were experiencing downtime. Mobilizing to help these groups, we reached out to the website administrators and, through the course of the day, on-boarded over 30 new county-level websites to the Athenian Project and helped them manage the unpredictably large amounts of legitimate traffic.

This last-minute effort would not have been possible without the help Continue reading