Awards

The selected projects within the August 2013 Call are:

• PPSPP/Swirl

  The explosion in peer-to-peer traffic today (in many areas in the world a majority of traffic) without a backing standard has lead to multiple incompatible designs, with varying quality and features. Content creators, distributors, consumers and ISPs are equally disadvantaged with the status quo, including disparate and incompatible implementations. Swirl has the ambitious goal to enable everyone to create, distribute, and consume static and streaming secure content from anywhere, of any size, via browser, smartphone/tablet, via home networks or commercial CDNs and routers, using open protocols, software, and an open development approach. SWIRL's Project lead Dave Cottlehuber (Austria) is an active member of the Peer-to-Peer Streaming Protocol (PPSP) working group and aims at a fully compliant implementation of the upcoming PPSPP standard.

  More about Swirl Project (source code)

• The Unhosted project

  Unhosted is an ambitious project led by Michiel B. de Jong (TR) that aims to allow a separation of data storage and services within the cloud. The project works on both working tools, libraries and on standardisation of the remoteStorage protocol. Unhosted has received prior funding from NLnet. In this project they will add extensible support for "legacy" and hosted accounts to remotestorage.js, improve documentation, rewrite some core modules, work on portable apps, and design and implement a shared notification mechanism in remoteStorage.js.

  More about Unhosted

• Sockethub

  Sockethub is a polyglot (speaking many different protocols and APIs) messaging service for social and other interactive messaging applications. It assists web app developers by providing server-independent, server-side functionality - which gives the application greater autonomy. It can be used as a tool for many different types of applications, large and small. In this auxiliary project lead developer Nick Jennings (CZ) will work on security features and on integration between Sockethub and remoteStorage.

  More about Sockethub

• Twisted Names EDNS(0) and DNSSEC Client Support

  Domain names are vital to the way we use the internet, as businesses, public institutions and private individuals. While the original system of resolving domain names was very robust and has made tremendous innovation possible, it was also found to be open to serious abuse. DNSSEC provides a cryptographic seal of authenticity that gives real proof of the validity of the domain name you use when you visit a website, chat or send an email. Through its dedicated DNSSEC fund NLnet aims to enable regular end users to profit from end-to-end DNSSEC verification and important security measures such as DANE.

  Twisted is an event-driven networking engine written in Python and licensed under the open source MIT license. This project led by Twisted core committer Richard Wall (UK) will enable hardening of security in all of the core Twisted networking components, , including full DNSSEC verification and DANE. These will also become easily available to hundreds of other projects that are built on top of Twisted.

  More about Twisted Names EDNS(0) and DNSSEC Client Support

• SW4RTZSH13LD

  SW4RTZSH13LD is not a pure technology project but is aimed to create an interactive experience to help scale awareness about the issue of information freedom and the importance of the open intenet. It combines fiction, non-fiction and user participation in a transmedia adventure for Internet freedom. It tells the stories of hactivists like Aaron Swartz and Edward Snowden through the eyes of a fictional character called Roan Warsatz; better known as SW4RTZSH13LD on the web. Triggered by the self chosen death of Aaron Swartz and inspired by his ideology, Roan Warsatz not only sets out to discover what happened to Swartz but also digs deeper into the importance of copyright reform, information access, and Internet freedom. SW4RTZSH14LD will become a personalized interactive storytelling experience that is unique for each user. NLnet will contribute funding to one or more hackathons for the project.