Introducing Outline: Making It Safer To Break The News
Journalists need safe access to information to research issues, communicate with sources, and report the news. That’s why today we’re announcing the release of Outline, a new open source tool that lets news organizations provide their network safer access to the open internet.
Outline makes it easy for news organizations to set up a corporate virtual private network (VPN) on their own server to more safely connect to the internet and keep their communications private. Millions of people around the world already use VPNs to get access to important information, but VPNs aren’t always reliable or safe. Most VPNs require you to trust a third party organization with you data, which means you’re not always sure who’s running the servers and providing your access to the internet. Some VPNs don’t even use encryption.
Outline gives you control over your privacy by letting you operate your own server. And Outline never logs your web traffic. We made it possible to set up Outline on any cloud provider or on your own infrastructure so you can fully own and operate your own VPN and don’t have to trust a VPN operator with your data.
Outline uses strong encryption to help keep your communications private. (Forgive us why we geek out a bit here.) Outline supports modern AEAD 256-bit cipher encryption and is resistant to probing and stronger against protocol fingerprinting, which makes it significantly harder to block by modern deep-packet-inspection software.
Outline servers automatically update with the latest security settings, so you don’t have to worry about keeping software up-to-date. And don’t take our word for it — Outline is completely open source and was audited by Radically Open Security, a nonprofit cybersecurity firm.
Finally, we made Outline easy to set up and manage. Organizations can set up their own server in just a few minutes — no tech savvy required. With Outline Manager you can create a server and share access with unlimited accounts. Use your own infrastructure or a cloud provider, many of which offer plans that start around $5 USD per month.
Much of Jigsaw’s work involves defending news organizations from digital threats that try to block access to information. We created Outline because news organizations need reliable, private internet access to make information accessible and meaningful for their readers. That’s a mission we share with the news industry. And a more informed world starts with access to information.
Visit GetOutline.org to get started.
— Santiago Andrigo, Jigsaw Product Manager
Note: Outline is still an early stage product, and we’ll release versions for other platforms soon. Follow us on Medium and Reddit for updates.
