Announcing the News Initiative, which is Google's wide-ranging objectives to empower quality journalism in the digital age and fighting the spread of fake news, there's also Outline.
Built by Alphabet incubator Jigsaw (formerly Google Ideas), Outline aims to provide safer internet access for news organizations and their staffs. It's an open-source virtual private network (VPN) where users can host their own server for free.
Focusing on human rights, Outline is marketed as a tool to help journalists to securely connect to their offices, sources, media outlets, and the rest of the open internet from anywhere.
And anywhere here includes places within the borders of countries that have internet censors in place.
Initially, Outline is available for users using Android, Windows, Chrome version 64 and newer.
Outline is essentially a corporate VPN with strong encryption.
Jigsaw said that the VPN service is easy to set up. Within minutes, users can install security updates automatically, and grants users the control over who else can access the newly created VPN. People can join by either accepting an invite or entering the key manually.
The works involve Outline Manager, where a key can be generated before sharing with those who need access.
Jigsaw promises security where users won't have to worry about having their data leaked. This is because Outline does not log any web traffic, and users have complete control over how many people are on their server, and the whole thing is easy to use and maintain.
The project is open source, but has been audited by Radically Open Security to verify that it's safe.
Users can either host Outline on their own server, or set one up to work with cloud-based solutions like Google Cloud Engine, Amazon EC2 and others.
In a blog post, Santiago Andrigo, Jigsaw Product Manager explained about Outline's features.
He said that while there are indeed many third-party services on the internet, but with Outline, there is no chance of anyone spying on user's data. While people generally use VPNs to access to the Internet, they are not always secure. said Andrigo.
"Most VPNs require you to trust a third-party organization with your 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."
It’s worth noting that Dan Guido, a security researcher at a New York-based security firm Trail of Bits, launched AlgoVPN, an open-source VPN tool back in 2016.
Jigsaw's Outline and AlgoVPN are indeed similar.
He claims that Jigsaw copied his work. He said that Google is "good at plagiarizing my work. I released @AlgoVPN, an open-source, self-hosted VPN solution, in 2016. I find it hard to believe @Jigsaw was unaware since I’ve met their engineers more than once."