One week. That’s all it took.
Seven days ago, Antifreeze it was a side project sitting on a server with 194 users. Then this community caught it. Two front page stories, hundreds of comments, donations from people I’ve never met, and suddenly 2,400 people across the country have an app on their phones that rings when ICE shows up in their neighborhood.
But I didn’t spend last week celebrating. I used it to make sure that no one can take this away from you.
Because we all saw what happened with ICEBlock. A million users. One call from Pam Bondi. It’s gone. I will not allow that to happen here. And after this week, it’s going to be a hell of a lot harder for anyone to try.
I am meeting with the EFF today
At noon today, I sat down with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
For those who don’t know, the EFF is a heavyweight champion of digital rights. They’ve been fighting government cyberbullying since 1990. They’ve watched the administration’s pressure campaign against ICE tracking devices closely, and they know who we are.
I want to make sure that AntiFreeze is strictly legal. I want to understand what protections are in place for developers to build apps like this. And I want support before anything happens, not after.
I will share what I can from the discussion on our Bluesky
Your donations bought us a way to escape
Something has been keeping me up at night…
AntiFreeze works in the .app domain. Do you know who manages .app domains? Google. The same Google that added ICE tracking apps from the Play Store at a time when the system was dependent on them. Can they kill our area completely? Maybe without a court order. But “probably not” is not a strategy.
So I signed up antifreeze.is.
The .i my domain is from Iceland. It is managed by ISNIC, an Icelandic private company in Reykjavik. Iceland doesn’t care what Pam Bondi thinks. They have some of the strongest digital copyright protections in the world, and the US government has the power to control their networks. Currently, antifreeze.is is the homepage of the site that says:
Bookmark this page. If anything goes wrong with antifreeze.app, that’s where we’ll be.
There is nothing wrong with antifreeze.app. The tool works well. The server is beeping. There is no one coming after us that I know of. This is me planning ahead so that if something happens, 2,400+ people don’t lose their safety net overnight like the millions of ICEBlock users did.
Do this now: open your browser, go to antifreeze.is, and bookmark it. Save it somewhere. Writes to the user of the app. It takes five seconds, and means you’ll always be able to find us.
We have updated the server
The traffic was growing rapidly, so we used donations to upgrade to a web center located in Germany with a private service provider. More RAM, more storage, ready for whatever comes next.
And before anyone asks: no, Germany is not slow. Cloudflare sits in front of everything, so the app loads from any data center near you. If you’re in Chicago, you’re hitting the Chicago server. The only thing that affects Germany is the API calls, and it adds maybe a tenth of a second. You certainly won’t recognize it.
Everything else happens behind the eyes
The Galileo project. I used Cloudflare’s program that provides free DDoS protection for public and private rights projects. If approved, AntiFreeze gets the same protection that major news organizations and human rights organizations use. For free.
PGP and warrant canary. There is now a warrant canary at antifreeze.app/canary.txt that is updated monthly. If it stops renewing, it’s your dead change. Something happened. The PGP key for authentication is at antifreeze.app/pgp.txt.
No Kings travel on Saturday. Many of you said you were bringing AntiFreeze supplies to the parade. If you haven’t printed yours yet:
Both are easy-to-print versions that work on any home printer. No special settings are required. The business card may need to be resized to fit your card stock.
Go back and take a look at what we built in a week
A developing web app that can’t be downloaded from any app store, because it never existed.
Behind Cloudflare’s global CDN, powered by Project Galileo.
It runs on a server in Germany, outside of US jurisdiction.
It has a registered backup location in Iceland, outside US jurisdiction.
Warrant canary live. The PGP key is published. The EFF consultation takes place today.
Last week this was a hobby project. Today it’s the infrastructure that 2,400 people and counting rely on, and no single phone, no single company, and no single point of failure can shut it down.
ICEBlock went down by phone. AntiFreeze is built to be impossible.
What you can do now
Install the device. On Android, visit antifreeze.app in Chrome (or Brave or Edge), tap Install, and enable location and notifications. On iPhone, visit antifreeze.app in Safari, tap Share, then Add to Home Screen, and enable location and notifications.
Bookmark antifreeze.is. Our emergency backup. Just in case.
Come to the No Kings march on Saturday with business cards and posters. Give them, hang them. Even if you’re not walking, print posters and put them up in your area: coffee shops, clothes racks, community boards, anywhere people gather. Every input into the ecosystem makes the network stronger for everyone.
Share this post. AntiFreeze only works if people use it. The more users in your area, the more likely you will receive an alert when needed.
Donate by Credit/Debit or PayPal: https://ko-fi.com/antifreeze
Donate Crypto: https://pay.oxapay.com/19667538
I will give a report after the EFF consultation. Thank you for everything. I’ll be in the comments answering questions, so if you have any concerns about the app, privacy, security, or anything else, ask away!
Lots of Love
— Josh
Bluesky Social
Original Post: I created an ICE tracking app that can’t be pulled from the App Store. Because it never was.
#Update #ICE #Tracking #App #AntiFreeze #harder #harder #track #Heres