If you make a donation to Tor this #GivingTuesday, you will help the Tor network team:
1) Improve the security of the Tor network. We've been looking at new designs from the research world for better padding schemes and improved cryptography. blog.torproject.org/giving-tuesday…
2) Scale the Tor network to support all who need it. As more people choose to protect their privacy, we need to make sure that Tor can handle the load -- but we'll have to make changes in the software's architecture to do so.
3) Develop Tor right. Development isn't just about writing new features: it's about writing code that is clean, correct, maintainable, and sustainable.
4) Most of all, you help us respond flexibly to unexpected events and issues. Despite our plans, we don't know what technological privacy challenges we'll face in 2020. Your donation can give us the ability to focus on breaking events w/o stalling progress on other development.
And you don't just help the network team. You help fund all of our work to protect privacy and freedom online and impact millions of people worldwide.
Starting this month, we're running a campaign to increase the number of Snowflake proxies run by volunteers. Snowflake is a new way to defeat internet censorship bundled in Tor Browser Alpha. You can help users in censored countries to connect to Tor by running a Snowflake proxy!
For Snowflake volunteers: If you use Firefox, Brave, or Chrome, our Snowflake extension turns your browser into a proxy that connects Tor users in censored regions to the Tor network.
Note: you should not run more than one snowflake in the same network. support.torproject.org/censorship/how…
For Snowflake users: Tor users can try it in Tor Browser Alpha (Windows, macOS, Linux), or for iOS, Onion Browser. Learn more how to enable it in Tor Browser Alpha: support.torproject.org/censorship/how…
NEW: We've published a research report of OTF Fellow Babatunde Okunoye titled, "Censored continent: understanding the use of tools during Information controls in Africa: Nigeria, Cameroon, Uganda, and Zimbabwe as case studies."
The research was conducted between 2019-2020, and answers three questions: 1) What are the tools used during Internet censorship events in Africa? 2) How and why are they used? 3) What are the usability challenges encountered by users of these tools?
Among the 33 interviewees in Cameroon, Nigeria, Uganda, and Zimbabwe, about half (17) had 2 or more circumvention tools on their devices. Those who had more than one tool installed on their devices switched from one tool to another depending on which particular tool worked best.
Suffering from onion service DoS? Here is a thread on how we would like to fix the problem for good. 🧵 (1/8)
Over the past few years, Tor developers have read days of network logs trying to understand and fix the DoS threat. Because of our protocol's inherent asymmetric nature, there is no easy fix, and a more fundamental approach is needed to address it. (2/8)
The idea is that clients need to include more information in their connection requests, so the onion service can prioritize which requests it responds to. (3/8)
In May and June 2020 we found and removed a group of Tor exit relays that were messing with exit traffic. They left almost all exit traffic alone, and we don't know whether any users were successfully attacked. blog.torproject.org/bad-exit-relay…
The attacker intercepted HTTP connections to a small number of cryptocurrency exchange websites. This situation is a good reminder that HTTP requests are unencrypted and unauthenticated, and thus are still prone to attack.
There are two pieces to mitigating this particular attack. The first piece involves steps that users and websites can do to make themselves safer. The second piece is about identifying and protecting against relays that try to undermine the security of the Tor network.
🔴We're live on the @rightscon digital stage for the panel 'The case for privacy by design: privacy law shortcomings and the role of privacy tools' with @FreedomofPress and @EFF.
"Privacy by design means that the choice is meaningful in the way that is presented for the user," - @htsuka
"I'm really happy that the narrative around privacy has changed. In 2013, people said, 'I don't need privacy, I have nothing to hide...' People are learning that privacy is what defines the human beings they are." - @Isa
Many important global news organizations use onion services to offer .onion versions of their sites and give their users the privacy, security, and censorship circumvention benefits of Tor.
ProPublica (@propublica) launched their onion service in 2016. "Readers use our interactive databases to see data that reveals a lot about themselves... Our readers should never need to worry that somebody else is watching what they’re doing on our site." propublica.org/nerds/a-more-s…
BBC (@BBC) added their onion site in 2019. Governments in China, Iran, and Vietnam have tried to block access to BBC's website, and their onion service makes it possible for users to more easily and safely circumvent these blocks. npr.org/2019/10/24/773…