Covid-19’s impact on Tor

https://blog.torproject.org/covid19-impact-tor

by netsec_burn • 6 years ago

302 193 6 years ago

blog.torproject.org

anigbrowl7• 6 years ago

Why isn't there a public open-source fund to finance open projects (ie one to which the donors have no clue or control where the funds will eventually go; they're disbursed on the basis of how widely something is used)?

burrows4• 6 years ago

What does “public” mean in this context?

And if you want this thing, why don’t you make it?

samatman2• 6 years ago

Everyone knows that there's a huge gap between wanting something to exist, and wanting something to exist, while having the expertise, time, resources, and will, to bring it into existence.

Since you know this as well as I do, I want to ask: what is your motive in asking this question?

anigbrowl7• 6 years ago

Public means non-profit and wholly transparent, explicitly dedicated to the creation and expansion of a software commons. It infuriates me that people who work on important projects like numpy or Tor which are very widely used have trouble paying the bills and keeping a roof over their head.

I don't make it because I don't work in the software industry and don't have access to large social or financial capital networks. That sounds a bit like asking why someone who proposes a public policy idea doesn't just run for President.

jzb2• 6 years ago

How many people or organizations are likely to donate to a random project they’ve no idea if it’s something they use or care about?

anigbrowl7• 6 years ago

Promoting free software in general means giving up that kind of micromanagement/ control maximization.

EamonnMR• 6 years ago

https://my.fsf.org/donate/

https://sfconservancy.org/donate/

https://www.apache.org/foundation/contributing.html

https://opensource.org/donate

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/donate/

anigbrowl7• 6 years ago

The FSF's total assets are less than $2m. Apache's under $5m. I mean something with billion $ capitalization instead of peanuts.

fsflover• 6 years ago

https://opencollective.com/

chrisco255• 6 years ago

See Gitcoin: https://gitcoin.co/landing

anigbrowl7• 6 years ago

This looks promising, thanks!

throwaway092837• 6 years ago

Indeed donations are far, far from enough.

GPS, GSM, fiber optics, Internet, touchscreens, semiconductors, satellites, most of chemistry and aviation - all were researched and developed using taxpayer money.

And it took billions.

Now all public R&D is being destroyed and yet FLOSS fits exactly in the category.

We desperately need large, global, R&D funding not some people throwing some bucks at patreon.

justicezyx• 6 years ago

What's the founding source of Tor project?

I thought people would be more willing to support them in current situations. Assuming they are on some crowd sourced funding sources.

bigiain• 6 years ago

DARPA, National Science Foundation, and Craigslist - amongst others...

https://www.zdnet.com/article/half-of-the-tor-projects-fundi... (2017 numbers article)

https://www.torproject.org/about/sponsors/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tor_Project#Funding

(And people wonder why I'm stocking up on tinfoil millinery supplies...)

jzb2• 6 years ago

I’m sorry to hear this, also surprised. Is the funding for Tor going to be so immediately affected they had to cut staff without a public appeal or anything?

whoisjuan• 6 years ago

It can totally happen. Funding commitments are gone fast when a crisis hits. People start cutting costs and start trying to find ways to reduce expenses. Giving away money it's definitely a bad idea during an economic crisis, so non-profits are hit hard.

Exhibit from the 2009 Financial Crisis: https://publish.illinois.edu/illinoisblj/2009/09/20/the-impa...

A good recent article on the topic: https://www.philanthropy.com/article/As-Coronavirus-Threat/2...

mc324• 6 years ago

This got me to think about the ACLU and what they are doing.

I see some issues about accommodating justice and other issues affected by the pandemic and the intersection with liberties... it's more about looking at the compounding effect than protecting against fundamental change and fundamental threats to civil rights.

But I don’t see any take on any measures governments have taken to kerb civil rights in the time of the pandemic as well as talk about tracking and contact tracing. Also kerbs on the right to assembly and to go out and about, etc.

Yes this would abut against the fight against the disease, but that’s not their job. They usually don’t contextualize liberties. But here they seem silent and it’s a bit puzzling.

SpicyLemonZest6• 6 years ago

The ACLU has largely transitioned away from civil rights absolutism towards progressive advocacy. They haven't entirely tossed it out the door, and still sometimes defend the civil rights of non-progressive groups, but the modern ACLU definitely feels it's important to contextualize liberties.

rootusrootus• 6 years ago

Agreed, they have significantly changed over even just the last few years. It makes me a little sad, because we have plenty of progressive advocacy groups, and I appreciated the ACLU trying to be more focused.

mc324• 6 years ago

It seems you’re right and it’s a shame that in this time when a few governments are taking advantage of the situation they don’t have their ears perked and tuned to ensure governments (local, state, fed) aren’t going overboard, impinging rights, or looking to erode them. I mean this affects the whole US constituency.

geofft6• 6 years ago

You mentioned Milo downthread, but I'll give another counterexample: the ACLU sued the city of Charlottesville when they said they'd only permit Unite the Right to happen at the larger McIntire Park on safety grounds. As a result of the lawsuit, the rally happened at the much smaller and busier Lee Park.

(Personally, that's why I no longer support the ACLU - this wasn't analogous to the Illinois Nazis case, and as everyone expected, violence happened and someone died. I felt like the ACLU had let their focus on civil rights absolutism drive them to defending someone whose civil rights weren't actually under threat instead of spending their resources on actual ongoing threats to civil rights.)

goodrubyist• 6 years ago

Woah, took me some time to digest this -- "contextualize liberties" must be the most Orwellian phrase in existence, only thing that might come close is another phrase you used, "civil rights absolutism."

lph• 6 years ago

...which could also be explained by progressive groups being the target of more repression lately than conservative groups.

DeathArrow4• 6 years ago

There's still EFF left to fight for civil rights, although EFF has a much more limited scope.

bsder• 6 years ago

But I don’t see any take on any measures governments have taken to kerb civil rights in the time of the pandemic

Part of it is that I expect that the ACLU doesn't really want to take on cases that are simply going to be moot once the state of emergency ends. I expect that their ears will perk up a little more about things that don't go back to "normal" once everything is done with.

And part of it is probably not wanting court cases to actually go through the courts unless they are sure they can win. If you send a case through to the Supreme Court right now, you may lose and set a really bad precedent.

The ACLU is likely better off fighting by lobbying and getting laws passed rather than using the courts right now.

mc324• 6 years ago

I'm not saying everything ends up being like the Patriot Act, but sometimes they do and once they get enacted they like hanging on way past their due date --sometimes they don't even sunset at all.

3ygun• 6 years ago

I follow on Twitter and have seen a lot about prisoner/immigrant advocacy (probably because of my Twitter bubble/liking habbits). But re-looking seems like a good mix of voting rights and medical access mixed in https://twitter.com/ACLU/

jdp23• 6 years ago

Stay-Home Orders: Your Rights During the COVID-19 Pandemic (ACLU-Texas): https://www.aclutx.org/en/know-your-rights/stay-home-orders-...

How to Think About the Right to Privacy and Using Location Data to Fight COVID-19 (by Jay Stanley of the ACLU) : https://www.justsecurity.org/69444/how-to-think-about-the-ri...

Apple and Google Announced a Coronavirus Tracking System. How Worried Should We Be?: https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/apple-and-googl...

ACLU sues federal agencies seeking records of facial-recognition use at airports and U.S. border: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/03/12/aclu-su...

specialist4• 6 years ago

What should they be working on?

Contact your local affiliate and tell them.

"The ACLU" isn't one homogeneous entity. I've spoken with my locals about privacy and voting rights. Naive me thought I'd have ready allies.

Nope.

Lefties are all over the place. Agreement on one issue is no predictor for any other issues. First persuade others to acknowledge a problem. Then get commitments of effort, support. Then forge a consensus around an action plan. Be very wary of kindly seeming people who are actively working against you.getting everyone to agree to the same set of reforms is even more work.

Worse of all, getting momentum is very hard. Because your coalition will dissolve the moment any change is enacted (if not earlier). Because no one will agree on the next steps.

Rinse, lather, repeat.

Policy and coalition building is a lot of work. Maybe avoid my mistake of burning out too soon. Pace yourself for a marathon.

Good luck.

specialist4• 6 years ago

Hysterical.

tastroder• 6 years ago

as well as talk about tracking and contact tracing.

Uh, they published a full white paper on this outlining their views: https://www.aclu.org/report/aclu-white-paper-principles-tech...

cbsks2• 6 years ago

I’m confused by this... why are layoffs happening so suddenly? Did they recently lose some large corporate sponsors? How many donations have been cut off over the last few months? Do they not have money in the bank?

From my perspective it looks like they have had ongoing financial problems, and are using this as a convenient scapegoat to cut expenses.

baby• 6 years ago

It doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing. Imagine if your company was going through a financially difficult time, and firing becomes the only path forward. This can greatly impact the team's moral and trust in management. Using the crisis as a scapegoat makes it easier to accept the event.

cbsks2• 6 years ago

I’m not saying that it is necessarily a bad thing, just that blaming a few months of decreased donations for laying off 37% of your employees doesn’t pass my sniff test.

Why not state the real reason?

Thorrez5• 6 years ago

On the other hand if you're lying about the real reason that can cause distrust among employees and hurt morale. (Not to mention I consider it unethical.)

Renaud2• 6 years ago

They are too dependent on government sponsorship. 80% of their funding comes from the US government in some shape.

I would imagine that a project of that importance deserves to be able to be self-sufficient. A US$2M budget/year is not that much, (m|b)illionaires making their money from the Internet could easily sponsor the project.

Better yet, having grass-root sponsorship is even more important. Maybe they need marketing help more than anything else?

mhuffman• 6 years ago

There is no tech company that is going to sponsor a browser that makes it harder for them to track customers.

Renaud2• 6 years ago

Craigslist is a sponsor, so not all tech companies think that way.

freepor• 6 years ago

Companies with network effects benefit from having literally everyone on the platform, so you don’t need to go to a competitor to communicate with any particular person. That’s why Facebook has a Tor endpoint, so that people in repressive environments can still use it and add to the network effect. The downside is that Tor support does enable harassment on the platform.

maallooc2• 6 years ago

They are trying their best to diversify their donation sources.

justnotworthit2• 6 years ago

I work on a project depended upon and repeatedly promoted by Snowden (tweets) and less-than-public-figures-who-lives-depend-on-it (pastebins).

We gave up writing grant proposals. After repeatedly pouring hours into crafting proposals exactly as specified, the big one (no plural) OTF (.gov funding) has never responded. The smaller, more informal ones aren't interested as well (no clue why).

What little OTF money there is goes to the same projects, written by the same grant writers. We're told by insiders that we need connections, need to hire those writers, and we're told we need a sexier story.

We can't fund a modest income for the lead developer (approaching nearly a decade). He lives cheaply in a developing country off anonymous donations of unpredictable amount and timing.

Tor has resources we couldn't dream of, and if they're cutting staff, there's no hope for any open source security project.

thaeli• 6 years ago

What is the project? (I understand if you don't want to name it in this context, but I am curious.)

badrabbit2• 6 years ago

How can the US IC benefit from your project? That's #1

AndyMcConachie• 6 years ago

Sounds like academia.

dillondoyle2• 6 years ago

It's nowhere near that small. That's like a 4-6 person 501cX. Their 2019 revenue was 309 Million

https://www.aclu.org/other/aclu-annual-report-2019

geofft6• 6 years ago

Did you mean this for the thread about the ACLU? The comment you're replying to is about Tor, which is much smaller.

Quanttek2• 6 years ago

(m|b)illionaires making their money from the Internet could easily sponsor the project.

The thing is: When you're the kind of person that is able to amass m-/billions, you're unlikely to be very altruistic. Most of these people had to, excuse my language, fuck over people (workers, customers, investors, the larger public) along the way in various ways. You simply can't be a billionaire without some kind of severe exploitation and it is unlikely that, when you have no qualms doing so in one area, it is unlikely you care about people's livelihoods etc. in other areas (there are some exceptions ofc, Bill Gates comes to mind). Jeff Bezos is a perfect example: The richest person on earth has donated what amounts to a few cents for an ordinary person but with great public fanfare. Not even during the COVID-19 pandemic, he views it as necessary (cf. with Jack Dorsey, donating 1/3 of his wealth).

input_sh• 6 years ago

(cf. with Jack Dorsey, donating 1/3 of his wealth).

He shifted 1/3 of his Square shares to an LLC. So far, that LLC has donated a little over 7 million.

yencabulator• 6 years ago

Bill Gates comes to mind

I'd argue that Bill Gates is regretting his previous actions and trying to fix his "karma" in his retirement. He was just as bad as the rest of them.

willis9362• 6 years ago

But removing fed funding would mean they have to remove their honeypot backdoors.

zrth• 6 years ago

Do you have anything to back these claims up?

sowithit• 6 years ago

Ironically, if they had more government sponsorship, they may be having fewer financial problems now. Government grant programs have multi-year contracts, and the agencies have yearly budgets. The government money is still flowing. It's the private money, from foundations and individuals, that has suddenly become unavailable due to declines in income and wealth.

LyalinDotCom• 6 years ago

For a project that is about freedom of information they sure kept this vague. Why not share more details of why you had to fire people, what funding sources dried up, etc?

tempestn• 6 years ago

For a project about privacy it seems appropriate though!

Thorrez5• 6 years ago

To protect the privacy of the users you want the organization to be as transparent as possible about everything not involving user data. If the organization is hiding something, that something could be user-hostile.

rentnorove• 6 years ago

Comparing a recent web archive, the difference in the sponspors page seens to be:

  - Mozilla  
  - Digital Impact Alliance  
  - Google Season of Docs    
  + RIPE NCC

https://web.archive.org/web/20191103152656/https://www.torpr...

https://web.archive.org/web/20200404101205/https://www.torpr...

RedComet• 6 years ago

How is their funding in any way affected?

MikeGale• 6 years ago

I don't understand the background here.

There is one thing we can all do, if we care about Tor, donate now.

jerheinze• 6 years ago

Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22907103

totalZero• 6 years ago

I was hoping this would be an analysis of changes in usage patterns.

System identification may be easier (and privacy thus worse) now that the network topology is more static, as people move around less due to the virus.

DeathArrow4• 6 years ago

Tor needs two things: more publicity and a public fund. I think many people would donate if they would find up about Tor and why it is important.

nbar16• 6 years ago

I use Amazon Smile to donate to Tor. It's not much, but it's something.

nbar16• 6 years ago

I feel for the people at Tor who were let go. My company was in the same position and I was unfortunately on the list of people who had their position terminated. While I am upset that I am now unemployed I also can understand how a company can be put in a difficult position during this time. I will survive, and I hope they do too.

wegs2• 6 years ago

I feel bad for the spiral here. We're now seeing the second-order of the depression spiral.

* First step was laying off people without jobs which could be done remotely.

* Second step is laying off people who could still be productive from home, but where there's less demand.

Unless we act with boldness and resoluteness, this will just continue to feed in on itself as the nation collapses.

nbar16• 6 years ago

Unfortunately for me, I was a remote worker already (worked there for a month shy of 6 years). Hopefully, my position (React/Node FS Dev) is in high enough demand after all this to resume working remotely with a comfortable salary. I've already had offers for remote but they require me to relocate after the pandemic is over, which is really clogging up the job boards.

humaniania• 6 years ago

Do you have any sort of science or statistics to back that up are you making fatalistic statements based on emotion?

fierarul5• 6 years ago

This announcement makes no sense.

You do not have 35 employees without some sort of stable budget. Seems very unlikely the budget changed so much in the past few months that you have to reduce your headcount by 40%!

Then they even mention that they expect Tor to be even more relevant in the coming period. Well, now would be a good time to keep the people, work on the product and show how relevant it is.

Very little specific detail considering they are a non-profit. Why not post the numbers?

maallooc2• 6 years ago

The fact is, they post their numbers every year. You can download their annual audit reports. They just did not state those numbers on this article.

And this layoff is not because the budget changed now, it’s to prepare for that.

Don’t demand to be spoonfed, just pay attention little more.

fierarul5• 6 years ago

Yeah, right.

One should expect transparency from little startups showing us their monthly revenue and such. We have to wait for the yearly audited reports to get a small glimpse into the world of non-profits.

I've read a few of these reports to know they are generally useless or well hidden.

It's early April. I'll just quietly wait another 8 months to see how their financials changed.

Or I could hunt down previous reports, see their revenue, infer their operating costs (assuming they didn't hire any new people), then guesstimate how their projected revenue is altered to much as to require a 40% headcount change.

Or maybe, just maybe, a non-profit could have posted this info.

RocketSyntax• 6 years ago

why are digital companies impacted? i don't understand. do their customers have less $ to spend?

Covid-19’s impact on Tor

Related Stories