Details were sparse, but the company’s said before it wants to expand its hidden services.
Even online anonymity and privacy need a crowd of sorts–crowdfunders, to be specific. The Tor Project recently kicked off a crowdfunding drive, using journalist and filmmaker Laura Poitras as an example of the importance of the online anonymity tools.
In a blog post announcing the funding drive, Tor quotes Poitras saying that she never could have worked on and help break the Snowden story without Tor. Poitras worked with Glenn Greenwald on the initial revelations from documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. She also directed the Snowden documentary Citizenfour. “Tor is an essential tool that…fosters free speech and independent voices,” she said.
Tor’s blog post on Tuesday didn’t have much in the way of specifics about the new crowdfunding drive or what motivated it. The Tor Project did not respond to a request for comment in time for this story.
Nevertheless, the group did say in March that it wanted to gather more funds from individuals to help make Tor hidden services more widely available. Basically, the group wants to make hidden services easier to use, more secure, and increase the user base for hidden services. “Anything you can build on the Internet, you can build on hidden services,” the non-profit group said in March. “But they’re better…anonymity is built in.”
Hidden services allow users to connect to online products and services such as websites, blogs, forums, and chat clients. The big difference, however, is that the user and the site they are connecting to don’t have to give up identifying information, allowing for a higher degree of anonymity.
Source: www.macworld.com
