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We surveyed all 336 OONI Run v2 links, and three of them drive 72% of all measurements

Toomore Chiang — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We surveyed all 336 OONI Run v2 links, and three of them drive 72% of all measurements¶

Worldwide, OONI Run v2 has produced 14.17 million measurements, and just three lists account for 72% of them. The highest-volume lists all work the same way: each one targets a single censorship or blocking phenomenon, and a continuously-running measurement backend executes it on a schedule, accumulating data over time. We surveyed every Run v2 link to measure how concentrated this is, and to draw out what the pattern offers communities that want to run their own local connectivity observation.

OONI (the Open Observatory of Network Interference) is a global censorship-measurement project. Its mobile app, OONI Probe, runs through a list of websites and reports whether each one is reachable from where you are. OONI Run v2 lets anyone compose their own list of sites to watch, generate a link, and have others run that list with one tap in OONI Probe, with every result flowing into OONI's public dataset. You can define your own measurement targets without writing code, yet few people know the feature exists or have used it, which is exactly why we wanted to see how it is actually used.

What we did¶

We took a snapshot on 2026-06-01 and went through every live OONI Run v2 link, 336 of them, pulling each link's lifetime measurement count from OONI's public aggregation API¹ and grouping them by list topic. Every figure below is based on that snapshot; the data source and caveats are at the end.

How big is the population: 337 links in two years¶

From the first link on 2024-04-24 to now, about 26 months, the whole world has created only 337 Run v2 links (one has been deleted; 336 remain). Creation spiked between October and December 2024 and has since held steady at 10 to 19 per month. 157 distinct authors took part, and 332 of the 336 use Web Connectivity, almost all of them testing website reachability.

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For a global censorship-observation tool, 337 links in two years is a small number. Going by creation count alone, it is easy to conclude that almost nobody uses Run v2. The usage data in the next section overturns that.

Usage is extremely concentrated, Gini 0.981¶

Adding up the lifetime measurements of all 336 links gives 14,171,627. The total is not small; the problem is how unevenly it is distributed. The Gini coefficient by measurement count is 0.981, almost at the 1.0 of complete inequality.

Why the Gini coefficient

The Gini coefficient was originally used to measure income inequality. It ranges from 0 to 1 and compresses the concentration of a whole distribution into a single number. 0 means perfectly even, with every link producing the same number of measurements. 1 means fully concentrated, with all measurements coming from a single link.

It fits here well, because each link's measurement count is a non-negative quantity and the question is exactly how concentrated all measurements are among a few links. Mathematically the Gini coefficient equals the area between the Lorenz curve and the diagonal (divided by the total area below the diagonal), so the closer the Lorenz curve below hugs the bottom edge, the closer the Gini coefficient is to 1. A value of 0.981 means the distribution is very close to the extreme where a handful of links take almost everything.

A single number does not show which links these are or what the long tail looks like, so we include both the Lorenz curve and a bucketed distribution to lay out the shape of the concentration.

Lorenz curve of measurement volume (the dashed line is perfect equality) {"description":"Lorenz curve of measurement volume across Run v2 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The Lorenz curve runs almost flat along the bottom and only shoots up at the very end. The 90% of links with the fewest measurements add up to just 0.93% of the total, and even the bottom 99% account for only 20.45%. The top 4 links take about 79.5%, and the single largest (DW's Global media, id 10006) is 46.5% on its own.

Which bucket each link's lifetime measurement count falls into {"description":"Distribution of lifetime measurement counts per link","data":{"values":[{"bucket":"= 0","links":112,"share":0.0,"order":0},{"bucket":"1–99","links":81,"share":0.0,"order":1},{"bucket":"100–999","links":73,"share":0.2,"order":2},{"bucket":"1k–9999","links":41,"share":1.0,"order":3},{"bucket":"10k–99k","links":15,"share":2.4,"order":4},{"bucket":"100k–999k","links":12,"share":28.0,"order":5},{"bucket":"1M+","links":2,"share":68.3,"order":6}]},"mark":{"type":"bar","tooltip":true,"color":"#0089bf"},"encoding":{"x":{"field":"bucket","type":"ordinal","sort":{"field":"order"},"title":"Lifetime measurements (bucket)","axis":{"labelAngle":-30}},"y":{"field":"links","type":"quantitative","title":"Links"},"tooltip":[{"field":"bucket","title":"Bucket"},{"field":"links","title":"Links"},{"field":"share","title":"% of all measurements"}]}}

At the other end of the tail, 112 of the 336 links (33%) have zero lifetime measurements, built and then barely run. 193 (57%) have fewer than 100, and the overall median is just 27. Most Run v2 links get created, run a few times, and stop.

Where the measurements concentrate¶

The concentration above only describes the shape of the distribution, not what the data is actually used for. Once the links are grouped by list topic, the most heavily-observed cohorts show a common way of working.

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Deutsche Welle (DW) uses 3 lists to continuously monitor the reachability of international media across many places, taking 72.4%. Spain's conexionsegura uses 13 lists to watch the piracy blocks ordered by the LaLiga football league, at 10.8%. Venezuela's vesinfiltro uses 4 lists to track local blocking, at 6.5%. Add Uruguay's UCU research team and an observer who has long tested Thai government websites. The most heavily-observed cohorts share a clear common thread: each list targets one specific censorship or blocking phenomenon, paired with a continuously-running measurement backend that watches it day after day. That is the underestimated way to use it.

Listing the top 15 links by measurement count makes the same pattern concrete.

link id	Lifetime measurements	List size	Created	Author	List name
`10006`	6,589,070	223	2024-07-03	dw.com	Global media
`10005`	3,093,765	91	2024-06-13	dw.com	Selected (inter)national media
`10236`	856,036	167	2026-05-14	conexionsegura	La Liga bloqueos.es
`10158`	734,627	4635	2025-04-03	ucu (UY)	lista global final
`10004`	582,480	15	2024-12-11	dw.com	Trusted International Media
`10154`	418,978	131	2025-03-26	vesinfiltro	MagisTV y FlujoTV
`10135`	344,268	819	2025-04-16	conexionsegura	Test Bloqueos LaLiga
`10153`	259,331	102	2025-03-24	vesinfiltro	PriorityList
`10143`	210,078	134	2025-03-05	vesinfiltro	VSF News y otros
`10298`	133,991	72	2026-05-04	Thailand observer	Test Thai gov websites
`10226`	118,509	170	2025-09-15	conexionsegura	Bloqueos LaLiga - Dominios
`10235`	109,276	293	2025-09-20	conexionsegura	VE media http+https check
`10214`	105,439	67	2025-10-04	Thailand observer	Test Thai gov websites
`10114`	102,096	256	2026-05-05	jiyul.org	revi
`10118`	56,541	3044	2025-03-26	ucu (UY)	LISTA GLOBAL

Long-term observation comes from a continuously-running backend, list size barely matters¶

An intuitive guess is that the more sites a list collects, the more data it produces. The data does not support that guess. Plotting each link's list size (number of inputs) against its lifetime measurements shows almost no relationship.

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The two extremes are clearest. UCU's id 10158 packed in 4,635 inputs (the largest on the network) for 734,627 lifetime measurements. DW's id 10004 has only 15 inputs yet 582,480. No matter how big a list gets, without a continuously-running backend to execute it the measurement count stays near 0, which means no observation is happening. What actually lets observation accumulate is whether there is a measurement infrastructure that runs the list every day; how many sites it collects matters far less.

anoni.net's own coordinates: the community is its own controlled experiment¶

The anoni.net community has built two Run v2 links, which happen to demonstrate the two patterns above. We lay both out, not just the better-performing one.

The first, id 10238, was built on 2025-09-15 with 7 inputs (anoni.net plus our own services: im, matrix, form, pad, search, cinny) and has run only 14 measurements in its lifetime. It sits with the majority: built but not run continuously. The second, id 10328, was built on 2026-05-15, expanded to 10 inputs, and this time paired with a self-operated vantage point that runs continuously. In half a month it accumulated 4,659 measurements, ranking 39th of 336, inside the top 12%.

Same community, same draft list of anoni.net's own services; the only difference between the two links is whether a continuously-running backend stands behind it. We do not dodge the other side either: 10328's share of the whole network is still near 0%. In such a long-tailed distribution, just running continuously for half a month already beats 297 links, which shows how many people miss the "run it continuously" threshold. The move from 10238 to 10328 is the record of the community crossing that threshold itself.

What it means for communities and OONI¶

For communities that want to run local connectivity observation, the census points in a clear direction. Run v2's value comes from a curated list aimed at a specific phenomenon plus a continuously-running measurement backend; missing either one drops you into the long tail. Opening more links by itself brings no data.

The same pattern applies to many topics. The DW, conexionsegura, and vesinfiltro cases above are three already-running examples: international media reachability, sports-piracy blocking, and local blocking. If you want to start, here are a few directions to consider.

Election observation: from before to after an election, continuously track the reachability of news media, candidate, and election-authority websites in a given region, recording any blocking or interference during the voting period, giving election observers and researchers an evidentiary time series.
Real-time observation of major events: during protests, strikes, disasters, or shutdowns, continuously test independent media, messaging services (Signal, Telegram), and help-and-information sites, to see in real time which are blocked and when.
Specific communities and issues: sites that are often blocked in some regions, such as LGBTQ+, religious minorities, women's rights, and human-rights organizations, observed longitudinally to accumulate evidence that research can cite.
Circumvention-tool availability: track the official sites and download endpoints of VPNs, Tor, bridges, and other circumvention tools, whether they are still reachable in a given place and when blocking begins, which is especially useful for groups helping local people stay connected.
Cross-border media and diaspora communities: the overseas media that diaspora communities rely on (for Chinese-language readers, for example RFA or Initium Media), observed for reachability differences across ASNs and changes over time.
Platform-level blocking events: when an app or service is suddenly blocked in a country, quickly build a list and observe across ASNs, measuring the scope and the start and end times of the block, turning a single event into analyzable data.

Pick a topic you care about most, list a dozen or so relevant sites, and have one vantage point run it every day; within a few weeks you will have your own reachability time series to analyze. For OONI and data-analysis partners: the aggregation API supports filtering by ooni_run_link_id, which makes a meta-analysis of the Run v2 ecosystem itself feasible. This report was produced exactly that way. The anoni.net community has written up this approach as a measurement-model proposal in issue #78; the call for feedback is still open, and we welcome discussion from the community and the OONI team.

Summary of the issue #78 measurement model

Issue #78 proposes a civic-internet-watch measurement model that splits the system into two layers.

List governance: the community maintains its own list of civil-society websites, with the single source of truth in the community's git repo. Inclusion criteria, consultation status, and sensitivity tiers are all decided by the community according to local context, and the git history is itself the record of list governance.
Measurement and data: using the standard Web Connectivity test, a Run v2 link generated from the list does the measuring. Volunteer phones and self-operated vantage points consume the same link and carry the same Run Link ID, and all results flow into OONI's public dataset, queryable via the OONI API and Explorer, citable by researchers, with no data lock-in.

List governance does not churn the shared Citizen Lab tw.csv, avoiding the breaks in long-term measurement time series that repeated edits to a shared list would cause. tw.csv is demoted from a required path to optional, additive feedback: only mature, non-sensitive organizations are fed back additively in exchange for the cross-platform baseline, while sensitive organizations stay in the community-managed list and Run v2 and never enter a public PR.

Data and caveats¶

This report's data is a snapshot taken on 2026-06-01, pulled link by link from OONI's public aggregation API¹ (filtered by ooni_run_link_id). Measurement counts keep growing over time, so re-querying later yields slightly higher numbers, while the shape of the concentration stays stable. A few caveats before reading the figures.

Measurement counts come from the aggregation API's measurement_count, a point-in-time query as of 2026-06-01 that keeps growing.
The lifetime query spans 2024-01-01 to 2026-06-30, covering the whole history of Run v2.
A link with 0 measurements may be a test or draft, and does not necessarily mean "failure".
A link can be run by probes in any country; the use-case cohorts are inferred from list topic, not an official OONI label.
Full disclosure: the community's own two links (10238, 10328) are both included in the analysis and discussion; we did not cherry-pick the better-performing 10328.

OONI API (aggregation endpoint) - OONI ↩↩

How Unredacted Helps People in Censored Regions Reach the Open Internet

Toomore Chiang — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

How Unredacted Helps People in Censored Regions Reach the Open Internet¶

This post is based on a guest post on the Tor Blog by Unredacted, with an anoni.net community perspective added for Taiwan and the wider Sinophone region.

Keeping the doors open, Tor Blog, by Unredacted.org, 2026-05-15

Unredacted is a US-based 501(c)(3) non-profit that runs a network of 300+ servers to keep people in heavily censored places connected to the open internet. Their guest post is part of the Tor Blog's spotlight series on organizations defending the free internet, and it opens with a line from a user in China: "You have helped many many people to overcome the great firewall." That kind of message is rare, because people living under censorship usually have no safe channel to send one.

This post highlights what Unredacted builds, and what it looks like from where the anoni.net community sits, in Taiwan.

What Unredacted runs¶

Unredacted Door is their umbrella for circumvention services: FreeSocks proxies, messaging proxies for Signal and Telegram, Tor bridges, and Snowflake. Over a recent 30-day window these carried nearly 300 TiB for tens of thousands of people routing around censorship. The largest piece, FreeSocks, is built to look unremarkable on the wire, the opposite of a standard VPN that advertises itself through a known endpoint and handshake. FreeSocks v2 leans on Xray to make proxy traffic resemble ordinary HTTPS, paired with an open-source control plane that rotates endpoints automatically when a server gets blocked.

What is Xray

Xray is a traffic-routing and obfuscation tool descended from the V2Ray project, widely used in heavily censored places like China and Iran. Protocols such as VLESS, Trojan, and Reality disguise proxy traffic as ordinary HTTPS / TLS, smoothing over the handshake and packet shapes a VPN gives away at a glance. See the Xray-core project.

GreenWare is their effort to run real relay capacity on low-power hardware. Instead of datacenter servers that draw power like a space heater, they run Tor exits on PoE-powered Raspberry Pi 5 boards and a 1U chassis of 20 ComputeBlade modules. As of their writing, all 123 of their Tor exit relays run on this combined setup, drawing roughly 400W in total, about what a few old incandescent bulbs burn. Lower cost and power per exit means more people can take on the hardest, most legally exposed part of running Tor.

From the anoni.net community: a Taiwan vantage point¶

anoni.net is an anonymity-network community based in Taiwan, and that is the vantage point these notes are written from. Taiwan's network environment is relatively free: no Great Firewall, no mandatory VPN registration, no state censorship orders to ISPs. That is exactly why a place like Taiwan, with free outbound connectivity, is well positioned to host Tor relays and bridges and carry a share of the circumvention work. The people this infrastructure serves are in heavily censored places like mainland China and Iran. Other regions with equally free connectivity, like Singapore, Malaysia, and wherever the diaspora lives, are just as suitable as hosting locations.

The anoni.net community tracks the number and distribution of Tor relays in Taiwan through Pulse live monitoring. As of 2026-05-31, Onionoo (the Tor Project's relay data service) sees 12 running relays inside Taiwan, of which only 3 carry the Exit flag (initramfs, GuruKopi, jerryrelay). Set against Unredacted, a single organization running 123 exit relays and carrying nearly 300 TiB over 30 days, Taiwan's nationwide exit capacity is under 3% of theirs. We keep this number current on the Tor Relays watch page and pair it with OONI's censorship observations for Taiwan and nearby regions.

For the Sinophone world, demand for circumvention has grown since 2020 across Hong Kong, Macau, and Mandarin-speaking communities in Southeast Asia, while circumvention resources written in Chinese remain comparatively scarce. Part of anoni.net's work is filling that gap with Chinese-language documentation, walking the same path as Unredacted Education.

From the anoni.net community: GreenWare's feasibility for free-connectivity regions¶

Unredacted running 123 exit relays on 400W makes for friendly operating economics. At a typical Taiwan commercial electricity rate of roughly NT$3.5–6 per kWh (about US$0.11–0.19), 400W running year-round is about 3,500 kWh, or roughly NT$12,000–21,000 a year (about US$400–700).¹ That is an affordable line item for a campus IT center or a community workspace. Readers elsewhere can convert their local rate; the order of magnitude usually lands in the same range.

The key is designing the hardware to scale. Raspberry Pi 5 is familiar to maker communities everywhere, and PoE+ HATs and PoE switches are easy to buy through ordinary electronics retail. ComputeBlade (the 20-module 1U chassis) has fewer retail channels and is usually obtained through official overseas ordering or a community group buy. An institutional server room suits this better than a home network, for three reasons: a static IP, institutional bandwidth, and someone on site to check the machines.

Campus Tor relays are one of anoni.net's three focus areas for 2026, and the community is collecting field experience into a setup playbook (Campus Tor Relay research track, a zh-TW page with the English version pending, plus the writeup Setting up a Tor relay at NTNU). Unredacted's engineering approach with GreenWare is a useful reference point for the next school weighing a deployment: start with a single PoE-powered Raspberry Pi 5 middle relay, and once it runs stably, consider exits and chassis density.

For an individual or a small group, running a Snowflake proxy (a browser extension or Docker) carries almost no electricity cost and is the lowest-barrier entry into circumvention infrastructure (see Snowflake).

What you can do¶

If Unredacted's work makes you want to help people in censored regions reach the open internet, here are a few entry points:

Learn about Unredacted: visit unredacted.org for their services and transparency information, then decide whether to support their servers, bandwidth, and staffing through their official channels.
Run Snowflake: the lowest-barrier contribution, run from a browser extension or Docker (see Snowflake).
Run a Tor relay or bridge: this needs a steady network and a little operational effort. The Tor Project's relay guide walks through the setup, and the community wrote up how to set up a Tor WebTunnel bridge.
Campus Tor relays: if you work or study at a college or university, start your assessment from the Campus Tor Relay research track (zh-TW page, English version pending).
Join the anoni.net community discussion: trade notes with other members over Matrix; the entry point is on the community page, and other contact channels are on the contact page.

Taiwan's 2026 average electricity rate is NT$3.7823 per kWh (frozen for April–September by the 2026-03-27 rate review); the actual per-kWh price varies by customer class and time-of-use tier. Source: Taipower electricity rate schedule. ↩

After Iran's 80-day blackout, traffic surged through our community's Tor WebTunnel bridge

Toomore Chiang — Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

After Iran's 80-day blackout, traffic surged through our community's Tor WebTunnel bridge¶

For people in Iran, the outside internet barely existed for nearly three months. When connectivity started to come back a few days ago, the Tor WebTunnel bridge our community runs began taking on a wave of traffic. That was Iranians who had found a way around the censorship and reconnected to Tor, getting back onto the wider internet.

Wherever you are, you can help

If you have a VPS (a small cloud server) or a physical machine, plus a domain name, you can run a Tor WebTunnel bridge and give people cut off by censorship a way back onto the open internet. Can't run a server? Open a browser tab and run Snowflake instead, it contributes anonymous traffic just the same.

Server specs, legal considerations, and the full setup steps are written up in How to set up a Tor WebTunnel bridge.

More than 80 days offline¶

Starting 28 February 2026, Iran cut its outbound connectivity during military operations. This was the whole country's link to the outside world going dark, close to nationwide, a different order of magnitude from the usual censorship that blocks individual sites. According to Cloudflare Radar, Iran's outbound traffic dropped to around 0.3% of its normal peak after the shutdown, effectively zero, and stayed pinned at that low through March and April¹². It was not until around 26 May that traffic shot back up toward normal levels. From shutdown to reopening, more than 80 days.

Iran's outbound internet traffic as observed by Cloudflare Radar. It fell to near zero after the 28 February 2026 shutdown, held at that low through March and April, and shot back up around 26 May.

During the blackout, Iran was left with only a heavily filtered domestic network. Local services like banking and food delivery kept running, but connections to the outside were almost entirely severed. NetBlocks recorded it as one of the longest nationwide shutdowns in modern history; of the country's 90 million people, most went nearly three months with little or no access to the global internet³.

Traffic jumped once Iran reopened¶

The Tor WebTunnel bridge our community runs sits in the background, helping people who cannot reach Tor get around censorship and connect. In the two days after Iran reopened, connections through that node jumped noticeably, with traffic well above its usual level. Seeing the traffic return was a relief, because it meant people were getting back online.

Traffic through the community-run Tor WebTunnel bridge. Connections jumped clearly once Iran reopened.

During the blackout, people there couldn't even reach Tor, because the entire outbound link was down. Once connectivity returned, many rushed to find out what had happened while they were cut off and to reconnect with family they had lost touch with. Journalists needed to get local news out, civil-society groups needed to coordinate with the outside, and all of that means reaching sites and services that have long been blocked. Getting around the censorship usually means Tor, and where Tor itself is blocked, it means bridges run by volunteers around the world. When people connected to Tor through a bridge, some of those connections came through the node our community hosts (the community also runs a node in Singapore, which didn't receive traffic this time).

Looking at the source networks behind the connections to this bridge, the top five are all major Iranian carriers, confirming the traffic really is coming from ordinary users on the ground there.

Source ASNs for connections to the WebTunnel bridge (Cloudflare dashboard). The top five are all major Iranian carriers: Mobile Communication Company of Iran (MCI), Iran Telecommunication Company (TCI), Irancell, Aria Shatel, and Pasargad, confirming the traffic comes from users inside Iran.

The traffic didn't fade after those first two days. Connections have kept coming through this bridge since. According to monitors like NetBlocks, Iran's recovery is incomplete: mobile networks were still down for a stretch while home Wi-Fi came back first, blocks on major social platforms remain in place, and in some cases are tighter than before the shutdown, so reaching ordinary sites abroad often still requires tools like a VPN³⁴. For many people, even with the internet "reopened," reaching the outside still means routing around a lot of blocking, and our WebTunnel bridge is one of those ways around.

With traffic still flowing through it day after day, a handful of bridges is clearly not enough. So we'd like to invite more people who are able to run bridges, in more places, so that more people who need to reach the outside can get through.

Need a connection? Write to us

The community currently runs one Tor WebTunnel bridge each in Taiwan and Singapore. To keep censors from simply blocking the addresses, these bridge lines aren't posted publicly. If you or someone you know needs one, you're welcome to email whisper@anoni.net to request it (other ways to reach us are on the contact page).

Why WebTunnel¶

WebTunnel wraps Tor traffic inside an ordinary HTTPS connection, so to a censor it looks like normal web browsing (illustration).

Tor has several kinds of bridges, and they differ in how hard they are for a censor to block.

Snowflake has the lowest barrier: open a browser tab and you're helping people connect, no server required, anyone can start in seconds, and it's useful in most censored places. It runs over WebRTC (the real-time connection technology browsers use for video calls), and that traffic doesn't quite look like normal web browsing, so in the most aggressively filtered environments it can be easier to spot. Another bridge type, obfs4, turns the traffic into a blob of patternless noise, but censorship systems using deep packet inspection (DPI, which analyzes connections one by one to decide what to allow) can still flag it as not-normal browsing and drop it.

WebTunnel takes a different approach: it wraps Tor traffic inside a genuine HTTPS connection (the kind with the padlock and the https prefix in your browser's address bar). To a censor, connecting to a WebTunnel bridge looks no different from visiting an ordinary website. To block it, they'd have to block large numbers of legitimate HTTPS sites along with it, a cost that censors usually won't pay. That makes WebTunnel one of the strongest bridges against this kind of filtering, and it's already in real use in China and Russia.

Iran's case this time was more extreme: the entire outbound link was severed, and during a full blackout no bridge can function at all. Bridges only become useful again once connectivity returns and the country is back to its everyday filtering. Iran's filtering is also trickier than China's or Russia's, since it uses a protocol allowlist that only lets specific kinds of connections through, and WebTunnel wasn't easy to run there at first⁵.

As Tor moved to distributing bridges over Telegram and volunteers grew the number of nodes, from 2025 onward Tor has observed more and more Iranian users successfully reaching Tor over WebTunnel⁶, which lines up with what our community node saw after the reopening. Over the same period, Snowflake has been especially useful in Iran, with Tor describing it as one of the best connection tools available there⁷. For internet freedom in Iran, both WebTunnel and Snowflake are working routes, and both welcome more people to join in.

Run one from your region¶

Anywhere with free, well-connected outbound access is a good place to host a bridge. Censors keep blocking the bridge IPs they already know about, so the more WebTunnel bridges there are spread across different countries and different network providers, the more entry points people on the ground can use. Every additional node, in one more country, is one more way in that hasn't been blocked yet.

The barrier really isn't high:

A small VPS with 512MB to 1GB of memory is enough to run one, with lower cost and less upkeep than a Tor relay.
You need a domain (or subdomain) and a TLS certificate (the certificate that lets a site use a secure https connection), which you can get for free from Let's Encrypt.
The legal risk is low. A bridge is only a relay point; it never connects directly to the website a user ultimately visits. The destination site sees an exit from the Tor network, not your server, which makes it far safer than running a Tor exit node.

We've written up the whole process, from preparing a domain and getting a certificate to standing the bridge up, plus the firewall, cover page, monitoring, and ongoing operations:

How to set up a Tor WebTunnel bridge

If running a WebTunnel bridge isn't an option for you, you can still open a browser and run Snowflake: leave the tab open and it contributes anonymous traffic, helping people who can't reach Tor get around censorship. When you're ready to commit a server, come back and set up a WebTunnel.

Not just Iran¶

Iran's shutdown was extreme, but censorship and shutdowns aren't a distant exception. Myanmar, Belarus, and China sustain heavy filtering year-round⁸⁹¹⁰, and every regional conflict, election, or protest tends to come with a tightening of the network. Hong Kong has gone from a fairly open internet to seeing national-security-law site blocking in recent years¹¹. Earthquakes and undersea-cable cuts can disrupt a region's outbound connectivity too¹². Helping people elsewhere get around censorship today is also how a community builds the experience of running and maintaining anonymity infrastructure for when it's needed closer to home.

One node doesn't change much, but many nodes spread across the world add up to a network a censor can't pull down all at once. If you have a spare VPS or physical machine, a domain, and a little time, we'd love for you to help stand up more bridges, wherever you are.

Community discussion happens on Matrix (home server im.anoni.net); how to join and other ways to reach us are on that page.

Cloudflare Radar — Iran - Cloudflare Radar ↩
Internet shutdown in Iran amid military actions - Cloudflare Radar ↩
Internet restored to tens of millions in Iran after three-month blackout - The National ↩↩
Iran's Internet restored for some after 88 days of blackout - UPI ↩
Hiding in plain sight: Introducing WebTunnel - The Tor Project ↩
Staying ahead of censors in 2025: What we've learned from fighting censorship in Iran and Russia - The Tor Project ↩
How Iranians are overcoming unprecedented internet censorship - TechRadar ↩
Update: internet access, censorship, and the Myanmar coup - Access Now ↩
Internet disruption hits Belarus on election day - NetBlocks ↩
China: Freedom on the Net 2025 Country Report - Freedom House ↩
Hong Kong Website Blocked, Sparking Fears Over Great Firewall - Radio Free Asia ↩
After Chinese Vessels Cut Matsu Internet Cables, Taiwan Seeks to Improve Its Communications Resilience - The Diplomat ↩

CryptPad 2026.5.0: zh_Hant Lands as a Built-in Locale After Two and a Half Years Upstream

Toomore Chiang — Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

CryptPad 2026.5.0: zh_Hant Lands as a Built-in Locale After Two and a Half Years Upstream¶

cryptpad.anoni.net Drive home after switching to 中文(正體). Every file category and app entry is localised.

For people who want a collaboration tool that does not silently keep a readable copy of their work on the server, the practical options are short. Google Docs, Notion, Microsoft 365 are excellent products, but every paragraph and every revision sits on those vendors’ servers in a form they can read. From there, algorithms, ads, training corpora, and government data requests each have their own path in.

That difference is exactly what matters when a journalist drafts a story that cannot leak, when a campaigner negotiates a strategy that cannot be wiretapped, when an NGO records distress reports from vulnerable users, or when a researcher works on a politically sensitive topic. Whether a first draft can be safely written at all often turns on that one architectural choice.

CryptPad is one of the few collaboration suites where the server genuinely cannot read what you wrote. Content is encrypted in your browser, the server only ever sees ciphertext, and yet a single interface covers most of what people normally reach for in Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, kanban boards, whiteboards, forms, and calendars.

Until recently the suite had one obvious gap for one large group of users: the UI shipped in English and Simplified Chinese only, with Traditional Chinese (zh_Hant) missing. From the first upstream PR opened at the end of 2023, through two and a half years of patient string-by-string work in Weblate, to the CryptPad 2026.5.0 “🌷 Spring release” on 2026/05/13, zh_Hant is now a built-in locale. The community-hosted cryptpad.anoni.net has been upgraded. Open cryptpad.anoni.net today and the Drive, the document editors, and the share-permission dialog are all in Traditional Chinese. Readers in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and across the Chinese-reading diaspora can use it without first learning an English menu.

What CryptPad is¶

CryptPad is developed by XWiki SAS in France under the AGPLv3 licence and is best described as an end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) online office and collaboration suite. One account gets you:

Rich Text: a Google-Docs-style WYSIWYG editor
Document: advanced word processing via OnlyOffice (.docx compatible)
Sheets: spreadsheets via OnlyOffice (.xlsx compatible)
Presentation: slides, with both Markdown Slides and OnlyOffice modes
Kanban: project boards
Whiteboard: free-form whiteboarding
Diagram: diagramming via Drawio (upgraded to Drawio 29.6.7 in 2026.5.0)
Forms: surveys and structured data collection
Calendar: shared calendars
Code/Markdown: code and Markdown editors
Drive: cloud storage that ties all of the above together

The core property is that all content is encrypted in your browser before it ever reaches the server. The server stores ciphertext; neither CryptPad’s operators nor the anoni.net maintainers hold the keys. This is what is meant by zero-knowledge: even if we wanted to read your pads, we couldn’t.

The Rich Text app in multi-user mode. Every edit is encrypted in the browser; the server only ever sees ciphertext.

Why the community self-hosts CryptPad¶

We self-host more than CryptPad. There is also Etherpad for quick shared notes and Matrix for live discussion (the Community page covers how the three fit together). CryptPad is what we reach for whenever a document needs long-term storage, end-to-end encryption, and full multi-user collaboration in the same place. Spending two and a half years on the Traditional Chinese translation made sense for several reasons.

E2EE and zero-knowledge by design. Community discussions routinely touch threat models, whistleblower-protection notes, and the back-and-forth of pushing Tor relays onto university campuses. Putting those in Google Docs or Notion is functionally identical to handing every unpublished strategy to a third-party platform and its advertising partners. CryptPad removes “the operator can read your content” at the architectural level — a guarantee that is far stronger than an SLA promise.

Feature-complete enough to replace mainstream cloud suites. Etherpad is fine for quick notes but does not cover sheets, slides, or kanban. CryptPad covers most of what people use Google Workspace for, and every pad inherits the same encryption and permission model. There is no need to keep switching tools because “this one needs to stay private and that one doesn’t”.

Every pad uses the same encryption and permission model. Sharing supports view-only / edit / embed, with optional password and expiry.

AGPLv3 licence, public cryptographic protocol. Any derived service has to remain open, so when we self-host we can audit the code top to bottom. The cryptographic protocol and data structures are also public — like Tor, Tails, and OONI, this is privacy that is verifiable rather than asserted.

Governance stays with maintainers and the community. The same reasoning we wrote up in why we self-host Matrix applies here. Retention policy, registration policy, channel rules are decisions we make ourselves; they are predictable, accountable, and can move with the community’s needs.

Real European public-sector and civil-society deployments. CryptPad is in use across multiple European government projects, NGOs, and research groups. Compliance, reliability, and long-term maintenance all have a track record. When we recommend it to more Chinese-reading users, we are not pointing them at a demo-grade toy.

Two and a half years of upstream work, mapped to a timeline¶

The CryptPad main application, the Accounts plugin, and the User Guide together contain over a thousand strings. Each one has to match the UI context where it appears, stay consistent across contexts (so that Save and Save As don’t drift into different verbs), and survive the constant trickle of new strings from active development. Every release means another pass over what changed.

2023/12/05. PR #1329 opened upstream. It corrected the language-menu labels — changing the zh-Hans entry to “中文(簡體)” and zh-Hant to “中文(正體)” — and used the description to ask CryptPad maintainers what process to follow to add a real zh_Hant translation, since at that point only zh_Hans had any content and zh_Hant was empty.

2024–2025. The CryptPad team opened zh_Hant translation spaces on Weblate across multiple sub-projects: the main App, the Accounts plugin, and the User Guide sections (Drive, FAQ, Application Document, Application General, Application Presentation, Share and Access, Collaboration, and more).

2026/03/13. All of the above reached translation completion. The community filed Issue #2237 upstream to report the milestone and to ask CryptPad maintainers to enable zh_Hant as a built-in selectable locale in the next release.

2026/05/13. CryptPad 2026.5.0 “🌷 Spring release” shipped. The Improvements section of the release notes lists, verbatim:

Enable zh-Hant/zh-Hans locales (#2237) and add alias system for locales #2254 by @toomore

That single PR not only turned on zh_Hant and zh_Hans as official locales, but also added a locale-alias mechanism so that accounts still configured with zh_CN or zh_TW (the older codes) automatically fall back to the new zh_Hans and zh_Hant, instead of getting pushed back to English after the upgrade. Existing Simplified Chinese users see their UI carry on as Chinese without having to reset anything.

A note on 正體 vs 繁體 — naming the script¶

CryptPad’s language menu originally read “中文(繁體)” for the zh_Hant entry — fántǐ, literally “complex form”. PR #1329 changed it to “中文(正體)” — zhèngtǐ, roughly “proper” or “standard” form. The community prefers 正體 because 繁 (complex) implies “more complex than Simplified”, whereas the script as used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau is simply the historically continuous form of written Chinese, with no “more elaborate than” relationship to anything.

Operating systems and most English-language writing still call it Traditional Chinese, and we are not asking anyone to change that across the board. Where we are doing the translation work ourselves, we use the name we prefer. How a community names its own script is part of the localisation work.

Using cryptpad.anoni.net from a censored or restricted network¶

cryptpad.anoni.net and cryptpad.org are not specifically hosted to be reachable from inside heavily filtered networks. Readers connecting from mainland China, Iran, Russia, or similar environments may see unstable or blocked connections. Recommended approaches:

Tor Browser reaches cryptpad.anoni.net over the Tor network, HTTPS by default. If the Tor network itself is blocked from your ISP, use Snowflake or request obfs4 bridges.
A VPN you trust. The VPN operator can see your connection metadata, but CryptPad’s end-to-end encryption guarantees that no intermediary — VPN, ISP, or server operator — can read your content.
Tails boots an entire operating system that routes all traffic through Tor and leaves no trace on the host machine. A good fit for higher-sensitivity collaboration.

CryptPad is E2EE regardless of how you connect; whether you reach it over Tor, a VPN, or direct, the server cannot read your content. The variable is whether you can reach cryptpad.anoni.net at all from your local network. For ongoing use in heavily restricted environments, Tor with Snowflake or Tails is the more reliable baseline.

Getting started on cryptpad.anoni.net¶

To start:

Entry point: https://cryptpad.anoni.net/
Account requests: email whisper@anoni.net for a registration code. Default quota is 50 MB, adjustable later. Registration does not ask for an email address inside the system and does not bind to a real-name identity, matching the Matrix flow.
Switching locale: after the upgrade, the top-right settings page offers “中文(正體)” and “中文(簡體)”. The query strings ?lang=zh_Hant or ?lang=zh_Hans also work.
Full tooling list: see Community.

If you spot a typo, awkward wording, or a new string that hasn’t been translated yet, contributions are very welcome — head straight to the zh_Hant or zh_Hans project on Weblate, or email whisper@anoni.net to let us know.

MADLink (Mandarin Translation) is Live, with an Editorial Observation Page on Taiwan's Response

Toomore Chiang — Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

MADLink (Mandarin Translation) is Live, with an Editorial Observation Page on Taiwan's Response¶

A publicly listed Taipei-traded company shipped 1,708 CSA-7400 high-density network platforms to a Chinese customer between 2019 and 2020. Those appliances ended up in Kazakhstan running a national-grade internet censorship and surveillance system. The supplier was ADLINK Technologies (TWSE: 6166), the customer was Geedge Networks, and the system they ran was the flagship Tiangou Secure Gateway (TSG), an offering whose capabilities rival China's Great Firewall.

That is the central finding of MADLink: A Taiwanese Vestige in the Geedge Supply Chain, InterSecLab's April 2026 report and the first follow-up to their September 2025 The Internet Coup. The anoni.net community has completed the Mandarin (Taiwan terminology, zh-TW) translation. Unlike the previous Internet Coup release, this round also ships an editorial observation page mapping how Taiwan's media, government, and legislators have received the report — with an English summary written for international readers.

What the report found¶

Between 2019 and 2020, ADLINK shipped 1,708 CSA-7400 appliances to Geedge. They formed the hardware foundation of Geedge's first-generation firewall platform, deployed in Kazakhstan to enable national-scale internet censorship and surveillance. CSA-7400 is a 4U high-density platform that ADLINK itself markets for deep packet inspection (DPI) and firewall workloads.

ADLINK hardware also turned up inside EtherFabric — a custom-built network packet broker (NPB) that Geedge deploys in Myanmar to load-balance traffic across multiple TSG nodes. A MAC address recovered from leaked documents traces back to ADLINK, showing ADLINK's footprint in Geedge's product line goes beyond the single CSA-7400 transaction.

Geedge's current-generation TSG hardware (deployed in Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Myanmar) is built on Nettrix servers (a subsidiary of US-sanctioned Sugon) with Inspur storage. These are commodity x86 components, sourceable on the grey market even where direct procurement is restricted. The report's argument: purpose-built surveillance hardware like the CSA-7400 and the ADLINK components inside EtherFabric is exactly where export controls have the most leverage, in contrast to commodity servers.

The Mandarin translation: reading path¶

The full translation lives here: MADLink / A Taiwanese Vestige in the Geedge Supply Chain (zh-TW) (Mandarin translation maintained in zh-TW only).

The original report is a single long web page. The translation team split it into 5 chapters so that Matrix discussions can map to specific sections:

Chapter 1/5: Executive Summary, What We Found, Why It Matters
Chapter 2/5: Geedge supply chain deep dive (three generations of TSG hardware)
Chapter 3/5: EtherFabric and ADLINK's role and response
Chapter 4/5: Conclusion
Chapter 5/5: Appendix (ADLINK and MOEA full statements)

ADLINK's full reply to InterSecLab is preserved verbatim in the appendix so readers can compare both sides directly.

What's new this round: the editorial observation page¶

For The Internet Coup, our work ended with a faithful translation. MADLink names a publicly listed Taiwanese company, which would normally trigger the expected loop of local press follow-up, legislative questioning, and a regulator response. As of 2026-05-20, Taiwan's Chinese-language public sphere has stayed noticeably quiet. That silence is itself observation material, so we added a separate page: Editorial observation: Taiwan's response to MADLink.

This page is explicitly an anoni.net editorial work, not part of the InterSecLab report. It has five sections:

Independent verification: Before recording the local reception, we ran reproducible verification on the report's key claims — the IEEE OUI 00:30:64 resolving to ADLINK on two independent lookup services (macvendors / macvendorlookup), ADLINK's own product page marketing the CSA-7400 for DPI / IDS/IPS / NGFW, Geedge (Hainan) Information Technology Co., Ltd. being founded by Fang Binxing in 2018 (cross-confirmed by Chinese Wikipedia, Epoch Times, and NTD), and the New Bloom Magazine April 2026 article's existence and date.

Coverage map: International / English coverage is present (InterSecLab original, New Bloom Magazine, cybernews, and others). Taiwan Chinese-language coverage is substantively absent — major outlets (UDN, Liberty Times, CNA, TVBS, TechNews, iThome) had no direct reporting on this angle as of 2026-05-16. Legislator Puma Shen, quoted in the original report, has not followed up publicly.

Why Taiwan has been quiet: Five observed factors, offered as hypotheses rather than verdicts — high technical barrier for general-audience journalists, domestic infosec media focusing on enterprise security rather than human-rights export controls, the September 2025 leak news cycle having cooled by April 2026, neither political camp having upside in amplifying the story, and Taiwan's civil-society attention focusing elsewhere.

Indicators to watch: Grouped by government / media / civil society, with concrete entry points (URLs for the MOEA strategic high-tech export entity list, Legislative Yuan IVOD and proceedings systems, the Market Observation Post System under stock code 6166, and Control Yuan corrective measures) plus a four-tier execution table (Google Alerts, manual checks, RSS / HTML diff bots, scheduled scrapers) so contributors of different technical means can pick a level that fits.

English summary for international readers: The complete English version, so readers connecting from outside Taiwan can follow the local reception context without going through the Chinese sections.

Why we wrote this page¶

MADLink's central question — whether Taiwan's export control framework can prevent local companies from supplying surveillance and censorship technology to vendors serving authoritarian governments — does not get answered by an English report alone. It needs local journalism, legislative questioning, and civil-society advocacy to follow up before regulators face real pressure to update the framework.

When that loop has not started, documenting the current state of reception is itself a form of relay. As substantive developments arrive (media starting to follow the thread, legislators raising the issue publicly, ADLINK filing a material announcement, or the MOEA updating the framework), the editorial observation page will be updated inline with date stamps and synced through Matrix.

Acknowledgements and how to join¶

Thanks to InterSecLab for continuing this investigative series, and to community members who contributed to translation and the editorial observation write-up.

Both reports (The Internet Coup and MADLink) share the same Matrix discussion channel:

https://matrix.to/#/#interseclab-the-internet-coup:im.anoni.net

If you spot reporting, government documents, or public statements not yet captured on the editorial observation page, please open a pull request via the edit icon at the top of that page or share in the Matrix channel.

Campus Tor Relay templates: proposal, SOP, and FAQ now published

Toomore Chiang — Thu, 21 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Campus Tor Relay templates: proposal, SOP, and FAQ now published¶

In November 2025, the first campus Tor Relay in Taiwan went live at National Taiwan Normal University's CSIE department. Over the past six months, community member NZ (Su En-Li) — the student who pushed the proposal through — worked with the community to turn that experience into a reusable template kit. The three documents are now published under CC-BY 4.0, with a long-form interview as the entry point.

The templates are ready. The next step is for more universities to take them up.

The template kit¶

Three documents cover the three roles in the rollout sequence: proposal author, technical operator, and the university administration team that gets asked questions.

English translation status

The three community documents below are currently only available in Mandarin. The Mandarin originals are the authoritative source and carry the full Taiwan-specific legal annotations. English versions will be added in a follow-up release.

Proposal template (school-facing document, four outreach email patterns, two-month administrative timeline): https://anoni-net.ipns.dweb.link/community/campus-tor-relay-proposal/
Deployment SOP (torrc, UFW, status page architecture, monitoring runbook, IPv6, handover): https://anoni-net.ipns.dweb.link/community/campus-tor-relay-sop/
FAQ for university administration and legal counsel (ten questions with Taiwan-specific annotations, plus two one-page summaries): https://anoni-net.ipns.dweb.link/community/campus-relay-faq/

The hub page collects all three with case studies, project goals, and a backlog of external resources awaiting translation:

Tor Relay 校園建立研究專題

For readers outside Taiwan¶

The case is grounded in Taiwan's TANet (the academic network) and Taiwanese legal context, but the kit transfers in pieces:

The proposal template's structure — scope, technical resources, operational responsibility, legal positioning, academic value — is reusable across jurisdictions
The outreach email examples show the registers that worked when approaching IT departments and faculty advisors; useful as a tone reference even when the local language and legal context differ
The torrc, UFW, and monitoring setups in the SOP are jurisdiction-agnostic, and the graduation-handover discussion applies to any campus where students will eventually leave
The FAQ's Taiwan-specific legal annotations need to be replaced with local equivalents, but the question structure of "what the university actually worries about" is the more portable part

If your university already runs a relay through EFF's Tor University Challenge program, we'd be glad to compare notes, particularly on how you handled the handover problem.

Why Taiwan still needs more campus relays¶

Tor's anonymity rests on relay diversity. When relays concentrate in a few countries or network providers, the network's ability to resist traffic analysis weakens. Taiwan's relay count on Tor Metrics is still limited, and each stable node adds another margin of resistance. Real-time observation:

Tor Relays watcher

University campuses are a reasonable place to close that gap: stable academic bandwidth, students and staff with the skill to operate the node, a clearer institutional review path than residential or small-company hosting, and direct alignment with EFF's Tor University Challenge.

Taiwan's civil society has been raising attention to whistleblower protection, anti-stalking, and press freedom, areas where Tor's value to local users tracks with the global picture. A campus relay is the concrete contribution of "making this infrastructure usable in Taiwan," closer to the actual situation than an abstract statement about privacy.

NZ's original materials¶

The templates are placeholder-scrubbed, sanitised versions. If you want to see what the real submission looked like, NZ has made the original Google Drive folder fully public:

NZ's original Google Drive folder

It contains the original NTNU project proposal (Google Doc), the slide deck from the December 21, 2025 on-campus sharing session, and on-site photos. The original Doc still carries NZ's personal email, advisor information, and the university's IP range. Please don't fork the raw Doc, change the school name, and submit it — it's easy to spot during review. The value of the archive is for comparing structure and wording. When you actually submit, use the placeholder-scrubbed templates on anoni.net.

The Taiwan case is also documented in English on the Tor Project blog, with NZ's first-hand account:

Setting up a Tor Relay at a university in Taiwan

The full long-form Mandarin interview with NZ on anoni.net covers the year-long arc through the proposal process. If you read Mandarin, this is the most complete record:

在台師大架設 Tor Relay：一段與學校溝通、留下可能性的實作經驗

Acknowledgements¶

The kit's source materials were contributed by NZ (Su En-Li), drawn from his proposal, communication records, and operational experience at NTNU. NZ released the materials under CC-BY 4.0 as a template for other universities to adapt.

Every campus relay that goes live lowers the cost for the schools that follow. If you adapt the kit and roll out a relay at your university, in Taiwan or elsewhere, we'd be glad to hear about it. We can fold your case into the project page so the next wave has more reference points.

The template kit is a shared starting point. Any university can pick it up, rewrite it, and route it through its own internal review. The more schools take part, the more the shared template library grows, and the easier the work becomes for the ones who follow.

Financial Companies as Censors: A Sinophone Asia-Pacific Reading of EFF's Transaction Denied

Toomore Chiang — Thu, 21 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Financial Companies as Censors: A Sinophone Asia-Pacific Reading of EFF's Transaction Denied¶

Image from EFF Deeplinks article Former EFF Activism Director's New Book, Transaction Denied, Explores What Happens When Financial Companies Act like Censors (EFF Financial Censorship banner library), licensed under CC BY 4.0.

On 9 May 2017, the cross-border electronic payment service PayPal closed all domestic transaction functions in Taiwan. Two PayPal Taiwan accounts could no longer send money to each other. Cross-border transfers kept working. The streamer economy took the worst hit. Twitch Cheer, YouTube Super Chat, StreamLabs, and NightDev — tools that processed local audience tips through PayPal — went dark on the same day. Small organizations and independent media that relied on PayPal for domestic flows lost a payment rail overnight⁸.

The legal trigger was Article 3, Paragraph 1 of Taiwan's Electronic Payment Institution Management Act, passed in 2015. PayPal chose not to apply for a license and closed domestic functions instead⁹. Nearly nine years later, the U.S. online payment processor Stripe still does not allow individuals or companies in Taiwan to register. Stripe is the credit card collection layer behind Substack, many subscription SaaS products, and many open source sponsorship pages. Individual creators in Taiwan have to first register a U.S. LLC to use it¹⁰.

In Taiwan's payment conversation, these two facts have usually been filed under "compliance trade-offs" or "market size." EFF's former Activism Director Rainey Reitman, in her April 2026 book Transaction Denied¹², compiles cases from 2012 onward across the U.S. and the Middle East. Stacked together, the cases reveal a cross-region, cross-issue pattern that's been running for more than a decade. Taiwan's two events belong in that record. So do parallel events from Hong Kong, mainland China, Macau, Singapore, and Malaysia, which Reitman's book — focused on U.S. and Middle Eastern material — does not yet cover.

What Reitman compiles: a decade-plus of financial censorship cases¶

Rainey Reitman spent 11 years at EFF, serving as Activism Director and later Chief Program Officer, before leaving in 2022. She co-founded the Freedom of the Press Foundation and chairs its board¹¹. Half of the author royalties from this book go to that foundation. In EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn's introduction on Deeplinks¹, she writes: "Rainey is a storyteller and an activist. She uncovers hidden systems of power that shape our choices, our voice, and ultimately our society."

The bulk of the book documents cases that actually happened. The 2012 anti-book-censorship coalition EFF led pushed back PayPal's content restrictions on the self-publishing platform Smashwords³. The same year, the Nifty Archive Alliance case saw Stripe cut payment rails for the LGBTQ erotica writing community that had been running since 1992. After advocacy, Stripe reversed course⁴.

The 2021 Larry Brandt case had no such reversal. Brandt is a U.S. individual donor who used PayPal for nearly 20 years to send small recurring donations to Tor relay operators around the world. One day in 2021, PayPal shut down his account with no warning, no appeals process, and no one able to explain why⁵. Tor is one of the anonymity tools the anoni.net community documents and many readers actually use, and Tor relay operators around the world depend on exactly this kind of individual sponsorship. Translate the case to a context English-language readers in Asia recognize: if you've been sending regular cross-border support to Hong Kong media in exile, Burmese independent journalists, Ukrainian grassroots groups, or any cross-border human rights project, the experience is the same. Small amount, clear purpose, multi-year history — none of it grants immunity.

When a multi-year small-amount donor has a single fresh donation flagged as suspicious and the account terminated, the claim that "financial institutions aren't censors" gets harder to defend. More cases line up: a U.S. citizen who taught Persian poetry had PayPal and Venmo accounts frozen, a New York Muslim city councilmember was blocked because a transfer memo named a Bangladeshi restaurant, and Palestinian users across an entire region were locked out of PayPal⁶.

Reitman points out that this pattern works long-term because the underlying assumption — financial institutions are neutral conduits — is widely accepted. In practice, the combination of overcautious compliance-driven risk avoidance, service terms vague to the point of unpredictability, automated decisions with no human review interface, and no functioning appeals path for those cut off produces an outcome that's effectively the same as content removal⁷. EFF has tracked dozens of these cases over the past decade-plus, faster than any legislature has moved on the issue.

From account blocks to platform content policy: a new chain of cases in 2025-2026¶

The cases Reitman compiles mostly center on financial institutions cutting off individual or organizational accounts. From 2025 onward, a different mode of pressure has emerged. Payment processors use contract terms and fine threats to push platforms into revising their own content policies. The target has shifted from individual accounts to entire platform-level policies.

In February 2025, Mastercard and Visa pressured multiple Japanese cultural-industry platforms, forcing services to adjust what they sold. Japan's domestic card brand JCB and various stored-value mechanisms absorbed some of the impact, allowing the affected services to barely scrape through¹³. In July of the same year, Steam (Valve) confirmed it had removed adult games from its store under payment-processor pressure¹⁴. In March 2026, U.S. FTC Chair Andrew N. Ferguson issued warning letters to PayPal, Stripe, Visa, and Mastercard on "debanking American consumers" — the first time a U.S. federal regulator publicly framed this pattern as an issue¹⁵. In May 2026, Kickstarter revised its content guidelines to ban several categories of NSFW content, with Stripe identified as the pressure source behind the policy change¹⁶.

From individual accounts severed, to entire markets shut out, to platform content policies rewritten by proxy, the reach of financial intermediaries has expanded steadily over the past decade-plus.

Taiwan as case study: PayPal's domestic shutdown, Stripe's continued closure¶

Read PayPal's 2017 domestic shutdown and Stripe's continued closure through Reitman's lens, and both look like the same thing: financial intermediaries unilaterally deciding who can collect money on their networks.

PayPal's case is "compliance-driven domestic shutdown." After Taiwan's Electronic Payment Institution Management Act took effect in 2015, PayPal opted out of applying for a license and closed domestic payment functions. Cross-border functions stayed. Local third-party processors like ECPay, NewebPay, and Pay2Go filled the gap. In hindsight, this localized Taiwan's domestic payment infrastructure further. But applications that had built on PayPal for local Taiwan flows needed an alternative the same day⁸.

Stripe's case is "the market was never opened." Individuals and companies in Taiwan cannot apply for a Stripe account directly. The common workaround is to register a U.S. LLC, apply for an EIN, open a U.S. bank account, and operate Stripe under the U.S. corporate name¹⁰. That route carries its own compliance cost — failure to file IRS Form 5472 starts at a US$25,000 penalty — and the threshold is high for individual creators. In October 2025, Stripe Tax began supporting Taiwan remote-seller tax registration¹², but Stripe Tax handles tax registration only. Taiwan users still cannot open a Stripe payment account.

Neither is "censorship" in the traditional sense, but for advocacy organizations, independent media, and creators, the effect is censorship-shaped. Depending on cross-border payment rails means the primary collection channel can disappear at any time, or may have never existed. Domestic third-party processors fill some of the gap, but cross-border collection, international convergence on KYC, and the gradual rollout of Taiwan's Virtual Asset Service Provider Act are tightening simultaneously. The institutional framing is documented in Mandarin at Taiwan VASP Act 2026 (zh-TW page, en version pending). Organization-side responses sit under Anonymous Donation Channels for Advocacy Organizations (zh-TW page, en version pending).

Sinophone Asia-Pacific: the same mechanisms with regionally specific outcomes¶

Reitman's book doesn't expand into Asia. But the four elements she identifies — overcautious compliance-driven risk avoidance, vague service terms, automated decisions, and absent appeals — map cleanly onto specific events across the Sinophone Asia-Pacific. The differences are who drives the cutoff and what the motivation is.

Mainland China: Account freezes after mandatory real-name registration on WeChat Pay and Alipay are a long-running phenomenon. Transfers touching sensitive topics, cross-border collection, or inbound flows from outside the country trigger "protective freezes" on accounts. The product of state censorship layered onto platform compliance — the mechanism Reitman documents in U.S. cases, with an additional policy-driven layer on top.
Hong Kong: After the 2019–2020 protests, HSBC, Stripe, PayPal, and others faced a mix of international due diligence and local compliance pressure. Accounts belonging to pro-democracy organizations, independent media, and overseas Hong Konger fundraising platforms have been frozen or terminated repeatedly. Domestic regulation and external due diligence tightened during the same window.
Macau: AML compliance pressure from the gaming industry spills over to ordinary users. Cross-border small transfers easily trigger EDD (enhanced due diligence), and independent media or human rights workers find their cross-border collection options thinning.
Singapore: The Monetary Authority of Singapore's Payment Services Act and the 2023 onward tightening of crypto/DPT licensing make it difficult for startups, independent creators, and cross-border NGOs to access stable collection infrastructure inside the country. Some foreign providers have stopped accepting Singapore registrants outright.
Malaysia: Bank Negara Malaysia's convergence on e-wallet KYC and existing foreign exchange controls make it hard for domestic users to receive small cross-border donations. Independent media and human rights NGOs need to route cross-border flows through longer paths.

Taiwan's situation — PayPal closed in 2017, Stripe never opened — belongs to the same family of mechanisms. The Taiwan payment conversation simply tends to file these under "compliance trade-offs" rather than identify them as financial censorship.

For English-language readers approaching this from outside the region, the takeaway is that Reitman's framework — financial intermediaries as de facto censors — extends well into the Sinophone Asia-Pacific. The U.S. and Middle Eastern cases in her book are well-documented and serve as the global anchor. The Sinophone Asia-Pacific cases summarized above are not yet catalogued at the same level of detail. That gap is exactly where the anoni.net community wants to contribute.

What the community wants to advance next¶

The community set anonymous payments as one of three 2026 focus areas. The original framing was "individual financial flows are an independent dimension of metadata." Reitman's book reframes the question: financial flows can be actively wielded as a censorship tool, and the risk is not abstract for advocacy organizations, independent media, or creators.

The existing Why Anonymous Payments Matter anchor (zh-TW page, en version pending) addresses payment flows as passively observed. This post addresses payment flows as actively cut off. Reading both together gives the fuller picture.

Next steps planned include adding a "cross-border sanctions and over-compliance side effects" section to Taiwan VASP Act 2026, and selecting 5–8 EFF Financial Censorship articles from the past decade-plus for curated translation. Tracking the progress of alternative payment systems is also part of the picture. Europe's European Payments Initiative and Brazil's Pix are two existing implementations¹⁷¹⁸, though payment rails are heavily regulated in every jurisdiction and building a scaled alternative is not cheap. The Anonymous Payments Research Track (zh-TW page, en version pending) is where the community discussion and translation backlog live.

For English-language readers who want the underlying material, EFF's Financial Censorship issue page{target="blank"} is the best entry point. _Transaction Denied is available from Beacon Press.

Internet Freedom: why the broader internet freedom frame matters for payment infrastructure
LGBTQ+ scenarios: a scenario page covering anonymous social participation, which intersects with payment privacy
Existing English coverage is sparse on payments. Several Mandarin anchor pages are linked above and will be ported to English on the roadmap.

Former EFF Activism Director's New Book, Transaction Denied, Explores What Happens When Financial Companies Act like Censors - EFF Deeplinks ↩↩
Transaction Denied book page - Beacon Press ↩
Free Speech Coalition Calls on PayPal to Back Off Misguided Book Censorship Policy - EFF Deeplinks ↩
Payment Provider Stripe Upholds Free Speech, Reactivates Nifty Archives - EFF Deeplinks ↩
PayPal Shuts Down Long-Time Tor Supporter with No Recourse - EFF Deeplinks ↩
Why Is PayPal Denying Service to Palestinians? - EFF Deeplinks ↩
Financial Censorship issue page - EFF ↩
PayPal withdraws, Taiwan local payment platforms rise - TechNews (in Mandarin) ↩↩
Streamer donations affected? PayPal announces end to Taiwan domestic transactions - Bahamut GNN (in Mandarin) ↩
Essential guide for Taiwan creators: platform fees and remittance back to Taiwan - most.tw (in Mandarin) ↩↩
Rainey Reitman - EFF Staff (11 years at EFF, co-founder and current board chair of the Freedom of the Press Foundation) ↩
Adds support for remote sellers in Taiwan to Stripe Tax - Stripe Changelog (2025-10-29) ↩
Mastercard and VISA's Offensive Against Japanese Cultural Industries - Gea-Suan Lin's BLOG (in Mandarin) ↩
Steam (Valve) confirms adult games removed under payment processor pressure - Gea-Suan Lin's BLOG (in Mandarin) ↩
FTC Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson Issues Warning Letters to CEOs of PayPal, Stripe, Visa and Mastercard About Debanking American Consumers - U.S. Federal Trade Commission ↩
Kickstarter Is The Latest Platform Seemingly Forced To Ban Adult Content By Payment Processors - Kotaku ↩
European Payments Initiative - Wikipedia ↩
Pix (payment system) - Wikipedia ↩

onionoo MCP is now public: query the Tor relay network in plain language

Toomore Chiang — Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

onionoo MCP is now public: query the Tor relay network in plain language¶

The community-hosted onionoo-fastapi service is now public at https://onionoo.anoni.net, released as v1.0.0. It wraps the Tor Project's official Onionoo API in two interfaces: a semantic HTTP API with a full OpenAPI document, and a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server.

Connect it to Claude Desktop, Cursor, Claude Code, or any MCP-capable client and you can ask a single question like "how many running Tor relays does Taiwan have right now, what is the total bandwidth, and what are the top five ASNs?" The agent breaks the question down, picks tools, fetches the data, and returns a readable summary. You do not need to learn Onionoo's field schema before starting research.

Why wrap Onionoo at all¶

Onionoo's specification is complete, but it has three hurdles for AI agents.

It has no OpenAPI description, so Swagger UI, Postman, and code generators cannot consume it directly.
Its compact field names (r, f, n, a, and so on) are designed for transport efficiency, not semantic clarity. Language models routinely confuse r with relay or running.
A single useful query often spans multiple endpoints (details plus uptime plus bandwidth). Agents that hand-roll that composition tend to make mistakes.

onionoo-fastapi takes care of those problems. Compact codes are renamed to nickname, fingerprint, addresses, running, and so on. A full OpenAPI document is published. Common multi-endpoint tasks are exposed as single MCP tool calls. One call returns the merged details, uptime, and bandwidth snapshot for a relay, instead of you stitching three endpoints together.

The service does not store any Onionoo data. It only forwards requests and reshapes responses. The upstream is https://onionoo.torproject.org.

What you can ask¶

Once connected, you can ask the agent the following sorts of questions in plain language.

Audit a country's Tor footprint: "Summarize Taiwan's running Tor relays. Count, total bandwidth, consensus weight, top five ASNs, and pick the three relays with the highest consensus weight."
Inspect a specific ASN: "List all running Tor relays under TANet (AS1659), including their flags, bandwidth, and uptime."
Compare fingerprints: "Compare 9695DFC35FFEB861329B9F1AB04C46397020CE31 and 847B1F850344D7876491A54892F904934E4EB85D. Versions, flags, country, and AS."
Single-relay health check: "Tell me the current status of relay moria1. Country, last week's bandwidth trend, and uptime."

Claude Desktop connected to onionoo MCP, replying to "Summarize Taiwan's Tor relays" with a structured report. The numbers come from upstream Onionoo and represent a point-in-time snapshot.

The pre-MCP version of this workflow meant skimming the Onionoo docs, writing a script, merging JSON, and formatting a table. A single sentence now gets you to a first-cut answer, and the cost of starting a piece of research drops sharply.

How to connect¶

For AI client users¶

In Claude Desktop, Cursor, or any other MCP-capable client, add this to the mcpServers section of the config:

{  "mcpServers": {  "onionoo": {  "type": "http",  "url": "https://onionoo.anoni.net/mcp"  }  } }

Save the config, restart the client, and the onionoo tool set will appear in the tool list. The full guide covers local stdio transport setup, all available tools, permission options, and self-hosted (Docker) instructions.

Read the full onionoo MCP guide

For direct API users¶

Each endpoint returns semantic JSON and can be called with curl:

# Taiwan relays, top 5 by consensus weight curl -s 'https://onionoo.anoni.net/v1/details?country=tw&running=true&order=-consensus_weight&limit=5' | jq . # Running relay counts aggregated by country curl -s 'https://onionoo.anoni.net/v1/aggregate/countries?running=true' | jq .

The full endpoint list and parameters are in the Swagger UI. Query parameters follow Onionoo's official specification.

Where this fits alongside our other observation tools¶

anoni.net now has three entry points for Tor network observation, each suited to a different task.

Tor Relays watcher (Mandarin): chart dashboards for Taiwan's relay counts and bandwidth trends. Good when you want to see how something has moved over time.
ASN observation coverage analysis (Mandarin): OONI observation data broken down by ASN. Good when you want to know which ASNs are actually being measured.
onionoo MCP (new): ask ad-hoc questions in plain language. Good when you want to scope out a specific relay, ASN, or country.

The three rely on different data sources (Pulse's own historical time series, OONI's raw observation data, and Onionoo's live snapshots) and complement each other rather than duplicating coverage.

Contribute or report back¶

File issues or feature requests: https://github.com/anoni-net/onionoo-fastapi/issues
To discuss which task-oriented tools we should add next, or to ask the community to demonstrate a particular query, drop by our Matrix room (the landing page is in Mandarin, English is welcome in the room).
To run your own instance (for a .onion service, internal network, or experimentation), the "Self-hosting (Docker)" section of the full guide has Docker commands and the full environment variable list.

The service is released under the MIT license. Source code: https://github.com/anoni-net/onionoo-fastapi. Issues and PRs welcome.

onionoo MCP: a query service for Tor relays — full usage guide
Tor Relays watcher (Mandarin)
ASN observation coverage analysis (Mandarin)
What is Tor? (Mandarin)

What is Differential Privacy?

Toomore Chiang — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What is Differential Privacy?¶

This article is based on the original explainer by fria at Privacy Guides:

What is Differential Privacy?, fria, 2025-09-30

Can you collect data from a large group of people while still protecting each individual's privacy? Differential privacy answers yes — with a mathematical proof to back it up. This article introduces the concept, traces its history from early anonymization failures to real-world deployments, and explores what it means for users and policymakers in Taiwan and the broader Chinese-speaking world.

A note for anonymous network users

Differential privacy and tools like Tor address different layers of privacy. Tor protects your transmission — it prevents an observer from knowing who you are communicating with. Differential privacy protects data release — it ensures that published statistics cannot be reversed to identify individuals. They are complementary, not interchangeable, and together cover different parts of a complete threat model.

If you care about where your data ends up across services, platforms, or government datasets, differential privacy is worth understanding: even "anonymized" or "aggregate" data can be reversed through cross-referencing with other sources. This article helps you identify which privacy claims are verifiable — and which are marketing.

Summary of the Original Article¶

The Privacy Guides explainer walks through the full arc of privacy-preserving data collection:

The core problem. Even seemingly harmless data points can identify individuals. Latanya Sweeney showed in 2000 that 87% of Americans can be re-identified from just three fields: ZIP code, date of birth, and sex.

Failed approaches. Before differential privacy, techniques like k-anonymity (every row has at least k-1 identical rows) and simple name-removal were considered sufficient. They weren't. The AOL search log release (2006) and the Strava heatmap incident (2018) are two famous examples of "anonymized" data that was trivially re-identified. In the Strava case, the platform did not deliberately expose anyone — aggregating millions of individual routes simply revealed patterns that only specific people would repeat. That is precisely the problem differential privacy is designed to prevent.

For k-anonymity specifically, researchers demonstrated the attack mechanism against the Harvard/MIT EdX dataset: they identified quasi-identifier combinations (course enrollment records) that resisted generalization, then matched them against publicly available LinkedIn profiles to narrow the candidate list to specific individuals. Cross-referencing with external data is k-anonymity's fundamental blind spot.

Randomized response (Warner, 1965) was an early building block: introduce deliberate randomness into survey answers so individual responses can't be trusted, but aggregate statistics remain accurate.

Differential privacy (Dwork et al., 2006) formalized this idea. It adds calibrated noise to data such that the output of any query looks essentially the same whether or not any particular individual's data was included. The privacy guarantee is controlled by ε (epsilon, the "privacy budget"): smaller ε means stronger privacy but less accurate results.

Local vs. Central DP. Central DP adds noise after data is collected, requiring trust in the central authority. Local DP (as implemented by Google's RAPPOR in 2014) adds noise on the device before transmission, eliminating the need to trust any server.

Real deployments include Google Chrome and Maps (RAPPOR), Apple's keyboard and emoji telemetry (Sketch/Matrix), Mozilla Firefox telemetry (Prio), and the U.S. 2020 Census Disclosure Avoidance System. Neither Google nor Apple publicly discloses the ε values used in their deployments. "We use local differential privacy" can be verified from published papers and code; "our ε is strong enough to protect you" remains a claim users cannot independently audit.

OpenDP, developed at Harvard, provides an open-source toolkit for applying differential privacy to arbitrary datasets.

Where research is heading. Machine learning models trained on personal data can leak information about their training set through membership inference attacks — an adversary probes the model to determine whether a specific record was included in the training data. Applying differential privacy during model training is the strongest known defense with formal guarantees. As AI systems increasingly rely on sensitive personal data, this application of differential privacy is growing in importance alongside the classical data-release use cases covered in the original article.

The full article is detailed, well-structured, and accessible to non-specialists — making it an excellent reference for anyone explaining privacy-enhancing technologies to a general audience.

Taiwan Perspective¶

Government Statistics and Open Data¶

Taiwan's open data platform (data.gov.tw) and national statistics releases rarely disclose how data is de-identified, let alone whether mathematically rigorous techniques are used. The U.S. 2020 Census case — where adopting differential privacy sparked public debate over how to set ε and who gets to decide — is directly relevant to Taiwan. As Taiwan's government expands data-sharing programs (health data, transportation, smart city initiatives), civil society advocates can use differential privacy as a concrete benchmark: not just "please anonymize it," but "prove the privacy guarantee and publish the parameters."

Regulation and Industry¶

Taiwan's Personal Data Protection Act (個人資料保護法) requires de-identification but does not specify technical standards. The "local noise, then upload" model demonstrated by Google and Apple provides a template that Taiwanese regulators and companies could reference when drafting or evaluating compliance practices. Taiwanese mobile applications — many of which collect detailed behavioral telemetry — are rarely audited for whether their anonymization claims hold up to re-identification attacks of the kind described in this article.

Civil Society and Health Data¶

Taiwan's National Health Insurance database is one of the richest health datasets in the world, and its secondary use for research has sparked repeated controversies around privacy. Differential privacy offers a path to publishing aggregate statistics from such databases while providing provable individual-level protection. Advocates working on health data governance, academic data sharing, or smart city projects can use this article as accessible educational material to raise the technical standard of the conversation.

Online Resources from Taiwan¶

Taiwan's Ministry of Digital Affairs (數位發展部) has published a Privacy Enhancing Technologies Application Guidelines (隱私強化技術應用指引) on HackMD, covering five key PETs including differential privacy, synthetic data, and federated learning. The document provides application scenarios, technical workflows, and case studies grounded in a Taiwan policy context — one of the few Chinese-language PET guides that connects regulatory needs to specific technical choices. It is a useful reference for advocates, researchers, and policymakers working in Taiwan or other Chinese-speaking contexts.

Reference: Privacy Enhancing Technologies Application Guidelines

Perspective for Chinese-Speaking Regions¶

China's Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL, 个人信息保护法) defines anonymization as irreversible de-identification, but does not mandate specific technical approaches. The gap between regulatory language and cryptographically provable privacy guarantees is significant. Google RAPPOR and Apple's local differential privacy deployments demonstrate what "verifiable privacy" looks like in practice — a standard that Chinese regulators, researchers, and civil society organizations can point to when evaluating domestic data practices.

China's major platforms (WeChat, Alipay, Baidu) process enormous volumes of user data with limited public technical disclosure. The differential privacy framework, and tools like OpenDP, provide a common language for demanding transparency: not just "we protect your data," but "here is our ε, here is our model, here is what you can verify."

What the Tor VPN security audit means for Taiwan's privacy community

Toomore Chiang — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What the Tor VPN security audit means for Taiwan's privacy community¶

This post is based on the Tor Project announcement:

Code audit for Tor VPN completed by Cure53 | April 15, 2026

In June 2025, Cure53 completed a penetration test and source code review of TorVPN for Android and its underlying Rust networking layer, Onionmasq. The Tor Project published the results in April 2026. The headline finding: Tor's core tunnel establishment and routing logic held up well. But there are specific technical issues worth understanding if you're recommending or deploying this tool in Taiwan's context.

What was audited¶

Two components were in scope:

TorVPN for Android — the mobile app that routes device traffic through Tor
Onionmasq / Tunnel Interface for Arti — the Rust-based layer handling TCP/UDP parsing, DNS resolution, and traffic forwarding into the Tor network

What the audit found¶

The core conclusion is reassuring: "Tor's core integration remains robust, with no fundamental issues in tunnel establishment or routing." The findings that do exist fall into four categories.

Input validation gaps — incomplete validation in several places could cause unexpected behavior at edge cases.

DNS handling weaknesses — under specific and uncommon conditions, DNS resolution logic could trigger denial-of-service behavior. This is rare, but matters more in environments where DNS is already manipulated.

Cryptographic recommendations — the audit flagged missing certificate pinning and opportunities to improve randomness quality. Both are defensive hardening suggestions rather than active vulnerabilities.

Mobile security gaps — two standard Android concerns: plaintext configuration storage (configuration data stored unencrypted on the device) and absent root detection (no warning or mitigation when running on a rooted device).

All findings have been accepted into Tor Project's ongoing security improvement roadmap.

The full audit report is available here: torvpn_cure53_audit.pdf

Why this matters specifically in Taiwan¶

Independent audits are how trust is built, not assumed. Taiwan has a technically engaged digital-rights and civic tech community — groups like g0v contributors, COSCUP participants, and digital journalists who recommend tools to people with real exposure. For those communities, "Tor is secure" is not a sufficient answer. A PDF with specific vulnerability IDs and a remediation roadmap is. This audit provides that foundation.

DNS manipulation is not a hypothetical. The DNS handling weakness identified in this audit is particularly worth noting in Taiwan's context. OONI measurement data from Taiwan shows that DNS interference does occur — not at the scale seen in heavily censored environments, but enough that understanding how a privacy tool behaves under DNS pressure has practical meaning.

Plaintext configuration storage is a legal and practical concern. Taiwan's Personal Data Protection Act places obligations on how applications handle user data stored on devices. The audit finding that TorVPN stores configuration in plaintext isn't just a technical footnote — it's a compliance-adjacent concern worth factoring into deployment recommendations, especially for users in higher-risk scenarios like journalists or activists.

Source

Based on the official Tor Project post Code audit for Tor VPN completed by Cure53.

Taiwan’s Virtual Asset Service Bill: What the Cabinet Approved (and What Happens Next)

Toomore Chiang — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Taiwan’s Virtual Asset Service Bill: What the Cabinet Approved (and What Happens Next)¶

On 2 April 2026, Taiwan’s Executive Yuan (the cabinet) approved the Financial Supervisory Commission’s draft Virtual Asset Service Act and sent it to the Legislative Yuan for review. If you follow crypto policy or stablecoins, this matters because Taiwan is moving from an anti–money laundering registration regime toward a licensing regime for service providers. This post is a status briefing that gathers the April 2026 cabinet move in one place for readers who mostly skip the Mandarin policy wires. It stays at the policy level. For legal questions, talk to a qualified professional in Taiwan.

After the cabinet, the bill is still a draft¶

The document that passed the cabinet is draft legislation. The next steps are committee review, party negotiations, and possible amendments on the floor. The law only binds the public after three readings, promulgation, and an announced effective date. Headlines about maximum prison terms describe draft criminal provisions aimed at fraud, manipulation, and unlicensed activity. Always check the final text after the legislature finishes.

What the published structure says¶

Official summary materials (as distributed with the cabinet decision) describe 56 articles, including:

General provisions: purpose, regulator, definitions, sandbox-style experiments, and international cooperation (Articles 1–5).
Virtual asset service providers: licensing, business scope, corporate form, capital, and conduct rules (Articles 6–28).
Industry association (Articles 29–33).
Stablecoins: issuance, reserves, and trading consent (Articles 34–41).
Supervision and enforcement: market-abuse prohibitions, inspections, and exit rules (Articles 42–46).
Penalties (Articles 47–54).
Transition from AML registration to licensing and commencement (Articles 55–56).

The draft explicitly frames a transition period for existing AML-registered VASPs and financial institutions already active in the space.

How “virtual assets” are framed¶

The draft spends real effort defining virtual assets and distinguishing NFTs and similar instruments from what the act treats as in-scope assets. Whether a token falls under the act depends on the statutory definition and case-by-case supervisory judgment. A colloquial label in a news article does not settle scope on its own.

Why stablecoins get their own chapter¶

Articles 34–41 address stablecoins (pegged arrangements, issuance, and interaction with trading platforms). That matters internationally because many jurisdictions are updating stablecoin rules alongside broader crypto frameworks. Taiwan’s draft reads best alongside its own central bank and banking law. Treat comparisons to the EU’s MiCA or U.S. federal bills as shorthand that still needs the local text.

Criminal penalties (draft text)¶

The following numbers come from the draft articles published with the cabinet package, as reproduced in official summary PDFs:

Article 47: Certain fraud or market manipulation offenses carry three to ten years of imprisonment and fines from NT$10 million to NT$200 million, with additional rules for self-reports and cooperation.
Article 48: Operating without required licenses (including certain stablecoin issuance scenarios) can carry up to seven years of imprisonment and fines up to NT$100 million, with corporate liability.

Other articles cover custody violations, false filings, and lighter offenses. Read the full text for complete elements of each crime.

Who speaks at public hearings¶

Outside Taiwan, readers often imagine NGO-led advocacy. In this policy area, Taiwan’s public record centers on government agencies (for example the FSC, Central Bank, and Ministry of Justice) and industry associations such as the Taiwan Virtual Asset Anti-Money Laundering Association and the National Virtual Asset Service Industry Association (names may appear in Mandarin in official records). Human-rights or consumer NGOs show up when they are on the Legislative Yuan hearing roster by name. When writing or reading coverage, treat trade associations as industry stakeholders. If a group is a trade body rather than a rights or consumer organization, say that plainly instead of calling it generic “civil society”.

Self-custody and ordinary users¶

The draft targets commercial service providers and stablecoin issuers that take customer assets or operate platforms under the statute’s definitions. Non-custodial wallets and routine on-chain transfers often sit outside that core line of business, though facts still matter at the margin. If you are unsure how an activity is classified, ask a qualified professional in Taiwan. This article stays at the pattern level so readers can orient coverage without a case memo.

Why the anoni.net community cares¶

We promote Tor, Tails, and OONI and think about payments and identity as privacy problems. Clearer VASP rules change how regulated exchanges and on-chain self-custody sit next to each other in practice. Understanding the bill’s progress helps communities discuss privacy, anti-fraud enforcement, and compliance with a shared vocabulary.

Primary sources¶

Executive Yuan: PDF of the draft Virtual Asset Service Act (search the cabinet news item dated 2 April 2026 for the attachment).
Legislative Yuan: ly.gov.tw for hearing schedules and verbatim records.
Secondary media: BlockTempo summary (useful context. Verify against the PDF).

If you have a direct link to a hearing roster or written comment that names additional organizations, we can update the stakeholder section to match the official record.

A Server That Forgets: why this relay design deserves attention

Toomore Chiang — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A Server That Forgets: why this relay design deserves attention¶

The Tor Project post, A Server That Forgets: Exploring Stateless Relays, is grounded in real operator experience from Osservatorio Nessuno in Italy. It is not just a technical tour. It asks a basic trust question: if a relay can be seized, searched, or physically cloned, what exactly can an adversary still learn?

Why this is worth translating¶

First, the article starts from actual seizure and raid precedents. That makes the threat model concrete. Relay operators are not debating abstract malware only; many are planning for legal process and physical hardware exposure.

Second, it gives a rare end-to-end map of the stack: TPM, measured boot, remote attestation, RAM-only runtime, VM images, and tooling paths such as Patela and stboot. Most discussions in our region cover one layer at a time. This one connects them.

Third, it keeps the hard parts visible. Re-sealing after updates, conflicts between stateless images and unattended upgrades, memory ceilings without swap, and the risk of losing a Stable flag due to restarts are all left as open engineering work, not hidden in marketing language.

What "stateless relay" changes in practice¶

A stateless system reboots into a known image and does not keep writable disk state. In security terms, this shifts defaults:

physical seizure yields less forensic material;
configuration drift is constrained by declarative rebuilds;
persistence across reboots becomes harder for attackers;
reproducibility and auditability become more realistic goals.

For Tor relays, there is one unavoidable tension: identity must survive reboots. Relays build reputation over time through long-term keys. If keys disappear on every boot, the node loses its standing and utility.

That is where TPM-backed key handling matters. Keys can be bound to measured boot state and used without handing raw private key material to the operating system. Remote attestation can then let an external verifier check what software stack actually booted. But the limitations are real too, including key-type mismatches and operational complexity.

Three deployment paths, three trade-offs¶

The post compares three practical models:

minimal RAM-disk setups (simple, manual key operations);
VM-based RAM images (easier rollback and image lifecycle);
bare metal with TPM + verified boot (stronger trust chain, heavier operations).

No single model wins everywhere. The right choice depends on threat model, budget, hosting constraints, and team maturity.

A Taiwan-local lens¶

For readers outside Taiwan, the practical question is not whether stateless relays are "good" in theory, but how they land in a place that is highly connected, commercially dense, and politically exposed in regional information conflicts.

Taiwan has strengths that can make this work easier than in some countries: mature datacenter services, access to commodity TPM-capable hardware, and a civic-tech culture that is comfortable with open documentation. In a favorable scenario, that means relay operators can standardize hardened images, publish clearer incident playbooks, and gradually build a small but credible trust layer around attestation and transparency reporting.

But there are downside paths too. Operationally, many local relay efforts are volunteer-run and time-constrained. Legal and hosting responses to complaints can be inconsistent. If a relay operator receives urgent abuse notices, equipment handling requests, or legal contact without a prepared process, "better architecture" does not automatically reduce human risk. Stateless design lowers some technical exposure, but coordination failure can still create real-world damage.

This topic is especially relevant if we connect it to those local conditions:

Volunteer operations and legal handling
A playbook for datacenter notices, law-enforcement contact, and equipment seizure can reduce panic and mistakes during incidents.
Hardware and supply-chain feasibility
TPM-capable mini-servers and hosting are available, but procurement, audit, and maintenance costs vary sharply. In a good case, operators can agree on a few reproducible hardware profiles and keep maintenance predictable. In a bad case, each team hand-rolls a different stack, audits become expensive, and security claims are hard to compare.
Public accountability, not just private hardening
Measured boot, attestation, and transparency logs can support broader civic-tech conversations about verifiable infrastructure claims, including open-source supply-chain trust. Best case: these tools become shared evidence that improves public trust. Worst case: they remain niche artifacts only specialists can read, so social trust still depends on reputation alone.

What remains unsolved¶

The most important takeaway is not "problem solved." It is "problem scoped clearly." The unresolved items are exactly where collaboration is needed:

predictable re-sealing workflows after stack changes;
upgrade pipelines that do not silently roll back on reboot;
memory tuning under strict no-swap constraints;
uptime strategies that preserve relay usefulness and network flags.

Closing thought¶

For privacy infrastructure, stateless design is not a silver bullet, but it is a meaningful way to reduce both attack surface and operator mistakes. This post helps move the conversation from slogans to engineering choices, with explicit costs and explicit trust boundaries.

Source

Tor Project, A Server That Forgets: Exploring Stateless Relays
Related: Patela, stboot, Emerald Onion

Cross-Community Collaboration: Anonymity Networks Community × ETHTaipei

Toomore Chiang — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Cross-Community Collaboration: Anonymity Networks Community × ETHTaipei¶

This year we are excited to partner with ETHTaipei (Taipei Ethereum Community) on program coordination. Both communities approach anonymous payments from different angles. To ensure each submission reaches the most fitting audience, we will review proposals together:

Application-oriented and introductory talks: prioritized for the Anonymity Networks Community track
Technical and protocol-level talks: may be moved to the ETHTaipei blockchain track

You do not need to decide which track to submit to — we will discuss placement with speakers during the review process. Both communities will cross-promote their schedules, so attendees can move between tracks to follow related topics across the event.

On Day 2 (Aug 9), both communities plan to co-organize a dedicated session on Anonymous Payments. Speakers and attendees interested in this topic are especially encouraged to take note. If you have a relevant proposal, feel free to mention in your submission notes that you are interested in being included in the cross-community session.

How to Submit (Read First)¶

Read the full CFP information and submission link before submitting.
In your proposal, make sure to choose "匿名網路社群 anoni.net" as the track topic so your submission enters this track's review process.
Clearly include your topic direction, intended format, audience background, requested duration (30 or 50 minutes), and demo needs (if any).

Read the full CFP details and submission guide

Ethics and Open Licensing Reminder¶

This track is for lawful use and does not support money laundering, tax evasion, or other illegal activity.
For topics involving anonymity tools, crypto assets, or coin mixing, focus on education and risk understanding, and remind audiences about legal differences across jurisdictions.
Public teaching materials and demo assets should follow COSCUP requirements and use open licenses.

About COSCUP¶

COSCUP is Taiwan's annual open-source community conference, centered on open-source collaboration and free admission. This track aims to connect technology communities and civic groups, expand practical exchange and local collaboration around anonymity, privacy, and internet freedom, and make participation easier for people who prefer a lower-profile presence with less personal data exposure.

COSCUP 2026 Anonymity Networks Community Track: Call for Proposals

Toomore Chiang — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

COSCUP 2026 Anonymity Networks Community Track: Call for Proposals¶

The Anonymity Networks Community is now accepting proposals for the COSCUP 2026 Anonymity Networks Community Track. This is our second year running related sessions at COSCUP. Through this open CFP, we hope to invite more people who care about or actively practice anonymity to share their work. The track runs for two days and includes talks, workshops, demos, and field experience sharing.

Read the full CFP details and submission guide

Key Dates¶

Event dates: August 8 and 9, 2026, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology (NTUST)
CFP deadline: 2026/05/09 (AoE)
Acceptance announcements: 2026/06/09
Schedule finalization: to be completed by 2026/06/23

CFP Topics¶

Personal privacy: practical personal privacy methods for real-life situations, including cross-border movement, device checks, account handling, and data management.
Anonymous networks and internet freedom: anonymous connectivity and secure communication under surveillance, blocking, or differential routing, including Tor, Tails, OONI, and anti-censorship practice.
Anonymous payments: lawful anonymous payment and donation practice, including payment-path data exposure risks, tool limits, compliance, and auditing experience.
International participation: local-to-global collaboration with organizations such as Tor Project, Tails, OONI, and EFF, including concrete local implementation experience.
Other related topics: whistleblower protection, anonymous reporting, secure communication, de-identification and metadata, open-source licensing, and reproducible builds.

For topic scope and proposal direction, please refer to the CFP page.

Focus Areas¶

Personal privacy is a basic human right and a foundation for digital safety and everyday digital life.
The internet should remain open and free, and everyone should be able to use anonymous networks.
Discussion of anonymous payments is grounded in lawful use, auditability, and the safety of vulnerable groups and community members.
Local action should connect with global collaboration and bring back repeatable practical experience.

If your topic aligns with these focus areas, we welcome your submission.

Cross-Community Collaboration: Anonymity Networks Community × ETHTaipei¶

This year we are partnering with ETHTaipei (Taipei Ethereum Community) on program coordination. Both communities approach anonymous payments from different angles. To ensure submissions reach the most fitting audience, we will review proposals together:

Application-oriented and introductory talks: prioritized for the Anonymity Networks Community track
Technical and protocol-level talks: may be moved to the ETHTaipei blockchain track

How to Submit (Read First)¶

Read the full CFP information and submission link before submitting.
In your proposal, make sure to choose "匿名網路社群 anoni.net" as the track topic so your submission enters this track's review process.
Clearly include your topic direction, intended format, audience background, requested duration (30 or 50 minutes), and demo needs (if any).

If you have questions, contact us via Contact.

Ethics and Open Licensing Reminder¶

This track is for lawful use and does not support money laundering, tax evasion, or other illegal activity.
For topics involving anonymity tools, crypto assets, or coin mixing, focus on education and risk understanding, and remind audiences about legal differences across jurisdictions.
Public teaching materials and demo assets should follow COSCUP requirements and use open licenses.

About COSCUP¶

Arti 2.2.0: better network fit now, stronger Tor plumbing later

Toomore Chiang — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Arti 2.2.0: better network fit now, stronger Tor plumbing later¶

This post is based on the Tor Project announcement:

Arti 2.2.0 released: HTTP CONNECT, RPC, and Relay development. | March 31, 2026

Arti is Tor’s next-generation Rust implementation. The 2.2.0 release is notable because it pushes a previously experimental access path into day-to-day usability: HTTP CONNECT is now included in full builds and enabled by default, sharing the same port as SOCKS.

For teams operating in filtered enterprise, campus, or public networks, that matters immediately. For developers embedding Arti, this release also expands RPC ergonomics with non-blocking requests, event-loop integration, and a new superuser administration path. In one version, Arti improves both network practicality and operational controllability.

What changed in 2.2.0¶

HTTP CONNECT moves from experimental to default-ready¶

Arti can now connect to Tor through HTTP CONNECT in the standard full build, and this behavior is enabled by default. Keeping HTTP CONNECT and SOCKS on the same port lowers integration friction for applications that need flexibility across different proxy environments.

This is especially relevant where SOCKS deployment is awkward but HTTP proxy infrastructure already exists. In those environments, anonymous connectivity often fails not because users reject privacy tools, but because the network path is brittle. Arti 2.2.0 reduces that brittleness.

RPC becomes easier to integrate into real services¶

arti-rpc-client-core now supports non-blocking requests and integration with application event loops. That directly helps service-oriented deployments where Arti is one component in a larger asynchronous system.

The RPC system also adds a superuser capability for administrative access to the Arti instance. This gives maintainers a cleaner foundation for automated operations, observability hooks, and policy-aware control planes.

A low-severity security fix ships in the same release¶

The team fixed TROVE-2026-005, a low-severity issue that could weaken DoS resistance in certain uncommon embedded build configurations.

Even with limited scope, fixing it here is still important: it signals that Arti’s release cadence is not only feature-driven, but also attentive to resilience under edge deployments.

Relay groundwork continues behind the scenes¶

The release notes also highlight continued relay work: relay channels, circuits, and directory server functionality (mirrors and authorities). These are foundational pieces that may be less visible to end users today but are essential for Arti’s long-term role in the Tor ecosystem.

In other words, 2.2.0 does more than ship visible feature improvements; it also moves Arti’s long-term architecture roadmap one step forward.

Why this translation matters in Taiwan context¶

Constrained-network reality: HTTP CONNECT default support is practical for schools, workplaces, and managed networks where SOCKS is difficult to deploy consistently.
Local dev and ops fit: non-blocking RPC plus event-loop compatibility makes Arti easier to connect with common service stacks used by local teams (for health checks, alerts, policy enforcement, and automation).
Infra governance signal: the combination of TROVE-2026-005 remediation and steady relay progress is useful for civic tech and digital-rights communities tracking whether privacy infrastructure is evolving responsibly.

2026/03 Community Update

Toomore Chiang — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

2026/03 Community Update¶

We're excited to share that the Tor Project invited us to contribute a guest blog post about our experience running a Tor relay on a university network in Taiwan. You can read the full article here: Setting up a Tor Relay at a university in Taiwan.

Taiwan occupies a unique position in the global internet freedom landscape. While the country enjoys relatively open access to the web, it operates under persistent geopolitical pressure and is regularly targeted by sophisticated cyber operations. In this context, privacy tools like Tor aren't fringe utilities — they're practical infrastructure for journalists, researchers, civil society organizations, and anyone who needs to communicate or organize without being observed. Building awareness and local capacity around these tools is part of what our community is working toward.

Community Updates¶

We've secured a two-day community track at COSCUP 2026 (August), Taiwan's largest open source conference. The track will mix talks and hands-on workshops, covering topics like privacy, campus anonymous network infrastructure, and anonymous payments. A call for proposals will follow — stay tuned.

One thing worth noting: COSCUP does not require registration or identity verification to attend, which means anyone can participate anonymously. For a conference focused in part on privacy and anonymity, that's a meaningful feature.

Running a Tor Relay at a University in Taiwan¶

Getting a Tor relay approved and running at a university isn't purely a technical challenge. It's also a cultural and institutional one. Universities in Taiwan, like many in Asia, tend to have cautious IT departments that are unfamiliar with Tor's legitimate use cases and wary of anything that might attract regulatory attention.

Our experience at National Taiwan Normal University involved explaining the difference between a relay (which only passes encrypted traffic) and an exit node, framing the project in terms of academic contribution and digital rights education, and working through the university's internal approval process. The result wasn't just a running relay — it was a template for how similar conversations might be approached at other institutions.

If you're involved with a university network in Taiwan or elsewhere in Asia and are curious about how to start this kind of project, we're happy to share what we learned. Join our Public Space on Matrix and say hello.

Cryptpad Localization and the zh_Hant / zh_Hans Split¶

We recently completed the Traditional Chinese (zh_Hant) localization of Cryptpad and submitted PR #2254 to properly split the legacy zh locale into zh_Hant (Traditional) and zh_Hans (Simplified). The PR has been included in the Spring Release (2026.3.0) milestone.

This might seem like a minor technical detail, but it matters: conflating Traditional and Simplified Chinese into a single zh locale erases a real distinction. Traditional Chinese is used primarily in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau — communities with distinct cultural identities. Correct locale support is a basic form of respect, and it also affects tool accessibility for users who aren't comfortable switching to English.

Cryptpad itself is worth a closer look if you haven't tried it. Think of it as a privacy-first alternative to Google Docs — documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and kanban boards, all end-to-end encrypted before they reach the server. Our community runs our own instance at cryptpad.anoni.net, offering 50 MB of free storage. Accounts are open — feel free to sign up and try it out.

Tails 7.6: bridges you can actually find, and a quieter password manager swap

Toomore Chiang — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Tails 7.6: bridges you can actually find, and a quieter password manager swap¶

We follow Tails releases because they ship the same building blocks many of us recommend in real life: Tor, a hardened desktop, and tools for people who cannot assume a “normal” network path. 7.6, dated 2026-03-26, is worth translating not for one killer feature, but for two changes that affect how people get online and how they store secrets on a live system.

Why this one matters (especially in regional context)¶

Tor bridges are not exotic; they are often the difference between “Tor works” and “Tor never connects.” In places where Tor traffic is filtered or throttled, users learn to hunt for bridges through side channels—paste sites, trusted contacts, or ad‑hoc instructions. Tails 7.6 brings that guidance into the Tor Connection assistant: pick Connect to Tor automatically, and if the network blocks Tor outright, the bridge screen can Ask for a Tor bridge based on your region, pulling candidates via the Tor Project’s Moat service—the same family of tech Tor Browser has used since 11.5—with the fetch disguised using domain fronting.

For readers in Taiwan and across East/Southeast Asia: censorship models differ, but the pattern is familiar—TLS interception, routing games, or “soft” blocking that fails open only for some apps. A Tails image that surfaces bridge acquisition in-product lowers the bar for journalists, lawyers, and civil‑society volunteers who already juggle operational risk; they should not also have to memorize bridge workflows from blog posts.

The second headline is Secrets replacing KeePassXC. That is a product decision, not a security downgrade by default: Secrets is tighter with GNOME, which matters on Tails because accessibility regressions (on‑screen keyboard, cursor sizing) are real blockers for some users. KeePassXC power users can still add it via Additional Software; the database format overlaps, so migration is meant to be frictionless.

Technical changes (short)¶

New / UX

Tor Connection: region‑aware bridge suggestions via Moat; automatic path aligns with modern Tor Browser connection UX.
Passwords: Secrets as default; KeePassXC optional; shortcut layout is KeePassXC‑like with extra Shift modifiers—see upstream docs for the full map (Ctrl+? in Secrets).

Versions

Electrum → 4.7.0 (from 4.5.8).
Tor Browser → 15.0.8.
Thunderbird → 140.8.0.
Firmware bundles refreshed for newer GPUs, Wi‑Fi, etc.

Fixes

Translated confirmation dialog before persisting language/keyboard to the stick (#21448).
Thunderbird migration “Learn more” button (#21455).
Turkish automatic upgrades (#21466).

Full upstream detail: debian/changelog.

Getting 7.6¶

Automatic upgrades from Tails 7.0+. If that fails, use the manual upgrade path. Clean installs: Windows, macOS, Linux, expert. Reinstalling wipes Persistent Storage on that medium. Image‑only downloads: USB, ISO.

Source

Based on the official announcement Tails 7.6.

Learning from TPA's ADR model

Toomore Chiang — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Learning from TPA's ADR model¶

In February 2026, anarcat from the Tor system administration team (TPA) published a post titled \"Keeping track of decisions using the ADR model\".
After reading it, we felt it offered a very practical way to think about proposals, decision-making, and how to write things down so that people can actually find and understand them later.

This post is not a translation of the original article. Instead, it is our own summary and reflection on:

what problem TPA was trying to solve with ADRs,
what they actually changed in their process,
how other projects handle proposals and decisions, and
how this connects to the context we are familiar with.

What we took from TPA’s ADR post¶

If you want the full story, read the original:
Keeping track of decisions using the ADR model.

For our purposes, the key takeaways are:

Short decision records over long RFCs — keep it concise and digestible.
Decide who decides (RACI-like) — make the decision maker and consulted/informed roles explicit.
Separate the record from the announcement — write the ADR for durability, write comms for the audience.

How other projects handle proposals and decisions¶

The TPA post also looks outward and compares different approaches in the wider open source ecosystem. Here is a short recap of some examples mentioned there, plus links if you want to dive deeper.

GOV.UK Design System – Uses RFCs for proposals and ADRs to record final decisions. Proposals live in a public repo, such as \"001-use-rfcs-and-adrs-to-discuss-proposals-and-record-decisions\". In other words: RFCs for discussion, ADRs for the final record.
Bitwarden – Maintains ADR documentation (and an ADR index) at contributing.bitwarden.com/architecture/adr/. ADRs are the primary way they record architectural decisions.
GitLab – In some subprojects (for example the GitLab Helm charts), existing architecture documents are gradually being rewritten into ADR form. This is a way to \"ADR-ify\" existing documentation.
ADR community / MADR – The site adr.github.io provides the MADR (Markdown Architectural Decision Records) template and supporting tools that many projects use as a lightweight, general-purpose ADR format.
Rust – Uses RFCs to propose and discuss changes to the language and standard library. RFCs are numbered, publicly discussed, and archived as part of the language's evolution.
Python – Uses PEPs (Python Enhancement Proposals) as the formal proposal and decision mechanism for language and standard library changes.
Kubernetes – Uses KEPs (Kubernetes Enhancement Proposals) for major features and architectural changes.

In short, there is no single universal pattern. Some ecosystems combine RFC-style proposals plus ADR-style records (for example GOV.UK). Others use ADRs as their main internal mechanism (Bitwarden, now TPA). Large ecosystems often rely on numbered proposal documents (RFCs, PEPs, KEPs) with their own traditions and workflows.

What feels distinctive about TPA's approach is:

the insistence on explicitly choosing the decision maker, and
the strong emphasis on separating the decision record from outward-facing communication.

Those two elements are transferable even if a project does not adopt ADRs in name.

Our context: communities and projects¶

In the communities and projects we are familiar with (for example, civic tech in Taiwan, government collaborations, and teams in local companies), there are already many forms of \"proposal → discussion → consensus\". What is often missing is not process, but a stable, easy-to-find, and newcomer-friendly record of the decisions themselves.

Some patterns we have seen:

Civic tech and community projects (for example g0v-related work)
Proposals and decisions are often documented through a mix of proposal documents, shared notes (such as HackMD), hackathon sessions, and online meetings. The g0v collaboration guide is a good example of how this culture is documented.
Architecturally important decisions, however, may end up scattered across notes, issues, pull requests, slides, and chat logs. After some time, it becomes hard to reconstruct why a system looks the way it does.
Government and public-sector collaborations
These projects often produce specifications, system design documents, and final project reports. They look more like \"one big document\" created at certain milestones, rather than a continuous log of decisions over time.
Many of these documents are not fully public, which makes it hard for external contributors to see the trade-offs and constraints behind the system.
Open source projects run by local companies
Some teams maintain internal decision records or design docs for architecture changes, but these live in internal knowledge bases. The public repository only shows the code, not the decision history that shaped it.

In all of these cases, it's not that there is no decision-making. It's that the decision trail is fragmented and fragile. Without a simple, repeatable format, it is easy for later contributors—or even future versions of the same team—to lose track of why certain paths were chosen.

This is where TPA's ADR model feels relevant to us:

Each important decision becomes a small, self-contained file that explains why.
It avoids the pressure to produce massive, perfect design documents.
It is more durable and discoverable than leaving everything inside issues or chat logs.
Newcomers and external contributors can read ADRs to quickly understand:
\"This system looks like this today because of these past decisions.\"

We see ADRs as one possible bridge between community-style collaboration and more formal project documentation.

How these ideas translate here¶

Short records instead of big milestone docs
For government-style projects that generate large reports, consider adding a lightweight adr/ folder where each file captures a single decision and its reasoning.
Decide who decides, even in volunteer settings
In civic tech teams with rotating contributors, explicitly naming a decision maker (timeboxed, or per module) reduces stalled discussions and clarifies accountability.
Separate ADRs from announcements
Keep ADRs technical and durable; publish separate updates (blog posts, READMEs, release notes) tailored to the intended audience.

We suspect these tweaks are small enough to try without heavy process changes, and big enough to improve continuity.

Closing thoughts¶

TPA's post was the trigger; our focus is on what we can apply locally. We'll start by:

Piloting a minimal ADR template in selected repos (one file per decision).
Naming a decision maker per ADR (and listing consulted/informed).
Writing separate, audience-friendly updates when decisions affect users.

If you already use ADRs—or if this motivates you to try them—we'd love to hear your experiences, especially from Taiwan and neighboring communities. TPA is also collecting feedback; you can join their discussion: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/41428.

From Discord’s Age Verification to Why We Self-Host Matrix

Toomore Chiang — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

From Discord’s Age Verification to Why We Self-Host Matrix¶

On 2026/02/09, Discord announced a global “teen-by-default” rollout and stronger age verification (English coverage: BBC, Medianama). New and existing users will default to a teen-oriented experience; to relax content filters or access age-gated spaces, users must complete verification via facial age estimation or by submitting ID. Discord frames this as a commitment to teen safety and Safer Internet Day, and will use an “age inference model” in the background to help assign age groups.

We are not dismissing Discord’s intent—youth protection and compliance are serious. But such measures also mean one thing: large platforms will need more personal data and behavioural signals to “classify” users. Whether via face scans, ID documents, or algorithmic inference, the result is handing over “who you are, how old you are, where you are” to the platform and its partners. For many people who just want to chat, game, or collaborate, that may be an acceptable trade-off; for others, it raises the question: is there another way?

What we care about: who decides the rules, who holds the data¶

Commercial chat platforms have their own rules: terms of service, product direction, what data is retained, how algorithms and policies work—mostly driven by the company and shareholders, with little say for ordinary users and little visibility into how their data is used. This isn’t about “who is worse”; it’s about who gets to decide.

The anoni.net community has chosen a different path: self-hosting a Matrix homeserver. We run tuwunel, a high-performance Matrix homeserver implemented in Rust, on im.anoni.net for community discussion and 2026 theme collaboration. Server configuration, retention policy, and channel rules are decided by operators and the community together—smaller scope, more predictable, and more transparent. Our focus is clear: internet freedom, anonymous networks, and privacy in practice, not “anyone can join and talk about anything.” This is a themed, consensus-oriented workspace.

Why we self-host Matrix (tuwunel + im.anoni.net)¶

Matrix is an open, decentralised real-time communication protocol and ecosystem, enabling different platforms worldwide to communicate and interoperate securely. Anyone can run their own Matrix homeserver and set their own server rules, retention, and verification policy. We therefore self-host im.anoni.net and use tuwunel (a high-performance Matrix homeserver written in Rust) to serve the community.

We use a registration-code system: you obtain a registration code by emailing whisper@anoni.net or through another trusted channel, then use that code to register on Matrix. At registration time we do not require an email address; you choose your own username, and the server does not store identity-linked registration records. Codes are reusable (not single-use), so they cannot be used to infer who registered or when. So: there is one point of contact when obtaining a code, but inside the system, registration and usage are not tied to email or real name—we keep “who is who” to the minimum needed to run the service.

The benefits of self-hosting and this flow are straightforward:

Minimal logging and tracking: we keep “who did what when” to the smallest scope we can, and delete when we can.
No real-name or verification requirement: no mandatory ID upload, no phone or email—just a registration code to sign up.
Policies designed for sensitive topics and anonymous research: whether you work on anonymous networks, censorship measurement, or other high-sensitivity areas, you don’t have to worry about account exposure; we will adjust policy as the community needs.

So we chose Matrix not simply because Discord is “bad”—rather, large platforms must serve business and the general public, while we need a space where we decide the rules, minimise data collection, and prioritise anonymity and privacy.

Between privacy and community quality: why we use an application process¶

So Matrix (im.anoni.net) and Cryptpad accounts both require a registration code, which you get by emailing whisper@anoni.net or through another trusted channel. We (or that channel) reply with instructions or the code, and you then complete registration in the client. We do not allow open one-click signup, so we can reduce abuse while keeping “no identity stored at registration” as above.

A brief note on Cryptpad: Cryptpad is an end-to-end encrypted, privacy-focused collaborative platform for shared pads, real-time notes, documents, to-do lists, whiteboards, and more. Content is encrypted throughout; only participants can access it. Unlike Google Docs and similar tools, Cryptpad has no server-side decryption and does not require trusting the operator—well suited to confidential or privacy-sensitive collaboration. We self-host Cryptpad so the community can discuss, co-edit, and collaborate with minimal risk of third-party collection or surveillance.

Why an application process:

To avoid abuse: open registration would quickly attract bots and bad actors; for a small self-hosted service, moderation would become unsustainable.
So everyone who joins knows what this space is: applicants understand that this is for themes like “personal privacy guidelines,” “Tor relays on campus,” and “anonymous payments”—not a general-purpose chat. People who write in for a code usually already have some interest in these topics.
We’re protecting the space, not excluding people: we don’t ask for real names or ID documents, only that you take a moment to write and briefly say what you’re interested in. If these themes matter to you, we welcome you to get in touch.

For how to request accounts and get started, see Community.

A word to people who use Discord¶

We don’t want this to feel like an either/or: many people need to stay on Discord for communities, games, or projects, and that’s fine. We’re saying: when you need to discuss sensitive topics or want higher privacy and a predictable environment, there is a small, stable Matrix space here.

If you want to dive into the 2026 themes (personal privacy guidelines, Tor Relay on campus, anonymous payments) or run experiments around anonymous networks, you’re welcome to do that on Matrix and Cryptpad.
If you only want to follow along occasionally, staying on your current platform is fine. We’ll keep sharing progress on the site and at events; you can decide later whether to go further.

anoni.net’s door stays open. The difference is that we think about this path in terms of who decides the rules and who holds the data, and we use a self-hosted Matrix and an application-based account process to balance privacy and quality in a way we can live with.

Project Proposal – g0v Hackath71n (g0v, the 71st Hackathon)

Toomore Chiang — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Project Proposal – g0v Hackath71n (g0v, the 71st Hackathon)¶

This time, we’re heading south to Kaohsiung (a.k.a. Takao) to participate in the “g0v Hackath71n – g0v the 71st Hackathon.” If you happen to be in southern Taiwan during this period, or if you’d like to travel south to Kaohsiung together—combining a short trip with a few days of remote work while joining the event—feel free to come find us at the hackathon. We’ve registered a booth to help move forward the progress of the “Anonymous Online Community” 2026 project!

At the moment, it looks like there are still a few spots available. If you’re interested in our project and would like to contribute, you’re very welcome to join us on the day of the event—no matter your background or area of expertise.

Time: January 25, 2026 (Sun) 10:30–17:30 (+0800)
Location: Le Phare Co-working Space | Xin Zuoying Branch / 4F, Global Mall, No. 1, Zhanqian North Road, Zuoying District, Kaohsiung City, Taiwan

Hackathon Goals¶

The January 25 hackathon will focus on advancing three project goals:

Personal Privacy Guidelines: How can we make practical adjustments to improve the security of our everyday internet usage? At present, we still lack a complete, actionable set of guidelines and materials.(Curriculum development)
Tor Relay Campus Deployment Competition: There is already a successful example at National Taiwan Normal University. To enable students at other universities to follow suit, we need a clear, well-documented process covering communication with schools, applications, and ongoing maintenance.(Event planning)
Anonymous Payments: As an essential piece of the “anonymity” puzzle, how anonymity can be achieved in everyday payment scenarios is a direction we plan to explore in greater depth.(Topic research)

Collaborative Notes¶

The shared notes document for this event can be found here!

anoni.net Docs — Sinophone Asia-Pacific Networked Freedom Observatory

We surveyed all 336 OONI Run v2 links, and three of them drive 72% of all measurements

We surveyed all 336 OONI Run v2 links, and three of them drive 72% of all measurements¶

What we did¶

How big is the population: 337 links in two years¶

Usage is extremely concentrated, Gini 0.981¶

Where the measurements concentrate¶

Long-term observation comes from a continuously-running backend, list size barely matters¶

anoni.net's own coordinates: the community is its own controlled experiment¶

What it means for communities and OONI¶

Data and caveats¶

Related reading¶

How Unredacted Helps People in Censored Regions Reach the Open Internet

How Unredacted Helps People in Censored Regions Reach the Open Internet¶

What Unredacted runs¶

From the anoni.net community: a Taiwan vantage point¶

From the anoni.net community: GreenWare's feasibility for free-connectivity regions¶

What you can do¶

Related reading¶

After Iran's 80-day blackout, traffic surged through our community's Tor WebTunnel bridge

After Iran's 80-day blackout, traffic surged through our community's Tor WebTunnel bridge¶

More than 80 days offline¶

Traffic jumped once Iran reopened¶

Why WebTunnel¶

Run one from your region¶

Not just Iran¶

Related reading¶

CryptPad 2026.5.0: zh_Hant Lands as a Built-in Locale After Two and a Half Years Upstream

CryptPad 2026.5.0: zh_Hant Lands as a Built-in Locale After Two and a Half Years Upstream¶

What CryptPad is¶

Why the community self-hosts CryptPad¶

Two and a half years of upstream work, mapped to a timeline¶

A note on 正體 vs 繁體 — naming the script¶

Using cryptpad.anoni.net from a censored or restricted network¶

Getting started on cryptpad.anoni.net¶

Further reading¶

MADLink (Mandarin Translation) is Live, with an Editorial Observation Page on Taiwan's Response

MADLink (Mandarin Translation) is Live, with an Editorial Observation Page on Taiwan's Response¶

What the report found¶

The Mandarin translation: reading path¶

What's new this round: the editorial observation page¶

Why we wrote this page¶

Acknowledgements and how to join¶

Further reading¶

Campus Tor Relay templates: proposal, SOP, and FAQ now published

Campus Tor Relay templates: proposal, SOP, and FAQ now published¶

The template kit¶

For readers outside Taiwan¶

Why Taiwan still needs more campus relays¶

NZ's original materials¶

Acknowledgements¶

Financial Companies as Censors: A Sinophone Asia-Pacific Reading of EFF's Transaction Denied

Financial Companies as Censors: A Sinophone Asia-Pacific Reading of EFF's Transaction Denied¶

What Reitman compiles: a decade-plus of financial censorship cases¶

From account blocks to platform content policy: a new chain of cases in 2025-2026¶

Taiwan as case study: PayPal's domestic shutdown, Stripe's continued closure¶

Sinophone Asia-Pacific: the same mechanisms with regionally specific outcomes¶

What the community wants to advance next¶

Related reading¶

onionoo MCP is now public: query the Tor relay network in plain language

onionoo MCP is now public: query the Tor relay network in plain language¶

Why wrap Onionoo at all¶

What you can ask¶

How to connect¶

For AI client users¶

For direct API users¶

Where this fits alongside our other observation tools¶

Contribute or report back¶

Related reading¶

What is Differential Privacy?

What is Differential Privacy?¶

Summary of the Original Article¶

Taiwan Perspective¶

Government Statistics and Open Data¶

Regulation and Industry¶

Civil Society and Health Data¶

Online Resources from Taiwan¶

Perspective for Chinese-Speaking Regions¶

Further Reading¶

What the Tor VPN security audit means for Taiwan's privacy community