In May 2022 someone posted on the Tor mailing list complaining about a Company called Team Cymru being one of the Host's of Tor's website.
Here's a vice article about companies that buy what's known as "netflow data" from Tier 1 ISPs and sell it to third parties. Team Cymru is one of the biggest such brokers, and as such, a bunch of security industry reps lick their balls rapaciously.
Anyway, this May 2022 mailing list post complaining about Team Cymru hosting Tor's Website.
OP just gets shit on by everyone who responds. (paraphrasing) 'The CEO of Team Cymru, "Rabbi Rob Thomas," has been on the board of directors of the tor project since 2011, and they've operated bridges for years,' we learn. 'OP needs to remove his tinfoil hat,' they say.
Ok, skip ahead to Tor Browser Bundle changelog update in October same year (2022):
Bug tor-browser-build#40633: Remove Team Cymru hard-coded bridges
So they weren't just hosting bridges, but default bridges hard-coded into the Tor Browser Bundle itself. In other words, when you click the "give me a bridge" button in tor browser (this option not available in Tails, and I see the sense in it not being so now), at least two such default bridges were operated by Team Cymru.
Rabbi Rob Thomas still sits on the board of directors.
I2P now getting the shit ddosed of it, as an inadvertent result of Tor's incompetence (assuming it's the same attacker). I2P dev on /r/i2p:
As you already know, the I2P network has been targeted by a Denial-of-Service attack for the past ~3 days. The attacker is flooding the network with malicious floodfill routers, which are responding incorrectly or not at all to other routers and feeding the network false information. This results in performance and connectivity problems, because the floodfills provide peer information to the participants in the network. The result is a form of sybil attack which is used to cause widespread denial of service. The attacker is changing specific characteristics of their attack as they carry it out. The focus for mitigation is to find general strategies which address the issue regardless of who is carrying it out, and which do not require the use of a fixed ban-list and which can provide long-term protections.
This attack has degraded the performance of the network but it remains intact and usable. Java I2P routers still appear to be handling the issues better than i2pd routers. Various mitigations should appear in dev builds of both Java and C++ routers in the next week.
BUT DONT WORRY! The Tor project is fundraising to fix the problem, they just hired two new onion devs! JUST HIRED!? THIS HAS BEEN HAPPENING SINCE JULY, AND EVEN LONGER AGO BEFORE THAT!
So the Poor folks at Tor just need another measly $155,000 to fix the problem guys. Funny if you split that in two you've got about two onion dev salaries and a handful of first class private jet flights to wherever the fuck.
Maybe Rabbi Rob can chip in? No, no he's already donated so much money AND RESOURCES DONT FORGET THE HARD CODED BRIDGES.
If Dingledine wasn't still at the top of Tor, shit would be so much more fucked up right now. I am sure of it.
The Joseph Cox guy who wrote the vice article I linked earlier does some decent reporting actually.
From August 2022, a story none of us heard about in the mainstream im sure: Facebook and Twitter Take Down a U.S. Propaganda Operation Targeting Russia, China, Iran. The USA conducting a propaganda campaign identical to Russia 2016. Some of the accounts had been active since 2011.
I have no idea what i'm reading
fuck feds