Tor, like much of the world, has been caught up in the COVID-19 crisis. Like many other nonprofits and small businesses, the crisis has hit us hard, and we have had to make some difficult decisions.

We had to let go of 13 great people who helped make Tor available to millions of people around the world. We will move forward with a core team of 22 people, and remain dedicated to continuing our work on Tor Browser and the Tor software ecosystem.

The world won’t be the same after this crisis, and the need for privacy and secure access to information will become more urgent. In these times, being online is critical and many people face ongoing obstacles to getting and sharing needed information. We are taking today’s difficult steps to ensure the Tor Project continues to exist and our technology stays available.

We are terribly sad to lose such valuable teammates, and we want to let all our users and supporters know that Tor will continue to provide privacy, security, and censorship circumvention services to anyone who needs them.

There's a new alpha release available for download. If you build Tor from source, you can download the source code for 0.4.3.4-rc from the download page on the website. Packages should be available over the coming weeks, with a new alpha Tor Browser release likely later this week.

This is a release candidate: unless we find new significant bugs in it, the stable release for the 0.4.3.x series will be substantially the same as this release.

Tor 0.4.3.4-rc is the first release candidate in its series. It fixes several bugs from earlier versions, including one affecting DoS defenses on bridges using pluggable transports.

Changes in version 0.4.3.4-rc - 2020-04-13

• Major bugfixes (DoS defenses, bridges, pluggable transport):
  • Fix a bug that was preventing DoS defenses from running on bridges with a pluggable transport. Previously, the DoS subsystem was not given the transport name of the client connection, thus failed to find the GeoIP cache entry for that client address. Fixes bug 33491; bugfix on 0.3.3.2-alpha.
• Minor feature (sendme, flow control):
  • Default to sending SENDME version 1 cells. (Clients are already sending these, because of a consensus parameter telling them to do so: this change only affects what clients would do if the consensus didn't contain a recommendation.) Closes ticket 33623.

The Tails team is happy to publish Tails 4.5, the first version of Tails to support Secure Boot.