Tor Browser Downloads Are Up in 2017

I just meant to ask if that could even be an option in that case, technically (a look at the ticket made me doubt), and if so, whether downstream/TB would value any such instant/short-life "update", generally. I know where they are, helped writing rules in HTTPS-E early days and trust you all to do the right thing™ anyway :)

I can see it's a moot point as you say, if indeed TB next fix-release is expected shortly, still it reminds me about e.g. past torbrowser-launcher issues in Debian repos, for example: also likely to have affected adoption rate (while it's the middle of holidays for kids and students in a large part of the connected world). I wonder how much your metrics can really tell about this, probably not much?

Every now and then, little things discourage privacy-concerned users who we had introduced TB and it's only when we ask them again how their usage goes, they tell us they had given up on it.

I have to admit I never actually downloaded Tor before two days ago. I downloaded it to read the Daily Stormer, not because I believe that codswallop they're selling (I'm actually somewhere down their list of people up against the wall after the revolution comes...) but because I believe in their right to say it.

The banning of the Stormer marks a sea change in who uses the "dark web". Before it was a handful of idealists, plus clients who were doing or saying things that were actually illegal. I might believe unabashedly in unrestricted freedom of speech but that doesn't mean I want to go to a kiddie porn site or a credit card number auction house and test my browser security just as a show of ideological purity. So the "dark web" lacked *destinations*, as far as I could tell - at least, destinations I would feel safe or interested in going to. But with the Stomer, we now see the crooked cabal behind the domain name racket has finally shown their true colors. They're not content simply chiseling away our money any more - they want to decide what we read and what we can't. And that means that there is now an .onion link required for a site that is entirely legal to read. And with the apparent banning of the Daily Rebel by one DNS, soon another. The slippery slope won't stop there -- before long you won't be able to look at pictures of a bull-fight or read an editorial praising enforcement of immigration law without going to the "dark web". Simply put, as of this week, the "dark web" became the only real internet there is. Not having a Tor browser is not having an Internet browser.

To be sure, I don't know if Tor can survive success -- I don't know if the only reason it was ever allowed is because practically nobody used it. It is possible that a coordinated campaign of idiots DDOSing and doxxing node operators and software developers will leave the network in shambles. If they do, of course, it will be no step forward against racism. A person with half a brain should be able to see that if racists resort to meeting in person to exchange "El Paquete" like the Cubans under Castro, those meetings will include hand-offs of more than just computer files, and vulnerable minority members who happen to be found near them will be in real danger. But far more damaging in the long run is that if racists aren't allowed to speak, people will no longer know that they have nothing persuasive to say. Worse than that, they will actually begin to believe that racism has been vanquished, even as vastly disproportionate numbers of blacks languish in prison cells, even as the same holier-than-thou tech overlords like Facebook invent mechanisms like "social credit" and "artificial intelligence" to allow businesses all over the world to discriminate against blacks systematically without being "racist".