So far, we’ve marked 77 tickets with BugSmashFund. As of today, 56 of those tickets have been closed, and 21 of them are still in progress. With this reserve, we’ve been able to fix bugs and complete necessary maintenance on core tor, bridgedb, Snowflake, and Metrics, as well as complete the Tor Browser ESR 68 migration.
The video from my DEF CON 2019 talk ("The Tor Censorship Arms Race: The Next Chapter") is now up. I'll be happy to answer questions about the talk, or about the censorship team in general, over the next few days in the comments.
Thanks to bridges, Tor users are still able to connect to the network when the public Tor relays are blocked. It's not enough to have many bridges: eventually, all of them could find themselves in block lists. We therefore need a constant trickle of new bridges that aren't blocked anywhere yet. This is where we need your help.
We formed an anti-censorship team to understand network censorship, build technology to circumvent it, and to make the Tor network accessible to everyone.
We spent 2018 fighting for the fundamental human rights to privacy and freedom online and made our software more accessible than ever before. We know our work plays an important part in ensuring that people fighting back against injustice are able to stay safe online, and we are ready for the challenges ahead in 2019.
Internet censorship is becoming ubiquitous, but not all censorship cases are easy to identify and confirm. Transparency of internet censorship is essential. We need evidence of internet censorship.
The Tor Project believes that everyone should have private access to an uncensored web, but digital authoritarianism is on the rise. For the 8th year in a row, internet freedom has declined around the world, including in the United States.