2019 End of Year Campaign Wrap Up - Thanks for Helping Tor Take Back the Internet

> What about full guides for making onion services?

Look here:
https://community.torproject.org/onion-services/
https://2019.www.torproject.org/docs/onion-services.html.en
https://2019.www.torproject.org/docs/tor-onion-service.html.en

Those guides need to be labeled better and linked to better so they're easier to find (talking to you, Tor Project!). As for web servers, forums or games, there are many choices of software designed for the regular internet that you could host on an onion service, and they are quite separate from Tor software. Be sure to inspect them for privacy and metadata leaks as most are not audited as strictly as Tor is.

I, myself, would like for the following pages to be expanded and for there to be a guide to anonymously contributing by Git over Tor.
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/TorifyHOWTO
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/SupportPrograms

This is insufficient for contributing over Tor, and it's hard to access and interpret for those outside of Tor's development teams: https://gitweb.torproject.org/githax.git/tree/

> What about specific tools for people who can't understand computers at all?

https://2019.www.torproject.org/projects/projects.html.en
https://2019.www.torproject.org/getinvolved/volunteer.html.en#Projects

For those people, the best tools that Tor Project recommends are arguably HTTPS-Everywhere, Tor Browser, TorBirdy, OnionShare, Orbot, Tails, Metrics, Onionoo. I would also recommend Privacy Badger, another add-on by EFF for regular web browsers.

> Or any online support via tor browser?

Across the top header of torproject.org, there's "Support", "Documentation", and "Community". When you open Tor Browser or start a new identity, the purple page has a link under the search box, "Questions? Check our Tor Browser Manual".

> is it possible to make onion service online not every time when computer online? For example computer online few hours but onion service online only one hour?

In that context, think of an onion service like any other web service: the computer or server it runs on must be online. Your example of the computer being on for longer than the onion service is entirely possible, and you can command the service to stop like any other daemon for the regular internet such as for HTTP (like Apache, nginx) or FTP (like FileZilla Server), but an example of the reverse where the onion service is online longer than the computer is not possible, obviously, because the service runs on the computer. You could host onion services on a VPS or dedicated server purchased at data center or CDN if you find a way to trust it. There also are distributed networks other than Tor such as IPFS that have limited capabilities to host static websites facing the regular internet.

> We are pleased to announce that we raised more funds in 2019 from individuals than ever before -- $833,956! This is almost double what we raised in 2018.

This is very welcome news, and I take it as an encouraging indication that if TP perseveres in the effort to transition from dependency on USG funding to a grassroots user-donation funding model (similar to ACLU, EFF, and other major organizations) is achievable. I think most of us now agree it is also necessary, so evidence that it is possible is very good news indeed!

I sense that all around the world, more and more people are becoming more and more concerned about the dangers posed to essentially everyone by both government dragnets/targeted-hacking and surveillance capitalism, are becoming more mistrustful of Big Tech consumer goods and services type companies and of their own government, and consequently are liable to become Tor users/donors in the near future.

The recent revelation (and prompt fix, thank you) of another critical in Tor Browser (at the "standard" security level--- "safer" or even "safest" should really be the default) has again underscored the fact that we can expect many more technical attacks on Tor users in the future, and discovering and countering these will likely be a top priority for the Tor teams in the years to come. But we must also regard the political/legal threat from AG Barr and his ilk as posing an existential threat to TP, so defeating this threat must also be a top priority:

arstechnica.com
The broken record of breaking encryption skips again in Florida shooter case
Trump's Twitter tantrum doesn't change the laws of mathematics. Neither does Cellebrite.
Sean Gallagher
15 Jan 2020

> On the eve of the House of Representatives' forwarding of articles of impeachment to the Senate, President Donald Trump took time to attack Apple. The president's outburst on Twitter appears to be about the FBI's inability to get access to the physical storage on two iPhones connected to last month's killings at Naval Air Station Pensacola in Florida. And it is the latest ratcheting up of rhetoric from the Trump administration on device encryption.

theregister.co.uk
Apple calls BS on FBI, AG: We're totally not dragging our feet in murder probe iPhone decryption. PS: No backdoors
This isn't the way to make the Cook(ie) crumble
Kieren McCarthy in San Francisco
14 Jan 2020

Susan Landau and other crypto experts are still trying to convince the Feds that extremism won't help anyone (except maybe, very briefly, Drump, as a temporary distraction from his trial in the Senate):

thehill.com
Breaking the encryption impasse
Denis McDonough and Susan Landau, opinion contributors
16 Jan 2020

As further evidence that TP needs to do more to correct anti-onion bias, here is yet another story which mentions onions in a derogatory context but fails to mention that onions are mostly used to protect people, not to harm them:

arstechnica.com
FBI arrests man suspected of orchestrating dozens of “swatting” calls
Group's online chats were often racist and anti-Semitic.
Timothy B. Lee
15 Jan 2020

> The US government has criminally charged a Virginia man for helping to organize dozens of "swatting" attacks and bomb threats made against a variety of targets in the United States and Canada. The man allegedly belonged to a group that coordinated via IRC and Tor hidden services to target prominent gamers, journalists, and government officials.

In other news on the legal front, privacy advocates around the world should be cheered by the fact that the top EU lawyer has issued a (non-binding) brief to the top EU court arguing that a suspicionless dragnet is illegal in the EU:

theregister.co.uk
Top Euro court advised: Cops, spies yelling 'national security' isn’t enough to force ISPs to hand over massive piles of people's private data
Opinion is preliminary, though a good start
Kieren McCarthy in San Francisco
16 Jan 2020

> Analysis In a massive win for privacy rights, the advocate general advising the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has said that national security concerns should not override citizens’ data privacy. Thus, ISPs should not be forced to hand over personal information without clear justification. That doesn't mean that the intelligence and security services should oblige communications companies to hand over information, especially when it comes to terrorism suspects, the opinion, handed down yesterday, proposes. But it would mean that those requests will need to be done “on an exceptional and temporary basis,” as opposed to sustained blanket harvesting of information – and only when justified by “overriding considerations relating to threats to public security or national security.” In other words, a US-style hovering up of personal data is not legal under European law.

I interpret this event to show that our side and win the legal victories we need--- currently, most urgently in the US and EU--- to have a chance of continuing to exist, which would mean that we will have a chance to continue to fight off technical threats, while continuing to read and discuss, to blog, to do journalism, to engage in politics, and generally to do what we can to ensure that civil society does not die in the 21st Century.