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US cuts funding to F-Droid, Tor Browser, Let's Encrypt and Tails Linux
(videos.abnormalbeings.space)
Oh course not. They stop people spying on you.
this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2025
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If you use these services, please donate once or regularly if you're able. They are free as in puppy, not beer - dev work costs money. I would guess many people using Tor/privacy tools are tech savvy enough to have financial comfort due to a good career. If you do it you're doing an everyday act of rebellion for the sake of progress!!!
Puppy?
"free" when you find it on the side of the road, but expensive to actually maintain without having it die on you.
The download is free, but pay for it or it's going to die.
Does this government funding really ever result in a hands off approach. In the case of Tor I wouldn't be surprised that funding comes with backdoor access.
Backdoor access to what?
The last reply I will make.
From September 19 2024
"In response, the Tor Project acknowledged that one user of an outdated application called Ricochet was likely deanonymized through a “guard discovery attack.” However, they emphasized that this vulnerability has since been patched in current versions of Tor software."
but that wasn't his last reply
Excuse me? Are you saying using guard discovery is a backdoor someone gave to the government? I mean, you can think whatever, but the technology isn't really.. backdoorable? It doesn't make sense in the context. Where will the backdoor lead? It has no where to go.
(I am a different person, not arguing anything about this particular vulnerability or the government's funding of Tor.)
I think you're defining backdoor too literally. I get your point, but colloquially it just means to get something nefarious in. If someone is saying "the government has a backdoor in an encryption algorithm" it would mean they believe the government has a vulnerability in that allows them to easily break the encryption, not necessarily a separate "door" or something.
Yeah the government has an institutional thing I forget what it is called, with massive amount of known exploits. That's not backdoors. A backdoor is a "planted" exploit, not a discovered exploit. It makes no sense to call all exploits backdoors.
TOR fundamentally cannot be backdoored. The US government funds it because more traffic on the network helps mask the traffic coming from CIA agents and the like
Showing my ignorance here, but would genuinely like an explanation - aren't/weren't compromised exit nodes a thing?
No system can be proven to have no exploits, but a backdoor is when there is a hidden prepared exploit planted on the inside (in this case presumably because they were funded by the government they assume they would get this in return, even though if that was the case they would do a crypto transaction and not openly fund them)
I'm not going to outright disagree with your opinion but I honestly have my doubts.
Go look at the code, then.
Imagine trying to explain FOSS to this fucking administration.
If it's free, then why are we paying for it?
I can hear ypu americanness from behind the screen darling.
Free means freedom not "no payments" it takes huge money to develop and maintain software and infrastructures like these. So they need funding to survive.
Sarcasm...
You sound like a smug a-hole.
Sorry, I was writing that in Trump's voice. I am an American who loves and contributes to open-source :)
Plenty of people who (I assume) are smarter than Trump don't understand that FOSS refers to freedom, not price. It's not a very good term and I don't like how widely used it is now.
I see what you did there... but freedom costs $1.05.
Freedom isn't free as in beer?
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