Throughout the month of December, we've highlighted a few of our fellow travelers on the road to Internet freedom in a series of blog posts titled "Tor at the Heart." We wanted to show some of the many other projects out there and their connection to us. Just like a heart, Tor helps to fortify these projects as they provide Internet freedom around the world. This past year we saw very dangerous trends of Internet censorship growing around the world. Activists in Brazil, China, Greece, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Turkey all experienced serious censorship events. The entire African continent saw a spike of censorship events, especially in Uganda, Chad, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Congo and Burundi. Technological tools like Tor are often the only way people within those countries can communicate to the outside world. Tor is also important for those of us lucky enough to live in countries without major censorship events. Journalists use Tor to communicate more safely with whistleblowers and dissidents. Everyday people use Tor to keep their Internet activities concealed from advertisers, ISPs, and web sites. Tor is important for anyone who doesn't want their browsing habits linked to them. 2016 has been a very busy year at the Tor Project. We created our own UX team to improve our tools usability, we fixed zero-days in less than 12 hours, we have started to apply very strong sandboxing to Tor Browser, we kicked off the next generation of onion services project, and we have done many other important updates on our network and applications. And 2017 is shaping up to be even more intense. We are working to deploy new features, including better mobile connectivity and better visualizations of our data so that others can easily explore and learn from them. We are working to improve the user interface on our website and various apps. And we’re working on better ways to safeguard our users, including sandboxing Tor at the application level and investigating quantum computing. As we wind down our 2016 end-of-year fundraising campaign, won't you take a minute to contribute a financial donation? Giving is easy, and you'll get the warm glow of knowing that you've done your small part to help someone in an oppressive part of the world be able to get her story out to the rest of us. We'll even throw in a t-shirt and/or other swag, if you choose, so you can show the world how cool you are and that you care about digital freedom. To donate: https://torproject.org/donate/donate-blog31 Thanks for your help. Here's wishing you and yours a healthy, happy 2017! Continue reading...
