| Title | Now Everyone Wants to Sell You a Magical Anonymity Router. Choose Wisely | |
| Date | Saturday October 25 2014, @04:14AM | |
| Author | Blackmoore | |
| Topic | ||
| from the unicorns-and-rainbows dept. | ||
After Anonabox requested US$7,500 and raised US$585,549 before being suspended, I hoped that one-stop solutions would be discouraged but according to Wired News, I couldn't be wronger because there are at least five parties aiming to fill Anonabox's niche:
Maintaining your privacy online, like investing in stocks or looking good naked, has become one of those nagging desires that leaves Americans with a surplus of stress and a deficit of facts. So it’s no surprise that a cottage industry of privacy marketers now wants to sell them the solution in a $50 piece of hardware promising internet "anonymity" or "invisibility." And as with any panacea in a box, the quicker the fix, the more doubt it deserves.
Last week saw the fast forward rise and fall of Anonabox, a tiny $45 router that promised to anonymize all of a user's traffic by routing it over the anonymity network Tor. That promise of plug-and-play privacy spurred Anonabox to raise $615,000 on the fundraising platform Kickstarter in four days, 82 times its modest $7,500 goal. Then on Thursday, Kickstarter froze those pledges, citing the project's misleading claims about its hardware sources. Other critics pointed to flaws in Anonabox's software's security, too.
But the Anonabox fiasco hasn't deterred other projects hoping to sell an anonymity router of their own. In fact, many of them see Anonabox's 9,000 disappointed backers as proof of the demand for their own privacy-in-a-box product. At least five new or soon-to-launch crowdfunding projects now claim to offer a consumer-focused anonymity router with names like Invizbox, Cloak, TorFi, and PORTAL, each with its own promises - and caveats.
Full disclosure: I may or may not be connected to one of the parties mentioned in the article but I think they're all misguided.
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printed from SoylentNews, Now Everyone Wants to Sell You a Magical Anonymity Router. Choose Wisely on 2024-04-18 23:31:05