Kickstarter Cancels Anonabox Funding Campaign

An anonymous reader writes: On Friday, the controversy surrounding Anonabox reached its zenith with Kickstarter officially canceling the project's funding campaign. Anonabox began with a modest goal of $7,500, but quickly reached its goal 82 times over. Then funders and interested parties began to scrutinize the project's claims, and that's when the project ran into trouble. From hardware that wasn't actually custom-made to software that didn't actually fulfill promises of privacy-focused routing on the internet, the facts regarding Anonabox proved that it was in blatant violation of Kickstarter's rules against false advertising. This project clearly failed, but if the support it initially garnered is any indication, the public is hungry for easy-to-use technology that encrypts and anonymizes all personal internet traffic.

Comments

Sure they do

[Kjella]

People would like a magic box that make them anonymous and secure on the internet while they log into Facebook, just like they want a magic diet pill while they continue to stuff their faces with sugar and fat. Or for a more relevant tech example they'd like a magic oracle to tell them if a website belongs to who they think it belongs to which is why we have CAs as the best approximation. It's never going to work that way, but there's a lot of money in selling snake oil...

Re:Really?

[NoMaster]

Why is custom hardware needed?

It's not. The off-the-shelf hardware they chose, combined with off-the-shelf software they chose, was quite capable of doing what he said it would.

The problem was he lied when he said it was custom hardware developed through a series of different iterations. It wasn't - it was as off-the-shelf as you can get, with only a "would you like fries with that?" ROM upgrade from 8meg to 16meg, and a lack of USB port - to differentiate it from the Alibaba $20 special. Right down to the case, which he also claimed was custom-designed by him...

(Hell, after people showed him pictures of an identical board in an identical case being sold there, he popped up saying the USB port was a 'fantastic idea' and that he'd now decided to include one too...)

The images of the hardware and development process used on the Kickstarter page? Again, deceptive - the picture of his 'custom-made' case was lifted from Alibaba and the original logo (badly) photoshopped out; images labelled as showing how ongoing development had shrunk the size of the hardware showed exactly the same photo (copied from elsewhere too) of exactly the same board simply resized to make it appear as though it was smaller , etc, etc.

Software? Very similar story. His 'custom-made code' consisted simply of a bunch of rules; the

The issue was never that he was taking a $20 box, installing Linux, and asking $50 for it. That's just capitalism. The issue was that he misrepresented what he was doing as original hardware and software development, lied blatently about it, and then when caught out doubling-down on the lies .

His Reddit AMA is a good overview of the whole thing.