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Mozilla Dusts Off Old Servers, Lights Up Tor Relays

Posted by timothy on from the good-citizenship dept.

TechCurmudgeon writes According to The Register, "Mozilla has given the Tor network a capacity kick with the launch of 14 relays that will help distribute user traffic. Engineers working under the Foundation's Polaris Project inked in November pulled Mozilla's spare and decommissioned hardware out of the cupboard for dedicated use in the Tor network. It included a pair of Juniper EX4200 switches and three HP SL170zG6 (48GB ram, 2*Xeon L5640, 2*1Gbps NIC) servers, along with a dedicated existing IP transit provider (2 X 10Gbps). French Mozilla engineer Arzhel Younsi (@xionoxfr) said its network was designed to fall no lower than half of its network capacity in the event of maintenance or failure. The Polaris initiative was a effort of Mozilla, the Tor Project and the Centre for Democracy and Technology to help build more privacy controls into technology."

3 of 80 comments (clear)

  1. Why make enemies of goverments? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

    This is a confusing move to me. While Tor does have some legitimate uses, governments and law enforcement agencies hate it, and criminals and criminal-perverts love it. It's not that I disapprove of Tor or Mozilla's actions - it's just that I think they've become an enemy of most world governments because of this, and I don't see that as a wise move.

    1. Re:Why make enemies of goverments? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      I see the propaganda has worked well on you, and you actually believe that Tor is only used by criminals.

  2. Can we please get the fuck off TOR by nimbius · · Score: 4, Interesting

    TOR has never been more than an interesting proof of concept. it took a little while for the spooks to catch on, but these days theyre so good at poisoning exit nodes and injecting malicious content that TOR is less of an anonymous network and more of a cautionary tale.

    You should be using I2P https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
    and while we're on the subject, Mozilla has gotten too chummy with advertisers for me to be comfortable with anymore. They started out on a mission to protect the internet, and now they have video chat, targeted advertising tabs, and a fat paycheck from google every month. Firefox is fast turning into the realplayer of the 21st century. What we should be doing instead of looking for corporations to help us is working to Opt out of global data surveillance programs like PRISM, XKeyscore and Tempora.

    --
    Good people go to bed earlier.