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Russia's Plan To Crack Tor Crumbles
mspohr writes: It looks like Russia's effort to crack Tor was harder than they anticipated. The company that won the contract is now trying to get out of it. Bloomberg reports: "The Kremlin was willing to pay 3.9 million rubles ($59,000) to anyone able to crack Tor, a popular tool for communicating anonymously over the Internet. Now the company that won the government contract expects to spend more than twice that amount to abandon the project. The Central Research Institute of Economics, Informatics, and Control Systems—a Moscow arm of Rostec, a state-run maker of helicopters, weapons, and other military and industrial equipment—agreed to pay 10 million rubles ($150,000) to hire a law firm tasked with negotiating a way out of the deal, according to a database of state-purchase disclosures. Lawyers from Pleshakov, Ushkalov and Partners will work with Russian officials on putting an end to the Tor research project, along with several classified contracts, the government documents say."
Russians are not dumb. In fact, a lot of major software advances are coming from there. They have a lot of experts who can step in, verify if TOR is cracked or not and set the "pants on fire" flag if need be. Russians tend to be less tolerant of up-front liars (especially for things like this) than US government interests.
I know you don't like Russia (nor any government which provides things like "roads", "power", "fire/police/EMS", or any service that one doesn't pay for out of one's own pocket), but Putin has only ascended in power, and is definitely not a fool or a moron. He took a broken down country with no food on the shelves, and put it back on the map as a world's superpower, and the second most immigrated to country in the world next to the US.
While our CIC is struggling to keep the government from shutting down (and the military has been gutted due to the sequester), Putin now has a solid power base in the Middle East while the rest of Europe is dealing with a humanitarian crisis not seen since WWII. He only has to sit tight and let Daesh and internal strife weaken his enemies while he slowly, but surely gains ground. He doesn't even need Pravda... many people will spew anti-US propaganda for him now.
Don't underestimate him, nor Russia. If a Russian firm can't crack TOR, they can't crack TOR, and unlike the US where they just go bankrupt and reform as another firm the next day, the Russian government is going to hold them to task, both civilly and criminally.