The original blog post by Rob Graham that Arstechnica reports on has created some confusion about Tor versions. The current recommended stable version of Tor is 0.2.3.25-12. The current alpha release is Tor 0.2.4.17-rc, and people running relays are being encouraged to use this version on the mailing lists. So the repositories, by recommending Tor 0.2.3.x, aren't out of date. However, the Tor website does advise against using the Ubuntu repositories because they aren't "reliably updated" (https://www.torproject.org/docs/debian#ubuntu), which I don't think is the fault of Tor developers. Also, the most up to date version of Tor can be found at the following repository: deb http://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org/ tor-nightly-0.2.4.x-wheezy main.
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Tor was not created by the Air Force. Initial work was funded by the Office of Naval Research via the Naval Research Laboratory. See: http://www.onion-router.net/History.html. You can also see a list of funders here: https://www.torproject.org/about/sponsors.html.en.
The original blog post by Rob Graham that Arstechnica reports on has created some confusion about Tor versions. The current recommended stable version of Tor is 0.2.3.25-12. The current alpha release is Tor 0.2.4.17-rc, and people running relays are being encouraged to use this version on the mailing lists. So the repositories, by recommending Tor 0.2.3.x, aren't out of date. However, the Tor website does advise against using the Ubuntu repositories because they aren't "reliably updated" (https://www.torproject.org/docs/debian#ubuntu), which I don't think is the fault of Tor developers. Also, the most up to date version of Tor can be found at the following repository: deb http://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org/ tor-nightly-0.2.4.x-wheezy main.