14 DAY TRIAL // It was only a few days ago that the Internet vibrated at the thought that everyone could use the Tor network with the help of a simple device that can fit in the palm of your hand, called Anonabox. Now, the Internet is on fire with accusations that the project is nothing like it is marketed to be.
In just about four days, the Kickstarter project has gotten over 9,140 backers who have chipped in with nearly $600,000 (€468,500), a whole lot more than the $7,500 (€5,855) they were looking to get in 30 days.
The team says Anonabox is open source and open hardware, but Reddit users are arguing that there’s nothing open hardware about the project. In fact, they say it’s not even their design, as it should be in these cases. In fact, after tons of questions, August Germar, one of the IT consultants who worked on Anonabox, admitted that the router was actually created from a stock board sourced from Gainstrong, a Chinese supplier.
He insists, however, that the project required that they add flash memory to the board to better accommodate the storage demands of TOR. The case, as well, was supplied by Gainstrong and isn’t actually custom-designed by the Anonabox team, as they wanted everyone to believe.
A twisted web
Under these circumstances, Reddit users are accusing them of reselling Chinese devices for $45 (€35) instead of the $20 (€15,6) they’re available for on Aliexpress. During an AMA on Reddit, the German said that he had never seen the pictures with the circuit board getting sold online up until then. “I’ve never seen that photo before now, but if that is the case good for them! We have not invented anything and there are no patents on anything,” he said during one of his replies.
But, on the other hand, in an interview with the Daily Dot he said that the device’s circuit boards were designed by an electrical engineer based on their specifications.
There are even more serious accusations regarding the software used by the project, which is OpenWRT, an operating system based on the Linux kernel and primarily used on embedded devices to route network traffic. Furthermore, Redditors claim that it is all configured so badly that the device is not actually protecting people, but rather giving away their information because it has backdoors for root passwords, open wireless network that anyone can connect to and is shipped with SSHD. This hasn’t been proven as of yet and the Tor folks have yet to analyze the open source code that was made available.