14 DAY TRIAL // The Kickstarter project that seems like it was too good to be true, the Anonabox, has been suspended by the company following a series of controversies regarding the product.
At the time the project was suspended, there were 8,929 backers that had pledged $585,549 (€458,890) for the pint-size device that was supposed to give users anonymity on the Internet, even though the goal of the campaign was to gather a mere $7,500 ( €5,877), which is a bit unusual for such a project.
Either way, the crowdfunding campaign has reached an end now because it seems like the project didn’t really respect the Kickstarter guidelines.
In the past few days, there’s been quite a bit of controversy regarding the device. Basically, the gadget could be used to route all Internet traffic through the TOR network, making users virtually untraceable. This has attracted quite a bit of press, especially given the international discussion about mass surveillance and how the Tor network can be used to stay under the radar of intelligence agencies such as the NSA and its international partners.
Caught lying
The claims came under fire as its popularity grew. Reddit users started digging into the project, arguing that there are several false claims in the campaign. For one, there’s nothing open hardware about the device. In fact, despite claims that they had built the device from scratch, it seems that the entire construction, including the board and the case, is sourced from a Chinese supplier that markets the entire thing for less than half the $45 (€35) Anonabox was supposed to cost.
Although August Germar, one of the IT consultants who worked on the project, admitted where the router came from, they said that they had added flash memory to the board to better accommodate the storage demands of Tor.
Furthermore, it wasn’t just the hardware part that was challenged, but also the software the device comes packed with, which some claim that it won’t actually help much to keep people anonymous. Instead, OpenWRT, an operating system based on the Linux kernel and primarily used on embedded devices to route network traffic.
However, there are claims that the Anonabox team configured it all so badly that the device would more rapidly give out information about users because it has backdoors for root passwords, than protect them. Furthermore, it seems that it creates an open wireless network that anyone can connect to, which makes the entire thing completely insecure. This has yet to be proven because the Tor folks haven’t looked it over.