Kickstarter has chosen to suspend the Anonabox campaign as controversy surrounds the supposed product. Anonabox planned to provide users an easy way to encrypt their internet traffic with a small device that would use the Tor service to provide for anonymity.
Anonabox’s Kickstarter campaign had been an incredible success, as its initial $7,500 funding goal was easily eclipsed. At the time it was taken down, the campaign had gathered more than $585,000 in support from backers, but internet denizens from Reddit had hard questions about the integrity of the project.
Not Credited
The box would connect to a user’s router through an Ethernet cable and then connect again to your desktop or laptop either wirelessly or through another Ethernet connection. That’s all that was needed – the user’s web browsing would be kept anonymous by Tor, a relatively secure network for those who wish to keep their presence on the Internet safe from prying eyes like hackers and identity thieves.
Anonabox’s Kickstarter campaign had been an incredible success, as its initial $7,500 funding goal was easily eclipsed. At the time it was taken down, the campaign had gathered more than $585,000 in support from backers, but internet denizens from Reddit had hard questions about the integrity of the project.
Anonabox developer August Germar says that the device is an original product, developed over the last four years – yet some claimed that the device looked all too much like something that was already commercially available. Germar said in an interview with Wired that he had approached a supplier about altering the device by adding more flash memory to it. There were other problems as well, and some egregious ones: Germar refused to release the OpenWRT code he recompiled for the supposedly open source product, and one Reddit user pointed out that the device is not only shipped with SSHD, has an open wireless network, but has a backdoor root password as well – a serious number of security vulnerabilities.
Germar says that these issues are indeed present but aren’t necessarily vulnerabilities. Instead, the developer said that simply informing customers of the software issues prior to purchas will allow them to be addressed.
Meanwhile, Kickstarter has put a start to the entire operation, though the crowdfunding website has declined to share why Anonabox’s campaign was ultimately suspended. The hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of pledges to the project have since been cancelled.
This archive content was originally published October 18, 2014 (www.betawired.com)