On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 07:11:53PM +0200, [email protected] wrote 2.0K bytes in 45 lines about: : > A thought: Currently there is a "Donate!" section on torproject.org, : > that doesn't mention what the money is used for or how much money that : > comes in. : : If you look closely, at the bottom of the page a pie says what the money : is used for.
For this specific topic, it is here: https://www.torproject.org/donate#outcome In general, all US non-profits have to file a Form 990 with the IRS annually. It is a public document that lays out who funds the non-profit and how much, where the funds went, and a categorization of how the funds were spent. Everyone considering donating to a US non-profit should find the 990 and evaluate their performance for yourself. There are other non-profits who make up metrics and rate non-profits on these made-up metrics. YMMV. : important that development gets funded. The German Chaos Computer Club : and the German Privacy foundation, to name only two, also accept : donations towards running Tor nodes. Yes. The CCC has a bank account just for donations for their Tor activities. The banking info for the CCC will return to our donation webpage shortly. As for the question, "why can't Tor do this already?" We've been told repeatedly and by very smart lawyers, do not host relays in the name of the non-profit Tor Project, Inc. An oversimplification of the advice is that we can spend our money on making more scalable, better performing, and more anonymous Tor, or spend our money fighting lawsuits from anyone claiming the non-profit is responsible for the traffic it transmits. We produce code, not legal statements of defense. We're always open to legal advice to the contrary. This FAQ is still valid, https://www.torproject.org/eff/tor-legal-faq.html.en. As for a 3rd party hosting fast exit nodes, great. Tor needs more relays to scale. The network is already overloaded and we're sustaining around 500,000 daily users out of roughly 30 million downloads in the last 12 calendar months. Tor is slow, this is not news to anyone. What is news is that there is such a demand for online anonymity and privacy half a million people are willing to take the slowness to protect themselves. I2P and FreeNet are also seeing growth over the past year or two as well. As the saying goes, "All ships rise with the tide." The topic of an exchange or marketplace to match those with money to those with technical skill in running relays is not new. It's been an internal debate for the past year or two. Incentives can have unforseen consequences, see https://blog.torproject.org/blog/two-incentive-designs-tor for lots of details. This legal environments change dramatically from country to country. Right now, the US is probably the best place to run an exit node, given tor has "common carrier like status" according to the aforementioned smart lawyers. Internally, we decided we aren't economists and would probably suck at running such an exchange. This doesn't mean you cannot try. Coldboot in the UK is also trying something similar. The more the merrier. I've had casual conversations with some global ISPs about running their own Tor networks as a value-added service to customers wishing to escape the defacto Internet surveillance that exists today. Not one has started such a thing to my knowledge. My suggestion for those considering doing something like Kickstart is to do a year at a time. It's easier to raise $2400 to fund a fast exit node at someplace like 100tb.com for a year than it will be to raise $200/mo for 12 months. Buy the server for a year and post a copy of the receipt somewhere. People will check throughout the year to see the server is still online. If not, figure out some refund plan pro-rated to months left in the contract if the server lasts less than a year. Maybe some other non-profit could offer to be a fiscal sponsor so the donations are tax-deductible. My USD $0.02. -- Andrew Lewman The Tor Project pgp 0x31B0974B Website: https://www.torproject.org/ Blog: https://blog.torproject.org/ Identi.ca: torproject *********************************************************************** To unsubscribe, send an e-mail to [email protected] with unsubscribe or-talk in the body. http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/
