Tor Cloud Project Bites the Dust
If you’ve ever heard of Tor, you know that the Tor network allows you to perform activities online under the cloak of anonymity. The Tor Cloud project further perpetuated the anonymous capabilities of Tor, by utilizing Amazon EC2 instances in order to facilitate anonymous connections to the internet. The only trade off is that users of the Tor Cloud would need to donate bandwidth in order to use the service.
In order to create a bridge to the Tor network, users could do simply spin up a VM at AWS. The Tor Cloud first became available in 2011. The Tor Cloud was another way to bring people into the Tor network, however, Tor mentions that the reason the Tor Cloud project has folded is due to the fact that developers have not stepped up to the plate in order to work on the open source software.
The Tor Cloud project currently has several bugs in the code. Many of these bugs are considered critical bugs that could put the end users security at risk.
The Tor website goes on to say, “The main reason for discontinuing Tor Cloud is the fact that software requires maintenance, and Tor Cloud is no exception.”
According to Tor, the decision to discontinue Tor cloud wasn’t easy. Sources who are familiar with the situation note that Tor talked about this decision for month, until the conclusion was made to finally ax the Tor Cloud service.
Tor Cloud’s website goes on to say, “There is at least one major bug in the Tor Cloud image that makes it completely dysfunctional (meaning that users could not use this particular service to access the Internet), and there are over a dozen other bugs, at least one of them of highest priority.”
Although Tor has officially stopped supporting the Tor Cloud network, Tor Cloud nodes still exist. Tor says that although these nodes are still in operations, the ability for new users to exchange bandwidth for anonymous browsing inside of Tor Cloud is no longer available.
