Covid-19's Impact on the Tor Project | Hacker News Reader

Covid-19's Impact on the Tor Project

blog.torproject.org

115 pointsjerheinze15 comments

The statement says, "Like many other nonprofits and small businesses, the crisis has hit us hard, ..."

It's a third of the team being lost, as far as I can see. But the statement doesn't spell out the reason - have donations dried up? Has Tor lost some sponsors?

The first thing you cut as a business looking to save as many employees as possible is your donations.

Really depends, if you are big enough you can use this as a PR opportunity very similar to the Notre-Dame de Paris fire.

Lot's of news along the lines of "Company XY is doing this to help fight COVID-19!", everybody wanting to manufacture ventilators was just the most visible peak of that.

Yes but as OP mentioned, if you’re about to cut employees, the PR might not be useful. Those companies getting into ventilators and switching production have lots of capital available.

Not even the best PR company in the world could spin a donation to the TOR project as helping fight Covid-19.

I've heard from friends in large nonprofits that they're expecting the funding landscape to change dramatically. Funders are potentially looking in very different directions now, presumably. Or at least nonprofits have to worry that they are, and it will be reflected in the next round of grant-seeking

Not the social services non-profits. Food security is crazy up, the one I’m associated with has an extra 1/2 of the yearly budget as surplus now because Feeding America just dumped 100 million donation from Bezos, the like FOUR relief packages congress has moved, and while physical food donation is at zero cash donations are slightly up.

Ah heck, I was reading another comment by you in another thread just now, and admittedly not thinking kind thoughts about it... so I'm glad to have been humbled by finding this prior reply, reminding me not to make snap judgements of others :) Thanks so much for your hopeful comment!

I wonder how much they'd need to absorb some of these losses.

What does Tor need 35 engineers for?

Serious question, since Tor is basically the server-client which was finished a long time ago and then a browser that basically is a fork of Firefox ESR.

You can get a gist of that by looking at what they do for each sponsor: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors (e.g. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/S... )

Another place to look is their tor-project mailing list where in each meeting they list things to do/things done: (e.g. https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2020-Apri... ) https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/

They don't have 35 engineers

What even is not engineering?

Well for one thing, it needs to defend Tor against many parties, some of them with essentially unlimited resources, who are working full-time to find holes to exploit.

Yeah, when you can credibly consider the NSA as an adversary, you need a strong team

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