Kickstarter Freezes Anonabox Privacy Router Project for Misleading Funders

It's easy to get the Internet riled up over a perceived offense (deception, scamming, fraud, other unethical behaviors), just like it's easy to get any group of people up in arms over the same thing.

I wouldn't list Reddit or any particular website as the source of this kind of witch hunting issue. The only thing to blame is the stupidity of crowds. If people went out of their way to see both sides of an issue, consider the sources and veracity of claimed facts and evidence, and actually make an informed decision then it'd be fine.

Obviously, this doesn't happen that much. But all I'll say is that just because some wall of text on Reddit has a lot of upvotes doesn't necessarily say anything about the actual truth of its contents. That means it's a bit foolish to discount all such things as distorted and inaccurate rabble rousing, just as foolish as the people who believe whatever they read without a second thought.

People love showering people they agree like with money, this case proves it. People also don't like to feel they are being taken advantage of and online you can find that out with a few clicks and 10 minutes of googling.

If someone gives $5 to a campaign that promises awesome wonderfulness but then finds out the awesome wonderfulness is being made in a Thailand sweatshop by 10 yearolds eating arsenic for breakfast they will pull the pledge and ruin the companies reputation.

Which is all to the good. Just look at Apple, they had their hipsters locked in when it was just the ridiculous 50% margins they were putting on their products. When we found out people were being worked to death and we had to pay those ridiculous margins that's when people became anti-Apple on mass.

Now if by anti-capitalist you mean anti-Dickensian exploration capitalist you're damned right. And I hope every half decent human being would be.

Right below it is a statement "By our fourth round of prototypes we had created a model with 64mb memory and a 580mhz CPU" which uses the word "created" not "found" or "utilized".

Then there was this AMA on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/anonabox/comments/2ja22g/hi_im_augus...

In it he says things like:

1. "I am claiming my device is not the same as the wt3020 off the shelf hardware yes." Self explanatory. He then states that "maybe" the only difference is the amount of storage, which is odd considering he just denied it's the same thing.

2. "Yes that is my picture and yes, I am claiming that the anonabox is not an off the shelf WT3020" Ditto.

3. "Yes honestly that does look like the same circuit board. I can't help but wonder if the factory that we sourced is going to try to sell them too." Here he even infers that their design was stolen and being resold behind their back. Again, this heavily infers they created/designed the board, and clearly denies knowledge of any other existing boards like his, meaning they didn't simply take an existing board and ask for more storage.

THEN he starts to walk it back, admitting to Wired they didn't design the board as they had first claimed as noted here: http://www.wired.com/2014/10/tiny-box-can-anonymize-everythi...

Which has the line "This piece has been corrected from an earlier version that included his claims that both the board and case were custom-built for the project." Note the explicit statement that they designed everything.

Wired further stated "he clarified that the router was created from a stock board." Clarified from the original statement that it was all custom designed.

Wired ends with "Germar also says now that the case was supplied by Gainstrong and was not custom-designed by the Anonabox developers, a partial reversal of how he initially described it to WIRED."

So, yes, he DID lie. He explicitly claimed it was all custom hardware multiple times, even when DIRECTLY confronted with evidence to the contrary. Only after several days of this did he begin to walk back his comments.