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Comment by skue | Hacker News Reader

Hooray. This project was misleading and naive in many ways, and it definitely seemed to violate Kickstarter's rules against resale. But that's not why I'm happy this project got killed.

The much bigger problem was the open SSL account and sheer misguidedness of running all network traffic through Tor. This project risked causing real harm to people thinking that this would safeguard their privacy.

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It would pretty much flood the TOR exit nodes, would it not?

It seems like TOR isn't exactly a commercializable network.

It could certainly be commercialized if the company making the product funded exit node servers to offset the increased usage from their customers (X gigabytes worth of exit node traffic capacity for each customer or something).

On this note, is there a reputable group that create exit nodes that can be funded?

Some Googling reveals https://www.torservers.net/ which seems to be an European (German) charity that runs exit nodes and relays you can donate to and they seem to be funding a couple Gbit worth of exit node traffic ( https://www.torservers.net/exits.html ) plus some relays.

I'm sure there are other exit node providers that one could donate to also. And of course, there's always the option of setting up your own exit node on a VPS -- find a Tor-friendly ISP and installation is basically an 'apt-get install tor' away (default configuration works fine). I run a few relays myself on my servers and it uses very little system resources and bandwidth is cheap.

Why would they do that?

It would defeat the anonymity purpose of tor and essentially be just another ISP, with diminished speeds and no added benefits.

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