Tor Router TorFi Pulled From Kickstarter

Another one bites the dust. Crowdfunding project TorFi, a Wi-Fi router that is built to run all internet traffic through Tor, or "the onion router," in an effort to ensure privacy, has been removed from Kickstarter only days after a similar listing for the Anonabox router was also taken down.

Coming from two Berkeley, California creators, TorFi aimed to protect users' privacy when it came to internet browsing in the form of turnkey Tor protection in a small router. In addition, TorFi supported OpenVPN, meaning traffic could be also be routed through a virtual private network. All of this was also from promised from similar product Anonabox, and it appears that the two routers are sharing the same fate for very similar reasons.

Digging just a little beyond the surface, you'll find that Kickstarter does not have a goal of squashing attempts to insure user privacy. They do, however, have rules against "presenting someone else's work as their own," as stated on the site's FAQ page. See, TorFi wasn't actually a new piece of hardware, but rather an off-the-shelf TP-Link router that was flashed with a custom version of open-source software, OpenWRT.

Likewise with Anonabox, it was revealed that the parts being used were just cheap offerings from China, and not original hardware as was claimed in the listing. In the case of TorFi, the only thing being funded through Kickstarter was a bit of reprogramming, and not development or preparations to launch a new product.

SOURCE ArsTechnica