Category: Year In Review

  • UNREDACTED, a year in review (2025)

    A message from our founder:

    2024 felt as if things were moving at a very fast pace, with many things possible in 2025. That feeling was true, and 2025 has been our most successful year to date. We deployed a lot of new hardware, new services, and improved our existing infrastructure drastically. We built Unredacted Labs, housing our experimental NoiseNet anycast network designed to make it more difficult for censors to perform traffic correlation attacks. At the same time, we finalized and deployed GreenWare nodes, energy efficient hardware that runs most of our Tor exit relays.

    None of this would have been possible without the people who believed in us, and our very generous donors. Achieving 501(c)(3) status has made funding all much easier to accomplish. I want to personally thank Power Up Privacy for quite literally powering up privacy infrastructure, and making much of what we do today possible.

    There’s one thing I know for sure, and it’s that in 2026, Unredacted will continue laying the pipes to build Internet infrastructure that helps people evade Internet censorship and protect their right to privacy. Internet censorship is only getting worse, and we need to work harder than ever to counter it. Read on to discover all of what we built in 2025, and our plans for 2026!

    Zach
    Executive Director
    Unredacted Inc

    A year in review (2025)

    Opinion:

    General Updates:

    Initiatives:

    Censorship Evasion (CE):

    Secure Infrastructure (SI):

    Conclusion:

    Internet censorship is bad

    Internet censorship is increasing year over year. Authoritarian governments are spending 10s to 100s of millions of dollars to increase their technological capabilities in filtering critical information and communication. Their goal is to control the flow of information and to feed people misinformation. We urge everyone to continue their work fighting against Internet censorship, as well as support organizations dedicated to this important goal. As 2025 comes to a close, we asked our community for anonymous comments on why privacy and censorship circumvention tech is important to them. Read some of those views below to understand different perspectives on privacy and censorship.

    I am a security researcher, programmer and IT analyst
    I have been effected heavily by the use of government control and restriction here in the united kingdom under a government who seeks to control every medium of data, making true privacy and anonymity here almost impossible in a so called “1st world” country.

    Anonymous

    In Russia, you can get jailed just by words in internet (So in Great Britain too?), you can get jailed by your political position, government can force you to sign war contract. They’re [government] forcing their citizens to use government messenger called “MAX” (Like chinese WeChat, but in Russia). Government blocking everything what they can (they already blocked matrix.org, youtube, partially blocked telegram, blocked discord, and much other services, also they partially blocked vless protocol). So Russia turning into China?

    Anonymous

    in germany the police can stop you and check your mobile browsing history if you supported palestine. privacy is important so we don’t save history when viewing the palestine genocide.

    Anonymous

    I run a little online community that teaches life skills to all comers. We talk about cooking, how to get stains out of laundry, budgeting, resume building, exercise, and more. We help people make friends, navigate difficulties at work, and plan for college. In Discord’s messy rush to comply with hastily passed age verification laws, our little community was wiped out. We were wrongly marked as having adult content, and most of our members removed. Heart-breakingly, one young user was booted just as we were walking her through how to challenge fraudulent charges she recently discovered on her bank account. We don’t know if she ever got the help she needed to get her money back. Months later, Discord hasn’t responded to appeals. Censorship doesn’t just impact the people or activities it is meant to impact. Censorship creates fear of the “wrong” communication, and causes a wide swath of collateral damage. I’m thankful that Unredacted Matrix has given us a safe place to try and rebuild, which will remain broadly accessible for the foreseeable future.

    Anonymous

    Website

    We finished some work on a redesign of our website so that it is a bit more visually pleasing. Many of the pages were updated to showcase our projects and services. One of our favorites is the security page, detailing how we take security seriously and what we do to secure our infrastructure. Although we believe the aesthetics are an improvement over previous design choices, we’re still actively working on the design front with more changes coming soon!

    Want to read more about the inner-workings our projects & services? Check out our blog!

    Infrastructure

    Unredacted’s infrastructure has never been this large and robust. We now have physical presence in 2 datacenters with our fully owned hardware. Combined with our global infrastructure, we have over 200 servers & VMs in operation today!

    At the moment, our core datacenter houses our most critical internal and public infrastructure. This includes our Secure Infrastructure (SI) services, which have fully redundant power, network, compute, and storage. We operate 2 fully HA Ceph clusters to ensure that our services remain up and performant. We now also have local and offsite backups in case of a disaster.

    Some of our cluster specs:

    • Compute: 5x dual CPU servers, each with 384GB of RAM and pure SSD storage (fully expandable)
    • Storage: 3x dual CPU servers, each with 192GB of RAM and 36x HDDs with 360TB of raw storage (fully expandable)

    You can even see our infra for yourself on our new 24/7 Twitch live stream from our datacenter!

    Click to the logo to view the stream

    Or watch the blinky lights in this clip

    We worked countless hours building out our infrastructure. Take a look at some of our builds below.

    Curious about those purple cables and that hardware? Read more about GreenWare on our blog.

    Network

    One of our most ambitious projects of 2025 was NoiseNet (AS401401). Launched under Unredacted Labs, NoiseNet is an experimental anycast network spanning the globe. It is designed to make it more difficult for censors to perform traffic correlation attacks against parts of our network. If a threat actor were to breach our network, or our upstreams, our goal is to make their their task much more difficult. NoiseNet adds a layer of ‘noise’ via asymmetrical traffic flows, encrypted tunnels, and the sometimes unpredictable nature of anycast. In 2026, we will further develop software that will run on our machines to delay packets and transmit cover traffic, adding even more noise.

    Currently NoiseNet consists of 70+ edge routers and we’re continually working to expand it. NoiseNet remains experimental for the time being, and there is much work to be done to improve its resiliency such as automatic packet loss and high latency remediation.

    See how it works below, and read our blog post for the full and nitty-gritty details on how it works.

    User -> NoiseNet PoP -> encrypted tunnel -> core router(s) -> endpoint

    This year, we also moved our core network to AS401720, separating NoiseNet and our core.

    Security Initiative

    As we operate services and infrastructure that processes potential Personally Identifiable Information (PII), security becomes important. We’ve maintained a security page, outlining some of the things that we do to secure our infrastructure from attack. We’re concerned with things like malware, vulnerability exploitation, and unnecessarily exposing information that threat actors could use to compromise us.

    As such, in 2025 we deployed several services to help us secure our infrastructure.

    • Unredacted Citadel – a self-hosted WAF which protects against vulnerabilities in our web applications, injects additional HTTP security headers, and can be used to defend against DDoS attacks.
    • Our own XDR + SIEM solution – deployed on every server we maintain to gather potential Indicators of compromise (IoCs), and to help generally defend against and alert us of attacks.
    • Unredacted Funnel – a self-hosted Tailscale/Headscale mesh network which allows us to securely SSH into our infrastructure, and transfer data between servers via encrypted WireGuard tunnels.
    • Unredacted Auth – our internal SSO solution, allowing us to securely access internal infra.

    Into 2026, we’ll continue improving our security.

    Unredacted Door

    In July of 2023, we started Operation Envoy, an initiative that consists of ‘envoys’ which help to deliver messages (packets) to and from the Tor network. Over the years, we’ve expanded it to include all of our services that help people get through the front door, and onto the free and open Internet.

    Today we’re rebranding Operation Envoy into Unredacted Door. It’s no longer an operation, but a suite of services that help people around the world bypass Internet censorship.

    Unredacted Door includes:

    Around the same time last year, we had served around 192TiB of traffic in a single 30 day period. As of December of 2025, in the last 30 days we’ve served over 291TiB of traffic to across all Unredacted Door services, which is a substantial increase. Year over year, we have achieved an increase in total bandwidth usage across our censorship evasion services. This means we’re helping more people every year, and we’ll continue to do so.

    30 days of past traffic (Dec, 2025)

    If we continue to average at this new rate of bandwidth over a year, that would be nearly 3.5PiB!

    Last year, we ended with 91 CPU cores and 90GiB of RAM. After consolidating, seeking better deals, and reviewing the current CPU core and RAM counts, we ended the year with 81 cores and 90GiB of RAM across all Unredacted Door services. Lower core count, but more bandwidth usage overall. In 2026 we’ll see a rapid expansion of our censorship evasion infrastructure, and we expect these numbers to go much higher.

    24 hour hour stats on CPU & RAM usage (Dec, 2025)

    Our anonymized & aggregated Unredacted Door metrics are publicly accessible, and you can see the direct impact that we’re making.

    In 2025, we will continue expanding our CPU core and RAM counts, but we can’t do it without your help! If you like what we do and want to support our mission, consider making a donation.

    FreeSocks, proxies that circumvent censorship

    FreeSocks is our service that provides free, open & uncensored Outline (Shadowsocks) proxies to people in countries experiencing a high level of Internet censorship.

    Since its inception, FreeSocks has issued over 46,000 access keys to people looking to circumvent Internet censorship. We’re proud to have helped so many people all over the world access the free and open Internet.

    A screenshot of the FreeSocks website

    Although delayed for quite some time, in 2026, we’ll be continuing our work on a full rewrite of the freesocks-control-plane (FCP), the code which powers FreeSocks and allows for access keys to be issued and have their state tracked. The rewrite will convert the existing code from JavaScript to TypeScript, and feature an API + web control panel which will allow us and others to manage their FCP deployment more easily.

    We’ve also been hard at work improving our automation stack for FreeSocks called ansible-role-freesocks (ARF), which helps us automate the deployment of new FreeSocks servers. ARF will continue to be improved going into 2026, becoming more robust and flexible. It also lays the foundation for our new and improved FreeSocks v2, launching in 2026.

    FreeSocks v2 (as seen in the diagram below) will utilize Outline’s Shadowsocks over WebSockets (SS over WSS) feature and dynamic access keys by default. Instead of raw Outline Shadowsocks, which is easily detectable and blocked by advanced DPI systems, SS over WSS encapsulates the Shadowsocks connection inside a WebSockets connection. This disguises it to censors, and makes it look like a normal connection made to websites by regular Internet users.

    A diagram outlining how FreeSocks v2 will work

    This makes FreeSocks much more resilient, additionally allowing us to front connections through any CDN or proxy that supports WebSockets. If blocked, we can easily rotate IPs or hostnames to get our users back online through our ARF automation, and update all dynamic access keys on the fly. All without our users having to do anything at all.

    A major hurdle for us is not having current support in outline-server for SS over WSS or dynamic access key issuance via the shadowbox API. We’ve been working on adding support for it in our fork of outline-server, and preliminary testing is looking great, with many users successfully testing in Iran, Russia and China.

    We intend to get our code merged upstream in 2026. Keep an eye on these GitHub threads.

    ->-> We can’t operate services like this without your help <-<-

    Unredacted Tor Exit Relays

    In our efforts to help people evade censorship, and protect their right to privacy, we have operated numerous high-bandwidth Tor exit relays since 2021.

    We’re currently #44 in the top exit families as of 2025’s end, and have a 0.21% exit probability according to OrNetStats. That means your connection through Tor may be one of the 0.21% which exits traffic through our relays.

    A screenshot from OrNetStats

    Currently, we have around 30Gb/s of capacity across our network (a drastic increase from previous years). However, due to complications with our anycast network, performance has taken a hit. As we expand NoiseNet and improve its resilience, we expect our bandwidth usage and overall throughput to increase. In 2026, we also plan to considerably expand our number of Tor exit relays from 30 to 90 or more.

    Our Tor exit relay bandwidth bitrate over the past 30 days

    Over the past 30 days we have received and transmitted over 162TiB of Tor traffic. If this rate continued for a year, that would still be nearly 2PiB of bandwidth usage for a whole year. Combined with our Unredacted Door services, that would be nearly 5.5PiB in total. That’s still excluding all of our other services. For comparison, Signal pushes around 20PB a year on their call relays, despite being much larger than us.

    Our bandwidth usage over a single 24 hour period

    With your help, we can do even more, and continue to push more traffic on the Tor network.

    Chat services

    Our oldest service XMPP.is hit its 10th birthday this year. It continues to be a reliable service, and has nearly 70,000 registered users.

    We’ve also spent many hours improving our Matrix homeserver:

    • Migrated its media storage to on-prem S3 storage using Ceph’s Rados GW.
    • Increased the resources available to it (32 cores and 256GB of RAM).
    • Various database maintenance events, settings tweaks.
    • Countless hours of moderation efforts, described in our blog post.

    Our Matrix homeserver now has nearly 30,000 users registered, and continues to grow!

    If you want to chat with us and other like-minded people, why not join one of our communities?

    Mastodon instance, and other services

    Last year we quietly launched our own privacy-focused Mastodon instance. It has been in testing for a long while, but it’s now considered stable, and actively monitored. It runs on the same powerful infrastructure that the rest of our core services operate on top of.

    Head on over to unredacted.social if you’d like to sign up, and join our growing community.

    We’ve also launched several other services, such as the ones below. All of which are behind our Citadel WAF.

    In 2026, we’re planning on introducing even more services, including a Delta Chat relay! We’ll be updating our website, social media, and community chats when we’re sure they’re up to our standards of stability, so stay tuned for announcements!

    Funding

    We expect to publish an IRS form 990 detailing all of our financials in 2026. This will allow anyone to transparently view how much revenue we bring in, how much we spend, and on what we spend our money. When the time comes, our transparency page will be updated.

    We expect that with our current expense and growth rate, the current funds we have will allow us to operate for 1-2 years. To continue our mission, and rapidly expand, we’ll need your support! We will continue our fight against Internet censorship and privacy in 2026.

    If you want to support us, we allow one-time or recurring donations via multiple payment methods, including PayPal, credit cards, cryptocurrency (including XMR & ZEC), Open Collective, Patreon & Liberapay.

    Looking forward to 2026, we have a lot of ambitious goals for Unredacted we can’t wait to share with you! A redesigned Freesocks, new services such as Delta Chat, considerably expanding our Tor exit relay network, fine-tuning our ambitious NoiseNet project, and launching Unredacted merch are just a few of our biggest goals for 2026. We’re so excited to continue developing services that give privacy and knowledge back to the people who would otherwise face censorship or surveillance. We want to thank you all so much for being here with us on our journey and for the donations and support our community gives us. If you believe in our mission and projects, please consider making a donation so we can expand our services and reach to even more people around the globe. Let’s make 2026 the year we all Unredact the Internet!

  • UNREDACTED, a year in review (2024)

    A message from our founder:

    2024 has been a great year for us at Unredacted, growing in many ways that we didn’t even imagine were so quickly possible. We set out to explore whether becoming a 501(c)(3) non-profit was feasible. We ended up putting in the research and work to do it, and we formally incorporated as Unredacted Inc in May and received our 501(c)(3) determination letter from the IRS in June. We received a huge amount of support, from kind words to donations, and even a grant from the Human Rights Foundation. All of the support we’ve received has inspired us and allows us to continue our growth.

    2025 will surely be a difficult and challenging year for the fight against Internet censorship, and the fight for everyone’s right to privacy. Access to free and open information is as extremely important as it ever was. With some level of critical thinking, the truth can be found. We’re refocusing and doubling down on our mission to fight Internet censorship and protect people’s privacy by building out more censorship-resistant and privacy-friendly Internet infrastructure and services, while polishing the existing.

    So much has already happened, so read on to see in full detail what we accomplished in 2024.

    Zach
    Executive Director
    Unredacted Inc

    A year in review (2024)

    General Updates:

    Initiatives:

    Censorship Evasion (CE):

    Secure Infrastructure (SI):

    Conclusion:

    Website

    This year, we put a lot of work into the content and design of our website. The front page was redesigned, we added breadcrumbs on nearly all pages for easier navigation, and redesigned our donation page. Furthermore, we added new pages and content such as our transparency report, Supporters page and launched Unredacted Updates, where you can get a summary of what we’ve worked on each month. Transparency is important to us, and there will be more to come in 2025.

    Want to read more about the inner-workings our projects & services? Check out our blog!

    Hardware

    Unredacted has largely operated on a mix of dedicated hardware that we rent from various hosting providers. Unfortunately one of those providers, Hetzner, mysteriously cancelled our account at the end of October. We’ve since migrated to more reliable providers. However, important infrastructure such as our Tor exit relays, XMPP.is, and Unredacted Matrix server run on top of rented dedicated servers still. This past year, we’ve pursued purchasing and colocating hardware that we fully own. So far, we’ve built out redundant edge routers, aggregation switches and a PoE switch (seen below) which will power a special project that we’re working on. We won’t give any hints on what the PoE powered Raspberry Pis are for now, but we’ll be announcing how and why we built them in early 2025. What we’ll say is that they’re scalable, efficient and more affordable to operate in the long run.

    We’re also in the process of building an high-availability virtualization cluster with Ceph for storage too. That hardware is still in testing, but we plan to fully deploy it in early 2025 as well. The new cluster will power XMPP.is, the Unredacted Matrix server and various other new services that we’ll spin up in 2025.

    The hardware purchases that we made wouldn’t have been possible without the amazing support and donations we’ve received from our community. We’d especially like to thank the Human Rights Foundation for providing a grant to us.

    Network

    For a long time, we have operated our own network on top of one of our hosting providers. Recently, we became an ARIN member and received our own ASN (Autonomous System Number), AS401401 – which, in HTTP status codes means “Unauthorized.” ARIN must have thought we were cool. 🙂

    We also received IPv6 and IPv4 prefixes, which we’ve started advertising to our upstream providers. Our edge network at the time of writing consists of 18 virtual machines across various hosting providers for diversity and redundancy. We built this network for the special project mentioned above in the hardware section, and in 2025 we’ll write about how and why we built it on our blog.

    Operation Envoy: Defeating Censors

    In July of 2023, we started Operation Envoy, an initiative that consists of ‘envoys’ which help to deliver messages (packets) to and from the Tor network. This helps users experiencing Internet censorship, or those who wish to mask their use of Tor. Previously, we focused heavily on deploying Tor snowflake proxies around the world.

    This year, Operation Envoy had its 1st year anniversary. We thought a lot about Operation Envoy’s future, and we decided that it should consist of more than just Tor bridges. Operation Envoy now consists of everything we operate that helps people reach the free and open Internet, or particular services such as Signal & Telegram.

    Operation Envoy includes:

    Around the same time last year, we had served around 121TiB of traffic in a single 30 day period. As of December of 2024, in the last 30 days we’ve served over 192TiB of traffic to across all Operation Envoy services, which is a significant increase, but also due to the reclassification of what an ‘envoy’ is to us.

    30 days of past traffic (Dec, 2024)

    If we continue to average at this new rate of bandwidth over a year, that would be over 2.2PiB!

    Last year, we ended with 31 CPU cores and 53GiB of RAM. Looking at CPU core and RAM counts now, we ended the year with 91 cores and 106GiB of RAM, which is again a significant increase – but also due to the reclassification.

    24 hour hour stats on CPU & RAM usage (Dec, 2024)

    Our anonymized & aggregated Operation Envoy metrics are publicly accessible, and you can see the direct impact that we’re making.

    In 2025, we will continue expanding our CPU core and RAM counts, but we can’t do it without your help! If you like what we do and want to support our mission, consider making a donation.

    FreeSocks, proxies that circumvent censorship

    FreeSocks, our service that provides free, open & uncensored Outline (Shadowsocks) proxies to people in countries experiencing a high level of Internet censorship was open sourced in June. It also hit its first year of existence in December of 2024, and has expanded rapidly.

    Since its launch, FreeSocks has issued over 10,000 access keys to people looking to circumvent Internet censorship. This is an amazing milestone, and we’re happy to be helping so many people across the world. We’ve received a lot of positive feedback, and it has inspired us to continue our work on the service.

    A screenshot of the FreeSocks website

    In 2025, we’ll be continuing our work on a full rewrite of the freesocks-control-plane (FCP), the code which powers FreeSocks and allows for access keys to be issued, and have their state tracked. The rewrite will convert the existing code from JavaScript to TypeScript, and feature an API + web control panel which will allow us and others to manage their FCP deployment much more easily.

    A sneak peek of the new FCP control panel

    We’re also planning to potentially move away from Outline’s server software, and utilize raw Shadowsocks, Vmess, VLESS and Trojan proxies to offer more options to our users. To note, existing access keys and Outline’s client will still work with raw Shadowsocks.

    We can’t run free & awesome services like this without your help.

    Tor exit relays

    In our efforts to help people evade censorship, and protect their right to privacy, we have operated numerous high-bandwidth Tor exit relays since 2021.

    We’re currently #20 in the top exit families, and have a 0.55% exit probability according to OrNetStats. That means your connection through Tor may be one of the 0.55% which exits traffic through our relays.

    A screenshot from OrNetStats

    Currently, we have around 5Gb/s of throughput capacity (3Gb/s more since last year), however in practice this has been lackluster due to hosting provider network congestion and rate-limits. With our new hardware, we’re planning to migrate all of our Tor exit relays to our colocation in early 2025, which should allow for better throughput and control.

    Our Tor exit relay bandwidth bitrate over the past 30 days

    Regardless, over the past 30 days we have received and transmitted over 366TiB of bandwidth. If this rate continued for a year, that would still be over 4.2PiB of bandwidth usage for a whole year, quite an achievement.

    Our bandwidth usage over a single 24 hour period

    With your help, we can do even more, and continue to push a lot of traffic for the Tor network.

    Unredacted Proxies

    In 2024, we quietly announced Unredacted Proxies – which allow people to connect to messaging services such as Signal and Telegram, without exposing the fact to their ISP or government.

    Unredacted Proxies are a part of Operation Envoy, and are quite useful to many people around the world where Signal & Telegram are blocked. We’ve had a lot of good feedback about the service, and while we don’t directly count the amount of users – we can see that it’s being utilized by many when looking at bandwidth metrics. We’ve particularly seen great interest from people in Russia and Iran.

    For those interested in the technical side, we use Signal’s TLS Proxy and Telegram’s MTProto for our proxies.

    Chat services

    Our oldest projects are our chat services. XMPP.is was launched in 2015 and our Matrix server was launched in 2021. For many years, thousands of individuals have used our chat servers to exchange messages back and forth between friends and family. These remain a crucial part of our mission, as it allows people to communicate securely and privately. We regularly maintain and update these services, but there’s nothing notable to announce for them this year.

    If you want to chat with us and other like-minded people, why not join one of our communities?

    Funding

    Las year, we struggled with funding. However, this year has been amazing in terms of funding. We received a record amount of donations, and even received a grant from the Human Rights Foundation! We’re eternally grateful to our community and supporters, and we promise to always use your money effectively. To date, no one at Unredacted makes any money for the work they do, and we intend to keep it this way until we are fully sustainable.

    2024 EoY Balance Totals (USD):

    • Cryptocurrency balances (calculated at time of writing): $35,681
    • Bank balance (at the time of writing): $246
      Total: $35,927

    2024 Grant Totals (USD):

    We expect that with our current expense and growth rate, these funds will allow us to smoothly operate for at least 2-3 years. To continue our mission, and rapidly expand, we’ll need your support! We have many very ambitious and interesting work & projects in 2025.

    If you want to support us, we allow one-time or recurring donations via multiple payment methods, including PayPal, credit cards, cryptocurrency (including XMR & ZEC), Open Collective, Patreon & Liberapay.

    In 2025, we plan to be much more transparent in terms of our spending and funding.

    What’s next?

    In 2025, we have a lot of work ahead of us. We’ll be building out new infrastructure, creating new services and revamping existing ones. We’re expanding at a rapid pace, and we’re going to continue doing so. The fight against Internet censorship and for people’s right to privacy will be especially important in the coming year.

    Happy holidays!

    Sincerely,
    The Unredacted Team

  • UNREDACTED, a year in review (2023)

    From our humble beginnings in 2015, to now (almost 2024), we’ve undergone many significant changes in the almost 9 years of our existence. We’ve established ourselves as a legitimate organization that is on a mission to fight Internet censorship, and provide various services to individuals & organizations seeking privacy and security. In 2023, a lot of work has been done to accomplish that mission. That’s why we’re starting our own “year in review” to go over all of the major developments that continue to challenge and inspire us.

    A year in review (2023)

    Operation Envoy: Defeating Censors

    In July of 2023, we started Operation Envoy, an effort to scale up our Tor bridge and snowflake proxy operations that help deliver messages (packets) to and from the Tor network. This helps users experiencing Internet censorship, or those who wish to mask their use of Tor. We focused heavily on deploying snowflake proxies around the world. At the start of the operation we were serving 93TB of symmetrical snowflake proxy traffic looking at the past 30 days.

    30 days of past traffic at the start of the operation (July 2023)

    As of December of 2023, in the last 30 days we’ve served over 121TB of symmetrical traffic to snowflake proxy users. We started with 34 CPU cores and 58GB of RAM from servers deployed around the world. We’re ending the year with the same core count, but with a bit less RAM at 53GB. However, we’ve served more traffic due to server provider changes and software upgrades.

    30 days of past traffic at the end of 2023 (December 2023)

    Our Operation Envoy metrics are publicly accessible, and can show you the direct impact that we’re making. Have a look.

    In 2024, we will continue expanding our CPU core and RAM counts, but we can’t do it without your help! If you like what we do and want to support our mission, consider making a donation.

    FreeSocks, proxies that circumvent censorship

    To continue our efforts and follow our mission in providing censorship-resistant Internet access, in late December we launched FreeSocks. A service that provides free, open & uncensored Outline (Shadowsocks) proxies to individuals in countries experiencing a high level of Internet censorship.

    A screenshot of the FreeSocks website

    We’ve spread news about the service on social media, and we’ve seen a gradual and steady increase in users since the launch.

    In 2024, we will scale the service to meet our user’s needs and write a blog post about how we built the core of FreeSocks on Cloudflare Workers in a privacy respecting way. Again, we can’t run services like these without your help.

    Tor exit relays

    In addition to our front-line censorship circumvention services, we have run numerous high-bandwidth Tor exit relays for many years.

    We’ve recently become #16 in the top exit families, and have a 1.03% exit probability according to OrNetStats. That means, you may be one of the 1% of Tor network users who exit traffic through our relays.

    A screenshot from OrNetStats

    Over the past 30 days, we’ve greatly improved our Tor exit relay setup, which consists of 2 hypervisors. Each having an Intel Xeon E-2276G, 64GB of RAM and a 1Gb/s NIC. We’ve spent a lot of time revising this setup to maximize bandwidth and resource usage.

    Our Tor exit relay bandwidth bitrate over the past 30 days

    This optimized setup has allowed us to push 2Gb/s of symmetrical traffic at any given time. In a single 24 hour period, we pushed nearly 20TB of traffic through our relays.

    Our bandwidth usage over a single 24 hour period

    If we continue at this rate for 365 days, that would be close to 7.3PB (Petabytes) of traffic for an entire year. With your help, we can do even more than this, and continue pushing tons traffic for Tor network users.

    Unredacted Guides

    In November of 2023, we launched Unredacted Guides. We aim to aid users in setting up, configuring and launching privacy/security focused software. It’s one thing to run these services ourselves, but helping others do the same only increases awareness and impact.

    As of writing this post, we have 2 guides.

    In 2024, we will continue to refine existing guides and write new ones in accordance with our mission.

    Chat services

    Our oldest projects are our chat services. XMPP.is was launched in 2015 and our Matrix server was launched in 2021. For many years, thousands of individuals have used our chat servers to exchange messages back and forth between friends and family. These remain a crucial part of our mission, as it allows people to communicate securely and privately.

    In November, we made efforts to secure XMPP.is based on the teachings from the jabber.ru MITM attack, and shared our work in a blog post.

    We will continue to maintain, monitor and secure our chat services for the years to come.

    Infrastructure changes

    Over the past year, we’ve made significant improvements to our server orchestration and the security of our services and website.

    We use many self-written Ansible roles and playbooks to deploy and maintain our servers. We’ve made a lot of refinements in this area which has made deploying and maintaining new services easier than ever.

    On the security side, we’ve utilized Cloudflare Access heavily on critical parts of our websites and locked down server access behind Tailscale. In 2024, a focus of ours will be to further secure our infrastructure from potential attacks.

    Funding

    While we’ve always paid for our services mostly out of pocket, 2023 was unfortunately one of the lowest in terms of funding, and it was far under our operational costs (domains, servers & SaaS providers). With that said, we greatly appreciate those that made contributions. Any amount helps us in carrying out our mission.

    2023 Donation Totals (USD):

    Cryptocurrency (calculated at time of writing): $127
    Stripe (credit cards): $68
    PayPal: $23
    Total: $218

    To continue our mission, we need your support! We allow one-time or recurring donations via multiple payment methods, including PayPal, credit cards, cryptocurrency, Open Collective, Patreon & Liberapay.

    In 2024, we will launch a fundraiser in an attempt to cover our operational costs. This will be announced later.

    What’s next?

    Regardless of funding for our services in 2024, we will make an attempt to expand them, and create new ones. We’ll continue working on awesome projects, and providing them to the masses.

    In 2024, we will explore the possibility of becoming a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and assess it’s feasibility. We’ve always been non-profit focused, but legitimizing ourselves as a US tax deductible non-profit has its perks and it may be the next step in the growth and expansion of our organization.

    Happy holidays!

Donate