Services
Internet Freedom is Here: FreeSocks v2
The Internet as we know it is in danger and democracy is under attack. Around the world state censors are working to restrict access to information, and prevent people from sharing their own. With growing access to technology, we need to ensure that information remains free at serious infrastructure scale – and we think we…
DDoS attacks on our primary network
Starting on February 15th, our primary network AS401720 was hit with a series of L3/L4 DDoS attacks from a Mirai botnet. For those not aware, a DDoS attack is designed to take down services and networks (not breach something). The attacks peaked at over 100 Mpps (million packets per second) and over 10 Gbps in…
The UK Online Safety Act & age verification
The Matrix.org Foundation posted yesterday that “public Matrix servers will also have to uphold age verification laws, as misguided as they might be.” This is true for them. They’re based in the UK and subject to the Online Safety Act. But it is not true as a general statement, and it’s not true for us.…
New rules for our chat services, and our efforts to moderate them
Over the many years that we’ve operated our free and public federated chat services, XMPP.is and the Unredacted Matrix server, we’ve quickly and effectively responded to abuse reports and made great strides in clamping down on the blatant abuse of our services. This hasn’t come without a cost, as we’ve spent countless hours banning thousands…
FreeSocks is now open source
Censorship on the Internet is getting worse, not better. The free flow of information is key to learning and making change. Because of this, we started FreeSocks, a service that provides free, open & uncensored Outline (Shadowsocks) proxies to people in countries experiencing a high level of Internet censorship late last year (2023). Since then,…
How we accidentally broke our Tor exit relays
Making technology work how you expect it to, and keep it working that way can be difficult at times. Changes in configuration or software updates can put services into a broken or half-broken state, and we had the latter happen to us. In the spirit of transparency, we are writing about the painful discovery that…
New Tor bridge types for Operation Envoy
In July of last year (2023) we launched Operation Envoy, our effort to deliver packets to and from the Tor network which helps defeat Internet censorship. This is achieved by Unredacted operating Tor bridges, also known as Pluggable Transports. Tor bridges obfuscate (bridge) the connection a user makes when connecting to Tor so that it…
Introducing FreeSocks, proxies that circumvent censorship
Easy censorship circumvention We despise censorship and human (& animal) rights abuses, and it’s time to fight back. In addition to Operation Envoy, our effort to provide stable and performant anti-censorship Tor bridges and snowflake proxies, we’re launching FreeSocks. FreeSocks is a free and open proxy service that aims provide an alternative to individuals that…
What we're doing in response to the jabber.ru MITM attack
As you may have heard, jabber.ru, a popular XMPP service discovered a sophisticated MITM attack against their service that may have lasted for up to 6 months. They published a great blog post, going over all the details of the attack and measures to prevent this sort of attack from happening on other services. From…
Operation Envoy: Defeating Censors
Operation background Accessing the uncensored Internet in some countries has never been so difficult. Internet censorship is rising across the world, and content filtering is becoming more difficult to circumvent as technology and censors evolve. Even in countries you wouldn’t expect. However the worst offenders are the ones you would typically suspect, China, Russia and…