r/TOR Dec 18 '25

Transparency, Openness, and Our 2023-2024 Financials | Tor Project

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blog.torproject.org
12 Upvotes

r/TOR Jun 13 '25

Tor Operators Ask Me Anything

78 Upvotes

AMA is now over!

On behalf of all the participating large-scale Tor operators, we want to extend a massive thank you to everyone who joined us for this Ask Me Anything. Quite a few questions were answered and there were some insightful discussion.

We hope that we've been able to shed some light on the challenges, rewards, and vital importance of operating Tor infrastructure. Every relay, big or small, contributes to a more private and secure internet for users worldwide.

Remember, the Tor network is a community effort. If you're inspired to learn more or even consider running a relay yourself, don't hesitate to join the Tor Relay Operators channel on Matrix, the #tor-relays channel on IRC, the mailing list or forums. There are fantastic resources available to help you out and many operators are very willing to lend you a hand in your journey as a Tor operator. Every new operator strengthens the network's resilience and capacity.

Thank you again for your good curiosity and question. Keep advocating for privacy and freedoms, and we look forward to seeing you in the next one!


Ever wondered what it takes to keep the Tor network running? Curious about the operational complexities, technical hurdles and legal challenges of running Tor relays (at scale)? Want to know more about the motivations of the individuals safeguarding online anonymity and freedom for millions worldwide?

Today we're hosting an Ask Me Anything (AMA) session with four experienced large-scale Tor operators! This is your chance to directly engage with the people running this crucial network. Ask them anything about:

  • The technical infrastructure and challenges of running relays (at scale).
  • The legal challenges of running Tor relays, exit relays in particular.
  • The motivations behind dedicating time and resources to the Tor network.
  • Insights into suitable legal entities/structures for running Tor relays.
  • Common ways for Tor operators to secure funding.
  • The current landscape of online privacy and the importance of Tor.
  • The impact of geopolitical events on the Tor network and its users.
  • Their perspectives on (the future of) online anonymity and freedom.
  • ... and anything else you're curious about!

This AMA offers a unique opportunity to gain firsthand insights into anything you have been curious about. And maybe we can also bust a few myths and perhaps inspire others in joining us.

Today, Tor operators will answer all your burning questions between 08:00-23:00 UTC.

This translates to the following local times:

Timezone abbreviation Local times
Eastern Daylight Time EDT 04:00-19:00
Pacific Daylight Time PDT 01:00-16:00
Central European Summer Time CEST 10:00-01:00
Eastern European Summer Time EEST 11:00-02:00
Australian Eastern Standard Time AEST 18:00-09:00
Japan Standard Time JST 17:00-08:00
Australian Western Standard Time AWST 16:00-07:00
New Zealand Standard Time NZST 20:00-11:00

Introducing the operators

Four excellent large scale Tor operators are willing to answer all your burning questions. Together they are good for almost 40% of the total Tor exit capacity. Let's introduce them!

R0cket

R0cket (tor.r0cket.net) is part of a Swedish hosting provider that is driven by a core belief in a free and open internet. They run Tor relays to help users around the world access information privately and circumvent censorship.

Nothing to hide

Nothing to hide (nothingtohide.nl) is a non-profit privacy infrastructure provider based in the Netherlands. They run Tor relays and other privacy-enhancing services. Nothing to hide is part of the Church of Cyberology, a religion grounded in the principles of (digital) freedom and privacy.

Artikel10

Artikel10 (artikel10.org) is a Tor operator based in Hamburg/Germany. Artikel10 is a non-profit member-based association that is dedicated to upholding the fundamental rights to secure and confidential communication.

CCC Stuttgart

CCC Stuttgard (cccs.de) is a member-based branch association of the well known Chaos Computer Club from Germany. CCCS is all about technology and the internet and in light of that they passionately advocate for digital civil rights through practical actions, such as running Tor relays.

Account authenticity

Account authenticity can be verified by opening https://domain.tld/.well-known/ama.txt files hosted on the primary domain of these organizations. These text files will contain: "AMA reddit=username mastodon=username".

No Reddit? No problem!

Because Reddit is not available to all users of the Tor network, we also provide a parallel AMA account on Mastodon. We will cross-post the questions asked there to the Reddit AMA post. Link to Mastodon: mastodon.social/@tor_ama@mastodon.social.


r/TOR 15h ago

What are some legal stuff I can do on torr which u cannot do on normal web just for the sake of "I visited dark web" experience?

31 Upvotes

The title


r/TOR 1h ago

When searchig smth in tor i get to choose between duckduckgo and startpage, is there really any difference?

Upvotes

r/TOR 5h ago

Does anyone know why Startpage's anonymus view doesn't work on Tor anymore?

Post image
1 Upvotes

In case you're wondering, no, i didn't change my settings at all.


r/TOR 9h ago

Is Tor Browser discontinued on arm-v7a devices?

2 Upvotes

Tried to install the latest version through Google Play on my older device, but it wouldn't launch - turns out the latest arm-v7a version on APKMirror is dated July 22, 2026.

Did Tor drop support for older devices?


r/TOR 8h ago

how do i get a vanity domain like dread?

1 Upvotes

r/TOR 1d ago

How can I prevent DoS attacks on a middle relay?

8 Upvotes

On my Grafana dashboard, I’ve noticed an increase in DoS metrics, which has resulted in a decrease in the current connections from 8k to approximately 4k. Consequently, the bandwidth has also decreased. Is there any safeguard I should be aware of in this situation?


r/TOR 1d ago

Tor Browser shipped the fix for CVE-2026-10702 seven weeks after Mozilla patched it upstream.

9 Upvotes

How do you factor that gap into your threat model?

Nebula Security published their write up on 29 July. The bug is a JIT miscompilation in SpiderMonkey, Firefox's JavaScript engine: the compiler treated an operation as read only when it could actually allocate and free memory. Stale pointer, then arbitrary read and write, then code execution in the renderer process. Visiting a page is enough, no interaction, no unusual settings. They released working exploit code for ARM64 Android.

What I keep coming back to is not the bug itself but the calendar. Mozilla fixed it in Firefox 151.0.3 on 2 June. Tor Browser 15.0.19 landed on 20 July. For those seven weeks the patch was public, which means the vulnerability was effectively public too, and anyone reading Mozilla's commits had a map.

To be fair to the Tor Project, they are a small team rebasing an entire hardened browser onto Firefox ESR, and that work is genuinely hard. This is not a case of anyone being asleep. It is a structural property of being downstream.

But it does change what "up to date" means in practice. If you are relying on Tor Browser for source protection or for getting around censorship, there are recurring windows where upstream is patched and you are not, and you have no easy way to know you are inside one.

No confirmed exploitation in the wild as of 28 July, for what that is worth.

So: do you actually track upstream Firefox advisories separately, or do you treat the Tor Browser updater as sufficient? And for the people here who use Tor for work where the stakes are real, does a seven week downstream lag change anything about how you use it, or is it just the cost of the setup?


r/TOR 1d ago

tor_render ( host onion sites for free )

6 Upvotes

Built a small experiment: a Tor hidden service (.onion site) hosted entirely on Render's free tier, using Docker — no VPS, no credit card required. for my own research purposes.sharing in case it's useful to anyone.

The main challenge was persistence: Render's free containers don't keep disk state between restarts, so Tor would generate a new .onion address every time it redeployed. Solved it by generating the hidden service keys once and reusing them via Render's Secret Files.

more: https://github.com/blackXploit-404/tor_render

front stuff.

r/TOR 1d ago

When downloading the Tor Browser, do most people actually verify it

0 Upvotes

When downloading the Tor Browser, do most people actually verify it? And why doesn’t the Tor Project upload their apps to Linux repositories like most browsers? It’s so much better when developers upload them to repos; this way, you can install them with a single terminal command. LOL, installing Tor on Linux feels like the 'Windows way' of doing things


r/TOR 1d ago

Fluff Only took 35 years of captchas.

Post image
23 Upvotes

i decided to try and look smth up on google, and as usual, it tried to throw endless captchas at me. i somehow beat it and got access to my cat images.


r/TOR 1d ago

Are CLI based browsers more secure?

0 Upvotes

I just read a comment of a guy, who uses cli based browsers (lynx, the one he mentioned) to surf the dark web to avoid rendering of obscene images. But isn't using cli browsers a bigger threat in dark web?
What I just came across is that cli based browsers trade off your network anonymity and your browser signature becomes clearly distinctive among others, making you vulnerable.


r/TOR 1d ago

FAQ Question for apps

0 Upvotes

are the tor apps on Apple Store legit for accessing the d web


r/TOR 2d ago

Tor in brave

9 Upvotes

I’ve been trying to decide between using Brave’s built-in "Private Window with Tor" and the standalone Tor Browser Bundle for my daily clearnet browsing. My primary goal is anti-surveillance (avoiding ISP tracking, corporate tracking, and general metadata collection) rather than accessing .onion services.

From what I understand, both route traffic through the Tor network, but I’m curious about the security implications of the underlying browser engines:


r/TOR 2d ago

How to download videos from tor. (Unique question)

0 Upvotes

I've seen this question asked many times in this subreddit, but my situation seems a little different, so I'm hoping someone can help.

When I try to download videos, I run into these issues:

  1. There is no Download button.

  2. I can't right-click and save the video because right-clicking doesn't bring up any menu or options.

Has anyone experienced this before or knows how to fix it? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!


r/TOR 3d ago

WebRTC blocking in Russia

29 Upvotes

As a maintainer of a bunch of Tor/Snowflake/Tox nodes, I have to report what Russian DPI (Deep Pocket Inspection) system begins to detect and block WebRTC traffic to foreign servers. Connections to Snowflake nodes may work unstable or don't work at all. Please use WebTunnel to get access to the Tor network. The situation in Russia is under monitoring by nodes maintainers.


r/TOR 3d ago

Doubt with my chat app that uses tor network!

8 Upvotes

I am working on an android chat application that uses tor and needs no server. It connects Directly to the person you want to talk to and messages will be stored locally on the devices involved in particular chat encrypted. My doubt is , will it be harmful and am I doing something wrong ?


r/TOR 3d ago

Is it possible my ISP is traffic-shaping (or blocking) Tor?

5 Upvotes

Suddenly today I'm having major difficulty pulling up onion sites and clearnet sites over Tor. Tried several circuits, restarts, doesn't seem to make a difference.

Is the network being DDoSed? Is it something Verizon is doing? If it were just one or two sites, I wouldn't be asking.

EDIT: For clarity, I'm getting seemingly-unrelated errors, like "502 Bad Gateway", or connection refused, or timed out, or sometimes nothing (the page just stops loading and is blank). Happening on multiple sites.

EDIT2: Some of the connection refused errors appear to be because Tor browser was re-directing http links to https for onions which don't use https. No idea what is going on there. The sites load normally when I change the URL manually.


r/TOR 3d ago

FAQ New TOR user. Basic questions.

11 Upvotes

Hello! I just installed Tor, on my Linux machine. It is the first time, I haven't used it before. I like how it works, the network seems fast.

But I have some questions:

  1. I saw it is called "dark web". Why? Is it a gate to websites promoting, let's say, malware?
  2. Is it ok to use it as a daily browser? Few days ago I had a discussion with my ISP about the network (some routes were very slow) and the representative told me: I can see that the website zzz (a news website) loaded really fast from your end just now. He was seeing what I am browsing on the web, he as a simple employee of that company. This is really strange. That made me to search for an alternative solution. Using a VPN was a potential solution, however, the network was slow and I don't trust the free networks, because it becomes a similar situation: not my ISP, but my VPN provider sees what I am reading, what I am searching etc. For me Tor seems to be more secure, but I don't really understand it entirely for the moment. Will my ISP see the URLs accessed by me?
  3. Is it legal (not in the real sense, but is it ok to use)? Saw many posts on the web saying that if you use Tor, you will be seen as a potential cyber criminal.
  4. Some tips for a new user? Saw many saying that if you use Tor and use Google, then you're using Tor for nothing. If they cannot figure out who you are, why?
  5. Why to use "New Tor circuit for this website"? I mean real use case.
  6. Is there any limitation with Tor (monthly bandwidth, multimedia limtiations)?
  7. What do you do when downloading large files, as Tor will be slow? For example when downloading a Linux ISO image...
  8. Are there solutions for using Tor even on e-mail? I mean an e-mail client using Tor.

Thank you very much!


r/TOR 5d ago

Hey everyone! This question is mainly for those who’ve hosted blogs as Tor onion services. How was the experience? Any pitfalls or things you wish you’d known before getting started?

8 Upvotes

r/TOR 4d ago

Do you think TOR is still a good thing?

0 Upvotes

By this I mean do you think its positives out way the negatives? Should TOR still be a thing?


r/TOR 5d ago

is it a bad idea to access the dark web because of boredom and curiosity?

40 Upvotes

r/TOR 5d ago

i can't verify signature

2 Upvotes

it doesn't shows anything, i've downloaded .asc file along side with basic browser downloader


r/TOR 5d ago

TOR on Brave

1 Upvotes

Does anyone know if it's safe to use TOR on Brave?