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Covid-19's Impact on the Tor Project
- samizdis 6y agoThe statement says, "Like many other nonprofits and small businesses, the crisis has hit us hard, ..." It's a third of the team being lost, as far as I can see. But the statement doesn't spell out the reason - have donations dried up? Has Tor lost some sponsors?
- Taek 6y agoThe first thing you cut as a business looking to save as many employees as possible is your donations.
- freeflight 6y agoReally depends, if you are big enough you can use this as a PR opportunity very similar to the Notre-Dame de Paris fire. Lot's of news along the lines of "Company XY is doing this to help fight COVID-19!", everybody wanting to manufacture ventilators was just the most visible peak of that.
- jeromegv 6y agoYes but as OP mentioned, if you’re about to cut employees, the PR might not be useful. Those companies getting into ventilators and switching production have lots of capital available.
- cwhiz 6y agoNot even the best PR company in the world could spin a donation to the TOR project as helping fight Covid-19.
- patcon 6y agoI've heard from friends in large nonprofits that they're expecting the funding landscape to change dramatically. Funders are potentially looking in very different directions now, presumably. Or at least nonprofits have to worry that they are, and it will be reflected in the next round of grant-seeking
- SlowRobotAhead 6y agoNot the social services non-profits. Food security is crazy up, the one I’m associated with has an extra 1/2 of the yearly budget as surplus now because Feeding America just dumped 100 million donation from Bezos, the like FOUR relief packages congress has moved, and while physical food donation is at zero cash donations are slightly up.
- patcon 6y agoAh heck, I was reading another comment by you in another thread just now, and admittedly not thinking kind thoughts about it... so I'm glad to have been humbled by finding this prior reply, reminding me not to make snap judgements of others :) Thanks so much for your hopeful comment!
- jsjddbbwj 6y agoWhat does Tor need 35 engineers for? Serious question, since Tor is basically the server-client which was finished a long time ago and then a browser that basically is a fork of Firefox ESR.
- jerheinze 6y agoYou can get a gist of that by looking at what they do for each sponsor: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors (e.g. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/Sponsor58 https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/S... ) Another place to look is their tor-project mailing list where in each meeting they list things to do/things done: (e.g. https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2020-April/002821.html https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2020-Apri... ) https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/ https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/
- twistypencil 6y agoThey don't have 35 engineers
- anacrolix 6y agoWhat even is not engineering?
- woodandsteel 6y agoWell for one thing, it needs to defend Tor against many parties, some of them with essentially unlimited resources, who are working full-time to find holes to exploit.
- SturgeonsLaw 6y agoYeah, when you can credibly consider the NSA as an adversary, you need a strong team
- agumonkey 6y agoI wonder how much they'd need to absorb some of these losses.