Kickstarter Suspends Anonabox Campaign

Well, it sounded good on paper, at least.

The Anonabox was a Kickstarter project that was planning to give purchasers easy access to anonymity by encrypting all of their traffic using the Tor service. You'd plug the super-tiny box into your router via an Ethernet cable, power up the device using a free USB port, and then connect to it with a client by plugging your laptop or desktop into the box's other Ethernet port (or connecting up to the Anonabox wirelessly). And that's it—like magic, your browsing would suddenly be encrypted using the fairly secure Tor network.

Said Kickstarter, which raised an impressive amount of funding ($585,549) over its brief few days of existence, has since been suspended. While it blew past its initial funding goal of $7,500, Reddit members questioned the project's integrity as a result of its creator's claims that the Anonabox was an original creation which took four years' worth of development to build.

In actuality, some claimed, the Anonabox looked suspiciously like a device that was already available for purchase. August Germar, the Anonabox's developer, clarified with Wired that he asked a supplier to add more flash memory to the device. And, of course, Germar recompiled OpenWRT to run on the router—though he hadn't made the entire package available, as one would think he might given his claims that the Anonabox was '100% open source.' Instead, users have only been given access to the device's configuration files.

And it gets worse.

'OpenWRT is so BADLY configured by Anonabox team that device that is supposed to protect you is actually giving away your information. The device has BACKDOOR root password, OPEN wireless network (so anyone can connect to it) and is shipped with SSHD!!! This means that anyone can take control of the device,' reads a description in the associated Reddit thread.

According to Germar, these issues stemmed from miscommunication, not malice. As he told Wired, the Anonabox's software issues aren't 'vulnerabilities.' Rather, something that can seemingly be addressed by letting purchasers know about their existence in advance.

As for the Kickstarter, the organization isn't citing the specific violations that resulted in the Anonabox's funding campaign being suspended. However, nobody will have to receive refunds; payments only process once a Kickstarter campaign closes. Since Anonabox's campaign was suspended prior to that, no payments have actually been made by any backers. Said pledges have instead been cancelled.