Koumbit is again part of the Tor privacy network. We provide this service to the public in response to the increasingly pervasive surveillance of everyone who uses the internet. We believe that there have been inexcusable attacks on democracy and basic rights to privacy.

Tor is a tool that allows journalists, human rights activists, and ordinary people to have some privacy in terms of the tracking of their IP addresses, which can be used to link online activity to an individual user identity. We believe that this type of privacy should be available to the public. The Snowden leaks have proven however that such privacy is being violated daily by the so-called democratic governments of the West, including Canada.

It is our hope that this new server will help the Tor network to achieve greater stability and speed, as the network is quickly becoming more popular. We are joining a small group of "fast" Tor relays in Canada, which number around 10 at the moment. We encourage other hosting providers to follow our example and to run as many Tor relays as possible, using their spare infrastructure.

Koumbit keeps no logs of users accessing the Tor relay and is in fact incapable of identifying users of the Tor relay, because of the nature of the network, whose goal is to provide anonymity. More information about the network can be found on the relay homepage.

An easy-to-use tool for those who want to expand the Tor network: presenting the Torride live cd

We spent a significant amount of time making it dead-easy for others who want to run this service on their space servers. We now offer a disk image that will provide a Tor relay, and can be booted from the network, a CD or USB drive. Since it is a live filesystem, we can now offer an additional guarantee that no data is kept on users of the server, as all data is stored in RAM and destroyed on reboots. More information on the disk image, called Torride, is available on the project homepage and the 1.1.0 release announcement.

Previous harassment, current autonomy

Koumbit has re-jointed the Tor network by putting its exit node back online after a downtime of nearly 2 years. We had to shutdown the relay due to constant harassment targeting service providers upstream from Koumbit, mainly from big media companies' lawyers. We now have our own IP addresses, which allow us to deal directly with this type of complaint.

The exit node provided by Koumbit qualifies as "fast," according to the Tor project Atlas. Specifically, we will dedicate a full 100 mbps (megabit per second), burstable to 1000 mbps, to this server.

Any questions or complaints about the service can be addressed to support+tor@koumbit.org.

"Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen." - George Orwell