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2026

What a Year of Research on the Geedge Leak Found

In September 2025, internal files and source code (the text of a software program) leaked from Geedge Networks, a company that builds internet censorship systems for China and other countries. Until then, outsiders could only infer how the Great Firewall (the system China uses to censor and monitor the internet) works by testing it from outside; the leak let journalists and researchers compare the code of censorship equipment with real networks for the first time. Over the year, research moved from what Geedge sold and to whom, to which parts are actually running. What has been confirmed is narrower than the headlines suggested but more solid than earlier guesswork, and people who use circumvention tools, Tor or VPNs now have a clearer picture of what they are up against.

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A Full Retranslation of The Internet Coup

The Internet Coup report cover

In September 2025 InterSecLab published The Internet Coup, an analysis of more than 100,000 leaked documents from Geedge Networks, the Chinese company selling Great Firewall technology to governments in Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Pakistan and Myanmar. A month later we released a Traditional Chinese translation for readers in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and elsewhere. That first version had gaps that could mislead readers about the risks, so we have retranslated all eight chapters from the original PDF. The addresses have not changed.

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New Home for the Blog's Technical Posts

The docs site is written for people new to anonymity networks and privacy, who may not yet know what Tor is. Posts that only make sense once you know Tor, cryptography or network measurement have moved to the new Articles section on the anoni.net home site. From now on this blog carries translations, analysis and regional observations written for a general audience.

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A new home for the blog's community posts

From now on the docs blog carries translations, technical analysis and regional observations only. The 31 posts about events, project launches, progress reports and the community's positions have moved to the community updates on the home site, which is also where future community announcements will appear.

Signal Login and the payment trail it leaves

A wallet on a wooden table with cash and cards sticking out, next to a smartphone and a set of keys
A wallet, a phone and keys, standing in for a registration that swaps the phone number for a payment and a key. Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Pexels (Pexels License).

In Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, every mobile number, prepaid SIMs included, is registered to a real identity, and the same holds across most of East and Southeast Asia. A Signal account is opened against a phone number, so however strong the encryption, the carrier's registration record ties the account to a named person. For journalists' sources, activists working across borders, and anyone who does not want their account traced back to them, the phone number has long been the most cited limitation of Signal.

In September 2026 Signal's Android beta opened a way to register without a phone number, called Signal Login, in exchange for a small one-time payment. The obvious worry followed: doesn't the payment record bring your identity right back? Signal reuses the zero-knowledge credentials from its donation system so that an account cannot be matched to a specific purchase. The payment date still travels with the account, however, and Google keeps a record that you bought it. Whether to use Signal Login, and how to pay, depends on which kind of tracing you need to defend against.

Docs site update review, September 2026

Docs site update review

The previous release went out on 2 September. Between then and the 20th, the docs site merged 140 pull requests. The Lab went live, the utilities grew from 9 tools to 15, nine worked examples string those tools into paths you can follow end to end, a settings drawer collects controls that used to be scattered, and the surveillance page gained a fifth tier. On the content side, three regional pages went up, one of them taking forty-nine public sources to pull apart identity binding and the data market beside it. The last two sections are for readers who acted on the old guidance.

Four cases in Anthropic's September 2026 threat report involve Taiwan, and here are the page numbers

Header image from Anthropic's report Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026
Image from Anthropic's report page Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026. Copyright Anthropic.

On 10 September 2026 Anthropic published Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 20261, a 154-page account of misuse it detected and disrupted between December 2025 and August 2026. The report is English-only and our community does not have the capacity to translate it in the near term, so we took on something smaller: a complete write-up of the sections that involve Taiwan and the Chinese state, each marked with its page number so readers can check the original.

The sections below aim to give readers who never open the report the full picture rather than fragments. Tables, figures and terminology follow the original as closely as possible.

What Tor VPN Beta's first year looks like across seven Asia-Pacific regions

This post builds on the Tor Project announcement below. We also publish full translations of it:

Tor VPN beta promotional image showing availability on download.torproject.org with F-Droid and Google Play badges, and a phone displaying the connected screen with upload and download counters

The Tor Project's retrospective on the first year of Tor VPN Beta contains one finding that reframes the whole product. The team expected to learn from real-world use, and what they learned was that the primary use case is unblocking the internet — not the privacy features a commercial VPN would lead with. Early adoption concentrated in heavily censored regions, and that shaped what got built next.

That finding is the interesting part for us, a community based in Taiwan, because the regions we cover sit at very different points on that spectrum. This post checks the announcement against measurement data for seven Asia-Pacific regions, and sets out what the regulatory picture looks like in each.

The docs site and its tools, available offline

When the network drops, the page you most need is often the one that will not open. On a flight, in the mountains, or in a new country before you have found a SIM, that is an inconvenience. Where the network is cut, throttled or blocked, the same situation costs far more.

From 4 to 6 September we were at Global Gathering 2026 in Estoril, Portugal. Alongside our booth on the last day we joined the Circles, where we talked about how the privacy material on the docs site is written and layered. The conversation kept returning to one premise: the moment a reader needs these pages is not reliably a moment with a working connection.

The top of the offline reading page: storage totals, the automatic-storage and inline-image switches, and the Save everything, Update what is stored and Clear all offline content buttons

Eight new tools on the docs site, all running in the reader's own browser

We are a group of volunteers working on anonymity networks and internet freedom, based in Taiwan. We maintain this documentation site, a practical guide to privacy and anonymity sorted by scenario for everyday life, sensitive work and high risk.

The articles on this site explain how to protect yourself. The tools section holds the things you can actually press. All eight compute in the reader's browser, send nothing anywhere, and keep working with the network off once stored on a device.

The tools index, eight cards each naming a tool and what it is for