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2026

A Throttle Announced in Advance: Recording 30 Minutes of Northern Taiwan's Mobile Networks on 13 August

Measuring Taiwan's mobile network throttling drill

On Thursday 13 August, from 14:30 to 15:00 Taipei time (UTC+8), mobile networks in Keelung, Taipei, New Taipei, Taoyuan, Hsinchu City, Hsinchu County, and Yilan will be throttled for thirty minutes. The throttle is part of Taiwan's Urban Resilience Exercise, executed simultaneously by all three major carriers. Official announcements state that voice calls, SMS, and cell broadcast continue to work, and that high-bandwidth services degrade: video streaming, video calls, mobile payments, cloud sync.1 The NCC's advice for the window is to prepare in advance for going offline.2

Officials have described the depth of the throttle twice. On 20 July, Defence Minister Wellington Koo told the Legislative Yuan that speeds would drop to one percent of 4G and 5G capacity. After the central Taiwan drill on 10 August, the Executive Yuan described the method: carriers apply rate limiting in the core network, capping mobile download speeds at 256KB. The two statements are of the same order, and either one gives a figure to expect when the measurements come in.

The date, the window, the seven counties, the three carriers: every boundary of this throttle is public before it runs. Studies of network throttling rarely get that. In most cases users notice slowness first and researchers reconstruct the timeline afterwards, leaving the edges fuzzy. Pre-announced shutdowns are not new elsewhere, exam-period national shutdowns being the familiar example.6 On the publicly documented record, a pre-announced throttle is less common, particularly one with per-carrier granularity.

During the same window at the central Taiwan drill on 10 August, Taiwan's OONI observations contained no performance measurement from a mobile network at all. The northern drill is the last of this year's exercise, so after 13 August the opportunity does not come round again.

If you are in one of those seven counties, your phone is going to slow down for that half hour regardless. Rather than just waiting it out, you might as well leave a record behind.

Retracting what we published: what changed on the docs site in the past two weeks

What changed on the docs site

Several pages changed over the past two weeks, and in most cases the change was to withdraw a passage rather than extend it. Hong Kong moved from medium to high risk for device inspection, the exemption for eSIMs bought outside Japan came out, a 2FA app we recommended turned out to have changed owners, and a blocking distribution drawn from 40 samples was recomputed over all 22,105. The site merged 50 pull requests between 27 July and 10 August, and a sizeable share of them went into corrections of this kind. What follows is page by page: what changed, what the evidence was, and a checklist in the middle for anyone who already prepared using the old guidance.

Snowflake gets a dedicated app, and the volunteer pool grew 29% in a month

This post is based on the Tor Project announcement:

Snowflake Volunteer promotional graphic showing several phone mockups of the app's enable toggle, settings screen, and statistics screen
Image source: Tor Project Blog.

We've written before that Snowflake is the lowest-barrier way to help people reach Tor: open a browser tab, leave it running, and you're relaying anonymous traffic. On 3 August, Tor Project lowered that barrier again with Snowflake Volunteer, a standalone Android app whose only job is being a Snowflake bridge.

Drawing an anonymity network onto a globe: the Interactive section, and the open-data walls we hit

Tor Relay Globe

The docs site now has an Interactive section holding three pieces, all centred on Tor. The one carrying the most data is the Tor Relay Globe, which plots nearly ten thousand running relays onto a sphere. Over sixty percent of them sit in the United States, Germany and the Netherlands.

Building it meant checking more than twenty public datasets. Six made it in. Almost nothing failed for technical reasons: the APIs mostly worked and the formats were clean. What stopped us was terms that do not allow redistribution.

Defending the Public's Right to Know: A Sinophone Asia-Pacific Reading of OONI in Practice

This post sits alongside Tor Project's spotlight series article on OONI. The body below summarises what the original covers and then maps the same workflow onto Sinophone Asia-Pacific — the section the original does not cover, and the main contribution of this post.

For the full narrative on Kenya's High Court case, Tanzania's follow-up litigation, Meduza's public-education framing, and the supporting cases from Egypt, Jordan, and India, please read the original:

Visual header for the Tor Project 'Defending the free internet' spotlight series, featuring OONI
Image source: Tor Project Blog.

COSCUP 2026 Anonymity Networks Community track needs on-site crew: three roles, Aug 8–9

COSCUP 2026 Anonymity Networks Community track hero image

The schedule is set and all sixteen speakers have confirmed. Across Aug 8 and 9 in room TR-510 at National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, the track runs from how censorship works and browser-fingerprint tracking, through the NTNU campus Tor node and data-privacy rights in the national health-insurance database, to the anonymous-payments session co-organized with ETHTaipei on the Aug 8 afternoon. Right now exactly one person is covering on-site operations.

Changeovers on Aug 9 are only five minutes long. Someone needs to raise the time card before a speaker runs over, and someone needs to use those five minutes to get the next speaker on stage with projection and audio tested. Several speakers have asked not to be recorded, so someone has to watch the whole way through and confirm nothing was captured. That one is unrecoverable if it goes wrong. On the Aug 8 morning there are invited civil-society groups and independent journalists arriving, so someone needs to greet people at the door and help them find seats.

We are looking for three on-site crew

  • Roles: recording (1), front-of-room runner (1), door runner (1)
  • Requirements: no background in Tor, anonymity networks, or any privacy technology
  • Availability: both days is ideal, one day is welcome too, and we will rotate shifts if enough people sign up
  • To sign up or ask: reach us through any channel on contact and tell us which role you want and which days you can make

Section 702 Has Expired: A Sinophone Asia-Pacific Read on Warrantless US Surveillance

EFF's NSA eagle graphic, reworking the NSA seal into an eagle plugging its talons into telecom lines, representing warrantless mass surveillance
Image: EFF designer Hugh D'Andrade's "NSA eagle," which reworks the NSA seal into an eagle plugging its talons into the nation's telecom lines. From EFF's NSA spying work, licensed under CC BY 4.010.

This post is an anoni.net reading based on the EFF Deeplinks article:

At midnight on 12 June 2026, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act lapsed1. EFF, which spent years arguing the program should require a warrant before the FBI reaches Americans' communications — or else expire — calls the lapse a victory1.

It is a real victory, and a narrow one. Section 702 was always built to collect the communications of non-US persons located abroad. That means everyone outside America — including readers in Taiwan, Hong Kong, mainland China, Macau, Singapore, and Malaysia — has always been a lawful target of this authority. The fight that just lapsed it was overwhelmingly a fight about protecting Americans. For the rest of us, the lapse changes much less than the headline suggests.

Editorial note: This is a companion post for English-speaking readers. The original article, by Maria Xynou (OONI), was published on the Internet Society Pulse blog and reposted on OONI's blog. Please read it there. anoni.net Docs is reposting a short summary here, alongside translations into Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese, plus a regional context section for readers in Chinese-reading regions.

What the original article covers

Maria Xynou's post is a concise overview of how Internet censorship is becoming harder to measure, and what OONI's data shows about how it is evolving. The main points:

  • Censorship is rarely binary. Confirming a block is not just "up" or "down". False positives are common, methods range from DNS manipulation and IP blocking to throttling and forged responses, and the same site may be blocked on one network but reachable on another.
  • OONI's approach. Open measurement methodologies, control measurements, a probabilistic pipeline (OONI Pipeline v5) that classifies results as "blocked", "down", or "OK" with confidence estimates, and crowdsourced data from volunteers running OONI Probe on their local networks.
  • Seven evolving trends. Globalization and normalization of censorship beyond the usual suspects, short-term targeted blocks around political events, long-term systemic suppression of marginalised communities, less transparent censorship in an encrypted web (TLS interference via DPI, no block pages), throttling and degraded service as subtler control, attacks on privacy technologies (encrypted DNS, ECH), and the rise of national intranets and allowlisting approaches.
  • Measurement enables advocacy. OONI has been part of the #KeepItOn campaign since 2016, and OONI data has supported legal and policy interventions in Gabon, Tanzania, Nepal, Togo, Mozambique, Pakistan, Kenya, and others.
  • Scale. Over 3 billion measurements from 30,000 networks across 245 countries and territories since 2012, with tens of millions of new measurements added every month.

Please read the original for the full argument, all the supporting links, and the country-specific examples:

Android 17 ships: the real GrapheneOS story is who decides what runs on your phone

Android 17 and GrapheneOS: who decides what runs on the phone you bought
Image: a smartphone wrapped in a chain and padlock, standing in for a device locked down by outside rules. Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya, via Pexels (Pexels License).

You paid for the phone, but what it can run and what it can install is increasingly not yours to decide. That question stays invisible until an app refuses to open because it "detected a non-stock OS," or an open-source OS you rely on gets harder to maintain because the hardware data behind it stops being public. Android 17 landed on 2026-06-16, and it pushed that question one step further.

For privacy-minded users, the OS in the middle of this is GrapheneOS: a hardened, de-Googled Android built on AOSP. It runs almost exclusively on Google Pixel hardware, and Google has spent the past year adjusting how open Android and the Pixel actually are.

Why this matters (especially in APAC)

This reads like a US/EU story about Google and Brussels, but it is close to home for readers across East and Southeast Asia and the Chinese-speaking world. Android 17's new sideloading "developer verification" flow is rolling out first in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand in 2026, expanding from there. Banking, payment and government apps across the region increasingly check whether a device is in "stock" state, and in mainland China that posture — device attestation plus real-name requirements — is already the norm. The losers are the same everywhere: people who want a phone they actually control.

OONI is guarding its data against bad measurements — what that means if you build on it

We build on OONI's public dataset. Our own work tracks how well Taiwan and the wider APAC region are actually observed in that data, and our Run v2 census mapped how the whole Run v2 ecosystem gets used. So when OONI published a long engineering post on [how it detects and mitigates faulty measurements]1 — alongside a new anonymous-credential system now rolling into production — we read it not as OONI insiders but as people downstream who use this data to make claims about a thinly-observed part of the world.

Here is what stands out from that seat.