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.
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.
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.
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.
This post builds on the Tor Project announcement below. We also publish full translations of it:
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.
When the network drops, the page you most want to open is often the one that will not open. On a flight, in the mountains, in a new country before you have found a SIM, that is an inconvenience. Where the network is cut, throttled or blocked, the same thing costs something else entirely.
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 how it is layered. The conversation kept returning to one premise: the moment a reader needs these pages is not reliably a moment with a working connection.
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.
Open a web page and the JavaScript on it can read your graphics card model, its driver details, and the hardware features it supports. Those answers barely change on a given machine, so a tracking company can combine them with other device traits into an identifier that needs no cookie, asks for no consent, and follows you between sites.
The graphics card is one source among many. Font lists, screen dimensions, time zone, and audio processing all feed the same identifier. A browser fingerprint cannot be cleared the way a cookie can covers how the whole mechanism works, why clearing cookies does nothing, and where each browser currently stands. This piece stays with the graphics card.
Brave has handled these signals since version 1.93, on by default on desktop and Android, rolling out in stages1. Three protections ship together: the WebGL vendor and renderer strings become one generic string shared by every Brave user, the WebGPU hardware description fields are cleared, and the list of supported WebGL extensions gets noise added to it.
The first two make every user look alike. The third makes one user look different on every site. Two opposite techniques arrived in the same release, each assigned to a different API, and where that line falls is also where Brave and Tor Browser part company on fingerprinting.
Taiwan has long gone without large-scale throttling or shutdowns. That is good for daily life, and for anyone trying to understand network anomalies it means there is no local sample to compare against. OONI is a long-running open source project measuring network interference and connection quality worldwide; anyone can install its app to contribute, and every result is published. Taiwan's record in that database has consistently shown a network working normally.
In the 30 days before 13 August, the three mobile carriers in Taiwan recorded 564 successful connection speed tests (the test is named ndt), with a median download of 12,425 kbit/s and only 4 measurements below 2,000 kbit/s, two of which were failures. kbit/s counts thousands of bits transferred per second — higher is faster, and 1,000 kbit/s is roughly 1 Mbps.
From 14:30 to 15:00 Taipei time on 13 August, mobile networks across seven northern counties were throttled for 30 minutes. Two days earlier the community put out a call asking people to run OONI Probe's performance tests during that window. Taiwan recorded 238 connection speed tests and 235 video streaming tests (named dash) that day, with 170 and 168 of them completed on mobile networks, coming from 47 devices. During the equivalent window at the central Taiwan drill on 10 August, the whole country produced zero mobile performance measurements.
The call started with community member mashbean, who proposed using the drill as a rare measurement opportunity. The two sides then prepared separately, one writing the call and the operating instructions, the other observing in the field on the day. He wrote his own record up as a separate post, which follows the network past the announced end of the drill and covers a period this dataset cannot see. Read together, the two posts span the full afternoon.
One Chunghwa Telecom Mobile handset measured 788 to 1,709 kbit/s during the throttle. Taiwan's public data had never shown figures of that order. It should be said up front that those figures come from 6 records left by a single device: enough to stand as one complete case, not enough to generalise to the country or to any carrier.
This post records network conditions. Whether carriers followed instructions precisely, and whether the officially published figure is accurate, are both outside its scope. Taiwan had no data on what throttling looks like, and preserving these 30 minutes is the point. Every query below works without authentication or an API key, so readers can run them again.
The most useful thing to come out of the analysis has nothing to do with throttling itself. It is a reading method: throttling and blocking produce completely different shapes in OONI data. Blocking sends anomaly rates up and leaves confirmed-blocking records behind, while throttling leaves the verdict fields untouched and shows up only in throughput and latency values. Taiwan's web connectivity anomaly rate that day was 1.0%, in the same band as the usual 0.6%, with confirmed blocking at 0 all day. Only speed went down. Describing a throttle through blocking anomaly rates returns a figure close to normal, and leads to the conclusion that nothing happened.
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 advice for the window from the NCC (National Communications Commission, Taiwan's telecom regulator) 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 (Taiwan's parliament) that speeds would drop to one percent of 4G and 5G capacity. After the central Taiwan drill on 10 August, the Executive Yuan (Taiwan's cabinet) 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.