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COSCUP 2026 Anonymity Networks Community track: two days, Aug 8–9, free entry, just walk in

COSCUP 2026 Anonymity Networks Community track hero image

Journalists need to protect sources, civil-society groups need to keep member lists and donor records safe, developers want to know whether the tools in their hands actually hold up against surveillance, and ordinary people rattled by scam texts or ad tracking just want a little control back. Under spreading censorship and monitoring, these needs land on the same set of risks: traffic can be intercepted, identities can be traced, and the timing and amount of a single transfer can reconstruct an entire web of relationships.

The Anonymity Networks Community (anoni.net) brings a year of hands-on work with Tor, Tails, and OONI (open-source privacy and anti-censorship tools), plus personal privacy and anonymous payments, to the open-source floor of COSCUP 2026. Across two days at National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, we run a full community track, from how the internet and censorship work, through real-world open-source privacy tools, campus Tor nodes, browser tracking, and the national health-insurance database and data-privacy rights, to an anonymous-payments session co-organized with ETHTaipei (Taipei Ethereum Community). Whether you came looking for tools you can use right away or want to contribute to open-source projects, there is a session for you.

Event details

  • Dates: August 8 (Sat) and 9 (Sun), 2026
  • Venue: National Taiwan University of Science and Technology (NTUST), Taipei. The community track is in TR-510; the Aug 8 afternoon session co-organized with ETHTaipei is in TR-511.
  • Admission: COSCUP is free, and the community track needs no separate registration. Just show up.
  • Getting there: sessions are drop-in, so you can come and go and don't need to stay all day. For transport and room locations, follow the official COSCUP schedule and venue info, which are authoritative (times may still shift before the event).

See the full schedule and session summaries

Brief yourself before you travel — take the right questions to your own AI

Illustration: an AI assistant on the left gathers scattered data cards (Wi-Fi, location pin, lock, SIM, QR) and sorts them along dotted lines into a shield-framed pre-departure briefing panel on the right, with an airplane and a flight-path arc above

Before a trip you check visas, plug types, and currency. Few people check how the internet is controlled where they are going, whether their work is legal there, or who to call if something goes wrong. For journalists, human-rights defenders, NGO staff, and researchers, those are the questions that actually affect their safety, and the hard part is that you usually don't know what to ask before you leave.

After Iran's 80-day blackout, traffic surged through our community's Tor WebTunnel bridge

For people in Iran, the outside internet barely existed for nearly three months. When connectivity started to come back a few days ago, the Tor WebTunnel bridge our community runs began taking on a wave of traffic. That was Iranians who had found a way around the censorship and reconnected to Tor, getting back onto the wider internet.

Wherever you are, you can help

If you have a VPS (a small cloud server) or a physical machine, plus a domain name, you can run a Tor WebTunnel bridge and give people cut off by censorship a way back onto the open internet. Can't run a server? Open a browser tab and run Snowflake instead, it contributes anonymous traffic just the same.

Server specs, legal considerations, and the full setup steps are written up in How to set up a Tor WebTunnel bridge.

CryptPad 2026.5.0: zh_Hant Lands as a Built-in Locale After Two and a Half Years Upstream

CryptPad Drive home in Traditional Chinese (zh_Hant). Left sidebar shows file categories; the +New button reveals Rich Text, Document, Sheet, Slides, Kanban, Whiteboard, Diagram, Forms, Calendar.
cryptpad.anoni.net Drive home after switching to 中文(正體). Every file category and app entry is localised.

For people who want a collaboration tool that does not silently keep a readable copy of their work on the server, the practical options are short. Google Docs, Notion, Microsoft 365 are excellent products, but every paragraph and every revision sits on those vendors’ servers in a form they can read. From there, algorithms, ads, training corpora, and government data requests each have their own path in.

That difference is exactly what matters when a journalist drafts a story that cannot leak, when a campaigner negotiates a strategy that cannot be wiretapped, when an NGO records distress reports from vulnerable users, or when a researcher works on a politically sensitive topic. Whether a first draft can be safely written at all often turns on that one architectural choice.

CryptPad is one of the few collaboration suites where the server genuinely cannot read what you wrote. Content is encrypted in your browser, the server only ever sees ciphertext, and yet a single interface covers most of what people normally reach for in Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, kanban boards, whiteboards, forms, and calendars.

Until recently the suite had one obvious gap for one large group of users: the UI shipped in English and Simplified Chinese only, with Traditional Chinese (zh_Hant) missing. From the first upstream PR opened at the end of 2023, through two and a half years of patient string-by-string work in Weblate, to the CryptPad 2026.5.0 “🌷 Spring release” on 2026/05/13, zh_Hant is now a built-in locale. The community-hosted cryptpad.anoni.net has been upgraded. Open cryptpad.anoni.net today and the Drive, the document editors, and the share-permission dialog are all in Traditional Chinese. Readers in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and across the Chinese-reading diaspora can use it without first learning an English menu.

Campus Tor Relay templates: proposal, SOP, and FAQ now published

Campus Tor Relay template kit

In November 2025, the first campus Tor Relay in Taiwan went live at National Taiwan Normal University's CSIE department. Over the past six months, community member NZ (Su En-Li) — the student who pushed the proposal through — worked with the community to turn that experience into a reusable template kit. The three documents are now published under CC-BY 4.0, with a long-form interview as the entry point.

The templates are ready. The next step is for more universities to take them up.

onionoo MCP is now public: query the Tor relay network in plain language

onionoo MCP launch

The community-hosted onionoo-fastapi service is now public at https://onionoo.anoni.net, released as v1.0.0. It wraps the Tor Project's official Onionoo API in two interfaces: a semantic HTTP API with a full OpenAPI document, and a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server.

Connect it to Claude Desktop, Cursor, Claude Code, or any MCP-capable client and you can ask a single question like "how many running Tor relays does Taiwan have right now, what is the total bandwidth, and what are the top five ASNs?" The agent breaks the question down, picks tools, fetches the data, and returns a readable summary. You do not need to learn Onionoo's field schema before starting research.

Taiwan’s Virtual Asset Service Bill: What the Cabinet Approved (and What Happens Next)

Policy update

On 2 April 2026, Taiwan’s Executive Yuan (the cabinet) approved the Financial Supervisory Commission’s draft Virtual Asset Service Act and sent it to the Legislative Yuan for review. If you follow crypto policy or stablecoins, this matters because Taiwan is moving from an anti–money laundering registration regime toward a licensing regime for service providers. This post is a status briefing that gathers the April 2026 cabinet move in one place for readers who mostly skip the Mandarin policy wires. It stays at the policy level. For legal questions, talk to a qualified professional in Taiwan.

Cross-Community Collaboration: Anonymity Networks Community × ETHTaipei

Cross-Community Collaboration: Anonymity Networks Community × ETHTaipei

This year we are excited to partner with ETHTaipei (Taipei Ethereum Community) on program coordination. Both communities approach anonymous payments from different angles. To ensure each submission reaches the most fitting audience, we will review proposals together:

  • Application-oriented and introductory talks: prioritized for the Anonymity Networks Community track
  • Technical and protocol-level talks: may be moved to the ETHTaipei blockchain track

You do not need to decide which track to submit to — we will discuss placement with speakers during the review process. Both communities will cross-promote their schedules, so attendees can move between tracks to follow related topics across the event.

On Day 2 (Aug 9), both communities plan to co-organize a dedicated session on Anonymous Payments. Speakers and attendees interested in this topic are especially encouraged to take note. If you have a relevant proposal, feel free to mention in your submission notes that you are interested in being included in the cross-community session.

How to Submit (Read First)

  • Read the full CFP information and submission link before submitting.
  • In your proposal, make sure to choose "匿名網路社群 anoni.net" as the track topic so your submission enters this track's review process.
  • Clearly include your topic direction, intended format, audience background, requested duration (30 or 50 minutes), and demo needs (if any).

Read the full CFP details and submission guide

Ethics and Open Licensing Reminder

  • This track is for lawful use and does not support money laundering, tax evasion, or other illegal activity.
  • For topics involving anonymity tools, crypto assets, or coin mixing, focus on education and risk understanding, and remind audiences about legal differences across jurisdictions.
  • Public teaching materials and demo assets should follow COSCUP requirements and use open licenses.

About COSCUP

COSCUP is Taiwan's annual open-source community conference, centered on open-source collaboration and free admission. This track aims to connect technology communities and civic groups, expand practical exchange and local collaboration around anonymity, privacy, and internet freedom, and make participation easier for people who prefer a lower-profile presence with less personal data exposure.

COSCUP 2026 Anonymity Networks Community Track: Call for Proposals

COSCUP 2026 Anonymity Networks Community track call for proposals

The Anonymity Networks Community is now accepting proposals for the COSCUP 2026 Anonymity Networks Community Track. This is our second year running related sessions at COSCUP. Through this open CFP, we hope to invite more people who care about or actively practice anonymity to share their work. The track runs for two days and includes talks, workshops, demos, and field experience sharing.

Read the full CFP details and submission guide

2026/03 Community Update

2026/03 Community Update

We're excited to share that the Tor Project invited us to contribute a guest blog post about our experience running a Tor relay on a university network in Taiwan. You can read the full article here: Setting up a Tor Relay at a university in Taiwan.

Taiwan occupies a unique position in the global internet freedom landscape. While the country enjoys relatively open access to the web, it operates under persistent geopolitical pressure and is regularly targeted by sophisticated cyber operations. In this context, privacy tools like Tor aren't fringe utilities — they're practical infrastructure for journalists, researchers, civil society organizations, and anyone who needs to communicate or organize without being observed. Building awareness and local capacity around these tools is part of what our community is working toward.