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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
On 2026/02/09, Discord announced a global “teen-by-default” rollout and stronger age verification (English coverage: BBC, Medianama). New and existing users will default to a teen-oriented experience; to relax content filters or access age-gated spaces, users must complete verification via facial age estimation or by submitting ID. Discord frames this as a commitment to teen safety and Safer Internet Day, and will use an “age inference model” in the background to help assign age groups.
We are not dismissing Discord’s intent—youth protection and compliance are serious. But such measures also mean one thing: large platforms will need more personal data and behavioral signals to “classify” users. Whether via face scans, ID documents, or algorithmic inference, the result is handing over “who you are, how old you are, where you are” to the platform and its partners. For many people who just want to chat, game, or collaborate, that may be an acceptable trade-off; for others, it raises the question: is there another way?
Commercial chat platforms have their own rules: terms of service, product direction, what data is retained, how algorithms and policies work—mostly driven by the company and shareholders, with little say for ordinary users and little visibility into how their data is used. This isn’t about “who is worse”; it’s about who gets to decide.
The anoni.net community has chosen a different path: self-hosting a Matrix homeserver. We run tuwunel, a high-performance Matrix homeserver implemented in Rust, on im.anoni.net for community discussion and 2026 theme collaboration. Server configuration, retention policy, and channel rules are decided by operators and the community together—smaller scope, more predictable, and more transparent. Our focus is clear: internet freedom, anonymous networks, and privacy in practice, not “anyone can join and talk about anything.” This is a themed, consensus-oriented workspace.
As 2025 comes to a close, we sincerely thank all our partners for their participation and support throughout the year. From project-based efforts to community building, we have accumulated many actions and valuable experiences over the past year. Below, we will look back on the key initiatives of 2025, and also share our next steps for promoting anonymous networks in 2026.
In 2025, the international human rights–focused conference RightsCon was held in Taipei. Upon learning that the Tor/Tails and OONI teams would also be visiting Taiwan, we initiated and prepared related workshop events several months in advance. The event attracted over 300 participants and specifically invited partners from news media and civil society organizations to join the discussions.
After the event, we compiled and published a comprehensive retrospective article to document this rare and valuable exchange.
As a result of hosting this event, we also recruited many enthusiastic volunteers. Together with them, we continued subsequent preparations, laying the groundwork for related activities held in August 2025.
In an era where the internet is highly monitored and centrally managed, anonymous communication has become a fundamental requirement for safe exploration, research, and expression. For Taiwan, this issue is especially tangible. Situated at a critical position in East Asia, internet freedom and communication resilience are core societal capabilities that get tested by real-world conditions.
Universities and academic networks have historically been the earliest places where new technologies and public infrastructure are experimented with. The following interview documents how a computer science student at National Taiwan Normal University, also a member of the anonymous network community, stepped into institutional reality on campus, communicated with the university, and attempted to actually set up a Tor Relay.
Within the anonymous network community, we often talk about technology and ideals. But the truly difficult question is often whether “this machine can survive in the real world.” Configuring the Tor Relay itself is comparatively straightforward.
This time, we interviewed a partner from the anonymous network community, NZ, who is currently studying in the Department of Computer Science at National Taiwan Normal University. He successfully set up a Tor Relay on campus, choosing to engage openly with the university system and complete the full administrative process, without going behind anyone's back.
蘇恩立 (Su En-Li, NZ) is currently a third-year undergraduate student in the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering at National Taiwan Normal University. With a strong interest in information security and network governance, he is currently responsible for operating and maintaining the first Tor node on Taiwan Academic Network (TANet). In addition to hands-on technical practice, he is also dedicated to knowledge sharing, serving as an anonymous network course instructor in the GDGoC NTNU student club. He has long been involved in Taiwan’s open source and information security communities, and has volunteered multiple times at major technical conferences such as SITCON, HITCON, and COSCUP, demonstrating both community service experience and strong technical passion.
In mid-September, you may have noticed something significant: approximately 500GB of data was made public. This data pertains to China's Great Firewall (GFW) technology and how this system is exported and implemented in other authoritarian regimes.
InterSecLab, a digital security-focused laboratory, became aware of this leaked data around December 2024 and promptly took action. Over the course of 10 months, they collaborated with several organizations and tech communities to verify and analyze the leaked data. The findings were published in a report released on September 12, 2025.
Although we (Anonymous Network Community) did not assist in the initial stages, after the report was released, we quickly reviewed its content. The report confirmed many of the long-suspected capabilities of the Great Firewall. Furthermore, the report provided a clearer picture of the teams and organizations operating behind the scenes. Their development environment is similar to that of modern startup teams, with operations and maintenance for international deployments being remotely executable. In other words, the Chinese Communist Party government and other client countries can activate customized or general rules with a single click!
