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:
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.
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:
This post is based on a guest post on the Tor Blog by Unredacted, with an anoni.net community perspective added for Taiwan and the wider Sinophone region.
Unredacted is a US-based 501(c)(3) non-profit that runs a network of 300+ servers to keep people in heavily censored places connected to the open internet. Their guest post is part of the Tor Blog's spotlight series on organizations defending the free internet, and it opens with a line from a user in China: "You have helped many many people to overcome the great firewall." That kind of message is rare, because people living under censorship usually have no safe channel to send one.
This post highlights what Unredacted builds, and what it looks like from where the anoni.net community sits, in Taiwan.
A publicly listed Taipei-traded company shipped 1,708 CSA-7400 high-density network platforms to a Chinese customer between 2019 and 2020. Those appliances ended up in Kazakhstan running a national-grade internet censorship and surveillance system. The supplier was ADLINK Technologies (TWSE: 6166), the customer was Geedge Networks, and the system they ran was the flagship Tiangou Secure Gateway (TSG), an offering whose capabilities rival China's Great Firewall.
That is the central finding of MADLink: A Taiwanese Vestige in the Geedge Supply Chain, InterSecLab's April 2026 report and the first follow-up to their September 2025 The Internet Coup. The anoni.net community has completed the Mandarin (Taiwan terminology, zh-TW) translation. Unlike the previous Internet Coup release, this round also ships an editorial observation page mapping how Taiwan's media, government, and legislators have received the report — with an English summary written for international readers.
On 9 May 2017, the cross-border electronic payment service PayPal closed all domestic transaction functions in Taiwan. Two PayPal Taiwan accounts could no longer send money to each other. Cross-border transfers kept working. The streamer economy took the worst hit. Twitch Cheer, YouTube Super Chat, StreamLabs, and NightDev — tools that processed local audience tips through PayPal — went dark on the same day. Small organizations and independent media that relied on PayPal for domestic flows lost a payment rail overnight8.
The legal trigger was Article 3, Paragraph 1 of Taiwan's Electronic Payment Institution Management Act, passed in 2015. PayPal chose not to apply for a license and closed domestic functions instead9. Nearly nine years later, the U.S. online payment processor Stripe still does not allow individuals or companies in Taiwan to register. Stripe is the credit card collection layer behind Substack, many subscription SaaS products, and many open source sponsorship pages. Individual creators in Taiwan have to first register a U.S. LLC to use it10.
In Taiwan's payment conversation, these two facts have usually been filed under "compliance trade-offs" or "market size." EFF's former Activism Director Rainey Reitman, in her April 2026 book Transaction Denied12, compiles cases from 2012 onward across the U.S. and the Middle East. Stacked together, the cases reveal a cross-region, cross-issue pattern that's been running for more than a decade. Taiwan's two events belong in that record. So do parallel events from Hong Kong, mainland China, Macau, Singapore, and Malaysia, which Reitman's book — focused on U.S. and Middle Eastern material — does not yet cover.
In June 2025, Cure53 completed a penetration test and source code review of TorVPN for Android and its underlying Rust networking layer, Onionmasq. The Tor Project published the results in April 2026. The headline finding: Tor's core tunnel establishment and routing logic held up well. But there are specific technical issues worth understanding if you're recommending or deploying this tool in Taiwan's context.
The Tor Project post, A Server That Forgets: Exploring Stateless Relays, is grounded in real operator experience from Osservatorio Nessuno in Italy. It is not just a technical tour. It asks a basic trust question: if a relay can be seized, searched, or physically cloned, what exactly can an adversary still learn?
First, the article starts from actual seizure and raid precedents. That makes the threat model concrete. Relay operators are not debating abstract malware only; many are planning for legal process and physical hardware exposure.
Second, it gives a rare end-to-end map of the stack: TPM, measured boot, remote attestation, RAM-only runtime, VM images, and tooling paths such as Patela and stboot. Most discussions in our region cover one layer at a time. This one connects them.
Third, it keeps the hard parts visible. Re-sealing after updates, conflicts between stateless images and unattended upgrades, memory ceilings without swap, and the risk of losing a Stable flag due to restarts are all left as open engineering work, not hidden in marketing language.
A stateless system reboots into a known image and does not keep writable disk state. In security terms, this shifts defaults:
physical seizure yields less forensic material;
configuration drift is constrained by declarative rebuilds;
persistence across reboots becomes harder for attackers;
reproducibility and auditability become more realistic goals.
For Tor relays, there is one unavoidable tension: identity must survive reboots. Relays build reputation over time through long-term keys. If keys disappear on every boot, the node loses its standing and utility.
That is where TPM-backed key handling matters. Keys can be bound to measured boot state and used without handing raw private key material to the operating system. Remote attestation can then let an external verifier check what software stack actually booted. But the limitations are real too, including key-type mismatches and operational complexity.
Arti is Tor’s next-generation Rust implementation. The 2.2.0 release is notable because it pushes a previously experimental access path into day-to-day usability: HTTP CONNECT is now included in full builds and enabled by default, sharing the same port as SOCKS.
For teams operating in filtered enterprise, campus, or public networks, that matters immediately. For developers embedding Arti, this release also expands RPC ergonomics with non-blocking requests, event-loop integration, and a new superuser administration path. In one version, Arti improves both network practicality and operational controllability.
We follow Tails releases because they ship the same building blocks many of us recommend in real life: Tor, a hardened desktop, and tools for people who cannot assume a “normal” network path. 7.6, dated 2026-03-26, is worth translating not for one killer feature, but for two changes that affect how people get online and how they store secrets on a live system.
Tor bridges are not exotic; they are often the difference between “Tor works” and “Tor never connects.” In places where Tor traffic is filtered or throttled, users learn to hunt for bridges through side channels—paste sites, trusted contacts, or ad‑hoc instructions. Tails 7.6 brings that guidance into the Tor Connection assistant: pick Connect to Tor automatically, and if the network blocks Tor outright, the bridge screen can Ask for a Tor bridge based on your region, pulling candidates via the Tor Project’s Moat service—the same family of tech Tor Browser has used since 11.5—with the fetch disguised using domain fronting.
For readers in Taiwan and across East/Southeast Asia: censorship models differ, but the pattern is familiar—TLS interception, routing games, or “soft” blocking that fails open only for some apps. A Tails image that surfaces bridge acquisition in-product lowers the bar for journalists, lawyers, and civil‑society volunteers who already juggle operational risk; they should not also have to memorize bridge workflows from blog posts.
The second headline is Secrets replacing KeePassXC. That is a product decision, not a security downgrade by default: Secrets is tighter with GNOME, which matters on Tails because accessibility regressions (on‑screen keyboard, cursor sizing) are real blockers for some users. KeePassXC power users can still add it via Additional Software; the database format overlaps, so migration is meant to be frictionless.
