Thank you to everyone who made a donation in 2020! You make it possible to resist the surveillance pandemic. You’ve made it possible for the Tor Project and the tools we support to survive a very difficult time, and to prepare for 2021 with ambitious plans.
This year has been difficult for all of us. Although challenging, we have managed to reorganize in order to meet the goals we originally set for 2020, and now, it’s time to look forward to 2021.
You're invited to a virtual State of the Onion on November 16 from 16:00 to 18:00 UTC. We'll this talk about highlights of the work we’ve accomplished during the year and what we are excited about in the upcoming year, plus hear from the Tor community.
Starting today through December 31, every dollar donated to the Tor Project, up to $100,000, will be matched by Friends of Tor. That means that your donation will make double the impact. We’re able to offer this match because of generous folks in our community who believe in Tor, privacy online, and the work to resist the surveillance pandemic.
As many friends and followers of Tor know by now, we spend the final weeks of each year asking for your help as part of our year-end fundraising campaign. For our 2020 campaign, we wanted a theme that conveys a positive message and speaks to the power of this kind of community action. That’s why we decided on the theme Use a Mask, Use Tor.
This August, we asked you to help us fundraise for our second annual Bug Smash Fund campaign. In 2020, despite the challenges of COVID-19 and event cancellations, you helped us to raise $106,709!
Today we are officially launching the Tor Project Membership Program, a new way for nonprofit and private sector organizations to financially support our work.
Starting August 1, every donation we receive during the month of August will count towards the Bug Smash Fund 2020. The Bug Smash Fund allows the Tor Project to find and fix bugs in our software and conduct routine maintenance.
At the beginning of August 2019, we asked you to help us build our very first Bug Smash Fund. This fund will ensure that the Tor Project has a healthy reserve earmarked for maintenance work and smashing the bugs necessary to keep Tor Browser, the Tor network, and the many tools that rely on Tor strong, safe, and running smoothly. We want to share a final update on the work the 2019 Bug Smash Fund made possible.
So far, we’ve marked 77 tickets with BugSmashFund. As of today, 56 of those tickets have been closed, and 21 of them are still in progress. With this reserve, we’ve been able to fix bugs and complete necessary maintenance on core tor, bridgedb, Snowflake, and Metrics, as well as complete the Tor Browser ESR 68 migration.