Last week, Ars reported on the story of Anonabox, an effort by a California developer to create an affordable privacy-protecting device based on the open source OpenWRT wireless router software and the Tor Project’s eponymous Internet traffic encryption and anonymization software. Anonabox was pulled from Kickstarter after accusations that the project misrepresented its product and failed to meet some basic security concerns—though its developers still plan to release their project for sale through their own website.
But Anonabox’s brief campaign on Kickstarter has demonstrated demand for a simple, inexpensive way to hide Internet traffic from prying eyes. And there are a number of other projects attempting to do what Anonabox promised. On Kickstarter competitor Indiegogo there’s a project called Invizbox that looks almost identical to Anonabox—except for the approach its team is taking to building and marketing the device.
Based on the Chinese-built WT 3020A—a small wireless router that appears identical to the box that was the basis for the Anonabox—the Invizbox will have similar specs to the cancelled Kickstarter: 64 megabytes of RAM, 16 megabytes of Flash storage, and the Linux-based OpenWRT embedded OS. The main difference, according to the Dublin, Ireland-based team behind Invizbox (Elizabeth Canavan, Paul Canavan, and Chris Monks) is that their Tor router will be locked down better—and they won’t pretend that they’re using custom-built hardware.
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