Tor kills cloud-bundling bridge software because nobody will maintain it

Privacy? You've heard of it but can't be bothered coding it

Lack of people willing to keep its code updated has led the Tor Project to kill off its Amazon Web EC2 instances and the Tor Cloud service they ran.

While Tor Cloud was a neat idea – let users run up Tor bridges on Amazon and donate that bandwidth to Tor for other users – software has to be maintained, and nobody wants the job.

Announcing the end of the project, Tor says “There is at least one major bug in the Tor Cloud image that makes it completely dysfunctional (meaning that users could not use this particular service to access the Internet), and there are over a dozen other bugs, at least one of them of highest priority”.

The worst bug: in packaging the Tor Cloud image, someone forgot to include Tor, meaning anyone trying to use it had to do so manually. The high-priority bug referred to is expired keys in the package.

“We have tried to find a new maintainer for Tor Cloud for months, but without success,” the post states. “Tor Cloud is still a good idea, it just needs somebody to implement it.”

The group attributes the decline in users of Tor Cloud since early last year to the bugs. From nearly 400, the number of Tor Cloud bridges has fallen to just over 100.

The project notes that manual bridge installs to Amazon EC2 will still work (if you know how), and those Tor Cloud bridges currently in service can still operate. ®