[tor-talk] Tor and Financial Transparency

[grarpamp]

On 8/29/13, Al Billings <albill at openbuddha.com> wrote:
> This conversation is a little tired.
>
> Is there likely to be a meeting of the minds or just a really long thread
> that proves nothing to anyone? :-)

Tor's a 501 entity, it's books are reasonably open and subject
to data correction when pointed out. There will be anonymous
donors. And donors from all sides and for all reasons.
Tor is open source, it's actively developed, debugged and outfitted. It
drives, adds, and embodies a lot of the state of the art in the field. It's
got a lot of eyeballs on it from various places. If the money corrupts and
it begins failing to perform as advertised, someone's going to call it out
in a technical fashion in mail, in papers, in a conference talk... and it
will be forked, or abandoned, or defunded and pitchforked by the donors
and users who have been conned. That con's really hard to pull off
and risky when most of the people involved are out in the open. As
such, Tor doesn't deny or gloss over design limitations, lack of fitness
for particular adverse scenarios, or its roadmap beyond the time
needed to create decent papers or mail out blurbs about them.

Money is given for people to do something useful with it.
I don't think it matters where the money comes from or
whether it's directed, so long as the product is in the
open for evaluation and choice. And that there's some
reasonable accounting as to how the total input was spent and
that it matches up with results observed in the output product.

Trolling on about this is just a stupid waste of time.
Tor is useful and I have no problem with the Tor project.

[No, I've not yet looked at the expenses to see if these millions
in corrupt funds are being spent on hookers and blow. If so,
please send an invite to the next party ;-]