The previous release went out on 2 September. Between then and the 20th, the docs site merged 140 pull requests. The Lab went live, the utilities grew from 9 tools to 15, nine worked examples string those tools into paths you can follow end to end, a settings drawer collects controls that used to be scattered, and the surveillance page gained a fifth tier. On the content side, three regional pages went up, one of them taking forty-nine public sources to pull apart identity binding and the data market beside it. The last two sections are for readers who acted on the old guidance.
When the network drops, the page you most want to open is often the one that will not open. On a flight, in the mountains, in a new country before you have found a SIM, that is an inconvenience. Where the network is cut, throttled or blocked, the same thing costs something else entirely.
From 4 to 6 September we were at Global Gathering 2026 in Estoril, Portugal. Alongside our booth on the last day we joined the Circles, where we talked about how the privacy material on the docs site is written and how it is layered. The conversation kept returning to one premise: the moment a reader needs these pages is not reliably a moment with a working connection.
We are a group of volunteers working on anonymity networks and internet freedom, based in Taiwan. We maintain this documentation site. The community also built asian-diceware, a 7,776-word English passphrase wordlist that drops straight in for the EFF Large Wordlist, with one difference: it pins 292 Asian loanwords that English dictionaries already carry. tofu, oolong, boba, and kimchi are all in there.
The tool page already covers how to use it, and the passphrase generator in the tools section is one click away. This post covers the other half: how the words were picked, and what got rejected along the way.
From 4 to 6 September we have a booth at Global Gathering 2026 in Estoril, Portugal, where we hand out a printed zine. Four A4 sheets folded in half inside a wrapper, A5 when folded. We printed 150 copies, they go until they run out, and there is no digital edition.
anoni.net is a volunteer community based in Taiwan, working on documentation, measurement tools, and self-hosted services for anonymity networks and networked freedom.
Booth slot: Sunday 6 September, 13:00 to 15:00
Where: Booth 6
What you can do there: take a zine, try eight browser-side tools that work offline and three interactive 3D pieces about Tor (the onion routing network), discuss anonymous payments
We are around all three days, so stop us anywhere at the venue outside the booth slot
Who the zine is for: anyone working on cross-border disbursement, donor anonymity, or a project blocked by financial controls. One of the sheets is written for you.
This article is the design record, written for people interested in typesetting and print, including the places we got wrong and fixed. For why we are attending, why the booth topic is anonymous payments, which sessions overlap with our work, and five other ways to find us, read anoni.net at Global Gathering 2026. The full event information is in that earlier post.
We are a group of volunteers working on anonymity networks and internet freedom, based in Taiwan. We maintain this documentation site, a practical guide to privacy and anonymity sorted by scenario for everyday life, sensitive work and high risk.
The articles on this site explain how to protect yourself. The tools section holds the things you can actually press. All eight compute in the reader's browser, send nothing anywhere, and keep working with the network off once stored on a device.
Global Gathering 2026, hosted by Team CommUNITY, runs from 4 to 6 September in Estoril, Portugal. We applied for a booth and the slot is now confirmed.
Date and time: 6 September, 13:00 to 15:00 WEST (UTC+1, Portugal local time during the event)
Tian Jian's learning platform TJ Field School is running a two-session series on digital security and privacy. Toomore from our community gave the first session on 12 August, and Mashbean takes the second on 26 August. Registration is still open.
Taiwan has long gone without large-scale throttling or shutdowns. That is good for daily life, and for anyone trying to understand network anomalies it means there is no local sample to compare against. OONI is a long-running open source project measuring network interference and connection quality worldwide; anyone can install its app to contribute, and every result is published. Taiwan's record in that database has consistently shown a network working normally.
In the 30 days before 13 August, the three mobile carriers in Taiwan recorded 564 successful connection speed tests (the test is named ndt), with a median download of 12,425 kbit/s and only 4 measurements below 2,000 kbit/s, two of which were failures. kbit/s counts thousands of bits transferred per second — higher is faster, and 1,000 kbit/s is roughly 1 Mbps.
From 14:30 to 15:00 Taipei time on 13 August, mobile networks across seven northern counties were throttled for 30 minutes. Two days earlier the community put out a call asking people to run OONI Probe's performance tests during that window. Taiwan recorded 238 connection speed tests and 235 video streaming tests (named dash) that day, with 170 and 168 of them completed on mobile networks, coming from 47 devices. During the equivalent window at the central Taiwan drill on 10 August, the whole country produced zero mobile performance measurements.
The call started with community member mashbean, who proposed using the drill as a rare measurement opportunity. The two sides then prepared separately, one writing the call and the operating instructions, the other observing in the field on the day. He wrote his own record up as a separate post, which follows the network past the announced end of the drill and covers a period this dataset cannot see. Read together, the two posts span the full afternoon.
One Chunghwa Telecom Mobile handset measured 788 to 1,709 kbit/s during the throttle. Taiwan's public data had never shown figures of that order. It should be said up front that those figures come from 6 records left by a single device: enough to stand as one complete case, not enough to generalise to the country or to any carrier.
This post records network conditions. Whether carriers followed instructions precisely, and whether the officially published figure is accurate, are both outside its scope. Taiwan had no data on what throttling looks like, and preserving these 30 minutes is the point. Every query below works without authentication or an API key, so readers can run them again.
The most useful thing to come out of the analysis has nothing to do with throttling itself. It is a reading method: throttling and blocking produce completely different shapes in OONI data. Blocking sends anomaly rates up and leaves confirmed-blocking records behind, while throttling leaves the verdict fields untouched and shows up only in throughput and latency values. Taiwan's web connectivity anomaly rate that day was 1.0%, in the same band as the usual 0.6%, with confirmed blocking at 0 all day. Only speed went down. Describing a throttle through blocking anomaly rates returns a figure close to normal, and leads to the conclusion that nothing happened.
On Thursday 13 August, from 14:30 to 15:00 Taipei time (UTC+8), mobile networks in Keelung, Taipei, New Taipei, Taoyuan, Hsinchu City, Hsinchu County, and Yilan will be throttled for thirty minutes. The throttle is part of Taiwan's Urban Resilience Exercise, executed simultaneously by all three major carriers. Official announcements state that voice calls, SMS, and cell broadcast continue to work, and that high-bandwidth services degrade: video streaming, video calls, mobile payments, cloud sync.1 The advice for the window from the NCC (National Communications Commission, Taiwan's telecom regulator) is to prepare in advance for going offline.2
Officials have described the depth of the throttle twice. On 20 July, Defence Minister Wellington Koo told the Legislative Yuan (Taiwan's parliament) that speeds would drop to one percent of 4G and 5G capacity. After the central Taiwan drill on 10 August, the Executive Yuan (Taiwan's cabinet) described the method: carriers apply rate limiting in the core network, capping mobile download speeds at 256KB. The two statements are of the same order, and either one gives a figure to expect when the measurements come in.
The date, the window, the seven counties, the three carriers: every boundary of this throttle is public before it runs. Studies of network throttling rarely get that. In most cases users notice slowness first and researchers reconstruct the timeline afterwards, leaving the edges fuzzy. Pre-announced shutdowns are not new elsewhere, exam-period national shutdowns being the familiar example.6 On the publicly documented record, a pre-announced throttle is less common, particularly one with per-carrier granularity.
During the same window at the central Taiwan drill on 10 August, Taiwan's OONI observations contained no performance measurement from a mobile network at all. The northern drill is the last of this year's exercise, so after 13 August the opportunity does not come round again.
If you are in one of those seven counties, your phone is going to slow down for that half hour regardless. Rather than just waiting it out, you might as well leave a record behind.
Several pages changed over the past two weeks, and in most cases the change was to withdraw a passage rather than extend it. Hong Kong moved from medium to high risk for device inspection, the exemption for eSIMs bought outside Japan came out, a 2FA app we recommended turned out to have changed owners, and a blocking distribution drawn from 40 samples was recomputed over all 22,105. The site merged 50 pull requests between 27 July and 10 August, and a sizeable share of them went into corrections of this kind. What follows is page by page: what changed, what the evidence was, and a checklist in the middle for anyone who already prepared using the old guidance.
