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COSCUP 2026 Anonymity Networks Community track needs on-site crew for three roles, Aug 8–9

COSCUP 2026 Anonymity Networks Community track hero image

The schedule is set and all sixteen speakers have confirmed. Across Aug 8 and 9 in room TR-510 at National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, the track runs from how censorship works and browser-fingerprint tracking, through the NTNU campus Tor node and data-privacy rights in the national health-insurance database, to the anonymous-payments session co-organized with ETHTaipei on the Aug 8 afternoon. Right now exactly one person is covering on-site operations.

Changeovers on Aug 9 are only five minutes long. Someone needs to raise the time card before a speaker runs over, and someone needs to use those five minutes to get the next speaker on stage with projection and audio tested. Several speakers have asked not to be recorded, so someone has to watch the whole way through and confirm nothing was captured. That one is unrecoverable if it goes wrong. On the Aug 8 morning there are invited civil-society groups and independent journalists arriving, so someone needs to greet people at the door and help them find seats.

We are looking for three on-site crew

  • Roles: recording (1), front-of-room runner (1), door runner (1)
  • Requirements: no background in Tor, anonymity networks, or any privacy technology
  • Availability: both days is ideal, one day is welcome too, and we will rotate shifts if enough people sign up
  • To sign up or ask: reach us through any channel on contact and tell us which role you want and which days you can make

Section 702 Has Expired: A Sinophone Asia-Pacific Read on Warrantless US Surveillance

EFF's NSA eagle graphic, reworking the NSA seal into an eagle plugging its talons into telecom lines, representing warrantless mass surveillance
Image: EFF designer Hugh D'Andrade's "NSA eagle," which reworks the NSA seal into an eagle plugging its talons into the nation's telecom lines. From EFF's NSA spying work, licensed under CC BY 4.010.

This post is an anoni.net reading based on the EFF Deeplinks article:

At midnight on 12 June 2026, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act lapsed1. EFF, which spent years arguing the program should require a warrant before the FBI reaches Americans' communications — or else expire — calls the lapse a victory1.

It is a real victory, and a narrow one. Section 702 was always built to collect the communications of non-US persons located abroad. That means everyone outside America — including readers in Taiwan, Hong Kong, mainland China, Macau, Singapore, and Malaysia — has always been a lawful target of this authority. The fight that just lapsed it was overwhelmingly a fight about protecting Americans. For the rest of us, the lapse changes much less than the headline suggests.

Editorial note: This is a companion post for English-speaking readers. The original article, by Maria Xynou (OONI), was published on the Internet Society Pulse blog and reposted on OONI's blog. Please read it there. anoni.net Docs is reposting a short summary here, alongside translations into Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese, plus a regional context section for readers in Chinese-reading regions.

What the original article covers

Maria Xynou's post is a concise overview of how Internet censorship is becoming harder to measure, and what OONI's data shows about how it is evolving. The main points:

  • Censorship is rarely binary: Confirming a block is not just "up" or "down". False positives are common, methods range from DNS manipulation and IP blocking to throttling and forged responses, and the same site may be blocked on one network but reachable on another.
  • OONI's approach: Open measurement methodologies, control measurements, a probabilistic pipeline (OONI Pipeline v5) that classifies results as "blocked", "down", or "OK" with confidence estimates, and crowdsourced data from volunteers running OONI Probe on their local networks.
  • Seven evolving trends: Globalization and normalization of censorship beyond the usual suspects, short-term targeted blocks around political events, long-term systemic suppression of marginalised communities, less transparent censorship in an encrypted web (TLS interference via DPI, no block pages), throttling and degraded service as subtler control, attacks on privacy technologies (encrypted DNS, ECH), and the rise of national intranets and allowlisting approaches.
  • Measurement enables advocacy: OONI has been part of the #KeepItOn campaign since 2016, and OONI data has supported legal and policy interventions in Gabon, Tanzania, Nepal, Togo, Mozambique, Pakistan, Kenya, and others.
  • Scale: Over 3 billion measurements from 30,000 networks across 245 countries and territories since 2012, with tens of millions of new measurements added every month.

Please read the original for the full argument, all the supporting links, and the country-specific examples:

Android 17 ships: the real GrapheneOS story is who decides what runs on your phone

Android 17 and GrapheneOS: who decides what runs on the phone you bought
Image: a smartphone wrapped in a chain and padlock, standing in for a device locked down by outside rules. Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya, via Pexels (Pexels License).

You paid for the phone, but what it can run and what it can install is increasingly not yours to decide. That question stays invisible until an app refuses to open because it "detected a non-stock OS," or an open-source OS you rely on gets harder to maintain because the hardware data behind it stops being public. Android 17 landed on 2026-06-16, and it pushed that question one step further.

For privacy-minded users, the OS in the middle of this is GrapheneOS: a hardened, de-Googled Android built on AOSP. It runs almost exclusively on Google Pixel hardware, and Google has spent the past year adjusting how open Android and the Pixel actually are.

Why this matters (especially in APAC)

This reads like a US/EU story about Google and Brussels, but it is close to home for readers across East and Southeast Asia and the Chinese-speaking world. Android 17's new sideloading "developer verification" flow is rolling out first in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand in 2026, expanding from there. Banking, payment and government apps across the region increasingly check whether a device is in "stock" state, and in mainland China that posture — device attestation plus real-name requirements — is already the norm. The losers are the same everywhere: people who want a phone they actually control.

OONI is guarding its data against bad measurements — what that means if you build on it

We build on OONI's public dataset. Our own work tracks how well Taiwan and the wider APAC region are actually observed in that data, and our Run v2 census mapped how the whole Run v2 ecosystem gets used. So when OONI published a long engineering post on [how it detects and mitigates faulty measurements]1 — alongside a new anonymous-credential system now rolling into production — we read it not as OONI insiders but as people downstream who use this data to make claims about a thinly-observed part of the world.

Here is what stands out from that seat.

COSCUP 2026 Anonymity Networks Community track runs two days, Aug 8–9, free entry, just walk in

COSCUP 2026 Anonymity Networks Community track hero image

Journalists need to protect sources, civil-society groups need to keep member lists and donor records safe, developers want to know whether the tools in their hands actually hold up against surveillance, and ordinary people rattled by scam texts or ad tracking just want a little control back. Under spreading censorship and monitoring, these needs land on the same set of risks: traffic can be intercepted, identities can be traced, and the timing and amount of a single transfer can reconstruct an entire web of relationships.

The Anonymity Networks Community (anoni.net) brings a year of hands-on work with Tor, Tails, and OONI (open-source privacy and anti-censorship tools), plus personal privacy and anonymous payments, to the open-source floor of COSCUP 2026. Across two days at National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, we run a full community track, from how the internet and censorship work, through real-world open-source privacy tools, campus Tor nodes, browser tracking, and the national health-insurance database and data-privacy rights, to an anonymous-payments session co-organized with ETHTaipei (Taipei Ethereum Community). Whether you came looking for tools you can use right away or want to contribute to open-source projects, there is a session for you.

Event details

  • Dates: August 8 (Sat) and 9 (Sun), 2026
  • Venue: National Taiwan University of Science and Technology (NTUST), Taipei. The community track is in TR-510; the Aug 8 afternoon session co-organized with ETHTaipei is in TR-511.
  • Admission: COSCUP is free, and the community track needs no separate registration. Just show up.
  • Getting there: sessions are drop-in, so you can come and go and don't need to stay all day. For transport and room locations, follow the official COSCUP schedule and venue info, which are authoritative (times may still shift before the event).

See the full schedule and session summaries

Brief yourself before you travel — take the right questions to your own AI

Illustration: an AI assistant on the left gathers scattered data cards (Wi-Fi, location pin, lock, SIM, QR) and sorts them along dotted lines into a shield-framed pre-departure briefing panel on the right, with an airplane and a flight-path arc above

Before a trip you check visas, plug types, and currency. Few people check how the internet is controlled where they are going, whether their work is legal there, or who to call if something goes wrong. For journalists, human-rights defenders, NGO staff, and researchers, those are the questions that actually affect their safety, and the hard part is that you usually don't know what to ask before you leave.

OONI Run v2 usage census

Worldwide, OONI Run v2 has produced 14.17 million measurements, and just three lists account for 72% of them. The highest-volume lists all work the same way: each one targets a single censorship or blocking phenomenon, and a continuously-running measurement backend executes it on a schedule, accumulating data over time. We surveyed every Run v2 link to measure how concentrated this is, and to draw out what the pattern offers communities that want to run their own local connectivity observation.

OONI (the Open Observatory of Network Interference) is a global censorship-measurement project. Its mobile app, OONI Probe, runs through a list of websites and reports whether each one is reachable from where you are. OONI Run v2 lets anyone compose their own list of sites to watch, generate a link, and have others run that list with one tap in OONI Probe, with every result flowing into OONI's public dataset. You can define your own measurement targets without writing code, yet few people know the feature exists or have used it, which is exactly why we wanted to see how it is actually used.

How Unredacted Helps People in Censored Regions Reach the Open Internet

This post is based on a guest post on the Tor Blog by Unredacted, with an anoni.net community perspective added for Taiwan and the wider Sinophone region.

Keeping the doors open

Unredacted is a US-based 501(c)(3) non-profit that runs a network of 300+ servers to keep people in heavily censored places connected to the open internet. Their guest post is part of the Tor Blog's spotlight series on organizations defending the free internet, and it opens with a line from a user in China: "You have helped many many people to overcome the great firewall." That kind of message is rare, because people living under censorship usually have no safe channel to send one.

This post highlights what Unredacted builds, and what it looks like from where the anoni.net community sits, in Taiwan.

After Iran's 80-day blackout, traffic surged through our community's Tor WebTunnel bridge

For people in Iran, the outside internet barely existed for nearly three months. When connectivity started to come back a few days ago, the Tor WebTunnel bridge our community runs began taking on a wave of traffic. That was Iranians who had found a way around the censorship and reconnected to Tor, getting back onto the wider internet.

Wherever you are, you can help

If you have a VPS (a small cloud server) or a physical machine, plus a domain name, you can run a Tor WebTunnel bridge and give people cut off by censorship a way back onto the open internet. Can't run a server? Open a browser tab and run Snowflake instead, it contributes anonymous traffic just the same.

Server specs, legal considerations, and the full setup steps are written up in How to set up a Tor WebTunnel bridge.