Sponsoring the Tor project with content delivery services

Fastly has historically supported many open source projects. We’re happy to announce that Fastly now provides sponsored Content Delivery for the Tor Project. TorBrowser updates are served over the Fastly network, taking load off of the Tor Project's backend servers and speeding up downloads for end users.

Tor offers free, open source software that provides online anonymity for users by bouncing their connection through a series of servers distributed across the globe before it reaches its destination. These servers, also called "Tor relays," are run by 7,000 individual volunteers and associations. Tor allows a wide range of speech and debate that would not be possible otherwise and is used by journalists, activists, and many other Internet users who desire privacy. Tor software is recommended by civil liberties advocates, law enforcement, military, and many other organizations.

When you use Tor, the web site you are visiting will not be able to determine your identity (unless you yourself volunteer it).

This is illustrated in a set of helpful graphs by the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

(Image courtesy of Privacy Canada.)

Fastly does not store customer request logs, so we do not store logs for downloads of the Tor Browser. Many of us on the security team at Fastly value the service the Tor Project provides to the Internet community, and we’re happy to be able to contribute to their initiative.