A recent Kickstarter anonabox boasted to be developed over four years, aswell as being 100% open source, it was then pointed out that the original project was a semi-finalist on Hackaday Prize (source).

With reddit in uproar, and anonabox’es AMA only receiving over 370 comments, August Germar logged off without any real answer as to why he has essentially stolen the product from aliexpress.

 

August Germar then verified that he was using the board from aliexpress and was infact simply buying the boards and installing the software. Anonabox also was called out about his version two prototype was infact a board for openwrt.

It seems as though the anonabox, origionally a plug and play type deal was infact not so plug and play, with some of the problems being that

• The project is not original and for $45 from an original $19 thats a huge price markup.
• The box itself is not secure as it took less than 30 minutes to crack the root password ‘on a relatively weak box’
• The box has logging which, when intended for plug and play is not so useful.
• The speed of the device is less than a tenth of some home routers.
• It seems that currently the product is nothing more than some reconfigured WT3020-V1.0
• The kickstarter page seems to have no understanding of how Tor works.

Their 404 page was also interesting

Thank you htilonom