This Iran proxy network thingy seems deeply suspicious to me. A tech journalist friend seems to think it’s legit, and I suppose I’ll admit that it’s too early to say. But I have a lot of questions:
- Why, when demand for your service will vary with global political events, would you buy servers instead of leasing them or using a scalable VPS setup?
- How is having a monolithic server installation in a datacenter consistent with avoiding ISP-level blocking by the government? How can this project succeed if the government just decides to block all encrypted traffic?
- Why is there no discussion on the project website of the technical approach being used? Are the developers familiar with the architecture and history of the Freenet project, or Tor? What are their technical credentials, anyway, other than having read the Squid docs?
- Why isn’t the app open source, or even just released? If the answer is “security through obscurity”, how long do the developers expect that tactic to work?
- Why have the organizers been hitting people up for money ever since the first press release?
- And, most pressingly: what could possibly possess someone to unsarcastically describe himself by uttering the phrase, “I have always been a man of principle“?