notes from running a 24/7 tor client: outages, weird latency spikes and other things that make badges jump.
Tor 0.4.8 and earlier will stop working on the network after 1 September 2026, a compatibility cutoff tied to the Arti migration. Arti is complete as a client, but its relay, directory authority and onion-service support remain experimental or test-only.
Tor's family declaration tells path selection which relays share an operator, so they never share a circuit. What MyFamily did, what undeclared families cost the network, and how the Happy Families key mechanism that replaced it works.
Middle relays carry Tor traffic between the first and last hop without ever connecting to the public internet. What the tier actually does, why network health depends on it, and what running one involves.
Tor's money once came mostly from the US government; today it is a mix of State Department grants, foundations, companies and small donors. A look at what the project's own reports and 990s actually show.
Tor bridges only work while censors do not know them, so their distribution is deliberately rationed. A look at BridgeDB's retirement, the rdsys successor, the Moat captcha, email and Telegram channels, and why bridge scarcity is a feature, not a flaw.
A VPN before Tor hides Tor use from your ISP but moves trust to the VPN provider; a VPN after Tor is broadly discouraged. For most users plain Tor remains the default. Here is what each chain order changes and when the extra hop is justified.
Every hour, a small, hard-coded set of directory authorities votes on a single document that defines the public Tor network. How that vote works, what it decides, and why bridges live outside it.
Tor Browser 16.0, released October 29, is the first stable build on Firefox ESR 153. It adds native ARM64 Linux support, rebuilds the settings pages, and offers an opt-in control that hides page titles from other software.
Since Tor 0.4.8, onion services can demand a transparent proof-of-work at the introduction step when overloaded, queuing clients by the effort they spent. How the Equi-X puzzle and its priority queue work, and where the defense still loses to well-funded attackers.
The meek bridge smuggles Tor traffic inside HTTPS requests to a major CDN: one domain in the TLS handshake, another in the Host header. Google and Amazon shut fronting down in 2018; meek-azure survives on Microsoft's CDN, slower and costlier than the alternatives, but reachable when little else is.
Every hour, nine directory authorities vote on the consensus, Tor's shared view of which relays exist and how much traffic each may carry. Who runs them, how bandwidth scanners feed them, and what happens when they disagree.
obfs4 is fast and proven but hard to distribute, Snowflake rides on volunteer WebRTC proxies, and WebTunnel hides Tor inside ordinary HTTPS. How the three mainstream bridge types compare on setup, detectability and throughput in 2026.
