Tor shutters its anonymous Cloud service

One of the greatest benefits of the Tor browser is to stay anonymous online. Many privacy oriented individuals, political activists, protest organisers, press reporters and pro-democracy activists like to stay online and Tor anonymiser network provides a perfect platform for them. One of the lesser known projects from Tor was the Tor Cloud service which let people construct bridges from Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud for more secure browsing through the Tor network.

Tor has announced that it is shuttering down the Tor Cloud service platform. The reasons given for the closure is some major bug that is present in the service. Tor explained the reasons in blog post,

We have tried to find a new maintainer for Tor Cloud for months, but without success. There have been offers to send us patches, but we couldn’t find a Tor person to review and approve them. We encourage everyone who stepped up to start their own cloud bridges project under another name (“Onion Cloud”?), possibly forking the existing Tor Cloud code that will remain available. Tor Cloud is still a good idea, it just needs somebody to implement it.

Based on the Amazon EC2 cloud computing platform, Tor Cloud provided a way to share computing resources and allow faster uncensored access to the internet.

It is still possible to manually install Tor bridges on Amazon EC2 and other cloud platforms, though it may be a tad difficult than the Tor Cloud service. Tor has also said that the present  settings for Tor Cloud remain unaffected by the closure of the service. Tor has also welcomed developers to work on their own forked version of Tor Cloud.