The Anonabox May Not Be Entirely Original

[exfileme]

The Anonabox uses off-the-shelf components and is not 100 percent original.

The Anonabox May Not Be Entirely Original : Read more

 

[ABagOfFritos]

Thank you for posting this. It's important to let your users know there may very well be good reason to avoid this product.

 

[applegetsmelaid]

Well, he did only set of a goal of 7500 bucks, I don't know why peeps have such high expectations - cause he certainly didn't.

 

[bootsattheboar]

Well, he did only set of a goal of 7500 bucks, I don't know why peeps have such high expectations - cause he certainly didn't.

So because he was only looking to scam people for a quick $5000, that makes it okay? $7500 was likely his personal limit between a waste of his time and worth the bother flashing and shipping X number of boxes. In any business venture, you should go in with humble expectations. If the market rewards you big, so be it. If not, no problem: move on to the next thing. As for the device itself, I see nothing wrong with what he's doing so long as he's upfront about it. Doubling the wholesale price is pretty typical method of calculating retail markup, although one would hope he's ordering them in bulk from alibaba instead of singly at aliexpress. He's adding value by customizing the firmware stack running on the device, but ultimately this is something you can do yourself with any ddwrt compatible wireless router.

 

[alextheblue]

Kickstarter scams are not unheard of. This one screamed scam from the start,

 

[rwinches]

So, It's impossible for them to have their design made in China?

 

[rwinches]

Yes I see the USB traces in the video so still it could be that the China firm suggested a mod of an existing product. Their stated goal is to get the price down. I think this is going to be OK if performance is good and it should be as the TOR function is in an external appliance instead of a local browser

 

[rwinches]

Until Nov., 11 people can back out.
Will the built in firewall provide the protection needed to cover the OpenWRT issues.
is HTTPS supported?
Or is this project immature and needs further refinement?
The main problem is claiming custom HW and clearly it is not.

 

[ewok85]

The issue is that many of the claims are proving to be false, which leaves doubt over how much of the rest of their claims are wrong or baseless.

The hardware itself has been around for more than 6 months in its current design, the SoC is more than 2 years old. The Anonabox people had zero input into the hardware, they just picked something off the web.

The software is also completely untouched by the developers - the OS is OpenWRT, which already has versions available for this hardware. Their Tor implementation is also unoriginal - they are using PORTAL by grugq, of course with zero acknowledgement that most of the heavy lifting was already done by someone else.

What they have provided is the settings they use: http://anonabox.com/about/code.php

People have already pointed out numerous issues with this - the password is clear as day (developer!). The default wireless is unencrypted and without a password. On top of that every box uses the same SSHD host key. These are extremely easy things to work around - the WT3020H as shipped by the manufactuer in China (NEXX) comes more secure than this, with each unit having a random wireless PSK which is printed on the bottom of the unit.

 

[rmirwin2]

Note, funding is suspended!

 

[USAFRet]

Kickstarter kicked it out.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/10/16/this-debunked-kickstarter-project-may-be-the-biggest-crowdfounding-fail-to-date/