On iOS, Tor used to recommend using the Onion browser (they probably still do, I haven't checked). Some time ago, the onion browser changed how it connects to the Tor network to use Orbot instead of connecting directly.

I can not help but see this as a malicious change.

Orbot directs all traffic from my phone through the Tor network. If an iPhone is secretly pinging some backend server for telemetry / looking for automatic updates / etc, then all those pings will now happen from the Tor exit node, effectively completely deanonymizing the user.

It's a trivial matter for an adversarial agent to ask apple for lists of all hits from a specifc tor exit node and identifying information from that user, and cross check that against whatever traffic they are trying to deanonymize.

I might be misinformed here, but I would love to be corrected about why anyone should trust Tor enough to access it from an iPhone anymore.

I tried contributing all of my $40 worth of Brave BAT currency (earned from ads) via contribution button in Brave. However it seems I can not as i'm treated with the following message: "This creator is unable to receive contributions from Gemini"

Am I wrong to assume that Tor is effectively a US government project at this point? It may allow people to bypass local internet controls (in some cases including government-imposed internet controls), but I would assume it is not truly anonymous.

> charitable giving from individuals from the U.S. decreased by 10.5%

Well you see it's been a rough year for the CIA, all of their budget is tied up on monitoring the situation in Ukraine so they had to cut some corners.

I was going to leave a comment on the linked page that a link to the project's budget should be prominent. I couldn't, because to do so, I had to either login via discord or github. Seems a bit ironic.