One of the earliest contributors to the Tor Project, a person known only as Lucky Green, decided to leave the project and shut down the Tor bridges under his administration, among which there is also a critical server that works as a Bridge Authority.
Green is one of the people who was part of the Tor Project before the network became known as Tor. He is one of the people who ran one of the first five nodes ever introduced to Tor and over the years, he has earned the trust of the Tor Project to allow him to manage special nodes within the network.
These nodes, called Bridge Authorities, have their IPs embedded in their Tor application code and allow the Tor network to bypass various ISP-level. In addition, they hold valuable information about other Tor nodes, since all Tor servers report back to one of the Bridge Authorities in the network.
Green gives the Tor Project time until August 31, 2016, to release a new updated version of the Tor applications and to remove the IP from his own Bridge Authority, known as the Tonga node.
In addition to the extremely important Tonga node, Green plans to shut down the other five servers he runs.
Green did not give many details about the reasons he made this decision. «Given the recent events, it is no longer appropriate for me to contribute substantially to the Tor Project either financially, as I have so generously contributed all these years, nor by providing computing resources», he wrote.
«Even so, I have the feeling that there is no logical choice within the bounds of ethics, to announce the shutdown of all Tor-related services hosted on every system under my control.»
It is not clear what recent events he refers to, but the Tor Project was shaken by a massive sexual scandal over the past two months. As a result, last week it was decided that the Tor Project Board of Directors would be replaced.
Green may not trust the company's new Board of Directors, or he may want to side with Jacob Applebaum, a prominent figure who was forced to leave the Tor Project after some serious allegations.
Below is Green's full statement, and here you can see an email exchanged with the Tor mailing list by Tor staff.
