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This is 2 days overdue, the 3rd launch anniversary passed on February 15th, however I didn't think it was worth making any sort of post considering not many users were able to access due to the on-going DoS attack.

I would bet on this not being the end of it, but I'll take the opportunity now to discuss what we have been doing behind the scenes and share it to /r/DreadAlert (over on Reddit) to continue the discussion if and when it does continue.

Both myself and /u/Paris are completely burned out from the hours we've had to put into this attack, its the largest any attacker has scaled up with us, we scaled much much further and seriously hurt the whole Tor network, but we did hit a bottle neck in this approach and no matter how much we scaled there would have been no possibility of much uptime. We did have it stabilized mostly today, however had issues with some crashes which we will resolve going forward. These attacks just make us a lot stronger and we learn more about the effects and solutions every time. With that being said, there is no easy way to avoid them, who'd have thought, two years down the line, we still wouldn't have any sort of fix. We are in a dire situation of need for a PoW implementation at the intro points if we want to stand a chance without shovelling piles of cash into the furnace.

Adding to that, I want to give a wholehearted THANK YOU, to every single user who donated, whether it was $5 or $5000, I think I speak for all of us when I say we are overwhelmed at the effort of the community for supporting us in such a time. I am extremely humbled and was intending to make a post requesting that users STOP donating, I couldn't take any more without feeling guilty because it just seemed it was going to complete waste. However, we likely wouldn't have survived to this point without them, so again I am lost for words, can't quite describe how appreciative I am of all of you.

Regarding PoW I do have some amazing news, as this attack motivated us to the point of desparate measures, where we have discovered ways around some of the issues that affect the uptime, I also went way beyond on what I thought was a hopeless adventure, worked out better than ever and we may have managed to secure private development of PoW fixes with some of your favorite minds, based on Tor project's PoW proposal. The next challenge will be that they accept the pull request if and when it is completed, but we'll look at that further down the line. All I can say is, things are looking a lot more positive now than they were last week.

Anyway, lets not dwell whilst we are online and celebrate the resilience we have proven for over 3 years now, I can't believe I am still here providing what has grown into such a useful service for an amazing community. We have achieved so much, especially things I have never even been able to discuss, maybe they should be saved for a point of retirement however.

I had a lot planned to make this birthday one to remember, but I've really not been able to focus my time on anything else as we have dealt with immense pressure from every angle. Anyone who needs anything from us, please consider our mental health right now because it is absolutely fucked.

I'll be providing some seriously great surprizes for everyone shortly.

Stay safe everyone and make sure to use https://old.reddit.com/r/DreadAlert for updates during any future outages.

Much love from Hug and team.
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