What has changed at OTF since 2020
OTF's independent structure survived the 2020 shake-up. The board was reconstituted, senior staff returned or were replaced by people from within the field, and the grant pipeline reopened in the second half of the year. Since then, the program has quietly run as it did before: open calls, outside technical reviewers, published audits, and a rapid-response fund for grantees in emergencies. Read our full OTF explainer for the mechanics.
Two things are different now. First, more foundations and allied-government programs have stepped up to co-fund some projects. Second, more grantees maintain public risk registers so their communities can see what would happen if funding paused again.
Tools that have grown in the meantime
Most of the tools this site covers have had real years of growth since 2020. A short version:
- Tor: new anti-censorship transports, better bridge distribution, and a smoother onion services experience. Read our Tor explainer.
- Signal: usernames instead of phone numbers, larger group calls, and safer message backups.
- Delta Chat: real-time messaging over standard email, with end-to-end encryption by default.
- Psiphon: continued rapid response for shutdowns in Iran and elsewhere, plus quieter work on protocol shape.
None of those advances arrived on their own. Each one came out of dozens of small grants, audits, and volunteer-hours from communities that OTF, private foundations, and users' donations sustain together.
New censorship pressure in specific countries
Country-level censorship has become more sophisticated and, in several cases, more frequent. Iran runs long shutdowns during protests; see our post on Iran's internet shutdowns for what those look like from the inside. China has kept iterating on the Great Firewall, blocking newer protocols and pushing on the ports that make circumvention harder. Russia has moved toward a slower, more constant filtering model that combines targeted blocking with legal pressure on companies that resist.
Smaller cases matter too. Uganda has ordered short shutdowns around elections. Pakistan and Ethiopia have done the same during protests. Myanmar has run some of the longest sustained blocks in the world since 2021. Each of those countries has produced its own local circumvention community, most of which the outside world only hears about through measurement papers or the occasional wire-service story.
Every one of those shifts drives real work on the tool side. New transports, better bridge distribution, and more measurement research all live downstream of what censors do.
New policy fights in democracies
The tools' legality is being tested in democracies too. In the US, proposals like the EARN IT Act keep circling the question of end-to-end encryption; see our EARN IT explainer. The UK's Online Safety Act carries similar tension. In the EU, the chat-control proposals for scanning encrypted messages have gone through several redrafts. Australia has kept its own assistance-and-access powers on the books, and India has floated traceability rules that would break end-to-end guarantees in practice.
None of these fights has ended. Each one shapes what the tools we cover here can legally offer, and each one deserves its own explainer as it moves. The pattern across countries is similar enough that a working answer in one place often shows up as a template in the next.
Why the update page keeps expanding
The single biggest lesson from the years since 2020 is that internet freedom is a moving target. Tools that were state-of-the-art five years ago are baseline now. Censorship techniques that looked exotic are now standard. Policy fights that were once regional now happen on every continent.
That is why we treat the updates page as a growing archive of what has actually changed, not a one-off news post. It is how the site keeps pace with a fight that keeps moving, and it is what a page called updates on the internet-freedom fight should look like. When something matters, it goes here with a link to the primary source and a short plain-English note on what changed and why it matters.