anonabox : a Tor hardware router on Kickstarter

It is interesting, and I only looked into it for about 15 minutes so far. However, my first thought upon seeing this was about how slow it would make all internet traffic for you. Tor is nice and probably one of if not the best privacy tool out there for the internet, but it runs REALLY slow most of the time because it relies on other people's internet connection speed and most people dont have that great of internet. Also you have no way of knowing if your traffic is passing through a compromised node or not, you just have to hope it isnt. So this seems like a nice device overall and could make private traffic much easier for the majority of people, but there is no such thing as a hardware based Tor implementation in the sense I would think of upon hearing that statement. Tor is software plain and simple (written to use generic x86 instructions), and no processor can really be designed to run it any better than a standard Intel or AMD processor in your PC, unless the Tor developers specifically wrote an entirely new piece of software on pretty much proprietary instruction sets and for specific hardware based acceleration such as an ASIC. And even then it only solves the CPU overhead side of things, not the part about other people slowing down your traffic by such a huge amount. So in the end I think it is just easier to use the Tor browser when you want to