Hello phptaskforce!
I'm the guy to talk to about it because I am the guy who builds them.
PAPARouter, for the most part, isn't anything unique. All it happens to be is a Raspberry Pi running Debian that's been set up as a wireless access point that accepts anything wireless that you can hook to it. It will then port forward to Tor and ship out the bytes. I wish I could take credit for it, but the original idea was put together by the brilliant technologist Limor Fried at ADAFruit. You can see it here.
https://www.adafruit.com/products/1406. You could build it yourself for about $95.00 or just buy the PAPARouter, already built and running out of the box, for $99.00.
I did enhance it to remove US and US intelligence friendly exit nodes so there is that.
We were also recently reviewed by FreedomHacker.net and got 4 out of 5 stars. (
http://freedomhacker.net/paparouter-review/#.U21jvcdhu6A )
The reason why it exists is to fill a void. Not everyone is a technician and can install Tor ( or at least competently) on their laptop/PC so I did gear it towards people who just want to plug it in and go.
That being said there are practical reasons to use a router and not install it on your laptop/PC. The first being that you don't need to install separate Tor clients on all of your devices. Another is that Tor consumes a lot of cycles and you can offload those cycles onto a dedicated appliance and leave your rig to do what it needs to do.
The latter has spawned a new market with scrapers, some sites like to scrape others for comparison shopping, etc and it's good for making sure that their identity isn't compromised and having their access chopped off at the IP level.
There was a great story published in BetaBoston about how women's shelters are using Tor to protect women who come there. (
http://betaboston.com/news/2014/05/07/as-domestic-abuse-goes-digital-shelters-turn-to-counter-surveillance-with-tor/ )
I love this use of the technology and am planning to start offering it at cost to any women's shelter that wants it.
Overall, PAPARouter is just a ready built solution for anyone who wants Tor. If anyone here decides to order one, I'll even give you $10.00 off on it. Just email me at
[email protected] before submitting your order so I get a heads up.
Julian
PAPARouter