Tor - anonymous browsing

From What The Wiki?!

from http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/static/security.html

Tor is a decentralized network of computers on the Internet that increases privacy in Web browsing, instant messaging, and other applications. We estimate there are some 30,000 Tor users currently, routing their traffic through about 200 volunteer Tor servers on five continents. Tor solves three important privacy problems: it prevents websites and other services from learning your location; it prevents eavesdroppers from learning what information you're fetching and where you're fetching it from; and it routes your connection through multiple Tor servers so no single server can learn what you're up to. Tor also enables hidden services, letting you run a website without revealing its location to users.

Individuals use Tor to keep websites from tracking them and their family members, or to connect to news sites, instant messaging services, or the like when these are blocked by their local Internet providers. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is backing Tor's development as a mechanism for maintaining civil liberties online. Corporations use Tor as a safe way to conduct competitive analysis. A branch of the U.S. Navy uses Tor for open source intelligence gathering, and one of its teams used Tor while deployed in the Middle East. This diversity of users helps to provide Tor's security.

Tor is free/open source software and unencumbered by patents. That means anyone can use it, anyone can improve it, and anyone can examine its workings to determine its soundness. It runs on all common platforms: Windows, OS X, Linux, BSD, Solaris, and more. Further, Tor has extensive protocol documentation, including a network-level specification that tells how to build a compatible Tor client and server; Dresden University in Germany has built a compatible client, and the European Union's PRIME project has chosen Tor to provide privacy at the network layer.

Of course, Tor isn't a silver bullet for anonymity. First, Tor only provides transport anonymity: it will hide your location, but what you say (or what your applications leak) can still give you away. Scrubbing proxies like Privoxy can help here by dealing with cookies, etc. Second, it doesn't hide the fact that you're *using* Tor: an eavesdropper won't know where you're going or what you're doing there, but she or he will know that you've taken steps to disguise this information, which might get you into trouble -- for example, Chinese dissidents hiding from their government might worry that the very act of anonymizing their communications will target them for investigation. Third, Tor is still under active development and still has bugs. And, since the Tor network is still relatively small, it's possible that a powerful attacker could trace users. Even in its current state, though, we believe Tor is much safer than direct connections.

Please help spread the word about Tor, and give the Tor developers feedback about how they can do more to get this tool into the hands of people who need it, and what changes will make it more useful. Also, consider donating your time and/or bandwidth to help make the Tor network more diverse and thus more secure. Wide distribution and use will give us all something to point to in the upcoming legal arguments as to whether anonymity tools should be allowed on the Internet. See Also

• http://www.activistsecurity.org/
• Participating With Safety -- how to use the Internet politically and safely.
• Choose good passwords and passphrases because if you don't your encryption will be easy to crack.