OperaTor works great as well. The Firefox extension is nice and simple. OperaTor is a collection of a few small files that work nicely on a thumbdrive. Have a go with it.

smarty927

Although I believe this could be the truly secure way to hide your IP from the websites you connect to, I am not willing to sacrifice my browsing speed for privacy.

Ken

@mrmoog: Well, they were the admin of A server, not THE tor server. There is no central tor server, hence the strength of the network.

I'm an advocate of Tor, but people should understand that a requirement of Tor is that you yourself are proxying others traffic. So you're running traffic through other peoples computers and other people are running traffic through your computer. So you are putting yourself at risk to be questioned about anything that may occur via your connection.

Now, you'll have plausible deniability, but you're on the cutting edge of legislation with this stuff in America. I can't speak to it's use in other areas.

@EDYTHEMIGHTY: I'd like to know what you're talking about. Has the algorithm been compromised?

Anyhow, I like tor because it could be useful to dissidents in struggles worldwide.

daniel.j.doughty

Tor is not safe, unless you're browsing with an encrypted connection. Tor hides your IP address but gives anyone who runs a Tor server the ability to sniff your internet traffic. More information here (arstechnica.com).

Chad Cloman

Hasn't Tor been shown to be....not safe? Why does everyone keep insisting on this?

edythemighty

I use Tor to access Google, Yahoo, and YouTube when the home router blocks them during late night(it's done like that to tell the teenagers in the house to turn off their PC and get to bed). I even made a "Torify.sh" Nautilus Script to run Firefox anonymously(as part of my script collection):
[www.gnome-look.org]

TonyAgudo

As a side note: The server admin for Tor was arrested last July, and his equipment seized. Fortunately the charges were dropped.

[www.cnet.com]

mrmoog

Use the privoxy client and you can get pretty good, albeit slower, privacy.

mikelotus

So what's the verdict on this "product"? Is it the best solution for browsing anonymously? What about something like JAP [anon.inf.tu-dresden.de] ?

philosopher_dog

@daniel.j.doughty: You are right about an important point, and that is that it was one admin and that one of the strengths is that your info is passed between a number of servers.

Using encryption does increase your security drastically, but even not doing so is much more anonymous. The EFF advocates tor. While it's great to be hard core in such matters, I wonder what the point of knocking significant privacy (ex. Doors & Windows locked, alarm turned on) when most people aren't using anything.

Also - Setting these things up doesn't ever stop you from browsing with them off.

Thanks a lot for the posting.

m.c.cookie

The biggest problem with Tor is a lot of the endpoints have been banned because people either purposefully trade child porn with it, or use CP as a "funny" way to troll message boards and such.

So, for just reading sites, Tor works great since (most) sites won't ban you from just browsing. If you want to post, however, you're at the whim of the network and if you get a "clean" endpoint.

fuzzycuffs

I was wrong. ignore most of what I've said above. Sorry for the confusion.

daniel.j.doughty

Tor works, it can be verified from whatsmyip.com , i've read you shouldn't log into bank accounts or do online shopping since you info is sent through the tor network. But for private/ anonymous web browsing it works great, sometimes its slower than others, i think it depends how many people are on the network, the more there are the faster it becomes due to more people serving as hosts!

jbravo188

Here is the article I was referring to:
[www.hackszine.com]

AndyFromTucson

I forget where I read it, but one website claimed that one or more of the bigger TOR servers was sponsored by an unknown organization with a Washington DC address. Hmmm. Now imagine you were government agency charged with monitoring electronic internet traffic by bad guys. Its almost impossible to do because of the distributed nature of the internet, unless you could somehow trick all the people with something to hide to route their traffic through a server controlled by you.... I am not saying that this is the case, but wouldn't it be professional malpractice for the NSA to not at least try to infiltrate the TOR network and log every packet for a rainy day?
You can call me paranoid, but if you are not paranoid why would you be using it in the first place?

AndyFromTucson

There are computers on the network that intentionally log information passing through. It was a good idea..

taybay

Definitively it is safer, because by means of the Internet many things can happen.

advancedovariancancersymptom.info

This is one of the coolest ways to make your broadband connection act like dialup. It works in the US with most websites and it was actually developed in conjunction with the Navy ([www.wired.com]). I didn't see any mention of it but you used to also need Privoxy ([www.privoxy.org]) to make this work. It seemed that a lot of the TOR servers were/are in offices (as opposed to people's houses) because surfing before 5 was regular, albeit slow, whereas surfing after about 5 landed me at Google in Japanese and other foreign lands at even slower speeds. This was when I used it a few years ago. I thought it was cool at first but I could think of no good reason to keep it (I'm not in communist China and why would I pay for broadband that renders like dialup?)

@FUZZYCUFFS - TOR works with most every website, just a lot slower than you might be used to. This is just a different way to connect to a website and you shouldn't normally be blocked from regular web surfing.

@ANDYFROMTUCSON - This is a US government-initiated project but the paranoia is unfounded. Traffic though TOR servers goes worldwide and while it may go through someone's server in DC, it goes abroad too. It's supposed to make three anonymizing hops before coming back to you and they don't always go through DC.

The actual danger with TOR is if you host an end server because apparently it looks like you, as the host for the TOR server, are surfing to some of the illegal sites that are visited by some TOR users. On the whole, it's not bad but it is slow. And I would not host a server.

Mark

Mark

Tor servers were covered extensively and in detail in this episode of security now with Steve Gibson & Leo Laport. I trust Steve Gibson! [twit.tv]

As I recall he was impressed.

zarathustra

Tor has been conclusively demonstrated to be neither nonymous, nor secure. See here, for example: [www.theregister.co.uk]

It is possible (straightforward?) to set up your own Tor Router, and capture data as it goes through. Thus, your passwords and other stuff that you thought you were keeping private is shared with others.

Do you think it possible for Governments (e.g. US NSA, Communist China) to set up Tor routers to examine the traffic that goes through it? I expect that it was done long ago.

Erudite

A word of warning to those in educational settings: some IT administrators see the usage of Tor as an indicator of inappropriate activities (shopping, banking, and you know what else) while at work. An article a while ago on, I think, insidehighered.com, described such a situation.

I am bothered by this kind of excessive oversight, but at the same time, I can't think of anything that I do on the internet at work that would require something like Tor. And no, I'm not at work now.

QuakerProf

"Theoretical security risks"? Dan Egerstad posting 100 government agencies' passwords means that it is definitely NOT a theoretical, but rather a very real threat. He's definitely not the only one doing it, either. If you do want to use TOR, make sure all your traffic is well encrypted or not worth having (unlikely, since even the people who run TOR say something like 5% of traffic is actually encrypted).

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