Tor - The Anonymity Network

Tor is an Internet project, that prevents people from tracking your location, when you view webpages. Tor originally stood for The Onion Routing project due to its many layers of encryption; Tor uses client software and a special purpose network to hide a users' original IP address, location, or other factors which might identify them. The advantage to Onion Routing, the process by which Tor works, "is that it is not necessary to trust each cooperating router; if any router is compromised, anonymous communication can still be achieved. This is because each router in an onion routing network accepts messages, re-encrypts them, and transmits to another onion router. An attacker with the ability to monitor every onion router in a network might be able to trace the path of a message through the network, but an attacker with more limited capabilities will have difficulty even if he or she controls routers on the message's path." Tor is totally free software, and is estimated to add 3-5 seconds to your web page retrieval. You can download Tor directly, although I recommend using the Torbutton add-on in FireFox. There are several technicalities you should understand before using Tor: You should disable thick-client extensions, such as Java, Flash, ActiveX, RealPlayer, Quicktime, Adobe's PDF plugin, and Silverlight. You should disable or minimize cookie usage, as these session states could potentially be used to identify you. Tor only provides anonymity between you and end website, not between you and the Tor network. Anyone sniffing your traffic can view you connecting to Tor, as well as a Tor connection with the receiving website, although the two incidents can not be proven as the same connection. Tor is revolutionary in protecting anonymity in The Internet by utilizing encryption and The Internet's decentralized structure. Although many of it's uses are arguable, it has been global cited as an amazing tool for human rights activists.