I have always been interested in how the Internet can be used for or against freedom (as in speech). The EFF is the best place on the web to know what's going on, and how you can help. For sometime now the EFF has supported and encouraged the use of Tor, and today I decided it was time I checked it out.
Tor is simply a way to be truly anonymous online. There is a good technical breakdown of the methods used, but if you've seen the spy movies where a hacker bounces his cell phone off of five other phone lines, across three countries, and one satellite then you get the idea. Tor stands for "The Onionskin Router" which implies peeling back layers before you get to the center. In addition to the bouncing, each system (called a node) in the chain doesn't tell the previous one which node it bounce to - there is no trail to trace back. An important note, Tor does encrypt the traffic between nodes but it's not there to encrypt your "message" - if you sign up on a website though tor and use your real name, all the nodes can see that (if they wanted to). For sending encrypted messages, use GPG or SSH.
There are three main reasons to use Tor: 1) you don't want people to know the sites you read; 2) you want to read the hidden onion sites; 3) you want to publish information anonymously. I'll touch on 1 and 2, for 3 read up on configuring hidden services.
Setting up Tor is easy, just follow the Windows, Mac, or Unix howto. Since I'm running windows, I downloaded the Windows bundle that includes Tor, Vidalia and Privoxy. Tor is the program that does bouncing, Vidalia is a program to help configure and run Tor, and Privoxy is the program you'll configure your apps to point to (i.e. your web browser). Once up and running, all you do is configure the proxy settings of your app to use the localhost port (8118 by default) Privoxy is listening on. If you are running Firefox, the process is simple with the Torbutton extension. With the extension, you can toggle on and off the Tor network.
So once your on, where do you go? Well the first stop is loading the hidden wiki (that link will only work if you're on the Tor network, and if it loads then everything is working). I also wanted to test the anonymous browsing, so I googled "my ip" and got the German version of Google. Visiting http://www.univie.ac.at/cgi-bin/ip.cgi I confirmed that the world was seeing me as a computer in Germany. After a few minutes I came back to that page are checked my IP again, which had changed - Tor changes nodes you are using every few minutes to further hide you.
Impressions of using Tor for the first time - it's slow. All that bouncing does add up, so don't expect to switch over to using Tor for everything unless you miss your old 56K modem. I also didn't see anything in the hidden network you can't find on the Internet - the difference here is no one knew I was looking and no one knew who put it there. What I would have loved to find are some hidden blogs by people who can't speak openly about their situation, be it government or corporate.
Hmm, maybe I'll start one. Maybe I already have.
