Tor - anonymity and circumvention

Tor is designed to increase the anonymity of your activities on the Internet. It disguises your identity and protects your online activities from many forms of Internet surveillance. Tor can also be used to bypass Internet filtering.

Homepage https://www.torproject.org Computer Requirements All Windows Versions an Internet connection Works best with Mozilla Firefox Versions used in this guide Tor: 0.2.0.32 Vidalia: 0.1.10 TorButton: 1.2.0

Installing Tor Read the brief Hands-on Guide Introduction Click the Tor icon below and 'Open' or 'Run' the installer. If necessary, save the installer first, then find it and doubleclick it If you saved the installer to your computer, you may delete it after installation Tor:

License

• Free and Open-Source Software

Required Reading

• How-to Booklet Chapter 8. How to Bypass Internet Censorship and Publish Information Anonymously on the Web

Level: 1: Beginner, 2: Average, 3: Intermediate and 4: Experienced, 5: Advanced

Time required to start using these tools: 20 - 30 minutes

What you will get in return:

• The ability to hide your digital identity from the websites you visit
• The ability to hide your online destinations from Internet Service Providers and national surveillance mechanisms
• The ability to bypass Internet censorship and filtering rules

1.1 Things you should know about this tool before you start

Tor is a software tool designed to increase the anonymity of your activities on the Internet. It disguises your identity and your online activities from many forms of Internet surveillance technology. Whether or not anonymity is important to you, Tor can also be useful as a secure means of bypassing Internet censorship in order to access or publish blogs and news reports.

Tor protects your anonymity by routing communications through a distributed network of servers run by volunteers from all over the world. This prevents anyone who may be watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents those sites from learning your physical location. As for the Tor volunteers themselves, some of them may learn that you are using Tor, and others may learn that somebody is accessing the sites you visit, but none of them can learn both.

Tor can disguise your attempts to connect to a particular website, but it was not designed to hide the content of your online communication. As a result, it can add an additional layer of protection when used with secure services like !RiseUp and Gmail, but should not be used to access insecure webmail providers, such as Hotmail and Yahoo, or any website that accepts your password over an insecure 'http' connection.

The Tor program is part of the Vidalia bundle. After installation, you will find four new programs on the computer:

• Tor - the program itself, which allows you to use the Tor anonymity network
• Vidalia - a graphical user interface (GUI) for Tor
• Privoxy - a proxy program that improves your browser's ability to access the Internet through Tor
• Torbutton - an add-on to the Firefox browser that allows you to easily enable and disable Tor

After installation, Tor, Privoxy and Vidalia will be automatically launched when your computer starts up. All three programs must be working in order to use Tor effectively.

Definitions:

• Port: In this chapter, a port is an access point through which software communicates with services running on other networked computers. If a URL, such as www.google.com, gives you the 'street address' of a service, then the port tells you which 'door' to use once you reach the correct destination. When browsing the Web, you typically use port 80 for insecure sites (http://mail.google.com) and port 443 for secure ones (https://mail.google.com).
• Proxy: In this chapter, a proxy is a software intermediary, running on your computer, on your local network or somewhere else on the Internet, that helps to relay your communication toward its final destination.
• Route: In this chapter, a route is the communication path on the Internet between your computer and the destination server.
• Bridge Relay: A Bridge Relay is a tor server that can provide your first step into the Tor anonymity network. Bridges are optional, and are designed for use by people who live in countries that block access to Tor.