Tor is a free web browser created by the US Naval Research laboratory with goal of creating anonymous web communication. Basically, they wanted to create a Web Browser that will hide you from EVERYONE
The Tor browser directs Internet traffic through a free, worldwide, volunteer network consisting of more than seven thousand relays. These relays bounce your traffic through random sources and conceal a user’s location and web usage from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis (i.e., Google, NSA, Aliens, the Ruskies).
You can get Tor here
Using Tor makes it very difficult for Internet activity to be traced back to a user and is therefore a tremendous tool for keeping your Internet activities from being monitored and tracked.
Why would you want to hide your traffic you may ask?
- Paranoia
- Nefarious activities
- Don’t want the search engines, ISPs and government agencies to have a giant database about you
- You don’t want to leave any provable trails of your web browsing history
Honestly, for a lot of people this probably is useless. But, its good to know that if you did want to do some tracking-free website browsing, this is the way to go
How does the Tor Browser work?
Without getting too technical, Tor encrypts your browsing requests and sends it through randomly selected relays. Imagine sending a piece of mail (with no return address) through several randomly selected (and untraceable) mailboxes before having it hit its intended destination. Your mail (aka, internet browsing request) will hit its destination but because of the all hidden hops between you and your destination, the source cannot be traced.
The original reason for Tor hitting the public sector was because the government wanted a place to hide their communication. Basically they wanted their communication chains to be hidden (our drowned out) by millions of other public sector internet requests.
Tor is a simple browser without all the plugins and extensions you may need for more advanced websites, but by and large it will allow you to browse the vast majority of the websites in total anonymity. It is a derivative of Mozilla Firefox so it should look familiar to a lot of people
Do not confuse Tor’s web browsing protection as total Internet protection however, because while it will mask traffic performed within Tor, it does not mask general internet usage (I.E., if you have Spotify accessing the internet to stream music, that connection to the internet is not going through Tor and is therefore not protected)
Only browsing done while within Tor is hidden
So, gumshoes, if you like the idea of not having Aliens, the government or Google knowing every single thing you’re doing on the internet, Tor is the web browser that will hide you from EVERYONE.
Here’s a wiki article if you really want dig deep into this shit
