Tor (anonymity network), page 1

The following thread has been supported by users on the thread Pirate Bay Release Regarding SOPA and is a direct response to the illegal take-over and shutdown of Megaupload by the U.S. Justice Department on 19 January 2012.

It is important to disclaim immediately that copyright infringement is an entirely different subject matter than Internet users' anonymity; this thread in no way encourages post replies with an agenda aimed at copyright infringement, stealing by or from Hollywood, or the network television/pay-cable industries.

Anonymity Online

Tor is free software for your computer, recommended bundled with its own browser rather than formatting your own, which conceals you, the user, from being monitored and physically located while using the Internet. The Tor network is a series of relays run by volunteers who distribute your communications and transactions throughout the network at random. Any person/corporation monitoring your Internet connection cannot link you to your true destination, nor follow you from site A to site B.

Tor (short for The onion router) is a system intended to enable online anonymity. Tor client software routes Internet traffic through a worldwide volunteer network of servers in order to conceal a user's location or usage from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis. Using Tor makes it more difficult to trace Internet activity...and is intended to protect users' personal freedom, privacy, and ability to conduct confidential business by keeping their internet activities from being monitored.

[emphasis mine]
Source

Defence against network surveillance and traffic analysis

The idea is similar to using a twisty, hard-to-follow route in order to throw off somebody who is tailing you — and then periodically erasing your footprints. Instead of taking a direct route from source to destination, data packets on the Tor network take a random pathway through several relays that cover your tracks so no observer at any single point can tell where the data came from or where it's going.

Source

The erasing of your footprints on the windy trail you leave through Tor is accomplished by the Tor software incrementally building a circuit of encrypted connections through the relays on the Tor network. Each relay along your path through the Internet only has knowledge of which relay gave it your information, and which relay ahead of it will receive your information. No one relay ever knows the entire path you take from point A to B when accessing the Internet. Each step from relay to relay has a separate set of encryption keys. This is how even your convoluted path cannot be backtracked. Your right hand doesn't know what your left hand is doing.

Onion-like Layers: Origins

Tor was originally designed, implemented, and deployed as a third-generation onion routing project of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. It was originally developed with the U.S. Navy in mind, for the primary purpose of protecting government communications.

Source
Official U.S. Navy Web Site operated by the Center for High Assurance Computer Systems in the Information Technology Division of the US Naval Research Lab

The underground railroad must be silent: Privoxy

We have established the virtual tunnels and layered encryptions that are the Tor. Your location and any transactions over your network connection, determined and tracked by IP address, are convoluted and encrypted with forward secrecy (the erasing of your footprints). Your direct route from site A to B is difficult to track.

Your destination from A to B on the Internet is not always direct. Web proxies are computers that allows indirect connections to other network services.

A common proxy application is a caching Web proxy. This provides a nearby cache of Web pages and files available on remote Web servers, allowing local network clients to access them more quickly or reliably.

A proxy is a go-between, for your computer to access information from a source more quickly, or more reliably. Proxies identify themselves as proxies, and reveal the original IP address to the sources they draw from to relay information back to your computer.

When it receives a request for a Web resource (specified by a URL), a caching proxy looks for the resulting URL in its local cache. If found, it returns the document immediately. Otherwise it fetches it from the remote server, returns it to the requester and saves a copy in the cache.

Web proxies also filter content.

Some censorware applications - which attempt to block offensive Web content - are implemented as Web proxies. Other web proxies reformat web pages for a specific purpose or audience; for example, Skweezer reformats web pages for cell phones

Source

Privoxy is a non-caching web proxy with open access to detailed configuration for the user. What you choose to filter from your received information over the web can range from ads to words to images. It is a customizable proxy that gives the user full control over her Internet experience. The name is condenced from Privacy Enhancing Proxy.

Privoxy is a proxy that is primarily focused on privacy enhancement, ad and junk elimination and freeing the user from restrictions placed on his activities. Sitting between your browser(s) and the Internet, it is in a perfect position to filter outbound personal information that your browser is leaking, as well as inbound junk. It uses a variety of techniques to do this, all of which are under your complete control via the various configuration files and options. Being a proxy also makes it easier to share configurations among multiple browsers and/or users.

[emphasis mine]
Source

Changing Our Habits

Tor specific:
Be smart and learn more. Understand what Tor does and does not offer.

Combine Privoxy (or any anonymity protecting proxy of your choice in your research) with Tor. How do I use Privoxy together with Tor?

This has been a brief overview of the meat-and-drink of Tor as related to Internet users' security, and its sister concern, web proxies. This thread has a used a broad brush to paint the subject with thin at best coverage of the computer science behind its workings.

I would like to invite any users with expertise to expand on any steps of the Tor process, proxies, Privoxy, and especially any further aspects of Internet privacy and anonymity. We have a right not to be followed or eavesdropped on for advertising or any other purpose, without consent.

_____________________

"darknet" warning:

Readers correctly warn each other: ".onion" sites are the deep web of dangerous content. Please be aware that Tor cannot actively lead you to any site with illegal content. It is a method of defence from being tracked. Only you have the initiative to seek out anything illegal.

reply to post by AzureSky

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links, or it didn't happen!

reply to post by trollz

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try updating your tor software, had that happen one time when i missed an update.

reply to post by kai22

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You could use it for ATS, it would allow you to look at the site with a fake IP, however if you commented on something that would require a log in, so if you log in with your normal ip at all it would be a method to trace it back to you.

reply to post by benrl

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I assume the same would apply to facebook aswell, darn shame lol.

How would it work for something like pirate bay? Obviously it doesn't require a login, so would the download run through the voluntary relays or straight to my own ip?

Thank you

Kyle

reply to post by UkRandom

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Oh no guys, we have a badass over here.

Seriously? You just took that information from a poorly-constructed mock-informational and pretended to be some kind of know-it-all. And yes, I've seen it.




*"Seen it" as in the poorly-constructed mock-informational I was referring to

reply to post by UkRandom

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So what you're saying is that your computer WILL be compromised, regardless of anti-virus/anti-malware?

Kyle

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