[I.M. Boggled]

Tor is a toolset for a wide range of organizations and people that want to improve their safety and security on the Internet.
Using Tor can help you anonymize web browsing and publishing, instant messaging, IRC, SSH, and other applications that use the TCP protocol.
Tor also provides a platform on which software developers can build new applications with built-in anonymity, safety, and privacy features.

Your traffic is safer when you use Tor, because communications are bounced around a distributed network of servers, called onion routers.
Tor's technology aims to provide Internet users with protection against "traffic analysis," a form of network surveillance that threatens personal anonymity and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security.

Instead of looking at the content of your communications, traffic analysis tracks where your data goes and when, as well as how much is sent.
Tor aims to make traffic analysis more difficult by preventing websites, eavesdroppers, and even the onion routers themselves from tracing your communications online.
This means Tor lets you decide whether to identify yourself when you communicate.

Tor's security is improved as its user base grows and as more people volunteer to run servers. Please consider volunteering your time or volunteering your bandwidth. And remember that this is development code—it's not a good idea to rely on the current Tor network if you really need strong anonymity.

https://tor.eff.org/

................
Tor: Overview

Tor is a network of virtual tunnels that allows people and groups to improve their privacy and security on the Internet. It also enables software developers to create new communication tools with built-in privacy features. Tor provides the foundation for a range of applications that allow organizations and individuals to share information over public networks without compromising their privacy.

Individuals use Tor to keep websites from tracking them and their family members, or to connect to news sites, instant messaging services, or the like when these are blocked by their local Internet providers. Tor's hidden services let users publish web sites and other services without needing to reveal the location of the site. Individuals also use Tor for socially sensitive communication: chat rooms and web forums for rape and abuse survivors, or people with illnesses.

Journalists use Tor to communicate more safely with whistleblowers and dissidents. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) use Tor to allow their workers to connect to their home website while they're in a foreign country, without notifying everybody nearby that they're working with that organization.

Groups such as Indymedia recommend Tor for safeguarding their members' online privacy and security. Activist groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) are supporting Tor's development as a mechanism for maintaining civil liberties online. Corporations use Tor as a safe way to conduct competitive analysis, and to protect sensitive procurement patterns from eavesdroppers. They also use it to replace traditional VPNs, which reveal the exact amount and timing of communication. Which locations have employees working late? Which locations have employees consulting job-hunting websites? Which research divisions are communicating with the company's patent lawyers?

A branch of the U.S. Navy uses Tor for open source intelligence gathering, and one of its teams used Tor while deployed in the Middle East recently. Law enforcement uses Tor for visiting or surveilling web sites without leaving government IP addresses in their web logs, and for security during sting operations.

The variety of people who use Tor is actually part of what makes it so secure. Tor hides you among the other users on the network, so the more populous and diverse the user base for Tor is, the more your anonymity will be protected. ...

Overview continues @
https://tor.eff.org/overview.html.en

[I.M. Boggled]

Tor aims to protect its users against traffic analysis attacks.
Tor operates an overlay network of onion routers that enables two things: anonymous outgoing connections and anonymous hidden services.

Anonymous outgoing connections

Users of the Tor network run an onion proxy on their machine. This software connects out to Tor, periodically negotiating a virtual circuit through the Tor network. Tor employs cryptography in a layered manner (hence the 'onion' analogy), ensuring perfect forward secrecy between routers. At the same time, the onion proxy software presents a SOCKS interface to its clients. SOCKS-aware applications may be pointed at Tor, which then multiplexes the traffic through a Tor virtual circuit.

Once inside the Tor network, the traffic is sent from router to router, ultimately reaching an exit node at which point the cleartext data is available and is forwarded on to its original destination. Viewed from the destination, the traffic appears to originate at the Tor exit node.

Tor's application independence separates it apart from most other anonymity networks: it works at the TCP stream level. Applications commonly anonymised using Tor include IRC, instant messaging and browsing the Web. When browsing the Web, Tor is often coupled with Privoxy - a filtering proxy server - that aims to add privacy at the application layer.

Anonymous hidden services

Although Tor's most popular feature is its provision of anonymity to clients, it can also provide anonymity to servers. By using the Tor network, it is possible to host servers in such a way that their network location is unknown. In order to access a hidden service, Tor must also be used by the client.

Hidden services are accessed through the Tor-specific .onion top level domain. The Tor network understands this TLD and routes, anonymously, to the hidden service. The hidden service then hands over to standard server software, which should be configured to listen only on non-public interfaces. Services that are reachable through Tor hidden services and the public Internet are susceptible to correlation attacks, and consequently are not really hidden.

An added advantage of Tor hidden services is that, because no public IP address is required, services may be hosted behind Firewalls and NAT.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_%28...ity_network%29

So, how would you rate this soft I.M. Boggled? I'm thinking about giving it a try and we all need to protect ourselves with all that is going on. That's if you want to stay around the net sites.

[HappyHemphog]

GDW, I've been using Tor and Privoxy for quite sometime now. It works very well altho you will get unreachable hosts occasionaly and have to hit referesh a few times before the site comes up.

I am fully confident that the sites I visit are not recording my IP and therefore there is no way you can be connected to that site.

I use Firefox as my main secure browser that goes through the proxy but when I want to surf a safe site without any delays, I fire up IE as it's not setup to use Tor.

The only thing I haven't figured out is how to make sure my connection to the chat server is proxied. In it's basic configuration, Tor/Privoxy only proxies your WWW traffic on Port 80. The chat server IC uses actually runs in the US. :(

Cheers!
Hempy

[I.M. Boggled]

Source:
News Forge, The Online Newspaper for Linux and Open Source

Privacy
Securing your online privacy with Tor

You may never think about it, but many of your online activities may be monitored and analyzed.
Advertising companies, government agencies, and private users can use traffic analysis to gather information about which Web sites and pages you visit, what newsgroups you read, and whom you talk to on IRC.
While there is no need to be paranoid (or is there???), you can keep your online communication private.
The Tor project can help you with that.

Traffic analysis is based on the fact that every packet of data sent from your computer includes a header containing information about source, destination, size, timing, and other items.
If you take a look at a packet header you can at the very least see who sent the the data packet.
That's what traffic analysis in its simplest form is about: intercepting data packets and looking at their headers.

Tor tries to keep your packets private by distributing your transactions over several places on the Internet, so there is no direct connection to your destination.
As Tor's Web site puts it: "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."

The Tor network consists of servers known as onion routers. Instead of sending data directly to a destination server, your computer uses these onion routers. To do this, the computer obtains a list of onion routers from a directory server and then selects a random path to the destination server. The clever part is that each onion router along the way knows only which server data is received by and which server data is being sent to -- as each layer in an onion touches only the ones on either side of it. In other words, none of the onion routers know where the data packet originated from.

To be able to use the Tor network you have to install a Tor client on your machine.
The Tor software is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X platforms and is pretty easy to install.

To protect your Web browser from leaking information via DNS requests, Tor client software relies on Privoxy, "a Web proxy with advanced filtering capabilities for protecting privacy, modifying Web page content, managing cookies, controlling access, and removing ads, banners, pop-ups, and other obnoxious Internet junk."

This means that before you can use your Web browser with Tor software, you should install and configure Privoxy.
Luckily, this is also an easy thing to do.
Then add the following line to Privoxy's configuration file (on Windows right-click on the Privoxy icon in the System Tray and choose Edit > Main Configuration):

forward-socks4a / localhost:9050 .

Finally you have to "torify" your Web browser and other applications.
This basically means that you have to specify proxy settings in the application.

To configure, for example, a Firefox browser, choose Tools > Options, select the General section, and click the Connection settings button.
Select the manual proxy configuration option, in the HTTP Proxy field enter localhost and in the Port field type 8118.
Click OK, and you are done.
If you need to configure other applications, check Tor's wiki, which provides detailed instructions on how to "torify" different software.

To begin preserving your online privacy, make sure that Tor and Privoxy are started, launch your Web browser, and point it to Junkbusters Web site.
If Tor is working properly, the Web page will display an IP address that is different from your own.

Tor was initially designed and developed as part of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory's Onion Routing program with support from DARPA. Today it is supported by Electronic Frontier Foundation, among others.

As any other open source project Tor needs help. If you are not a developer you can help by setting up an onion server, provided you have spare hardware and bandwidth. The installed Tor client can easily be turned into an onion router by simply editing its configuration file. However, doing so requires you have a working knowledge of server configuration, and it's a good idea to check Tor's documentation beforehand. If you are concerned about legal issues, check the Legal FAQ for Tor Server Operators as well.
https://business.newsforge.com/articl...52221&from=rss
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Thanks Triple H for your Tor report, we have quite a few more Tor Geeks around here I would suspect...
What are best (pros) and worse (cons) features of this software in your experiences?

Captain Kirk:SHIELDS UP!
Scotty: Aye Aye Captain, Shields are up and at full power.

IMB

Don't leave home without it !

https://tor.eff.org/download.html.en

[buzz lite yr.]

I was wondering what that was in my toolbar , an onion with a green checkmark? Hope its been doing a good job. Can I use JAP also with TOR? I might download that next. pCe...

[Sinfuldreams]

But works
and Easy to use and configure in Mac OS X

Wont slow the Chat room down at least not yet.

It works!

Sin

[HappyHemphog]

Originally Posted by Sinfuldreams

Wont slow the Chat room down at least not yet.

That's because the chatroom use a port other than port 80. By default Tor/Privoxy only anon port 80 (WWW service) connections.

On a side note, as far as I've been able to tell, the chatroom is running on a server in the US. With the recent activities up north I've decided to avoid the chatroom until I can get Tor/Privoxy configured to handle the traffic.

If there is a Networking guru out there that can help me configure Tor/Privoxy to handle the chat connection, I'd appreciate it.

Cheers!
Hempy

I downloaded Tor and Privoxy do I need to do anything else ?