Hey GSO, its been a very long while, however, here you guys go.

NOTE:
Tor is a very integral part of my own -stay out of jail- policy.

Tor is an application, for whatever OS's use berkeley sockets (Windows, Linux,) that will encapsulate your data and route it through several "onion routers" to provide a realatively high level anonymity, either through traffic analysis or direct sniffing of your line. Tor also has another goodie called "Anonymous Services."

In a nutshell, all you have to do is go to http://tor.eff.org and leech a binary, run it, and config everything for socks A proxy on port 9050, but that wouldnt be much of a article would it?

Ok, so lets talk about what data encapsulation is, encapsulation is all from a point of reference, for example, TCP/IP is encapsulation for protocols such as FTP, and HTML, and FTP and HTML are encapsulation for raw data.

The way that tor works is it encapsulates all your TCP/IP packets (DestIP blah blah etc) and encrypts it with what is called onion encryption. The concept of onion routing was concieved by the US Navy, and is summarised here: http://www.onion-router.net/Summary.html .

Tor is an implementation of onion routing and currently operates with 'mad grants' from the navy. This brings up the obvious question: Well, doesn't the army have any sort of backdoors for sniffing?

The answer is, we havn't found any yet. This is the joy of open source! As with JAPS and the german government demanding a 'backdoor.' Others were able to audit the source code, and identify the 'backdoor' and report it!

Onion routing works by first encapsulating your data, then encrypting it with several layers of encryption, the packet is then routed through a series of onion routers that in turn strip off a layer of encryption, untill the last one, that sends your packet un-encrypted. This ensures that nobody can determine the SOURCE of a packet, nor whom you intended the packet to go to! When a resonce is recieved the packet is reconstructed backwards through the chain, again with your identity safe.

Tor can be used on most applications, SSH, HTTP, Instant Messengers, and even IRC.

Some Tor routers block port 25 for possible abuse.

Onion routing is an interesting development of Tor, it allows one to access, and run, completely anonymous services, IRC servers, webservers, and even jabber servers can be run. This manifests itself in the "Hidden Wiki" http://6sxoyfb3h2nvok2d.onion/
(You must be using TOR and Privoxify)

As a bonus, if you are behind a firewall and restricted to port 80 communication only, Tor will allow you to access services on other ports, all you must do is add "FascistFirewall 1" to torrc and set your free ports with "FirewallPorts"

I hope you find tor as liberating as I did!

Links:
http://tor.eff.org/ <- Tor project main page.
http://www.onion-router.net/ <- The Navy's website regarding onion routing. Technical information and pretty charts available.
http://tor.eff.org/overview.html <- A nice overview with pretty pictures.
http://tor.eff.org/cvs/tor/doc/tor-doc-win32.html <- Information about Privoxify & Installing tor on win32.
http://tor.eff.org/cvs/tor/doc/tor-doc.html#installing <- Linux friendly guide.
http://wiki.noreply.org/wiki/TheOnionRouter/TorFAQ <- A Tor Wiki entry.

I too use tor and find it as a much better solution for secure browsing / access. At times it can be slow however, making me want to go back to fast secure proxies.
The nature of your browsing perhaps could dictate your usage of tor.
I think once the tor network has grown considerably, it will be a much better network for secure, quick browsing.

P.S. I believe you can set restrictions on chosen TOR servers, and perhaps even limit it to ones in your country. Anyone have information on this?

Looks like lots of fun, I particularly like the FascistFirewall option as I am always setting up firewalls like that or am going to clients that have them and of course -I- should be able to get out and do whatever I want. I currently use my own Stunnel server to do this but TOR might be more fun. I'll give it a shot....

--P>G>>

Yes you can do,



Check out tor-reference.html or man in linux

I Love Tor and everything associated with it !!!
But i can only be dreaming of the day when we shall get high speed Tor Servers so that we can really put tor to good use !!!

Anyway people who are interested in tor might want to listen to this Audio Speech and Read this Document Slides

i agree it is a cool service
anyway a small warning: u don't know how data are sent (through which servers) and who is a real owner of this system.
maybe i am too paranoic but i trust only the chain which is built by myself
i remember a lot of peeps were happy users of some anonymous web services (i don't wanna mention them here now-some of u know what i am talking about) few years ago before somebody has found they are penetrated by gov agencies
just my cents