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Web anonymity with Tor Download

11 August 2010 in Freeware by admin

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Tor is a free software that provides web browsing anonymity by distributing your transactions over several different places on the Internet, so that no single point can link you to your destination. Instead of taking a direct route from source to destination, data packets on the Tor network take a random path 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.

Tor lets you to browse the internet without letting the website you visit to keep track of your location i.e. where you come from and where you go to.Tor also lets you visit websites blocked by your ISP or organization or country.Tor basically protects you from a common form internet surveillance known as traffic analysis.

Tor encrypts everything between you and the Tor network and everything inside the Tor network, but it can’t encrypt your traffic between the Tor network and its final destination. If you are communicating sensitive information, you should use as much care as you would on the normal scary Internet — use HTTPS or other end-to-end encryption and authentication.

Here are some prominent features offered by Tor:

  • Tor protects the web surefer from identity theft
  • Tor protects your communication from irresponsible corporations on whom you place trust to safeguard your sensitive data
  • Tor hides ip addresses and thereby protects your children while they surf the internet.Revealing the ip addres is quite dangerous as it could be easily mapped to a city or even a street within the city.
  • Tor also allows officials to surf questionable web sites and services without leaving tell-tale tracks
  • Human rights activists use Tor to anonymously report abuses from danger zones

Tor is a software that lets you keep your privacy and be safe on the Internet. Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world. Unlike a typical proxy provider that sets up a server somewhere on the Internet and allows you to use it to relay your traffic. Tor passes your traffic through at least 3 different servers before sending it on to the destination. Tor does not modify, or even know, what you are sending into it. It merely relays your traffic, completely encrypted through the Tor network and has it pop out somewhere else in the world, completely intact.

Tor provides two levels of anonymity.They are connection-level anonymity and application-level anonymity.Connection-level anonymity focuses on making sure the application’s Internet connections get sent through Tor. This step is normally done by configuring the program to use your Tor client as a “socks” proxy, but there are other ways to do it too.

For application-level anonymity, one need to make sure that the information the application sends out, doesn’t hurt your privacy. For eg: even if the connections are being routed through Tor, one still don’t want to include sensitive information like his/her name. This second step, however, needs to be done on a program-by-program basis.Hence many programs are not recommended for safe use with Tor.

Here we detail the steps to install Tor on windows, the most widely used desktop in the world.However, Tor can be used on lunux, unix and Mac as well.

Tor for windows consists of Tor, Vidalia (a GUI for Tor), Torbutton (a plugin for Mozilla Firefox), and Polipo (a web proxy).Download Tor for windows here.

After downloading and installing the three components, you need to configure your applications to use them.As a first step you need to set up your firefox browser.You should use “Tor with Firefox” and “Torbutton”, for best safety.

The downloaded bundle automatically installs the Torbutton plugin for you. You just need to restart your Firefox browser, and you’re all set.

For applications that support HTTP proxies, just point them at Polipo (that is, localhost port 8118). To use SOCKS directly (for instant messaging, Jabber, IRC, etc), you can point your application directly at Tor (localhost port 9050). For applications that neither support SOCKS nor HTTP, try SocksCap or FreeCap, a free software.

Next, make sure that Vidalia is running. Vidalia uses a small green onion to indicate Tor is running or a dark onion with a red “X”, when Tor is not running. You can start or stop Tor by right-clicking on Vidalia’s icon in your system tray and selecting “Start” or “Stop” from the menu.

Next, you should try using your browser with Tor and make sure that your IP address is being anonymized.you can check this by clicking on Tor Detector. The Tor network relies on volunteers who donate bandwidth. The more people who run relays, the faster the Tor network will be. There are several features that make Tor relays easy and convenient, including rate limiting for bandwidth, exit policies so you can limit your exposure to abuse complaints, and support for dynamic IP addresses.

Free download Tor for you OS from here and enjoy.

Enjoy the free anonymous surfing software and web proxy sites to browse the web in total privacy!!!

Tags: Anonymous surfing, Anonymous Web surfing, Anonymous browsing, Anonymous browsing tool, Free anonymous surfing tool, Proxy software, Free Proxy software

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