After reading a blog entry and comment about Tor I decided to test it out for myself.
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.
Tor aims to defend against traffic analysis, a form of network surveillance that threatens personal anonymity and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security. Communications are bounced around a distributed network of servers called onion routers, protecting you from websites that build profiles of your interests, local eavesdroppers that read your data or learn what sites you visit, and even the onion routers themselves.
In my case it was a rather simple matter of "sudo urpmi tor privoxy" as I am running the Mandriva distribution of GNU/Linux. Followed by adding "forward-socks4a / localhost:9050 ." to /etc/privoxy/config and starting the services. After that I added the Torbutton extension to Mozilla Firefox.
As the original blog entry mentions, the system is rather slow due to a lack of servers, but the Torbutton extension allows for quick activation / deactivation that might come handy at times.
Personally I'm more interesting in securing my communication and avoiding trojan horses and spyware on my acquaintances' computers. But Tor does have its place in order to help ensure privacy while using the Internet.
