Tor
Tor is a program designed to allow its users to surf the web anonymously. When the user requests a page, Tor directs the request to one of the servers on its network, which sends the request on through the network until it reaches its destination. The destination server sees a request from one of Tor’s nodes, not from the original user, thereby providing them a degree on anonymity.
It’s also now possible for Tor users to host servers anonymously, allowing them to share potentially restricted content.
What prompted me to write this post was an article in Wired which noted that there’s now a web service called tor2web which allows a regular user to browse Tor’s servers (albeit without anonymity). Unfortunately, most of the servers seem to contain either (1) pornography, (2) conspiracy theorists, or (3) Linux user groups. Still, the technology’s pretty neat!
This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008 at 11:00 pm and is filed under computer science, web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
2 Responses to “Tor”
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Scott said on December 24, 2008 at 11:51 am:
Hmm… How is this different than proxify or something?
Harry Schwartz said on December 24, 2008 at 10:58 pm:
While I haven’t actually used Proxify, it looks like it doesn’t allow you to set up anonymous servers on its network the way Tor can. Proxify also seems to charge for some of its services, and it’s not an open source project. Somehow I feel safer going through a fairly decentralized network of users than I do using a company’s closed-source product. Subscribing involves giving Proxify some personal information, which really seems like the *opposite* of what you want to be doing. And finally, a company can be subpoenaed, but it’s harder to get information from a ever-shifting web of pseudo-anonymous users.
Again, I haven’t used Proxify yet, but from reading over its website it seems a little less than ideal to me.