Anonymity, Internet privacy and freedom to access any website has been a major demand of Internet users around the world. Many different technologies invented to bring all these features together to help users go incognito. Today I’m going to write about one of the most reliable and easy to setup anonymity tool, Tor.
Why anonymity is important? Some ISPs have a sharp eye over their customers and block certain websites, for instance Facebook banning in some Asian countries is quite common. You are sitting in school, office or university and urgently want to access blocked websites. You want to hide downloaded files from your ISP and many more possible reasons.
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Tor is all about freedom. It’s a free software and a setup of open network that keeps you undercover while you are using Internet, even if you are under monitored network. That’s little definition of Tor. Okay fine, we are here to download files and view websites anonymously rather describing tor.
Tor is available on all platforms; Windows, Mac and Linux. However you can face some GUI problems while using it on Linux. In the early stages of Tor it was hard to setup but now they have devised “tor browser bundle” which contains preconfigured portable Firefox Aurora, waiting to be double-clicked.
Download the package here, extract it and run it. This will start Firefox Aurora and Vidalia, a graphical front-end for tor. Enjoy anonymity. You should see a web page saying something like that congratulations you are using tor. This will ensure you that now you are completely anonymous. Your activity will be hidden from your ISP and your local network. You can access all websites and websites wouldn’t find out from where you are coming. The ISP will only know that you are requesting for tor network and the website will also see a request from a tor network. It’s kind of tunnel created between you and the website.
Now come to downloading. For 99% times http/https downloading is done via tor network which means your downloading is also anonymous. How to see if the file is downloading or not? When you start Firefox Aurora it also starts Vidalia. Vidalia can be used to monitor the bandwidth being used by network through tor. So stop all types of downloading and uploading processes and then download that file and open the bandwidth monitor. If you find a considerable amount of change in the graph then the file is downloading via tor network otherwise not.
That was all about setting up tor. Now for those who are curious to know what actually happens behind tor can read this short description. Tor consists of three parts; Tor clients, relays and exit nodes.
Tor Clients: A client installed on your computer is responsible for connecting to the tor network creating a tunnel for you.
Relays: Relays is a set of tor network. Rather than sending the request directly to the website, it first bounces many times between theses relays so the third-party ISP and the website didn’t know from where the request is coming from.
Exit nodes: Exit nodes are where tor relays ends and the third-party ISP is responsible for sending your request to the website.
Now when the website sends back the data packets the whole process is followed in reverse order. In this way your request is anonymously taken to the website and anonymously return to you. All the ISPs involved will only see requests from tor network. That was a brief description explaining how Tor works. However I’ve found it an all-in-one package for anonymity and accessing blocked websites. Visit Tor’s websites.
