More and more netizens are becoming concerned about the growing publicity of their online lives: websites collect data about their users; ISPs sniff at the traffic; governments impose censorship of the media; fraudsters sell your stolen data all over the web. In response, the world is developing technologies to protect personal data and make Internet surfing safer.
And Tor has been one of the leading guardians of the Internet anonymity for quite a while. Although setting up Tor Bundle is somewhat complicated and the Tor speed is relatively slow, it's still the best tool for achieving maximum anonymity. In fact, connecting to the Onion Routing with Tor Browser requires little to no effort.Tor has helped people all over the world.
Many folks associate the onion network with the darknet and illegal activity. Yes, at some point Tor is being used to access places within the .onion domain, which might contain illegal content according to the law of some countries. But the wish to secure your data on the Internet is not fundamentally illegal or immoral.
To get started with Tor we encourage you to Tor Browser first. It's a fairly simple, free and open source tool.
Connecting to Tor with the Tor Browser
The Onion Router (TOR) is free software for accessing a distributed network of nodes (relays) with layer-by-layer data encryption. All relays in the network are funded and supported by volunteers around the world. Tor circuit consists of several type of entities:
- The entry relay receives requests from network clients, encrypts the received data, and redirects it to the middle relay.
- The middle relay transmits data from the entry relay to the exit relay, simultaneously decrypting its layer of the data.
- The exit relay is the last point between the Tor network and all external Internet resources. It retrieves data from the middle relay, finalizes the decryption, and sends the requests to the target server.
- Bridge node is used to provide access to the network in cases when the direct connection to the entry node is blocked by the ISP
Because of that many layers it is called the onion routing. Each data packet is encrypted with three keys when it is sent. After that, it is sent along a chain of randomly selected relays. Each relay decrypts the packet at its own layers and passes it on. After it exits the network, the data is again unencrypted and readable by any service.
Sometimes you need to hide the fact of using Tor from your ISP.Because in some countries it is not allowed to connect to even bridge nodes. Here is where connecting to Tor via VPN comes very handy. By the way, our VPN gives this option for free.
Tor browser on Windows
Download the Tor browser from the official website
Tor browser is good to go right after the installation. By default it uses the DuckDuckGo search engine, which claims to be not collecting any personal data about their users.
The browser has three security levels: standard, safe, and safest.
Keep in mind that the second and third security levels may lead to web applications dysfunctioning because of JavaScript disabling.
The browser also supports connection to Tor through a third-party proxy servers.
Tor browser on Android
You can download and install the Tor browser for Android in a casual manner via Google Play. It's always free.
After installation, just launch the app, click the CONNECT button, and start anonymous surfing. The Android version provides different security levels as well.
Tor might not be fast and robust, it still has millions of users around the world and the number is only growing, because it's almost the only way to go online and truly remain anonymous. And of course, it's totally free.
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