Tor is a tool that can be used to proxy your online communications between multiple, randomly selected, global providers effectively anonymizing your Internet traffic. Tor is a free anonymizing service, but doesn’t also encrypt your traffic.
Privoxy is a non-caching proxy that also has a certain amount of filtering built into it. Many may use privoxy to do adware removal. But it can also be used to filter information for Tor. Installers are available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/ijbswa/files. Once you have installed privoxy you can access the configuration page at http://www.privoxy.org/config/. Because privoxy is a command line tool, you can also access the help page for that using the following command (using privoxy as your working directory):
privoxy –help
By default privoxy will install the following files on your system:
- /usr/sbin/privoxy
- /etc/privoxy/config
- /etc/privoxy/match-all.action
- /etc/privoxy/default.action
- /etc/privoxy/user.action
- /etc/privoxy/default.filter
- /etc/privoxy/user.filter
- /etc/privoxy/trust
- /etc/privoxy/templates/*
- /var/log/privoxy/logfile
But you don’t have to install any of that. Or use it manually – you can, but you don’t have to. You can download the Vidalia Tor installer bundle, which will install privoxy, Vidalia, Tor and the Torbutton extension for Firefox. The installer package can be run choosing all of the defaults and then will need a reboot. Once complete, open Firefox (the first time it will install the extension, quit Firefox and then reopen it to activate it) and you’ll see Tor Disabled in the lower right hand corner of Firefox. You’ll then be able to click on it to switch over to using Tor from within Firefox. Click on it again and it will disable Tor again.
Overall, this is a nice and sleek design for obtaining anonymous web communications. Obviously, if you use it to log into your Twitter account, that’s not anonymous. But browsing and posting to sites does not link back to your IP address, which is one key aspect of Tor. You’re also still connecting over standard protocols. Again, Tor does nothing to encrypt data – it is a service dedicated to anonymity.
