Safeguarding online privacy and security is becoming more and more important, both for individuals and organisations, and one of the best and simplest ways of doing so is to use Tor. In short, Tor allows you to use the net anonymously, whether you're browsing or publishing information, using instant messaging or Internet Relay Chat.

"Tor's hidden services let users publish web sites and other services without needing to reveal the location of the site. Individuals also use Tor for socially sensitive communication: chat rooms and web forums for rape and abuse survivors, or people with illnesses. Journalists use Tor to communicate more safely with whistleblowers and dissidents. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) use Tor to allow their workers to connect to their home website while they're in a foreign country, without notifying everybody nearby that they're working with that organization."

Tor is reccomended by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and groups such as Indymedia. It's also free and open source.


Installation
A typical installation bundle consists of three packages:

Vidalia - a configuration and monitoring GUI to allow you to control Tor.
Polipo - a caching web proxy that increases the browsing performance of Tor
Torbutton - a Firefox extension that allows you to flick anonymous browsing on and off at a button click.

You find all downloads on the download page. There are versions for Linux, Mac (both OS X and PowerPC) and Windows, with the latter coming in two flavours. There's a regular Installation Bundle, an 8.5MB package containing all the necessary goodies and automatic setups, and a 15MB Browser Bundle that requires no installation, making it ideal for USB drives. It unpacks to a Desktop folder named "Tor Browser" that you can then copy anywhere or even run in situ. Just open it and click on Start Tor Browser.exe. The package contains a portable version of Firefox that won't interfere with your installed version.

(You'll find full installation details on the Documentation page.)




Windows installation adds the Vidalia control to your Taskbar...





...allowing you to control and configure Tor


Testing
To activate/deactivate, simply click the Tor control on Firefox's status bar...



... then check the changes on What Is My IP. Note that when you change from Disabled to Enabled or vice versa, Torbutton blocks the refreshing of tabs by clicking the Reload (F5). You need to click in the URL bar and hit Enter.


Important!
Tor's a great place to start, but simply installing it will not magically make you anonymous for ever more. Check out these warnings. You may need to change some of your browsing habits and/or tweak your software!