Privacy: The Tor Project

I know it’s been out for a bit now, but I wanted to give a short intro to this exciting project. Tor is an anonymnity network designed by the EFF. From the website:

Tor is a toolset for a wide range of organizations and people that want to improve their safety and security on the Internet. Using Tor can help you anonymize web browsing and publishing, instant messaging, IRC, SSH, and other applications that use the TCP protocol.

The tool works by bouncing all of your traffic through a set of encrypted links (called onion routers). The trick is that none of the hops know anything about the original source — they just pass the information along to the next link in the encrypted chain.

So if you ever find yourself desiring a system for communicating anonymously, do go check it out. Also consider giving as I do to the EFF in order to support projects like this one.

Here’s the overview page: http://tor.eff.org/overview.html

Here’s the download page: http://tor.eff.org/download.html

And here’s the documentation page: http://tor.eff.org/documentation.html

Edit: My buddy Ken told me eariler tonight that he’s sending his Skype traffic through Tor as well. Very cool; I’m all over it once I find the Skype proxy settings in the OS X client. :)