The Grand Tor: How to Go Anonymous Online
Fifteen years have passed since a couple of MIT grads and a Navy-funded researcher first built The Onion Router, or Tor, a wild experiment in granting anonymity to anyone online. Today, Tor has millions of users. The original project has been endlessly hacked on, broken, and fixed again. While imperfect, it remains the closest thing to a cloak of anonymity for internet users with a high sensitivity to surveillance, without needing serious technical chops. And it’s stronger and more versatile than ever before.
Tor protects your identity online—namely your IP address—by encrypting your traffic in at least three layers and bouncing it through a chain of three volunteer computers chosen among thousands around the world, each of which strips off just one layer of encryption before bouncing your data to the next computer. All of that makes it very difficult for anyone to trace your connection from origin to destination—not the volunteer computers relaying your information, not your internet service provider, and not the websites or online services you visit.
