It\u2019s been a hot topic in the news for years now.\u00a0 Privacy on the Internet is something that users not only want but expect, even if they know they shouldn\u2019t.\u00a0 So much of our daily activity resides there.\u00a0 From our entertainment and paying bills to shopping for gifts, clothing and bulk household items, Internet service has become a utility, not just a frivolous addition to your cable TV package.\u00a0 With so much activity going on in the strange in-between world of the Internet, there was bound to develop an underground.\u00a0 Much like in your day-to-day world where the world\u2019s secret places thrive, there is an equivalent world on the Internet where anarchy is king and the rules are few.\u00a0 One of the ways you can get to this place is called Tor.<\/p>\n
In the Beginning:<\/strong><\/p>\n Tor was once an acronym standing for \u201cThe Onion Router<\/a>\u201d which was a reference to how the program layered and encrypted the users on the network; it became its official name in early 2006.\u00a0 Tor began as a project of the United States Naval Research Laboratory for reasons that to this day are shrouded in mystery.\u00a0 When it came to be funded through the Electronic Frontiers Foundation<\/a> (EFF), it ceased to be a military endeavor and took its first breaths as an independent project.\u00a0 It is currently run by \u201cThe Tor Project\u201d, an educational 501c3 devoting its time and services to developing a web browser designed to preserve anonymity on the Internet.<\/p>\n The gritty details<\/strong><\/p>\n Let\u2019s get a little more technical and see how this works.\u00a0 Tor protects the user by taking the outgoing signal and bouncing it through various relays across the globe. In order to do this however, one must download and install a Tor browser package which is available on the Tor Projects homepage.\u00a0 The browser itself is very pared down and as no-nonsense as it gets, allowing no scripts to come through that you do not by hand approve and no cookies to be saved so that your information remains private.<\/p>\n When you visit a website, it sends out the signal to the first relay and that relay encrypts it which sends it along to the next for further encryption, and so on.\u00a0 By the time it reaches its destination, often hundreds of relays have been used to get there.\u00a0 This still usually happens in a matter of seconds, making Tor browsing not that much slower than using your normal services.\u00a0 The browser itself is set up to access a different type of web page called an \u201cunindexed site\u201d or a \u201chidden service\u201d:\u00a0 these are web sites that are invisible to everyday search engines.\u00a0 They achieve this by using public encryption keys and 16 character hash tags followed by the pseudo-top level domain marker \u201c.onion\u201d.<\/p>\n Doesn\u2019t make sense?<\/em>\u00a0 That\u2019s the point: to most browsers, it\u2019s not supposed to.\u00a0 Normal web browsers cannot decrypt the information produced by a .onion service or page.\u00a0 When a user starts the Tor\/Onion browser and enters in a .onion domain address the information going forward to the first relay gets encrypted and sent forward to the next relay.\u00a0 Because the next relay in the line cannot tell from where the incoming connection came, the user is effectively protected from any attempt at traffic analysis.\u00a0\u00a0 Even if someone could either decrypt one node or get some legal order to release the data, it\u2019s one of dozens or hundreds of nodes.\u00a0 In summary, the traffic is effectively impossible for anyone to trace, even the people who themselves take part in it.\u00a0 There\u2019s literally not a single person on the planet who could trace a request made through Tor.<\/p>\n Oooh, this is intriguing!\u00a0 What can Tor be used to reach, then?<\/strong><\/p>\n In a word: anything.<\/span>\u00a0 This is the Internet unchained, the picture that many of you probably had of it when you first heard of it.\u00a0 This also includes all of your \u201cnormal\u201d sites, though naturally browsing Sesame Street is not going to be the first idea that comes to mind.\u00a0 What does come to mind is all of the stuff that you imagined must exist somewhere out there on the Internet, if only you knew how to find it.<\/p>\n It is at this point, then, that we have to issue more than just a typical warning, and state that there is no, we repeat, no endorsement of any activity through this article.\u00a0 Truthfully, we know a lot of you will be naughty.\u00a0 That\u2019s the reality, and we can\u2019t stop it, no matter how stupid it might make you.\u00a0 But we can tell you that these things are underground for a reason.\u00a0 You investigate any of this at your own risk, and that\u2019s not a risk we want to see any of you take.\u00a0 Are we all clear?<\/em><\/p>\n Tor in the News and the future of anonymous usage<\/strong><\/p>\n The development of Tor is not an isolated phenomenon.\u00a0 While it may have been a military project initially, it\u2019s still true that there is a higher push for privacy on the Internet as time goes on.\u00a0 Tor is a somewhat accidental response to it, but it\u2019s nonetheless one that answers this call.<\/p>\n That being the case you would think that Tor would be in the headlines more.\u00a0 It has instead attracted oddly little attention.\u00a0 A branch of the collective Anonymous used it recently to infiltrate a child pornography web site.\u00a0 It was the subject of governmental ire for giving access to a network that they couldn\u2019t reach (ironic, no?).\u00a0 It was also cited as a tool that was used by Egyptian rebels in their recent insurrection.\u00a0 Despite these isolated incidents, though, this pathway to the electronic underground remains mostly as invisible as the sites that it accesses.<\/p>\n It\u2019s hard to say what this all means.\u00a0 One thing we can say is that the technology is solid.\u00a0 One renowned security expert accessed a black market selling just about every manner of illegal goods, to try to find a security weak point anywhere whatsoever in the process.\u00a0 Shockingly, he could find none.\u00a0 Think for a moment about what that would mean if that were to remain the case and become more publicly known.<\/p>\n There\u2019s really only about one thing we can say for certain regarding the future of Tor and its relationship to web security: it\u2019s going to be mighty interesting.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s been a hot topic in the news for years now.\u00a0 Privacy on the Internet is something that users not only want but expect, even if they know 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shouldn\u2019t.\u00a0…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2818,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[377,3201,3203,3202],"class_list":["post-2811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-security-issues","tag-privacy","tag-the-onion-router","tag-the-tor-project","tag-tor"],"views":98,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2811"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2811\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}