Why you need to know about TOR and why you will probably be using it in the future.

I’ve been pretty quiet about the whole SOPA thing. For your of you who don’t know, SOPA, the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (and it’s Analog in the Senate (PIPA)) will allow the United States government to block certain websites based on an arbitrary set of criteria. You can find out a lot more online. It’s censorship, basically. In the same sense that China, Siria, Iran and other human-rights unfriendly countries do. Welcome to America in 2012. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

It’s a shame it’s come to this. Write your senator. Tell him you won’t reelect him if he supports the PIPA bill. Write the president. Tell him you care about the freedom of information. Tell your mom. Tell your sister. Sticker your cat. Shout it from the rooftops. Here’s a huge list of cool and easy stuff you can do to make your voice heard.

The bottom line: the world’s greatest library, the collection of the knowledge and culture that makes us a people, the Internet, is about to be shut off from you. You’ll still be able to use it, but you’ll never be able to trust it. The internet is going away in favor of a brand-friendly propaganda-only machine that prevents you from freely using, thinking, or learning things that your government, and the corporation it works for, don’t want you to know. Maybe you think this is a good thing. I don’t know. I hope not. I want us to stay friends, you and I.

If this doesn’t scare you, I don’t know what else will. Someday, the internet you know and love could look like this:

But here’s a sliver of hope for you.

I have, for years, been using something called “Tor.” Tor is “a free and open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as ‘traffic analysis’.”

They actually have a bootable live disk (based on Debian) now that works as a computing environment wherein all the traffic is routed through TOR. This is the same software that internet users in countries with oppressive governments use. It’s slower and clunkier, but it works, it’s (mostly) free and (mostly) safe.

Download the stand-alone browser bundle and give it a try. What can it hurt?

The bottom line is, Tor works. If not only as a proxy, at least as a source of anonymity. And using it, configuring it, and supporting it, I think, is something that is going to be very important to our future as a people.

Sad that it is so. But you would do yourself a real service to familiarize yourself with Tor and the Tor Project.