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.

Much kudos to the OperaTor people for putting this “No, you’re not totally anonymous,” message at the startup page for the recently released OperaTor Browser. Here’s why TOR matters.

The thing is, TOR is an incredibly useful too for defeating proxies, getting around firewalls, and making your IP address a relatively meaningless way of keeping tabs on your web behavior.  If you use the Internet and you value freedom, you need to familiarize yourself with TOR. If you want to read a really incredible discussion about tor, and I’m serious, it’s really incredible, you need to listen to Security Now Episodes 69, 70, 71 and 72. Here’s a link to Steve Gibson’s awesome Security Now page at GRC.com. 

So far my experience with OperaTor has been very satisfactory. In fact, I used it several times at work today to research the TOR project in general for this article. (Work blocks me from viewing webpages regarding “proxy defeating” or something like that. Don’t matter, really.)

The thing is, a desire to be anonymous does not automatically imply that there is something to hide. The desire to be anonymous, at least for me, only implies that I don’t want your shit all up in my grill. If you’ll pardon the expression.

Anyway, if near anonymity is something you desire, and you have 30MB worth of space on some kind of a portable drive, you could do worse than to give OperaTor a try.