Category Archives: Tor Browser

Tor has provided the user a simplified browser which requires no configuration and from the get go your up and running. Installation of this application went smoothed with no glitches. click on the icon and your up and anonymous. Pro's Main GUI is basic enter a URL and your on your way. A green onion icon in the upper left will show you what nodes your IP is going through, and you can change these at a second, this makes it very attractive in protecting your identity. I ran checks on tor to determine if it was hiding my IP and it did without any problems. Cons: Tor in its comments indicated not to add extensions on as this would degrade its protection so on will have to run the browser as is.However Tor stated one can download the complete package to insure all features could be implemented. Depending on the nodes at the time the browser is open can slow down the web page to a small degree that is being opened, but is acceptable in my opinion Conclusion: If your needs are a simple way of hiding your identity and IP Tor browser will work Review details

Continued here:
Tor Browser - Freeware download and reviews from SnapFiles

Tor Browser for Windows has been designed to help you preserve your privacy online. Tor Browser is a tool set that can help you anonymize web browsing and publishing, instant messaging, and other applications that use the TCP protocol. This can be helpful for private use and business use.It means that confidential information can be kept from prying eyes. ISPs, key loggers and other types of malware are not able to track your activities easily.

Tor Browser for Windows works by bouncing traffic around a distributed network of servers which it calls "onion routers". The interface allows you to toggle it on and off based upon when you need anonymity online. Tor Browser for Windows also lets you choose from various proxy tunnels based on a world map that displays exactly where each one is located.

Overall, Tor Browser for Windows is a simple, well organized and effective tool for users who are concerned about security or invasions of privacy whilst they are online. The browser interface is a standard, user friendly affair and the application is relatively lightweight.

Read more:
Download Tor Browser for Windows 6.0.1 - FileHippo.com

Need to hire an assassin, buy some contraband, view illegal porn, or just bypass government, corporate, or identity thief snooping? Tor is your answer. Tor, which stands for "The Onion Router" is not a product, but a protocol that lets you hide your Web browsing as though it were obscured by the many layers of an onion. The most common way to view the so-called Dark Web that comprises Tor sites is by using the Tor Browser, a modded version of Mozilla Firefox. Using this Web browser also hides your location, IP address, and other identifying data from regular websites. Accessing Tor has long been beyond the ability of the average user. Tor Browser manages to simplify the process of protecting your identity onlinebut at the price of performance.

What Is Tor? Ifyou're thinking that Tor comes from a sketchy group of hackers, know that its core technology was developed by the U.S. Naval Research Lab and D.A.R.P.A.. The Tor Project non-profit receives sizeable donations from various federal entities such as The National Science Foundation. The Tor Project has a page listing many examples of legitimate types of Tor users, such as political dissidents in countries with tight control over the Internet and individuals concerned about personal privacy.

Tor won't encrypt your datafor that, you'll need a Virtual Private Network (VPN). Instead, Tor routes your Internet traffic through a series of intermediary nodes. This makes it very difficult for government snoops or aggressive advertisers to track you online. Using Tor affords far more privacy than other browsers' private (or Incognito) modes, since it obscures your IP address so that you can't be trackedwith it. Standard browsers' private browsing modes discard your cached pages and browsing history afteryour browsing session.Even Firefox's new, enhanced private browsing mode doesn't hide your identifiable IP address from the sites you visit, though it does prevent them tracking you based on cookies.

Starting Up Connecting to the Tor network entails more than just installing a browser and firing up websites. You need to install support code, but luckily, the free Tor Browser bundle streamlines the process. Installers are available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Tor Project recommends installing the browser on a USB drivefor more anonymity and portability; the driveneeds to have 80MB free space.

We tested a standard Windows installer, with choices to create desktop icons and run the browser immediately. The browser itself is a heavily modified version of Firefox 38.5 (as of this writing), and includes several security plug-ins as well as security tweaks such as not caching any website data. For a full rundown of the PCMag Editors' Choice browser's many features, read our full review of Firefox.

Before merrily browsing along anonymously, you need to inform Tor about your Webconnection. If your Internet connection is censored, you configure one way, if not, you can connect directly to the network. Since we live in a free societyand work for benevolent corporate overlords, we connected directly for testing. After connecting to the Tor relay system (a dialog with a progress bar appears at this stage), the browser launches, and you see theTor project's page.

Interface The browser's home page includes a plea for financial support to the project, a search box using the anonymized Disconnect.me search, and a Test Tor Network Settings link. Hitting the latter loads a page that indicates whether you're successfully anonymized. We recommend taking this step. The page even shows your apparent IP addressapparent because it's by no means your actual IP address. We verified this by opening Microsoft Edge and checking ouractual IP address on Web search sites. The two addresses couldn't have been more different, because the Tor Browser reports the IP address of a Tor node.

The browser interface is identical with Firefox, except with some necessary add-ons installed. NoScript, a commonly used Firefox add-on, is preinstalled and can be used to block most non-HTML content on the Web. The green onion button to the left of the address bar is the Torbutton add-on. It lets you see your Tor network settings, but also the circuit you're using: Ourcircuit started in Germany and passed through two different addresses in the Netherlands before reaching the good old Internet. If that doesn't suit you, you can request a new circuit, either for the current session or for the current site. This was one of our favorite features.

One thing we really like about the Tor Browser is how it makes existing security and privacy tools easier to use. NoScript, for example, can be a harsh mistress, who can bedifficult to configure, and can break websites. But a security panel in the Torbutton presents you with a simple security slide. At the lowest, default setting, all browser features are enabled. At the highest setting, all JavaScript and even some image types are blocked, among other settings. This makes it easy to raise or lower the level of protection you need, without having to muck around in multiple settings windows.

Everything you do in the browser is tested for anonymity: When we tried full-screening the browser window, a message told us that that could provide sites a way to track us, and recommended leaving the window at the default size. And the project's site specifically states that using Tor alone doesn't guarantee anonymity, but rather that you have to abide by safe browsing guidelines: don't use BitTorrent, don't install additionalbrowser add-ons, don't open documents or media while online. The recommendation to only visit secure HTTPS sites is optionally enforced by a plug-in called HTTPS Everywhere.

Even if you follow these recommendations, though, someone could detect the simple fact that you're using Tor, unless you set it up to use a Tor bridge relay. Those are not listed in the Tor directory, so hackers (and governments) would have more trouble finding them.

One thing we noticed while browsing the standard Web through Tor was the need to enter a CAPTCHA to access many sites. This is because your cloaked URL looks suspicious to website security services such as CloudFlare, used by millions of sites to protect themselves. It's just one more price you pay for anonymity.

We also had trouble finding the correct version of websites we wished to visit. Directing the Tor Browser to PCMag.com, for example, took us to the Netherlands localization of our website. We could not find any way to direct us back to the main URL, which lets you access the U.S. site.

The Dark Web You can use Tor to anonymize browsing to standard websites, of course, but there's a whole hidden network of sites that don't appear on the standard Web at all, and are only visible if you're using a Tor connection. You can read all about it in our feature,Inside the Dark Web. If you use a standard search engine, even one anonymized by Disconnect.me, you just see standard websites. By the way, you may improve your privacy by switching to an anonymous search provider such as DuckDuckGo or Startpage.com. DuckDuckGo even offers a hidden search version, and Sinbad Search is only available through Tor. Ahmia is another search engine, on the open Web, for finding hidden Tor sites, with the twist of only showing sites that are on the up-and-up.

Tor hidden sites have URLs that end in .onion, preceded by 16 alphanumeric characters. You can find directories of these hidden sites with categories resembling the good old days of Yahoo. There's even a Tor Links Directory page (on the regular Web) that's a directory of these directories. There are many chat and message boards, but you even find directories of things like lossless audio files, video game hacks, and financial services such as anonymous bitcoin, and even a Tor version of Facebook. Many onion sites are very slow or completely downkeep in mind that they're not run by deep-pocketed Web companies. Very often we clicked an onion link only to be greeted with an "Unable to Connect" error. Sinbad helpfully displays a red "Offline on last crawl" bullet to let you know that a site is probably nonfunctional.

Speed and Compatibility Webpage loading time under Tor is typicallyfar slower than browsing with a standard Internet connection. It's really not possible to state definitively by how much your browsing will be slowed down if you use Tor, because it depends on the particular relay servers your traffic is being routed through. And this can change every time for every browsing session. As a very rough rule of thumb, however, PCMag.com took 11.3 seconds to load in Firefox and 28.7 seconds in the Tor Browser, at the same time, over the same FiOS connection on the open Web. Your mileage, of course, will vary.

As for browser benchmarks, the results hew to Firefox's own performance, with near-leading performance on all the major JavaScript tests, JetStream and Octane, for example. Onourtest laptop, the Tor Browser scored 20,195 on Octane, compared with 22,297 for standard Firefoxnot a huge difference. The Tor network routing is a far more significant factor in browsing performance than browser JavaScript speed. That is, unless you've blocked all JavaScript.

Keep in mind, though, that the Tor Browser is based on the Firefox Extended Support Release versions, which updates less frequently so that large organizations have time to maintain their custom code. That means you don't get quite the latest in Firefox performance and features, but security updates are delivered at the same time as new main versions.

There's a similar story when it comes to standards compatibility: On the HTML5Test.com site, which quantifies the number of new Web standards supported by a browser, the Tor Browser gets a score of 412, compared with 468 for the latest Firefox version. You may run into incompatible sites, though. For example, none of the Internet speed connection test sites performed correctly in the Tor Browser.

Tor, Browser of Thunder With the near complete lack of privacy on today's Web, Tor is becoming more and more necessary. Itlets you browsethe Web knowing that all those tracking services aren't watching your every move. Most of us have experienced how an ad follows you from site to site, just because you clicked on, or searched for a product or service once. All that goes away.

Of course, you pay a price of extra setup and slower performance with the Tor Browser, but it's less onerous than you may think. And the included support for fine-grain privacy and security protection is excellent. If you take your online privacy seriously, you owe it to yourself to check out the Tor Browser. For standard, full-speed Web browsing, however, check out PCMag Editors' Choice Web browser, Firefox.

See the rest here:
Tor Browser - uk.pcmag.com

Download the file above, and save it somewhere, then double click on it. (1) Click "Run" then choose the installer's language and click OK (2). Make sure you have at least 80MB of free disk space in the location you select. If you want to leave the bundle on the computer, saving it to the Desktop is a good choice. If you want to move it to a different computer or limit the traces you leave behind, save it to a USB disk.

Click Install (3) Wait until the installer finishes. This may take a few minutes to complete.

Once the installation is complete, click Finish to launch Tor Browser's wizard.

Once you see Tor Browser's wizard click Connect

Alternatively, you can launch Tor Browser by going to the folder Tor Browser which can be found at the location you saved the bundle at (Default: Desktop) and double click on the Start Tor Browser application.

Once Tor is ready, Tor Browser will automatically be opened. Only web pages visited through Tor Browser will be sent via Tor. Other web browsers such as Internet Explorer are not affected.

Once you are finished browsing, close any open Tor Browser windows by clicking on the (6). For privacy reasons, the list of web pages you visited and any cookies will be deleted.

To use the Tor Browser again, double click on the "Start Tor Browser" application.

Remember that Tor anonymizes the origin of your traffic, and it encrypts everything inside the Tor network, but it can't encrypt your traffic between the Tor network and its final destination. If you are communicating sensitive information, you should use as much care as you would on the normal scary Internet use HTTPS or other end-to-end encryption and authentication.

Read the original here:
Tor Browser - Tor Project: Anonymity Online

What is Tor?

Tor is a volunteer-run service that provides both privacy and anonymity online by masking who you are and where you are connecting. The service also protects you from the Tor network itself.

For people who might need occasional anonymity and privacy when accessing websites, Tor Browser provides a quick and easy way to use the Tor network.

The Tor Browser works just like other web browsers, except that it sends your communications through Tor, making it harder for people who are monitoring you to know exactly what you're doing online, and harder for people monitoring the sites you use to know where you're connecting from. Keep in mind that only activities you do inside of Tor Browser itself will be anonymized. Having Tor Browser installed on your computer does not make things you do on the same computer using other software (such as your regular web browser) anonymous.

Open a browser like Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer, or Microsoft Edge and go to:

https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en

If you are using a search engine to look for the Tor Browser, make sure that the URL is correct.

Do not use any other source, and if you are prompted to accept alternative HTTPS (SSL/TLS) security certificates, do not proceed.

Click the large Download button, or scroll down to the Tor Browser Downloads section. Click on your desired language and OS version (Windows 32/64-bit).

Some browsers will ask you to confirm whether you want to download this file. Internet Explorer 11 shows a bar at the bottom of the browser window. For any browser, it is best to save the file first before proceeding. Click the Save button.

This example shows Tor Browser version 5.0.3 which is the current version at the time of writing this guide. There may be a more recent version of Tor Browser available for download by the time you read this, so please download and use the current version that Tor Project provides.

After the download is complete, you might get an option to open the folder where the file was downloaded to. The default location is the Downloads folder. Double-click on the file torbrowser-install-5.0.3_en-US.exe.

After double-clicking on the Tor Browser installer, a window will open with a warning about the origin of the software. You should always take these warnings seriously and make sure you trust the software you want to install and that you got an authentic copy from the official site over a secure connection. Since you know what you want, and you know where to get the software, and the download was from the Tor Project's secure HTTPS site, go ahead and click Run.

A small window will open asking what language you want to use for the Tor Browser. There are several to choose from. Pick the language you want and click the OK button.

You'll find a new window that will tell you where the Tor Browser will be installed. The default location is your desktop. You can change this to be a different location if you want, but for now keep the default.

The installation process is complete when you see a window that says you have completed the installation process. If you click the Finish button, the Tor Browser will start immediately and Start Tor Browser shortcuts will be added to the Start Menu and Desktop.

The first time Tor Browser starts, you'll get a window that allows you to modify some settings if necessary. You might have to come back and change some configuration settings, but go ahead and try to connect to the Tor network by clicking the Connect button.

A new window will open with a green bar that illustrates Tor Browser connecting to the Tor network.

The first time Tor Browser starts it might take a bit longer than usual; but be patient, within a minute or two Tor Browser will open and congratulating you.

Click on the Tor Onion logo in the upper left of Tor Browser then the Privacy and Security Settings.

Some features of a normal web browser can make you vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks. Other features have previously had bugs in them that revealed users' identities. Turning the security slider to a high setting disables these features. This will make you safer from well-funded attackers who can interfere with your Internet connection or use new unknown bugs in these features. Unfortunately, turning off these features can make some websites unusable. The default low setting is fine for everyday privacy protection, but you can set it to high if you are worried about sophisticated attackers, or if you don't mind if some websites do not display correctly.

More:
How to: Use Tor for Windows | Surveillance Self-Defense

Last October, the Silk Road story broke when its owner Ross William Ulbricht, a 29-year-old who allegedly created and managed the Silk Road underground website, was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The police seized the website that was considered one of the most popular Underground places on the Internet for buying drugs and other illicit goods and services. Just some days after the Shutdown of Silk Road, Authorities in Britain, Sweden, and the United States arrested eight more vendors who dedicatedly used to sell illegal drugs on Silk Road. Yesterday, Cornelis Jan Slomp, a 22-year old Dutch man who allegedly used the Silk Road underground black market website to sell illegal drugs for bitcoins worth millions of dollars has agreed to plead guilty in Chicago federal court to federal drug conspiracy charge filed against him, according to a statement issued by U.S. Attorney Zachary T. Fardon in Chicago and Slomps lawyer.

FBI CASHING OUTSEIZEDBITCOIN OF WORTH$3 MILLION

Cornelis Jan Slomp, who go by the name SuperTrips was arrested with over $20,000 in cash at Miami International Airport in August where, according to police, he planned to meet with the partners in the drug trade last year. He is in custody facing a maximum term of as long as 40 years, a $5 million fine and a forfeiture of more than $3 million in alleged proceeds of his crimes.

The suspect was accused of distributing worldwide about "104 kilograms of powder 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine (MDMA); 566,000 ecstasy pills containing MDMA; four kilograms of cocaine; three kilograms of Benzodiazepine; and substantial quantities of amphetamine, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), and marijuana, in addition to allowing substantial quantities of methamphetamine, ketamine, and Xanax to be distributed through his SuperTrips vendor account from March 2012 through August 2013," according to the authorities.

FBI's TRAP

Some undercover Homeland security agents were monitoring the website for about 18 months and observed Slomp who had offered various controlled substances for sale and on April 2012, authorities at Chicagos OHare International Airport seized an envelope mailed from the Netherlands containing ecstasy hidden inside an empty two DVD cases.

"During the investigation, agents collected more than 100 similar envelopes in Chicago, each mailed from the Netherlands or Germany, containing various controlled substances," the Chicago US Attorneys Office said in a statement.

In February, Ross William Ulbricht, who allegedly created and ran the black website under the name Dread Pirate Roberts, pleaded not guilty to operating a drugs trafficking scheme, conspiring to launder money and other crimes.

U.S. Attorney Zach Fardon who formed a new cybercrime unit last month said, Illegal drug-trafficking is not new but drug-trafficking using a sophisticated underground computer network designed to protect anonymity of buyers and sellers presents new challenges to law enforcement that we are prepared to meet.

Read more:
Tor Browser Bundle - The Hacker News

Users who want to remain anonymous online often opt for using the Tor Browser, which hides their real IP address, but there are techniques that (more or less) malicious actors can used to identify them.

Browser and system fingerprinting are two of them. And while the Tor Project has already implemented a number of countermeasures against different fingerprinting methods, newer ones are popping up every now and then.

The latest ones have been demonstrated by security researcher Jose Carlos Norte.

He created proof-of-concept JavaScript code that can be inserted into the source code of a website to extract information about how users interact with their computer, their hardware, the computing power and memory speed of their computer, and so on.

This code allowed him to:

The script manages to collect this information because Norte found a way to bypass the protection of the Date.getTime() method, which prevents measuring of events happening under 100ms.

If a website is able to generate a unique fingerprint that identifies each user that enters the page, then it is possible to track the activity of this user in time, for example, correlate visits of the user during an entire year, knowing that its the same user, Norte explains.

Or even worse, it could be possible to identify the user if the fingerprint is the same in tor browser and in the normal browser used to browse internet. It is very important for the tor browser to prevent any attempt on fingerprinting the user.

Here is an example of how the fingerprint of different users using the same Tor browser version but different computers can differ:

Whether this fingerprinting method can ultimately lead to the unmasking of Tor users or not is debatable, but its good to know that security researchers are probing the defenses of such crucial software, because we can be sure malicious users do so constantly.

Norte hopes that his research will spur Tor developers to find a solution to this problem. Apparently, it already has.

In the meantime, in this particular case, users can protect themselves by simply disabling JavaScript on the Tor Browser (it is currently enabled by default).

Excerpt from:
New ways to fingerprint Tor Browser users discovered - Help ...

Tor Browser for Windows has been designed to help you preserve your privacy online. Tor Browser is a tool set that can help you anonymize web browsing and publishing, instant messaging, and other applications that use the TCP protocol. This can be helpful for private use and business use.It means that confidential information can be kept from prying eyes. ISPs, key loggers and other types of malware are not able to track your activities easily.

Tor Browser for Windows works by bouncing traffic around a distributed network of servers which it calls "onion routers". The interface allows you to toggle it on and off based upon when you need anonymity online. Tor Browser for Windows also lets you choose from various proxy tunnels based on a world map that displays exactly where each one is located.

Overall, Tor Browser for Windows is a simple, well organized and effective tool for users who are concerned about security or invasions of privacy whilst they are online. The browser interface is a standard, user friendly affair and the application is relatively lightweight.

Excerpt from:
Download Tor Browser for Windows 5.5.1 - FileHippo.com

Dont want people snooping on your browsing habits? Would you like to visit web sites anonymously? I don't blame you. Sometimes I sit back and think about all the information that I've put on the internet over the course of just my short lifetime this far. With only about 8 years of accessing the internet so far, I've put enough information to write about 10 autobiographies where each one would be different from the first. And that's just from my search results alone. Information that I've posted to social media, now that's a big book. My solution,Tor Browser; and itmay just be for you too if youre the kind of person that sees trouble lurking behind every web and ip address.

Originally developed as a 3rd generation onion routing project for the US Navy, Tors main goal, its job was to protect government communications. For years, it protected government information and it is now publicly available and publically used. People can use Tor to keep websites from tracking them and their loved ones. Tor browser can be used by your children too. Advertisers are studying everyone on the internet. If your child can access the internet, they can be targeted for ads and products that can lead to kids not feeling secure about themselves. Users are able to anonymously post to websites, social media, messengers, and other services even if they are blocked by their internet service provider.

How does it work? TorBrowser utilizes a network of virtual tunnels that result in improved security on the web. These virtual tunnels render your information near untraceable. Of course what you search for will still be recorded on the internet, however the connection between you and the information will be completely severed. Advertisers and malicious programs on the internet will be unable to locate the origin of the information. Can the government trace that information? Probably, but software developers can create communication tools that will help to protect privacy.

People use Tor for thousands of reasons. Many use it for to be able to access chat rooms for sensitive topics. When information is private, people want to feel secure about posting the information truly anonymously. You are not truly anonymous if you're using a web browser that stores and shares your information, purposely, with advertisers, government, and other miscellaneous requests. A journalist may use it to communicate more safely with whistle blowers and dissidents. Coming out with potentially harmful, dangerous information can be life threatening if you leave this information available to be obtained by anyone at anytime. Tor Onion Browser can prevent the connection between you and the information so that you feel secure because you are secure.

A branch of the U.S. Navy utilizes Tor for open source intelligence gathering. Oddly enough, the different type of people who use Tor for different reasons are what make Tor browser download even more secure, because information is being tossed around more and more. When information is scrambled amongst other information, it makes it very hard to pinpoint what information belongs with what person.

Continued here:
Tor Browser Download | Rocky Bytes

We are pleased to announce another public beta release of Tor Messenger. This release features important security updates to libotr, and addresses a number of stability and usability issues. All users are highly encouraged to upgrade.

The initial public release was a success in that it garnered a lot of useful feedback. We tried to respond to all your concerns in the comments of the blog post but also collected and aggregated a FAQ of the most common questions.

Tor Messenger now supports OTR conversations over Twitter DMs (direct messages). Simply configure your Twitter account with Tor Messenger and add the Twitter account you want as a contact. Any (direct) message you send to another Twitter contact will be sent over OTR provided that both contacts are running Tor Messenger (or another client that supports Twitter DMs and OTR).

Facebook has long officially deprecated their XMPP gateway, and it doesn't appear to work anymore. We had multiple reports from users about this issue and decided that it was best to remove support for Facebook from Tor Messenger.

We hear that an implementation of the new mqtt based protocol is in the works, so we hope to restore this functionality in the future.

Before upgrading to the new release, you will need to back up your OTR keys or simply generate new ones. Please see the following steps to back them up.

In the future, we plan to port Tor Browser's updater patches (#14388) so that keeping Tor Messenger up to date is seamless and automatic. We also plan to add a UI to make importing OTR keys and accounts from Pidgin, and other clients, as easy as possible (#16526).

The secure updater will likely be a part of the next release of Tor Messenger.

Please note that Tor Messenger is still in beta. The purpose of this release is to help test the application and provide feedback. At-risk users should not depend on it for their privacy and safety.

Linux (32-bit)

Linux (64-bit)

Windows

OS X (Mac)

sha256sums.txt sha256sums.txt.asc

The sha256sums.txt file containing hashes of the bundles is signed with the key 0x6887935AB297B391 (fingerprint: 3A0B 3D84 3708 9613 6B84 5E82 6887 935A B297 B391).

Here is the complete changelog since v0.1.0b4:

Tor Messenger 0.1.0b5 -- March 09, 2016

Read more from the original source:
Blogs | The Tor Blog