Tor

[tansqrx 0]

I have recently found an extremely wonderful piece of software and I want to share it with everyone. It is useful, open source, and of course free. The great collection of 1’s and 0’s is called Tor (tor.eff.org/). Tor is essentially a privacy application that you can use to surf the internet “anonymously”. Of course I have to but anonymous in quotes because with current technology there is no true anonymousness when entering the internet. Tor does bring this goal one step further. Tor is a research project funded by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), another wonderful organization that you should check out. I will let the site explain the details but basically Tor is a network of computers running the Tor software. The network forms sort of a cloud where each Tor server only knows the recipient and who to sent the data to. With a chain of several Tor Servers it is possible to completely loose the IP of the original client and server. The links between each Tor server and the client is encrypted to prevent any eavesdropping.I installed Tor over a week ago and for the most part I am very pleased with it. The install was not completely straight forward but far from impossible. To surf using a web browser you have to also install Privoxy (http://www.privoxy.org/) and configure some of the Privoxy config files. Tor runs as a console application so an annoying DOS window remains in the task bar. There is an additional piece of software that I use to run Tor as a windows service and report the status messages via a system tray icon.In most cases browsing was just as quick as without a proxy. Every now and then I will hit a circuit that times-out or is very slow. This is perhaps the biggest downfall but a livable one considering what you give up in privacy when not using a proxy such as this one. I have also connected mIRC and several other applications, all of which work well.I have great plans for Tor in the future. I have been writing an application that uses proxies to search the internet that has been giving me a hard time lately. If all goes well. Tor will solve my problems entirely. Just start the search and the proxy changes for me automatically every 10 minutes. Also in the future Tor may support BitTorrent which will make downloading a lot safer.Give Tor a try and if you don’t like it or don’t have a strong sense of privacy, chunk it. But I think you will be surprisingly pleased with what you find.

[yordan 10]

Very interesting. I will give it a try. I am currently trying to install it. How do you know that it works ? Is there a site where you can check your IP address, in order to see if you are anonymized ?Yordan

[yordan 10]

OK, everything is installed. Unfortunately id does not work here. 404 error : Your request for http://forums.xisto.com/topic/86590-topic/?findpost=& could not be fulfilled, because the domain name http://forums.xisto.com/ could not be resolved.
So, I will not be able to check my anonymous address at ipid.shat.net and showmyip.com.

[Reaver 0]

There is an additional piece of software that I use to run Tor as a windows service and report the status messages via a system tray icon.

Hey tansqrx can you please give me more information on this peice of sortware if possible as i would like to give Tor a full run through and find out all the possibilities as you said it works in Mirc and this will be one of my main purposes of using Tor.

Also is it possible to use two Tor services or clients and mask the mask or am i going of on the wrong tangent here.

Cheers

Reaver

[jipman 0]

Tor's a proxy serv, you only need one of those. Also, you don't need a client, just setup your browser/mailer/mirc to use the socks server.

[Reaver 0]

Jipman let me explain what i am trying to acheive, i asked about running to "clients" because i wanted to know if its possible to have to fake ips on 1 computer so i could for example join the same mirc channel twice from the same computer. And i thought maybe this is possible with Tor , but thats where my line of reasoning went

[jipman 0]

You know that Tor works in a kind of a P2P like kinda way?.So, if you would run 2 ToR services, which is perfectly possible, and have 2 irc clients and connect them both with either one of the service, chances are that you will be able to connect, since it's very likely that each server will find a different route to the server.If you mean fake ip's in this way, then yes, it's possible.

[tansqrx 0]

Reaver,

The program that I use to control Tor is TorCP and can be found at http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/, I found it as a link off the Tor Wiki at http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/. I followed the instructions for adding Tor as a windows service, basically âtor -service startâ. I then added a control listener to the torrc file which is all explain in the instructions.

As for some of the other questions, Yes Tor acts like a proxy server. The unique catch is that the proxy never takes the same path, rarely has the same exit point, and is very hard to trace. The Tor Wiki showes how to torify many applications. One gripe that I have noticed. When running mIRC, many of the exit points have already been banned. This shows that there are a limited number of exits and apparent many are heavily used. Besides that I have had little trouble. I am even looking into setting up my own server.

[abhiram 0]

Tor is really cool. I gave it a try when I was at home for the holidays and wasn't behind a proxy server (in college, I am so I don't think it'll work). One thing that really convinced me that it was working fine was the fact that everytime I run TOR and open google.com, it would give me the page in a different language... rarely english . I got japanese, portugese, spanish... Also, I've heard that it's literally impossible to trace the IP back to the original computer because of the way it branches out while trying to reach the destination IP.

[Zony 0]

This looks pretty cool. Think I will try after I have reinstalled XP.

[yordan 10]

I tried it yesterday, it works fine. It works even better than the anonymizer proxies. I saw that the anonymizer proxies changed my proxy address, but did not change my physical IP address. And tor changed my IP address to a really anonymous one. thanks for the info, tansqrx.And you are right, abhiram, it does not work behind a proxy, it works only if you can surf without proxy.if you can surf without proxy, you can surf anoymously with a proxy.

[spacewaste1405241471 0]

Strange...Very strange.A while back there was a tutorial about this, and it was a good tutorial, very useful/helpful.I can't seem to find it anymore though.My two cents on tor though: No matter what people say, it will lag your connection a little bit...Because you'll be logging on from different parts of the world...And it's basicly like playing on a american server whilst you are in china :/ {lag}.Though, I must admit it is quite secure, and helps me out from time to time .Advice though, when reading on the tor website, make sure you look into privoxy, because your browser may still leak out your info, depending the sockS you are using, so it's always nice to be as safe as you can possibly be.Another thing though, when browsing with tor, on framed pages, if you are logged in using a specific ip, chances are that ip will change every time you go to a another page on the framed site, so be sure to not use tor when you are in that situation, though it will only be during times of games or high security, in which you won't need tor anyways, because it's already secure, so you should be fine .Enjoy.

[yordan 10]

A while back there was a tutorial about this

Maybe you are talking about this tutorial : http://forums.xisto.com/topic/79591-topic/?findpost=