Explaining Tor the IC way
Normally when you go online, your request for any website or Internet service travels from your computer more or less directly to the server that hosts your final destination, the site or service you are trying to visit/access. At every stop along the way, however, your request cherfully announces exactly where on the Internet it come from, and exactly where on the Internet it is going, thanks to identifiers called source and destination headers, which you can think of as the address info on a postcard. Because of these headers, your Internet browsing can easily be identified as yours by, among others, webmasters, network admins, and most importantly foreign entities and intelligence services.
But is there a safer, faster, and all-around more efficient way to do this without using proxies or virtual private networks as shield? Yes through the Tor network. Tor is not a proxy server or VPN service. See Differences
Explaining Tor
The Tor Project was a creation of the United State military, that ended up becoming one of the few effective shields against the state’s surveillance. Tor is FOSS that is free and open source software that anybody can copy, distribute, modify to suit their wants all for free. And if used carefully, allows the user to browse online with the closest thing to perfect anonymity that can be practically acheived at scale. It protocol were developed by the US Naval Research Laboratory throughout the mid 1990s, and in 2003 it was released to the public, to the worldwide civilian population on whom its functionality depends. This is because Tor operates on a cooperatives community model, relying on tech-savvy volunteers all over the globe who run their own Tor servers out of their basements, attos, and garages. By routing it users Internet traffic through these servers, Tor does the same job of protecting the origin of the user traffic as the same thing as the IC “non-attributed research” system, with the primary difference being that Tor does it better, or at least more efficiently. With the Tor protocol, your traffic is distributed and bounced around through randomly generated pathways from Tor server, with the purpose being to replace your identity as the source of a communication with that of the last Tor server in the constantly shifting chain.
How Does IT Work
Virtually none of the Tor servers, which are called layers, know the identity of, or any identifying information about the origin of the traffic. And in a true stroke of genius, the one Tor server that does know the origin(the very first Tor server in the chain) does not know where the traffic is headed. Put it simply: the first Tor server that connects you tot the Tor network, called a gateway, knows the one sending a request, but because it isn’t allowed to read that request, it has no idea whether you’re looking for a pet memes or info about North Korea and the final Tor server that your request passes through, called an exit, knows exactly what’s being asked for, but no idea who’s asking for it.
This layering method is called onion routing, which gives Tor it’s name: The Onion Router. The classifies joke was that trying to surveil the Tor network makes spies want to cry. Therein lies the project’s irony: here was a US millary-developed tech that made cyberintelligence simultaneously harder and easier, applying hacker know how tp protect the anonymity of IC officers, but only at the price of granting that same anonymity to adversaries and to average users across the globe. In the sense, Tor was even more neutral than Switzerland Link, Tor was a life changer, giving the Internet with just the slightest taste of freedom from being observed.
