Tor was in the headlines for two reasons last week; first, Facebook launched its own Tor service, then later in the week it was mentioned in almost all reports about the closing down of Silk Road 2.0, a dark net market place where users bought and sold illegal narcotics.
Tor is often associated with the shadiest side of the internet, including the drug and arms trades, and child pornography - but you might be surprised to learn that Tor was originally developed by the US Navy.
So what exactly is Tor?
It is an anonymising web browser. When you are online your IP address works as your digital figure print – browsers like Tor bounce web traffic through thousands of computers, obscuring your IP address.
Rather than going straight from A to B, this traffic goes through a random trail of computers around the world. The history of the individual movements are erased. This allows a computer to go from A to B through this network of other computers in a way that is effectively impossible to track.
Is this legal?
Yes, this is all totally legal – but untraceable browsing can hide illegal behaviour. Using Tor, illegal acts like buying illicit substances or viewing child pornography are very difficult to trace, so people who engage in these illegal activities can be enabled by anonymous browsing.
What else is it used for?
Tor is used for a lot of reasons. The US Navy developed it to allow them to communicate securely. In the post-Snowden internet landscape, the use of anonymous browsers like Tor has become more common.
On a basic level there are a few reasons why you might want to browse anonymously; if you live under an oppressive regime that blocks sites like Twitter or Facebook, Tor could be used to bypass blocks placed by local internet providers.
In more open societies, it is used by many people who are not comfortable with the idea that internet service providers or companies like Google and Facebook are logging their personal information and selling it to advertisers, or making their information available to government agencies like the NSA in the US and GCHQ in the UK.
Facebook and Tor
Mark "Privacy is No-Longer a Social Norm" Zuckerberg’s Facebook has just launched a hidden Tor version of the site. Before now, Tor users had problems accessing Facebook; because of the way that Tor bounces information around the internet it appears to the site that users are browsing from Dublin, then moving to Tokyo or Cape Town or Mexico City within a few seconds. When Facebook picked up these different locations, it blocked users accounts because it thought that their accounts had been hacked.
The Tor platform will allow users in regions where the social network is blocked to access the site without this problem. The new server will improve Tor surfers' user-experience and increase their security. It could be an early sign that Tor is starting to enter mainstream internet usage.
