Browse Anonymously

Anonymity on the Internet may be a marketer’s nightmare, preventing the gathering of data about who is visiting your site, but as a means of protecting and enabling individuals to more safely interact online, anonymity is a must. While wandering through the halls of the Westin Seattle, where CFP2005 recently took place, we ran into Roger Dingledine of the Tor project. At first we thought we were talking to a representative of the well known sci-fi publisher, but soon discovered Tor is the developer of an application designed to plugin to browsers and enable anonymous communication. Tor delivers anonymous connections by routing all your Internet traffic, including browsing, IRC and SSH through multiple onion routers making it difficult for someone checking server stats to determine where information you receive came from or where your outbound information is going. While this doesn’t keep people from seeing information you transmit, it does keep them from knowing that your information came from you. We talked to Roger about applications for Tor, potential hurdles to overcome for implementing anonymous communication and how anonymity enables people to communicate safely in places where there might be dangers associated with people discovering your true location.