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Bring-more-tor-into-your-life.md (2665B)

    

  1. ---
  2. date: 2015-11-11
  3. # vim: tw=80
  4. title: Bring more Tor into your life
  5. layout: post
  6. tags: [privacy, tor]
  7. ---
  9. [Tor](https://www.torproject.org/) is a project that improves your privacy
  10. online by encrypting and bouncing your connection through several nodes before
  11. leaving for the outside world. It makes it much more difficult for someone
  12. spying on you to know who you're talking to online and what you're saying to
  13. them. Many people use it with the Tor Browser (a fork of Firefox) and only use
  14. it with HTTP.
  16. What some people do not know is that Tor works at the TCP level, and can be used
  17. for any kind of traffic. There is a glaring issue with using Tor for your daily
  18. browsing - it's significantly slower. That being said, there are several things
  19. you run on your computer where speed is not quite as important. I am personally
  20. using Tor for several things (this list is incomplete):
  22. * IRC (chat)
  23. * Email client
  24. * DNS lookups (systemwide)
  25. * Downloading system updates
  27. Anything that supports downloading through a SOCKS proxy can be used through
  28. Tor. You can also use programs like
  29. [torify](https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/TorifyHOWTO) to
  30. transparently wrap syscalls in Tor for any program (this is how I got my email
  31. to use Tor).
  33. Of course, Tor can't help you if you compromise yourself. You should not use
  34. bittorrent over Tor, and you should check your other applications. You should
  35. also be using SSL/TLS/etc on top of Tor, so that exit nodes can't be evil with
  36. your traffic.
  38. ## Orbot
  40. I also use Tor on my phone. I run all of my phone's traffic through Tor, since I
  41. don't use the internet on my phone much. I have whitelisted apps that need to
  42. stream video or audio, though, for the sake of speed. You can do this, too - set
  43. up a black or whitelist of apps on your phone whose networking will be done
  44. through Tor. The app for this is
  45. [here](https://guardianproject.info/apps/orbot/).
  47. ## Why bother?
  49. The easy answer is "secure everything". If you don't have a good reason to
  50. remain insecure, you should default to secure. That argument doesn't work on
  51. everyone, though, so here are some others.
  53. * Securing trivial traffic makes more noise to hide the things you care about
  54. * You can have more peace of mind about using public WiFi networks if you're
  55.     using Tor.
  56. * ISPs can't inject extra ads and tracking into things you're using over Tor.
  57. * The NSA targets people who use Tor. If you "have nothing to hide", then you
  58.     can help defend those who do by adding more noise and giving agencies that
  59.     engage in illegal spying a bigger haystack. Bonus: Tor helps make sure that
  60.     even though you're being looked at, you're secure.