So you want to surf the web anonymously? TOR's one of, if not the best, way to do it, and best of all it's FREE (and easy to setup and use).

In this tutorial we'll explain in "Layman's Terms", what Tor is.

Tor (used to stand for "The Onion Router", but it's no longer considered an abbreviation, so it's just "Tor"), is an anonymity network, used to surf the web (and more) anonymously. Basically, anyone running the Tor software on their computer runs a proxy, and traffic gets passed (encrypted) from one person running Tor to another person running Tor, multiple times through many users, until it get's to the page that you requested. Hence the term "Onion" used to describe it, since it works in "layers". Each person running Tor on their computer is called a "Node".

To the page (and anyone logging requests to that page, such as the website owner for example) they can only see the IP address of the last Node (called the "end node"). Any communication along the way, between you, when you request the website page, and the final destination, is encrypted, and cannot be analyzed. However, the last Node in the chain can log and view traffic through it, if the person running it is unscrupulous, so for that reason it can't be said that Tor is 100% anonymous.

There are a few different ways to use Tor, so we'll explain to you the basic ones. First off, you need to decide which program you'll want to use along side of Tor itself:

• Polipo cache's pages and does a few other more technical things that for the purpose of this tutorial I won't explain, so that you don't feel confused or overwhelmed, (if anyone else wants to go into technical details on what Polipo does, comments are welcome) suffice it to say, you don't really need to know that stuff in order to use Tor. Polipo is for that reason, said to be faster while using Tor, and often it is, but not always, and it's also said to be the less secure option of the two as far as your privacy is concered. It will giv eyou a new IP address when surfing, however it is said to also leak alot of your real information along the way.
• The other option is using Privoxy instead of Polipo. Privoxy doesn't cache your web pages, but it's much more secure as far as leaking any of your real information. Since it does no caching, it can be painfully (brutally, ripping out hair) slow most of the time.

So it boils down to do you want speed, or security. Polipo for speed, Privoxy for security. Regardless of yoru choice, Tor is generally still just too slow to use 100% of your time on the internet, so you'll really only want to use it when wanting to remain private for a short time.

Tor is also much too slow, and for some other reasons, it's highly discouraged to use it for something like Torrent downloading.

You can download Tor from this page: Clicky

Be sure to read our beginner's tutorials on how to actually USE Tor and get ya all set up! Just choose one (or all) of the links below.