For at least a year now, I’ve been interested in installing and using Tor, the software which hides your IP address by bouncing your packets among a number of servers.  But I held off — it seemed a pain to install.  Plus, to be totally protected, you need to encrypt your packets.  And I couldn’t imagine that attorneys would be interested in going to those lengths to protect their anonymity.

But after reading Nicholas Carr’s book, The Big Switch, and thinking about how some companies want to control what we watch and do on the Web, I decided to install the Windows and Linux versions of Tor on my dual-boot laptop.

The WIndows installation couldn’t have been easier.  Everything you need comes in one bundle: Tor, Vidalia (graphical user interface for Tor), Privoxy (filtering Web proxy), and Torbutton (Firefox add-on that lets you turn Tor on and off).  It’s all pre-configured to work together.  Once the bundle finished installing, I saw a green onion (Vidalia) and a blue P (Prixovy) in my Windows system tray.  When I launched Firefox, I saw Tor Enabled in the lower right-hand corner of the status bar.  (Double-click on it and it turns Tor off.)

To test, I sent emails to my Gmail account with Tor enabled/disabled.   When Tor wasn’t running, my email contained the IP address of Jenkins’ wifi network.  With Tor on, I saw a random IP address.  Cool!

I can customize Privoxy so that it blocks my referrer address (the link I followed to get to a specific site) and hides my user agent (i.e. operating system and browser).  But for now, I’m going to go with the standard installation until I’ve had time to fully test Tor.

Speaking of which, I’ve noticed 2 issues so far.  Google is my homepage.  Since Tor bounces my packets around the world, I get a different version of Google each time I click on the home button.  For example, today my home page initially was Google Sweden, then after 10 minutes or so, it became Google Germany.  It’s kind of amusing to see where my “fake” IP address is located by this method.  Anyway, I can always go to U.S. Google by typing www.google.us.  Here’s a less amusing problem: with Tor enabled, Google thinks I’m an automated bot.  I have to enter a CAPTCHA every time I want to search.

And let me tell you, Web surfing with Tor is slooow.  But they warned me about that.

And now to the Linux installation.  A disaster.  I’m running Dapper Drake, an old version of Ubuntu.  It’s the only distro I could get to work on my 5 year-old hand-me-down laptop.  I had to do a lot of manual installing and fiddling — made me actually appreciate Windows for a bit — before I had to give up.  In the end, I quit because Torbutton wouldn’t work with my version of Firefox, which I can’t seem to be able to upgrade successfully.  And wifi on my Linux partition is slow to begin with, so Tor would have made me want to scream.  Par for the course, I guess.

I’m probably not going to use Tor enabled by default.  I have no idea how, say, Amazon would handle Tor’s IP randoization if I was trying to buy a book.  But I’m interested in testing that, and any other things that come to mind.

Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian
on October 01, 2008 - 10:10 am

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