The Onion Router, now called Tor, is a privacy-focused web browser run by a nonprofit group.
    • emberwit@feddit.deEnglish
      5·
      11 months ago

      It’s a web browser. Slower than others and some pages won’t work but other than that, it does just that.

      • Mummelpuffin@beehaw.orgEnglish
        6·
        11 months ago

        …I mean, it’s more like the web browser makes it easy to use the Tor network. The network is the slow part. Your requests are getting ping-ponged all over the world intentionally taking the long way around.

      • interolivary@beehaw.org
        6·
        11 months ago

        On the other hand, there’s no way to track you. Useful for looking up medical info in a way that search engines and such can’t relate back to you. Often I’ll keep browsing in it once I’ve opened it because it’s just basically Firefox.

        This is only true if you have the most “paranoid” security level selected, and at that point anything that relies on Javascript (or any of the other features that get blocked) will break. Enabling Javascript or the other blocked Web features will make it fairly trivial to track you especially the more you browse, so at that point you might as well just be using a regular VPN.

        Tor itself isn’t the problem in this equation, it’s the browser, and they tend to leak information like a sieve

          • interolivary@beehaw.org
            2·
            11 months ago

            Sure, it all depends on how paranoid you are, my point was more that saying someone is untrackable if they use Tor has a lot of caveats.

            For the average pleb it’s probably fine, if all they’re doing is just trying to dodge regular trackers and not the authorities

    • ctr1@fl0w.ccEnglish
      2·
      11 months ago

      It’s great for anything low bandwidth that isn’t tied to your identity, and helps for peace of mind, despite its issues. You do run into captcha or DDOS protection issues occasionally, but the new tor circuit for this site button sometimes works. Also it uses letterboxing to prevent resolution-based fingerprinting, which isn’t very pretty, but leaving it at its default size (or locking the size using the WM) works well and is good for privacy.

    • Audalin@beehaw.org
      1·
      11 months ago

      It’s great when you want to connect two devices behind NAT without relying on any specific third-party server or service. I ssh to my laptop from my phone with it when away from it.

      It’s also useful to circumvent censorship, though it depends on the country. Also, websites employing wide-range IP blocks, in my experience, more often than not still allow Tor.

        • Audalin@beehaw.org
          2·
          11 months ago

          You run a Tor Hidden Service with sshd on one device. Knowing the .onion address, the correct port and having the corresponding private key on the other device (all of that not really subject to change), you can run the Tor daemon on it (for Android, you can use Termux) and connect with ssh, using torify nc %h %p as ProxyCommand.