TOR – Anonymous Web Browsing

TOR is a tool I’ve known about for some time but never really had a chance to check out.  Tonight I sat down and spent a few minutes with it.  It’s very cool.  I downloaded the TOR browser bundle which is basically a minimalist way to check it out.  The bundle includes a TOR client as well as a version of Firefox portable.  By expanding it into a folder or even onto a USB drive you can run TOR and see what it’s like to browse the net anonymously.  So why would you want to browse the web anonymously you ask?  Well I can think of plenty of reasons. I often want to check some of the web sites I run from a remote connection to test firewalls and connectivity.  TOR basically relays your connection out and around the net.  That makes it possible to remotely test websites without having to use a remote tool to connect to a remote computer.  What I found out about this little bundle is quite cool. It has a built in bandwidth monitor, the ability to check out the nodes on the TOR network, the ability to dynamically change your network identity and the ability to make yourself a TOR relay.  Pretty cool stuff. 

I fired up the Firefox portable browser with TOR and went to www.myipaddress.com  to check out what was being reported as my IP. It came back with an IP address in Germany.  When I went to Google sure enough I was sent to the German version of Google.  Very cool.

So I only have you one reason for browsing anonymously but I’m sure you have your own reason. It’s a very cool tool and will now takes it’s place on my USB utility belt.