TOR: Anonymous internet

Last week when I was reading slashdot, I stumbled upon TOR-- an anonymous Internet communication system. I decided to check it out.

Installation

I ended up having to download a few things to get it going well.. but it wasn't really much of a pain..

• TOR - the anonymous web router system.
• Privoxy - a lean web proxy which strips off identifying information.
• Switchproxy - a plugin for Firefox which allows me to toggle TOR routing really easily.

After running through the well-documented install instructions, I was up and running. This is how I visualize this stuff:

Before
Browser--> makes request--> real destination

After
Browser--> makes request--> local proxy (Privoxy)--> privatizes request--> forwards to TOR--> real destination

Conclusion

TOR seems to be pretty well thought out with regard to anonymous internet browsing.. but how does it perform? TOR works by first creating a circuit (private encrypted network path between TOR servers), then using that circuit to serve up content. I found (anecdotally) the circuit building to be noticeably slow.. but once a circuit was created, the browsing experience was fairly smooth. Since TOR is really into anonymity, it automagically re-creates a circuit after small period of inactivity (like every two minutes)... which was slow.

The latency created by TOR establishing circuits got annoying pretty quickly. When I am at work, I use the internet in a pretty choppy fashion.. so every time I need to lookup something on google or whatever, I had to wait for a circuit to be created. However, a nice benefit of TOR is the "get around your corporate website blocker" feature.. So if I ever need to access a site that was deemed inappropriate by a company, I could easily do that by routing through TOR.

Overall, I like the concept and will probably run a TOR server at home, just to further the cause.