I am officially the coolest dude in Brooklyn (in my head at least). I have my very own Tor t-shirt! A few weeks ago one of the developers of the software emailed me to let me know that I had been running a fast Tor server for some time now and he asked me if I wanted a free t-shirt. Naturally I said yes. Soon after, I received a package with the shirt. It’s the coolest, ever. Click the thumbnails if you want a better look at the front and back.

Tor is a free program that provides onion routing anonymity for just about any program using the TCP protocol (browsing, blogging, instant messaging, IRC and SSH to name a few of the uses). In this day and age, with privacy rights getting raped, prison-style and draconian governments throwing people in prisons for thought crimes, it’s a good and necessary thing to have and to support. I run Tor on a Linux server (Ubuntu) I rent somewhere in Florida to give back to the network I occasionally use. I don’t really use the server for much, so I don’t limit the bandwidth I give to Tor, allowing it to be one of the faster middlemen in the web of servers that make up the Tor network. I think it’s pretty cool shit.

Tor is available for Linux, Windows and Mac. The project is non-profit and is supported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and people like you (if you’re cool) and me (I’m so totally neat). You should download Tor, in case you should ever need it. If you have some free bandwidth, consider running a Tor server. You can also help the project by donation. If all of this isn’t your bag of nuts, you might want to think about becoming a member of the EFF and supporting the fight to protect digital rights and privacy. It’s all good shit.

Daveb recently got around to installing Tor, an anonymous proxy surfing agent. The project’s homepage describes it as:

Tor is a toolset for a wide range of organizations and people that want to improve their safety and security on the Internet. Using Tor can help you anonymize web browsing and publishing, instant messaging, IRC, SSH, and more. Tor also provides a platform on which software developers can build new applications with built-in anonymity, safety, and privacy features.

Your traffic is safer when you use Tor, because communications are bounced around a distributed network of servers, called onion routers. Instead of taking a direct route from source to destination, data packets on the Tor network take a random pathway through several servers that cover your tracks so no observer at any single point can tell where the data came from or where it’s going. This makes it hard for recipients, observers, and even the onion routers themselves to figure out who and where you are. Tor’s technology aims to provide Internet users with protection against “traffic analysis,” a form of network surveillance that threatens personal anonymity and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security.

Granted, to most people, this makes no sense or seems hardly worth it, but trust daveb when he tells you that nothing quite thrills him as seeing his IP address, geographic location and machine name change with each request sent to or from his browser or whatever the hell he configures to work with Tor. It’s the shit. It’s open source, free, available on all platforms and is backed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who are all a bunch of good people. Daveb recommends.