How to help our friends in Iran, Honduras, China

[Warpy]

and even help ourselves preserve our anonymity on the net: join the Tor Project.

Tor is a network that routes your computer through a series of proxies to make it extremely difficult to trace who and where you are. The practical side of this is that you can surf anonymously. The extremely practical side of this is that people in heavily censored countries can also post on the web and their authorities will not be able to trace their IPs.

I've been using it for about a week, and while it's a little disconcerting to see Google ads on DU in Dutch, French, or other languages, the whole thing seems to work fairly well.

The best way to get started is here: https://www.torproject.org/ Read all the disclaimers carefully to see if it's useful to you. The best way to get started is to download the Tor+browser. It will give you a stripped down Firefox, perfect for using Tor. You can use your other copy of Firefox if you need to use the extensions and leave the Tor enabled copy in the background.

It's little enough to do to help our unfree friends.

(so far, it's not illegal, but I doubt the PTB will be amused for long)

[woo me with science]

1. Not sure I understand this.

How does my using Tor help them? I have seen the sites to help you set up proxies for others to use, but they seem extremely complicated to me. I don't understand how my simply using TOR will set up a new proxy, rather than just using and slowing down one that is already out there? I guess I just don't understand the concept.

For the record, I did try TOR, and I found it extremely frustrating. It slowed the browser down to a crawl, even using Firefox.

[RoyGBiv]

2. Theory ...

The theory is, the more people that use it, the better it works, which is true as far as it goes. The "help" is of an indirect sort. The more people in "free" societies allowing their systems to be used as gateways, the easier it is for those in more repressive areas to access things that tend to be blocked.

It will slow things down, however.

[Warpy]

3. The newest version of Tor fixed that problem in Firefox

I usually keep a stripped down version of Firefox to run Tor on and do my surfing with an up to date version with bells and whistles. I have Tor set on "help users in places with censorship" since I don't really go many places that need to be visited anonymously.

Tor just does a runaround when you're surfing. In other words, DU is reading my IP as (usually) Germany or the Netherlands rather than flyover country USA and the Google ads post accordingly. It's a way for users to keep their surfing anonymous and flummox prying eyes in the government.

The downside is that the military and intelligence communities in various countries also use it as well as a few people who are engaging in illegal activities.

However, the sheer number of Tor users who have signed up in Iran and China, especially, make it unlikely that my IP is being hijacked by anybody who doesn't desperately need to cover their tracks from a punitive government.

I'll admit, though, that it's a stinker to set up properly.