It is founded by computer scientists Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson, and five others. is a 501(c)(3) research-education nonprofit organization based in Winchester, New Hampshire. However, that only works reliably for websites that an observer can monitor to match the timing of requests.2gzyxa5ihm7nsggfxnu52 rck2vv4rvmdlkiu3zzui5du 4xyclen53wid.onion ( Accessing link help) The project notes that someone observing both a website’s traffic and your computer could infer that a given session is related to your usage that’s a government-scale form of activity, which could be pinpointed against an individual or could be a country-wide strategy to track as much Tor use as possible. You can bump up a protection slider higher than the default, reducing the odds of being characterized uniquely, and making it harder for a remote party to have potential pathways for malware.

In these enhanced settings, the Tor browser’s sets several options by default to make you less easy to track using well-known techniques that can uniquely identify a browser by installed fonts, browser version, platform information, and other data a statistically significant percentage of the time. The privacy settings let you clamp down on browser characteristics that can be used to track or identify your browser uniquely. (Tor’s name once stood for The Onion Router, referring to a technical definition of onion.) IDG But it has its own privacy and security settings, reachable via a green onion icon in the toolbar. The Tor browser, which is built as a modified version of the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox, enables a number of features by default, including always-on private browsing mode.

It’s effectively a series of anonymized VPN tunnels. Encryption established by the originating browser prevents any snooper learning more about the full pathway. No router knows about anything except the immediately previous and successive connections. Each session, which lasts about 10 minutes, creates a “circuit” through a randomly selected set of routers. The Tor browser, a multi-platform Web viewer that relies on passing through a series of encrypted tunnels to and between Tor routers that are run by volunteers and organizations around the world. Each Tor session creates a “circuit” through intermediate routers, none of which knows the full path.

The tor web browser