Illusion Of Anonymity In The Internet. Do Tools Like Thor Really Work?

Illusion of Anonymity in the internet. Do tools like Thor really work?.

Most of the time this information is obtained using cookies. An HTTP cookie is a small piece of data sent from a website and stored in the user's web client while the user is browsing it. Whenever user loads the website, the browser sends the cookie back to the server and notifies about the user's previous activity. Cookies were designed for websites to remember specific information thus allowing better browsing experience. However, sometimes cookies and especially third-party tracking cookies, are used as ways to compile long-term records of individuals' browsing histories. In addition, many websites don't even warn the user about the use of cookies.

Today Tor is a non-profit organisation that focuses on research into online privacy and anonymity. Several years ago Tor was hardly heard of outside the IT community, but as more and more average users became aware of the information snooping it became the most popular tool of its' kind. In a year, Tor has grown from 500,000 daily users worldwide to more than 4 million users. And even though U.S. Navy still uses Tor, it is used every day for a wide variety of purposes by the journalists, law enforcement officers, activists, whistleblowers and ordinary people that are concerned about their anonymity.

Tor also potentially secures your everyday browsing via mobile phone. since people tend to browse using their smartphones more and more often. Orbot brings the features and functionality of Tor to the Android mobile operating system. It claims to allow users to access websites, email and messaging without being monitored. Orbot works on the same principle as Tor and has the ability to anonymize all of the TCP traffic on your Android device. However, the project is still under active development and sometimes struggles to stay up to date with all changes in Android and mobile threats.

Another tool that Tor provides is Ahmia - open-source search engine software for hidden onion sites. Ahmia indexes and searches content published on Tor Hidden Services. This content cannot be accessed unless you are using Tor, which means anonymous content sharing and reading.

Reliability is a huge factor in packet traffic. If your data won't reach the destination there is no point to anonymize the connection. Exitmap is a Python tool Tor uses to systematically scan for malicious and misbehaving exit relays. If such a relay is found, it is given the “BadExit” flag which won't allow it to be used as an exit node. Similarly, a notification service called DocTor checks for a handful of other issues like Sybil attacks.