Tor or Not to Tor...That is the Question

[JohnyMac]

Folks...What are your thoughts on Tor? I am thinking of going this way?

Why? Just to poke the eye of .gov not planning on using it for a notorious purposes.

Thoughts?

[Kbop]

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tails_(operating_system)
https://tails.boum.org/

 

[APX808]

I wrote an intro to Tor with practical exercises http://apx808.blogspot.com/p/anonymous-browsing.html

During the last years some vulnerabilities were discovered but they fixed them and it provides a great protection of anonymity if you follow some basic guidelines.

Tor forces the gov to target someone specifically instead of just being able to monitor traffic massively, and if you aren't a HVT the gov isn't going to be expending time and resources in tracking your Tor traffic.

So, I like Tor, I like its philosophy and I encourage its use.

[JohnyMac]

Awesome blog site APX! 

I am on Tor as I type. 

Question for you: Using your email account while on Tor will your email be encrypted?

[APX808]

Using your email on Tor is a bad idea because you potentially lose your anonymity, login on anything could affect your anonymity, specially sites not using HTTPS, just like this forum.

If your email provider uses HTTPS, practically all of them do, your credentials and stuff you type should be encrypted by HTTPS protecting them to be eavesdropped in Tor exit nodes.

What you can do if you want to use your email on Tor is to open a Tor session exclusively to check your email, then restart the session in Tor and do your browsing.

[JohnyMac]

Thx APX. I kind of knew that just needed to be be verified.

Better yet encrypt your emails using the step by step set-up that APX talks about in the Communications forum.