TOR try out

Out of curiosity just to see if it worked etc, i installed the TorButton for FF from the official www. I noticed it only showed & had the option for Polipo, whatever that is. However i was unable to surf to ANY www whatsoever.

Why would that be ?

On here https://www.torproject.org/download/download.html.en amongst other bundles, it mentions Vidalia Bundle = Contains Tor, Vidalia, Polipo.

What's the difference between Vidalia & Polipo ?

Managed to log in here & then tried posting this from the above TOR bundle,



but Very slow I couldn't even post a smiley, never mind upload the screenie How people put up with it, if my experience was anything to go by =

 

Polipo is kind of a web proxy. When you install the Tor bundle, the first thing you should do is click "Run TorBrowser". This connects you to Tor, gets Vidalia up and running and brings up the bundled and configured Firefox. It's quite slow often because of the proxies and such. I found no real slow down though on run of the mill websites. .Onion links were a different kettle of fish.

 

@ dw426

Thanks for your prompt reply

What about my earlier experience with just the TorButton FF extension, before i installed the bundle. = It didn't work ?

By the way, the TB was installed the other day whilst ShadowDefender was enabled = Deleted after rebooting.

TIA

 

I honestly don't know, Clone. Did you see an icon either in Firefox or down in your taskbar that stated Tor was running? I've never dealt with installing Tor the old fashioned way, meaning trying it with my own copy of FF. I always used the bundle, and, if Vidalia was green (it's an onion icon in the taskbar), I knew Tor was configured and running. When you first start Tor, it's supposed to set itself up by connecting you to multiple other computers and doing all the networking magic. Maybe you tried surfing before it was done doing that? It can take a few minutes on occasion as it hunts down nodes for you to connect to and do everything else.

 

For what it's worth, that's also what I did (for Linux, though).
And like you, dw426, I had no real slow down of "regular" websites.

 

If you had not previously installed Tor, TorButton would point FF to Tor proxies that were not there.

 

Tor pads packets, and gets very slow when there are many requests for small files. Sites with simple static HTML are fastest. Sites with dynamic HTML involving lots of client-server traffic and numerous small graphic elements are slow.

Ra at -ra.fnord.at has Tor fast gateway VM that rejects nodes with high latencies. It's based on OpenWrt, is tiny, and boots in about 3 seconds. Running Tor in VMs is wise, as others have noted on Wilders.

 

@ dw426

OK thanks Yes Vidalia was green.

Well that explains it, Thanks

 

Good stuff I hope this thread can turn into a good source of information for people that want to give TOR a try, and for people to share their experiences from doing so.

The last time I tried it it was pretty slow. For me personally, too slow to deal with. But I've heard it's sped up substantially since then.

Surf anonymously my friends...

 

The bad thing about it is that to remain private and really use Tor effectively, you need to kill Flash, Java, Javascript, cookies and so on. Heck, you can do that without needing to resort to the slowness of Tor. For more "suspicious" activities, yeah, well, you need the slowness of Tor

 

^ Yep, that's what sucks about proxies. ^

And the scary part is I don't think a lot of people really understand this. In some cases they're actually lessening their security/privacy, not increasing it.

But for me personally there are very few cases where I need scripts enabled. When I need to log in/post somewhere (which I only do 2 places), check email, or purchase online from Amazon or EBay. When I'm not doing one of these things I'll sometimes even use the Ixquick proxy on top of my VPN. It's surprisingly quick.

 

Torbutton turns of all Firefox add-ons when active, which includes Flash. You can check it out by visiting about:config with and without Torbutton enabled to see the differences with out visiting any web site on the Internet.

-- Tom

 

I've been using SeaMonkey with Tor for some time. On my setup, SeaMonkey is required to connect through Proxomitron via port 8080. My firewall prevents SeaMonkey from connecting out directly. Proxomitron is launched by and connects via SocksCap to Tor via its default Socks port (9050). Proxomitron filters handle the Flash, Java, and javascript filtering duties.

This arrangement will work with any browser that allows you to specify proxy settings. I strongly suggest using firewall rules that prevent your browser from connecting to anything other than Proxomitron.

Lately I've decided to try running a relay/exit node on my default system again. The last time I tried it, my PC was never listed as a valid relay and the traffic was very light. This time it's listed as a server and has handled over 1600MB of traffic in the last 30 hours. At times there's been over 100 connections in and out of Tor. On several occasions it has used nearly 100% of my available bandwidth, slowing my own browser to a crawl. Yes, I realize that I could lower the permitted traffic levels but I want to stress this system and see if the "running out of buffer space bug" on Windows has been successfully mitigated on my setup. Time will tell.

 

Just use the browser bundle, what's wrong with that?

It seems to take care of pretty much everything...

 

Not everyone likes FireFox. With SocksCap and Proxomitron, you can use any browser. The big change is that you have to make sure that Proxomitron is filtering out anything that can leak your IP and other data and that your browser can't bypass it (firewall rules).

It's no different than the other security choices we have. We can get a package that does it for us or we can get the components, do it ourselves, and learn a lot along the way.