WHAT IS TOR ||

WHAT IS TOR

[THE ONION ROOTER]

The Onion Router, from which the acronym TOR comes from, was primarily developed for the use by the US military, predominantly Navy, as to mask their IP addresses which could lead to theft of sensitive data while gathering information on missions. Once the military passed to in-house high anonymity VPN systems, TOR was released as an open source free software, that is completely legal to use and possible to download from the TOR website.

So what is TOR? TOR is a multi-proxy network that doesn’t rely on specific proxy servers to process your data but uses the connections of multiple other TOR users to mask the IP of the original user. While this arrangement has the same risks of all other proxy connections, this risk is somewhat mitigated by the fact that there are over 3 million users sharing their IP addresses worldwide, making the exact pinpoint of the original internet request next to impossible.

The TOR Browser, that is the program used to access the internet over the TOR network, is relatively easy to install, and the program itself is coded in C, Python, and Rust. It works on all the major operating systems such are Windows, Linux, macOS, and Android.