Recently, many Indians were shocked to see that their favorite BitTorrent sites have been blocked by several ISPs (Internet Service Providers). While most of them cursed the government and let it go, several geeks like me were still accessing these sites.
Via proxy sites? No, they are volatile, unreliable and pretty much just want to sell ads.
How else? Answer is TOR.
TOR is a simple approach to a complex process of proxy and anonymity. You can think of it as a blanket on your identity except that this doubles as a tool to access any site/FTP server in the world.
TOR was originally ” The Onion Routing project of the U. S. Naval Research Laboratory” and it’s primary task is to protect the users that are communicating from possible security breaches. The approach in simple terms is that, TOR distributes the data traffic among several TOR nodes so that the communication is never direct, this ensures that anybody who is tailing the data packets will get lost. The advantage with this is that an ISP can never in it’s wildest dream ban all of the TOR nodes and since we approach a website via these nodes, we can access any site at anytime.
TOR is available on multiple platforms which makes this tool more universal and acceptable as you can use the same technology on your PC, MAC and Smart Phones.
TOR solutions for normal public include,
- TOR Browser : A pre-configured browser that adheres to all the settings and protocols of TOR project. This software is available for Windows , Mac and Linux platforms. The best part is that this software is portable which means you can carry it in a flash drive and browse safely on any computer. I personally use it on my linux based laptop, the package consists of a terminal command which starts up and configures a modified firefox browser to browse the web anonymously.
- Tails Live USB distro: We can never run out of crazy Linux distributions, Tails is a live USB distribution which means that it can be installed and run off an USB stick although it makes sense to carry around a browser than a full distribution of Linux.
- ORBOT for Android: Have you ever felt left out for living in a third world nation? Awesome apps like Pandora, Spotify and Netflix are USA exclusive and will not even appear in the Google Play Store of India. ORBOT solves this problem very efficiently, you have to install the app, activate it by long press and voila ! We can even select individual apps for TOR which means other apps remain independent of any changes. I’ve been using Pandora radio on my tablet for quite a while now and there haven’t been any hiccups till date.
- OBSFPROXY : This is the tool which circumvents censorship via the TOR browser and gives you complete uncensored and safe internet experience.
As you can see in the above picture, kat.ph site has suggested a german version for our session. This is achieved via obfsproxy.
You can find out more about TOR at The TOR project site.
Note: Durofy does not advocate any kind of piracy or illegal access to any content. The article is only for educational purposes.
