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Posted by Sherman in Idaho [72.47.153.24] on Thursday, July 05, 2012 at 02:19:40 :
In Reply to: Can you run TOR posted by Paul(in NY) [12.64.158.189] on Wednesday, July 04, 2012 at 20:07:04 :
It shouldn't require any more bandwidth between your computer and the Internet. What slows it down is it routes the encrypted data through maybe a dozen other randomly-chosen computers around the world. It's the transit time around the world that introduces a delay, not the speed of your connection. It does use some processing power on your computer to do the encryption so if you have a really old computer that might slow it down.
Each computer in the chain only knows who the first computer upstream and downstream from itself is, and it doesn't know anything about what a block of data means, since it's all encrypted at that point. TOR used to be a rather complicated thing to use and you had to be a pretty serious hacker to make it all work, but with the "TOR Browser Bundle" it seems to be a very simple plug-and-play installation. You do have to use their "bundled" version of Firefox to keep it secure.
I don't claim to understand just how TOR works, but I know that dissidents in police states all over the world trust their lives to it. If the Red Chinese government can't crack it to throw dissidents in prison, I don't think Google can crack it to sell you plane tickets.
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