How to use Tor to protect your privacy and hide your IP address

Tor (The Onion Router) is free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis. Tor improves your security and your privacy through a network of virtual tunnels.

Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location. Tor works with many of your existing applications, including web browsers, instant messaging clients, remote login, and other applications based on the TCP protocol.

Hundreds of thousands of people around the world use Tor for a wide variety of reasons: journalists and bloggers, human rights workers, law enforcement officers, soldiers, corporations, citizens of repressive regimes, and just ordinary citizens. Tor's security improves as its user base grows and as more people volunteer to run relays.

Tor is an open source. Those that provide the bandwidth for individuals and companies are using their own bandwidth to give users this freedom. As volunteers are paying for your bandwidth usage, we should be kind and do not transfer huge amounts of data when using the Tor network.

Tor works for the operating system of Windows Vista, XP, 2000, 2003 Server, Millenium, 98SE, Mac Universal Binary (OSX 10.4 & 10.5), PowerPC Only (OSX 10.3) and Linux/Unix Redhat/CentOS, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, SUSE. But they recommend using Firefox with the Torbutton extension.

Follow these steps to use it in Firefox:

1. Download Tor & Privoxy & Vidalia bundle and install it (http://www.torproject.org/easy-download.html.en).

2. Start Firefox, open Privoxy & Vidalia. Click the ‘Tor Disabled’ button on the right bottom of your Firefox browser to turn it to ‘Tor Enabled’.

3. Now your can browse the web under the protection of Tor.

If you want to use other solution to hide your IP and protect your privacy such as free VPN, you can try UltraVPN, Alonweb, CyberGhost and Hotspot Shield, but from time to time the free services come and go, as that was the case for AlwaysVPN and Relakks.