By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

There’s been a lot of fury and curiosity around Google’s new secure VPN option. You can download it and see for yourself. (it is supposed to be for San Francisco residents only, but people as far away as London have reported being able to use it.) The question no one can seem to agree on is how secure it really is. While the jury is still out, there is an interesting product from the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) called Tor. It’s free and available for downloading.

Tor: An anonymous Internet communication system
Tor is a toolset for a wide range of organizations and people that want to improve their safety and security on the Internet. Using Tor can help you anonymize web browsing and publishing, instant messaging, IRC, SSH, and other applications that use the TCP protocol. Tor also provides a platform on which software developers can build new applications with built-in anonymity, safety, and privacy features.

Your traffic is safer when you use Tor, because communications are bounced around a distributed network of servers, called onion routers. Instead of taking a direct route from source to destination, data packets on the Tor network take a random pathway through several servers that cover your tracks so no observer at any single point can tell where the data came from or where it’s going. This makes it hard for recipients, observers, and even the onion routers themselves to figure out who and where you are. Tor’s technology aims to provide Internet users with protection against “traffic analysis,” a form of network surveillance that threatens personal anonymity and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security. Source: tor.eff.org

We say: Privacy nuts love Tor. Surf from your bunker or your home office and no one is the wiser. Alice Adds: Isn’t it weird that in the example picture they use the name “Alice” as the computer looking for privacy? Eerie!