Tag: Tor browser

May 24, 2022 – The Tor Browser and Experiments With Privacy

May 24, 2022 /

Admittedly, I haven’t used the browser a lot. The reason being is that there are some hidden issues with trying to maintain privacy. Today, I will talk about some of my observations.

  1. Many websites are tracking your IP address. When you try to access ‘anonymously’, you are denied access at all. Tor claims that the resolution is re-establish a new VPN connection and try again but I have not ever been successful getting onto Craigslist with Tor. Other sites like newspapers give you three free tastes, but when you come in anonymously you are also denied.

2. Privacy works on every screen. So for example, I selected my store so that I could check inventory but after a page refresh so does your store selection. I haven’t played with it enough to sort of get the rhythm of things so it might work if you do things in the right order, but I could see that action getting old if you were looking for something in particular.

3. There is some behavior that I might describe as ‘buggy’. Honestly, I don’t know if it is a service denial or some sort of technical issue. Because of the number of hops, and obscurity, pages are often very slow to load as well. We are talking minutes sometimes for search results to paint images. This is in addition to all of the other gyrations to setup for clearing of cache.

I am not in love with the Tor push to use Duck Duck Go as a search engine either. While they claim to protect privacy, they also got caught manipulating results in favor of pro Ukraine/Anti Russia results. That is simply against my values. The options are pretty meager otherwise, Twitter, Youtube or Wikipedia? Those are not search engines for the entire web to my knowledge. I have switched to Yahoo for now.

I have spoke in the past about my desire for things to just work. I am not going to expend the patience to keep reconnecting or rerouting for a low probability of someone stitching together data on me. Always the surest way to go is to not participate. I know that isn’t always preferable, but lets be honest this world didn’t exist 30 years ago so some selective participation might be healthy.

End Your Programming Routine: I haven’t completely given up on Tor, but the chances are low that it will work out for me. Unfortunately, as the tracking gets tighter and better, I just don’t see this mechanism working well. It is probably time to keep working on finding a service rather than something free. I think it is a good idea that cant keep up against stronger technology.

May, 2 2022 – Speaking of Privacy Again…

May 2, 2022 /

***9-9-24: My web host called and said that the link to the Tor Browser was malware and that my site was infected. I have no way of actually knowing this is true so I have removed it from this post. I suspect that they wanted a way to try and sell me their security service at $400/yr. For now, search the tor browser for yourself and use at your own risk.***

I have been thinking about BitWarden and privacy this week. I have also been aware of the benefits of a Virtual Private Network but never looked into it. Combining those two things together got me looking around for what a VPN would cost and I stumbled on the Tor Browser.

Let’s go back to the basics, what is a Virtual Private Network or VPN for short? A VPN is a networking routing strategy where your computer goes to a specified computer address every time for the first connection. In theory, if someone was looking at your history they would only see a connection to a single IP address. To go along with that, your first jump would be to a server that is clean and secure and the people running it value privacy.

As far as I know, without a VPN your routing is somewhat random. Random but also potentially public. Even more insidious than that is that most browsers are reporting your searches to the parent owner of that browser. They then take that data and use it to develop more artificial intelligence and data trends. This is how you look up something and all of a sudden you are bombarded with adds for that particular item.

The more I think about it, the more certain I am that BitWarden is doing the same thing. I think that it is also worth pointing out that a VPN is not going to protect you from that type of tracking because of the browser extension is getting the data right from the source – you.

The Tor browser is a browser that has an integrated VPN function into the operation. It is open source and differs a little from the pay services. So, you are not paying for a service for all of your devices but activating the VPN function by using the browser. Why? Because there are still some good guys out there that believe in American values. People work on these projects because they are passionate about what we all think is true, we should own our own privacy.

In looking around a little it looks like Brave can do this too by changing the settings of the browser. As a side note, I don’t think Brave is actually tracking me but it does have the potential to be public. In fact, most browsers have a private mode. With that said, I don’t happen to believe that ABC or Microsoft has our best interest in mind however. Apple does seem to be more trustworthy with privacy but I don’t think for a second that they are just sitting on data that they are collecting.

Also, looking at how these things work they don’t save any history and certainly recommend not adding any extensions. To my knowledge, Tor is the only one that has an integrated VPN feature though.

I think it is pretty evident why privacy is important. But I think it is worth mentioning that context is important. People create their own realities when they only see part of the data. What if I was pricing a pallet of shotgun shells for my kids Trap club? That seems to be explainable. But what if I was looking for a kilo of cocaine? Who knows, maybe I wanted to look at the effects of inflation and I decide I cant make the correlation. Or what if I wanted to read Mein Kampf so I was looking to buy a copy? These things can easily be taken out of context or are even tools for entrapment. In the end, I am not doing anything technically wrong and it is none of your business.

End Your Programming Routine: I am going to keep using Brave but I am also going to try out Tor. There are some clear drawbacks to using it exclusively and one is the convenient password access. I have also noticed that some sites will reject the Tor browser because (I assume) that those sites are wanting the metadata that you are bringing when you are trying to access said site. In theory with Tor, you are able to change your VPN route and try again but I have not been successful with that yet.