Look at it like a browser with a free VPN built in and tons of privacy preserving features.
It looks and works exactly like Firefox, except websites don’t know who you are, where you live, how many family members you have and what your current employment status is (the data Google Analytics will collect about you). Firefox already includes some privacy-preserving features, but they’re not nearly as effective as Tor’s.
You can use Tor without ever visiting any onion site (the sites the news will tell you are run by terrorist pedophile drug lords). You can just browse the normal internet¹. Normal internet sites are encrypted by HTTPS, but your ISP and everyone else on the path between your computer and the website can (for now) see the name of the sites you visit², but with .onion sites NOBODY except the website you’re visiting knows about your browsing habits.
Hidden services (.onion sites) are even better for privacy, but they’re not easy to remember like normal sites. There are listicals everywhere though, here’s a bunch of them I use:
¹: this happens through “exit nodes” that will decode your request and forward it to the normal internet. Account registration (and sometimes login) are often blocked because “free VPN” usually means “trash people flock to it when they abuse sites” and those few exit nodes are quickly blacklisted.
²: through something called “SNI inspection”. Browser and server developers are working on fixing that, but for now
Look at it like a browser with a free VPN built in and tons of privacy preserving features.
It looks and works exactly like Firefox, except websites don’t know who you are, where you live, how many family members you have and what your current employment status is (the data Google Analytics will collect about you). Firefox already includes some privacy-preserving features, but they’re not nearly as effective as Tor’s.
You can use Tor without ever visiting any onion site (the sites the news will tell you are run by terrorist pedophile drug lords). You can just browse the normal internet¹. Normal internet sites are encrypted by HTTPS, but your ISP and everyone else on the path between your computer and the website can (for now) see the name of the sites you visit², but with .onion sites NOBODY except the website you’re visiting knows about your browsing habits.
Hidden services (.onion sites) are even better for privacy, but they’re not easy to remember like normal sites. There are listicals everywhere though, here’s a bunch of them I use:
Here are some new publications that use onion sites to make sure they can’t be taken down by bad governments:
And for good measure, here are some sites you wouldn’t think have an onion site but still do:
¹: this happens through “exit nodes” that will decode your request and forward it to the normal internet. Account registration (and sometimes login) are often blocked because “free VPN” usually means “trash people flock to it when they abuse sites” and those few exit nodes are quickly blacklisted.
²: through something called “SNI inspection”. Browser and server developers are working on fixing that, but for now
Thanks for the info! I’ll save this comment for further study.