Tor

Also known as The Onion Router

daemon and utilities for an anonymizing network

AI overview

Tor is free software that routes your internet traffic through multiple computers around the world to hide your identity and location from websites and internet service providers. It matters because it helps protect privacy for people who need it—such as journalists, activists, and ordinary people in countries with heavy internet censorship—though it can also be misused for illegal activities.

AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.

~40 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Tor is a free overlay network for enabling anonymous communication. It is built on free and open-source software run by over seven thousand volunteer-operated relays worldwide, as well as by millions of users who route their internet traffic via random paths through these relays. This technique is called onion routing.

Using Tor makes it more difficult to trace a user's internet activity by preventing any single point on the internet (other than the user's device) from being able to view both where traffic originated from and where it is ultimately going to at the same time. This conceals a user's location and usage from anyone performing network surveillance or traffic analysis from any such point, protecting the user's freedom and ability to communicate confidentially.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Tor” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.