Secure your VPN
Tor and other VPN alternatives
Tor has long been regarded as the gold standard for privacy and anonymity. See how easy it is to go dark.
V
PNs are advertised as being a boost for privacy, security and anonymity. Those nouns may well apply in particular situations. But it’s hard to call a VPN an anonymous service when you have to sign up with a very un-anonymous credit card. And it’s hard to say for sure if they’re private or secure if you’re talking about a bunch of effectively centralised servers that no one can audit. Fortunately there are alternatives, and one you’ve probably heard of is
Tor
(formerly known as
The Onion Router).
Similar to a VPN, Tor proxies traffic through encrypted tunnels, obfuscating users’ IP addresses. It’s different though because no one entity owns Tor. Anyone can run a Tor node and anyone can connect to it for free, without any sign-up process. Tor connections – ‘circuits’ – are routed over at least three Tor nodes, with each hop unwrapping a layer of encryption (hence the old Onion name) to discover the next. In this way there’s no correlation between the first and final nodes. Tor is used in two ways: either as an intermediary to regular web service, or to access Tor’s hidden services, which have their own .onion domain names.
All manner of Tor users
You might have heard of Tor being used for organised crime, assassinations for hire, or any number of other bad things. Malfeasance certainly takes place there, but there are a number of legitimate services operating on the onions, too. The BBC News website, for example, is blocked in countries that would rather its citizens only tune in to state media. So since 2019 the BBC has operated a Tor service at www.bbcnewsv2vjtpsuy.onion. Not exactly easy to remember, but a small price to pay to access a free press. Tor service names are generally 16-character long random strings, but with a little effort it’s possible to personalise the first few letters. Facebook (also blocked in a number of countries, but not necessarily deserving of a mention in a privacy feature) operates a Tor service at https://facebookcorewwwi.onion, for example.