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Using Tor and Privoxy in Firefox Web Browser

Tor(The Onion Router) is a toolset to improve your anonymity online. My main purpose here, is to surf websites that are banned by my ISP, or websites that banned my ISP. Its concept might sound a lot complicated, but getting it to work was just easy on my Debian box.

To start, you’ll need to install these packages in unstable pool.

1. tor
2. privoxy

After installing these 2 packages, using this firefox extension will set your firefox ready. You need to restart your browser in order for the extension to work. Here’s a screenshot of torbutton, it should appear on right part of status bar.


Single click on the Torbutton will turn it on/off. Configuration of privoxy(it has a lot of filters by default) can be done by browsing this location “http://p.p/” in your firefox browser. Detailed configuration please refer to privoxy.org

To “Torify” other applications, if supported, you can use these proxy settings.

• HTTP Proxy: localhost:8118
• Socks4a: 127.0.0.1:9050

There’s a very detailed instruction to torify various application here. If you enjoy the features of Tor, and happy using it, please contribute some of your bandwidth by serving your computer as a node/server. Detail instruction can be found here.

[color=red]Warning: Using Tor with BitTorrent or other P2P traffic is highly unethical, and not recommended.[/color]

Update on 14th Jan 2007
I am getting quite some traffic in for this post. Windows users, I’m sorry that I can’t you help much with this post. However, there’s a detailed instruction posted on Tor website for windows installation, you can find it here
.

Update on 24th April 2007
Check out this recent post if you are looking for a simpler web proxy solution.

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