Technology
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Disclaimer that I haven’t used Tor in a while, do your own research, etc
The US navy designed and open sourced the Tor network. If all the traffic meant to be anonymous was coming from the US navy it doesn’t work well as an anonymizer. There’s been various claims that they have backdoors over the years, but to my knowledge none have held water.
Unless you’re running an exit node (which requires different software than the Tor browser) other people’s traffic isn’t getting routed through you so you’re fine legally.
VPNs are not very good at protecting you from the websites or services you connect to. They’re best used to hide where you’re connecting to from your ISP. Modern fingerprinting using things like browsing habits, installed software, web browser size, cookies, etc is barely effected by VPNs and the Tor browser takes care of an minimizes lots of those tools.
The biggest issue for day to day use for me is how slow it is. Because your traffic is being routed through 3-5 nodes before getting to its destination overall speed and latency suffer a lot
That's why I never continued to use it after the times I experimented with Tor.
But can't you just spoof most of that if you really want to? If you're putting in the effort to be concerned with anonymity.
Thanks for summarizing this for me. I think I could just use a vpn and librewolf to accomplish what you are talking about with the tor browser.
Librewolf wipes everything once it’s closer and it pretty basic if you use the default settings.
Are people using it to casually browse Lemmy and stuff?
I use librewolf, but for me the first thing to change was to do not delete things on exit. I'm looking for a better firefox, not a lighter tor browser
Theres also the mullvad browser which is just tor browser without the tor part