anonymizing overlay network for TCP Tor is a connection-based low-latency anonymous communication system which addresses many flaws in the original onion routing design. In brief, Onion Routing is a connection-oriented anonymizing communication service. Users choose a source-routed path through a set of nodes, and negotiate a "virtual circuit" through the network, in which each node knows its predecessor and successor, but no others. Traffic flowing down the circuit is unwrapped by a symmetric key at each node, which reveals the downstream node. Basically Tor provides a distributed network of servers ("onion routers"). Users bounce their tcp streams (web traffic, ftp, ssh, etc) around the routers, and recipients, observers, and even the routers themselves have difficulty tracking the source of the stream. Note that Tor does no protocol cleaning. That means there is a danger that application protocols and associated programs can be induced to reveal information about the initiator. Tor depends on Privoxy and similar protocol cleaners to solve this problem. Client applications can use the Tor network by connecting to the local onion proxy. If the application itself does not come with socks support you can use a socks client such as tsocks. Some web browsers like mozilla and web proxies like privoxy come with socks support, so you don't need an extra socks client if you want to use Tor with them. This package enables only the onion proxy by default, but it can be configured as a relay (server) node. Remember that this is development code -- don't rely on the current Tor network if you really need strong anonymity. The latest information can be found at https://www.torproject.org/, or on the mailing lists, archived at https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/ or https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-announce/.