Tor

[me-5yx05kfkO/aqeI1yJSURBw at public.gmane.org (Matthew Gillen)]

On 02/18/2011 01:27 PM, John Boland wrote:
> i can see that this is very handy for folks wishing to anonymize their web
> activities.  whether to avoid government interference or something more
> nefarious.
> how does this effectively differ from the ipredator service (
> https://www.ipredator.se/?lang=en) offered by the pirate bay?  this service
> creates a vpn tunnel from your machine to their servers and then nat's your
> activities.

Because with Tor you don't have to trust any given third party (pirate
bay in your example).  The idea in Tor is that no one in the network
knows who a particular packet is destined for except the intended
receiver.  If pirate bay got served a warrant (let's ignore the
international issues for the moment so I can illustrate the technical
differences) to reveal the identity of the receiver or originator of
some packet, they could be forced to identify you (and they do know who
you are).  If someone in your Tor network got served a warrant, they
couldn't give you up even if they wanted to, since they can't know who
the ultimate receiver was.

>From what I understand there is a theoretical weakness to Tor in that
the anonymity can be compromised if a large number of the nodes in the
Tor network are owned by a single snooper (say, the gov't).  But I don't
follow Tor that closely....

Matt