Tor and other VPN alternatives

VPNs 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, proxies traffic through encrypted tunnels, obfuscating users’ IP addresses. It’s different though because no one entity owns . Anyone can run a node and anyone can connect to it for free, without any sign-up process. connections – nodes, with each hop unwrapping a layer of encryption (hence the old name) to discover the next. In this way there’s no correlation between the first and final nodes. is used in two ways: either as an intermediary to regular web service, or to access hidden services, which have their own.onion domain names.