Does Tor render other apps "anonymous"?

February 21, 2006 7:06 PM

Anonymity-online-filter: When using something like TOR (http://tor.eff.org/) to be "anonymous" online you modify browser settings; but there are many apps other than browsers that access the internet (Bittorrent, antivirus, etc.). Does TOR take care of these apps as well? Why, why not, etc.?
posted by rumbles to computers & internet (6 comments total)

No. Like you said, you have to modify your browser's settings to tell it to go through TOR instead of making a direct connection. If you run a program without setting its proxy to TOR, then it'll make a normal connection that doesn't protect your "Identity" (really, your IP Address.)

There's a free program called FreeCap that will let you use TOR with any program that uses TCP, even if it doesn't have a proxy setting for you to plug TOR into.
posted by reishus at 7:13 PM on February 21, 2006

Short answer: no.

Long answer: It's quite hard to intervene between all applications and the networking features of the operating system, and modify their behavior transparently to the application (so you don't have to configure each application individually). Trying this tends to cause your operating system to crash in odd and unfixable ways. A company called ZeroKnowledge tried to do it, and basically failed - their product didn't work that well, and was eventually discontinued.

Longer answer: Someone should build this sort of thing into the operating system to begin with.
posted by jellicle at 7:17 PM on February 21, 2006

If you want easy, blanket anonymity then get a tunnelling VPN proxy. You do still have to remember to use anonymous aliases.

Here's a comparison of some network anonymiser technologies.
posted by meehawl at 7:22 PM on February 21, 2006

Tor works using an onion routing architecture which means your traffic is being routed by a number of different servers' connections, thereby multiplying the total internet traffic volume several-fold. Bittorrent already chews up massive resources and at this point in time you would have to be somewhat nuts to allow bittorrent-scale volume to run over your server.
posted by DirtyCreature at 7:23 PM on February 21, 2006

meehawl: Have you actually tried the findnot service? Would you recommend it?
posted by blueyellow at 10:05 PM on February 21, 2006

Findnot works better than most, but it is more expensive than many of the lower priced or free services. Limit is 1GB per day.
posted by meehawl at 5:02 AM on February 22, 2006