'tor' is an implementation of The Onion Routing system, as described in a bit more detail at http://www.onion-router.net/. You can read list archives, and subscribe to the mailing list, at http://archives.seul.org/or/dev/. Is your question in the FAQ? Should it be? ************************************************************************** See the INSTALL file for a quickstart. That is all you will probably need. ************************************************************************** ************************************************************************** You only need to look beyond this point if the quickstart in the INSTALL doesn't work for you. ************************************************************************** Do you want to run a tor server? First, set up a config file for your node (start with sample-orrc and edit the top portion). Then run the node (as above, but with the new config file) to generate keys. One of the generated files is your 'fingerprint' file. Mail it to arma@mit.edu. Remember that you won't be able to authenticate to the other tor nodes until I've added you to the directory. Command-line web browsing: For more convenient command-line use, I recommend making a ~/.wgetrc with the line http_proxy=http://localhost:8118 Then you can do things like "wget seul.org" and watch as it downloads from the onion routing network. For fun, you can wget a very large file (a megabyte or more), and then ^z the wget a little bit in. The onion routers will continue talking for a while, queueing around 500k in the kernel-level buffers. When the kernel buffers are full, and the outbuf for the AP connection also fills, the internal congestion control will kick in and the exit connection will stop reading from the webserver. The circuit will wait until you fg the wget -- and other circuits will work just fine throughout. Then try ^z'ing the onion routers, and watch how well it recovers. Then try ^z'ing several of them at once. :) How to use it for ssh: Download tsocks (tsocks.sourceforge.net) and configure it to talk to localhost:9050 as a socks4 server. My /etc/tsocks.conf simply has: server_port = 9050 server = 127.0.0.1 (I had to "cd /usr/lib; ln -s /lib/libtsocks.so" to get the tsocks library working after install, since my libpath didn't include /lib.) Then you can do "tsocks ssh arma@moria.mit.edu". But note that since ssh is suid root, you either need to do this as root, or cp a local version of ssh that isn't suid.