Testing TOR-network
After reading news about SOPA, attempts
to restrict anonymous public network communication and traffic
surveillance I got interested in TOR-network.
During the last weekend I tried it out
by installing Tor and Vidalia. Reading Tor news, blogs and YouTube videos about the survailance and censoring issues was 'eye-opening' :)
I turned bridge-relay feature on to
allow Tor-community to use my server as a hub for a while. I was
curious about the traffic bandwidth and speed when using this
anonymous browsing. The results was very interesting.
First I got several web services
working which were not available for me. E.g Pandora radio started
easily. It was available in Finland few years ago but was closed from
people outside USA. Of course I don't need it any more. There are so
many other radio sites like Spotify and Live365 which I'm paying to
be a VIP-member. By using proxies, like Tor network is, restricted
web-services can be opened from anywhere.
Claiming Tor users as pirate music and
movies downloaders seems to be wrong. First, Tor-network is much
slower than regular downloading. Tor network hides your identity and
encrypts the content. No need for Tor for usual downloading: by configuring a proxy information to Torrent
client application does the anonymous torrent download much better.
Furthermore, running the bridge over
the weekend, all traffic game from places like Syria, Iran, Ethiopia,
China and Netherlands. I bet those users are _NOT_ downloading illegal
copyrighted material but rather trying to send short messages outside
censored countries. Total relayed data was less than 100 MB's. It is hard
to imagine people downloading MP3-music from anonymous net when there
is shooting on the streets. Their only option is to get over the
censoring and try to send FaceBook status updates and Tweet outsiders
what is really going on. Thinking this scenario, maybe we all should
support anonymous communication by running Tor-bridges.