Who would have thought that one of the best ways to preserve your privacy would
be to hide behind an onion? And no, I'm
of course not talking about growing a literal massive onion and standing
behind it hoping that the smell will keep everyone else at bay. Today's
episode is all about the onion router, better known as tour. used by dissident,
uh, cyber criminals, and even ordinary folks the world over to keep their
online activities away from the prying eyes of governments, advertisers,
stalkers, or maybe even me. Dang it. But
how does it work? Why is it considered so secure? And does it have any
weaknesses? We touched on tour in our
video about the deep web and the dark web, which you can check out here, but
we're going to dive into it in a little bit more detail. Tour tries to anonymize
your online activity by encasing your
traffic in multiple layers of encryption, then sending it through a
number of nodes that peel back those layers one at a time, hence the onion
nickname. Each node only decrypts enough
information in the packet to know where to send it next. So none of the nodes
know both your identity and the identity
of whatever website or server you are trying to connect to. This high level of
encryption and repeated bouncing of network traffic makes tour quite secure,
but it isn't entirely foolproof. At some
point, your data has to leave the tour
network to get to wherever it's going through something called an exit node.
The very last tour node that your data travels through. And when your data
leaves an exit node and is sent to its destination, it is no longer necessarily
encrypted. While it's very difficult still for the recipient to tell that
it's you connecting, any unencrypted
personal information can be read by both the operator of the exit node and
whatever site it is that you're connecting to. In fact, a team of
researchers several years ago harvested a bunch of unencrypted email addresses
and passwords in this manner even though they were sent over tour. The fact that
anyone can run an exit node also means that you don't know who could be looking
at your information on the other end. To alleviate this problem somewhat, the Tor
Foundation provides the tour browser for free, which is a modified version of
Firefox that, among other things, attempts to use the encrypted HTTPS
standard instead of regular HTTP for as
much web activity as possible and also
disable certain plugins that can leak your IP address. Many plugins and other
applications for that matter won't run over the tour network by default and can
thereby give away your identity even if
your other traffic your normal web browsing traffic is going through tour.
It is possible to force other applications to use the tour network
either by manually configuring them or using programs like tallow that do it
for you. But since any unencrypted information that you send or receive can
still be seen by exit nodes, some users have tried using virtual private
networks or VPNs, which you can learn more about here, by the way, in
conjunction with Torah to create an encrypted tunnel at every point of the
connection. Not a bad solution as long as you can trust your VPN provider not
to keep tabs on you. Of course though, the best idea is not to send anything
personally identifying over tour or anywhere if you can help it. Tour also
has the limitation of being a rather slow network. So it might not be too
useful for downloading large amounts of
you know stuff uh streaming in 4K or using Bit Torrent especially the latter
as the Bit Torrent protocol can broadcast your IP address if you aren't
careful. Nevertheless though, tour is still a great help to activists, uh,
victims of crime and people who are just plain concerned about preserving
personal privacy in an age where it feels like we can always be watched. Tor
may not be perfect, but it is a good first line of defense against aggressive
advertisers, shady government shenanigans, or, you know, Skynet.
Speaking of online security, Tunnel BearVPN lets you tunnel to 20 different
countries, allowing you to browse the internet and use online services as
though you were in that different country. And of course, if you clicked
on the explanation of VPNs that I referred to earlier in this video, you
would already know that. Aha. They have easy to use apps for iOS, Android, PC,
and Mac. They also have a Chrome extension. You just choose the country
that you want. You click the little virtual button and boom, your little
bear tunnels over to wherever it happens that you want to be tunneling through.
When you turn on tunnel bear, your connection gets encrypted and your public IP address gets switched so that
you can show up as though you were in a different country, letting you bypass
stupid things like geographical region
restrictions. Super thumbs up. It's also easy to use. You don't have to do any of
that, you know, port configuration and DNS or blah blah, etc. nonsense. It's so
easy that your mom could use it and they have a top-rated privacy policy and do
not log their users's activity. So, you can actually try out Tunnel Bear for
free with 500 megs of data included. And
you can save 10% on your unlimited package, which only costs a few bucks a
month by heading over to tunnelbear.com/Linus linked in the video description. So,
thanks for watching, guys. If you like this video, hit the like button. If you
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