TOR Basic Outline guide.

Tor Tutorial
By: @aluminary

	Greetings, faithful supporters of Anonymous and haters of PRISM. We are Anonymous, and for a moment, we're going to take time off from destroying things we don't like and teach you how to secure yourself and hide your identity while online. Naturally, this will be a benefit to you in the long run. Most people have no doubt heard of “TOR”, or “The Onion Router”. In basic terms, Tor is a routing network that sends all of your internet traffic through many different nodes all scattered about around the world. So imagine you've got a message you want to pass to a friend who's standing 100 meters from you. Whereas your standard internet traffic would be like walking over to your friend and handing him that note, Tor puts many different people between you two. So rather, in this situation, you'd hand the note to one of those people, they'd pass it to a random person, who'd pass that on, again and again until it gets to your friend. This allows the actual source of the traffic to be hidden after it comes through the exit node. Fortunately, Tor is very easy to acquire.
	It can be downloaded from here: https://www.torproject.org/
	For windows users, that download comes with the Tor browser bundle, which, when used, routes all of your traffic through a series of nodes as mentioned previously. Likely Linux users will know how to properly configure a client or program to use Tor, so we won't waste their time.
	Once downloaded, that package will come with Vidalia Control Panel, an .exe file which acts as a sort of mothership. Once opened, a socks5 proxy server will begin running on local host. Your computer is the only computer on the network that will be able to use it unless others are also running Tor. The Tor browser will begin running on its own, so all you'll really need to do once in that browser is simply start searching away like a pro. If you want to verify your privacy because of paranoia, you can visit cmyip.com while using the Tor browser and be assured that your real IP is in fact hidden.
	Tor itself is generally considered trust worthy. The thing is, even if nodes are run by undesirable parties, not only would said parties have to own that node, but they'd have to own the entire random path to... well... backtrace you. A downside of this entire thing, though, is that Tor is a high latency network. Because your traffic is being routed all around, it's also a bit slower. You will certainly notice slower internet speeds in applications using Tor (regular browsers not on the proxy won't be any slower). Then again, such a trivial matter is certainly worth the amount of protection Tor will offer you. Tor is a widely used and completely free project available at the aforementioned link.

	Remember though, nobody is completely invincible. And human error can play into your traffic, or worse, your identity, being revealed. If, however, you take precautions to make sure Tor is operating and so forth, you will be fine. One more downside of Tor – that is one of the reasons a lot of us use VPN services – is that it's blocked in a lot of places. Because it's so easy and so anonymous, many websites, services, IRCs and networks will block Tor Exit Nodes to eliminate or crack down on abuse. In these cases, you'll probably need special permission to use the Tor server, as is the case with the AnonOps IRC network, which is one widely used meeting place for Anons.

	Stay Anonymous. Stay safe.
	Keep it up and defeat PRISM. Together, we are strong.
	Together, we are Legion.

	Twitter:   https://twitter.com/op_nsa
	IRC: webchat.anonops.com
                     channel: #opnsa.
	^^You cannot use Tor with webchat. J/s