"We've covered Tor in LJ before (see Kyle Rankin's "Browse the Web without a Trace", January 2008), but that was some time ago, and this subject seems to be more timely with each passing day. Also, with Tor being at only 0.2.x status, it still qualifies as software in development, so I'm justified in featuring it this month.
"For those not in the know, Tor stands for The Onion Router, and its roots go all the way back to the US Naval Research Laboratory, Tor's original sponsors. It then became an EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) project until 2005, and it now has moved up to being its own nonprofit research/education organization: the Tor Project.
"The essential idea is that your original IP address is masked by passing it through numerous special routers, designed to avoid keeping records, until the original source has been lost and the receiving end knows only about the last Tor box it encounters. To quote Tor's man page:"
