Want Your Privacy Back? Install and Run Tor in Ubuntu

Have you ever felt that you are being watched in whatever you do online? Websites seem to know who you are and can greet you with your name when you visit them. Google always seems to know what you are searching, even before you started the search. Getting scared? Perhaps it’s time to turn your privacy filter on.

Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis.

What Tor does is to bounce your web communication around a distributed network of relays so that no one will know where you are from. By using Tor, it prevents anyone to learn what sites you have visited, and also sites to find out where you are from. (Note: For more information on how Tor works, check out its overview page for detailed explanation.)

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Tor in Ubuntu and how to get it running in your browsers.

Note: Windows and Mac users can also download Tor from the download page.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install vidalia privoxy tor

Next, we need to configure Privoxy. Open /etc/privoxy/config in your favourite text editor.

sudo gedit /etc/privoxy/config

We need to find this line: listen-address localhost:8118
In my config file it was line number 741.

Beneath this we need to add the following text (including the period):

forward-socks4a / localhost:9050 .

Your config file should look like this…

/etc/privoxy/config

Save and exit.

Now we need to restart Tor and Privoxy

sudo /etc/init.d/tor restart
sudo /etc/init.d/privoxy restart

Configuring your browser to use Tor

If you're using Firefox (we recommend it), you don't need this page. Simply install the Torbutton plugin, restart your Firefox, and you're all set:

 

Otherwise, you need to manually configure your browser's proxy settings.

In Mozilla and Firefox on Windows, this is in Tools - Options - General - Connection Settings.

In Firefox on OS X, it's Firefox - Preferences - General - Connection Settings.

In Firefox on Linux, this is in Edit - Preferences - Advanced - Proxies.

You should fill in "localhost" and "8118" to point the top four protocols to Polipo, as shown here. (Even though Polipo doesn't support FTP and Gopher, you should set them up anyway.) You should also fill out the socks proxy entry to point directly to Tor("localhost", "9050", and socks5) to cover protocols besides the first four. Then click "OK".

Alternatively, go to https://check.torproject.org/. It will inform you if you are running Tor.

Configuring Google Chrome to use Tor

In Google Chrome, click on the Wrench icon and go to the Options page.

Go to “Under the Hood” tab and click the Change proxy settings button.

Change the proxy setting to “Manual proxy configuration”. Enter the following in the HTTP proxy,Secure HTTP proxy and Socks host field.

Click Close.

Similarly, go to https://check.torproject.org/ and you will be able to see if Tor is running successfully on your Google Chrome.

What Tor does not do

While it is easy to install Tor and get it running on your computer, it is also good to understand its disadvantages and what it does not do that might affect your browsing experience.

• Using Tor will slow down your browsing speed.
• Using Torbutton for Firefox will block browser plugins such as Java, Flash, ActiveX, RealPlayer, Quicktime, Adobe’s PDF plugin, and others as they can be manipulated into revealing your IP address.
• Tor might delete your cookies that they deem dangerous. You might want to use CookieCuller Firefox addon to protect any cookies you don’t want to lose.
• Tor is not 100% safe. It only encrypts the traffic within the Tor network. Any traffic outside of the Tor network is still unencrypted.

Do you think Tor is a good way to protect your privacy? What other ways do you use to protect your online presence?

Basically we need to install three things:

1. Polipo - a proxy server, 
   
2. Tor, the onion router, and 
3. Torbutton -a Firefox add-on.

Bellow are steps to install these three things.

Install Polipo, a caching web proxysudo apt-get install polipoSetup polipo
Manually open /etc/polipo/config and copy-paste config details here orsudo sh -c "wget 'https://svn.torproject.org/svn/torbrowser/trunk/build-scripts/config/polipo.conf' -O /etc/polipo/config"After this restart poliposudo /etc/init.d/polipo restartAdd Tor repositorysudo sh -c "echo 'deb http://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org karmic main' >> /etc/apt/sources.list"Add Tor repository GPG keygpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv 886DDD89
gpg --export A3C4F0F979CAA22CDBA8F512EE8CBC9E886DDD89 | sudo apt-key add -Update repositories and install Torsudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install torInstall Torbutton (an add-on to firefox) 
Just go to website of Torbutton and install it.

Check if you are anonymous
Enable tor in Firefox using the Torbutton, and go to Are you using Tor?If everything is OK you should see the following:

Additionally, you can install vidalia, a GUI for Torsudo apt-get install vidalia

Now, using vidalia you can create a new identity (i.e. a new IP) whenever you want: