Exploring the SelekTOR front end for the Tor anonymity tool
Hiding from Spies
© Lead Image © AndreaDanti, 123RF.com
If you want to exploit protection through the anonymous Tor router fully, you need to delve deep into the underlying technologies. The SelekTOR front end saves you much of that effort.
Tor, which was originally known as "The Onion Router," [1] is an anonymous networking solution that has recently gained popularity as a means to avoid government snooping and commercial behavior tracking. A Tor client, running on a desktop system, routes traffic to an anonymous network consisting of Tor nodes.
Tor relies on the onion principle (Figure 1) and redirects the traffic through three nodes, changing the route every 10 minutes. The Tor Browser Bundle comes with a preconfigured combination of the Firefox web browser, the Tor client, and Tor Launcher.
The complete Tor package lets you surf the web in relative anonymity and use services such as email, instant messaging, IRC, SSH, and P2P. Although the Tor project offers its own user interface for its anonymous router in the form of Vidalia, the alternative SelekTOR front end provides some functions that Vidalia lacks. For example, SelekTOR offers semi-automatic configuration of the Tor client, as well as a choice of exit nodes sorted by country.
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