HOWTO: Surf and IM anonymously using tor and privoxy

[flygmaskin]

This howto will show you how you can surf (or IM, or irc, or whatever) anonymously using the tor network. I'm using hoary, so I don't know if this will work on warty. Please give me some feedback on this.

BEFORE YOU START
Make sure you have enabled the universe repository.

INSTALL TOR AND PRIVOXY

$ sudo apt-get install tor privoxy

CONFIGURE PRIVOXY
Add the following line to /etc/privoxy/config. You can put it at the top of the file if you want (Don't forget the last dot.)

forward-socks4a / localhost:9050 .

then it's time to start tor and privoxy

$ sudo /etc/init.d/tor start
$ sudo /etc/init.d/privoxy start

To Torify an application that supports http (ie Firefox), just point it at Privoxy (that is, localhost:8118 ). To use SOCKS directly (for example, for instant messaging, Jabber, IRC, etc), point your application directly at Tor (localhost:9050).

To see if everything is working, go to this site.

[jdong]

I strongly support the use of anonymizing functions to browse the internet. Excellent documentation!

Please tell me if it works in Warty -- if it doesn't I'll help you out with Warty backports/extras!

[poptones]

"No hay ningún sitio Web en esta dirección."

Is this coming from the app or from some weird server it keeps connecting to?

[wallijonn]

"No hay ningún sitio Web en esta dirección."

I think that translated it means "There's no website [defined] in this direction".

Under Warty the file is in /etc/tor/tor-socks.conf.

http://network-tools.com/analyze/

[negativ]

Is there any way to speed this up? I've got it working per the instructions in the post, but the result is that browsing is now sssslllloooowwww. It makes me feel like I'm on dial-up.

Could there be something tweakable, or is this just the price you pay?

[wallijonn]

With TOR installed I basically see no difference in web surfing, ie, I detect no slow down. I'm on a 128k DSL.

[kyle.quamme]

I am having problems getting this set up, but I really want to use it. Could someone that has it working post some directions for Firefox, Gaim, and whatever else you would like to help me out a little? It would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[Leaf]

I am having problems getting this set up, but I really want to use it. Could someone that has it working post some directions for Firefox, Gaim, and whatever else you would like to help me out a little? It would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Sure thing buddy.

To get firefox to work with it (keep in mind I'm using 1.0)
10 GOTO to edit>prefs
20 GOTO the general tab
30 GOTO Connection settings
40 set manual proxt connection
50 in the HTTP field type localhost
60 in the port field type 8118
70 this assumes that you followed the OP's instructions.

this is what mine looks like http://img114.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img1...eenshot4hc.png

Actually I had a question too, do we have to type sudo /init.d start tor/privoxy every time the computer boots up? Originally I thought it didnt matter, but I modified one of my xsession.d startup scripts to run the commands at startup.

For GAIM however, I did not get it to work, with either one of the localhost ports and attempting every combination of socks4/5 http etc. Kept on getting a connection error. Anyone else have any luck?

Thanks again to the OP

[Tichondrius]

As is common in the world of Linux, just like the internet at large, many times the information you find is not complete and/or accurate, but still potentially very valuable. In this case, the instructions are generally correct, but the problem is that the tor package in Ubuntu's repositores is a little old (version 0.0.7) and doesn't work with some networks, like mine. Tor did not start for me, and its log file (/var/log/tor/log) contained an error:

[err] You are running Tor version 0.0.7, which will not work with this network.

So you need to get the latest version 0.0.9.2 from here. Follow the instructions to add the Tor repository to your sources.list file, do "sudo apt-get update" and download and install it using apt-get or synaptic. Then startup the tor daemon:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/tor start

to check that it's running and listenning on port 9050:

$ netstat -a | grep 9050

Now everything should work, assuming you set firefox proxy to localhost:8118 as shown in the previous post. And btw, you do not need to start tor and privoxy manually after a reboot, as they were added to the system startup scripts, when the packages were installed.

There is definetly a long wait for webpages to load, but you do get complete anonimity as verfied by the link given in the first post. To stop using it, just change the proxy setting in firefox back to "direct connection to the internet" (no proxy) or whatever it was before. I don't think there is any impact on system performance if you are not using this anonymizing proxy.

[Lovechild]

it's kinda slow but it works.. gaim still doesn't like it though.