First post, by Wonkothesane
Hello, until recently i was Tricia McMillan, the irresponsible MyPal-surfer who is online with XP and continousely trying to pep-up his/her beloved notebook-grandpa with fresh software.
Different mainstream sites offer pre-configured Firefox-Tor-bundles, even for XP. As Tor is en vogue and somehow obscure (to me) i'm wondering if it makes sense to experiment with it. E.g. Chip (a well known german magazine) claims "Dl Tor, clickediclick, and you're surfing 100% anon. Before doing (or believing) this, i got several questions that are not answered in wikipedia:
In media Tor is usually mentioned in the context with the so-called darknet. That is like comparing apples and pears, two different pairs of shoes, no? Apart from getting closer to the market for bazookas, happy pills etc., simple IP-tracking from google & co becomes impossible, right? Is there any other advantage (or disadvantage) re. security? Wikipedia says that there are as few as 2.000.000 users in the world, that makes less than 0.1% of all onliners. If Tor is that good and/or easy, everybody should use it? I've read that it's slow, due to the encryption. Slower than normal http*S*-surfing? Do i need a fast connection/broadband? Running the proxies must cost a lot of $$$, why is it free, resp. who is operating the network? Will it really work on my 512MB notebook?
Thanks in advance for some advice!