A while ago I downloaded and installed Tor & Privoxy on my Mac. For those of you who don’t know Tor is a tool to enable you to anonymize your web browsing and Privoxy is a proxy server that has advanced filtering capabilities for protecting privacy.
Check out ShowMyIP.com to see the what information can be acquired from your broswer, just from casual web browsing.
Data packets on the Tor network take a random pathway through several servers that cover your tracks so no observer at any single point can tell where the data came from or where it’s going
That’s all well and good for protecting privacy over the internet, but what about your actual computer? Did you know that every time you browse the internet data is stored on your computer in various locations, such as cookies, history, and page cache? Even simply deleting these files does not mean that they are not accessible by people who know how too.
Because of this a portable version of FireFox was developed that can be run self-contained from a USB Drive. This means that all of these files are no longer scattered across your computer but contained within your USB Drive.
TorPark
TorPark is the best of both of these worlds – a portable web browser that has Tor technology built in.
After a quick download of TorPark, and all you need to do is unzip the files and copy them to your USB Drive. Double-click the Torpark.exe file and FireFox will load and you are ready to go.
One thing to note is that Torpark will automatically close any FireFox windows already open – Which I found out much to my horror as I was nearly at the end of writing this very article. (I hadn’t saved it, and lost everything!). Also when opened, an attempt to load FireFox from your normal desktop shortcut will result in a new Torpark window being launched – very clever!
When you have finished your surfing, closing Torpark will prompt to ask if you want to store any data on your USB Drive.
A Great little App, I can see Tor growing in popularity over the coming months..
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