714 – Privacy and security: Tom talks Tor Browser

Episode 714 – Tor Browser
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 714 to Screw the Commute podcast? I'm going to talk about the Tor Browser today. Now, if you need some super high security when looking things up online, then you might want to learn about this somewhat famous or I don't know, maybe we could call it infamous browser. Here's their tagline. Browse privately. Explore freely. Defend yourself against tracking and surveillance and circumvent censorship. That's their tagline. Plus it gives you access to what you may have heard of as the dark web. Right. So if you do anything bad there, that's on you. I'm only going to talk about legit uses of Tor. I use it a lot when going after the bad guys in my consumer advocate role on scambrigade.com. If you want to see the trailer of that TV show in development. I hope you didn't miss episode 713. That was Dr. Wayne. I think he's related to Muhammad Ali because he has all these sayings and rhymes to remind you to stay healthy. See, if you're not healthy, you can't run a great business. So check that out. Anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, and then the episode number. That was 713. All right, make sure you follow me on TikTok. tiktok.com/@digitalmultimillionaire. You can put the at sign in a URL. A lot of people don't know that. And of course, pick up a copy of our automation e-book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. I want you working with people and making money and not fighting with your computer all day long. So those are all the kind of techniques I use to really be lightning fast, taking care of customers and saving lots of time.

[00:02:18] Okay, let's get to the main event. The Torproject.org is where you find this browser. All right, so this browser gives you a chance to get to the dark web and, and a lot of most people think of the dark web as all illegal activities. Well, yeah, there's lots of that stuff there for sure. But it has legitimate uses too. And these include you can communicate or browse in countries. For instance, I had a student that was in China and a lot of the websites were blocked that she needed to get to, so she just got on the Tor browser. There's another way to do this also with called a VPN, but if you put both of them together, you're really up in your security. We'll talk about that later, but allowed her to get the pass the censorship stuff. All right. So I'm just going to give you kind of an overview of the kind of things that the Tor browser will do for you. It blocks people from tracking you, and ads can't follow you around. And whenever you leave a site, it automatically clears all the cookies say so it gets rid of your browsing history.

[00:03:28] It's very difficult to surveil. You say nobody can see your connection and can't see what websites that you visit. They can't like get all your browsing habits. It resists a thing they call fingerprinting, so it makes everybody there look the same. All the people using Tor. So it makes it difficult for them to pick you out and see what you were doing. And they've got multi layered encryption. So what that is, and I'll be getting this a little bit more later, but run your anything you're doing through all kinds of different servers so that nobody knows what's going on, how to find you or and each server doesn't know where it's came from or where it's going, all that stuff. So with you can pretty much browse freely because maybe you're on a network that blocks certain sites. And so you can you can bypass that with this. Now, I was a little concerned. I've known about this and used it for years, but, you know, I only do good try to do good stuff. So I'm not really worried about, you know, I'm not trying to do bad stuff. So there are bad section. I'm going to read from there about section. It says, We believe everyone should be able to explore the Internet with privacy. We are the Tor Project, a 501C3 US nonprofit. We advance human rights and defend your privacy online through free software and open networks. Hmm.

[00:05:04] 5o1c3 US non profit. That means that they are tied at the hip with the government. That bothers me a little bit, even though I'm highly happy that this thing exists and I use it. But that does worry me. And and then another thing that worries me, they have a huge team of people that they list right on the site. And this worries me not only just because it's a nonprofit tied to the government, but you got so many people, somebody might be bribe able. I don't know what they could possibly do from the inside to to help surveil you. This is unlike that group Anonymous, who pretty much stays anonymous. All right. I'm not saying Anonymous is good or bad, but I will tell you, I'd much rather have them on my side if something went down for me or my company than against me. I'll tell you that because these people are high level computer people, you know that and all hidden. You can't find them, you know, so. So they can do about whatever they want. Thankfully, they're doing mostly good stuff that I know of, and they're doing all kinds of stuff that I probably don't know of. Most people don't know. All right. So the caveat here is that you are not totally secure. You're just way more private than your normal browsing activities. Now, if you want to up your level of security even higher, you combine a VPN that's called a virtual private network with Tor. Now, I covered VPNs in episode 589.

[00:06:42] Screwthecommute.com/589. Now, we're not talking hardly any money here. I mean, just a little bit. Tor is free and a quality VPN is just a tiny amount of money per month. There are free VPNs, but I never kind of heard anybody brag about how good they are. Right. So. So if you combine those two now, you really upped your security, but here's where you're going to pay. With speed because the nature of the security things are going to go much slower. And and here's why. And it doesn't stink and it won't make you cry. Right? It's called the Onion protocol. So how does this work? Well, onion routing, it's like layers of an onion. That's kind of was what it was developed on. Each layer conceals where the stuff that you're doing came from and where it's going. And I know these people that work for Tor and most people that are real technical with like, say, would puke at my definition. All right. But that's not critical to us as business people to know that the details of the tech behind it. But. But anyway, it's designed so people can't fall the air round and they can't monitor what you're doing. See, there's a bunch of servers all over the world and they're usually run by volunteers, so and no one knows where the info originally came and those where nobody knows where it's going to end up. To take this two step further. They've developed garlic rounding.

[00:08:19] I haven't delved into garlic routing, although it does keep away vampires, but that's kind of like onion routing on steroids in that they put multiple messages together. So it makes it really hard to do any kind of traffic analysis because there's all kinds of people lumped together and and going all which way. And so it's it's upset again. So this is enough to get you started on your quest for privacy. And remember, if you do something bad or or try to buy something bad off the dark web that's on you, right. I only use Tor for legit purposes and you're on your own if you deviate from that. All right. So there's loads of information online about this that you can dig really, really deep if you if this interests you. But I've been using it for years without any trouble. And you might wonder, how do I know about this? Well, I mean, when you work this Internet day and night for 29 years, you kind of you learn all the stuff that some of it you wish you didn't know. So. So anyway, but if you like, help with this and and the million other things to be successful online, check out my mentor program at greatinternetmarketingtraining.com. It's the longest running, most unique, most successful ever in the field of Internet and digital marketing. So check it out at greatinternetmarketingtraining.com. All right. We'll catch you on the next episode. See you later.