Tag: The Tor Project

What is Tor and Why Use It?

What is Tor and Why Use It?

by AnnaLee ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Since I’ve chosen The Tor Project as my internship community some close friends got curious about Tor. Some of them heard of it during ‘deep web’ conversations and others had even used it once or another. However many of them had doubts and misconceptions about the Tor Browser. I must add that this post represents my opinion and mine only.

  • So what is Tor?

Tor is a browser as many others that we can use to surf the web (Safari, Chrome, Firefox). However, Tor’s main mission is to provide online freedom, privacy and censorship circumvention to everyone, free of charge. Breaking it down, Tor protects your data online while surfing the web.

  • Why someone would like to have a browser like that?

Sometimes when living in a free country, where we have no consequences for giving our opinion or even accessing certain websites, we tend to take freedom for granted. When we aren’t threatened by our sexuality, gender, race, life choices, social status, is easy to forget how many people are frightened daily. When an opinion online can be the cause for persecution and hate, consequences that can go as bad as death. This is the reality of many people using Tor browser.

Along the years that I’ve been into college and my early professional life I’ve read and heard people talking about Tor in different ways. But mostly referring to it when talking about the ‘deep web’. Breaking news: there’s no such thing as ‘deep web’. It’s all the same, all the content online belong to the web. The difference is that some pages are indexed and reachable through search motors like Google, Bing, Yahoo and so on. And the other side is only reachable through specific components, as Tor.

The things that one may find while looking for the non-indexed vary. But mostly it will be journalistic pages, activist groups, alternative opinions. The non-indexed pages aren’t all made of cybercrimes and cybercriminals. It’s vastly used by people that otherwise could suffer harsh consequences for exposing their thoughts, gathering for a protest or even discussing a certain topic.

Journalists are known to use private means to get their tips and gather the information that otherwise would not be gathered. It’s an important maintainer of human rights.

If none of the situations above apply, you can still use Tor to stop google and other websites and extension to spying on your online activity. Do you know when you make a search and then for months you see ads about it? This is Google storing your search history, accessing your information, selling it to marketing companies and inducing you to buy things. All the online data of many users is stored and used for this daily, generating millions to these companies.

  • How Tor works then?

Working with many access points and constantly changing the user network. Tor isn’t a VPN, isn’t a centralized point of access that can be easily tracked. It encapsulates your data and transports it safely across the Tor Network providing security and safeguarding your privacy. A website will not be able to keep your information as it would if using another browser. With powerful tools as First-Party Isolation, bridges to bypass censorship and bans, three layers of encryption, you get back the control over the internet and what you share online.

As Tor says: Sharing should be a choice. Privacy isn’t supposed to be a privilege.

I recommend people to follow Tor’s social media and read the blog. There you will find much more information. It’s important to normalize privacy among users and get the word out that Tor is here to help minorities and provide freedom.

You can also download Tor and try for yourself at The Tor Project website.

It is available for OS X, Android, Linux, and Windows.

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Are You Ready To Change Your Expectations?

Are You Ready To Change Your Expectations?

by AnnaLee ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

This post is one that I’ve been meaning to write for a while now. Because it is important to manage our expectations when it comes to projects. This topic has been discussed among Mentors, Alumni, and current interns in an Outreachy chat.


I had to give it a thought about all that I expected from my project and how things worked. It’s normal to feel a bit lost when things don’t go as planned, many of us interns, had to manage our expectations and be flexible about changes here and there. Many things happened during our three months interning and some changes and adaptations had to be observed.


When applying this to my project I can see clearly how I underestimated my tasks. I had mainly two main tasks. The first was to catalog all the posts from the Tor Blog and identify the used tags. The other one was to verify and update the press list. The first task took almost a month and a half, I was doing it manually and thought that I would be able to finish it in time. I was so wrong. As the weeks passed I began to panic, I had more than 2500 posts to catalog and then identify issues on the tags and I had done around 500.


My time was on the verge, I decided to take a few days and think about an automation solution. It came out as a JavaScript crawler to automate the info fetching from the blog and turn everything into a spreadsheet. It took me four days to finish the project. Then with more time, I began working on correcting the wrong tags directly in their blog.


Updating the press list was something that I know that would take some time as well, but I didn’t think that it would take as much time as the first task. It was harder than I expected because a crawler wouldn’t help me then! 😀


In the end, I’ve managed to complete all the tasks given and even began editing a post for the Tor Blog (I keep working on it with my former mentor). Therefore, my expectations were greatly modified. I see now that it’s a great experience that helped me to manage better tasks and my time.


What we all concluded is that changing expectations in a project is normal, and is a good sign of a professional that can deal with sudden problems and manage time effectively.


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Why did I choose The Tor Project?

Why did I choose The Tor Project?

by AnnaLee ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

When deciding which FOSS communities I would enroll I came across some very well known communities like Mozilla, Wikimedia, The Tor Project, Debian, and the list goes on. All of them with amazing opportunities. I took my time getting to know them as much as I could and also seeing which projects would keep me interested. When I finally told some of my friends that I had been selected by The Tor project some of them asked me why I had chosen Tor.

First of all I selected Tor based on their values and what they mean to a lot of people around the world. People that otherwise would not be able to access the internet or do it freely. I wasn’t an expect in security and that’s the best part, nobody there judged me for this. After all I could feel safe and alright in an community like Wikmedia being a tech writer. However, getting within Tor is a new experience, something that is pushing me out of my comfort zone. And it’s all good and knowledge.

The people I met there so far are nice and understanding. They provided me material and links to know more about privacy issues and how Tor has been helping minorities and people that otherwise could have problems for advocating for their right, being non binary, assuming their sexuality and much more.

We don’t really think about how deep our lives are exposed out there, how corporations have been making billions on our information and metadata. We don’t think about all the people out there that were defending a cause and got arrested after posting something on internet.

Choosing Tor opened my eyes to something big that has been occurring right under our noses, but we just don’t care. It is never taken seriously until it’s someone that you know that got arrested for nothing, locked up because of a retroactive “crime”. All of this has been happening daily and it is possible because of our data out there.

The Tor Project is my way to learn more about the privacy issues that we have and also to work for this community in order to help more people and bring awareness to others that don’t know about the topic. Above all I have this deep feeling that my values are in sync with Tor’s mission and that’s the most important. We have to work for something that we believe, so we can work with passion.

I’ve been deeply in love with the idea of helping people to protect themselves and helping to maintain a free internet where repressed people can be themselves!

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