Google Re-Routing of Tor Requests
This, again, is another technology-related post, tangentially related to the law.
I’m using the Torbutton Firefox plugin to route my brower requests through Vidalia/Privoxy and onto the Tor network. Tor is a technical method of constantly re-routing your web (or other Internet-related) requests through different Tor servers such that each “server step” along the way doesn’t know where the original request came from. (That’s an attempt at a simplification.) Using Tor, you can anonymize your web traffic.
So when I tried to search on Google, I was a bit confused when I was at the Danish Google – google.dk. I tried again, and then I was at the German Google. And then I realized what’s happening. My web request was getting routed from a Danish Tor server, google.com recognized my Danish “origin,” and then served me the Danish home page.
So, if anything but a little bit of a pain, it’s at least proof that my Tor-surfing is working. And my anonymity is somewhat retained.
(I’m working on a paper including a practical guide for Fourth Amendment privacy-protection of electronic communication. That’s my justification for this post.)
International, Internet, Open Source, Privacy, Technology | paul | 
October 5, 2006 3:15 pm
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