In this article we’re going to talk about Tor. But don’t worry, we’re not talking about the Marvel character who smashes everything with his hammer. On NovaFuture you don’t need a cape and bulging muscles to become a superhero. As far as superpowers go, all you need is a protocol that protects your privacy and helps make the web great again.

Don’t think we’re exaggerating! Because with Tor you can do something that governments and multinationals truly hate: make yourself invisible on the internet. Actually invisible! Not like your browser’s “private browsing” mode that half-hides your activity and searches. And that’s genuinely awesome. Because on top of protecting your privacy, it also seriously boosts your online security.

And the best part of all this is that Tor is free, open source, and anyone can use it with zero hassle. In fact, everyone should use it. And ideally, everyone should contribute to it. We’re going to explain why. So take a few minutes to read this all the way through, because you’ll see that this topic is genuinely fascinating and it concerns you directly.

The story of Tor: A remarkable tool born in a U.S. military research lab

It’s the 1990s. The internet is just barely making its way into people’s homes. And somewhere in the labs of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, three engineers ask themselves a question that will change the history of the web: How do you get intelligence agents to communicate over the internet without being identified?

The problem is almost philosophical. If only secret agents use an anonymous network, that network is completely pointless! You just have to see who’s using it to know who the agents are. So for anonymity to truly work, everyone has to use it. Which cleverly allows spies to disappear into a crowd of ordinary people.

These three researchers, Paul Syverson, Michael Reed and David Goldschlag, then invented the concept of onion routing. The image is intentionally vivid because the encryption works exactly like the layers of an onion. Each layer wraps around the next and no one can see the core without peeling the whole thing. Which is made impossible by the very design of the system.

After it was developed, the project gathered dust on the Navy’s shelves for a few years. Then, in the early 2000s, a young MIT graduate named Roger Dingledine picked up the torch alongside Syverson. He renamed the project Tor, which stands for The Onion Routing. Bonus linguistic tidbit: Tor also means “gate” in German. A gate to freedom? That’s exactly it!

Then another MIT classmate quickly joined the adventure. His name was Nick Mathewson. And two years later, in October 2002, the Tor network was officially launched. At the same time, its code was immediately released under a free license. Because for it to work, everyone has to be able to verify it, modify it and improve it. Finally, in 2006, Dingledine, Mathewson and five others founded The Tor Project, a nonprofit organization based in Massachusetts. It still runs the project to this day.

How does Tor work? Welcome to the onion recipe

Remember the onion image? Good, because we’re coming back to it, but this time we’re getting into the details. Don’t worry though, we’re not going to throw incomprehensible equations at you. Just a neat analogy that’ll let you understand everything in a simple, straightforward way.

When you browse the internet normally, it’s like sending postcards without envelopes to every corner of the world. Your mail carrier can perfectly see who you are, knows where you live, who you’re writing to and what you’re saying. Which can be fun for vacation memories. But it’s a disaster for your privacy.

With Tor it’s completely different. Because when you send a request, it gets encrypted in multiple layers, exactly like an onion. To do this, it passes through three different servers, called nodes, before reaching its destination. The first node knows who you are but doesn’t know where you’re going. The second knows where it came from and where it’s going, but doesn’t know who you are. The third sends your request to its destination but has absolutely no idea who sent it. The result is that no single party ever holds all the information. That’s the genius of the thing!

And these nodes are volunteers all around the world who make their computers available to the network. Thousands of people quietly contributing so that you and millions of others can browse freely. We’ll come back to this a little later to explain how you can get involved.

Why was Tor the obvious choice for NovaFuture?

On NovaFuture we write about freedom, ecology, social justice and digital autonomy. Topics that might seem perfectly harmless from your screen if you live in the Western world. But topics that can get someone summoned by police, forcibly disappeared, or worse in a large part of the world. Unfortunately, that’s not an exaggeration. It’s just a sad daily reality for millions of people who are condemned to be denied access to real information.

That’s why NovaFuture is fully accessible via .onion. This way, someone living under a totalitarian regime can read our articles, take part in discussions on NovaFlow and open their own blog on the platform without ever being identified or located. It seemed completely logical to us that a platform committed to freedom of expression should do its best to protect its most vulnerable readers and users.

With this layer of protection, you can freely criticize awful dictators like Putin or Trump without risking any retaliation whatsoever. In short, you can finally say what you actually think and engage with others without having to censor yourself. Is this model the jungle, as some people dare to claim? Absolutely not! Because if you want to use your freedom of expression here to push reactionary ideas, you’ll quickly realize this is not the right place for that. Now, if people with garbage ideas want to use Tor to talk among themselves, that’s their problem. Not ours! Because unlike education and culture, censorship has never solved a single problem at its root. On the contrary, it only produces frustration… and therefore radicalization.

But before going any further, we want to be clear that we don’t want you getting into trouble because you think Tor is a standalone solution. Tor is only truly 100% effective when used in the right ecosystem. Meaning free operating systems like Linux or FreeBSD. For everything else, using Tor on Windows, Mac OS, Android or iOS is frankly ridiculous given how thoroughly those systems vacuum up your personal data. So if you haven’t already, switch to Linux first and install Tor on it in under a minute. We should also mention that Linux distributions like Ubuntu Touch are available for quite a few mobile phone models.

The darknet is the new big bad wolf… really?

The darknet! Just the word makes sensation-hungry journalists and scapegoat-seeking politicians shudder. You immediately picture hoodie-wearing guys in front of Matrix-style screens trafficking unspeakable things in grimy basements. Great atmosphere for a B-movie, complete with ominous soundtrack and clickbait headline. Except the reality is infinitely less cinematic.

So what exactly is this famous darknet? Technically it’s simply a network layered on top of the web that requires specific software to access. Tor is one of those pieces of software. The fully .onion sites you’ll find on this alternative web look like any other website. A little uglier in terms of design, let’s be honest 🙂 That’s it! No drama, no monster under the bed.

Sure, there are dark corners on the darknet just like there are dark corners in any city in the world. But calling the darknet as a whole a criminal hideout is exactly like saying that the phone is a terrorist tool because terrorists have used phones. Or that a car is a weapon because some people have used it as one. That kind of reasoning is so shallow there’s nothing to unpack. Tor is just a very useful tool. We’re not going to avoid it because some people use it the wrong way.

And above all, if you’re a decent person, what are you actually going to find on the darknet? Independent media protecting their sources. Whistleblowers. Activists from countries where freedom of expression doesn’t exist. Libraries of free books. Discussion forums full of people who are fed up with being spied on… In short, far more ordinary people than fugitive criminals. And in the end, let’s be very clear: Just like on the regular web, if you stumble onto sketchy sites it’s because you went looking for them. Because nothing is going to come to you without you explicitly asking for it.

The myths about the so-called darknet, demolished one by one

Let’s start with the biggest, the most repeated and the most insufferable one: Tor supposedly fuels all kinds of trafficking. Drugs, weapons, human beings… The darknet would be organized crime’s supermarket and Tor its cash register. Except that argument falls apart in two seconds when faced with one simple question: How does trafficking actually work in the real world?

The drugs circulating on the darknet were grown somewhere on this planet. They were bought and paid for in the real world. They traveled in trucks, ships, planes… They crossed borders. They were handled by dozens of people. They were stored in very real warehouses. Same goes for weapons. Traffickers absolutely don’t need Tor to run their business; they did it just fine before it existed and they’ll continue just fine without it. As for human trafficking and child abuse, these are two very serious problems that need to be addressed at the source, on the ground, and not by staring at screens.

And when a major darknet marketplace gets taken down by authorities, do the sellers suddenly become choir boys? Do they hang up their boots and file for unemployment? Of course not! They migrate elsewhere and find other channels. In short, they adapt and nothing is resolved. Because trafficking is a deep economic and social problem, not a technological one. So eliminating Tor, as governments beholden to financial oligarchs dream of doing, would no more eliminate organized crime than eliminating mobile phones would.

Same logic applies to the big myth of untraceable cryptocurrencies. This fantasy gets trotted out regularly to justify mass surveillance. Except if the police actually wanted to do their job, all they’d have to do is follow the money. The real money! The kind that flows through tax havens, opaque holding companies and offshore accounts. The money belonging to billionaires, celebrities and politicians who hide their fortunes from the tax authorities. But authorities will never go after that. Because it doesn’t suit anyone in the upper echelons. So instead they prefer to wave the red flag of digital anonymity to justify surveilling everyone, while giving GAFAM free rein to gorge themselves on our personal data. That’s textbook Machiavellianism!

Now let’s talk about security. We’re supposed to believe that Tor is the digital Wild West, that you’ll get hacked the second you open it, that pirates are going to break into your machine and walk off with your vacation photos and credit card number… When in reality it’s the exact opposite! How do you hack an invisible user? How do you target someone you can’t locate, identify, or even detect? It’s almost unnecessary to spell it out: Real security on the web is anonymity. Nobody is going to come pushing drugs or weapons on Tor. And a hacker isn’t going to come after you because structurally it’s impossible. So Tor doesn’t expose you to additional risks. On the contrary, it protects you from them. Far more effectively than all the so-called cybersecurity software combined.

So ultimately, demonizing Tor amounts to admitting something pretty awkward to the general public. Because if Tor bothers leaders and big tech so much, it’s only because they conduct extensive surveillance of the entire population. And behaving that way, for states that claim to be democratic, very seriously warrants doubting their good intentions.

Tor Browser is simply an excellent browser

Let’s talk now about Tor Browser, the official browser of the Tor project. And here we’re going to tell you something that might surprise you: It’s an excellent browser, even if you never visit a single .onion site in your life!

And the cherry on top: Tor Browser lets you browse the regular web anonymously. Because in practice, when you visit a regular site with Tor Browser, your request still passes through the network’s three nodes before reaching its destination. Which means the site you’re visiting never sees your real IP address. It only sees the exit node’s address, somewhere in the world. So you can visit your favorite sites, forums, independent media… anonymously, without leaving a trace in your browsing history. The .onion sites are just a bonus, not a requirement!

Tor Browser is based on Firefox but optimized for speed and security. It blocks trackers, fingerprints and spy scripts. No built-in artificial intelligence watching you, no shady suggestions and no data collection dressed up as a service. And it’s fast! Really fast! Way faster than the naysayers would have you believe.

You might know Brave? It’s the other browser that claims to care about privacy. It has its qualities, we’re not going to trash it. It even handles .onion sites through a private browsing window. But it’s a budget integration compared to Tor Browser. And ever since Brave started bombarding us with its built-in artificial intelligence, its in-house crypto and its token rewards… We’re seriously starting to wonder where it’s headed. Does it even know itself? A supposedly free browser that pushes you toward a commercial ecosystem with every update is a bit like an organic grocery store opening a McDonald’s in the basement.

Tor Browser doesn’t sell you anything. It doesn’t pitch you anything. It doesn’t want anything from you. It just does its job. Which is to let you browse in peace without anyone looking over your shoulder. So download it at torproject.org, install it in two minutes and make it your main browser. You’ll see you won’t look back.

The real insecurity isn’t where they’re pointing the finger

We keep hearing on repeat that Tor is dangerous, that anonymity on the internet is a threat to security, that everyone needs to be surveilled to protect everyone. Oh really? Because we’d love for someone to explain to us how an ordinary citizen browsing with Tor because they’re sick of being tracked by big tech is a threat to anyone.

Because while they’re waving the red flag of online anonymity in our faces, the real sources of insecurity are doing just fine. Because it’s our governments that start wars. Because it’s capitalism that’s methodically destroying the planet. Because the resulting climate breakdown is going to upend the lives of billions of people far more surely than any Tor user ever could.

So no! Absolutely not! The threat is not Tor. The real threat is not anonymity. Simply because the real insecurity flies in private jets, sits on boards of directors and votes laws that protect itself. And meanwhile you’re being asked to submit to surveillance like a criminal when you’ve done nothing wrong. Let that sink in! They need to stop treating us like we’re clueless.

Conclusion: Supporting Tor means supporting your freedom!

Tor is great. Tor is free. Tor is open source. But Tor is also a project that needs you to survive and grow. The first way to contribute is to become a network node. In practice that means your computer will relay some of the traffic to other users. But don’t worry! Your machine isn’t going to turn into a NASA server! You set the bandwidth you want to allocate yourself, it runs in the background without slowing your computer down. And don’t sweat it, your IP address won’t be exposed since you’re only an intermediate node in the chain. You can therefore directly contribute to global freedom of expression from your living room without taking any risk whatsoever. And if you have a dedicated server, even better! Because the more nodes there are, the stronger, faster and harder to attack the network becomes. And as with all quality free and independent projects, a financial donation to the Tor Project is always welcome. Because we can never say it enough: If you want strong alternatives to big tech that respect nothing, you have to give! Even a little. Every gesture counts. So be generous with the indie web and it’ll give back to you a hundredfold.

We wrote this article because we use Tor every day and because we have very big projects coming up with this technology. So before sharing all of that with you, we wanted to set things straight once and for all. Because it is categorically out of the question that we let ourselves be treated like criminals simply for protecting our community’s privacy. For anyone still struggling with the concept: Private means that a user’s personal data is not supposed to leak without their explicit consent. That’s not an opinion, it’s a definition. So there’s nothing to debate.

On NovaFuture we’re always happy to meet you on NovaFlow. We chat, introduce ourselves, debate and share what we want. But it stops there. Because it has to stop there. Alongside that, it is completely unacceptable and outright scandalous that there are sites out there making a business out of your private life! And yet that’s become the absolute norm. Honestly, on a personal level, I can’t wrap my head around how we let things sink this low.

So for every indie web site out there, Tor should be a standard just like https is today. That’s a serious conversation worth having. And we fully intend to contribute to it. In the meantime, if you enjoyed this article please take a few seconds to share it widely. Don’t pretend you didn’t read that and share it 🙂 And a few more seconds to buy us a coffee because we really need one. Either way, thanks for reading all the way here. @ see you soon for new adventures that you’ll be able to follow with your Tor browser. No 3D glasses required, everything here is crystal clear.