Don't Hurt Your Head!

Anonymous browsing is simply browsing the World Wide Web with most of your identity hidden. Browsing anonymously is easy with Ubuntu or Debian. I have some easy steps to get you going.

You’ll need to set up our package repository before you can fetch Tor. First, you need to figure out the name of your distribution. If you’re using Ubuntu 9.10, it’s “karmic”, while 9.04 is “jaunty”, 8.10 is “intrepid”, and 8.04 is “hardy”. If you’re using Debian Etch, it’s “etch”, and Debian Lenny is “lenny”.

Then add a line to your sources.list file

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

deb     http://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org <DISTRIBUTION> main

where you substitute the above word (etch, lenny, sid, karmic, jaunty, intrepid, hardy) in place of <DISTRIBUTION>.

Then add the gpg key used to sign the packages by running

gpg –keyserver keys.gnupg.net –recv 886DDD89
gpg –export A3C4F0F979CAA22CDBA8F512EE8CBC9E886DDD89 | sudo apt-key add –

Now refresh your sources and install Tor by running

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install tor tor-geoipdb

Install Privoxy

Simply make sure you have universal repositories and then:

sudo apt-get install privoxy

Configure Privoxy

Edit the file “/etc/privoxy/config” doing for example using nano:

sudo gedit /etc/privoxy/config

Add the following line (anywhere in the file is fine):

forward-socks4a / localhost:9050 .
That last . is very important don’t forget it.

Starting Services and Checking Status

sudo /etc/init.d/tor start
sudo /etc/init.d/privoxy start

Check that the service is running on port 9050

netstat -a | grep 9050

You should see the following output:

tcp 0 0 localhost:9050 *:* LISTEN

Now ad the tor button to your browser. Open Firefox, Go to Tools > Add-ons, In the search bar put in TorButton. When it finds it install the add-on. Restart Firefox and click on the Tor button in the lower right hand corner of the browser.

Test your installation:

http://check.torproject.org/

There you have it, be safe and smart.

Congratulations. You are using Tor.