MrMagoo, your post describing Tor is quite interesting and valuable. I hope that the project succeeds, because the world needs a free anonymous Internet communication capability. Based upon my reading of the Tor documentation, I see three primary differences as compared to
Total Net Shield.
The first is speed: “Tor is never going to be blazing fast. Your traffic is bouncing through volunteers' computers in various parts of the world, and some bottlenecks and network latency will always be present.” It’s a subjective assessment on my part, but my impression is that Total Net Shield actually
improves your Internet speed (about 5% to 10%), probably because
all traffic to/from the proxy server is compressed, resulting in higher effective bandwidth.
The second is more sinister, and harder to assess. Since the anonymous network is built through an informal association of “volunteers” around the world, there is the possibility that one (or more) of the servers in the chain is actually logging your traffic and thereby
reducing your anonymity. To be fair, this concern is mitigated by the fact that there are several ‘hops’ in the communication path, and that the public key used for encryption is changed frequently (but who controls the corresponding private part of the key pair?).
The third is ease-of-use and support, a weak point for almost all such free applications and services.
Nonetheless, Tor seems to be a good choice for users who only feel the need to occasionally achieve Internet anonymity, or who are not willing or able to pay the subscription fee for a service like Total Net Shield.
* * * * * * * * * *Internet Explorer 7 – coming for Windows XP later this year - claims to provide a much higher degree of security than version 6. We’ll need to wait and see.
Personally, I have the (numerous and confusing) security settings of Internet Explorer 6 configured to be quite restrictive for the general purpose “Internet zone,” and grant “Trusted zone” status to the small set of honorable websites that I often visit. Such an approach has served me well so far, but I admit that it is probably beyond the comfort level of most PC users.
* * * * * * * * * *Linux may provide a more secure environment than Windows XP, although I have seen technical discussions that argue both positions. Again, the new
Windows Vista operating system claims to have a significantly improved security model than XP, but the evidence is yet to be accumulated.
A key (and obvious) limitation of Linux is that it is not Windows – i.e., it doesn’t run the breadth of applications that are available for the Windows platform. While there are many ‘equivalent’ applications for Linux (e.g.,
OpenOffice versus Microsoft Office), it just isn’t the same, and the learning curve to transition to another set of applications has kept me within Windows, for better or worse.
Home
Pages: 1
