The Tor tower · the atrium

Tor browser: the tower, floor by floor

This is the entrance to the tor browser tower. It is the only building on this island where the software is the easy part and the person using it is the hard part, and every floor above is shaped by that.

Tor exists because of a specific problem no other tool on this island solves. A VPN moves the trust from your internet provider to a company; somebody in the middle can still see both ends, and that company has an address, a legal department and a jurisdiction. Tor is built so that no single point in the path knows both who you are and where you are going. That is the whole design, it is why the system is slow, and it is why the answer to “should I just use a VPN instead” depends entirely on what you are protecting yourself from.

The tower is written for two audiences and says which one each floor is for. The first is people who are curious and will use it once — for them the important floors are the ones about what not to do. The second is people who need it for work: reaching a source, publishing from somewhere it is not safe to publish, reading what a government has blocked. For them the software floors are the least important part of the building.

Three levels, and you are on the first. The atrium lists the floors; a floor covers one subject completely and holds the shorter guides underneath. Nothing here is more than three clicks from the front door.

One idea is worth carrying up the stairs, because it explains why this tower is arranged the way it is. The software on these floors is genuinely excellent and it is genuinely free, and in almost every case where somebody using it has been identified, the software did exactly what it promised. What failed was ordinary human behaviour: an account logged into out of habit, a file downloaded and then opened later on the everyday computer, a photograph that carried a location inside it, a username reused from a different life. That is why the wing about habits sits at the same level as the wing about software rather than as an appendix to it, and why a reader who only has ten minutes should spend them there.

What this tower will not do

It will not publish addresses. No onion links, no directories, no mirrors, not as illustration and not as curiosity. Explaining how the network functions is education; handing somebody a door is something else.

It will not help anybody do anything illegal, and it will not pretend that is an unusual position. The network was built by people who wanted journalists and dissidents to be able to work, that remains its most important use, and the floors here are written for that reader.

And it will not tell somebody whose safety depends on this that a web page was enough. Where the stakes are real, the right move is training and support from an organisation that does this properly, and the last floor in the habits wing is mostly a list of where to find them.

On sourcing: everything here about how the network behaves is taken from the documentation of the project that maintains it, with the date it was read. This subject attracts an unusual amount of confident writing from people who have never used any of it, and the only defence against joining them is to quote the people who build the thing. What holds instead is simple: no addresses are published here, and nothing in this tower is for sale.