How to PROPERLY install Tor.

What Is Tor?
[spoiler]Tor is short for The Onion Router and was initially a worldwide network of servers developed with the U.S. Navy that enabled people to browse the internet anonymously. Now, it's a non-profit organization whose main purpose is the research and development of online privacy tools.

The Tor network disguises your identity by moving your traffic across different Tor servers, and encrypting that traffic so it isn't traced back to you. Anyone who tries would see traffic coming from random nodes on the Tor network, rather than your computer.

To access this network, you just need to download the Tor browser. Everything you do in the browser goes through the Tor network and doesn't need any setup or configuration from you. That said, since your data goes through a lot of relays, it's slow, so you'll experience a much more sluggish internet than usual when you're using Tor.

If you want to be anonymous; say, if you live under a dictatorship, you're a journalist in an oppressive country, or a hacker looking to stay hidden from the government; Tor is one of the easiest ways to anonymize your traffic, and it's free. It's far from perfect, though.

On a more general level, Tor is useful for anyone who wants to keep their internet activities out of the hands of advertisers, ISPs, and web sites. That includes people getting around censorship restrictions in their country, police officers looking to hide their IP address, or anyone else who doesn't want their browsing habits linked to them.

Tor's technology isn't just about browsing anonymously. It can also host web sites through its hidden services that are only accessible by other Tor users. It's on one of these hidden service sites that something like The Silk Road exists to traffic drugs. Tor's hosting capabilities tend to pop up in police reports for things like child pornography and arms trading, too.

So is it something that everyday users need? Probably not, at least not yet. But it's become popular because of its usefulness in many of these more specific situations.

Tor is handy, but it's far from perfect. Don't think just because you're using Tor that you're perfectly anonymous. Someone like the NSA can tell if you're a Tor user and that makes them more likely to target you. With enough work, the government can figure out who you are.

Furthermore, anonymity is not the same as security. It's hard to hack into the Tor network, but the browser is a different story. As we found at least year, the NSA can get into your browser a lot easier than it can the network and once it does, it gets access to everything else. So, "man in the middle" style attacks on Tor are still possible with help of internet service providers.

As the How-To Geek points out, you still need to use HTTPS whenever possible to protect yourself from man-in-the-middle style attacks. Likewise, Tor's only as strong as its browser, which has had security flaws before, so it's worth making sure you always have the newest version.

As I mentioned above, if you're an average user looking at cat GIFs and browsing Facebook, you probably don't need to worry about the government spying on your activity, and Tor is just going to slow down your connection. It's more likely that you need to secure your internet rather than anonymize it, say, when you're using public WiFi. In that case, you'd want to make sure you're using HTTPS on all sites that support it, and possibly even use a VPN to encrypt all your traffic when you're away from home.

If you want to stay anonymous because you're downloading large files and don't want people to see what you're downloading; say, on BitTorrent; Tor is not a good solution. It won't keep you anonymous, and you'll slow down everyone else's traffic for no reason. In this case, you'd want a proxy or a VPN instead.

In other cases where you want to stay anonymous, Tor will do the trick, and it'll do it freely and easily. But we recommend considering a VPN too; as long as you use a VPN dedicated to anonymity that doesn't keep logs of your traffic, it can provide quite a few advantages over Tor (though you'll usually have to pay some money).

Most importantly, remember: nothing is 100% anonymous or secure, whether you're using Tor, a VPN, or anything else. If you think you need something along these lines, think about what exactly you're doing and what you need to protect; half the battle is picking the right tool for the job.

Step 1:
[spoiler]Download the Tor Browser Bundle from one of the links below.

Windows version www.torproject.org/download/download-easy.html.en#windows

Linux version www.torproject.org/download/download-easy.html.en#linux

Mac version www.torproject.org/download/download-easy.html.en#mac

Execute the file you downloaded to extract the Tor Browser into a folder on your computer.

Then simply open the folder and click on ?Start Tor Browser.

You finished installing Tor successfully!

Upcoming Tutorials
[spoiler]"How to PROPERLY stay anonymouson Tor."
"How to PROPERLY access the DeepWeb."
"How to PROPERLY access theDarkWeb."
"Difference between DeepWeb, DarkWeb, and Darknet."