What is TOR and when should you consider using it and more on Tech Talk With Craig Peterson today on Maine's WGAN Saturday Show [10-19-19]

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Have you heard of TOR?  Do you know what it is or how it is used? It is available to anyone but there are caveats. Listen in and I will break it down more 

For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com

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Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig
Hello, everybody, Craig Peterson here. Welcome back. I hope you're enjoying today's show. We got about an hour left here as we go through some of these topics. We're going to talk about the Tor Browser. Is this what you've been looking for? Is this going to keep you safe online? We're going to be talking about Facebook's new Libra cryptocurrency and what they're doing with that we'll talk about this fake iOS jailbreak site and I OT attacks, there is so much to learn and understand that it really gets confusing and, and I get it so we're trying to make this a little bit simpler for everybody. Hopefully, it'll be simpler for you. Hopefully, you'll be able to understand it and life will be good right life will be all better. Well if you have questions about What we're talking about today, there are a few ways to reach me. Now, I do get a lot of emails, I get thousands a day sometimes thank goodness, I've got good email filters that block most of those out because I've had the same email address now for almost, well, almost 30 years, so quite a while with the same email address, and I've had email even longer than that. But I'm getting all these emails. So sometimes you might send me something and it might take me a little bit to get back to, you know, don't be afraid to send something again, if you don't reach me and me at Craig Peterson calm is probably the best place to reach out for me. So it's, you know, it's a good place good information that we provide in our newsletter every week. So make sure you are on the newsletter. That way you'll get my show notes. It's Craig peterson.com slash subscribe to the show notes. If I was just responding to Facebook message a Facebook mail. And it was a gentleman who has been running a small it firm kind of a break-fix shop, little IT shop. And he had some questions that he was presenting and said he loves to listen to the podcast. And yes, indeed, you'll find my podcasts almost everywhere as well, if you enjoy podcasts, and I'd love to hear from you if you are online listening if you have questions or comments. So the other way to reach me is to text me you can text me directly. I'm not using a short code. This is a phone number that goes to me and my team 855-385-5553 you can just send me a text anytime. Any questions, anything that you might be wondering about, I can even sign me up for the weekly show notes that go out typically Saturday mornings, we try and get those things out. So let's get into this whole story. browser thing is there are many people out there that really have some questions about it. But I bet you, you guys, most of you have not even heard of the Tor browser. So maybe we should start with a little bit of an explanation here. So Tor Browser was put together as part of the onion network, this Tor network that's out there by the US military. In fact, the military in the United States is still paying to maintain this network. Now this network is used a lot by bad guys. This is where the Silk Road was. We might have heard of this. You could buy almost anything you wanted. On the Silk Road. You could go there, you could buy drugs, have them shipped to your home, just all kinds of things. This is where they supposedly had the red rooms, and just It's a crazy place, but it was designed to provide anonymity for the people that used it, and was designed and put in place by our military, because we wanted the ability to have people within these countries that were really kind of suppressed. But to be able to have those people be able to send messages to our State Department, our CIA, or even to communicate with each other. You've probably heard about these Hong Kong protests. And they've been using an app that allows them to communicate directly with each other and does not send it through the public Internet. And of course, the Chinese government not happy about that at all. And the reason they're not happy about it is that they don't know what people are saying. And you know how I feel about cryptography. So Apple pulled that app from the store so that these Chinese protesters couldn't use it to coordinate their activities. And then they got a lot of publicity Sure, and so Apple put it back on the store, my understanding is it's back off the store now. So this is all important stuff to understand. And that's where Torah came from. So people like people in Hong Kong, could use the public Internet and could communicate and do it under the radar. Now, it's not 100% under the radar, for instance, our clients and this is particularly true for clients that have financial information or that have military requirements. Our clients we haven't set up so that what is called Tor exit nodes are blocked so that their internal people cannot just use Tor now to steal information provided to the Chinese. You've probably heard me in the last hour, talking about how the Chinese apparently stole all kinds of technology from our major contractors Boeing and Airbus military contractors. subcontractors, they got engine technology, they got flood control technology. They got all kinds of stuff that they stole. So you don't want your employees to be able to take your intellectual property and use it now to get a job somewhere else, right? So yeah, yeah, you can hire me. And I will bring all of Tesla's electric car technology with me. That is a legitimate lawsuit that's been going on, where a guy was accused of having stolen the technology from Tesla and took it to his next employer and vice versa, has happened to it's happening every day. Now, you can use this Tor Browser, even if you're not an activist over in Hong Kong, even if you're not someone trying to communicate with the State Department department or the NSA. You can use the Tor browser to go almost anywhere online. You don't have to be on the dark web. You can be just Online cruising around. And the idea behind it is they use multiple exit nodes so that when you connect it, it is a VPN. And your data is transmitted to a Tor node. And it's encrypted wallets in transit when it gets to the remote and it then goes out onto the regular internet. But the other thing that's happening as it's in transit is it decides which exit node to use. So you might actually be using multiple exit nodes. So you can't be tracked very easily because they don't know you know, the ISP for this tour exit node doesn't know who you are.

Because that's going through the Tor network is, again, think of it as a VPN. But the big difference between a normal VPN and a Tor type VPN is it is constantly switching you to different exit nodes so that even the ISP of that VPN doesn't know where you're going. So I know this is really complicated. If you have any questions, let me know. If you want me to help you set it up for you to know, let me know, for you to know how to do it, right. Whether you're trying to do it for business or you're trying to do it for yourself, I'd be glad to do it. We could even arrange a bit of training on it if that's something that interests you as well. Journalists use this a lot. And it's used to kind of stay under the radar of maybe a business or government agency that that might be squealing on. The Tor browser is legal in the US. I'm pretty sure it's legal in Canada, not sure about Mexico. But it is illegal in some of these foreign countries like in China and in Iran and North Korea, various other places but dissidents are using it journalists using it a lot. You can get the browser for your Linux, your Mac your windows. It's also available Mobile on Android, the Google Play Store, there's something called the onion browser that you can get I have it installed on my iOS devices. And I use it when I really kind of need to be super-secret. And that's the idea behind it. The Tor network is called the onion. This whole onion browser, the whole concept is there are multiple layers, right? So they might be able to get to one layer, but hopefully, they can't get to the next I. I don't want to go into much more detail here because it gets really rather confusing. good article, I put it up on my website at Craig peterson.com that came from CSL online that I'm referring to right now. That's the one I'm holding my hands if you're watching this, either live or in replay on video. But it's basically a three-layer proxy think like three VPN and that's what the whole thing is all about. So they explain it in pretty good detail in this article. So when should you use it? Well, if you need real anonymity. And that has to do with anonymity from the government. Maybe you are a whistleblower you're trying to communicate this is what an Edward Snowden would use, for instance, or you just want to keep your data private. You don't want your internet service provider monitoring, where you're going and what you're doing online. Because if you're using the Tor browser, and you know, one of these onion browsers, they're not going to be able to tell where you're going and what you're doing there. There's a big caveat here. Because in some cases, if you're using the Tor Browser, now, the business owner might start getting suspicious, the government might start getting suspicious. And you might find yourself as a matter subject of investigation, a little extra investigation, right? Because they're not quite sure what you're doing. But I do use it from time to time and I've found it to be pretty good, frankly. But in most cases with our clients, we block access to it. So keep that in mind as well. It is great for anonymity. Tor has spelled EF those guys asking TORT or the Tor browser, and it is something that I think many people should use and consider using, you know, part of our security that we've been talking about. Look at it and play with it. Okay. Any questions? just email me at Craig Peterson calm, be more than glad to answer those questions for you. Or again, you can text me 855-385-5553 Hey, when we come back, we're going to talk a little bit about cryptocurrencies. And Libra. What's this all about? Why is it fall flat on its face? You're listening to Craig Peterson on WGAN and online, Craig peterson.com. Stick around.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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