# Tor and privoxy

## Princess Nell

I have been running tor and privoxy for a while now, but I don't believe I was using them correctly and

effectively. When I updated tor to 0.1.2.19-r2 yesterday, portage pointed out

 *Quote:*   

> 
> 
>         You must create /etc/tor/torrc, you can use the sample that is in that directory
> 
>         To have privoxy and tor working together you must add:
> ...

 

I didn't have this line, and after adding it, web access has become extremely slow. Pages that were

loading in seconds now take a minute or more. Google now rejects a lot of my searches 

 *Quote:*   

> 
> 
> We're sorry...
> 
> ... but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now. 
> ...

 

and redirects to sorry.google.com.

Even writing this post, I'm asked to re-login every time I press the preview button, and then lose what

I typed already, so maybe my config isn't correct?

Is this fixable, or is it just the price I have to pay for privacy?

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## Desintegr

How did it work before ? How do you configure your browser (proxy server port) ?

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## Princess Nell

The browser config hasn't changed: manual proxy configuration with localhost, port 8118.

Looking at the docs now, and the gentoo wiki, it seems that I was never actually using tor because without this particular line in the

config file, privoxy was just doing its own thing, without tor.

This begs the question: does it make sense to use tor at all?

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## F_

 *Princess Nell wrote:*   

> 
> 
> This begs the question: does it make sense to use tor at all?

 

Why does it beg that question?

Tor is slow because of onion routing. Packets take longer to get to destinations because they are taking a more indirect route. Hence the pages will load up far slower than you may imagine. However I've never had any experience getting logged out every several seconds of a website like you are experiencing.

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## jmz2

 *F_ wrote:*   

> Tor is slow because of onion routing. Packets take longer to get to destinations because they are taking a more indirect route. Hence the pages will load up far slower than you may imagine.

 

I used tor and privoxy this way for a time with no problems. Surfing wasn't noticeably slower. But to have privacy with tor + privoxy, you need to disable javascript too, otherwise analytics tools, ad servers et cetera will still be able to recognize you.

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## Princess Nell

Javascript is not a problem. I'm using NoScript, and it's actually been stable for the past one or two revs  :Wink: 

Yes, using e.g. Gentoo forums with tor+privoxy does certainly not work. Every submit action takes me

back to the login screen, and a new topic afterwords.

The question begging is: why is it so slow? It is not just slow, like in jmz2's case, it is unusably slow. And that

is being fully in line with http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Anonymity_with_Tor_and_Privoxy.

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## madisonicus

 *Princess Nell wrote:*   

> Google now rejects a lot of my searches
> 
> ...
> 
> Yes, using e.g. Gentoo forums with tor+privoxy does certainly not work. Every submit action takes me
> ...

 Because of the anonymity that it provides, TOR is often used by spammers and bots to do undesirable things like post adverts to forums and try to game search engines by creating the illusion of increased interest in a particular website.  Therefore the Gentoo forums admins reject attempts to post from TORified IP addresses and Google will often reject TORified queries.

 *Princess Nell wrote:*   

> The question begging is: why is it so slow? It is not just slow, like in jmz2's case, it is unusably slow. And that is being fully in line with http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Anonymity_with_Tor_and_Privoxy.

 First, I would suggest reading TOR FAQ 1.9 and the other excellent information on the TOR project homepage.

Simply put, it is slow, as F_ wrote, because it provides protection against most kinds of traffic analysis.

More technically, there are several aspects of TOR design that result it its being slow.  First, TOR since it uses TLS necessitates the use of TCP which require acknowledgments insuring the receipt of each packet for at least three layers of anonymization.  Moreover, most TOR servers are small home users who are willing to allocate only a small amount of their bandwidth to it.  And to top it all off, the particular path chosen for your packets is random across the entire globe, so packets may need to traverse the entire planet more than once just to establish a connection.  Essentially TOR is a string of low-bandwidth relays spread widely across the planet that communicate very inefficiently by design.

If the connection is too slow, you could try restarting the TOR init script, it might pick out a faster path for you.  But, because of the design considerations TOR will rarely be much faster than a dial-up connection.

Unfortunately, the question you will need to ask yourself is whether the protection against traffic analysis that TOR provides is worth the price of the slow connection.  Many people, myself included, use TOR only when it serves a purpose, rather than all the time.  Firefox plug-ins like TorButton make that very easy.

HTH,

m

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## manaka

You can try the directives EntryNodes, ExitNodes and ExcludeNodes to hint Tor to use nearer nodes... You trade some randomness for a speed gain...

Also, for better privacy, make sure SafeSocks is enabled. This option makes the Tor client not to allow unsafe socks requests.

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## Carnildo

 *Princess Nell wrote:*   

> The question begging is: why is it so slow? It is not just slow, like in jmz2's case, it is unusably slow. And that
> 
> is being fully in line with http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Anonymity_with_Tor_and_Privoxy.

 

It's the way TOR works.  Every few minutes, the TOR service on your computer will select three servers from the list of known TOR servers: an entry node, a middle node, and an exit node.  Your speed will be no faster than the slowest of these servers divided by the number of people using it.  Sometimes it will be quite fast (I've gotten transfer speeds as high as 500kbit/second), and sometimes it will be unusably slow.  Normal speeds are slightly faster than dialup.

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