- Jan 24, 2011
- 9,378
Is this how the mainstream finally begins to win back its online privacy?
The Tor anonymity network may soon expand to hundreds of millions of new users around the world as the software’s developers prepare to scale to a “global population.”
Several major tech firms are in talks with Tor to include the software in products that can potentially reach over 500 million Internet users around the world. One particular firm wants to include Tor as a “private browsing mode” in a mainstream Web browser, allowing users to easily toggle connectivity to the Tor anonymity network on and off.
“They very much like Tor Browser and would like to ship it to their customer base,” Tor executive director Andrew Lewman wrote, explaining the discussions but declining to name the specific company. “Their product is 10-20 percent of the global market, this is of roughly 2.8 billion global Internet users.”
That ranges from 280 million people to 560 million. While it stands to reason that not all of those people would be using the “private browsing mode” all the time, even a fraction of these numbers represents a potentially huge increase in size for the Tor network.
The product that best fits Lewman’s description by our estimation is Mozilla Firefox, the third-most popular Web browser online today and home to, you guessed it, 10 to 20 percent of global Internet users.
Mozilla, one of the biggest and most influential tech nonprofits ever, offers Firefox as a free, open-source, privacy-friendly alternative to browsers likeGoogle Chrome and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
If implemented effectively, Tor would be a major privacy upgrade over Firefox’s current private browsing mode which “allows you to browse the Internet without saving any information about which sites and pages you’ve visited.”
Tor, which is capable of all that and more, crucially blocks websites from learning any identifying information about you and circumvents censorship. It also stymies eavesdroppers from discovering what you’re doing on the Web. For those reasons, it would be a powerful addition to the arsenal of privacy tools Firefox already possesses.
The Tor Browser is already a modified version of Firefox, developed over the last decade with close communication between the Tor developers and Mozilla on issues such as security and usability.
When we reached out to both parties for comment, neither Tor nor Mozilla confirmed or denied that they were in talks.
Read more: http://www.dailydot.com/politics/tor-mozilla-firefox/
The Tor anonymity network may soon expand to hundreds of millions of new users around the world as the software’s developers prepare to scale to a “global population.”
Several major tech firms are in talks with Tor to include the software in products that can potentially reach over 500 million Internet users around the world. One particular firm wants to include Tor as a “private browsing mode” in a mainstream Web browser, allowing users to easily toggle connectivity to the Tor anonymity network on and off.
“They very much like Tor Browser and would like to ship it to their customer base,” Tor executive director Andrew Lewman wrote, explaining the discussions but declining to name the specific company. “Their product is 10-20 percent of the global market, this is of roughly 2.8 billion global Internet users.”
That ranges from 280 million people to 560 million. While it stands to reason that not all of those people would be using the “private browsing mode” all the time, even a fraction of these numbers represents a potentially huge increase in size for the Tor network.
The product that best fits Lewman’s description by our estimation is Mozilla Firefox, the third-most popular Web browser online today and home to, you guessed it, 10 to 20 percent of global Internet users.
Mozilla, one of the biggest and most influential tech nonprofits ever, offers Firefox as a free, open-source, privacy-friendly alternative to browsers likeGoogle Chrome and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
If implemented effectively, Tor would be a major privacy upgrade over Firefox’s current private browsing mode which “allows you to browse the Internet without saving any information about which sites and pages you’ve visited.”
Tor, which is capable of all that and more, crucially blocks websites from learning any identifying information about you and circumvents censorship. It also stymies eavesdroppers from discovering what you’re doing on the Web. For those reasons, it would be a powerful addition to the arsenal of privacy tools Firefox already possesses.
The Tor Browser is already a modified version of Firefox, developed over the last decade with close communication between the Tor developers and Mozilla on issues such as security and usability.
When we reached out to both parties for comment, neither Tor nor Mozilla confirmed or denied that they were in talks.
Read more: http://www.dailydot.com/politics/tor-mozilla-firefox/
