Online privacy continues to be an important issue for many Internet citizens, as awareness of spyware threats and the danger of identity theft increases. Personal privacy is also a growing concern. Ars recently reported on a browser based on Internet Explorer called Browzar that claimed to make it easy to hide one’s online tracks. Now, a new web browser based on Firefox called Torpark aims to go even farther by integrating an anonymous proxy into the package.
Torpark has been released by a group called Hacktivismo, an organization whose aims are “to further the goals of human rights through technology.” The browser is a modified form of Portable Firefox, and as such can be run directly from a USB thumb drive, or any form of portable storage media (the browser comes in at a lightweight 7 MB), without having to go through an installation routine. When the user exits the browser, all personal data from that session is automatically deleted.
The browser uses a built-in version of the Tor anonymizer, which routes browser traffic through an “onion” of different routing sites in an unpredictable pattern, frustrating attempts to identify the user’s original IP address. Traffic is additionally encrypted while moving through these layers. The Tor network was originally sponsored by the US Naval Research Laboratory, before being handed over to the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2004.
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