Heads & Tails (1.2)

Facebook has now embraced the Tor network

HUMAN LIFE is full of ironies. A friend of mine, who lives in Europe, is terrified of identity theft and religiously shreds his snail mail and deletes his email. Another friend, this time in the states, is angry at his government's Big Brother approach to citizen management. He's especially upset by the NSA's mass-monitoring of electronic communications. But of course it's a world-wide phenomenon: under the umbrella of 'anti-terrorism', governments everywhere have been inventing ways to spy on people, and been trying to control what a person can or can't do on the once-freer Internet. As an unexpected result, we are being collectively taught to think like activists and hackers.

Now private networks and the murky dark corners of the web are beginning to appeal to us all -- those of us with dark hearts and also those of us who breathe in the light.

The TOR network is not new (it already has around 2.5 million daily users) but it has been gaining popularity for a while, especially because of governmental attention paid to wikileaks, sharing sites, and the emerging acceptance of bitcoin. This morning TOR became famous (or infamous) because of the news that Facebook has embraced it.

TOR is an anonymising platform, one designed to protect you whenever you go online. Your name and details can be hidden, as well as your address and location. By address I mean not only where in the world you are, but also the mac address of your machine.

The accommodation by Facebook would seem at first to be odd, since surely the whole purpose of using social media is to be social; but there is of course a difference between social and sociable.

If you're interested in trying out the TOR browser, I suggest you download and install a complete OS that sets it all up for you: Tails. [This is why this article is named Heads and Tails (1.2); Heads is Facebook and Tails is... duh...]

Tails and the new Facebook portal work fine together. Tails is a live OS: it's designed to run from a flash drive and when you go offline it removes all traces of your online activity. Tails can be found here.