This column has covered a few Internet privacy solutions. See "iPhantom Delivers Maxiumum Internet and P2P Privacy."

Jim Razpoza of eWeek (pictured here) gives an update on the Tor project. Free open source software-based anonymity software like Freenet has typically been complex and slow. Not so with Tor. Rapoza now recommends Tor for most web browsing, instant messaging, IRC, SSH, and other TCP applications. Note however that Tor may not be compatible with file sharing software or may impact its performance due to such software's high resource usage. Tor uses onion routing to pass data through multiple computers that only know their neighbors and not the data source or destination.

Razposa writes:

Using the tools available at tor.eff.org, I have been able to easily install Tor (along with the Privoxy secure Web proxy) and run it seamlessly without affecting my daily Web usage. One of the main reasons is that the Tor downloads include Vidalia, an easy-to-use GUI that made it simple to turn Tor on whenever I wanted to be more anonymous in my surfing.

Best of all, I've seen very-little-to-no performance hit while Web surfing using Tor. Using the bundled Vidalia/Tor/Privoxy packages, which run on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux systems, I could easily set up any of my less tech-savvy friends and family.

As the Tor network becomes easier to use and more people begin to use it, it will become that much more effective and make it that much more difficult for oppressive regimes or sleazy companies to defeat it-the larger the onion network, the more layers that need to be dealt with.

Note that Tor may