Quote Originally Posted by wintermute7
Tor is a powerful tool and you can configure all of these settings. The latest versions allow you specify exit by country, the configuration file can exclude or require certain relays in the cascade, the GUI controllers can tell you which relays are in use for what connects, all of what you want. Manually changing these settings may impact your level of anonymity but it would still be superior to JonDo in every sense except maybe speed - especially when you get a slow circuit

Besides everyone should be using HTTPS for private data!
Hey there wintermute7,

welcome to the thread. What you say sounds intriguing to me -- when you write that you can specify the settings, are you saying you can pick specific relays that you will connect to to form circuits? What can you know about these relays? As regards country of exit, that def sounds cool, but can you see who it is runs the relay? My thinking -- and perhaps this implicates me in an institutional bias, but I don't think so -- is that I want to know as much about the exit nodes I use as I can. Are they used by a lot of people? Who owns them and where are they located/co-located? What kind of organizations are in the mix? Any scammer with a pc can set up a Tor node, and that makes me nervous (as a sometime scammer myself ;-)

I absolutely agree that individuals should use ssl for private data but many users are ignorant of this, and it also begs the question of what exactly is private data? It may be different for each individual. Personally, I don't want anyone to know the items I browse at an online store -- and its easier to figure out who someone is from their internet searches than you might think -- see this link: Lesson From Tor Hack: Anonymity and Privacy Aren't the Same

excerpt:

True anonymity is hard. Just as you could be recognized at an AA meeting, you can be recognized on the internet as well. There's a lot of research (.pdf) on breaking anonymity in general -- and Tor specifically (.pdf) -- but sometimes it doesn't even take much. Last year, AOL made 20,000 anonymous search queries public as a research tool. It wasn't very hard to identify people from the data.

In any event, you have made me curious enough that I am going to download and play with Tor for a bit.