The Tor Project has released a two-minute animated film on its blog intended to educate current and potential users of its service. The Cambridge-based nonprofit oversees a group of servers that provides users with greater privacy and security on the Internet than conventional browsers.
The video is a plain-English pivot from the nonprofit’s other, rather cryptic, communications, which are often riddled with mouthfuls such as “the OpenITP circumvention tech festival” and “we want to use multithreading to spread Tor’s cryptography across more cores.” (If you understood that, please skip this article.)
Instead of unfamiliar technobabble, the narrator tells viewers in accessible terms that their typical online behavior is probably spilling information to unwanted strangers: advertisers, nation states, identity thieves.
Advertisement
“They will see your real identity, precise location, operating system, all the sites you have visited, the browser you use to surf the Web, and so much more information about you and your life, which you probably didn’t mean to share with unknown strangers who could easily use this data to exploit you,” the speaker says.
Then comes the hook.
“But not if you’re using Tor.”
The video explains how Tor shrouds a user’s Internet traffic in three layers of encryption and passes it through three servers that are operated by volunteers. It explains the benefits of the software, showing how activists and journalists can use it to evade surveillance, as can citizens living in oppressive regimes. Web surfers can also log on to duck a salvo of Web advertisements.
Tor has initially made the video available in Arabic, English, Farsi, French, and German, with subtitles available in those five languages plus Chinese and Spanish.
The video comes on the heels of a rocky finish to 2014 for Tor Project public relations. The Silicon Valley publication Pando Daily took the organization to task over its use of government funding, which spiraled into a tumultuous Twitter tango between key Tor figures and the article’s author. (Tor started as a Naval Research Laboratory project and continues to openly receive funding from various government entities.)
Advertisement
But things are looking up lately. This month, it was announced that Tor was picked 10th in Reddit’s 2014 ad revenue charity, receiving nearly $83,000 from the company, which spread 10 percent of its ad revenue for the year among 10 nonprofits.