Tor Browser 9.5

Didn’t they just lay off a bunch of people?

Why do you think it fails as basic security against the government? Honestly curious. And what would you suggest instead. To my knowledge many dissidents and activists around the world are specifically using TOR because it supposedly does indeed provide protection against government tracking.

> For the first time, Tor Browser users on desktop will be able to opt-in for using onion sites automatically whenever the website makes them available.

Good. This is, in my opinion, one of the bigger pain points of the whole Tor experience.

I don't personally think the problem is with understanding how onion addresses work (I've explained them to my mother and she understands the concept pretty easily), it's just the user-experience that has always been kind of a pain - even for people that use Tor often and understand it well.

I don't use the Tor browser for a number of reasons, so I can only hope other browsers follow suit.

I mean there are a lot of resources but they are at a very high level. I don't think much has changed.

The basic idea is that with Tor, you make HTTPS connections to the "tor relay", a network of volunteers who route your traffic around the world to make it hard to track. You can use Tor in two ways: you can join the relay network and route traffic for others, or you can just use the browser and make queries. If you do decide to join the relay network you have an additional decision about whether you will be an "exit node", one that does the final request to the destination website and thus appears to be the initiator of the request. This is an option because it can be difficult on home internet setups: if someone uses your exit node to post a lot of stupid crap to Reddit and Reddit tries to IP-ban them, then you are suddenly IP-banned from Reddit at home, because you ran the exit node.

If you are just a user then the only thing you need to know is that there is a price for your privacy, which is that routing your traffic all the way around the world takes a little more time than sending it straight to you, and this has two effects -- a latency jump which exists basically no matter how big the network gets, and a slowdown in your bandwidth which depends on how big the network is relative to the number of people trying to browse with it.

I understand the concept of Tor but since the government is actively watching, it doesn't really fit the usecase if I understand correctly.

From a privacy point of view, couldn't you use multiple VPNs?